by Sarah Bruni
Iva furrowed her brow. “But why should I know?” she said.
“You worked together today,” Peter said.
“Yes,” Iva said. “In the morning.” She placed two pint glasses on the table and poured from bottles into the glasses. She sat across from him at the table and studied him. “You are worried?” she said.
“Yes,” Peter said.
Iva frowned, then nodded as if understanding. “Yes, but she loves you.” She said this slowly, delicately. She topped off their beers. “I know this.”
“But where is she?” Peter said.
“The night is warm,” Iva said. “She can be breathing in fresh air somewhere. It would be okay?”
“Yes,” Peter said. But he thought if she was breathing in fresh air somewhere, she would have told him. She knew he had dreamed her drowned for four nights and counting. He had explained that last night. He had explained to her every dream of his she’d ever been in, as if to atone for not telling her from the start. He told her how pretty she looked in her underwear the first time he saw her in his sleep, how he thought of nothing else for weeks. He explained how he had dreamed she would get in the car with him and drive east on the interstate, how after a while, the fields would give way to skyscrapers rising up on either side of the highway like growing things; there would be crushed metal floating up a river despite its weight; there would be a man whose life would be spared for their effort.
Gwen had spoken quietly. “And everything so far has come true,” she said. “Like with the girls in the car.”
“Not yet,” Peter said. “Not for sure.”
“Who’s the man?” she said.
“I don’t know,” Peter said. “I only see him in parts.”
Gwen pushed her hands into her hair. “You don’t know him,” she repeated. “So why are we trying to save him?”
“He’s trying to kill himself,” Peter said quietly.
“And so are a million people,” Gwen said. “Are we going to chase all of them down with a gun?”
“No,” he said. “Just this one.”
Gwen nodded. She looked at her nails.
“You need to go home, Gwen,” he said.
She stiffened. “Forget it,” she said. “I want to be where you are.”
He wanted to kiss her and he wanted to push his hands into her hair. Also, he wanted to drag her out the door, put her in a cab, get her out of the city the way she came. It was undeniable that he needed her help. The night at the scrap yard proved that much. But if she were really in danger, he was ready to give up the search.
“Then we’re both leaving,” he decided.
Gwen shook her head. “Where would we go? Home? We can just ask for our old jobs back, right?” She let out a nervous laugh. “I’m not going back there, not yet. We’re better off here than anywhere else. You know that.”
“If anything happens to you,” Peter said.
“Nothing will,” she said.
But certainly something had. This is what they had fought over last night. This was what he was afraid to say aloud to Iva as she poured more beer for him and tried to make him laugh. After they finished their beers, Iva explained the only thing to do now was go back upstairs and get some sleep. Peter walked back up the stairs that led to his apartment, but he did not sleep. He did not go near their bed. He was afraid to dream. Instead, he pulled a kitchen chair to the front window. He sat in the chair and turned out the lights. He faced the park. He thought he could make out the hind legs of animals running, rushing toward something, but they were always just in his periphery and never there when he turned his head. He watched the park until the sun abandoned the other side of the world and showed up in Chicago, and only then did Peter stand up from the chair and give up his watch with the understanding that Gwen was not coming back.
The next morning, the onslaught of spring rested heavy in the breathable air. Spring was hideous. It was a season of everything trying, relentlessly, to come back to life, and while there were always a few small victories, for the most part, the general effort was pathetic. In Chicago, as in Iowa, the first nice day, everyone wore shorts. Eventually, the frost would show up again and put any gesture toward renewal in its place. This, however, was one of the nice days. There was the smell of dew. There was the smell of cut grass. Skateboarders descended on the parks in packs, like another life form—the most inexperienced freshly hatched in kneepads that bulged about the delicate joints. Birds sang. Bikers signaled. Dogs sniffed up trees. Peter sat on a bench at the lakeshore and held his face in his hands.
He hadn’t slept, and that choice was taking its toll. All that he perceived was bright and oversaturated. He saw shapes, colors, forms, but everything hurt to look at. After sitting upright all night to discourage dreaming, morning brought the decision to come to the lake. That was where Gwen had been when she eluded him in his dreams. He didn’t know where else to begin. Then there was the fact of the comic books, a fact he was working hard to forget but was exceedingly aware of: in the Spider-Man comics, Gwen Stacy dies falling toward a body of water. In light of this fact, it now occurred to Peter that it was nothing short of irresponsible to use this name to address the woman he loved. What exactly had been wrong with her real name? Sheila was a lovely name, Peter thought now, and he began to repeat the name under his breath, as if to attract attention, so any bystander looking in on the situation would understand that in fact there had been a mistake. While the girl who was trapped underwater in his dreams may have been referred to as Gwen, the whole rest of the world called the girl a different name—her real name, and Sheila was wholly unlike Gwen Stacy. Did Gwen Stacy speak French in Spider-Man comics? No! Did she have very light freckles on her cheeks and across the bridge of her nose that could only be detected in sunlight, and even then, only if you were right beside her? Of course not! Gwen Stacy had a pasty complexion with no natural variation in skin tone whatsoever, and the more that he thought about it, the more Gwen Stacy’s complexion made him feel a little sick to his stomach. Gwen Stacy was a fraud. She was stuck up and she wore hideous outfits to parties. She was nothing like Sheila. Really there was no way in which one could be confused for the other. You would be hard pressed to find two women who were more staggeringly different in every way, Peter decided. He sat on a bench and watched the waves make contact with the rocks along the shore until he convinced himself he had come to the wrong place. He wouldn’t find her here, near the rocks or under the water as he had in his dream, and comforted by this knowledge, he made his way back home, where it was only a matter of time before she would show up.
Someone had been in the apartment. Someone had been searching for something quickly, violently, and left the place in ruin. Their drawers had been turned out, the contents spread onto the floor. The CD player and been removed from the wall, and Gwen’s CD snatched from it. His duffle bag lay half empty on its side, but nothing of his seemed to be stolen. The kitchen cabinets were open, and their boxes of cereal and cans of soup sat sideways on the counter and in the sink. They had so little, it made Peter’s eyes smart to see all they had accumulated together so easily upended.
When he turned from the mess in the apartment, he felt someone standing there in the hallway behind him before he heard her speak.
“Peter,” she said.
He felt his stomach rise and fought to temper his breathing. “Jesus, Iva,” he said. He held his hand to his chest.
“What is this?” she said.
Peter stepped back from the mess. He shook his head. “Did you see anyone come into the building?” he asked.
“I was working,” she said. She looked at the floor, which Peter understood to mean that Gwen had not shown up at work. Iva would have said so if she had.
Iva took a step into the apartment and stared. “But why this?” she said. “Like COPS on television.” She shook her head.
“Iva, you watch COPS?” Peter asked.
“Yes, sure,” she said. “If there is nothing else to see
.”
He nearly laughed before it occurred to him that Iva was right. She meant nothing by it; she had no reason to think that her neighbors had done anything to attract such attention. But once she had said it, the thought took root in his brain and settled there, like a confirmed fact. Someone had been here poking around for a reason. It wasn’t so unthinkable that a cluster of poor decisions made during their exit from Iowa had caught up with them by now. It wasn’t safe to stay in the building anymore.
“I need your help,” he said to Iva. “I need to find another place to sleep.”
Iva nodded and asked no questions. She looked from the opened cabinets to Peter. She placed her hand on his arm. “No problem,” she said.
NOVAK STRAINED TO HEAR the radio, but the kidnapper girl kept it so quiet in there, he could barely make out the words. He smelled nail polish again. The girl couldn’t get enough of painting her nails he guessed. He was tied to a chair in his own kitchen. At first the whole situation felt vaguely erotic—though the girl seemed too naive to pick up on that kind of thing. She had a pair of tiny breasts, barely visible though her T-shirt, and a handgun that he knew she kept in her purse. But Novak had been tied to the chair for the past two hours, and all she’d done so far was paint her nails and listen to his radio in the other room.
He had just finished a shift at the foundry, and he was going to leave out a few scraps for the stray before he took off for the night. The dog had been hanging around all day, making a general nuisance of herself, but when the time came to actually seek her out, the dog was nowhere to be found. He had started calling for her when he noticed the dog was huddled up at the far end of the scrap yard, beside a girl. Novak noticed nothing about the girl at first, save for the fact that she was acting vaguely proprietary with the stray in a way that didn’t suit him. He had started to call for the animal as if she were his pet. Here, girl! Come, girl! That kind of thing.
“This your dog?” the girl had asked in an odd way that, in retrospect, he identified as a test.
“Yes,” Novak had responded tentatively.
“Ha, I’ll bet,” the girl said.
“Excuse me?” Novak asked
“This is a wild animal!” she had shouted. “You’re trying to domesticate a wild animal?” But even as she was accusing him of this, he noticed that she was securing a ribbon around the dog’s neck. It wasn’t until she finished with the ribbon that she looked Novak straight in the face, and he recognized her from the security camera kidnapping on television he’d seen a few weeks before. She looked different, of course. Her mousy-colored hair from the photographs had been converted to a shocking blond, but there was no question that her face was the same. The strange thing was that, in that moment, something seemed to shift in the way she looked at him as well.
“Okay,” he heard her say, and he noticed her voice had changed. Novak looked up to find the girl was now holding the gun. The girl was pointing the gun at his chest. “Okay,” she said again. “You and the dog, get in the truck.”
The girl looked to weigh about a hundred pounds, it would have been easy to wrestle the thing from her hands, but as Novak was getting into his truck, as she raised the gun and ordered him to drive, he thought here was something he had never seen before, and that maybe there was a reason for it all, that a pretty young victim of kidnapping wanted to kidnap him. Perhaps there was a reward for finding her. Perhaps the girl needed rescuing. Either way, something was actually happening, and who was Novak to stop it? So he drove. She didn’t tell him where to drive, so he drove to his apartment. He unlocked the door, checked the mail, and set it on the coffee table.
“Do you have any rope?” the girl asked.
He figured she meant for the dog, but once the dog was tethered in the yard, she asked Novak to sit in the kitchen chair with his hands behind him, and he understood that she had it in mind for him as well. When the girl had insisted on tying him to the chair, Novak offered his wrists to her. She had his attention.
“Let me know if this is tight enough,” she had said. “Let me know if you could get out.” This was strange, he thought; the girl seemed to assume, or understand, that Novak had no intention of breaking free of the shackles she’d fashioned.
“No, it’s tight.” Novak answered honestly. She had tied a good knot.
After another twenty minutes of sitting there in silence, Novak was starting to get annoyed. She had barely spoken to him. He yelled toward the front room. “Hey?” he called. “Miss?” He didn’t know what to yell. She was the most nonthreatening captor one could possibly imagine; it was difficult to know how to address her.
The girl craned her neck around the corner of the kitchen. Her fingernails were the showy red of fake blood that you could buy at the drug store, confirming the smell wafting around the place. Her face looked even younger now than it had as she was tying him up. “Um, yeah?” she said.
Novak regarded her carefully. The gun was nowhere in sight—what the hell was there to say? Novak improvised his way toward confrontation. “Do you think I could get a glass of water or something? I get pretty dehydrated if I don’t drink eight a day.”
The girl looked at him hard, so at first Novak thought she was going to refuse him the water—a small titillation—but then she asked, “Do you really drink eight? That’s really good for you.”
Novak adjusted his wrists where they ached, a dull pain he had to work to freshen. “Sure,” he said. “Keeps the doctor away, right?”
“No,” said the girl, “you’re thinking of apples.”
She had turned from him by then and began randomly opening the cabinets. She guessed wrong twice, revealing first a shelf full of instant rice and ramen noodles, then his dishes. Novak was a little shy about the disorder of his cabinets, but then he remembered he was being held hostage and decided not to be embarrassed. “To your right,” Novak said, just as her hand was hesitating before a third incorrect choice.
The girl pulled down a pint glass and placed it under the faucet. She set the glass in front of him on the table, not so much to be cruel he thought, as because she seemed to have forgotten she’d tied his hands together. Maybe all that nail polish was affecting her brain. Novak was about to direct her to the drawer where there might be straws, when she spoke again.
“Can I ask you something?” She seemed a little nervous suddenly, and it made Novak uneasy. He nodded.
When her voice came out again, it shook a little. “Is this some kind of trick, some joke between the two of you?” she asked.
Novak looked up at his captor. “Sweetheart, you’re the one with the gun. You tell me what the trick is.”
She studied his face. “You talk like him,” she said quietly.
“I talk like him?” Novak repeated.
“I need to ask you something,” she said again. “And I need you to answer honestly.” She looked to the kitchen tiles, looked up again. She said, “You’re Jake Novak.” It didn’t seem to be a question at all in her tone of voice, but in her forehead there was the perplexed wrinkle of insecurity that sometimes accompanies questions.
Novak was startled for only a second before remembering that the girl had obviously gone through all his things in the other room, bills or mail or whatever. “Great detective work,” he said.
She smiled distractedly, not processing the insult. Then she spoke again. “I thought you were supposed to have died twenty years ago.”
Novak stopped shifting in his chair.
“So what I want to know,” she continued, “is who is lying to me. You or him?”
“Him who?”
“Are you from Iowa?” the girl asked.
A tiny fear was growing in his stomach now. He wanted the girl to stop talking. He wanted her to go back into the other room and put on another coat of nail polish.
“I’m from Iowa myself,” said the girl, as if explaining all. She held out her hand, waited a moment, then let it drop. “I’m Gwen Stacy,” she announced, but this time she said it
like a question, as if awaiting his approval. “Ever heard of me?”
The name sounded vaguely familiar, but this was not the name that was given for the girl on the nightly news. He knew it from somewhere, but couldn’t place it.
She made her voice low, almost flirty, as if she were delivering someone else’s lines. “Actually,” the girl said, “I never thought of you as the motorcycle type before, Pete!”
She was quoting something, clearly. “Gwen Stacy,” he repeated now, getting closer to the source. “Spider-Man’s first love.”
“So you do remember me,” said the girl. “I thought so.”
“But your real name is Sheila something,” Novak said. “Isn’t it?”
She turned on him sharply. “Why would you say that?” she asked.
“Honey, your face is all over television,” he said. “Surely you know that much.”
“Oh, her.” She seemed to be the one getting nervous now. “You thought I was that girl who got kidnapped?”
“Of course,” he said. “Why do you think I let you kidnap me?”
The girl stared.
Novak hadn’t exactly worked out this connection himself. “I thought maybe I would help save you somehow.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. You were going to save me by getting kidnapped yourself?”
Novak shrugged. It did sound pretty unlikely, the way she said it.
“You are way out of line, Mr. Novak,” she said sternly. “You have no idea how far out of line.”
But her body began to shake and she went into the other room where Novak could hear her blowing her nose loudly, and then flushing his toilet.
He wanted to get out of the kitchen now. He thought maybe he could get her to untie him. But then, he thought better of it. As aloof as his captor seemed to be, she did seem to know something of his past, though a past so distant, there was no way she was old enough to have firsthand knowledge of it. He was from Iowa. He should have died twenty years ago; that had been his first attempt at it anyway. He had taken every pill in the family medicine cabinet—no small feat what with Mom’s trouble sleeping—but he had failed embarrassingly, and when his mother came to see him in the county hospital, she had sat across the room from his bed while he slept it off, and it was only as he was waking up that she walked over to his bed and slapped him on the mouth. His mother retreated to the other side of the room and began to cry, though it wasn’t clear whether she was crying for him or for herself. They had already been on their own for the past six years, he and Mom and Seth.