The Night Gwen Stacy Died (29 page)

THE TAXI COULD NOT
drive fast enough, and he thought he was never going to get there, that perhaps the
driver was taking a circuitous route only to let the meter run, which was something
you had to watch out for even in Iowa—Peter should know—and certainly here it was
more common. Peter sat in the back seat of the taxi, staring into the address in his
hand. Since turning the corner away from the street that housed Lenka and Petra’s
apartment, he recognized nothing in the dark—each time he managed to catch the name
of a cross street in the taxi’s headlights, the intersections seemed absurd, unlikely:
Hermitage and Armitage, Hoyne and LeMoyne. What sort of city planners would make rhymes
of so many intersections?—so all he could do was trust the driver, put his faith in
the route they traveled. But when the taxi finally rounded the corner onto Walton
Street and stopped in front of an apartment, Peter felt he had arrived too soon. He
stood before the front door with his hands stuffed in his pockets and waited for a
long time before he pressed his fingers into a fist and began to knock. His heart
shook at the thought of Sheila on the other side of it, walking toward him now, and
how he would hold her, how he would inhale the citrus smell of her hair.

Within a few seconds he heard the sound of the deadbolt and chain unlocking. “Coming,”
he heard a man’s voice say, “coming.”

Then the door was opened and the man who had spoken stood beside it. The man continued
to hold the door open, but he didn’t get out of the way for Peter to pass, and Peter
made no attempt to advance into the apartment. He remained rooted to the spot in the
hallway, a mirror opposite to the man inside, who stood exactly eye-level at Peter’s
height. So it was the eyes he saw first. The eyes of the man were dark, but clear.
They were the same as those that he had dreamed every night for a week in Iowa. He
felt his stomach drop in confirmation of this fact. He and Sheila had done it; they
had done this thing together. It was as he was moving away from the man’s eyes to
take in the rest of him that he took a step backward, his foot caught on the mat in
the hallway, and he stumbled slightly, he looked down at his shoe, and then looked
up again and saw that the man’s mouth now was beginning to open, as if to address
him. There was something about the mouth too that Peter recognized.

The man was saying something now, and then he said it again. This time more quietly,
more like a whisper.

Seth.

There was that saying, he had heard it said before: as far as the human ear is concerned,
there’s no equal comfort to the sound of one’s name. People were always saying this,
narcissists it seemed. But there was something else to it, he was now remembering;
it had to do with the mouth of the other person, the one that was doing the speaking.
Because it was rare for a mouth to be able to perform this trick, to offer asylum
in a familiar sound, shelter in a syllable.

Peter stepped quickly through the doorway of the apartment so the man was close enough
to touch. He pushed the palm of his hand against the man’s shoulder; it was solid.
He touched the top of the man’s forearm where his shirt met his skin, and there was
muscle there, and bone. He pulled together each one of his fingers into a fist and
he landed the fist in the pit of the man’s stomach, between his ribs. The man reeled
backward for a second, coughed, touched the place where Peter’s fist had made contact.
He said nothing.

Peter took another step forward into the apartment, closing the distance between them.
“It hurt?” he asked.

“Not bad,” the man said, taking a quick breath, releasing it. “Yeah, a little.”

Peter nodded. He spoke slowly to keep his voice from shaking. “You died twenty years
ago.” He said this plainly, neither question nor accusation.

The man looked at the floor. “I tried to, yes,” he said. “I wanted to.”

Peter’s throat tasted of salt. He swallowed the taste. He had come here to save a
man who died the way his brother had. Now, to find Jake standing before him in place
of the stranger, alive, healthy, Peter thought he would kill him himself. He shook
his head. “I tried to?” he repeated. He felt dizzy now, standing so close to the man,
his brother, or some version of Jake, some vision of him.

“How long,” he said.

“How long what?” asked his brother.

“Have you been here?”

Jake said nothing for a minute. Then he said, “Twenty years.”

Peter was nodding now. He was trying to get his head on a single thought, he couldn’t
focus on the place, this definite place all along, never dead, never not eating or
sleeping or washing his hair like anyone else, all this time, one state away. “Chicago,”
is what he said finally. Then, “Chicago, Illinois.” Then he felt the room start to
get hot, the heat under his fingernails again, as it had happened when he dreamed
this place, and he felt like he needed to sit down, like his legs could not support
his weight, and his brain was running the name of this place through its reels like
the even sound of a passing train—Chicago, Illinois, Chicago, Illinois—and then the
room started to go funny, dark spots, all of them fuzzy, like after looking at the
sun, the white wall behind his brother’s head was full of these dark pools, portals,
negative spaces you had to watch not to fall into, he remembered thinking, which was
the last thing he remembered thinking before he fell into one.

How to adjust the story you’d followed all your life to allow for the details that
were continuously accumulating, piling on top of one another, until there was no sense
in looking the other way? Always a new telling, a revision, had to be crafted to deal
with the worst of it. He learned this from his mother. Jake was dead to them for twenty
years because this seemed the only way to accommodate the reality of his abandoning
them. But this had been his mother’s imposition, her organization of the latest details
into something they could live with.

That night again at the kitchen table: his mother, the dominos.

You and me, honey. How she wouldn’t stop repeating it. How about you and me?

Where’s Jake? he’d asked her. And for a long time she hadn’t answered him, until finally
she said, He’s gone.

Gone where?

How she had started with the truth. How Jake had gotten on a bus that crossed from
Iowa into another place, this nearby city, in the middle of the night. In towns like
theirs people talk; even outside of daylight, there are witnesses to everything.

He had started to cry, and his mother had pushed all the dominos to the side of the
table. A few had clattered against the kitchen tiles. His mother had opened her arms
and he’d crawled across the table and into her lap. And his mother had smoothed her
hands against his hair and said, baby, I’m so sorry.

Because in a way wasn’t it worse? To have helped to bring someone back to life, into
the life you had all maintained together, and then to have to hear secondhand, from
neighbors, from spies, that your effort wasn’t worth anything. To not know whether
he would ever come back, or whether he would always come back, and always they would
be abandoned again and again.

His mother rubbing his back, rocking him back and forth in the kitchen chair. The
white dots of the dominos on the kitchen floor winking up at him like faraway constellations.

Listen, his mother said. And Peter knew he would listen to anything. Whatever she
said, he would believe her. He’s gone, she said. Do you understand?

Peter nodded.

He went to sleep again, his mother said. Asleep, the way we found him in the closet.

How he’d howled, how he’d bit down into the wool of her sweater. But his mother didn’t
tell him this for nothing: it was better that he know, that he understand the bounds
of their shared grief and his own place in it, understand irrefutably that they had
only one another to care for from now on.

A pillow stuffed beneath his neck, a damp kitchen towel folded across his forehead.
He blinked; he looked around. A kitchen chair had been pulled to the side of the couch,
his bedside, and sitting on the chair was his brother. Jake was pushing his hair away
from his face, away from the towel, like his mother used to do when he’d been down
with a fever. Peter sat up with a start.

“It’s okay,” Jake said. He pushed him back to the pillow. “You passed out.”

Peter nodded. “For how long?”

“A few hours,” he said.

“I haven’t been sleeping,” Peter said. He felt the impulse to defend himself. “I’ve
been having these dreams.”

“It’s okay,” Jake said again.

Peter began remembering then. “I punched you,” he said.

Jake nodded. His mouth tightened.

“I came here to rescue someone else,” Peter admitted. “I dreamed someone who was trying
to kill himself the same way you did.”

“You rescue a lot of people?” Jake said quietly.

Peter shook his head. “No one,” he said. “I have never done it right yet.”

“You rescued Gwen,” Jake said. “She said so.”

Peter blinked. “From what?” he asked. But before his brother could answer, he said,
“I got her in trouble is all I’ve done. I’ve done her more harm than anyone.” But
then he remembered: she was supposed to be here. “She was here in the apartment?”
he asked. “You saw her here?”

Jake nodded.

Peter felt his stomach fold in his chest. “Where is she?”

“She’s coming,” Jake said. “She’ll be here soon.”

Peter stared into the ceiling. She was coming. She would be here. He exhaled hours
of worry. He said, “How did she find you?”

Jake looked away for a minute into the other room. He said, “She kidnapped me.”

Peter felt the tiny hairs on the back of his neck rise.

“What?” he said. “I don’t understand.”

“She was angry with me, I guess. There was this stray dog I was looking after, and
Gwen thought it was a wild animal I was trying to unlawfully domesticate, and she
pulled a gun on me, tied me up and everything.”

“She tied you up?”

“Yeah, the dog and me both,” Jake said. “She must have taken the dog with her ’cause
she’s not around, but you’ll have to see her when she comes back. Beautiful dog,”
Jake continued. “I started calling her Patch, you know, after our old dog. Remember,
you know how Patch was, real smart and the way his ears—”

Peter cut him off. “Patch is dead.”

“Well, I figured,” Jake said quietly. “It’s been twenty years. The best ones don’t
make it past fourteen.”

“No, not like you think,” Peter said. “It was right after you left. I watched him
run from our property into the field behind the house.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean he didn’t stick around either,” Peter said roughly, frustrated by the need
to translate for his brother. Wolves lived in the woods behind the house. Foxes were
sighted. Jake knew this as well as he did.

It was quiet for a minute. They were taking turns, asking questions, trying to fill
in the gaping holes of all that had happened with facts they could trade.

Jake spoke then, a whisper. He said, “Why did you kidnap her?”

Peter raised his voice. “Did she say that?” The thought of Gwen betraying him in this
way made his stomach churn. He had offered this to her, this story as a possible alibi,
but he didn’t think she’d use it.

“Relax,” Jake said. “She didn’t have to say it. She’s all over the news.”

“We were only pretending,” Peter said. “Gwen asked me to point the gun at her.”

“Gwen’s her real name?”

Peter considered this. He could feel his brother testing him. “It’s the name I gave
her,” he said. But that sounded wrong, conceited, as if he thought he could walk around
handing out new names to everyone, so he said, “It’s more like a nickname.”

Jake nodded. Then he said, “She called you Peter.”

Peter swallowed.

“You found my comic books,” Jake said.

“Yeah, I found them,” Peter said. “I snuck them out of your room when Mom started
throwing all your stuff away. I pretended that you had left them there for me to find.”

“You read them all?” Jake said. “I had quite a collection.”

Peter stared off into the kitchen. “I was lonely,” he said, as if in defense. “I had
just learned to read.”

He wanted to explain about the dreams, this apartment, about Gwen and their journey,
all of it, but Jake was talking over him then, saying, “Shhh, later Seth. Tell me
later.” Jake was folding the towel over his forehead again, he was telling him to
go back to sleep. Peter allowed himself to close his eyes again; it was quiet for
a long time. Then he started to hear Jake’s voice speaking to him, speaking quietly
while he slept, like his brother wanted to be the first to explain. He could feel
Jake by his bedside the whole time, and sometimes he heard bits of things he said,
like a car radio passing in and out of range. He heard Jake speaking, but couldn’t
pull all the words together. He felt the pressure of his brother’s hands fold the
towel again and again over his forehead. He heard him speak the names of familiar
things. The name of their dog, the name of the park near the house, people they had
known in Iowa. He heard him speak the name of their mother.

The lake. The way he dreamed it was the same as always: there are tiny tremors of
waves touching the rocks close to shore, retreating. Always the water there is black
and full of living things: things with gills and spores; things with lungs must keep
treading water.

A crowd is gathered around. A crowd is waiting for word. There is the camera. There
is the microphone.

Algae, garbage, pieces of silt.

Sheila, her hair drenched and floating. Her eyes open wide as a swimmer’s.

It was late when Peter woke up alone in the living room with a glass of water in his
hand. He stood from the couch quickly and started making his way from room to room.
“Sheila,” he said aloud. Jake had said she was coming; hours ago she had been on her
way. He started looking through the rooms. “Sheila?” he said into every dark room
of his brother’s apartment. The door to Jake’s bedroom had been closed. It was late
now; the sun had gone down long ago. He reached for the doorknob of his brother’s
room but thought better of it. He reached for the switch on the television. He needed
something else to look at to stop seeing the way her eyes had looked in the water.
He needed to watch something moving for a while until morning came. He turned on the
television and sat back down on the couch. The couch smelled of Sheila, and for a
moment it settled him to find a trace of her.