Читать книгу Don't You Cry: A gripping suspense full of secrets - Mary Kubica, Mary Kubica - Страница 19

Quinn

I don’t have to wait too long to be put to the test again.

As I stand in the kitchen, in my hand the phone rings. Esther’s phone. I jump. This time it’s not a blocked call, but a local 773 number. The caller has an easygoing voice, upbeat, maybe the same age as me, though it’s hard to tell through the phone because of course I can’t see the woman on the other end of the line. She asks if this is Esther, and this time I assert proudly, “It is.”

It’s fun, masquerading around as Esther. I hold Esther in the highest regard. If there was one person in the world I’d like to be, it’s Esther. She’s beautiful and intelligent and kind. She’s dauntless and spunky sometimes, and a good roommate to boot.

But all those thoughts fall quickly by the wayside when the caller on the other end of the line announces, “I was inquiring about your ad in the Reader.”

“What ad?” I ask, forgetting for a fleeting moment that I am supposed to be Esther. She’s trying to sell some things, I figure, maybe cleaning out the crap in that storage facility. Who needs an old lava lamp, anyway? They’re way passé.

But when the woman on the other end of the line declares, “The ad for the roommate,” my mouth drops. I’m all but stunned speechless. “Have you already found someone else?” she asks, and a tremendous amount of time passes before I find the ability to speak.

A thousand thoughts run amuck in my mind, but at the very core of them is one question that comes to me again and again: Why? Why did Esther place an ad in the Reader, why is she looking for a new roommate, why does she want to do away with me? I’m hurt. My feelings are hurt like I’ve been stabbed in the back with Romeo’s dagger. I get it that I’m a slob and I pay a measly forty-five percent of the rent rather than the afore-agreed-to fifty, that I don’t always have the cash to cover my share of the utilities or that I leave lights on and forget to turn off the sink water. But still, Esther, I snap silently in my head, wondering suddenly who is the lousier roommate: Esther or me. How could you do this to me? Where did she possibly think I would go if she kicked me out? Back home to suburban America to live with my mother and father and Madison the dweeb? No way. Esther could have pointed out my deficiencies for me; we could have had a conversation about it. She could have given me some warning before deciding to kick me out. Some time to find a new apartment, a new roommate. My heart sinks. I thought Esther was my friend, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe Esther was just my roommate all along.

“It’s okay if you did. I mean, it’s not a big deal,” says the caller, but I clear my throat and swallow the overwhelming sense of betrayal and say to her, “No. I didn’t. I’m so glad you called,” and it’s then that I make arrangements to meet the young lady who’s about to be my replacement, who’s to take over my spot at the kitchen table, my place on the rose-colored sofa, the one who will soon inhabit my room, and become best friends with my best friend while I get tossed like leftover food.

I think of myself, all alone in the big city, without Esther. I can’t afford the rent in a city apartment on my own if my life depends on it. Eleven hundred dollars a month this unit costs, which in Chicago is quite the steal. Esther has lived in this apartment for years, the reason it was cheaper than all its other walk-up counterparts in the neighborhood: rent control. If I walked into Mrs. Budny’s office today and told her I wanted my own apartment, identical to the one I share with Esther, she’d charge me sixteen hundred bucks a month and I don’t have anything in the realm of that kind of money.

I agree to meet with my replacement after work tomorrow at a small coffee shop on Clark. We say our goodbyes and I pull up the Reader online, and sure enough, there it is, the ad. Female in need of roommate to share 2BDR Andersonville apartment. Great locale. Call Esther, and there she leaves her cell phone number beside a photograph of our walk-up from the outside, the autumn leaves tumbling from the trees as if she’d taken that photo yesterday or maybe just the day before.

Why, Esther? I silently beg. Why?