The Night Gwen Stacy Died (27 page)

There was a knock on the door then, and Novak was startled. He started to guide the
pile of pills back into the narrow mouth of the bottle, but before he had finished,
the door was opening and the girl was pushing her way inside.

“I need to brush my teeth,” she said. “I forgot.” Her eyes were sleepy and slowly
scanned the room. “I guess you don’t have an extra toothbrush?”

“No,” Novak said. He capped the bottle and pushed it back into the cabinet without
comment.

“I’ll just use my finger then,” she said. “Even though it’s a little gross.”

“You could use mine if you want,” Novak said.

Gwen made a face. “No thanks.”

“Toothpaste is on the top shelf,” he said, and he started to step aside to make space
for her in front of the mirror.

“Jake,” she said, just as he was leaving, and he paused at the door.

“Yes,” he said.

She looked him in the eye for several seconds, saying nothing, but Novak understood
in this look that, yes, she had seen the pills on the shelf already, and she knew
full well what his history of swallowing such things was, but she was going to trust
him, she was going to trust this was something that was already part of the past.

“See you in the morning,” she said.

He didn’t see her in the morning. He slept late into the day, and it was early afternoon
when Novak opened the door to his room and found she was already gone. Still, there
was nothing to worry about; Gwen knew what to do. The plan had already been devised.

“When he gets here,” Novak had asked last night, “can we have some time alone?”

“Of course,” she said. “I’ll get out of your way.”

“It’s been a long time,” he said.

The girl looked at her shoes. She said, “I know it.”

So now there was nothing to do but wait. The rope was on the kitchen counter leftover
from yesterday’s interrogation. Patch was missing again; Gwen probably took her along.
Novak sat in the same kitchen chair, this time with his hands free, or with his hands
fidgeting or straightening the kitchen, organizing the dishes and the boxes there,
because all there was to do now was wait. Wait for the sound of the door, when he
could stand up, when he could walk through the kitchen and onto the landing, when
he could open the door and invite in the past that he had given up and that he always
believed had given up on him.

THE GIRL IN THE MISSING
person poster looked young. Sheila was walking home from Jake’s apartment when she
saw the poster stapled to a telephone pole. It was past midday, and she was walking
fast with Patch beside her, barely pausing at crosswalks. By now it was clear that
Patch didn’t need the encouragement of a ribbon and a rope. The animal had no intention
of wandering off, and the two walked swiftly down the sidewalk, side by side. She
had been thinking only that she had to hurry, that Peter would be worried by now.
She had spent the night at Jake’s without calling home—she and Peter didn’t have their
phones, so it wasn’t that easy, though she might have called Iva to deliver the message—and
now she felt guilty for keeping him waiting so long. She had been walking fast and
only stopped momentarily in front of the poster, mustering up a half second of sympathy
for the kidnapped teenager, when she recognized the photograph.

She had been sitting in the backyard with her father last summer, keeping an eye on
the meat on the grill while he ran inside to check the baseball scores. It had been
just before the Fourth of July; her mother was in the kitchen, frosting a cake fashioned
after an American flag, with rows of strawberries for the stripes and blueberries
for the negative spaces between the fifty stars. Sheila had been examining the underside
of a hamburger when her father came outside with the camera slung around his neck,
his face pressed up against the viewfinder, framing her there, though this kind of
thing wasn’t really his strength. Her mother was always the one who took pictures,
the person who organized and cataloged every family event—birthdays, graduations—by
date and by album. These photographs everyone was prepared for, dressed appropriately,
animated according to the occasion. But for her father to snap an unexpected photograph
of only Sheila on a nothing summer night was something strange. It had reminded her
that in a number of years she would be the one taking care of her parents, instead
of the other way around. Between she and her sister, Sheila had always been the more
sentimental, the more prone to tears. Watching her father behind the camera, squinting
into the last bit of sun in the yard, Sheila felt her face become warm.

“The light’s no good,” she’d said to her father. “It won’t turn out.”

“Shows how much you know,” he mumbled, snapping the shutter.

But the girl in the poster didn’t look like someone who had a father; her eyes were
fearful, feral, the eyes of an animal lingering by the shoulder of the road before
running headlong into traffic. She ripped the poster down from the telephone pole
where it was stapled. Under the photograph, she read:

MISSING PERSON: Sheila Gower

Age: 18. Height: 5 feet, 6 inches. Weight: 115 pounds. Hair: light brown. Eyes: light
brown. Last seen: March 20, Sinclair Gas Station, Highway 6, Coralville, Iowa. She
is thought to be residing in the Chicago metropolitan area. Anyone with information
about the whereabouts of Sheila Gower should contact the Special Victims Unit of the
Chicago Police Department.

You would think that the cops in a major U.S. metropolis would have something better
to worry about than the disappearance of a girl from a gas station three hundred miles
away. This was a city full of crime and criminals; you had to wonder how the cops
found the time to even bother. According to the poster, Sheila Gower had been kidnapped
and taken from her home against her will. According to the poster, someone was responsible;
someone was going to have to atone for all this trouble they caused Sheila Gower and
her family. Looking at the poster she understood that there was still a way she could
return to Iowa, to her father and mother, to Andrea and Donny; she could find another
job, find a new lunch table in the cafeteria, or take up eating with Anthony again.
All this could be nothing but a brief wandering off from the regular course of her
life. A misstep, a mistake.

She imagined herself in her parents’ backyard. Her mother would dab at her eyes with
a tissue and her father would pace in awkward circles around her for weeks, like something
in orbit. There would be a party with corn on the cob and mashed potatoes and a seven-layer
cake. Andrea would give her some cross-stitched thing, and Donny would be there in
one of his undershirts, telling dirty jokes. His jokes were so dumb, sometimes you
had to laugh a little. But it would mean saying she was kidnapped. It would mean betraying
Peter and giving up Gwen Stacy.

She thought of all those long lunch periods spent with Anthony in the cafeteria when
she had been waiting for something like this to come and interrupt the regular plodding
course of her days. With Anthony, she had taken comfort at first in having someone
to sit with, but the fact was the only reason they sat together was because they had
no one else. Yes, maybe after a while they had developed a little more affection or
appreciation for one another, but from the start the arrangement was practical, and
in essence this was the problem as well. The thing about Peter was there wasn’t a
single good reason for her to leave with him. But he made her feel like she was the
only one in the world who could help him, the only one in the world who would do.

As a child, Sheila had spent all her time alone on the front stoop of the house with
chalk or a jump rope, daydreaming of some weary, self-possessed foreigner showing
up in the yard, a cross between Mary Poppins and Marie Curie. The person would show
up with a suitcase and a strange manner of dress because she had traveled from so
far away to get to Sheila. She would be an illusionist, or a fortune-teller, a figure
skater, a Russian ballet teacher, a gypsy street musician with a saw and a bow peeking
out of her rucksack—the details didn’t matter.
So you’ve been here all along!
the woman would gasp through her thick accent.
I’ve been searching the world for you
, she would say to Sheila.
And finally I have found you here.
Sheila would step away from the front stoop of her parents’ house, and the woman
would take the shawl from her own shoulders and wrap Sheila in it like an infant and
lead her away toward some hazy destiny. Of course, whatever the woman had come to
teach her would take work and dedication, many long hours of practice at a tedious
and very specific skill, and she would have to leave her family behind for a time,
but it would all be worth it.

Sheila looked at the girl in the poster again, steering her brain away from the words
below her picture, and in it she could see the yard at her parents’ house, the smell
of freshly cut grass belly up on the lawn, smoke rising off the grill, the noise of
the baseball scores on the radio, Cubs up 4–3 in the seventh, summer night heat, the
moths and mosquitoes. Her father. She could think of Andrea or of her mother without
much guilt, but her father was different. Now, in her mind, he was sitting at the
desk in the corner of the living room with his thinning hair and his high blood pressure,
muttering the initials of cusswords at the television, and it made her heart hurt
to think of him red-faced and fuming and ignorant of her whereabouts. He sat at the
desk in the corner of the living room when he was watching baseball on TV while doing
the family’s finances—balancing the checkbook, filing bank statements. Above her father’s
desk was a little plaque that said
COURAGE: ACTION CURES FEAR
, but there was a time when she was still learning how to read when she asked her
father what the sign said, and he had told her to sound it out for herself and she
had come up with
Action Curious Fear.

Her father had laughed. “
Action curious fear
doesn’t make any sense, honey. A sentence needs a verb.”

But there was a way in which, even years later, when looking at her father sitting
at the desk with the ball game on in the background, if she glanced quickly in that
direction, the sign said both things. It said that the way to overcome fear was to
challenge it with decisive momentum. But it also said something murkier that she could
never quite work out. Something about the still moment just before an action in which
curiosity and fear crouched closely against one another, sharing so much of the same
breath and breathlessness, it was hard to tell them apart. She missed her dad. Her
eyes started to sting, but she blinked the feeling away.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said aloud: to Patch, to nobody.

Sheila stuffed the poster in her handbag and continued walking home to Peter.

The apartment was empty. The bed was unmade. There were several cans of beer in the
sink. Sheila sat on the edge of their mattress and stared at the wall on the other
side of the room. She had counted on finding Peter in the apartment. She had counted
on him waiting there for her until she returned. What if the cops had taken him away?
What if they had found him here alone and had taken him, were questioning him, and
she didn’t get back in time? Don’t be an idiot, she told herself. He’s working. He’s
on a walk. He’s out looking for you. Fine, good, Sheila thought, but also she thought
that it was time to clear out. She had to find a way to get him to Jake’s apartment,
and she couldn’t wait around. She realized then that she had never been alone in the
apartment in the late afternoon, and it felt eerie in the hazy sunshine, no curtains
on the windows, the dirty mattress in the corner of the opposite end of the loft.
This wasn’t living. This was squatting. They had found what they had come to Chicago
to find; now it was time for them to get out of there.

Sheila knocked on Iva’s door, but there was no answer. She would be working of course.
Sheila would be working with her if it were any other afternoon. So she would leave
something in writing. She didn’t have any paper, but all the mail for the building’s
residents was collected in a bin at the bottom of the stairs. Sheila opened a bill
addressed to a name she didn’t recognize, scratched out the name with her pencil,
and wrote “Peter” on the envelope. Then, on the backside of the bill she wrote Jake’s
address. She wrote as fast as she could. She explained how she had found the man from
his dream by the scrap yard, how she needed Peter to come as soon as he could, that
he should stay out of the apartment. Then she stole another piece of mail from the
bottom of the stairs and wrote a second note.

Iva—

C’est moi—Sheila. Je suis désolée pour—(Here she paused for a second before switching
to English. The thing was she was in a hurry, and Iva spoke English perfectly, or
in any case just as well, and anyway, she would understand!)—skipping work again.
I wanted to call, but we will talk soon, and I’ll explain everything. Could you make
sure you get this to Peter for me? Merci!