“No brothers or sisters?” she asks, and I say no.
“Where’s your mother?” she asks. And though so many phony, easy answers spring to mind—she’s dead, or she’s in a persistent vegetative state in a hospital following some traumatic brain injury, or she’s in jail on countless drug citations and a murder charge—none of these responses prevail. Instead, I tell her the truth.
“She left,” I say as I reach for a forgotten grape at the edge of Pearl’s plate and pop it in my mouth so I don’t have to say anything more.
There aren’t many memories I have of my mom, but there are a few. They’re not good. I’m standing beside her bed, having had a bad dream. Crying. And not just a whiny kind of cry, but a really scared cry because there are monsters under my bed and I need her to get them for me. She pretends to sleep before she sits up in bed and tells me to go back to my room. It’s the middle of the night, Alex. Even for a five-year-old, I know there’s no compassion in that voice of hers, no affection. She’s stone cold. I tell her I’m scared, but she yanks the blanket up over her head and pretends she can’t hear me. Pops, working a nightshift, isn’t home. I poke a finger into the blanket and beg for her to come. She pushes me away with her hands. She doesn’t come, and in time I give up. But I won’t step foot in my bedroom. I won’t sleep in there with the monsters. Instead, I sleep on the hallway floor. In the morning, still bushed, her eyes only half-open, she steps on me. When I cry out she yells at me again. This is my fault.
Motherhood scared the bejesus out of her. She never wanted to be a mother. Any form of affection terrified her, as well. My mother’s smiles were rare and her hugs were always succinct, plaited with tension and angst. As if it hurt to hug. As if it was painful. That’s one of the few things I remember from my early years, the way she wiggled out of my clasp when I wrapped my clumsy little boy arms around her knees or her waist—as high as I could reach—as I tailed her, toddling, arms extended, wanting more, just one more hug, until she got mad.
Go away, Alex. Leave me alone. Don’t touch me.
That’s another thing I remember. My mother’s small feet, barefoot, trotting down the tatty carpeting of our home, shooing me away like a fly. Alex! she would snap, voice on the cusp of losing it, but trying hard to maintain control. I told you to go away. Don’t touch me.
“Where’d she go?” Pearl asks, and I say simply, “Away,” because in all honesty, I don’t know where it is that my mother went to and I try not to think about it, about the possibility that she could have another family—another husband, another child—somewhere out there in the world.
“That sucks,” she says point-blank as she pushes the plate of food away. “People can be so selfish sometimes, don’t you think?”
I tell her that I do.
And then for whatever reason, I gather the courage to ask, “What are you doing here?” And she smiles that crafty smile again and says to me, “I could tell you, Alex. But then I’d have to kill you,” and we laugh, and though it’s a curbed laugh, an inhibited laugh, I realize how good it feels. It’s been a long time since I’ve laughed. Too long. The noise sounds hollow here in the abandoned home, bouncing off the rickety walls and back to our ears where I have to remind myself that the laughter is a good thing. It means that we are happy.
I’ve forgotten what it feels like to be happy.
I also notice that she has a beautiful smile. Simple, with small, precise white teeth that are all but hidden behind the lips. It’s unpresuming and sweet. I get the feeling that she hasn’t smiled in a while, too, that she hasn’t laughed. Not a real, genuine, bona fide laugh, anyway.
“The truth?” she asks then, pausing in her laughter as she reaches a fearless hand across the two-foot span and runs her fingertips along my shark’s tooth. I feel my body stiffen, the blood in my veins coagulate and solidify. I can hardly breathe.
“Just passing through,” she says, though from the look in her eye I’m guessing there’s more to it than that, and once again my thoughts retreat to one man and one man alone: Dr. Joshua Giles. As a surge of jealously swells up inside me, I unearth one more reason not to like the guy.
She’s here for him when I wish more than anything that she could be here for me.
I wonder what that means—just passing through—and consider what it would be like to be a drifter, to move from town to town all alone, just passing through. I wonder if somewhere, out there, she has family, friends, a boyfriend, someone who is missing her, someone who is looking for her.
Someone who is thinking of her the way I now think of her.
“How long will you stay,” I ask, “before you have to leave?”
She shrugs and says to me, “I’m in no hurry,” and I wonder what that means: a day, a week, a year? I want to ask her. I want to know definitively which day I’ll show up at this forsaken home and she won’t be here. Tomorrow? Friday? Next week? Will she say goodbye before she leaves? Will she ask for me to go, to tag along with her on her trip? Doubtful, but still, I can dream.
I don’t ask her any of these things. Instead, I fidget with the heater to avoid her inveigling eyes.
Today I don’t stay too long; I can’t stay too long. I peer down at a cheap watch on my left wrist and check the time. Before long, I’m due at work, another day of bussing tables for Priddy’s minimum wage.
“You’ll remember to turn the heater off before you leave?” I remind her as her hand slides from my necklace, and she says she will. I nod my head and I say that I have to go, peering back over my shoulder for one last look before I’m gone.
Quinn
There’s a dish Esther serves. It’s a vegetarian recipe, a stir-fry with beans and broccoli and baby corn. And tofu. It should be disgusting but it’s not. It’s absolutely delicious. It also has a sauce complete with soy sauce and rice vinegar.
And a quarter cup of peanut flour.
Which doesn’t matter in the least bit to me, but it does matter to Kelsey Bellamy.
She was four years old when she was first diagnosed with a peanut allergy. That’s what her fiancé, Nicholas Keller, tells me as I sit across from him at his own kitchen table in a recently renovated flat in Hyde Park. It’s a small glass-top table that generally just sits one.
Him.
His eyes are disconsolate, brown eyes that dampen when I mention her name. Kelsey.
“She’d eaten peanuts before with no adverse effect,” he tells me, “but over time, things change. Especially when it comes to allergies. She was four years old, and her mother served her a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for the first time, and right away—or so the story goes—Kelsey could hardly breathe. Her throat swelled up, she broke out in hives. Anaphylaxis. From that day on, she carried with her an EpiPen. Benadryl. She was always ready.
“She was always so careful about eating peanuts. We hardly ever ate out—too risky. She read the label on everything. Absolutely everything,” he says. “She wouldn’t eat products that were manufactured on shared lines for fear of cross-contamination. No processed cereal, no granola bars, no crackers.”
“So what happened?” I ask, and he shakes his head and says it was an accident, a horrible accident.
Nicholas Keller wasn’t hard to find. There were only twenty of them in the entire United States, and only two in Illinois. He was the first I called. Lucky guess. The commute from Andersonville to Hyde Park took a good eighty minutes: one “L” ride, two buses and a half-mile walk on foot.
I waited until evening when I knew he would be home from work. According to LinkedIn, Nicholas Keller is a financial adviser, a fact he later confirms in the foyer of his home, small talk before I dive into the reason for my visit. He seems to be a pretty straitlaced guy, not quite what I would have imagined for Kelsey Bellamy. And yet, as the saying goes, opposites attract.
“I went to grammar school with Kelsey,” I lie, “in Winchester.”