But here’s the really weird thing, though of course everything about this day, this week, is weird. When I talk to Detective Robert Davies, I’m absolutely certain we’ve spoken before. His voice is as familiar to me as some decades-old song whose lyrics you never forget.
I’m not in a rush anymore. Now I have time to kill, two hours until I meet the detective. I drift into Esther’s room and drop to the floor, assessing the photograph I’m creating, all those minced-up bits of photo paper coming together one by one: the sleeve of a plum sweater, the black of a shoe. Threads of blond hair that look uncannily like mine, the blond blown-out look bobbing on the surface of that chunky sweater with its bateau neckline. My fingers start to shake as I grab for more shreds and lay them in place, the task becoming quicker now that it’s nearly through. There aren’t so many pieces remaining anymore in my pile on the floor, and I’ve become quite the maven, knowing innately the blue of the sky versus the blue of a short-sleeve shirt of a man hovering in the background beneath a store awning, which is, of course, also blue. I gather the bits one by one and pop them into place, watching the image take shape: a city street scene. I’m not one for wearing purple, but the sweater is a favorite of mine, the boatneck that slips from the shoulder exposing the flesh of a collarbone: the closest to sexy I ever get. It’s a dark purple, nothing too feminine or dainty like lavender or violent, but rather plum. A robust plum. I’m standing midstride in the image, walking down the urban street. I’m not smiling; I’m not even staring at the camera. In fact, I don’t even know that the camera is there, and—as I’m flanked by dozens of other pedestrians also as incognizant of the camera as I—I imagine Esther hidden on the other side of the busy city street, snapping the photo with a long lens.
But why?
It’s as I lay the last few shreds with shaking hands that the answer comes to me. As I piece together the last ribbons of skin I begin to understand, the skin no longer a summer tan but losing color quickly and drifting to a winter white as it does now. My face takes shape: the flat forehead, the thin eyebrows, the big eyes. I piece together the nose, the lips, moving downward, and as I reach the exposed neck above the collar of that plum sweater I see that someone’s taken a red roller ball pen to the flesh and slashed clear through the neckline.
Alex
I run silently from the house but I don’t go home. Instead, I hide in the overgrown bushes outside. I haven’t quite figured out what to do and so I loiter and think, think and loiter. But I don’t have to do either too long. Before I know it, there’s a noise from the window of the old home. The sound of footsteps in the lawn. The crunch of brittle, autumn leaves beneath her feet. And then Pearl appears and makes the decision for me.
She is wrapped up in her coat and hat and in her hands is a shovel. A shovel? I think, taking a second look at the item in her hands. Yes, a shovel.
She starts to walk. She doesn’t see me as I follow her by twenty paces or more, as we drift down the street and into town, heading in the direction of the old cemetery, again. I am on tiptoes, trying hard to silence my footsteps. Pearl, herself, walks as if on air.
I watch breathlessly as Pearl lets herself in through the strident iron gate, walking across a carpet of fallen leaves. I follow. It’s still early morning, the sun having yet to subdue the heavy fog that impregnates the land, turning the air to clouds. We walk through clouds all along the way, Pearl in the front, me in the rear, watching as the world materializes before us in ten-foot increments so that we’re utterly clueless as to what exists beyond those visible ten feet. I am, at least. I have no idea what’s there or what’s not there as if I’m Christopher Columbus half certain that in those ten feet I might fall off the face of the flat earth and die. Black turns to gray—the bark of the trees, the iron of the gate getting washed away by the fog. Everything is pale and bleached. Tree branches and age-old gravestones become intangible, evanescing at their edges. Before my eyes, they disappear, too, lost in the brume. Streetlamps are on, their light fading fast in ten-foot intervals as do the trees and the fence and the gravestones I falter past one by one by one, tripping over rocks and roots all along the way to Genevieve’s resting spot, her grave.
Pearl has no idea that I’m here.
As I hover in the distance, completely blanketed by the thick fog and the branches of dense shrubbery, I see her take a gardening spade to the earth and start to dig.
Quinn
Outside the day is cold. It’s sunny, but that doesn’t mean much. The sun reflects off the glass of the buildings, subduing me. Slowing me down. It’s in my eyes so that I can’t see, and I need to see as I scurry through the masses of people, looking forward, looking backward, hurrying on my way to Millennium Park. I turn around quickly, making sure I’m not being trailed.
The temperatures stick around in the midforties as, up and down Michigan Avenue, workers hang holiday lights on the buildings and trees. It’s too early for this, only November, and yet within days Mickey and Minnie will arrive to lead the parade, the Magnificent Mile Lights Festival, which Esther and I went to together last year.
But this year we won’t be going.
I consider the red line singed across my neck in the shredded photograph and think, This year I might be dead.
The streets are busy. Sandwiched somewhere in between the morning rush and the noon hour, the streets are still congested with people, hordes of them standing at various intersections, waiting for their turn to cross. Cabs soar by, much too quickly for the allotted speed of thirty. I stand at the intersection, waiting for the light to turn green. I watch as a cabbie slams on the brakes, startling a woman in the center of the street. She drops her yoga mat and flips him off, but he breezes past her, anyway, uncaring.
And then I scurry on to Millennium Park.
Millennium Park is a ginormous park right in the heart of the Loop, complete with a garden and band shell, an ice rink, a fountain with reflecting pool and, of course, the legendary Bean. It has a name, one I can’t think of right now as I hurry right past it, but for most of us Chicagoans it’s aptly known as the Bean. It looks like a bean. If it talks like a bean and walks like a bean, then it is probably a bean.
Tons of people gather at Millennium Park each day, locals and tourists alike. It’s a hotspot. Kids kick around in the reflecting pool, being spat at by the faces of Crown Fountain. They lie on their backsides beneath the Bean to see their warped reflections in the steel plates like a fun-house mirror. They dine in outdoor cafés; they listen to live music on the lawn of the pavilion, catching some rays under the warm, summer sun. They follow paths and bridges through the gardens and eat ice cream beneath the tall trees.
But not today.
Today it’s too cold.
I didn’t think of this when considering a nice, public place to meet the detective.
I’m early. While I wait for the detective to show, I try to hide among the stripped November trees, but they’re transparent, see-through. They offer no disguise. Tourists with a camera pass by and ask that I take their picture. I back away. I say that I’m in a hurry. I can’t be slowed down.
I make the decision to steal away into a local coffee shop to kill some time. I order a latte and take a seat in back. There is a newspaper on the table that someone must have left behind, and I hold it to my face so I won’t be seen. I think about the photograph scattered in a million pieces on Esther’s bedroom floor. It’s a threat, a blatant threat. She wants to take my life. Esther took that photograph and then marked it up with a red pen, a thin line across my neck—a telling sign she wants me dead.