The Night Gwen Stacy Died (11 page)

Peter just looked at her. “I failed,” he said.

“Failed what?” she yelled. The passing traffic on the other side of the median made
it hard to hear. “Failed who?”

She saw them then, the people in the car. It was impossible not to see them then.
There were two of them, girls, a little older than Sheila, driving home from college
for the weekend, she imagined, their bodies now slumped against the dash. One of them
had red hair. One of them was wearing a thin silver chain that ended in a locket near
her chest. The one who had been driving had a gash on her cheek.

“They’re dead?” Sheila whispered.

The man from the SUV caught up to them now and stood on the other side of Peter. “I’m
a doctor,” the man said, like someone on television.

Peter shook his head. “We’re too late.”

The man leaned into the car and reached for each girl’s wrist. A moment later the
ambulance pulled up and the paramedics and police took over. Sheila and the man who
said he was a doctor stood to the side of the car, and Peter took a few steps back
toward the taxi. The paramedics asked what they had seen, but what could they say?
They had seen nothing. They could do nothing. They had come upon the car just moments
before the ambulance had arrived. They shook their heads, and the police thanked them
for stopping and asked them to be on their way. Then, too quickly it seemed, Sheila
and Peter were back in the taxi, the drone of the road beneath them, the steady pelting
of insects on the windshield, like nothing at all had happened, and this felt not
right, that two girls were dead on the side of the road now, but that she and Peter
could just keep driving, the highway under them impartial and unchanged.

“I feel sick,” Sheila said.

Peter stared straight out the windshield. His eyes were wet.

“Hey,” Sheila said. “Are you all right?”

He nodded.

“There’s nothing we could have done,” she said.

He shrugged. He opened his mouth but his voice shook. He tried again. “That’s what
I’m tired of.”

“Of what?”

Peter blinked. He said nothing.

But this was something Sheila could understand. There was the way things should be
and then there was the way things were, and the two rarely seemed to overlap. Peter’s
hand was on the gearshift and before she had given thought to what she was doing,
Sheila placed her hand on top of his. She was driving away from her home with a stranger,
away from her family and everything she knew. She was driving past mile markers, away
from cornfields, cows, from roadside debris, from the mangled bodies of two girls
who, half an hour before, like Sheila, were still making plans. She squeezed Peter’s
hand in that moment without knowing why, but feeling the uneven jitter of the road
through his hand cradling the gearshift, Sheila felt grateful—that his hand was there,
that she had thought to take it.

After four and a half hours, the skyscrapers could be detected, but only in the distance.
The landscape looked as much a certifiable city as anything Sheila had ever seen.
You couldn’t see much of the buildings in the dark, but Sheila could see enough to
be impressed by their height alone. Peter merged with the lanes of traffic headed
into the city, and pulled off the expressway at Western Avenue. This was the longest
street in the country, he told her, and they were heading north on it when suddenly
he parallel parked the taxi and said, “We’ll hail a local cab from here.”

In the glove box, Peter retrieved an envelope full of his fares, unrecorded—a sum
that nearly matched the Sinclair register count. Just after crossing the Mississippi,
they had pulled over at a rest stop to scrape the company decals off the car doors.
He had by that point already smashed the CB radio on the side of the road with the
sole of his boot and thrown his own cell phone in the Mississippi as they drove over
it. Sheila had gasped, “Why did you do that?” Peter shrugged. “I don’t want to talk
to anyone else,” he said. Her phone in the station, his in the river. They were acting
recklessly. They were cutting themselves off from the rest of the world. But there
was a strange calm in it, a promise implicit in the risk.
WELCOME TO THE PRAIRIE STATE! LAND OF LINCOLN!
the signs in the grass by the bathroom had shouted. Now Peter unscrewed the license
plates and grabbed the laminated sign off the dash—so aside from being the wrong color
yellow, the wrong make and model of car to blend in with Chicago taxis, with the wrong
type of
FOR HIRE
light affixed to the roof, and parked on a busy street through several rush hours,
the taxi fit right in.

A Chicago cab drove them to a hotel. Peter carried the duffle bag full of money.

“Have a seat,” he told her.

Sheila sat in the lobby while he checked in. It wasn’t really that much money. Sheila
had more saved in the bank than what they had stolen.

“What if we get caught?” Sheila asked.

“You can say you got kidnapped. If you wanted to bail on me.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Sheila.

“I’m glad,” said Peter.

“I’m not a kid,” said Sheila.

“It’s late,” he said. “Let’s get something to eat.”

For dinner they ate hamburgers at a diner around the corner. Peter wasn’t much of
an eater, but Sheila was starving. She finished her meal and most of his french fries.

Sheila moved his plate closer to hers on the table, so she could easily sop up the
ketchup on her plate with his discarded scraps. She said, “Is this your first time
on a trip like this?” She was trying to gauge exactly what kind of trip this was going
to be. The truth was she had never really been on a trip, and she wanted to figure
out how things were going to work.

Peter looked up. “Oh no,” he said. He shook his head. “I’ve been all over the place.
I’ve been to Lincoln, Nebraska. I’ve been to Nashville, Tennessee.”

“When did you go to all those places?” Sheila asked.

Peter said. “I’m twenty-six years old. I’ve been a few places.”

“But never Chicago.”

“My first time,” Peter said. He smiled hugely without showing his teeth. He had been
fingering a book of matches, as if getting ready to light one. Of course, the diner
was nonsmoking, and though his cigarettes were nowhere in sight, each time he came
close to snapping one of the matches between his fingers to ignite it, Sheila felt
nervous. Finally he set the matches on the table and looked up at her. “You too, I
guess?”

“What? Oh yeah.” Sheila hadn’t really wanted to admit that aside from family camping
trips it was her first time away from home, but Peter seemed edgy; she wanted to offer
him something, to set him at ease. “It’s my first time staying in a hotel,” she said.

Peter whistled. “Wow, I guess I should have checked us into somewhere nicer, tried
to impress you a little bit.”

“Oh, I don’t know. It seems real nice,” Sheila said.

“There’s cable TV,” he said. “I guess that’s something. There’s a continental breakfast.”

“There’s a pool,” Sheila said. She had seen tile arrows pointing around the lobby,
smelled the certain stench of chlorine.

“Hey, there is a pool, isn’t there?” Peter brightened for a second. “I say first thing
we do when we get back is dive in.”

“Deal,” said Sheila, and they smiled at one another across the booth, carefully, politely.
Sheila noticed then that his foot had brushed up against her leg under the table.
She wasn’t sure if he noticed or not, but she left her leg where it was. It was only
later, when they were walking back to the hotel, that it occurred to her that they
hadn’t packed swimsuits. That they hadn’t packed anything. It wasn’t going to be that
kind of a trip.

She stopped on the sidewalk and turned to him. “What are we doing here?” she asked.

Peter took her hand. He said, “You know, don’t you?” He was looking at her so seriously,
it seemed to Sheila that no one had ever taken her so seriously in her life. He said,
“Isn’t that why you asked me to point the gun at you?” He seemed then as scared as
she was. It was true that she had asked him to do this, but it was at his suggestion,
and anyway, she thought he would direct things from there. Sheila considered the possibility
that this was how all such arrangements began when there was the irrational question
of desire hanging around in the corners of every half-thought. It came down to this:
a series of actions, a series of reactions. He would say something, and then she would
say something, then there would be time to interpret, to analyze, before acting again.
She thought of hearts beating under floors, hearts inside drawers. It was no wonder
there were so many casualties. But the important thing now was to keep reacting. The
important thing now was not to stop.

She had never shared a bed with anyone before. Even in her parents’ house, she and
Andrea always had their own rooms. When they got back to the hotel Peter fell asleep
still in his clothes, on top of the covers. Sheila tried not to be disappointed; she
had been hoping for more attention. Sheila tried to sleep, but she could feel his
weight next to her. She watched him while he slept, as if she might miss something
if she dozed off. Peter was on his back, stray strands of hair over his eyes. Sheila
cautiously pushed one of the strands behind his ear with the tips of her fingers.
He blinked, opened his eyes. He smiled at her and closed them. When his breathing
steadied again, Sheila began playing with the buttons of his shirt, and before she’d
really considered what she was going to do once his buttons were unfastened, she found
she was pressing on them, silently encouraging each one to fit through its little
neighboring slot. She had wanted to get a good look at him. Under his shirt, Peter
was wearing a ribbed sleeveless undershirt, the same kind Donny wore around the house,
but Peter’s shoulders were thinner and darker, like a boy’s.

“Hey, go to sleep,” he said with his eyes closed.

“I can’t sleep,” Sheila said.

“You should try.”

Sheila licked her lips. She traced the lines of his undershirt with her thumb. Peter
gave a little grunt after a minute and lifted her up on top of him.

“Hmm?” he asked, although she hadn’t said anything.

Immediately she felt panicked and exhilarated. There was nothing to say, so she kissed
his eyebrow quietly, in a spot where there was a little white scar, a small response
to his odd question. In reply, he pulled her face down to his and kissed her mouth.
The other boys she had kissed didn’t kiss so hard. Peter gripped her face between
his hands when he pushed his tongue into her mouth. He pulled her face away from his
and eyed her with a quiet reprimand. “You don’t look a day older than sixteen,” he
said.

Men took her for an early twenty-something all the time, but Peter didn’t seem to
care what her answer was to this charge, because suddenly he became very awake, his
hands moving quickly under her clothes. She had his attention, and now she was going
to have to figure out what do with it. She had heard the men who sat in a line at
the bar she went to with her sister say to one another that there were two types of
women in the world: flirts and cock-teases. When the girls walked away from the bar
with the words ironed into the asses of their sweatpants, the men decided which category
each fell into.
Flirt?
they asked one another.
Nope, definitely a cock-tease
. Sheila had wanted to ask someone, but didn’t: Which one was better? And: Weren’t
they kind of the same thing? But she wasn’t stupid enough to say this kind of thing
aloud. She understood that only a girl would get hung up on such distinctions. She
ran her hand along the place where Peter’s belt fastened shut, understanding that
once she got him out of the jeans, she had no idea what to do with what she was sure
to find there. But Peter stood abruptly before she could do anything else. He said,
“Are you sure about this?” and Sheila nodded.

“Okay,” he said. He kissed her neck and grabbed his wallet from the dresser. “Back
in a minute.”

The door slammed and she was alone in the room. She flopped back on the bed and studied
a crack in the ceiling. Back in a minute? Hadn’t that been the contents of the note
she left on the locked door of the gas station after she turned off the pumps? Had
she done something wrong? Should she take off her shirt or something while she was
waiting? Sheila scooted to the end of the bed so she could see herself in the mirror
above the dresser. She pulled her hair out of its ponytail and peeled her shirt over
her head. “Hi,” she said to the girl in the mirror, but then she felt ridiculous for
saying anything to that idiot in her underwear. She was still sitting there trying
to decide if she should put her shirt back on when the door swung open again. Peter
walked to her quickly, placed his hand in the crevice of her side above her jeans
and kissed her. In his hand there was a small yellow box. Already Peter was removing
the rest of her clothes; he was waiting for her to reciprocate. “Will you put it on
me?” he asked, pushing the box into her hand.

Sheila willed herself to finish what she’d started. Don’t be a baby, she told herself.
Don’t be a flirt. She fit her hand under the buckle of his belt and unfastened it.
She ripped the packaging away from one of the condoms, and she was holding it up to
him when Peter pushed forward so that he was already in her hand. Peter pulled the
rest of her clothes off, and he looked a little like he was going to cry. At first
it didn’t feel like anything, then it sort of felt like something, but she was afraid
it was not the right thing, and then she realized she wouldn’t even know if it was
the right thing. She thought of asking him what it was supposed to feel like, but
when she looked up at him, it was clear he was feeling something, the way he was pulling
her thighs closer to him and gasping for breath like someone coming up for air from
underwater. The smell of latex stung in her nostrils. Andrea had advised her that
even if she didn’t like it the first time—and eventually, she would like it—she should
make a lot of noise, or the guy would think there was something wrong with her. But
every time Sheila opened her mouth, Peter cupped his hand over it and smiled, asked
her if she wanted to wake everyone up. Each time she opened her mouth to sound pleased—pleased
in the way one was supposed to sound while having sex for the first time with another
person—Sheila had to focus to be sure her mouth produced a moan instead of a question.
The question her mouth was trying to form still wasn’t entirely clear to her, but
it had something to do with the women who had been in the car on the shoulder of Interstate
80. She looked down at her skin, her body beside his, below his, but alternately,
in place of her own, she saw the girls’ narrow bodies, as they had been wrapped around
the steering wheel, the glove compartment. Then Peter started gasping again and he
pulled away from her fast, closing his eyes, helpless to whatever it was that was
passing over him. Sheila breathed in and the air tasted sweet and she felt an odd
calm settling in her own body like a kind of quiet accomplishment.