But there are other mothers who are here, other mothers that I take in one at a time, wishing each and every one of them were mine.
And then it’s nighttime, and the world around me is nearly black. I’m twelve years old, staring through a telescope lens with Leigh Forney at my side. She doesn’t touch me, and yet somehow, in some way, I can feel her skin, barely, just barely, the nebulous sensation of skin on skin. I’ve never felt this way before. This is different; this is new. And it’s not bad at all. I like the way I feel as I stand there on the lake’s shore, looking at the sky, listening to the waves, reminding myself to breathe. It’s a night committed to memory, the particulars stored someplace safe to draw on in times of need. Leigh’s romper, a purple gray thing with shorts and a T-shirt conjoined at the center with a drawstring waist. Her feet, barefoot. A pair of sandals dangling over a single finger so that it stretches too far one way. On her hair: a headband. In her eyes: excitement and fear, like mine. The night is dark, save for the stars. The moon is foggy and vague. And Leigh says to me in a voice that is both playful and pure, “Bet I can beat you to the carousel,” and like that, we’re off and running, feet sinking in sand, through the parking lot, over the orange partition and onto the sleepy carousel where it’s there, as I climb on a sea serpent chariot and the dormant carousel begins to spin, that the world around me ebbs from view.
The room turns darker, the ceiling illuminated like a nighttime sky, my mother’s craven smile flecked across the drywall like a constellation. I’m five years old and all around me the world is black. It’s nighttime still and I’m asleep in my big-boy bed, senseless to the touch of a hesitant hand that strokes my hair in the darkness, heedless of my mother’s hurting words breathed into my ear before she goes. You deserve so much more than me.
But I hear them now, words that ease their way into my anamnesis as the line between this life and the next softens and blurs.
And I fall.
Quinn
We stand on the street corner. There are men and women in uniform scuttling all around us: policemen, paramedics, detectives. They move quickly, trotting between gathering spots and meeting points: their cars, the inside of the single-story stucco building, a makeshift command post where Detective Robert Davies stands, telling the others what to do. The storage facility is cordoned off with yellow caution tape. Police Line Do Not Cross, it says. And yet I stand there beneath a thick, scratchy wool blanket and watch a dozen or more men and women in uniform cross behind that line. I watch them go in, and then later, I watch as they emerge, toting a form on a stretcher, strapped to the gurney with elastic bands and covered in a blanket.
Esther.
Dusk is falling quickly. The cars on the streets mushroom in number, from the usual daytime congestion to the bumper-to-bumper, bottleneck traffic of rush hour in Chicago, further aggravated by brouhaha on the side of the street: the policemen, the paramedics, the detectives, which passing cars pause to see, further holding up traffic. The cursory cars stare at me, standing there beneath the scratchy wool blanket, holding an ice pack to my head. They stare at Esther being removed from the storage facility. They stare at a news crew complete with microphones and cameras, men and women made to remain behind a police line where they can’t reach the detectives, the storage facility employee—who garners his own scratchy, wool blanket—or me.
Car horns blare.
In Chicago, in November, dusk falls before five o’clock. The sun sets in the west, out in suburbia, somewhere above my mother and father’s split-level home, taking with it the sun, leaving behind scant traces of light and a cobalt sky. Beside me, Ben stands, his arm on my shoulder, though I can hardly feel its weight. I don’t know how he got here; I can’t remember calling. But maybe I did.
I can do little but stare at Esther on the gurney as she tries to push herself up to a sitting position with little to no strength. The paramedic places a firm but gentle hand on her shoulder and commands her not to move. “Stay still,” he says, and, “Relax.”
Easier said than done.
Esther has been held captive in this storage facility for five long days. For five days she has been denied food, and only teased with water the one time her captor passed through.
“She was there. Genevieve,” Esther tells me, and I’m not sure if she was really there or if it was only a dream, an illusion, a trick played on Esther by her own mind. “She gave me water. Lukewarm water, for torture, a tease, a way to prolong what should have been a certain death.” Esther laid there on the concrete floors for days, cold, alone and terrified. That’s what she said to me as I laid there, too, on the floor with her, waiting for paramedics to arrive, wrapping my body around hers to try and keep her warm. She had no idea what day it was, or what time. She was covered in her own bodily waste, and in her mouth was a gag so that she couldn’t cry out or scream. There was little the storage facility worker could do, though he called 911 and cranked the heat, trying to get the temperature in the building to rise so that she’d stop palpitating. But it didn’t rise. Not fast enough, anyway. We wrapped Esther in our own sweaters and coats, anything we could find to bring her warmth. The man offered trifling bits of water, pressing a bottle to her lips, though he cautioned that too much would make her sick. I didn’t know one way or the other, though if it were up to me I would have let her drink the whole darn thing.
And then the paramedics arrived, and the police, and the facility employee and I were sent outside.
There on the street curb Ben wraps his arm around me again and draws me near. I’m shaking, from cold, from fear. Ben tells me this as I lean into him, and beg the wind to quit. “You’re shaking,” he says. My hair whips around my head, the plunging temperatures chilling me to the bone. Tonight we’re expected to get snow, the first few flurries of the season. Nothing that will stick, but still snow. I’m thinking of the radiator in Esther’s and my little apartment, of whether or not it will be enough to warm the rooms. I’m thinking about the apartment itself, with all of Esther’s and my belongings tucked inside. I fold my head onto bent knees and begin to cry. A quiet cry. A tear or two that dribble, unchecked, from my eyes. I don’t think Ben sees.
I won’t go home tonight; tonight I will stay with Esther.
“She’s asking for you,” a voice says, and as I turn, there is the detective, Robert Davies.
“For me?” I ask, somehow surprised, and my gaze follows his to where Esther and her gurney are parked inside the ambulance with a single door open wide. An EMT attends to her, administering fluids. Soon she will be ushered to the hospital for a further examination and there she will spend the night.
I cross the police staging area and draw near the ambulance door. “How is she doing?” I ask the paramedic who presses a stethoscope to Esther’s heart for a listen and tells me that she’ll be fine. I can’t yet look into Esther’s eyes. There are no wounds that I can see, no gashes or blood, and yet I imagine that everything is broken on the inside.
“I haven’t been a very good roommate,” I confess, peering sideways at her, and Esther’s jaded face turns confused. In that moment she looks so puny to me, undernourished and scared. Delicate in a way I never knew she could be. Her eyes look tired, her hair—oleaginous and filthy—lying too long over her bony shoulders. It needs to be trimmed. I reach out a hand and stroke that hair, finding it impossible to believe that just twenty-four hours ago I was sure she was stalking me, that she was trying to take my life.
But now I see: not my Esther. No. Esther would never do anything to hurt me.