The Night Gwen Stacy Died (13 page)

There was a knock on the bathroom door.

Sheila flung the door open and held up the handful of IDs. “What the hell is going
on?” she asked.

“Oh, I wanted it to be a surprise,” he said. He sounded disappointed. “Look in your
own wallet.”

“I already did.”

“Did you notice anything?” he smiled.

“You changed my name.”

Peter shook his head, as if this part had nothing to do with him. “I changed your
age so we won’t always have to stay in at night. You can’t get away with flirting
with the bartender here like you did in Iowa.” He smiled. “They don’t even let you
through the door if you’re underage.”

Sheila paused.

“Thanks,” she said slowly.

Peter kissed her on the cheek. He smoothed her hair behind her ear.

“I really like you,” he said.

Sheila took a few steps back into the bathroom, her stance softening. “You do?”

“Of course,” Peter said. “Why do you think I asked you to come with me?”

“Actually, that hasn’t been made entirely clear to me,” Sheila said.

Peter advanced into the bathroom, and Sheila could feel his reflection in the bathroom
mirror moving closer as Peter moved closer. She felt surrounded. He said, “When I
saw you in the station, I felt like I already knew you. I felt close to you instantly,
like we had already met somewhere else, somewhere in the past that I couldn’t quite
place. Like you reminded me of someone I had already known, but had lost.”

“Gwen Stacy,” said Sheila.

Peter looked at the floor. “Is that okay? Does that bother you?”

Sheila said, “I haven’t decided yet. I mean, she’s a character from a comic book,
not a real person. You get that, right?”

“Of course,” Peter said, “but understand, I’ve been waiting my entire life for someone
like her to show up. And you remind me of her. Or, in some way you are her and I know
you’re meant to be here with me. Now if that scares you, I’m sorry, and I don’t want
you to stay if you don’t feel the same. But maybe we could spend a little more time
together and, I don’t know, see how it goes.”

Oh my God, Sheila thought, he’s fucking crazy. I’m sleeping with a crazy person. But
she wasn’t scared. She was scared when she wasn’t with him, when she felt like she
had to investigate and assemble clues on her own. When he spoke to her like this,
she felt exhilarated, like maybe she actually
was
Gwen Stacy, maybe this was why nothing else in her life had ever felt like the right
thing, because the right thing was to be here with Peter.

Sheila looked him in the eye. “I’m not scared,” she said.

Peter kissed her other cheek, the one he hadn’t kissed before. The gesture felt calculated
for a moment, like he was trying to balance something obscure though this small sign
of affection, but Sheila let it go and decided to be thankful for the symmetry. It
was all a matter of deciding how to interpret information, she told herself. “I’m
real glad to hear you say that,” she heard him say then. He said this quietly, and
again Sheila nodded. “It means a lot to me,” Peter said.

“I’m not scared,” Sheila repeated. “We’re doing the right thing.”

Peter smiled. “I knew it,” he said. “I knew I was right about you.”

Then he started to pull at the buttons on his pants, as if to use the bathroom.

The following night they used Sheila’s new ID in the hotel bar. The bartender didn’t
look at her name oddly, as she expected he would. He glanced at it through the plastic
sleeve of her wallet and said, “What are you having?”

“Vodka tonic,” said Sheila cautiously.

Peter ordered a beer and they found a table in the corner. He announced that they
were going to run out of money, which Sheila had already figured. They had only been
there for three days, but living exclusively on the stolen money wasn’t a sustainable
plan. Sheila understood if it ever came down to an emergency, she had money saved
in her bank, the money she had been saving for France. But she didn’t want to touch
that. She didn’t want her bank tracing her location after a transaction; besides,
that money had nothing to do with this.

“If you want to stay here, we’ll have to start looking for new jobs,” he said. “Do
you want to stay in Chicago?”

She thought she did. She knew she wanted to be where he was. But what she had been
craving was a plan, a ready-made plan that she could latch onto and live inside of,
and the more time she spent with Peter, the clearer it became that there didn’t seem
to be any semblance of a plan at all. Aside from the river cruise, she hadn’t seen
more than two blocks in either direction of their hotel. She was giving her father
an ulcer.

“Who are the men whose IDs you have in your wallet?” she asked.

Peter nodded, as if confirming the question was a fair one. He said, “They’re brothers.”

“Are they real, or made up?”

“No, they’re real.”

“Who are they?”

“Me and my dead brother,” he said. “Jake.”

“I didn’t mean . . . um,” she trailed off. “Sorry.”

“Well, what for? He died years ago.”

“You miss him?”

“He was much older than me. He died when I was a kid and left me all his comic books.”

“Well, then which one are you?” asked Sheila.

“If I had to pick one, I guess I’d be the original,” Peter said. He was smiling that
goofy, half-crazed smile he sometimes had. “Lee and Ditko’s, back when the mechanical
web-shooters were designed by hand. None of this bullshit inflation with organic spinnerets—I’m
just not interested in that.”

Sheila stared. Two thoughts came to her at once, quickly, and settled uncomfortably
in her chest. The first was that the supposedly hard and fast rules by which the regular
world functioned were actually blurry, irregular, like the borders between state lines,
how it was difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when one territory became another
if you weren’t on the strip of the Interstate that marked the transition with a welcome
sign. That the logic she had thought governed the world of adults was a hazy thing,
no more certain than the lies they told to children. But the second thought came just
as quickly: anyone could play this game. Sheila narrowed her eyes. “I mean, which
brother are you?”

“The younger one,” he said. “The baby.”

“What’s your real name?”

“What’s the difference?”

“But Peter isn’t your real name.”

He looked at her hard. “Nobody reads comic books anymore,” he said. “So it might as
well be.”

Sheila looked Peter in the eye and reached out across the table. She gripped his chin
between her two fingers, and held him there. She dropped her voice and spoke low.
“Lots of people read comic books still,” said Sheila. She knew this to be true, and
she would stand by it. There were readers everywhere; there were movies being made
all the time. What right did Peter have to single-handedly commandeer the story? He
wasn’t doing it without her input. She tightened her grip on his face, held it still,
and his mouth—half-opened as if in reply—sat mute by her hand, waiting.

Sheila let go of his face and put her hand back around the glass of ice that held
her drink. She tipped back the glass and felt the last of the vodka coat the inside
of her mouth. She placed the glass down on the table, and allowed her eyes to meet
Peter’s. At first he just stared. He ran his own hand over his chin, as if tracing
the impression she had left. “Okay, sweetheart,” he said softly, “you’re right. Lots
of people read them.” But still he didn’t look away, and she didn’t look away, and
in that lapse something shifted, as if the empty space between them were growing angles,
edges, something sharp enough to reach out and grab and form into what you wanted.

“New rule, starting now,” said Sheila, and Peter nodded. “No more calling me
kid
, no more
sweetheart
, no more
Sheila
. You call me my name as it’s printed on my ID, and I’ll do the same for you. Deal?”

He looked at her uneasily for a second. “Okay,” he said.

“Say it,” she said.

“I said we have a deal,” he said.

She shook her head. “I want to hear you say my name.”

“Gwen,” he said. “We have a deal.”

Sheila smiled. Under the table, she slipped her hand onto his knee.

His friend in Humboldt Park had said that they could crash in the loft for a few weeks,
no more than that, or they’d need them to help make rent. Technically, she and Peter
were fugitives. Sheila knew this, of course. But they had started to depend on each
other. It was thrilling, and in a way, everything changed when they were in the apartment
together. She felt less like a runaway and more like his girlfriend. She had never
been anyone’s girlfriend. Peter draped his arm over her shoulders as they walked down
the street together, like he wanted to protect her, to be on both sides of her at
once. But he was helpless too. Sleeping beside her, he would call her name and ask
her for things, and it made her feel powerful, so she understood that he wanted her
to protect him as well. This was part of the deal.

Sheila met a pretty Czech girl named Iva who lived downstairs and had also recently
left her home. She cleaned houses with a group of women, all from different places.
Iva came upstairs to introduce herself one of the first nights, and Sheila took to
her right away. Iva was a somewhat recent immigrant to Chicago, with a passable—but
far from perfect—command of the English language, and Sheila instantly saw an ally
in her. She went and knocked on Iva’s door the following night, when Peter wasn’t
around, and asked her for a job.

Iva looked at her carefully. “You want to clean houses?” She seemed incredulous at
first. “The work is hard. Floors we clean on our knees, you understand this.”

“I get it,” Sheila said. “I know how to clean.”

“The bathroom in your apartment,” Iva said. “I saw it yesterday. It is not so clean.”

“We just moved in,” Sheila assured her. “I haven’t had the chance.”

Iva stared at her for another second, then disappeared into her own bathroom. She
came back with a bottle of bleach and a sponge. “We try it?” she asked. “A test.”

Sheila took the bottle of bleach and the sponge from Iva, and before both women walked
up the narrow stairs to Sheila’s apartment, Iva opened her fridge and grabbed two
bottles of beer to take upstairs with them.

Iva opened one beer and looked in Sheila’s cabinets for a glass, but there weren’t
any there. She looked confused for a second but let it go without saying anything.
Then Iva took a sip from the long neck of her beer bottle, licked her lips, and sat
on the closed lid of the toilet while Sheila got on her hands and knees and did her
best with the bleach and the sponge in one of the blackened corners. Iva opened the
second beer and smiled as she set it on the edge of the bathtub for Sheila.

“You are too young for him,” Iva said.

Sheila, scrubbing at the tiles, felt her face get hot. She looked up at Iva. “I’m
not as young as I look,” she said. But she could feel the color in her face and was
sure that just then she looked even younger.

Iva smiled. “He knows how many years you have?”

Sheila nodded. She pushed a loose strand of hair behind her ear. She continued scrubbing.

“How many?”

She had been ready to say twenty-one, but as she turned and sat on the tub to take
a sip from the beer that Iva had offered her, she felt here was an opportunity to
speak the truth and see how it sounded. The possibility was liberating. It was the
same with her name. After demanding that Peter call her Gwen, she had introduced herself
as Sheila to Iva without thinking twice. It felt good to be able to control this,
to exercise authority over when she was one thing, and when she was another. “Seventeen,”
Sheila said. “I’ll be eighteen next week.”

Sheila was afraid that Iva would reprimand her, the way her sister might have, but
she could see right away that she would be rewarded for her honesty. Iva nodded. “He
has a nice face, your boyfriend,” she said. “But he looks very sad, I think.”

It was the first time anyone had referred to Peter this way, and Sheila felt her heart
knock things around in her chest. “He is too sad,” Sheila agreed. “I’m going to work
on that.”

“Yes,” Iva said. “I imagine you will have success.” She reached out and touched the
ends of Sheila’s hair that hovered near the tile floor while she scrubbed. “Very pretty,”
Iva said, “but you will need to tie it back to work.” Iva took a black rubber band
from her own wrist and offered it to Sheila.

Sheila nodded; obediently she fastened the band into her hair.

“I pay in cash,” Iva said finally. “The women whose houses we clean will leave the
payment in cash, and we share it.”

“That works for me,” Sheila said.

Iva smiled a little then in the corner of her mouth like of course she knew it worked,
or she wouldn’t have mentioned it. Her smile remained couched in the corner of her
mouth as if to say, I know you have something to hide, but you’re not alone in this.

Sheila started cleaning houses. No one talked to each other much except when articulating
the full name of a cleaning product. “Clorox Bleach?” someone would shout from the
bathroom down the stairs. “Murphy’s Oil Soap!” the girl in the kitchen would respond,
and the two would meet halfway up the stairs and make the exchange. The houses they
cleaned had many bathrooms on each floor. “A waste!” Sheila heard one woman say, as
she moved between bathrooms with a sponge. Sheila had never thought of the two bathrooms
in her parents’ house as excessive; there was one on each floor. Now she could see
how little one needed to survive.

It didn’t take long to discover that Iva spoke French as well as English, and so sometimes
Sheila would speak with her in her own stunted French. “What age do you have?” they
asked each other over and over again, and each time Sheila answered honestly, it felt
just as good as it had the first time. “How does Chicago please you?” The way that
Iva said the name of their city, Chicago sounded like the most exotic place in the
world. But of course, that was a trick of the tongue; that was the French, making
every word in Sheila’s life sound like a huge soiree with lace tablecloths and pointy
shoes, while her hands were wringing out a dirty sponge in some rich woman’s bathtub.