But these are just things to me. Material things. What matters most to me isn’t worth more than a few bucks, but I keep it tucked away under my bed to be sure Pops never finds it. My collection of crinoid stems. Indian beads gathered from the seashore. Tiny fossilized creatures collected in a Ziploc bag. Pops can have the telescope if he needs it that badly, but the crinoid stems are mine.
As expected, a single stove burner has been left on, the house filling quickly with a kerosene-like smell. A grilled cheese—completely blackened—lies forgotten on the stove, burning on a frying pan while Pops sleeps and snores, runnels of drool trickling down his chin and onto a slothful hand. The butter has been left out of the refrigerator, on the countertop beside the pack of American cheese. Both look a little bit gamy to me; I toss them in the trash. The fridge door is wide open, the food inside drifting to lukewarm. There’s a spilled beer on the floor, the brew seeping into the tiles of our kitchen floor, warping them before my eyes.
I try to shake him awake and get him to clean his own goddamn mess. He doesn’t budge. I press my ear to his chest to be sure; he’s still breathing. He better be.
This way I can kill him when he finally does wake up.
He could have burned the whole house down.
I open the windows to air out the stench and put myself to work cleaning up the mess—Pops’s mess—again, my anger mitigated only by the fact that my stomach is full.
Tonight I’ve been fed and cared for by a mother, any mother, whether or not that mother is mine.
Quinn
It’s dark by the time I leave the apartment of Nicholas Keller. It’s darker than dark. It’s pitch-black, a starless November night, the sky an inky black.
I hop on the 55 bus in Hyde Park, a good six or seven miles south of the Loop. My home, at least nine miles north of the Loop, feels far away. In another world entirely, on another planet, in another galaxy, and though I want to be there, I wonder if my home will ever again feel like home.
The commute to my apartment is inauspicious even before it begins, over an hour long, retracing the steps I made on the way to the Hyde Park flat less than an hour ago as the sun was just starting its drop in the cold night sky. Two buses, an “L” ride and a half-mile walk on foot.
But that was before. Before I had confirmation from Nicholas Keller that Esther killed his fiancé, a woman now buried beneath a bronze grave marker in an idyllic cemetery in the suburbs of Boston.
What I don’t get is what all these weird occurrences have in common: Esther’s disappearance, the hunt for a new roommate, the petition to change her name, the death of Kelsey Bellamy.
There’s one thought I can’t get out of my mind. Is Esther on the hunt for a new roommate because she also wants me dead?
Is Esther trying to kill me?
A shiver runs down my spine, and I imagine spiders scaling my vertebrae like a flight of stairs, thousands of spiders climbing the skin, their long segmented legs stealing their way across, claws digging in. Spinning webs beneath my shirt.
Is Esther a murderer?
Suddenly I’m scared.
And still, none of this explains the identity of My Dearest. Who is My Dearest? Who, who, who? I demand to know, needing the answers now.
I think desperately of the men Esther has brought home over the months we’ve been together. There weren’t many; that much is for sure. There was the one who liked to cook, some hottie with high cheekbones, a strong jawline and large sweet-talking eyes. There was a secret admirer who sent her flowers, a dozen red roses without a card.
Were either of these men My Dearest? I don’t know.
And what do any of these things have to do with me?
One thing I know for sure: something sketchy is going on. Tornado sirens start screaming silently in my ear. Air-raid sirens warn me of an impending nuclear attack. Everywhere I look, I see a giant red flag. Danger, Will Robinson!
I’m scared.
The evening commute has come and gone. The bus isn’t as crowded as it often is, which is both a blessing and a curse. I would welcome the noise, for a change—bodies pressing into mine, reeking of their noxious breath and body odors. I’d embrace it for one reason and one reason alone: the fact that there is safety in numbers.
But not tonight. Tonight I am alone.
I slide into a ragged seat all by my lonesome and look out the window into the shadowy night. I pull my coat around me to help keep me warm. No dice. Thanks to the LED lights on the bus, it’s hard to see much of anything. The lights of the city burn ablaze in the distance, our Great Lake nothing more than a blackened abyss. A bottomless pit. I wonder what lies on the other side of that big, black lake. Wisconsin. Michigan.
Beyond that, there is nothing. Just darkness.
But it doesn’t stop me from imagining the things I can’t see.
I see Esther here and there, standing on the side of Lake Shore Drive, concealed behind a leafless tree. I’m overcome with this sudden, uncanny belief that she’s out there and that Esther, my dear friend Esther, is after me. I’m sure I catch sight of her in the driver’s seat of another car on LSD, a red, two-door coupe, a woman who stares in through the bus window at me, her eyes menacing and hostile and mean. I spy Esther’s coat at a bus stop we soar past en route to the Red Line station: her black-and-white checkered pea coat, her black beanie set atop a head. I twist in my seat, desperate for a glimpse of the woman who wears these things, but when I turn around, she’s gone. In her place, where I imagined her to be, is coily black hair on the head of a teenage girl. A zebra-striped sweatshirt. Jeans.
My eyes scan the riders on the bus one by one by one—not Esther, not Esther, not Esther. I mentally check them off in my mind. I inspect them all as they drop in their fare and climb on board. I do this at each bus stop—eyes scanning the hair, the eyes, for traces of Esther, reminding myself to look closely; she could be in disguise. Some middle-aged woman glares back at me and says, “What are you looking at, girl?” and I avert my eyes as she walks by in a huff and takes a seat behind me.
When I don’t see Esther, I tell myself that maybe she’s hired someone to do away with me. It’s silly, and yet it’s not so silly when I put two and two together in my mind. Esther killed Kelsey and then she found me. Kelsey with her food allergies was an easy target. Esther could kill her with her eyes closed and both hands tied behind her back. Step one: do away with EpiPen. Step two: peanut flour. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.
But not me. I have no allergies.
And now Esther is on the hunt for a new roommate, Megan from Portage Park. Her time with me is coming to an end. That’s what I tell myself, anyway, as I sit on the bus, all but paralyzed now in fear. Esther is trying to kill me.
My rationalization leads to this: Esther has hired a hit man to kill me. She can’t kill me herself, so instead she’s hired someone else to do the job. Why else would she have all those withdrawal receipts from the ATM that I found in the kitchen trash can? Three receipts over three consecutive days, five hundred bucks each, totaling fifteen hundred dollars.
Is my life worth fifteen hundred dollars?