by Mary Kubica
But Ingrid isn’t using good hostage negotiation tactics. She’s drawing from despair, from this sudden knowledge that Esther is dead. Ingrid screams aloud, “You killed my baby,” a poor choice of words that makes Genevieve reel.
I try desperately to abort a bad situation. “Tell me what I can do for you, Genevieve. Is there something you need? Something that will help you escape?” I ask, my voice louder than the other two, but still, losing composure as before me the scene falls to pieces. I tell Genevieve that I have a friend who is a pilot, a man who owns a small private jet, and how he might be able to help her flee. There’s a small, regional airport in Benton Harbor, just two or three miles from here. I’ll put in a call. I’ll ask my friend to meet us there.
Genevieve looks at me then and spits out, “You’re lying, Alex. You’re lying. You don’t have any friends,” and my breath catches, thinking a knife wound would have felt better than that.
You were my friend, I want to tell her. I thought you were my friend. But those words won’t help. I need to stay rational, and forget that in the mix of all of this, I, too, have been hurt. This isn’t about me. This is about Ingrid, Genevieve and Esther. It’s their story, not mine.
“Genevieve,” I say instead, trying to catch her attention like a game of Capture the Flag. For one split second out of the corner of my eye, I think I see a shape in the window, a pair of eyes looking in at me. Chalky-white skin, hair dyed a faux red, a menthol cigarette perched between a pair of thin, chapped lips, clouds of smoke seeping into the autumn air. Red.
But then it’s gone.
“Genevieve,” I say again, steering my words around Ingrid’s desperate keening, which is doing much more harm than good. “Genevieve. Listen to me, Genevieve. I’ll help you get out of here,” I tell her. “Where do you want to go? I’ll take you anyplace you want to go. I can get you there.” I say it once and then I say it again, quieter this time. “I can get you there.”
But nobody is listening anymore to what I have to say. We’ve all turned our attention to Genevieve. Genevieve, who regales us with the tale of the night she scaled an apartment building on Chicago’s north side and forced her way in through a bedroom window. The window was closed, but she got herself in, anyway, with the help of a slotted screwdriver and some elbow grease. She climbed through the window frame and into the bedroom and there, sound asleep in her bed, was her baby sister, Esther. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen her, of course. They’d met before, an attempt at reunification that failed miserably when Genevieve threatened to expose Ingrid. From that moment on, Esther didn’t want a thing to do with her. She wanted Genevieve to go away. But Genevieve didn’t want to go away. She wanted them to be a family.
“Esther,” Genevieve spews. “Esther,” she says again with an abhorrence on her tongue. “Esther refused. She wouldn’t do it, she said she couldn’t do it, to you,” she says, staring into Ingrid’s desperate eyes. “You’d get in trouble, she said, if people found out I wasn’t ever dead. What would people think if they knew? Esther asked me. Do you think I care what anybody thinks?” she asks.
“And so,” she says, hands up in the air as if admitting to something careless, negligent, a simple mistake, an easy oops—having forgotten a carton of milk at the grocery store or leaving a candle unattended for too long, “I killed her.” She draws that knife across her very own neck—close, but not close enough to lacerate the skin or leave a mark even. “Like this. This is what I did.”
And then for five long seconds the room goes quiet and still.
Five, four, three, two, one.
Bang.
Ingrid moves first, charging from the sofa like a linebacker and into Genevieve, though neither of them falls to the ground. Neither one falls, nor does the knife slip from Genevieve’s grip. I watch and wait and hope that it will happen, that it will happen soon, but it doesn’t. They grapple for the knife, two women locked in a gauche embrace, fighting for the weapon. And when it doesn’t happen, when the knife doesn’t fall, I know I need to move quickly, I need to act quickly, I need to do something. Save Ingrid! a voice screams in my ear. Save Ingrid! I’m keenly aware that Ingrid is on the verge of losing this fight. I can’t sit idly by and watch Ingrid die. Ingrid is a good person; she is. They struggle for a single second before I join the scuffle, three bodies united with a knife wedged somewhere in between.
It’s inevitable that someone will get hurt.
It’s bound to happen.
It’s then, as the knife slips through my skin with the ease of a foot sliding into a pair of socks or a shoe, that I hear it: the sublime sound of police sirens hollering through the streets of town, coming to save me.
It’s as the blood begins to seep from the aperture of my skin that I feel it: a searing pain that immobilizes me. I can’t move, though all around me the others have begun to drift away, watching on with round, agog eyes, mouths parted, fingers pointing. Before my eyes, Ingrid and Genevieve, the both of them, begin to blur. The knife remains inside me, protruding from my abdomen, and at seeing the knife, I slowly smile. After the commotion is through, I’m the one who’s managed to walk away with the knife.
I’m the victor, for once in my life. I won.
The room around me begins to wax and wane like the lake at high tide. And this is what I see: the lake, Lake Michigan, my anchor. The cornerstone of my existence, my mainstay.
They say that your entire life drifts before your eyes in those last few minutes before you die.
This is what I see.
The room around me turns blue and begins to ripple from the walls, across the wooden floors, a breaker coming at me, my feet sinking into sand. I sink into the water then, the blue water of the lake threatening to drown me, or to carry me home perhaps. Home. The lake, Lake Michigan, my home.
Before I know what’s happening I’m three years old again, toddling along the beach for the very first time, gathering beach rocks in a plastic pail. Geodes and lightning stones and quartz. Rocks, all rocks, making my pail grow heavy with time. My mother is there, loitering where the water meets sand, sitting on the beach, her feet lost in the lake’s surge. The sand sticks to her feet, her legs, her hands. She wears cutoff denim shorts and a frumpy T-shirt, one that once belonged to Pops. The shorts she made herself, sheared a pair of jeans off between the waist and the knee so that the edges turn to rags. They fray at the hem, white threads falling from the denim shorts, trailing the length of her gaunt legs.
What she loves is the beach glass, and so when I find it, I collect it in my uninhibited hand and run to her, tiny fragments of beach glass in my sandy palm, pale blue and a washed-out green. My mother smiles at me, this timorous sort of smile that says smiling doesn’t come with ease. But still, she smiles, a forced smile that tells me she’s trying. She runs a hesitant hand along mine as she takes the pail from my hand. She invites me to sit down beside her, and together we piece through the rocks, sorting by shape, and then by color. My mother has a rock for me, as well, a tiny tan saucer that she sets in the palm of my grimy hand, telling me to Hold tight; don’t lose it. An Indian bead, she tells me. Crinoid stems. I’m far too young for words like this, and yet they’re ones that wind their way to my heart like a tree’s sinuous roots, anchoring me to the ground, feeding my soul.
I hold tight; I don’t lose it.
And then, like that, I am eight years old. Eight years old and sad and alone and awkward, a boy too tall for his lanky frame. Sitting by myself on the beach, kicking bare feet at the sand, my eyes obliviously searching the sand for crinoid stems. I watch the way the granules of sand rise up in the air and then fall, dispersing through the air like dandelion seeds. Again and again and again. Rise up and fall, rise up and fall. I dig myself a hole in the ground with an old toy shovel some other kid left behind. I think I might just want to bury myself inside. Bury myself inside and never come out. All I want is my mo
ther, but my mother isn’t here. I stare at that place where the water meets sand, where the waves come crashing onto the shore. I do it to be sure, but sure enough, she isn’t there. She’s nowhere.
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.
Only now do I know it’s true.
“What do you mean?” she asks, her voice nearly a whisper. She’s all but lost her voice. She holds a hand to her throat; it h
urts. “You’re a good roommate, Quinn, you are. You found me,” she breathes, “you saved me,” and at that word saved she begins to cough.
“We don’t have to talk right now,” I say to her. “You should rest,” but as I turn to go, she reaches for my hand.
“Don’t go,” she says, and I take a deep breath and admit to the things I’ve done, how I riffled through her bedroom once, twice, three times, how I found things I know she never wanted me to see. I don’t have to tell her what I found; she knows. She nods knowingly and I voice a name: Jane Girard. Esther’s new name. I also confess that she got a phone call from a woman named Meg, a woman replying to her ad in the Reader, a woman who wanted to be her roommate instead of me. I try not to be sensitive; Esther has been through enough. And yet it hurts when I tell her this, when I admit to knowing she wanted to replace me with another roommate.
“Oh, Quinn,” she says, and with whatever strength she has, she squeezes my hand. “The roommate was for you,” she says, five words that leave me utterly confused. “I was the one who was going to leave.”
And then she explains.
When Esther was a little girl, only a year or so old, her sister drowned. She died. Esther didn’t know a thing about her sister, though there were photos that she’d seen, and also a story that was imparted to her over the years: they were in a hotel room, Esther, her mother and sister, Genevieve, and when Genevieve was left alone in the bathroom for a minute or two, she sunk under the bathwater and died. The reason she was left alone in the room? Esther. That’s the story she was told, though her mother always finished with this addendum: It’s not your fault, Esther. You were only a baby. You couldn’t have known.