The Night Gwen Stacy Died (24 page)

After an entire spring of solitude, it felt good to run his eyes over the letters
the girl’s hand had produced again and again. The girl’s handwriting slanted down
to the right, lopsided. Her letters were fat and lightly rendered.
You looked like you really needed the sleep
, the girl had written. She wrote,
Please just stay there until I get back.
Novak stared and he waited. He blinked at the page. It had been a long time since
anyone had thought to write him a note.

THE COYOTE WAS HUDDLED
over something in the yard when Sheila came for it. She approached with a map and
a flashlight—courtesy of Jake Novak’s coffee-table cabinet—and saw that there was
some living thing in the grass there beside the coyote.

“Hey,” Sheila said, “what do you have?”

It was difficult to say at first. It was a small rabbit, still alive just in the hind
legs. It must have been very young, unable to run even from a tethered coyote. Its
tiny eyes were flat and black though its leg continued to twitch in the animal’s mouth.
Well, that was the food chain for you—gruesome, unforgiving stuff. Sheila stepped
back and allowed the coyote to finish with the rabbit, checking with the flashlight
to be sure. Then she untied the coyote and began to walk toward the place where she
planned to release it.

The coyote looked frightening with its blood-stained mouth, but Sheila supposed her
ratty ponytail and her industrial-strength flashlight made them a fine pair. Besides,
it wasn’t more than an hour and a half walk to a decent-sized park with some forested
areas. The two walked on in silence. Really she didn’t need the flashlight to consult
the map as she expected she would. She was still expecting Iowa. Here there were streetlights
everywhere.

The radio in Jake’s living room had used the word
wanted
. The radio said police were gathering an investigation team presently, that it was
only a matter of time before Seth Novak would be located and apprehended. The radio
listed his offenses: grand theft auto, larceny, the kidnapping of a minor—one Sheila
Gower—and the crossing of state lines. She had tensed again upon hearing herself identified
as the kidnapped minor, for it meant it was Peter they were coming for; Sheila Gower
was only the victim who got caught up in this mess. But she had started to think of
herself as Gwen Stacy, and Gwen Stacy operated on a wholly different set of rules.

A month ago, if she had seen a man who was supposed to be dead walking down the street,
Sheila would have thought she’d seen a ghost and probably would have run. In other
words, she wouldn’t have, say, pointed a gun at the guy’s chest and demanded answers.
But even the gun was getting more comfortable in her hands. It had been in her handbag
the whole time she had sat on the street and spoken to Jake and the coyote, so once
she’d finally worked out just where she’d seen his face before, her first instinct
was to believe she’d been lied to about his death for a reason, that she was in possible
danger. So, yeah, she had pointed a gun at the guy. But Jake Novak was a very strange
guy. In fact, at first he had given her the creeps.

It took a whole afternoon of interrogation and crossexamination in the kitchen to
establish that Jake was as scared of her as she was of him. He appeared genuinely
perplexed by her presence, by her knowledge of his past, so that it seemed pretty
unlikely that she had walked into some sort of strange pact or scheme between brothers.
She had to consider the possibility that she had discovered Jake on her own, independent
of anything Peter had planned. How this related to the man who was the one they were
searching for, she still couldn’t say, but for the time being, it hardly seemed to
matter. Back at the house, tied up in his kitchen, was the brother Peter thought he
had lost twenty years ago; Sheila had found him without even looking. She considered
all this as she walked. It was important to take it one thing at a time. The coyote
was the first thing. It gave her time to be alone and think everything through.

The rope went taut and Sheila turned to find the coyote had paused to smell a tree.

“Don’t stop,” Sheila ordered. “We’re very close now.”

It was another ten minutes before they reached their destination. As they walked on,
the lawns became better manicured; the cars parked along the street became larger,
more menacing and tanklike. Then they approached the forested expanse of the park.

“Home sweet home,” Sheila said to the coyote. She started to slip the rope away from
the animal’s neck.

But once free, the coyote made no attempt to wander from her.

“Love makes this house a home,” she announced. “Home is where you hang your heart.”

The coyote looked at Sheila strangely, showed some teeth.

“Sorry,” Sheila said. “My sister always says that kind of thing. But anyway, this
is where you belong, like it or not.”

Not!
the coyote’s eyes seemed to protest.

“Come on,” said Sheila. “Aren’t you supposed to want to conquer new lands? You want
to be somebody’s pet? You want to be crazy Jake Novak’s puppy?”

The coyote began sniffing around again, on the trail of something, she hoped. Sheila
started to wander in the other direction, at first slowly, the way one is told to
flee from bears and other wild things, but then with more speed. It was a matter of
minutes before the coyote was back at her side, looking up at Sheila as if for a cue.

It was getting a little annoying. Here she was, trying to do the right thing, and
the coyote was turning the attempt into a replica of one of those heartwarming scenes
from the movies. Sheila remembered primarily two veins of movies about canine-human
friendship. There was the kind where the human tries to reinstate the wild animal
to its natural habitat only to be reduced to yelling the kinds of obscenities appropriate
for children’s programming (“Scram! Get lost! I never want to see you again!” the
hero yells at the wild animal, holding back tears). There was also the variation where
the canine-friend was domesticated at first, and the two were pals, but then the animal
develops rabies and has to be shot, usually by the kid who raised it. What sort of
stories were these to share with children anyway? And why for example was her entire
fourth grade class forced to read
Where the Red Fern Grows
and watch
Old Yeller
back to back? Even the boys had sobbed.

Sheila turned around and sat down on a log. She counted the number of seconds it took
the coyote to run from the patch of earth it was sniffing to the place where she sat.
(Seven.)

“Scram!” She tried yelling, but the line fell flat.

The coyote cocked her head the way speakers of other languages sometimes do when you
speak to them in English, the gesture of listening.

“Get lost!” It came out more like a question.

Then she tried something else.

“Patch?”

The coyote pounced beside her, quickly, half-violently, in a way that at first made
Sheila gasp and draw away, but then the coyote rolled on her back, offering her belly.

“Seriously? You’re going to respond to that,
Patch?
” Sheila said, giving the animal a few test pets. It was the name she had heard Jake
use to address it. “Hey good girl, Patch, okay good girl,” she continued mumbling,
pushing her palm along the short fur of the animal’s belly.

Could it be possible that the animal was part dog after all? Sheila wondered. One
of those hybrids, the offspring of two species? Could it be two things at once, regardless
of the genetic material in its cells that determined the expectation for how it should
act, what it should want?

She thought of the coyote in Macbride Hall, who had faced death as bravely as any
animal, and then the horrible embarrassment of the afterlife, to be stuffed and set
up, expected to act alive. To be asked to play a regular breathing mammal again, with
legs and a language: an ordinary organism, but to have crossed into this other world,
where everything was almost as it should be—business as usual with a few slight variations.
And Sheila thought it made sense that the best ones to talk to were always those who
could make a home for themselves anywhere, the ones who could look at a glass case
and couple of rogue predators they’d really never be caught dead with in the natural
world and say, yes, I think I could make this work.

It was while she was walking toward Jake Novak’s apartment, with the grateful animal
beside her, that she decided maybe this was what mothers and therapists were trying
to get at when they talked on idiotic television shows about finding “one’s place
in the world.” The one part they had right was that it wasn’t a real place, like Paris
or Iowa or something you could point to on a map and say, “the beaches there are lovely,”
or “dead-end town.”

She was becoming an ace at calling the shots and making up the rules. Peter was right.
She hadn’t seen that at first. When he’d made her try on the stupid dress, she had
thought him dramatic, odd, obsessive. He had scared her with that ratty secondhand
thing, the way he pressed his face into it. But when you understood things like that,
like the plain fact that everyone was, by living in a body, completely alone—entering
the world that way, leaving it that way—it made sense that it took little effort to
know how to react to the will of another living thing.

She entered the apartment, turning the corner into the kitchen, and found Jake sitting
at the table, exactly as she’d left him. He seemed genuinely happy to see her. “Hey,”
he said. He smiled.

“Hey,” she said.

“Where’d you go?”

“I tried to release Patch into the wild,” Sheila said.

“Oh?” He looked disappointed. “I was kind of looking after her.”

“Well, she refused to go,” Sheila said, “so I brought her back with me.”

Patch walked into the kitchen, her nails tapping out a rhythm on the tile floor.

“Hey girl,” Jake said, but he didn’t make as if to pet her because his hands were
still bound. Patch paused for a moment in front of Jake’s chair before collapsing
with a huff on the rug in front of the kitchen sink. Jake turned toward Sheila. “I
got your note.”

“Yes, good,” Sheila said, remembering.

Jake shifted in his chair. “The thing is,” he said, “I’ve been tied up here for hours
now. It’s late. I need to use the bathroom.”

Sheila considered this. Of course the request was legitimate, but she couldn’t risk
letting him get away either. She said, “If I let you go into the bathroom alone, are
you just going to use the toilet? Or are you going to try to jump out the window to
escape or something?”

Jake looked at the ceiling. “I’d say just the toilet,” he said.

Sheila stood behind the chair and began releasing the rope. The gun rested in the
waistband of her jeans, and as Jake turned and touched the places on his wrists where
the rope had bitten down, Sheila placed one hand on the gun. She said, “You have five
minutes.”

But he was out of the bathroom within two. Sheila was standing in the kitchen, listening
to the sound of the toilet flush, when Jake walked into the room and sat back in the
chair, offered his wrists again.

“Maybe it won’t be necessary,” she said.

Jake shrugged. “Whatever you think.”

“Look me in the eye and tell me you won’t try to get away,” Sheila said.

Jake looked at her strangely. “This is my apartment. I live here. Also, in case you
haven’t noticed, I’m twice your size,” he said. “If I wanted to get away, no offense,
but it wouldn’t be that difficult.”

Sheila set the rope down on the kitchen counter. Jake Novak had a point.

In the cabinets she found a few boxes of macaroni and cheese, and she doubled the
recipe, measuring twice the milk, twice the butter, to accommodate them both.

“Can I help with anything?” Jake asked. And sometimes Sheila would say, “Yeah, find
me a measuring spoon,” and “Where do you keep the bowls around here?” But mostly she
found her way around the kitchen and preferred him to keep sitting where she could
see him. When everything was mixed together in the pot, she put the pot at the center
of the table on top of a kitchen towel, and doled out servings in each of their bowls.

It was Jake who spoke first. “Hey, this is really great,” he said, tasting his dinner.

“It’s just macaroni,” she said. “It probably tastes the same when you make it yourself.”

Jake shook his head. “It never tastes like this when I make it,” he said.

“It seems like maybe you don’t take very good care of yourself,” Sheila said.

Jake shrugged.

He ate quickly, voraciously, like a stray unsure where its next meal would come from,
and Sheila felt a little sad to imagine Peter’s brother eating alone at this table
other nights, every other night. She said, “Don’t you ever miss your home?”

“This is my home,” Jake said.