The Night Gwen Stacy Died (15 page)

“Peter,” she said.

At the sound of his name, he looked up at her, but his eyes were glossy and difficult
to make contact with, like the eyes of an animal in pain or fear. She shook him again
by the shoulders. “Peter,” she said again.

“Gwen,” he said now, as if relieved. He repeated her name several times, greedily,
comforted at the sound.

“You were sleepwalking,” she said. “You were drinking water in your sleep.” She put
her hand on his forehead like her mother used to do, feeling for fever.

Peter shook his head, embarrassed; he began to stand up from the bathroom tiles. “I
was having a bad dream,” he said. “You were underwater and I couldn’t find you.”

Sheila smiled. She guided him back to their bed and pulled her arm tighter around
his torso, rubbed his back until she could hear his breathing steady and wander off,
like she was the one who would take care of him now. That was the first night she
had found him up wandering the apartment.

But after three nights of turning off the kitchen tap, after three nights of finding
Peter drinking from the bathroom tap and explaining how he was looking for her in
the water, she was frightened. She would wake up, first cold, then angry at him for
walking away from their bed, for doing strange things at night that he made no attempt
to explain to her in the morning.

“What are you seeing?” she asked him.

“A lot of water,” he would say.

“And I’m in the water. Am I swimming?”

He’d say. “Come on. Let’s talk about something else.”

“Tell me,” she would beg on the third night.

“It’s a dream,” he’d say, “It doesn’t matter.”

“Stop it,” she would yell as she shook his shoulders on the fourth night. Peter looked
back at her with wet eyes. “I can’t,” he said, and the helplessness in his voice would
be what scared her more than anything.

The morning of her eighteenth birthday marked three weeks of their shared survival
as fugitives, but Sheila woke up thinking it couldn’t last much longer. She woke up
early enough to watch the first sunlight touch the floorboards through their curtain-less
windows. Peter had been up again last night and now he slept beside her, deeply as
always. Sheila dressed slowly and let herself out the front door. She purchased a
coffee from the café at the corner and crossed the street to Humboldt Park. The park
was deceiving, more expansive than it seemed from the window of their apartment, and
it was empty at this early hour and looked slightly more sinister than during full
daylight. She walked by a boathouse and along a lagoon. She walked through a grove
of crabapple trees, and out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of an animal
watching her, as if charting her movements, something fierce in gaze and sharp in
bone structure, but when she turned again, she only saw a collie sniffing around plots
of perennial flowers. It happened several more times, this feeling of being watched,
her progress through the park guarded by something wild, but always by the time she
turned on her heels to catch her pursuer, the park returned to a benign landscape.
The truth was she was glad for the distraction. She walked for forty minutes, aimlessly
at first, then more purposefully, and tried with everything she took in not to think
of her father this morning, not to think of him waking up for work on the date she
was born and brushing his teeth or tying his shoes or reading the newspaper.

Walking from the perimeter of the park, Sheila passed a payphone. She stopped and
clutched the receiver in her hand. She thought that it would be enough only to hold
it, but before long she was fishing around in her bag for spare change and dialing.
She could picture the telephone on the nightstand beside her parents’ bed. Her father
picked up after a single ring.

“Hello?” he asked. His voice had the slow panic of interrupted sleep.

“Dad,” she said. And already she could hear every noise in the room, her mother shrieking
in the background, her father covering the mouthpiece of the telephone and saying,
“It’s her.”

It was her father who spoke first. “Sheila,” he said. “Your mother’s worried sick.”

“Dad,” she said again. “I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry for,” he said. His voice was strangely calm and steady. “Are
you safe? Did they hurt you?”

“I’m okay,” Sheila said. She could feel a sob building in her throat. “Dad, I have
to go.”

“Now wait a minute,” she heard him start, but she made herself put down the phone
before she could hear the rest.

She told herself it was better to let them know she was okay, that she was safe, than
not to have called at all.

When she arrived back at the apartment, Peter was up and dressed. He looked at her
slowly. She could see that her absence from the bed this early had worried him, but
this he was trying to disguise. “Have you eaten?” he asked.

“Only coffee.”

“I thought I would take you to breakfast,” he said.

It was difficult to discern whether he understood the significance of the day, or
if he just had a craving for an omelet. He was more delicate since the sleepwalking
had started. It seemed like the smallest things she said, even in jest, could hurt
him.

“I bet my parents are really worried about me,” Sheila said.

Peter nodded. “Maybe you should think about going home.”

Sheila felt her eyes fill. “I don’t want to,” she said.

“Okay,” Peter said. “You don’t have to.” He put his arms around her, dried her face
with his fingers. “You know I want you with me, but you do whatever you feel is right.
You make the rules, okay?” Sheila nodded. He kissed her forehead. Then he said, “Wait
here.” He retreated to the bedroom and returned with something stashed behind his
back.

“What’s this?” Sheila said.

Peter exaggerated the gesture of concealment and took a step forward.

Sheila tried pulling at each of his arms, but Peter wouldn’t reveal the object until
she promised to sit down and close her eyes. Sheila complied, sitting on their bed,
with her legs folded beneath her.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m ready.”

Peter said nothing, but she could hear him kneel on the ground, beside the electrical
outlet. Then she heard the sound of static and from it the Frenchwoman’s voice began
to speak.

“Je ne sais pas,” the Frenchwoman said.

“Je ne sais pas,” said Peter.

“Je ne sais quoi,” the Frenchwoman said.

“Je ne sais quoi,” said Peter.

Sheila kept her eyes closed for a moment and listened. She had left her CD player
in the gas station and hadn’t heard her lessons since. It was a level-one lesson and
all he was doing was repeating, so the dialogue was nonsensical, but it didn’t really
matter. Peter’s voice was soft and unsure of itself as he repeated after the Frenchwoman.
When Sheila opened her eyes, Peter stopped the tape abruptly, as if suddenly shy.

“Do you like it?” he said.

Sheila felt something, like desire, rise in her gut. “Your accent needs a little work,
to be honest,” she said.

Peter looked at the floor, but he smiled.

“Where did you get it?”

Peter leaned nervously over the tiny, black buttons, as if they were the teeth of
an animal. “A little pawn shop on Chicago Avenue,” he said. “They barely sell these
things new anymore, so—” he trailed off. “Happy birthday, Gwen,” he said quietly,
and he touched her face where her cheek met her chin.

Sheila stood beside him. With one hand she pressed the play button on the CD player,
and with the other she took Peter’s hand and walked him back to the bed. They lay
still, side by side. The Frenchwoman spoke; Sheila and Peter listened. The familiar
rhythm of her voice filled the room like a mother’s, and Sheila felt content just
to let the sound soak up around them without reacting to the words.

In the pauses between each French phrase, Sheila heard not Paris, but Iowa. She heard
the stillness of empty fields of quiet crops, of parking lots at night with only insects
moving, the stillness of her parents’ kitchen in the long afternoon hours. Iowa was
the last place she’d heard French like this. She understood then that she was not
going to Paris. She had saved all her money to get as far as Chicago, and now she
was here, with Peter, working hard not to let the French make her miss the home it
called to mind.

On the bed, Peter took her hand into his and squeezed it.

Sheila bit her lip to discourage a tremble.

“We’re going to make it. It’s working,” Peter said. He pressed his mouth to her temple.
“Everything is going according to plan.”

And a part of her thought,
What plan?
But so what if the plan was hazy and unknowable in its entirety? An arrangement was
beginning to form, rules they agreed on. She saw how he would take care of her, except
for when she took care of him, and how they would pool their money and work to eat,
and this was one way to leave the place you’d known too long and make a go of it.
This was what a plan looked like once you stopped obsessing over the culminations
and actually started to live inside it.

Yes
, she wanted to say. She wanted to agree with this logic, to adopt it as her own.
Instead she said, “I want to know where you go at night.”

“But I’m always right here,” said Peter, “beside you.”

“Take me with you,” she said. “In one of the dreams.”

Peter shook his head. “Don’t,” he said.

The Frenchwoman was still speaking, but she was background noise now. The names of
the things she said had become irrelevant.

CHICAGO. IT SEEMED
unlikely that you could get to a place like it, another world entirely, after only
four hours in the car. There were parks and avenues stuffed with skyscrapers, there
was a lake that you’d have sworn was an ocean for its size and for the way the waves
pulled themselves out onto the sidewalk. The city Peter had dreamed every night for
a week retreated to the back office of his brain, to be replaced by the thing itself.
It at first seemed purely speculative that people actually lived here, but he saw
them, all right: filling their cars with gas, walking their dogs. Those were the surefire
signs of residence—cars, dogs.

In the hotel, there were rules posted everywhere. By the pool:
NO RUNNING. NO DIVING. NO HORSEPLAY
. By the bar:
NO ID, NO SERVICE. WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO ASK FOR IDENTIFICATION OF ANYONE WHO LOOKS
TO BE UNDER
35. Out front of the lobby:
NO SMOKING WITHIN 15 FEET OF THE ENTRANCE
. With every cigarette, Peter walked the requisite fifteen feet before rummaging in
his pocket for a match and even in this ridiculousness, he felt content to be abiding
by the rules of this other place.

Later—near the apartment he’d secured for Gwen and himself—squirrels darted between
trees with hedge apples, giant and unwieldy, stashed between their front teeth. There
had been talk, all over the middle of the country, of wilder animals—coyotes, cougars—crossing
into the borders of cities and roaming the streets by night. Peter felt as if he had
reached a place where so many living things converged, he sometimes had to close his
eyes so as not to get overstimulated. He found an ad in the paper for a partially
furnished apartment in Humboldt Park, a weekly rental, and he’d told Gwen that a friend
of his had hooked them up. He didn’t want her to know how much of their money was
going to the place. He had put down two weeks’ rent, because the landlord had been
a bulky man who asked no questions and did not ask him to sign anything. It was an
investment really, cheaper than the hotel room in the long run. Safer too.

When he walked Gwen into the apartment, she ran excitedly from the sink to the table,
from the window’s view of the park to the mattress on the floor—you’d have thought
he’d secured a penthouse suite. The apartment was borderline decrepit, sure to be
full of cockroaches, but Gwen clearly was impressed, and in a way it endeared her
further to him. At the time, watching her run through the near-empty room—touching
everything, securing her arms around his neck—the stolen car and money, the gun and
the police seemed to exist in some other reality that had nothing to do with Peter
Parker, nothing to do with the woman he loved.

They had been living there two days when the Czech girl who lived below came up the
stairs to introduce herself.

“You are from here?” she asked. Her name was Ivana—“Iva is for short.” She was likely
Gwen’s age, but spoke with the low, throaty tenor of Slavic translation, which made
her seem older, more sage than both Gwen and himself.

“No,” Peter said. “We’re new to the area.”

Iva nodded. “Two years I have been here,” she said. “I can explain.”

Which made it sound to Peter as if she would explain her journey from Eastern Europe,
how she came to live in the Midwest from the Old World sophistication of opera houses
and finely fermented beers. But what she had come to explain was purely practical
advice. She explained how the man who lived on the corner sold drugs, how they would
hear the people waiting for him in the alley. She explained how at night they were
never to walk on the park side of the street, but to stay to the house side, where
there were streetlamps, to avoid getting mugged.