The Night Gwen Stacy Died (7 page)

Andrea shrugged. “Yeah,” she said, “Or you could just say it in English.”

The following Monday Sheila walked though the halls like a ghost. She spent the entire
lunch period locked in the last stall of the girls’ bathroom so as not to have to
face Anthony. Following French class, Sheila lingered and approached Ms. Lawrence’s
desk. Ms. Lawrence was busy erasing the day’s lesson and chalk dust filled the air
between them. Sheila cleared her throat.

“Miss Gower,” Ms. Lawrence said, straightening up, “what can I do for you?”

Ms. Lawrence’s English voice was slightly higher, more nasal, than her French voice,
and immediately it put Sheila on edge. In English, she sounded more like any other
teacher, less like an ally.

Sheila leaned into Ms. Lawrence’s desk. “I wanted to tell you that I’m going to Paris,”
she said. “In the fall.”

Ms. Lawrence’s face brightened instantly, and Sheila felt her chest open again, her
breathing steady. “That’s wonderful, Sheila,” she said.

“I just thought you would like to know,” Sheila said.

“Of course, how exciting,” said Ms. Lawrence. “Just think of how much your French
will improve! If you need a recommendation or anything of that sort, I’d be happy
to write you one. What type of program is it?”

Sheila watched Ms. Lawrence’s manicured fingernails pick a piece of lint off her sweater
while she waited for her to say something.

“Oh, it’s not really a program,” Sheila said. “I’m just going.”

“I don’t understand,” Ms. Lawrence said. “You mean you’re going on vacation?”

“No,” said Sheila, “to live. I’ve been saving for a while.”

“You know people there? Family?”

“Not really,” said Sheila.

“I see,” said Ms. Lawrence. She bit her bottom lip.

It was quiet for a second.

“It’s very expensive, Paris.”

“I thought I could maybe get a job when I get there.”

The chalk dust was settling around them. Sheila thought she could feel it drifting
off the edges of things in the room.

“Have you thought about Canada?” Ms. Lawrence said finally.

“Canada,” Sheila repeated. Like
Canada
-Canada? Like
Canada-north-of-Minnesota
-Canada. She felt suddenly like she was going to pass out.

“Because Paris is,” Ms. Lawrence paused. “How do I put it? Well, there’s ‘
Paris
,’” and here she extended her four fingers as if to place a quote around the word,
“and then there’s Paris. The Paris that our textbook talks about just doesn’t exist,
not really.”

“What?” Sheila said. “What do you mean?”

“I mean sometimes our expectations of a thing create a kind of unreality.”

Sheila wondered if Ms. Lawrence was insane.

“I mean it’s a city like any city. Yes, it’s wonderful, but there are Burger Kings
there too, for example. There are ignorant drivers. There are thunderstorms. There
are bills to pay and waiting rooms. The common cold. I mean I could keep going,” Ms.
Lawrence said, but she trailed off.

“So Paris is Coralville,” Sheila said.

“Oh, there’s a thought! How interesting!” Ms. Lawrence laughed. She shook her head.
“I don’t want to discourage you. But a place like Montreal is also really lovely,
and it’s so much cheaper too, and closer to home. If you’re looking for an adventure,
I mean. If that’s what you’re looking for.”

“An adventure,” Sheila repeated. She repeated it again biking down the Coralville
strip to the gas station after school. As if all she had been looking for was a cheap
and convenient thrill. As if she had memorized all that vocabulary and all those conjugations
to move to a place where it snowed so much that underground tunnels had to be dug
so the people could still get to work in the morning without using the actual streets.
“Maybe give it some thought,” Ms. Lawrence had said. “Just as an alternative. We could
research some options together.” Sheila swerved slightly across the white line of
the road and was brought back to the task of pedaling by the sharp horn of a driver.

“Get on the fucking sidewalk!” the man yelled out his window at her as he sped past.

Yes, of course
, Sheila thought for the instant in which problems conflate in one’s brain and this
seemed like the solution to everything that had steered off course in her life,
I should get on the sidewalk!
But if there had been a sidewalk, she would already be on it.
SHARE THE ROAD
a bright yellow sign sprouting from the concrete advised, as if it were that simple
a thing to share something as open and straight and endless as a road. “There is no
fucking sidewalk!” Sheila screamed back, near tears, pedaling fast, but minutes later,
to no one, after the man had already driven off and was surely by now circling around
the mall in pursuit of parking.

Sheila sat in the gas station and waited for Peter. She didn’t know what she would
say to him, but something was going to be said. She understood, irrationally, suddenly,
that she needed him to walk into the station. It was toward the end of her shift,
shortly after she’d decided that he would not come in at all, that she heard the sound
of his engine cutting in the lot by the bathrooms, and she turned to see the headlights
of his cab just as he switched them off. Sheila lifted the stack of flashcards from
the counter and placed the top one—
la carotte, le céleri, la pomme de terre
—directly in front of her face.

Peter walked into the gas station and stood at the counter.

“What’s going on?” Sheila asked, looking up from her flashcard. This close to her
face the words on her flashcard meant nothing at all. The letters blurred. The letters
made her feel uneasy. “Slow night?”

Peter reached into the pocket of his jacket and placed a shiny gun on the counter.
He didn’t say anything. He just took it out the way someone might take out a set of
car keys and placed it up there as if it had been uncomfortable in his pocket.

“Uh, what’s with the gun?”

“A proposition,” said Peter.

“What is a gun doing on my counter?” Sheila clarified. Her heart beat faster, but
it wasn’t fear exactly that directed her blood to move like this.

“Have you ever been to Chicago?” asked Peter.

“No.”

“I’m going to Chicago,” said Peter. “I thought you might like to come with me.”

Sheila knew she wasn’t putting in twenty-plus hours a week at the Sinclair station
to go to a place like that.

“I was going to leave the country soon,” she said.

Peter shrugged. “So I’m heading east. It’s on your way.”

“What’s in it for me?” asked Sheila.

“If you don’t want to go,” he said, “I’ll go without you.”

It occurred to her then that maybe this was one way to leave a place, with a boy and
a gun. This was teamwork, having a plan.

“What’s the plan?” she asked. “I’m assuming there is one.”

Peter cleared his throat. “I will hold you at gunpoint. You will empty the cash register
into my duffle bag. We will drive to Chicago. Fast,” he added.

A city is a city
, she thought,
is a city is a city
. Is that what Ms. Lawrence had been trying to tell her? She thought of her father
as he had looked standing in the doorway of her bedroom. She raised her chin and looked
straight into the eye of the security camera.

“I don’t even know your real name,” said Sheila.

“Sure you do, Gwen,” he said quietly.

He looked at her queerly, smiled at her with his eyes, as if they two were in on something
wonderful, some unnamed thing she wanted.

“Point the gun at me,” said Sheila.

Peter Parker did as he was told.

FOR A LITTLE OVER TWO
hours, Peter had been driving up and down the Coralville strip with a gun in the
glove compartment. It wasn’t even his glove compartment. It belonged to Yellow Cab
number ninety-seven, the taxi he drove most nights. Any one of the inebriated clients
he might pick up—and, working nights in a town bordering a college town, a good percentage
of his clientele was inebriated—could get curious in the front seat and find the gun
nestled between outdated city maps and his emergency stack of Dairy Queen napkins.
Peter removed the gun from the glove compartment while stopped at a red light; he
admired its petite muzzle and short black trigger, then he lay it down quietly on
the passenger seat. He didn’t know if it was loaded; he had been afraid to open it
up and find out. Better not to know, better to allow himself to be in awe of the certain
danger of it, to use this danger as backup, a motivation to walk into the gas station
and say what he had seen.

What he had seen was the girl, the gas station attendant who showed up in his dreams.
Often she appeared in her underwear. In these regular dreams, the girl’s underwear
was always white cotton with lace trim. She spoke French to him in these dreams, but
not much else happened, and anyway Peter didn’t understand French, so she could have
been saying anything—“Nice weather we’ve been having,” or “Can I borrow your car?”—the
stuff of everyday necessity. Still, these dreams were nice. They did nothing to upset
Peter.

He was on his way to the gas station now. Perhaps she would be expecting him, because
it was almost eight and he hadn’t yet been there. Peter pulled off onto the shoulder
of Highway 6, half a mile from the station. He picked up the gun from the passenger
seat.
The shotgun rides shotgun
. But it was a handgun, and he was hoping the girl would want to sit beside him.

He had been driving a cab for the past five years, but he had been coming in to visit
the girl when his shifts were slow only for the past month or so now. She was nice
to look at even if she sometimes acted like she didn’t want him around. The first
time he’d come into the station, the girl stared at his ID for maybe a full minute,
but she hadn’t said a word about it.

“Something wrong?” Peter had asked her.

The license he carried in his wallet was a fake he’d made some years ago on the occasion
of his twentieth birthday. But everyone called him Peter anyway, so it didn’t seem
to make much of a difference. Unless he had to sign his name for some tax or employment
purpose, this was the license he pulled from his wallet. His face was getting old
and familiar enough around town not to be asked for identification much, so there
seemed to be little reason for an adolescent gas station attendant to make him feel
self-conscious about it. “Is there a problem?” Peter repeated.

“Not unless there’s something I’m missing,” the girl said, in a way that made it seem
as if he were the one with the staring problem.

The next time he went in to buy cigarettes, Peter pulled off the cellophane and knocked
one out from the pack. “Do you mind?” he asked, raising the freed cigarette halfway
to his mouth.

“You’re not allowed to smoke in here, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said. He
started to make his way toward the door when he heard her say, “Unless you’ve got
one for me?”

Peter turned to face the girl, regarding the entire wall of cigarettes behind her,
in every package and variety imaginable—hard packs, soft packs, filtered, unfiltered.

“I just want one,” the girl said. “I’m not really a smoker.” She reached out her hand,
and Peter placed a single cigarette between her fingers.

After that, he’d made a habit of coming in. The girl would have his pack waiting for
him. While Peter finished his cigarette in the station, the girl would tell him random
facts about foreign countries she thought he’d appreciate. “In Paris, you can bring
dogs everywhere,” she’d say. “Into restaurants and everything. Nobody cares, it’s
just the culture.”

“Hmm. Sounds like a health code violation,” Peter would say.

“You’re really arrogant,” the girl said, smiling, “if you think your health codes
are the same as everyone else’s.”

It was around this time the girl had started showing up in his dreams.

But more recently, there had been no French, no underwear. What Peter kept seeing
in his sleep—it had happened every night this week—could not exactly be called a dream,
and he knew better than to call it that. It was closer to sensing something while
awake—complete with smell and taste and touch. The things Peter saw weren’t always
the most important things. They were often isolated and individual, not enough to
affect more than a few other lives.

His mother called them nightmares. The first time it happened he was seven: he woke
up coughing, a mouthful of water lodged in this throat. His mother had been sitting
at his bedside, striking his back, trying to get his lungs to take in the air. She
thought that he must have reached for the glass of water on his nightstand in a dream,
and tried to drink. But Peter had not been the one swallowing water in his dream.
It had been quiet ten-year-old Henry Macy from the neighborhood whom Peter had watched
drown, and when two weeks later the Macys found Henry face-down in a flooded ditch,
Peter was afraid to tell his mother that he had seen it happen exactly the same way
and had done nothing to warn anyone. Most nights he would dream like any other person,
but there were a handful of things he saw around this time that could not be circumscribed
to his own dormant brain. He saw the grocer slip on a patch of ice and break his hip,
one week before he saw him lose his balance chasing a cart in the parking lot; he
dreamed his own dog running away from home and wouldn’t leave the dog’s side unless
absolutely necessary, until one time, they were playing with a tennis ball together,
and he could do nothing to stop the dog from bolting out of the yard, away from him;
for the past month he had endlessly dreamed two women he didn’t recognize fall asleep
at the wheel of their car and slam into a highway median in the middle of the night.
The women were so young. Girls. They looked barely old enough to drive, and when they
crashed into the median each night Peter watched their long hair rush forward toward
the dashboard as the car began to spin.