The Night Gwen Stacy Died (25 page)

“Not this,” Sheila said. “Iowa.”

Jake swallowed. “Of course,” he said.

“But you never went back.”

“There are too many things I am ashamed of.”

“Because everyone thinks you’re dead?” Sheila said.

His lip began to tremble a little then. It was hard to say if he already assumed this,
or whether it hurt to be reminded. He set his fork on the edge of the bowl on the
table. She didn’t know if she should continue, but he looked up at her now, eager
to hear what other information she carried with her. Now that she had started to speak,
it was clear the thing to do from here was not to stop.

“Your brother,” Sheila said.

Jake waited.

She tried again to find the words, the correct way to begin.

“Your brother,” she said again.

Jake reached across the table for her hand, and Sheila placed her small palm inside
of his. She watched the way her tiny hand fit there, nested inside.

“He’s here,” she said. “In Chicago. He came here to find you.”

But only in saying it aloud did she understand that this was true, that sitting across
from her at the table, his hand trembling around her own, was the man whose life they
had come to intercept from the start.

PETRA AND LENKA SPOKE
no English. They lived further west of the park, in a one-room apartment with slanted
floors. Iva had called them right away. She had explained that they owed her a favor,
and it would inconvenience no one for Peter to sleep there a few nights. No one would
think to look for him there. But Peter had his doubts. When Iva had knocked on the
door, Lenka opened it only a crack to admit her, and Peter was instructed to wait
in the hallway. He waited there for five minutes of audible negotiations before Iva
opened the door and announced, “It is okay.” Inside, there was one queen-size bed,
which the women presumably shared, and there was a mattress pad, a bit thicker than
a sleeping bag, stretched out on the floor of the kitchen, which Peter understood
to be for him. Now Iva had gone back home, and Petra and Lenka were playing cards
at the kitchen table, while Peter sat across the room in an armchair and pretended
to watch television.

On the television, a group of people were living on a remote deserted island surrounded
by sharks, and they had to try to get along or the sharks would eat them one at a
time, one at the end of each episode. But they still couldn’t do it. Every day they
tried to get along; they tried team-building exercises like preparing food and going
on scavenger hunts, but it just wasn’t working out, they explained to the camera.
“At the end of the day,” one man said, “it’s us against the sharks, and the sharks
don’t give a sh** about getting along. As far as the animal kingdom is concerned,
getting along is a f***ing waste of time.” The other people on the island agreed that
this comment was bad for team morale before the show cut to commercial. Peter stood
and switched off the television. He didn’t think anyone had really been watching it,
but instantly Lenka turned from the kitchen table and looked at the empty screen,
as if confused.

“Is it okay?” Peter asked.

Petra scowled and mumbled something in Czech.

Peter retreated and turned the television on again.

He shifted in his chair and continued to wait. Every once in a while Lenka would say
something to Petra that would make her laugh, and Petra would look at Peter, or at
the television, it was hard to say which.

It was evening, nearly dinnertime, and Peter sat listening to the people on television
trade insults before the next scheduled shark attack, thinking that if Gwen didn’t
show up soon, it would be too late. Iva had promised to continue to monitor the apartment
for any further activity, but he couldn’t help feeling helpless, sitting across town,
waiting for something to happen. He had seen a bar at the corner when Iva dropped
him off, and he thought this would be a better place to wait. If he was going to be
trapped here, he at least was going to have a few drinks. He stood from his chair,
and Petra and Lenka looked up from their cards.

“I’m going out for an hour,” he said.

“An hour,” Lenka repeated, trying on the words like a misfit sock or glove, and Petra
smiled and hid her mouth behind her cards.

Peter took a step forward. “One drink,” he said. He held up one finger, then tipped
two fingers in front of his mouth to gesture toward the act. Petra and Lenka stared
at him, like a painful game of charades in which no one had seen any of the same movies,
read any of the same books.
Two words, two syllables. Sounds like . 
.
 . “
One beer,” Peter said slowly.

Petra’s eyes widened at Lenka, as she made the same tipping gesture in front of her
small pink mouth. Lenka rolled her eyes. “Pivo,” she said. Then both women threw down
their cards and began to laugh.

“I’m coming right back,” Peter continued, emboldened by this tiny success in communication.
“Please don’t lock the door.” He opened the door and pointed to the lock. “Please,”
he said again. Why hadn’t he asked Iva the word for
please
? But finally Petra nodded. Lenka said, “Door, okay,” and she waved him off. Peter
decided to take this as confirmation that he would find his way back inside, and so
he smiled, in a way he hoped looked sincere, and felt confident enough to step through
the door and let it shut behind him.

“What’re you having?” The bartender hobbled from her seat at the end of the bar and
threw a coaster in front of him.

He ordered a scotch, then another. The televisions were on here too. There were several
of them; there was no escaping them. But the volume was muted so Peter kept his eyes
close to the ground. Even now, late in the day, the weather was temperate, and the
back door was propped open with a phone book. Without the distraction of communication,
Peter’s thoughts reorganized themselves toward contemplating the many errors that
needed his attention. He sat at the bar and thought only of Sheila. Sheila lost, Sheila
drowned, Sheila missing. Sheila’s eyelashes, her neck, the perfect spaces between
the tiny bones along her spine.

He was staring at the bottom of the jukebox across the bar when he saw something slink
in through the door. Out of the corner of his eye, whatever it was passed for a dog,
but it was a strange-looking dog. This was confirmed by two men playing pool across
the bar.

“Will you goddamn look what we’ve got here,” one said to the other.

His partner straightened up from his shot at the table and leaned into his cue.

Then everyone was looking. The animal seemed to shy from the extra attention, and
settled quietly near a cooler at the front of the bar, looked the other way, as if
mesmerized by all the different colored bottles of beer.

The animal looked perfectly harmless. One woman cooed, “Hey, pup pup puppy,” and announced
she was going to pet it. But the man she was with grabbed her wrist and said it was
actually time to get going.

“Settle down,” the bartender chided. She clapped her hands above her head. The bartender
announced that yes, there was a coyote in the bar, and that Animal Control had been
called. Everyone was free to take off or stick around. “If you’re leaving,” she advised,
“don’t forget to close your tab.” A few people walked away from half-full beers with
an exaggerated tiptoe by the animal. But most picked up their conversations after
a few minutes of taking pictures of the animal with their cell phones. The coyote
didn’t even look up. It had curled into a ball in front of the cooler and closed its
eyes. Peter wondered if this was such a strange occurrence really. Stranger things,
it seemed—more absurd and unthinkable things—happened all the time. The bartender
turned the televisions up as a means of distraction. It was the people on the island
again, organizing their ranks before the attack everyone knew would come at the end
of the hour.

Peter ordered another scotch.

He drank it slowly to balance the pace in his brain. Peter was sitting in an unknown
bar on an unknown street in a city he had no business being in. He had come here to
save a stranger for no good reason. But now, none of it mattered. The whole natural
world felt skewed, its order difficult to anticipate, to penetrate in a way that made
any sense to him now. Coyotes walked into bars. Sharks attacked on schedules set by
television executives. Sheila was gone. He dreamed her disappeared, floating or trapped,
and in doing so, he had put her in danger, and now she was lost. He was irresponsible.
He was afraid. He was alone again.

A woman with long dark hair sat on the stool beside him watching the televisions,
but she was muttering something about the animal. “Third one found alive in the city
this month alone,” she said. “It’s not a good sign.”

“What do you mean?” Peter said.

“Look around!” the woman grumbled. “The whole world’s fucked. Starting with the food
chain and working its way on up the line.”

“Keep it down,” the bartender said. “You’re freaking everyone out.”

But the woman would not stop talking. “You know what they say about coyotes,” she
said, laughing. “Wily? Pranksters? Right?” the woman said.

Some of the people at the bar nodded their heads.

“Well,” the woman said, “that’s all bullshit. They’re messengers. They move between
the living and the dead and they carry messages.”

“Keep it down over there!” The bartender was becoming more insistent.

Peter felt his body slide off his stool. He lifted his eyeglasses from his face, propped
them on his head, and crouched to the ground to get a better look. He remembered Iva
saying how the animals ran along the lake in packs. Peter looked at the coyote, and
the coyote opened its eye closest to Peter. He didn’t know what he was thinking, but
he was thinking the animal had information.

The coyote looked away from Peter, at the bottles of beer in the cooler. But it knew.
The woman was right; animals don’t walk into bars for no reason at all. They carry
messages.

“Get away from the animal,” the bartender advised. “You’ve got about three seconds
to move.”

Peter moved a step closer to the coyote and leaned into it, his body asking the animal
to confirm or deny it carried information. His body asking the animal if Sheila was
living or dead.

The coyote turned to Peter. Its ears were sharp and, when it looked up, its eyes,
translucent yellow. Four uniformed men appeared in the bar then, with instruments
in their hands—a metal glove, prod and a lasso, and tranquilizer darts just in case.
The coyote showed its teeth but—messenger or not—the animal was little match for four
men with a strategy and the tools to implement it.

Messengers take on all different sorts of forms, so sometimes it’s difficult to predict
their arrivals. When Peter walked back into the apartment, he found Iva was there
again, sitting at the kitchen table with Petra and Lenka, drinking tea. The cards
had been put away. Iva stood when Peter entered the room and pushed an envelope in
his hand. “It was beneath my door,” she said. “But it is for you.” She indicated the
name scrawled on the front of the envelope:
Peter.
He reached for the envelope and took a step back from the kitchen table. All three
women watched as he read.

Peter, I found him. Where are you? I found him. Near the scrap yard, like you dreamed.
I came home for you but you aren’t here and I don’t want to leave him alone again
and you know why! But there is nothing to worry about because we’re both safe and
I am looking after him until you get here. So I guess the plan is working, just like
you said it would and we’re doing fine love. I mean it. His address is 1534 W. Walton.
Get over here fast, I need you and so does he.

Love,

Gwen

P.S. Also stay away from our apartment—it isn’t safe.

“From Sheila?” Iva said. “Yes?”

“Yes,” Peter said. He breathed out and then in again. “It’s her,” he said.

Iva nodded. “I knew it must be,” she said. “You will make up with her?”

Lenka asked something in Czech, and Iva pointed to Peter, smiling, and answered.

“I say to her that now you found your love again,” Iva explained. “And Lenka says
this is good.”

Petra was smiling now too. “Dávej si pozor,” she said. She clucked her tongue like
a grandmother giving counsel.

“Yes,” Iva agreed. “Also to be careful.”

Peter nodded in assent to all of it. He would be careful; he would find her again;
he would set everything right. He would find the man and the dreams would stop and
he would get them all out of the city. Sheila had done her part, and now he was needed;
he had a function, a purpose, a power, just as he’d been promised. He felt he had
to move quickly and he felt he could barely move. He kissed Iva on the cheek, mumbling
his gratitude for the message, and started to make his way to the door. Then, he turned
back and kissed Petra and then Lenka, before running into the street to find a taxi
that would take him to the address in his hand.