I think of it, I saw no visible symptoms of illness—no coughing, no sneezing, no watery eyes. She was on the sofa, buried beneath the blanket in her comfy, cotton pajamas. Come with me, I’d begged of her. There was a new bar open on Balmoral that we’d been dying to go to, one of those chic, low-lit lounge types that only served martinis.
Come with me, I begged, but she said no.
I’d be a killjoy, Quinn, she said instead. Go without me. You’ll have more fun.
Want me to stay home with you? I asked, but it was a halfhearted suggestion. We’ll order takeout, I said, but I didn’t want to order takeout. I was in a new baby-doll dress and heels, my hair was done, my makeup was on. I’d gone so far as to shave my legs for the night; there was no way I was staying home. But at least I offered.
Esther said no, go without her and have fun.
And that’s just what I did. I went out without her and I had fun. But I didn’t go to that martini bar. No, I saved that for Esther and me to do together. Instead, I wound up at some shoddy karaoke bar, drinking too much and going home with a stranger.
When I came home for the night Esther was in bed, with her door closed. Or so I thought at the time.
But now I can’t help but wonder as I sit on the sofa, considering this morning’s turn of events: What in the world would make Esther disappear out the fire escape window?
I think and I think, but my thoughts only land on one thing: an image of Romeo and Juliet, the famous balcony scene, whereby Juliet professes her love for Romeo from the balcony of her home (which is more or less the only thing I remember from my high school education, that and the fact that a pen barrel makes the best artillery for shooting spitballs).
Is that what sent Esther clambering out the window in the middle of the night: a guy?
Of course at the end of that tale, Romeo poisons himself and Juliet stabs herself with a dagger. I read the book. Better yet, I saw the movie, the 1990s adaptation with Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio. I know how it ends, with Romeo drinking his poison and Juliet shooting herself in the head with his gun. I think to myself: I just hope Esther’s story has a better ending than that of Romeo and Juliet.
For now there’s nothing to do but wait, and so I sit on the small rose-colored sofa, staring at the empty kitchen table, waiting for Esther to arrive home, regardless of whether she spent the night in her bed or crawled out the third-floor window of our walk-up instead. That doesn’t matter. I still wait in my pajamas—a waffle henley and flannel boxer shorts, a pair of woolly slipper socks prettifying my feet—for my coffee and bagel to arrive. But today they’re a no-show and I blame Esther for it, for the fact that this day I’ll go without breakfast and caffeine.
* * *
By the time noon rolls around, I do what any self-respecting adult might do: I order Jimmy John’s. It takes a good forty-five minutes for my Turkey Tom to arrive, during which time I convince myself that my stomach has begun to digest itself. It’s been a solid fourteen hours since I’ve had a thing to eat, and what with the surplus of alcohol, I’m quite certain I’ve got the whole stomach bloating thing going on like those starving kids you see on TV.
I have no energy. Death is imminent. I may die.
And then the buzzer beeps from the first floor and I rise quickly to my feet. Delivery! I greet the Jimmy John’s guy at the door, handing him his tip, a few measly dollars I manage to find in an envelope Esther stuck in a kitchen drawer with the description Rent.
I eat my lunch hunched over an industrial iron coffee table, and then do what any self-respecting human might do when her roomie has gone AWOL. I snoop. I let myself into Esther’s room without a hint of remorse, without a whisper of guilt.
Esther’s room is the smaller of the two, about the same size as a large refrigerator box. Her double bed spans the room, popcorn wall to popcorn wall, leaving hardly anywhere to walk. That’s what eleven hundred dollars a month will buy you in Chicago: popcorn walls and a refrigerator box.
I slip past the foot of the bed, tripping over the pile of bedding that’s still left on the scratched wooden floors, and peer outside at the fire escape, a collection of ladders and platforms in steel gratings that adheres to Esther’s window. We joked about it when I moved in years ago, how she got the smaller room, but by virtue of the conjoined fire escape to her window, she’d be the one to survive a blaze should the entire building one day go up in flames. I was okay with that. Still am, really, because not only do I have a bed and a desk and a dresser in my room, I have a papasan chair. And the building has never once caught on fire.
Once again, I find myself wondering what in the holy hell would make Esther climb out her fire escape in the middle of the night. What’s wrong with the front door? It’s not as if I’m worried because, really, I’m not. Esther’s been on that fire escape before. We used to sit out there all the time, staring at the moon and the stars, sipping mixed drinks, as if it was a balcony, our feet dangling over a repugnant Chicago alleyway. It was sort of our thing, spreading out along the uncomfortable steel gratings of the dingy black fire escape, sharing our secrets and dreams, feeling the lattice grilles of the unforgiving metal dig into our skin until our backsides fell asleep.
But even if she was there last night, Esther certainly isn’t on the fire escape now.
Where could she be?
I peer inside her closet. Her favorite boots are gone, as if she put on her shoes, opened the window and climbed outside with intent.
Yes, I tell myself. That’s exactly what she did, an assumption that reassures me that Esther is just fine. She’s fine, I tell myself.
But still. Why?
I stare out the window at the quiet afternoon. The morning’s coffee blitz has given way to a caffeine downer; there’s not a soul in sight. I imagine half of Chicagoland perched before the TV, watching the Bears claim another stunning defeat.
And then I turn away from the fire escape and begin my search of Esther’s bedroom. What I find is an unfed fish. A heaping pile of dirty laundry spilling out of a plastic hamper in the closet. Skinny jeans. Leggings. Jeggings. Bras and granny underwear. A stack of white camisoles, folded and set beside the hamper with care. A bottle of ibuprofen. A bottle of water. Grad school textbooks piled sky-high beside her ready-to-assemble IKEA desk, in addition to the one that lies on top of it, holding random papers in place. I set my hand on a desk drawer handle, but I don’t look inside. That would be rude, somehow, more rude than riffling through the items left on top of the desk: her laptop, her iPod, her headphones and more.
Thumbtacked to the wall I find a photograph of Esther and me, taken last year. It was Christmas and together we stood before our artificial Fraser fir, snapping a selfie. I smile at the memory, remembering how Esther and I trekked together through mounds of snow to collect that tree. In the picture, Esther and I are pressed together, the boughs of the evergreen prodding our heads, the tinsel getting stuck to our clothing. We’re laughing, me with a complacent smirk, and Esther with her gregarious smile. The tree is Esther’s, one she keeps at a storage facility down the street, a ten-by-five box where, for sixty bucks a month, she keeps old guitars, a lute and whatever else she can’t fit into her pint-size bedroom. Her bike. And, of course, the tree.
We’d gone to that facility together last December, on a mission to find that Christmas tree. We trudged through embankments of newly fallen snow, our feet getting stuck in it like quicksand. It was snowing still, the kind of snowflakes that poured down from the sky like big, fat, fluffy cotton balls. The cars that lined the city streets were buried deep; they’d have to be dug out or wait for a forty-degree thaw. Half the city was shut down thanks to the blizzard, and so the streets were a rare quiet as Esther and I slogged along, singing Christmas carols at the tops of our lungs because there was hardly anyone around to hear. Only snowplows braved the city streets that day, and even they skidded along in a zigzag line. Work had been canceled, for Esther, for me.
And so we plodded to the storage facility to hunt down that small plastic tree to haul home for the holiday season, stopping in the concrete