And now, in daylight, standing in the kitchen, I ask, “Do you want cereal for breakfast?” opening the refrigerator and then a cabinet door. There’s not much to be seen: Esther’s Frosted Flakes, some instant oatmeal, a gallon of milk that may or may not have expired.
“No,” Ben says. “I’m not a breakfast person,” and so he sticks with the coffee as I pour myself a bowl of Esther’s Frosted Flakes and eat them dry just to be on the safe side. Certainly Esther wouldn’t poison her own Frosted Flakes.
Or would she?
I take a bite and spit it out posthaste, deciding maybe I’m not such a breakfast person after all, either.
“I should go,” Ben says then, speaking in one-word sentences. “Shower,” he says, and, “Work.”
And that’s where things get awkward.
Most men who spend the night with me end up disappearing before the rise of day, usually at my request. I know how the story goes. They say they’ll call, but they never call. I sit around waiting for the phone to ring, feeling sorry for myself when it doesn’t, and then angry with myself for getting my hopes up. For even thinking that they’ll call. I should know better.
These days I’m the first to say goodbye, and so at daybreak, before the sun has a chance to accentuate his latest mistake, I tell my dates to leave. It’s far easier to be the one in the managerial position telling some man to go, rather than the one who gets left behind.
My roommate, I hear myself say, is awake. You have to go.
But with Ben it’s different. With Ben, I don’t want him to leave. I don’t want to say goodbye. I want to thank Ben for coming to my rescue, for keeping me safe, for bandaging my injured hand. For getting me through what would have otherwise been a terrifying night. For the food and the wine and the company, and maybe, just maybe, for the kiss. If there was a kiss. I’d like to pretend that there was, just to get that awkward first kiss out of the way. The next one, I tell myself, will be far less thorny and fraught instead with romance and passion. That’s what I tell myself, anyway, as I watch Ben slip into a coat and then into his shoes.
But instead all I manage is a stiff, unconvincing, “You’re the best,” and he says, “You’re not so bad yourself,” and then he goes and I’m left overanalyzing those five elementary words of his—You’re not so bad yourself—until it’s enough to make my head explode.
I run to the window to see him leave, drooling out the window like a dog watching its owner go. Once he’s gone, around the corner and out of sight, I peer at the clock on the microwave: 7:58. I peer down at my attire: pajamas. I have seventeen minutes to get showered and dressed for work. Shit.
I grab the dirty dishes and toss them in the sink; the last thing I want is the apartment looking like a sty if Esther decides to come home. I don’t need to give her any more fuel for the fire, another reason to want to do away with me. I open a window a crack, hoping to air out the stench of last night’s crispy sesame chicken, now hardening on a plate on the coffee table. I grab that dish, too, chuck the chicken in the trash and set the plate by the sink. It’s just as I’m about to head into the shower that I hear the sound of my phone, set on the countertop beside the now-empty bottle of red wine, ringing. I grab for it and pick it up, not bothering to look at the numbers on the display screen.
“Hello?” I ask, pressing the phone to my ear. I will it to be Esther. Please let it be Esther.
But it’s not Esther.
On the other end of the line, a flinty voice asks, “Is this Quinn Collins?” and I say that it is while listening to the sound of neighbors in the hall scurrying off to work, the slamming of an apartment door, the jingling of keys.
“This is Quinn Collins,” I say, my mind predicting I’m about to be suckered into buying a new cell phone plan or donating to breast cancer research.
“Ms. Collins, this is Detective Robert Davies, following up on a missing-persons report you filed,” the flinty voice says, lacking all the charisma I’d expect of a salesman. He isn’t friendly; rather, he’s curt and intimidating, and my first instinct is that I’ve somehow done something wrong, that I’ve overlooked some missing-persons protocol I should have known about. I’m in trouble. I’ve screwed up, again. I’ve heard this tone before from my father, from a teacher, from an employer before he fired me for some wrongdoing, or for just being plain lazy. Seems I’m always letting someone down.
“Yes,” I say meekly as I press my back to the popcorn wall, the phone to my ear, and admit sheepishly, “I filed a missing-persons report.” Though I can’t see it, I’m certain my skin turns red.
I hear the sound of paper on the other end of the line, and imagine this man, this Detective Robert Davies, thumbing through the report, staring at the image of Esther and me I imparted to the Chicago PD: she and I at Midsommarfest, feasting on greasy ears of corn. I uproot memories of the setting sun, the sound of some ABBA tribute band onstage, Esther laughing as she smiled for the camera with a piece of hairy husk strewn between her teeth.
Where are you, Esther? I silently plead.
“You’re the roommate of Esther Vaughan?” he asks, and when I say that I am, he says he has some questions for me, questions he’d like to discuss in person. At this my stomach drops. Why? Why does he want to talk to me? In person, no less. Can’t he ask his questions over the phone?
“Am I in trouble?” I ask spinelessly, and he lets loose a railroading laugh, the kind that isn’t meant to express humor but rather be intimidating. And it works; I’m intimidated.
I glance at the clock. I now have about fourteen minutes until I need to leave for work. I don’t have time to stop by the police station on the way to work, and I’m not even sure I want to speak to this detective all on my own. I need Ben.
“I can stop by the station this afternoon,” I say, though of course that’s the last thing in the world I want to do. “After work.”
But the detective says to me, “No, Ms. Collins, it can’t wait until the afternoon. I’ll come to you,” he decides, and already he’s asking where I work—though I’m banking on the fact this is something he knows—but one thing I refuse is to let a detective show up at the office, asking questions, in a place where gossip and hearsay spread like wildfire. Police were here, people will say, asking questions. Details will be invented: handcuffs, Miranda rights, a million-dollar bail. Before the end of the day, the rumor mill will have decided that I killed my roommate and Kelsey Bellamy, too.
I shake my head. I tell him no. “I can meet you in an hour,” I say to him instead, and we make arrangements to meet at Millennium Park.
“Make it two,” he says then, seemingly the kind of man who always needs to get in the last word. We’ll meet at Millennium Park in two hours. Detective Davies and me. Sounds quite quaint, and also a little painful and terrifying, like dental work. I sigh, pressing the end button on the phone and then I make two subsequent calls: one to work, calling in sick—a second bout of the stomach bug, I tell my boss, Anita, who is clearly not pleased—and a second call to Ben, which goes unanswered to my chagrin.