out of the lot and out of town that I see her sitting all alone on the playground’s belt swing, her feet dragging through the sand below. Her hands clutch the chain, though she doesn’t pump her legs, allowing the wind to move the swing for her. It’s a measured swing to say the least, deliberate and lazy, as one does when they’re thinking about something else and not at all about the swing.
Pearl.
Her coat is on; her hat is on. Her hands are ungloved and look to me to be cold. Her scarf is wrapped around her neck, though the wind grabs it by either end and pulls, so that the scarf floats this way and that on the current of the wayward wind. It’s begun to rain—just a slight drizzle—something she seems repellent to, as if she’s waterproof. She doesn’t seem to mind the rain, which pelts me in the eyeballs and soaks my insides. I can’t stand the rain. I could scurry home; I should scurry home. I should run. But I don’t. Instead, I move to a covered spot, a picnic area with wooden tables and, more importantly, a roof. I sit on the timber tabletop, a solid fifty feet from where Pearl sits.
She doesn’t see me.
But I see her.
When I get to the end of the note, I have one, simple, undeterred thought: Who the hell is My Dearest? I have to ask Esther about this. I just have to. The last line screams over and over again in my ear: Did you see me? Were you trying to make me mad?
I want to ask Esther, Who?
I scurry out into the living room to see if she’s come home yet, slipped in quietly while I was in her bedroom. I half expect to see her sitting on the rose-colored sofa, crisscross-applesauce as she says to those tiny tykes at the bookshop’s story time. I picture myself confronting Esther about the note, thrusting the typed sheet of paper under her nose. Who is My Dearest? I ask. I see myself shake that note in front of her rueful face and demand to know, Who is he?
A line runs through my mind: Or maybe that was something she came up with all on her own: leaving the lights on so that I could see. It was, after all, her victory.
In my musings I shake Esther by the shoulders and ask over and over again: Who is she? Who is she, Esther? as Esther’s face turns contrite and she begins to cry.
But no. I wouldn’t do that to Esther. I wouldn’t want to see her cry.
But still, I want to know. Who is she?
Of course it doesn’t matter, anyway, because when I come barreling out of the bedroom she’s not there. Of course she’s not there. It’s just me and an empty room. The TV is off and so other than the hiss of the radiator the room is silent. The room itself screams of Esther, all the mismatched furniture she owned before I moved in: the rose-colored sofa, the industrial iron coffee table, a mod plaid chair in black and white, throw pillows in moss and yellow and blue. And then, of course, there was the frieze rug that we carried home together from some yard sale on Summerdale—my only contribution to the decor save from, of course, me. We must have walked three blocks with that rug, Esther in front, me in the rear, laughing all along the way from the sheer weight of it, from the fact that it was a bilious green. I take in the walls of the apartment themselves, a blinding white, which we’re prohibited from painting by order of Mrs. Budny. Mrs. Budny, an eighty-nine-year-old Pole who lives in the unit beneath us, and also my landlord. The walls instead are covered in coat hooks and candleholders and a dry-erase board where Esther and I leave each other curt little messages, missives and other forms of communiqué.
Pick up milk.
Did you eat my cheese?
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
Ran out. Be home soon.
It’s lonely, I realize again then. The apartment is lonely without Esther home.
I pick up my phone to call Ben, a coworker and also a friend. Ben is, more or less, the only person I talk to at work unless of course I’m being paid to talk to them. The lawyers who beckon me to fetch files and make photocopies—I only speak to them because I have to speak to them. It’s required. Part of the job description essentially.
But Ben I speak to because I want to. Because I like him. Because he’s nice.
He’s also handsome as all get-out, a twenty-three-year-old PA like me, though one with legitimate plans of law school ahead. But he’s got a girlfriend. A college coed, another law school hopeful like him. As soon as she finishes up a prelaw degree at UIC, they’ll both apply for law school together in Washington, DC. So romantic. His girlfriend’s name is Priya, a name that even sounds beautiful.
I’ve never met her in person, Priya, but I’ve seen the assemblage of photographs Ben stores in his smallish office cube: photos of Priya alone, photos of Ben and Priya, photos of Priya and Ben’s dog, a one-eyed Chihuahua named Chance (and if that doesn’t say something about the size of Ben’s heart, I don’t know what does).
I find Ben’s number in my call history and click on his name, and then proceed to listen to the phone ring five shrill times before it sends me to voice mail. I listen to Ben’s message, the simple and robotic and yet entirely charming sound of his voice as he says, This is Ben. Leave a message. I could listen to that message on repeat all night. But I don’t. Instead, when the phone beeps, I take my cue and leave a vague message. “Hey,” I say. “It’s Quinn. I have to talk to you. Call me back, okay?” I don’t say a thing about Esther. That’s not the kind of message you leave on a voice mail; it’s tacky. Important things aren’t meant for voice mail. I’ve been dumped that way before, and so I should know. I’ll fill Ben in when he calls back, but then I picture Ben and Priya together and wonder when he’ll call back, or if any of this will matter any more when he does. Esther will surely be home soon, I think, although now I’m not so sure.
I sit on the sofa all alone and watch as the apartment is besieged by blackness. Nighttime. The only light derives from a streetlamp or two outside our apartment window—and even those are few and far between—our little residential Chicago neighborhood too far from the Loop to be illuminated by the likes of the Willis Tower or Donald Trump’s posh hotel. As darkness takes over, I start to fill with a sense of unease. Where is Esther? Esther has done strange things before, don’t get me wrong, but never before has she left me for a whole day without saying where she was going or when she’d be home. Never before has she climbed out that fire escape window and disappeared into the darkness of night. I stare at the clock on the wall and realize it’s been twelve long hours since Esther’s alarm clock first woke me from sleep, and still she’s not here.
I start to worry. What if something has happened to Esther, something bad?
And so I contemplate a second phone call. Not to Ben this time, of course, but to the police. Should I call the police? My mind vacillates back and forth between Call the police and Don’t call the police like a game of eeny, meeny, miny, moe, before landing on Call the police. And so I do. I dial 311, the city’s nonemergency phone number, as opposed to 911. This isn’t an emergency, or at least I don’t think it is. I pray it’s not an emergency. A woman answers the phone, and I picture her, some telephone operator, sitting at a computer desk with a headset on her head, flattening her hair.
At the operator’s request, I state the nature of my nonemergency. “My roommate,” I tell her, “is missing.” And then I fill her in on the details of Esther’s quick departure—the window, the screen, the fire escape.
She listens attentively, but when I’m through, her words are wary. “Have you checked the local hospitals?” she asks.
“No,” I admit, feeling suddenly like a fool, “I haven’t.”
It didn’t occur to me for one split second that Esther might be hurt.
“That’s a great place to start.” And I gather from her comment that calling the police isn’t a great place to start. “You’ve checked in with your roommate’s family? Other friends?” she asks, at which I shake my head in silent admission. I did