Ben mulls this over.
“I went to high school with a guy,” he says after some time. “Brian Abbing. Rumor had it he broke into some pricey bridal shop one night, and made off with a few thousand bucks from the register. The back window was smashed. The place was tossed, shattered mannequins and torn dresses everywhere. There was no proof that Brian did anything, but still, people pointed fingers.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Someone saw him hanging out down the street. And he was just sort of that kid, the kind of kid who people like to pick on. He never dated, he talked with a lisp, he had no friends other than Randy Fukui, who was just as much of a hermit as Brian. They did everything wrong—they had the wrong clothes, wrong music, wrong hair. They talked about video games all day, and made friends with the old shop teacher, some Vietnam vet who talked about flamethrowers and rocket launchers all the damn time.”
“People made fun of them because they didn’t like their clothes?” I ask. I’m listening but I’m only sort of listening.
“It was high school,” Ben says, and I think, Enough said. I hated high school. Everyone hates high school except for those in the catty and shallow cliques—the lacrosse players and the girls of the pom-pom squad—who roam the halls, making others feel unworthy. I couldn’t wait to get out of high school when I was there.
“What happened,” I ask, “to Brian?” My heart suddenly goes out to Brian. I was teased for many things as a teenager, mainly my utter stupidity. It’s not a good thing being stupid when you’re also a blonde. I was called many things: banana head, buttercup, Tinker Bell. The blond jokes were endless.
“Police never could figure out who did it, not soon enough, anyway. There was no evidence, no fingerprints, and so it remained an open case. But the kids put him on trial, anyway. They pointed fingers, they called him names. Even Randy stopped talking to him. He couldn’t walk to math class without half the school calling him a crook or a klepto. By the time the police nabbed the real culprit, some six months later, Brian had already climbed to the top of some cell phone tower and jumped.”
“He killed himself?”
“He killed himself.”
“Wow,” I say. It seems kind of extreme for me, but I guess that’s the kind of thing you never get over, the name-calling and finger-pointing. Sometimes when I close my eyes at night I can still hear my entire econ class laughing because every time the teacher called on me, it was as if I’d gone mute. Earth to Quinn...
“Same thing could happen to Esther,” Ben says. “It doesn’t matter if she was exonerated from charges, if charges were even made. People would always look at her and think, Murderer, whether or not she is,” and I nod my head listlessly, knowing that’s exactly what I’m thinking, too.
Esther is a murderer.
“Once a murderer, always a murderer,” I say then as I sip from my plastic wine cup with shuddering hands, spilling tiny red droplets along the tabletop. Red like blood. “Esther would be hurt if it turned out we were wrong.”
I’m not sure it’s the best time to be worried about Esther’s feelings, but I can’t help myself. I am. Though of course if we’re right, then I might be the one who ends up hurt, though in an entirely different way than Esther. But still, I imagine Esther all alone at the top of a cell phone tower just like Brian Abbing, about to free-fall to the ground below, and I know we can’t call the police. Not yet, anyway. Not before we know more.
“There’s no reliable evidence, nothing tangible, no witnesses or hearsay,” Ben says, reaching for a napkin and wiping my mess away. If only everything were so simple. He agrees with me now and takes back his advice of going to the police, and the decision—whether good or bad—is made not to call.
Instead, we sit at the kitchen table in nervous silence. Ben unearths the crispy sesame chicken from a paper bag and hands me a fork. He refills my wine and pours himself a cup and then scoots his chair closer to mine, and under the small kitchen table, we touch.
The first glass of wine is, in a word, ghastly. We sit taking small, pensive sips from our plastic cups of merlot. We ignore the way my hands convulse as I raise the cup up to my lips and sip. What I want to do is scream. I want to scream loud enough that all the neighbors can hear, that Mrs. Budny can hear, but especially so that Esther can hear. Why? I want to scream. Why are you doing this to me?
By the second cup of wine, we leave the kitchen table and move into the living room where we sit side by side on the small sofa. A joke is made and we both force a stilted laugh, thinking in the backs of our minds we shouldn’t be laughing at a time like this. But the laughing is contagious, one laugh which leads to two and then three. The mood in the room becomes lighter and the world takes on an air that is no longer all Debbie Downer. It feels good.
By the time a third cup is poured I can hardly remember why my shirtsleeves are torn and on the palm of my hand is a giant gauze bandage and strips of medical tape. By the fourth I’m quite certain our legs became tangled on the small sofa like a Jenga game—his on top of mine, on top of his, legs which we keep pulling out and rearranging on top of one another, trying to get comfortable. It isn’t in the least bit libidinous, but rather cuddlesome and affectionate, something that takes my mind off this week’s strange turn of events that’s transported me from a normal existence to one which has gone completely haywire and berserk. We talk about things other than Esther. We talk about Anita, our boss at work, the one paid to deal with the miscreant project assistants like Ben and me. We debate things like the death penalty and assisted suicide, whether or not orange candies really are the worst. They are (Ben disagrees, though of course he’s wrong). At some point Ben asks about my love life, or complete lack thereof (my words, not his), and I grimace and bring up Priya instead, fueled by alcohol to ask the question that’s been living at the back of my mind for months.
“What do you see in her?” I say audaciously, though it isn’t meant to be trivializing or mean, but comes out that way, anyway, and I thank the wine for that as I thank the wine for many things: for the fact that Ben is here, snuggled beside me; for the fact that I have no misgivings about the way my hand reaches out to grab his, not worrying once that he won’t reciprocate the gesture; for the fact that for the first time in days, I tingle with happiness instead of fear.
“Everything,” Ben says, and I feel my heart sink—my hand starts a slow withdrawal from his—only to rise to the surface again as he sighs and says then, “Nothing,” and I’m not sure which to believe: everything, nothing or something in between.
“I’ve been with her half my life,” he confesses to me, staring at me with those eyes of his, his voice drowsy from the wine, his face close enough to mine to feel his breath when he speaks. “I don’t know what it’s like to not be with Priya,” and I think that I get it. I think that I do, this sense of familiarity and comfort that slips into a relationship over time, completely trampling all excitement and passion. I don’t get it personally, because of course my longest relationship lasted a mere seventy-two hours, but I get it. I see the way my own parents no longer kiss; they don’t hold hands. I watch the way my father sleeps on the guest bed lest my mother’s chronic insomnia keep them both up all night. Ben and Priya aren’t even married and already there’s no excitement, no passion. At least that’s what I’d like to believe, but who am I to say what goes on in their private life.
But I don’t want to think about that right now; I don’t want to think about Priya. Instead, I press myself closer to Ben so that we sit side by side, our legs running in parallel lines, plunked on the coffee table, my ankle crossed with his.