Alex
“Hello?” I call out softly as I come into the quiet house through the back window, doing a sweep of the room with my flashlight. It’s early morning, the sun just beginning to ascend into the November sky. The house is still relatively dark, not yet revived by the luminescence of the morning light. The home is quiet. Pearl might just be asleep, which wouldn’t be such a bad thing. I wouldn’t mind sitting here for a while, watching as she sleeps.
I’ve been thinking about her all night, since I walked her home from the cemetery and in the middle of the street in the middle of the night we said good-night.
In fact, I find that I can’t get her out of my mind.
I tread quietly through the first floor, a mug of instant coffee in my hand. I don’t drink coffee, but it was the only thing we had on hand at home. I don’t want to wake her—not yet, anyway, not before I catch a vision of her asleep, just a whisper of the ombré hair spilling across the country plaid pillow, the moth-eaten blanket pulled up to her chin, her skin rosy red, her eyes still crusty with sleep. The house is warm, thanks to the heater, the faint smell of kerosene still filling the air. That and something chemical and unpleasant, like mothballs and mold.
But when I come into the living room, the ad hoc bed is empty. She’s not there. The heater is on, and so I know that she’s here somewhere. She knows better than to leave the heater unheeded. I told her as much before. And yet she’s not here, on the floor, sound asleep as I expected her to be, in my sweatshirt, with my necklace wrapped around her neck. I lay my hand on the bedding and feel that it’s grown cold. And I think that she’s left, that she’s left me, and I feel sad and more than a little bit let down. She’s gone.
But then I hear something coming from up the stairs, a sound. A voice, singing. A soprano voice crooning a song. I stop for a moment to listen, willing my heartbeats to stop so that I can hear. It’s little more than a murmur that echoes throughout the hollow home, bouncing off the pared walls and the frail steps that are covered in unraveled carpeting. I hold my breath. I try to hear past the ringing in my ears.
It’s her. It’s Pearl, and she’s singing.
I leave the coffee behind and head up the stairs, one step at a time, summoned by the melody.
On the second floor, I scan the bedrooms one by one, pitying the family who once lived here, the forgotten dolls and animals, a child’s drawing that still hangs from the putrefying pink walls. It’s sad. Pathetic, really, and what makes it even worse is that whoever swiped the refrigerator, the air conditioner, the copper pipes, didn’t want a thing to do with the bears or dolls.
Upstairs, it’s cold, the outside air bursting into the bedroom without restraint. The broken windows are open wide, and the range of the heater doesn’t reach this far.
I follow the sound of Pearl’s voice, and before I’m fully aware of what’s happening, I’m in a bedroom, her bedroom, Genevieve’s bedroom. I know it’s Genevieve’s bedroom because a wooden G hangs crookedly from a nail on the wall. I take in an old, cracked dresser, a shattered mirror, walls that are a cloudy pink. I step over the shards of glass on the floor, certain some vandal did that—that they broke the mirror—consigning him or herself to seven years’ bad luck. There are things left behind that no one wants: a doll on the floor, an eerie, eldritch doll that stares up at me with acrylic eyes; furniture, splintered beds and the cracked dresser, left behind for the rats and mice to share.
And then there is Pearl.
She stands on the far side of the room with her back turned to me. She doesn’t know that I’m here. She stares down at a doll in her arms, a soft cloth doll with filaments of blue yarn for hair. Blue, yes, blue. Don’t ask me why it’s blue. That’s not the weird thing.
The weird thing is the look in Pearl’s eye, which I glean in the reflection of the broken mirror on the floor—a patchwork of endearment and sadness—as she cradles that doll in her arms, and runs a gentle hand over the fibrils of hair. The way she lifts the doll up to her lips and places a kiss on its raggedy old forehead. The doll is dressed in a knitted green dress with matching green shoes, a pink cardigan that stretches to her fingerless hands. She’s made of cloth, her smile a simple strip of red yarn. Her eyes are made of beads, but the whole of her is in tatters, badly worn, and abandoned for many long years, along with the home. Just like Pearl.
It’s then, as I stare like a deaf dumb mute, that Pearl presses the doll against her chest, supporting and protecting her like a mother does her child. She closes her eyes and begins to sway at the hips, resuming the melody that first summoned me up the broken stairs and into the bedroom. And that’s when I realize this isn’t just any kind of song, but rather a lullaby.
I gather bits and pieces of the lullaby’s refrain: Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry, as she sings for the doll that lies listlessly in her arms. She cradles the baby with fondness and devotion, but also something akin to ownership, claim and proprietary rights.
It’s weird.
I’m speechless. I can’t say anything, and for a good thirty or forty-five seconds, I can’t move. I can’t do anything but stare as Pearl holds that doll and pitches herself back and forth, back and forth, slowly in the room. She sings, her voice perfectly pitched. It’s seductive, really; it could lull me to sleep. Go to sleep, my little baby.
But there’s something not right about this. I feel that in every single one of my bones. My body screams at me to leave. Leave! But I don’t leave. Not at first, anyway. I can’t, for I’m completely captivated and enchanted by the measured sway of her hips and the tiny, precise toe taps, the squeak of the floorboards that accompanies her every move like a three-piece band. There’s a part of me that wants to say something, to reach out and touch her, to swap places with the doll so that she’ll dance with me instead. And I close my eyes for one moment and one moment alone and allow myself to evoke the soft touch of Pearl’s hands around my neck, to feel her warm breath in my ear, even if it is only pretend. I want to tell her to stop. To put the doll down. To come back downstairs with me so we can both pretend this never happened, that I didn’t see this. I want to sit on the moth-eaten blanket and talk about ghosts and death and dying. I want to go back in time, if only ten minutes at best. I want to go back to ten minutes ago when I climbed merrily though the broken window with a cup of cheap coffee in my hands, thinking that maybe—just maybe—today we would kiss.
But there’s also a part of me that wants to run.
Quinn
In the morning, we dance the two-step in my tiny apartment kitchen, going this way and that, for coffee and mugs. We step on each other’s toes. We both giggle and blush and say, Excuse me, at the very same time, and again we laugh. I pour his coffee; he retrieves the sugar from the canister on the counter. It’s as if we’ve done this a thousand times before.
Poor Priya, is what I should be thinking, but instead: Yay me!
We didn’t sleep together. Not in the way that is often intended by those two words. But we did sleep together. And by that I mean two bodies sound asleep in nearly the same space, me on my bed, he on my bed, head to toe, toe to head. There may or may not have been a kiss. But that’s hard to remember, thanks to the wine.
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.
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 kno
w 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.