“I was hoping you’d do me a favor, Alex,” Ingrid says, drawing my eyes away from a lady on the TV screen. Her home is a crisp white: white walls, white cabinets. The floors are a contrast to the rest of the home, stained plank flooring, so dark they’re almost black. Her furniture and decor are austere, shades of neutrals and gray, not much in the way of knickknacks or accessories, unlike my own home, Pops being the hoarder that he is, unable to part with anything. It’s not like he collects years’ worth of rubbish, piled miles high in the middle of our living room, stray cats procreating in every crevice of our home so that it burgeons with feral kittens, some living, some dead. No, not like that; not like those hoarders on TV. But he is sentimental, the type that has trouble parting with my junior-high report cards and baby teeth. I suppose this should make me feel good. Deep down I guess it does.
But it’s also a painful reminder that Pops has no one else in this world but me. If I were to leave, where would he be?
“I made a shopping list,” Ingrid says, and without waiting for her to voice the words—Will you go?—I say, “Sure thing. Tomorrow, okay?” And she says that it is.
From a window in the kitchen of Ingrid’s home, I’ve got a decent view straight to the inside of Dr. Giles’s office. Ingrid’s Cape Cod sits just above his, the window at the ideal angle to see right in. It’s not a great view, but still, it’s a view. As Ingrid sorts through her purse for two twenty-dollar bills and hands them to me, I catch sight of something shadowy and vague, just the movement of shapes through the glass. Someone is there. I stare, but I don’t stare long. I can’t. I don’t want Ingrid to think I’m some Peeping Tom. Instead, my eyes meet Ingrid’s and I tuck the two twenty-dollar bills into a pocket and tell her that I’ll go tomorrow morning. I’ll go to the grocery store in the morning. I’ve done this routine many times before.
I take the list, say my goodbyes and go.
The minute I emerge from Ingrid’s house and step down the wide porch steps and onto the sidewalk, I see it.
The café window is now untenanted.
The girl is gone.
I often thought that Esther was transparent, like a pane of glass. What you see is what you get. But now, sitting on the floor of her boxy bedroom, on my legs so that they’ve gone numb, holding the note to My Dearest in my hand, I think that maybe I was wrong. I’ve gotten it all wrong.
Maybe Esther isn’t transparent, after all. Not a pane of glass but rather a toy kaleidoscope, the kind with intricate mosaics and patterns that change every time you so much as turn the edge.
It was a listing in the Reader that brought me to Esther.
“You can’t be serious?” asked my sister, Madison, when I showed her the ad: Female in need of roommate to share 2BDR Andersonville apartment. Great locale, close to bus and train. “You have seen the movie Single White Female, haven’t you?” she probed from the edge of her twin-size bed, science flash cards spread out before her, proliferating like rabbits on the bedspread.
I picked up a flash card. “You’re never going to need this junk, you know?” I asked, staring at the garbled definition on the back. “Not in the real world, anyway.”
And then Madison gave me that look like she always did and said, “I have a test tomorrow,” as if that was something I didn’t know.
“No shit, Sherlock,” I said, tossing the flash card back on the heaping pile. “But after high school,” I mean. “You’re never going to need this crap.”
I was the last person in the world who should be giving anyone advice on anything, the least of which was education. I had graduated five months ago from college, a crappy college at that, one which didn’t quite make the cut of best colleges in the US of A. But the tuition was cheap, or cheaper than its counterparts. They also let me in, the same of which couldn’t be said for the other colleges to which I applied thanks to a little thing known as learning disabilities. Between the ADHD and the dyslexia, I was a lost cause. Or so said the multitude of rejection letters I received from the colleges to which I applied, with the big, red Rejected stamp across the returned applications.
That’s quite good for the self-esteem. Really, it is.
Or not.
I spent the first two of my eight semesters on academic probation. But when the dean threatened to dismiss me from school, I got my act together and cracked open a book. I also remembered to take my Ritalin from time to time, and admitted to the learning disability, which I wasn’t too keen on having to do.
But still, somehow or other I managed to graduate from college with a 3.0. And yet no one needs academic advice from me, least of all Madison, my little sister, on schedule to graduate with high honors. And so I shut my mouth. On that subject at least.
I had, by the way, seen the movie Single White Female. Of course I had. But desperate times called for desperate measures, and I was desperate. I was twenty-two years old, five months post–college graduation and desperately in need of fleeing my parents’ suburban home where they lived with my mastermind sister and her smelly guinea pig. Madison was still in high school, a science geek with a whole medical career ahead of her. That or an embalmer, maybe, with her whole morbid fascination of things that were dead. She had a taxidermy squirrel she bought on the internet with her allowance, the same thing she planned to do with the guinea pig when it finally kicked the bucket—skin and stuff the pathetic thing so she could set it on a shelf.
Madison was happy as a clam living at home. She couldn’t understand my need to get out. It was more than just dullsville for me; it was nails on a chalkboard, the way my mother’s minivan greeted me at the suburban Barrington Metra station each day after work, Mom behind the wheel, always on my case to know how the day had gone.
Did you make any friends today? she had asked that first day of my new career as a project assistant at an illustrious law firm in the Loop, as if it was the first day of kindergarten and not a job. I got the job based on a little white lie, claiming interest in law school when law school didn’t interest me at all.
Did you learn anything new? my mother asked there, that day, in the front seat of her car.
Nope, Mom. Nothing.
But I did, didn’t I? I learned how much the job sucked.
And then my mother and I drove home, where I was forced to listen to the parental figures go on and on about how Madison was oh so smart, about how Madison aced another exam, about how Madison had already been accepted to some smarty-pants college, while I’d picked one based on the simple fact that it was cheap and they’d actually accepted me as opposed to the mass of rejections I received following a poor performance on my SAT.
I had to get out. I was feeling suffocated, smothered. I couldn’t breathe.
And that’s when it happened. I was riding the Metra home from work when I flipped open to the classifieds and saw the ad in the Reader. Esther’s ad, a beacon in a dark night sky. I’d looked for apartments before, but my entry-level job barely paid minimum wage, and though I tried cutting corners—studio apartments, garden apartments, apartments on the south side—the simple fact was that I couldn’t afford an apartment in Chicago all on my own. And an apartment outside of Chicago was out of the question because then not only would I need an apartment, I’d also need a car, some mode of transportation to drive me to and from the train station rather than mother dearest.
Female in need of roommate to share 2BDR Andersonville apartment. Great locale, close to bus and train.
I was sold! I called immediately and we made arrangements to meet.
The day I was to meet Esther for the first time, I mentally prepared myself for a meeting with Jennifer Jason