by Sarah Bruni
Novak looked at the girl and tried to imagine his brother with her. He tried to imagine his brother at all. Standing beside the girl in his sleeping bag was the closest he’d been to his brother in years. Here in his sleeping bag, on his couch, was the girl Seth loved. He said, “What’s he like?”
“Peter?” She bit her bottom lip.
Novak blinked. He swallowed. He said, “Is that what you call him?”
Gwen looked at the ceiling.
Novak nodded, beginning to understand the rules in operation here. He said, “Gwen Stacy is kind of an unusual name for a gas station attendant.”
The girl continued staring up. She spoke to a crack in the ceiling. “Can I ask you something then?” she said.
“Yeah,” Novak said.
“You’ve read all those comic books too, right?”
“They were mine,” Novak said. “A long time ago.”
The girl nodded. “In the comic books,” she began, “when Gwen Stacy dies,” she said, “why doesn’t Spider-Man save her? I mean if he saves everyone else?”
Novak looked at the girl in his sleeping bag, this sweet little twig of a whisper of a woman who looked after his brother, and he felt sorry then that Seth had to be the one to seek him out, that he hadn’t had the fortitude or the balls to do it himself. “I don’t know, honey,” he said to the girl. “It’s sometimes harder with the ones you love.”
Novak went into the bathroom to get ready for bed. In the medicine cabinet were the vials of pills, still lined up in a single row. There were different colors for different prescribed uses; some calmed and deadened the nerves, some helped you get to sleep. Novak regarded the tiny white ones, the ones that he took in the evening. He poured a pile of them into his hand and traced a path through the uneven heap with his fingers. They looked strange in his hand, like a palm full of sugar or sand, a pile of something better housed elsewhere. There was always something in their color and uniform size that calmed him, like tiny waves in the narrow ditch of his hand. It called to mind the place at the pit of the sea, the way he had felt when he had swallowed enough of them to return to the place his father was. But this was the problem with thinking that way, preferring to hobnob with the dead, to snub the living, and then to think of Seth, alive and nearly thirty now, and practically on his way. There was the toilet. He had a strange impulse to flush the entire vial of pills down it, how he wouldn’t want his brother to come and see so many of the same sorts of pills he had swallowed so many years ago. But this was unreasonable, of course; they presented no threat to anyone now.
There was a knock on the door then, and Novak was startled. He started to guide the pile of pills back into the narrow mouth of the bottle, but before he had finished, the door was opening and the girl was pushing her way inside.
“I need to brush my teeth,” she said. “I forgot.” Her eyes were sleepy and slowly scanned the room. “I guess you don’t have an extra toothbrush?”
“No,” Novak said. He capped the bottle and pushed it back into the cabinet without comment.
“I’ll just use my finger then,” she said. “Even though it’s a little gross.”
“You could use mine if you want,” Novak said.
Gwen made a face. “No thanks.”
“Toothpaste is on the top shelf,” he said, and he started to step aside to make space for her in front of the mirror.
“Jake,” she said, just as he was leaving, and he paused at the door.
“Yes,” he said.
She looked him in the eye for several seconds, saying nothing, but Novak understood in this look that, yes, she had seen the pills on the shelf already, and she knew full well what his history of swallowing such things was, but she was going to trust him, she was going to trust this was something that was already part of the past.
“See you in the morning,” she said.
He didn’t see her in the morning. He slept late into the day, and it was early afternoon when Novak opened the door to his room and found she was already gone. Still, there was nothing to worry about; Gwen knew what to do. The plan had already been devised.
“When he gets here,” Novak had asked last night, “can we have some time alone?”
“Of course,” she said. “I’ll get out of your way.”
“It’s been a long time,” he said.
The girl looked at her shoes. She said, “I know it.”
So now there was nothing to do but wait. The rope was on the kitchen counter leftover from yesterday’s interrogation. Patch was missing again; Gwen probably took her along. Novak sat in the same kitchen chair, this time with his hands free, or with his hands fidgeting or straightening the kitchen, organizing the dishes and the boxes there, because all there was to do now was wait. Wait for the sound of the door, when he could stand up, when he could walk through the kitchen and onto the landing, when he could open the door and invite in the past that he had given up and that he always believed had given up on him.
THE GIRL IN THE MISSING person poster looked young. Sheila was walking home from Jake’s apartment when she saw the poster stapled to a telephone pole. It was past midday, and she was walking fast with Patch beside her, barely pausing at crosswalks. By now it was clear that Patch didn’t need the encouragement of a ribbon and a rope. The animal had no intention of wandering off, and the two walked swiftly down the sidewalk, side by side. She had been thinking only that she had to hurry, that Peter would be worried by now. She had spent the night at Jake’s without calling home—she and Peter didn’t have their phones, so it wasn’t that easy, though she might have called Iva to deliver the message—and now she felt guilty for keeping him waiting so long. She had been walking fast and only stopped momentarily in front of the poster, mustering up a half second of sympathy for the kidnapped teenager, when she recognized the photograph.
She had been sitting in the backyard with her father last summer, keeping an eye on the meat on the grill while he ran inside to check the baseball scores. It had been just before the Fourth of July; her mother was in the kitchen, frosting a cake fashioned after an American flag, with rows of strawberries for the stripes and blueberries for the negative spaces between the fifty stars. Sheila had been examining the underside of a hamburger when her father came outside with the camera slung around his neck, his face pressed up against the viewfinder, framing her there, though this kind of thing wasn’t really his strength. Her mother was always the one who took pictures, the person who organized and cataloged every family event—birthdays, graduations—by date and by album. These photographs everyone was prepared for, dressed appropriately, animated according to the occasion. But for her father to snap an unexpected photograph of only Sheila on a nothing summer night was something strange. It had reminded her that in a number of years she would be the one taking care of her parents, instead of the other way around. Between she and her sister, Sheila had always been the more sentimental, the more prone to tears. Watching her father behind the camera, squinting into the last bit of sun in the yard, Sheila felt her face become warm.
“The light’s no good,” she’d said to her father. “It won’t turn out.”
“Shows how much you know,” he mumbled, snapping the shutter.
But the girl in the poster didn’t look like someone who had a father; her eyes were fearful, feral, the eyes of an animal lingering by the shoulder of the road before running headlong into traffic. She ripped the poster down from the telephone pole where it was stapled. Under the photograph, she read:
MISSING PERSON: Sheila Gower
Age: 18. Height: 5 feet, 6 inches. Weight: 115 pounds. Hair: light brown. Eyes: light brown. Last seen: March 20, Sinclair Gas Station, Highway 6, Coralville, Iowa. She is thought to be residing in the Chicago metropolitan area. Anyone with information about the whereabouts of Sheila Gower should contact the Special Victims Unit of the Chicago Police Department.
You would think that the cops in a major U.S. metropolis would have something better to worry about th
an the disappearance of a girl from a gas station three hundred miles away. This was a city full of crime and criminals; you had to wonder how the cops found the time to even bother. According to the poster, Sheila Gower had been kidnapped and taken from her home against her will. According to the poster, someone was responsible; someone was going to have to atone for all this trouble they caused Sheila Gower and her family. Looking at the poster she understood that there was still a way she could return to Iowa, to her father and mother, to Andrea and Donny; she could find another job, find a new lunch table in the cafeteria, or take up eating with Anthony again. All this could be nothing but a brief wandering off from the regular course of her life. A misstep, a mistake.
She imagined herself in her parents’ backyard. Her mother would dab at her eyes with a tissue and her father would pace in awkward circles around her for weeks, like something in orbit. There would be a party with corn on the cob and mashed potatoes and a seven-layer cake. Andrea would give her some cross-stitched thing, and Donny would be there in one of his undershirts, telling dirty jokes. His jokes were so dumb, sometimes you had to laugh a little. But it would mean saying she was kidnapped. It would mean betraying Peter and giving up Gwen Stacy.
She thought of all those long lunch periods spent with Anthony in the cafeteria when she had been waiting for something like this to come and interrupt the regular plodding course of her days. With Anthony, she had taken comfort at first in having someone to sit with, but the fact was the only reason they sat together was because they had no one else. Yes, maybe after a while they had developed a little more affection or appreciation for one another, but from the start the arrangement was practical, and in essence this was the problem as well. The thing about Peter was there wasn’t a single good reason for her to leave with him. But he made her feel like she was the only one in the world who could help him, the only one in the world who would do.
As a child, Sheila had spent all her time alone on the front stoop of the house with chalk or a jump rope, daydreaming of some weary, self-possessed foreigner showing up in the yard, a cross between Mary Poppins and Marie Curie. The person would show up with a suitcase and a strange manner of dress because she had traveled from so far away to get to Sheila. She would be an illusionist, or a fortune-teller, a figure skater, a Russian ballet teacher, a gypsy street musician with a saw and a bow peeking out of her rucksack—the details didn’t matter. So you’ve been here all along! the woman would gasp through her thick accent. I’ve been searching the world for you, she would say to Sheila. And finally I have found you here. Sheila would step away from the front stoop of her parents’ house, and the woman would take the shawl from her own shoulders and wrap Sheila in it like an infant and lead her away toward some hazy destiny. Of course, whatever the woman had come to teach her would take work and dedication, many long hours of practice at a tedious and very specific skill, and she would have to leave her family behind for a time, but it would all be worth it.
Sheila looked at the girl in the poster again, steering her brain away from the words below her picture, and in it she could see the yard at her parents’ house, the smell of freshly cut grass belly up on the lawn, smoke rising off the grill, the noise of the baseball scores on the radio, Cubs up 4–3 in the seventh, summer night heat, the moths and mosquitoes. Her father. She could think of Andrea or of her mother without much guilt, but her father was different. Now, in her mind, he was sitting at the desk in the corner of the living room with his thinning hair and his high blood pressure, muttering the initials of cusswords at the television, and it made her heart hurt to think of him red-faced and fuming and ignorant of her whereabouts. He sat at the desk in the corner of the living room when he was watching baseball on TV while doing the family’s finances—balancing the checkbook, filing bank statements. Above her father’s desk was a little plaque that said COURAGE: ACTION CURES FEAR, but there was a time when she was still learning how to read when she asked her father what the sign said, and he had told her to sound it out for herself and she had come up with Action Curious Fear.
Her father had laughed. “Action curious fear doesn’t make any sense, honey. A sentence needs a verb.”
But there was a way in which, even years later, when looking at her father sitting at the desk with the ball game on in the background, if she glanced quickly in that direction, the sign said both things. It said that the way to overcome fear was to challenge it with decisive momentum. But it also said something murkier that she could never quite work out. Something about the still moment just before an action in which curiosity and fear crouched closely against one another, sharing so much of the same breath and breathlessness, it was hard to tell them apart. She missed her dad. Her eyes started to sting, but she blinked the feeling away.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said aloud: to Patch, to nobody.
Sheila stuffed the poster in her handbag and continued walking home to Peter.
The apartment was empty. The bed was unmade. There were several cans of beer in the sink. Sheila sat on the edge of their mattress and stared at the wall on the other side of the room. She had counted on finding Peter in the apartment. She had counted on him waiting there for her until she returned. What if the cops had taken him away? What if they had found him here alone and had taken him, were questioning him, and she didn’t get back in time? Don’t be an idiot, she told herself. He’s working. He’s on a walk. He’s out looking for you. Fine, good, Sheila thought, but also she thought that it was time to clear out. She had to find a way to get him to Jake’s apartment, and she couldn’t wait around. She realized then that she had never been alone in the apartment in the late afternoon, and it felt eerie in the hazy sunshine, no curtains on the windows, the dirty mattress in the corner of the opposite end of the loft. This wasn’t living. This was squatting. They had found what they had come to Chicago to find; now it was time for them to get out of there.
Sheila knocked on Iva’s door, but there was no answer. She would be working of course. Sheila would be working with her if it were any other afternoon. So she would leave something in writing. She didn’t have any paper, but all the mail for the building’s residents was collected in a bin at the bottom of the stairs. Sheila opened a bill addressed to a name she didn’t recognize, scratched out the name with her pencil, and wrote “Peter” on the envelope. Then, on the backside of the bill she wrote Jake’s address. She wrote as fast as she could. She explained how she had found the man from his dream by the scrap yard, how she needed Peter to come as soon as he could, that he should stay out of the apartment. Then she stole another piece of mail from the bottom of the stairs and wrote a second note.
Iva—
C’est moi—Sheila. Je suis désolée pour—(Here she paused for a second before switching to English. The thing was she was in a hurry, and Iva spoke English perfectly, or in any case just as well, and anyway, she would understand!)—skipping work again. I wanted to call, but we will talk soon, and I’ll explain everything. Could you make sure you get this to Peter for me? Merci!
Then she slipped the note under Iva’s door where she was sure to see it. She turned from the door, walked back across the hallway and up the stairs, and it was only in walking away from the note that she considered that she, in all likelihood, wouldn’t see Iva again. She should have at least written the whole note in French, or added some pleasantries at the end, or learned some Czech, but it was too late, and it didn’t matter now. She had bigger problems to sort out, so she tried to put Iva out of her mind as she turned the knob of her front door, stepped inside, and proceeded to trash her own apartment.
She started with the cabinets. She pulled the few boxes and cans from the shelves and let them land in the sink and on the counter. Patch eyed her with a look of panic, beginning to pant heavily and pace around the apartment, but Sheila didn’t stop. If the cops were to show up, it would look like they had fled. She pulled all the sheets off the bed and threw them in the middle of the floor in a heap. She unp
lugged the CD player Peter had bought her for her birthday and shoved the CD in her handbag. Her movements were practiced, methodical, erasing their habits and routines from the place. She went to the closet where they each had two sets of clothes. She pulled each item of clothing from its hanger, until she got to the secondhand dress that Peter loved. She kicked off her jeans and T-shirt and slipped the dress over her head. She pulled her hair out of its ponytail, so the blond mass of it rested long against her back. In the bathroom mirror, she decided she could pass for someone else.
She placed a hand on her hip. Name? she demanded of the girl in the bathroom mirror.
Gwendolyn Stacy, she replied.
Then she practiced pulling the ID from her wallet to back it up, because everyone knew Gwen Stacy didn’t stutter when giving a straight answer, and she didn’t have any trouble dealing with the cops. Her father was a cop.
She arrived at the comic book store just before closing, and this time she didn’t waste her energy riffling through the issues along the walls or worrying about the etiquette of the place. She parted with Patch on the sidewalk outside the store. “Stay,” she said. Patch growled slightly, but seemed ready to comply. Then she walked straight to the checkout and placed her hands on the counter.
“Can I help you?” the boy behind the counter asked.
“Hope so,” Sheila said. “I’m looking for The Amazing Spider-Man # 121.”
The boy squared her up. “Is that right?”
Sheila dug in the bottom of her handbag and produced several hundred-dollar bills, placing them one at a time on the counter. “That’s right,” she said.
“Hold please,” said the boy slowly, and he went off into the back. After several moments, he reappeared with another boy, slightly taller, who seemed to be in charge.
“I’m looking for a particular Spider-Man comic book,” Sheila said again. “The Night Gwen Stacy Died.”
“Issue 121,” the boy who was in charge said. “I’m familiar. You know it’s not the kind of thing you can just walk into a shop and expect to pick up. What you’re asking for is something of a collector’s item.”