the list of reasons I don’t like the guy.
There was a whole scandal when Dr. Giles moved his office into the tiny blue cottage. A scandal because the ladies in town took to lurking around the café, to puttering up and down the street, so they could see the comings and goings of Dr. Giles’s clientele: which of the town’s members was seeing the headshrinker and why. Proving what people hated most about small-town living: there is no such thing as privacy.
Ours really is the paradigm of a small town. We’ve got one stoplight, and we’ve got a town drunk and everybody knows who the town drunk is: my father. Everyone gossips. There’s nothing better to do than throw one another under the bus. And so we do.
Ingrid opens the door before I knock. She opens the door and I step inside, wiping my shoes on the woven floor mat. She smiles. Ingrid is about the same age my mother would be if my mother were still here. Don’t get me wrong, my mother’s not dead (though sometimes I wish she was dead), she’s just not here. Ingrid has one of those short hairdos forty-or fifty-year-old women sometimes have, the color of wet sand. She has welcoming eyes. She has a nice smile, but a sad smile. There isn’t a person in town who could say a bad thing about Ingrid, but rather the bad things that have happened to Ingrid. That’s what they talk about. Ingrid’s life is the definition of tragic. She’s gotten the short end of the stick, that’s for sure, and as a result she’s become the town’s charity case, a fifty-year-old woman too terrified to step foot out of her own home. She has panic attacks any time she does, chest pressure, trouble breathing. I’ve seen it with my own two eyes, though I don’t know her whole story. I make it a point not to meddle in others’ business, and yet I’ve seen Ingrid get loaded into an ambulance and whisked off to the emergency room when she thought that she was dying. Turned out everything was fine. Just fine. Just an ordinary case of agoraphobia, as if it’s ordinary for a fifty-year-old woman to stay in her home because she’s scared to death of the world outside. She doesn’t leave her house for anything, not to get the mail or water a flower or pick a weed. Within the gypsum walls she’s perfectly fine, but outside these walls is another story.
But all that said, Ingrid isn’t crazy. She’s about as normal as they come around here.
“Hi, Alex,” she says to me, and I reply, “Hi.”
Ingrid dresses like a fifty-year-old woman should: a bright orange sweatshirt kind of thing, and black knit pants. Around her neck, a locket and chain. In her earlobes, stud earrings. On her feet is a pair of flats.
Before Ingrid has a chance to close the door, I turn around for a quick peek. There in the storefront glass I see her, Pearl, obscured in part by the reflection of nearly everything on the opposite side of the street. What’s inside and what’s outside are complicated by glass, so it’s no wonder that birds fly headlong into it sometimes, plummeting to their deaths on the porous concrete.
But still, through the marquee of trees and in the manifestation of half the world on one pane of glass, I see her.
Pearl.
Her eyes stare out the window, but not at me. I follow the path of Pearl’s eyes to a sign that hangs with scroll brackets from the neighboring home: Dr. Giles, PhD. Licensed Psychologist. And there he stands, Dr. Giles, with his dark, trim-cut hair and well-groomed style, waiting impatiently for a patient to appear.
Well, I’ll be. She’s watching him.
Does she have an appointment with Dr. Giles? Maybe. Maybe that’s it. My perception shifts, but not so much that I stop thinking about her hair or her eyes, because I don’t. In fact, they’re there every time I so much as blink.
Ingrid closes the door, and she asks of me, “Can you lock it?”
Ingrid’s home is on the small size, but more than adequate for a single occupant as I kick the door closed, turn the dead bolt, and bring Ingrid’s lunch to her kitchen table. On the marble countertop is an open cardboard box, a small reserve of novels set beside it. Something to pass time. There’s a knife set there, too, a professional-grade carving knife, used to slice through the packaging tape.
The television is on, a small flat-screen TV that Ingrid doesn’t watch, though I can tell she’s listening to it and my guess is that the sound of actors and actresses on the TV screen tricks her into feeling like she’s not alone. That someone is here even if they’re only make-believe. It’s a spoof she plays on herself. It must be lonely, not being able to leave your own home.
The house is otherwise quiet. Once upon a time there was the sound of boisterous children and stampeding feet, but not anymore. Now those sounds are gone.
“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
