The Night Gwen Stacy Died (20 page)

Peter smiled. He opened his mouth slowly, as if searching for the best way to pose
an answer. He said, “How much do you tip a stripper?”

Sheila had been shocked to hear that come out of his mouth. She didn’t think the woman
would warm to that kind of comment at all; but the woman started laughing. She had
taken a step toward Peter and put her hand on the arm of his jacket. “You working
now?”

Peter had opened the door and held out his hand, as if to lead the way. “Don’t work
too hard, sweetheart,” he called to Sheila as the door closed behind him. It was the
first time Peter had called her anything like that. It made her face flush to hear
it, even though he’d just called the woman in the leather dress the same thing. From
the glow of the fluorescent light inside the station, Sheila could just make out Peter
opening the door for the woman. She saw the way that he looked at the woman’s legs
before he closed the back-seat door of the taxi, and she didn’t like it.

But that was the way it was with Peter. It had everything to do with why Sheila had
left with him. Before she’d met him, she didn’t know that real people existed in the
world who could walk around talking like that. Men in movies she’d seen could be that
crass, certainly, but to be that crass and that odd at once, to be so confident and
so strange. “Don’t talk to strangers,” her father had advised when Sheila told him
she’d taken a job at the Sinclair station, as if she’d been a toddler impatient to
cross the street. But Peter made her want to talk to strangers. He made her think
that there was something worth talking about, even in Iowa—something she didn’t need
to go to France to find, if people could talk to one another in this way right on
the Coralville strip. To learn that even her own language could allow for something
like that. It worked the same way the night that she left with Peter. When Peter had
called her that other name for the first time, there was the feeling that this too
was partly true, and her heart raced at the sound of it, because here was an invitation.
There was already this story that Peter had, he was living inside of it; here he was
offering to share it with her, and all she had to do was agree to come along. The
choice had been obvious.

But last night, for the first time, they had fought over this choice. Peter had tried
to give up on her, to get her to go back home without him.

“If anything happens to you,” he said, “I’ll never forgive myself.”

Sheila said, “Nothing is going to happen to me.”

“Tomorrow,” Peter said, “I’m going to buy you a bus ticket.”

“Oh yeah?” said Sheila. “With whose money.”

He had looked at her strangely. “With my money,” he said.

“With
our
money,” Sheila said. “With the money we took together from
my
gas station.”

She looked at him for a second. They both knew that that money was long gone. It had
barely lasted the first week of their cohabitation. They had already lived almost
five weeks as fugitives together.

“Fine,” Peter said, “With
our
money.” And he continued. “I’ll buy you a ticket with
our
money, you’ll get on a bus, ride it home, and be with your family, who probably think
you’re dead by now. This isn’t right that you’re with me in another city when your
family is thinking you’re dead. Do you get that?”

Sheila felt all the heat building up in her face. She squeezed all her fingers together
into a fist, as if to counter the feeling in her stomach of having been punched, but
she waited; her fingers crouched against one another in that tight ball, but she was
still. She made her voice small. She shook her head. “No,” she said, “I want to be
where you are.”

“Well, sorry,” Peter said. He shrugged his shoulders like he was the one making the
rules and that was the end of it, like she was a child under his care. “It’s not going
to work that way. It’s not safe anymore.”

She wanted to lunge for him then. In that moment Sheila wanted to charge her whole
self into his and push him into the window. She wanted to reach into his body, pull
out a tibia or a femur and squeeze its proteins to dust. She felt like she had more
strength concentrated in every muscle than she’d ever had in her life, and her joints
were shifting around inside of her, her cells were multiplying, like the real living
organism she supposed she had been all along, but also—and this was the strange thing—she
felt helpless, she felt drained of every available energy, like all of this velocity
building in her was a product of what he had given her and what she had done with
it. She remembered Mr. Zorn, her sophomore-year physics teacher, stepping back from
the chalkboard in admiration of an equation he had just written, saying how beautiful
it was, how perfectly and essentially balanced, and Sheila had rolled her eyes sitting
at her desk at how pathetic this had sounded, how devoid of beauty Mr. Zorn’s life
must have truly been for him to even think to say something so insane, but now she
felt the weight of this truth sting in her somewhere. She and Peter had built this,
they had built it together—that’s where the velocity came from, that’s where the force
of the thing came from—and to remove one of the variables from the equation was to
leave it unbalanced, and she was not going to let this happen. She stood several steps
away from Peter in their bedroom. She continued to breathe steadily in and out. She
said, “Okay, Peter Parker, now you listen to me.”

She caught something shifting in his eye already, but he held his tongue.

“If you think you’re dealing with a child, if you think you’re dealing with someone
who will let you call the shots from here on out, you robbed the wrong fucking gas
station.”

His eyes were filling now, but he said nothing still.

“I asked you to point the gun at me because I wanted to go with you. If you think
that I would have asked any crazy person who showed up with a gun to do the same,
you’re an idiot, Parker, I really mean it, you’re really an idiot. And if you’re stupid
enough to give up on everything now then you go ahead, really, but I want you to know
that no one has ever let me down so bad in my life. I took a risk on you, Parker.
Do you get that? I had nothing to run from. I had my own life, my own plans. Now if
you’re going to give up on me this fast, then you’re a coward, then the whole thing’s
just been a game, a lot of bullshit, a lie from the start.”

Peter held out his hand. He said her name.

But Sheila shook her head. “Don’t lie to me,” she said. “Don’t lie to yourself. Don’t
ask me to keep this up if you don’t really believe it.”

Peter reached again for her hand and this time she let him take it, and it was only
as she looked down at her hand inside of his that she realized it was shaking.

He said, “I have never believed in anything the way that I believe in this.”

Sheila let her face fall into his chest. She breathed in the cotton collar of his
shirt, gulping at the air there, greedily, unevenly. She inhaled the air closest to
his jaw, his neck, his chest, his hair, his hands, as if this were the only oxygen
in the room that her body would know how to use.

There was a knock at the door now, and Sheila jumped at the sound of it, her pants
still slung around her ankles, her shirt crumpled in the sink.

“Yeah,” she called out from the bathroom.

“C’est moi,” Iva said. “Tout est fini?”

“Oh shit, sorry, Iva,” Sheila said. It was their last house of the day. Petra and
Lenka and the others would already be standing in the front yard smoking cigarettes
and squeezing lotion into one another’s dry hands, impatient to call it a day. “Gimme
two minutes.”

“Very good,” said Iva. “We wait downstairs.”

Sheila dressed, splashed water on her face, and rushed to the first floor. Sure enough,
the others grimaced with impatience as they lit second cigarettes off the burning
ends of someone’s first.

Iva had a car that all the women piled into together, but they usually had more women
than there were seats, and the last time Sheila had sat between two women arguing
over her head in Czech for the duration of the car ride in rush-hour traffic.

“If it’s cool, I think I’ll just take the bus,” she said to Iva, and though the bus
was $2.25 to ride, and everyone knew this was wasteful when there was a car waiting
to drive her right to her door, Iva said it was cool, gave Sheila her cut of the day’s
earnings, and slid in behind the wheel.

“À bientôt,” Sheila waved from the driveway, and she passed the bucket and mop through
the open window, as the others organized themselves into the open seats for the journey
across town.

The first time she heard the howling from the scrap yard, it sounded almost human.
The unmistakable sound of a living thing in pain or fear issuing from the same space
as the clatter of machinery and metal crushing metal, metal folding back onto itself,
folding itself into new forms. But it was not human; it was some animal lost in the
industrial corridor, punctuating the steady pound and grind of men at work. It was
a week ago that Sheila had climbed onto the roof deck of one of the houses she’d cleaned
to shake debris from a set of matching bathroom rugs and spotted the sound for what
it was: a cry for help. She had noticed the smoke rising from the scrap yard, and
she’d asked Iva about it. “It is rubbish,” Iva had answered. “Metal of no use.” But
one only needed to gaze at the tower of half-flattened cars to ascertain that while
the metal pile might not have a use, it was a strange sight to behold in the middle
of the city.

That night, she had described the place to Peter, and at the mention of the scrap
yard, it was obvious that Peter was interested already. Whatever had happened that
night, she was still trying to make sense of it. He had tried to save her from something,
something obscure and benign, an empty sound, a false explosion. But even so, the
way he fell over her, how he covered her face on the ground so she wouldn’t breathe
in the smoke. He had dived over her in a moment of crisis, but the moment was as if
it were staged, the explosion wasn’t real. Was he capable of orchestrating something
of that magnitude? Clearly not. Then the man who was there seemed to know something,
and in speaking to him, Sheila understood she would have to direct things, or let
Peter give them away. She had kissed Peter to absolve him, to unframe him, to convince
the man that there was nothing to suspect, nothing to uncover. And it had felt good
to protect Peter, to rescue him, but it was also as if this moment marked the change
in him, the moment when the dreams began in which she was showing up in the water.

Now she wandered around the scrap yard by daylight, alone, hoping to see something
to help her make sense of what had happened there, but she saw nothing from that night
with Peter, neither the man who had stopped them, nor the signs of another strange
explosion. Only when she had all but ceased looking for it, did Sheila find the source
of the howl that had called her attention to the scrap yard in the first place.

The animal was medium-sized and gray with a lighter patch around its eyes, and in
her exhausted state, it looked like something from a dream, a fluffy, hazy suggestion
of a dog, its silent approach, treading out a path on the concrete. When she spotted
it, the animal was walking away from the piles of scrapped cars, parallel to Cortland
Street, headed straight for her. When it reached the cement block where she stood,
the dog stopped and sat beside her. She knelt down and began working her fingers into
its coat where burrs were matted, speaking quietly in its ear. The dog allowed itself
to be petted, arching its body against her hand as she stroked its back. “Where do
you belong?” she asked. “What are you doing in the scrap yard?”

The dog was beautiful, its coat thick and gray, with a white undercoat, and its tail
full and wavering slowly as Sheila spoke. It was only as she pulled the animal closer
to her that she noticed something off in its eyes. The eyes were fierce and Sheila
pulled her hand away fast. The animal continued to watch her, as if studying something.

It seemed too tame to be truly wild, but there was something about the eyes that didn’t
sit with her. There was something that reminded her of the mountain coyote in the
case at Macbride Hall.

“You’re one of the lost ones,” she said. “What are you doing in the city?”

The animal regarded her with more distance. “Where is your pack?” Sheila asked. “You
shouldn’t be traveling alone.”

Sheila should have been afraid to touch a wild animal, but the animal had become something
else from its time in the city. The animal seemed confused about how to be something
wild. Sheila took the ribbon out of her hair and fastened it around the coyote’s neck.
She was going to save this one, she decided.

The coyote gratefully licked the palm of Sheila’s hand. “Where do you want to go,
the forest preserve? The wilderness? The lake?” The possibilities were endless, each
one more gratifying than the last to consider. Sheila’s plans were interrupted by
the call of a man approaching.

“There you are, girl!” the man cried. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

The coyote turned to the man, her tail wagging slowly, as if remembering something.

“Making friends, I see?” The man glanced in Sheila’s direction for half a second,
before returning his focus to the animal.

“May I help you?” asked Sheila, a little curtly, as if she were back in the gas station
dealing with a problem customer.

“I think it’s rather a matter of whether I can help you,” the man said. “I’ve been
looking after this dog for almost a week.”

“Dog?” Sheila repeated.

“Hey girl,” the man addressed the animal, seeming to ignore her. “Why did you run
off on me like that? I brought you something.” He began digging around in his pocket.
Sheila looked up at the man for the first time. He looked to be about forty, but his
voice was younger, the voice of a younger man.