The Night Gwen Stacy Died

by Sarah Bruni

  Would it be accurate to say that they willfully ignored the fact of their criminal status? They had been living in the apartment for nearly two weeks now. Their actions were not something they acknowledged aloud. It was the way it had been with the name, the way he had used it the first night in the station, and it seemed to initiate this understanding that she didn’t want to disrupt by talking the thing away. So too with their crime. Andrea had said the gas station was all over the news. And why wouldn’t it be? It was no small thing to rob a business and cross state lines in a stolen vehicle. But Peter and Sheila didn’t have a television or a radio and they made no effort to seek one out, at least for a time, as if to deny the possibility of danger, like children who close their own eyes with the hope of not being seen.

  But Sheila didn’t need to see the local news at night to sense the danger. She was starting to feel lingering glances cast in her direction, even the women with whom she cleaned houses, save Iva, seemed to regard her with a slight sense of distance. It was difficult to say whether it was because she didn’t speak their language, or because she was a wanted criminal. After work that day Sheila stopped at the drug store at the corner and bought, for herself, a box of hair bleach, lipstick, eye makeup, red nail polish and, for Peter, a pair of black plastic-framed eyeglasses and a pair of desk scissors—all for under forty dollars. She reasoned it was time to make an effort to look less like themselves. When she knocked on Iva’s door with the box of hair bleach, her friend immediately smiled. Sheila sat on the lip of the bathtub in Iva’s bathroom, while Iva stood behind her in the mirror with plastic gloves on her hands, massaging the platinum dye into Sheila’s scalp.

  “I always thought it would be fun to be a real blond,” Sheila explained innocently.

  “Very beautiful,” Iva said. “Like American movie star.”

  “Think Peter will be surprised?”

  Iva stifled a smile. “I think you will get some.”

  Sheila felt the impulse to reach for Iva’s hand, but because it was covered in the plastic glove, she reached for her wrist. Iva was funny in English; she was funny in French. She didn’t take herself so seriously that she wouldn’t mind laughing at her own expense. But the times Sheila heard her friend speak in Czech, it filled her with an incredible sadness that she couldn’t explain. To hear the speed and seeming force with which Iva spoke to the other women, Sheila felt the Iva she knew was only a shred of the real woman, what this woman must be like in her own language.

  “Iva?” Sheila asked. “What are you doing here?”

  A thought crossed Iva’s face quickly, as that other Iva, the version of her friend that was more solemn, that had survived something. “A chance to begin again. The same as you, no?” she said.

  Sheila looked at the floor.

  “Not important,” Iva said. She raised Sheila’s chin with her gloved hand, so that both women faced the mirror.

  Sheila nodded. “Thank you, Iva,” she said.

  “It is nothing,” Iva said.

  When Peter arrived home from work that night, Sheila had already prepared dinner. She had applied a coat of nail polish and spent a good half an hour in the bathroom mirror with the eye shadow and mascara and all the various accompanying brushes. Soaked in black paint, her eyelashes were longer than she could have imagined. Everything about her was exaggerated. She felt like the animated or Technicolor version of herself. Then she sat and waited for him at the table, waited for him to notice her.

  It didn’t take long. The second he opened the door he took a step back.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  Sheila turned. “You like it?”

  He walked quickly to her. He reached out for her waist and pulled her to him. Sheila smiled. She thought he was going to kiss her, but then he pulled her away just as quickly, his hands still on her waist.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he said quietly. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Doing what?” Sheila asked.

  Peter eyed her with a look of reprimand.

  “You look like her,” he said.

  “Who?” Sheila said.

  “Who,” Peter repeated, half a laugh. He gave her hair a little tug. He kissed her then, but the kiss was rough and difficult. He wasn’t kissing Sheila; he was kissing the other woman. “You’re going to drive me crazy,” he said simply.

  “You started it,” said Sheila.

  Peter nodded. “Yes,” he said.

  “That’s not why I did it anyway,” Sheila said. “You know we need to disguise ourselves, our identities. Don’t pretend you don’t think about it.”

  “About what?” he asked.

  Sheila stared. “We broke the law, Peter,” she said. “We’re wanted criminals. People are looking for us.” She went into her handbag and produced the black plastic glasses she had purchased for him. She held them out. “I tried them on in the store. There’s no prescription. The lenses are a little scratched, but if you squint you can still read and see enough of everything.”

  “I don’t wear glasses,” he said.

  “Well now you do,” she said. “Try them on.”

  Obediently, Peter placed the eyeglasses on bridge of his nose.

  Sheila nodded. “Good,” she said, reaching into the plastic bag to reveal the scissors as well. “And after dinner we’ll see about your hair.”

  Several nights later, Sheila woke up cold. First she noticed only that the sheet was missing, crumpled in a heap at the foot of the mattress, half on the floor. It was as she sat up to retrieve the blanket that she noticed that Peter was not in their bed. She heard a mumbling sound and saw the bathroom light was on; she stood up from the mattress to investigate only after fifteen minutes had passed and Peter had not returned.

  The first thing she identified was that the kitchen tap was left running. Sheila turned off the faucet and advanced toward the light in the bathroom. In the bathroom, the tap was also running. Beneath the sink, Peter was sitting on the bathroom floor with a glass of water in his hand. Between gulps from his glass he mumbled something under his breath, something Sheila couldn’t make out. Once his glass was empty, he reached to the running faucet and refilled it, then repeated the action. Sheila watched this continue for several minutes before she crouched on the floor beside him and placed her hands on his shoulders.

  “Peter,” she said.

  At the sound of his name, he looked up at her, but his eyes were glossy and difficult to make contact with, like the eyes of an animal in pain or fear. She shook him again by the shoulders. “Peter,” she said again.

  “Gwen,” he said now, as if relieved. He repeated her name several times, greedily, comforted at the sound.

  “You were sleepwalking,” she said. “You were drinking water in your sleep.” She put her hand on his forehead like her mother used to do, feeling for fever.

  Peter shook his head, embarrassed; he began to stand up from the bathroom tiles. “I was having a bad dream,” he said. “You were underwater and I couldn’t find you.”

  Sheila smiled. She guided him back to their bed and pulled her arm tighter around his torso, rubbed his back until she could hear his breathing steady and wander off, like she was the one who would take care of him now. That was the first night she had found him up wandering the apartment.

  But after three nights of turning off the kitchen tap, after three nights of finding Peter drinking from the bathroom tap and explaining how he was looking for her in the water, she was frightened. She would wake up, first cold, then angry at him for walking away from their bed, for doing strange things at night that he made no attempt to explain to her in the morning.

  “What are you seeing?” she asked him.

  “A lot of water,” he would say.

  “And I’m in the water. Am I swimming?”

  He’d say. “Come on. Let’s talk about something else.”

  “Tell me,” she would beg on the third night.

  “It’s a dream,” he’d say, “It doesn’t
matter.”

  “Stop it,” she would yell as she shook his shoulders on the fourth night. Peter looked back at her with wet eyes. “I can’t,” he said, and the helplessness in his voice would be what scared her more than anything.

  The morning of her eighteenth birthday marked three weeks of their shared survival as fugitives, but Sheila woke up thinking it couldn’t last much longer. She woke up early enough to watch the first sunlight touch the floorboards through their curtain-less windows. Peter had been up again last night and now he slept beside her, deeply as always. Sheila dressed slowly and let herself out the front door. She purchased a coffee from the café at the corner and crossed the street to Humboldt Park. The park was deceiving, more expansive than it seemed from the window of their apartment, and it was empty at this early hour and looked slightly more sinister than during full daylight. She walked by a boathouse and along a lagoon. She walked through a grove of crabapple trees, and out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of an animal watching her, as if charting her movements, something fierce in gaze and sharp in bone structure, but when she turned again, she only saw a collie sniffing around plots of perennial flowers. It happened several more times, this feeling of being watched, her progress through the park guarded by something wild, but always by the time she turned on her heels to catch her pursuer, the park returned to a benign landscape. The truth was she was glad for the distraction. She walked for forty minutes, aimlessly at first, then more purposefully, and tried with everything she took in not to think of her father this morning, not to think of him waking up for work on the date she was born and brushing his teeth or tying his shoes or reading the newspaper.

  Walking from the perimeter of the park, Sheila passed a payphone. She stopped and clutched the receiver in her hand. She thought that it would be enough only to hold it, but before long she was fishing around in her bag for spare change and dialing. She could picture the telephone on the nightstand beside her parents’ bed. Her father picked up after a single ring.

  “Hello?” he asked. His voice had the slow panic of interrupted sleep.

  “Dad,” she said. And already she could hear every noise in the room, her mother shrieking in the background, her father covering the mouthpiece of the telephone and saying, “It’s her.”

  It was her father who spoke first. “Sheila,” he said. “Your mother’s worried sick.”

  “Dad,” she said again. “I’m sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry for,” he said. His voice was strangely calm and steady. “Are you safe? Did they hurt you?”

  “I’m okay,” Sheila said. She could feel a sob building in her throat. “Dad, I have to go.”

  “Now wait a minute,” she heard him start, but she made herself put down the phone before she could hear the rest.

  She told herself it was better to let them know she was okay, that she was safe, than not to have called at all.

  When she arrived back at the apartment, Peter was up and dressed. He looked at her slowly. She could see that her absence from the bed this early had worried him, but this he was trying to disguise. “Have you eaten?” he asked.

  “Only coffee.”

  “I thought I would take you to breakfast,” he said.

  It was difficult to discern whether he understood the significance of the day, or if he just had a craving for an omelet. He was more delicate since the sleepwalking had started. It seemed like the smallest things she said, even in jest, could hurt him.

  “I bet my parents are really worried about me,” Sheila said.

  Peter nodded. “Maybe you should think about going home.”

  Sheila felt her eyes fill. “I don’t want to,” she said.

  “Okay,” Peter said. “You don’t have to.” He put his arms around her, dried her face with his fingers. “You know I want you with me, but you do whatever you feel is right. You make the rules, okay?” Sheila nodded. He kissed her forehead. Then he said, “Wait here.” He retreated to the bedroom and returned with something stashed behind his back.

  “What’s this?” Sheila said.

  Peter exaggerated the gesture of concealment and took a step forward.

  Sheila tried pulling at each of his arms, but Peter wouldn’t reveal the object until she promised to sit down and close her eyes. Sheila complied, sitting on their bed, with her legs folded beneath her.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m ready.”

  Peter said nothing, but she could hear him kneel on the ground, beside the electrical outlet. Then she heard the sound of static and from it the Frenchwoman’s voice began to speak.

  “Je ne sais pas,” the Frenchwoman said.

  “Je ne sais pas,” said Peter.

  “Je ne sais quoi,” the Frenchwoman said.

  “Je ne sais quoi,” said Peter.

  Sheila kept her eyes closed for a moment and listened. She had left her CD player in the gas station and hadn’t heard her lessons since. It was a level-one lesson and all he was doing was repeating, so the dialogue was nonsensical, but it didn’t really matter. Peter’s voice was soft and unsure of itself as he repeated after the Frenchwoman. When Sheila opened her eyes, Peter stopped the tape abruptly, as if suddenly shy.

  “Do you like it?” he said.

  Sheila felt something, like desire, rise in her gut. “Your accent needs a little work, to be honest,” she said.

  Peter looked at the floor, but he smiled.

  “Where did you get it?”

  Peter leaned nervously over the tiny, black buttons, as if they were the teeth of an animal. “A little pawn shop on Chicago Avenue,” he said. “They barely sell these things new anymore, so—” he trailed off. “Happy birthday, Gwen,” he said quietly, and he touched her face where her cheek met her chin.

  Sheila stood beside him. With one hand she pressed the play button on the CD player, and with the other she took Peter’s hand and walked him back to the bed. They lay still, side by side. The Frenchwoman spoke; Sheila and Peter listened. The familiar rhythm of her voice filled the room like a mother’s, and Sheila felt content just to let the sound soak up around them without reacting to the words.

  In the pauses between each French phrase, Sheila heard not Paris, but Iowa. She heard the stillness of empty fields of quiet crops, of parking lots at night with only insects moving, the stillness of her parents’ kitchen in the long afternoon hours. Iowa was the last place she’d heard French like this. She understood then that she was not going to Paris. She had saved all her money to get as far as Chicago, and now she was here, with Peter, working hard not to let the French make her miss the home it called to mind.

  On the bed, Peter took her hand into his and squeezed it.

  Sheila bit her lip to discourage a tremble.

  “We’re going to make it. It’s working,” Peter said. He pressed his mouth to her temple. “Everything is going according to plan.”

  And a part of her thought, What plan? But so what if the plan was hazy and unknowable in its entirety? An arrangement was beginning to form, rules they agreed on. She saw how he would take care of her, except for when she took care of him, and how they would pool their money and work to eat, and this was one way to leave the place you’d known too long and make a go of it. This was what a plan looked like once you stopped obsessing over the culminations and actually started to live inside it.

  Yes, she wanted to say. She wanted to agree with this logic, to adopt it as her own. Instead she said, “I want to know where you go at night.”

  “But I’m always right here,” said Peter, “beside you.”

  “Take me with you,” she said. “In one of the dreams.”

  Peter shook his head. “Don’t,” he said.

  The Frenchwoman was still speaking, but she was background noise now. The names of the things she said had become irrelevant.

  CHICAGO. IT SEEMED unlikely that you could get to a place like it, another world entirely, after only four hours in the car. There were parks and avenues stuffed with skyscrapers
, there was a lake that you’d have sworn was an ocean for its size and for the way the waves pulled themselves out onto the sidewalk. The city Peter had dreamed every night for a week retreated to the back office of his brain, to be replaced by the thing itself. It at first seemed purely speculative that people actually lived here, but he saw them, all right: filling their cars with gas, walking their dogs. Those were the surefire signs of residence—cars, dogs.

  In the hotel, there were rules posted everywhere. By the pool: NO RUNNING. NO DIVING. NO HORSEPLAY. By the bar: NO ID, NO SERVICE. WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO ASK FOR IDENTIFICATION OF ANYONE WHO LOOKS TO BE UNDER 35. Out front of the lobby: NO SMOKING WITHIN 15 FEET OF THE ENTRANCE. With every cigarette, Peter walked the requisite fifteen feet before rummaging in his pocket for a match and even in this ridiculousness, he felt content to be abiding by the rules of this other place.

  Later—near the apartment he’d secured for Gwen and himself—squirrels darted between trees with hedge apples, giant and unwieldy, stashed between their front teeth. There had been talk, all over the middle of the country, of wilder animals—coyotes, cougars—crossing into the borders of cities and roaming the streets by night. Peter felt as if he had reached a place where so many living things converged, he sometimes had to close his eyes so as not to get overstimulated. He found an ad in the paper for a partially furnished apartment in Humboldt Park, a weekly rental, and he’d told Gwen that a friend of his had hooked them up. He didn’t want her to know how much of their money was going to the place. He had put down two weeks’ rent, because the landlord had been a bulky man who asked no questions and did not ask him to sign anything. It was an investment really, cheaper than the hotel room in the long run. Safer too.