by Sarah Bruni
Sheila remembered being in the gas station with Peter one night when a woman in stilettos and a leather dress came into the station and started talking to them.
“Hi honey,” she greeted Sheila, then turned to Peter. “That your cab parked outside?”
It happened all the time. People with nothing better to do would kill time in the station, just long enough for a conversation. The woman was complaining; she had walked six blocks already from the club where she worked—here she’d gestured to her footwear as if to explain the utter impracticality of the six blocks—all because the taxi she called never showed. And this wasn’t the first time either.
Peter lifted his hand and rubbed his thumb and two fingers together. “How’s your tipping?”
“A couple bucks,” the woman said. “It’s late when I call. It’s not a far drive.”
Peter shook his head, gravely. “There’s your problem, sweetheart.”
“Okay, smartass,” she said. She put her hand on her hip. “You tell me. How much do you tip a driver?”
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.
“This is not a dog,” Sheila said.
The man laughed, ignoring her. “Come on, Patch, girl. Get in the truck.” Sheila could see the truck from the parking lot. It was white and covered in mud.
“I’m serious,” Sheila said. “I’m pretty sure it’s a felony to domesticate a wild animal in this state.” She didn’t know this herself, but it sounded like it could be true.
“And what exactly were you doing putting a ribbon around the neck of a wild animal?” asked the man.
“And where exactly are the identification tags,” asked Sheila, “proving this dog belongs to you?” She looked at the man again, and saw a name stitched into the pocket of his navy jumpsuit. She remembered Andrea saying you had to start from the middle and work to the ends to be sure it came out even. But this stitch looked like it had come from a machine. There was something familiar about the letters sewn there, but she at first couldn’t place the reason. She gazed into the thread that had formed the first letter, an N; it seemed slightly larger than the rest of the script, almost an oversight, an error—there was something strange there. It took her another moment to understand the strange thing was that she had heard the same last name spoken aloud that morning when the radio had named her abductor: Seth Novak.
“Patch,” the man repeated. “Get in the truck.” But this time, he sounded tired when he said it. He sounded like he wouldn’t have th
e strength for a fight if it came to that. He squatted on the cement and placed his hand on the animal’s head, between her ears. The man was studying her, suddenly; she could feel his eyes on her. Sheila met his eyes and retracted her own hand from the animal with a start, as if a current had passed between them.
IT WAS OBVIOUS ENOUGH to make the heart feel sick and slow on the job. If you were deranged, if you were mindless enough to put all your efforts in one place, on one thing, it was only a matter of time before that thing would turn up missing. Peter sat alone in the kitchen with a beer in his hand. It was his second beer, and he tried not to drink it all at once. He had come home from work and made dinner; he had eaten dinner, he had cleaned up after dinner and put Gwen’s untouched plate in the fridge, and she was still not home. He paced in a line from the bedroom to the kitchen. He crushed the beer can in his hand. It was nine o’clock before he allowed himself to walk down the narrow stairs that led to Iva’s apartment and knock on the door.
Iva answered in a bathrobe. Her dark hair was gathered into a spout at the top of her head, and she was yelling in what he assumed to be Czech into a cell phone. Immediately, she seemed older than he first had guessed. He didn’t know why he’d pegged her as Gwen’s age. She opened the door wider for him to step inside. “Peter!” she said. She kissed his cheek and pulled him into the room. “This talk is finished soon,” she said, indicating the telephone. She spoke quickly, cutting the other speaker off, then closed the phone and dropped it on the table.
“So many girls and so lazy!” she said.
Peter knew from Gwen that Iva had an entire brigade of Eastern European women whom she called when she had jobs. For her ability to set appointments in English, Iva took a 10 percent cut of the women’s profits. She did not take this cut off Gwen’s earnings.
“A glass of beer?” Iva said, making her way to the kitchen. “But where is your girlfriend?’
“I thought maybe you knew,” Peter said.