The Night Gwen Stacy Died (18 page)

“You lost? You in the wrong neighborhood.”

Peter pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with his finger. He put his arm
around Gwen’s shoulders. “We’re on vacation. We’re out for a late night walk,” he
said. He tried to smile. “Is that a crime?”

It occurred to him that if there was a reward being offered in exchange for information,
this man could use the money. His brain raced, and he tried to think of something
to say.

But before he could say anything, Gwen’s face was next to his, her mouth beside his
mouth. The kiss was quick, but he could feel Gwen directing it; he could feel the
small bones that were her teeth tense behind her thin smile. It was more certain and
steady than anything he could have managed. When she pulled away, she said, “Honey,
it’s late. Let’s go home.”

Peter nodded, took his cue. He said to the man, “We better be getting back.”

The man shook his head and smiled at something over their heads where the scrap pile
rose behind them. “I see that,” he said, nodding at Gwen. “But don’t be walking no
more round here at night. Ain’t no place for walking,” he said. He picked up his bicycle
and the scrap metal in the shopping cart rattled beside it. “You’re not supposed to
be here.”

Gwen laughed all the way home, on the walk back down Cortland, and when the 73 bus
let them off at their stop, Gwen launched into it again. “Parker, you saved my life,”
she said for the hundredth time. “The next time I’m in imminent danger, I’ll know
who to call.” She laughed, trailing off.

“Could you maybe stop saying that?” Peter said. “I mean you don’t even know what you’re
talking about, do you?” He said it more sternly than he meant to, but it was irking
him somehow, this cute way she just happened to want to slip into the dress, the way
she was playing at being a damsel in distress. “Have you ever read a single one of
the comic books, Sheila?”

“Don’t call me that,” she snapped.

“It’s your name, isn’t it?”

“As much as yours is whatever you scratched out of your driver’s license.”

He felt as if he had been punched in the stomach, and he wanted to return the blow.
He couldn’t explain it. He wanted some power over her, as a kind of counterforce for
that which she held over him. It was as if she hadn’t noticed how close they had come
to being identified. But if not, why did she kiss him in that moment? With the kiss,
she had absolved him.

Once they were in their room again and began undressing for bed, Peter tried to smooth
things out.

“Listen,” he said. “I’m sorry I tried to save you from that fake explosion. Okay?”

“Forget it,” Gwen smiled. She kicked off her shoes in the corner. “Never happened,
right?”

She was still angry with him, but she pretended to laugh. She really did love him;
he could see that. She was such a sweet and sensible girl, his Gwen; she was perfect,
really. Peter took a few steps toward the bed and held out his hands.

Gwen shook her head. “Lose the street clothes, Parker,” she said suddenly, fitting
her fingers into the waistline of his jeans, pulling him in. “And then maybe I’ll
think about letting you near me.”

He started to remove his clothes, his shirt, his socks. He had started to reach for
her again, but Gwen stopped and he saw something shift then in her face, her mouth
soured at the corner. She sat up in the bed. She stood. “Oh God,” she said. “Oh my
God.” She placed her chin in her hands and started to sway back and forth.

“I’m just like those other girls,” she said.

Peter swallowed. He said, “What other girls?”

“The dead ones on the side of the road,” she said. “The ones you were trying to save.”

He spoke to her cheekbone, to her jaw, to the place where her hair was stacked behind
her perfect ear. He said, “You’re nothing like those other girls.”

“Why not?” she said. “It kind of seems like you’re trying to save me.”

Peter shook his head. “No,” he said.

“Yes you are!” she was shouting now, pacing around the room. “You tried to save me
from that explosion that wasn’t a real explosion. You’re going to start thinking up
ways to save me, so you can feel powerful? Is that what you’re doing?”

“No, Gwen,” he said. “No.” He couldn’t explain the explosion. It was nothing he had
anticipated. He reacted in the moment, nothing more.

Gwen turned fast and squeezed his arm at his wrist so hard he felt the blood working
to push through. She leaned into him close, so that her breath was the only air in
the room. She said, “This is not a comic book.”

“No, of course not,” he agreed.

“You are not a superhero. This thing we are together—you don’t own it.”

“You think I don’t already fucking know that?” he said quietly, but then he got louder.
“I’ve never been able to help anyone in my entire life. Not one. You’re the one who
saved us in the scrap yard. That man might have recognized us, he thought I was a
kidnapper, and you know he did, that’s why you kissed me. Don’t act like you don’t
know that, because you do.”

Gwen loosened her grip on his arm, and he felt the blood pump greedily, hungrily into
his hand and each of his fingers. She held his wrist tenderly now, stroking where
his veins showed through the skin.

“How did they die?” Gwen said, quietly now.

Peter exhaled heavily. He pushed his face into his hands. “The one who was driving
fell asleep. The car hit the median.”

Gwen swallowed. “How do you know that?”

“I saw it happen like that in a dream. I didn’t know it was going to happen that night,
on that road, with you. I only knew it was going to happen.”

Gwen pulled him away from her, eyed him carefully.

She said, “It’s always been like this?”

Yes
, he was going to say,
always
, but before the words rose in his throat, it occurred to him that it had not always
been like this. “No,” he said, and his voice began to quiver, to wander off scale,
and he pressed his face into Gwen’s shoulder. “It started when my brother died.”

Gwen stroked his hair, and she rubbed his back, and she said, “Shhh,” and she said,
“Peter,” and then she led him back to the bed and he rested his head on her chest,
where he listened to the steady rise and fall of her breath for balance.

When he woke up, it was with a start. Gwen slept beside him, the sheets tucked beneath
her chin. The explosion, he was thinking. But what else was there to really say about
it? The explosion had not been a real explosion; it had been a dummy, a stand-in,
a stunt, a lot of noise and no substance. Ultimately, all he could say was that the
explosion had been a distraction from the fact that Gwen had taken him to a place
he’d seen in his dream. The implications of what this might mean he could only begin
to surmise. But the bottom line was what the man at the foundry kept saying. They
were trespassers. They had crossed a line that was meant to remain uncrossed.

With that, the floodgates opened. Later that night, the dream came exactly as it had
before. There were the skyscrapers, the scrap yard; there was the narrow river, the
strange apartment, and the eyes of the man who lived there. The eyes were quiet and
pleading. There was the half a vial of white pills in the medicine cabinet. The man
was sitting on the bathroom floor with a glass of water. He sat with his legs propped
beneath him. Then Peter was at the sink with the water glass in his hands, and when
he turned around the man was no longer there. Peter stood alone in the bathroom. It
was while he was looking for the man that it occurred to him that Gwen was not there
either. It wasn’t clear if she had been there at all this time. “Gwen,” Peter began
to call through the rooms. “Gwen.” He was alone in the apartment for only another
moment. Then he was at the lake. He was walking along the lakeshore near the space
where a small crowd had gathered. There were cameramen and there were microphones.
There was a crowd surrounding a stretcher that was being thrust toward the water.
Under the water, something was caught. Something was being prodded at and recovered.
He heard someone say, Shallow by the rocks. He saw her blond hair, drenched and floating.
When he woke up, it was not in their bed. He was alone in the bathroom with an empty
glass and every tap in the house was running, the sinks and tub pooling with Lake
Michigan water that Peter drank by the glassful.

The dream would come for three more nights before Peter said something. He woke up
in her arms, on the floor of the bathroom. Gwen was smoothing her hands over his hair
again. She was leaning into him, saying his name, and he was relieved to hear her
say it. But later that night, or the next, or the next, it would happen again, and
he was terrified not to say something to her now. The following morning she was listening
to her French lesson in the other room with the CD player he had given her for her
birthday, brushing her hair in the mirror, when he said her name like it was a question.

“Gwen?”

“Je voudrais un café,” the French woman was saying.

“Lady wants a cup of coffee,” Gwen said loudly, as if translating for the benefit
of a phantom waiter in the bathroom with them. The way she interacted with the CDs
lately, when she played them at all, it sounded as if it were Gwen who was trying
to help the French woman communicate, rather than the other way around.

“Un café crème,” the French woman clarified.

“Cream, hold the sugar!”

“Gwen?” Peter said again.

For a moment, Gwen said nothing, and Peter thought she was too entrenched in breakfast
translation to be bothered. But when he pulled her against his chest, she stayed rooted
to the spot he held her. She let the French woman struggle through the rest of her
order alone. He smoothed her hair in his hand. He said, “Gwen, there’s something I
need to tell you.”

She nodded. He felt her body tense again in response to his weight.

He said, “It has to do with why we’re here.”

ANOTHER ABDUCTION, ANOTHER RUNAWAY
, another kidnapping, another set of dough-faced middle-aged parents appealing to
their God to bring back another child unharmed. Every night, it seemed, there was
one of these stories on television. But the lines blurred. Sometimes the kidnappers
were victims, the runaways were perpetrators, the abductees complicit in their own
demise. This was what made a captive audience of the nation—one never could anticipate
the twists and turns of a story like that. You started with an innocent victim who
captured the hearts of viewers everywhere, and you hoped for the best. But sometimes
she was secretly a prostitute, or maybe she had tried to kill the wife of her illicit
lover five years ago, stuff like that. Tonight there were the parents saying what
a good girl she was, good grades, driven, kind to her neighbors, a real gem of a kid,
this girl. Sure, sure, Novak thought. The mother was a little overweight, tearing
up with a photograph clutched between her two hands. The father was solemn, quiet,
brooding, holding the hand of his wife, and you could tell he was broken up about
the whole thing, but he wasn’t going to cry on national television.

A runaway himself, these stories interested Novak. His own family had never searched
for him, never notified the cops, never wept on television. And while initially, that
had been exactly what Novak had wanted, while it seemed for a time that he was going
to get away scot-free, it didn’t take long to resent the fact that no one had ever
bothered to pursue him. It felt after a while like they had been the ones who had
chosen to abandon him instead of the other way around. Novak had failed at enough
things to not try much anymore. He had failed at pleasing his family. He had failed
in love. The only way he succeeded in maintaining any kind of income at all was through
his work at the foundry, but even that was precarious. He’d messed up his lower back
years ago working construction, an injury that he’d never had properly looked at,
and it had grown into a kind of chronic pain that he was only able to keep at bay
through a careful balance of pain medication, sedatives, and antidepressants. The
first few times he stumbled into the television crew at the lake throwing coyote props
into the water, he thought he was seeing things. If he missed a dose and doubled up
later, there were sometimes side effects. But he wasn’t seeing things. Things were
just legitimately that messed up.

The coyotes were rumored to be hailing primarily from wildlife preserves in the suburbs.
They had lost their packs, for reasons said to be obscure, and were heading east,
toward the lake, as if by instinct. They were isolated and terrified, their actions
impossible to predict. Something that should go without saying when it comes to wild
animals roaming a metropolis. Novak understood this as well as anyone. He had been
alone at the lake for weeks before the crews showed up to document this phenomenon.
It started with a video camera. A few stands of lights. A man with a microphone. Soon
there was a trailer parked along the lake to house cue cards and a man whose job it
was to call out when it was a wrap. A television documentary crew had shown up with
a modest budget, set up cameras on the rocks, and shot a special report on the rising
number of coyote casualties recorded in conjunction with this stretch of land. The
documented number of wild coyotes in Chicago was staggering by all accounts, but recently
their bodies had begun showing up in the lake. Scientists were interviewed, along
with eyewitnesses claiming to have seen coyotes jump. Novak was happy to have the
company at the lake. He never saw a coyote jump, but he saw plenty of the crew, staging
reenactments with life-size stuffed animals. When the stuffed animals were pitched
into the water, they floated for a few minutes before sinking. Sometimes, there was
the outline of a tail or snout resting just above the surface of the water. It was
good to see something besides a stone sink. Gravity at work called to mind a larger
world of momentum operating outside the laws of his own body and brain.