Body of a Girl

by Leah Stewart

  My leg starts to jiggle, impatience slamming through my body. “Sergeant . . .,” I start.

  “And bodies?” he says. “They don’t float. When you’re dead . . .” He mimes a shooting, pointing an imaginary gun at me and jerking it back. “You’re dead, you sink to the bottom like a rock. Watch when they shoot somebody on TV. They fall into a swimming pool and they just float like a cork.”

  “Yes,” I say. I’ve heard all of this before. I know if I listen long enough, he’ll have to give me something in return.

  “Olivia,” Morris says. “Does your mother know what you do for a living?”

  “She knows I’m a reporter.” I hold my pen ready.

  “But does she know what you report? Does she know her little girl is crawling around crime scenes?”

  “Do you have an ID?” I say.

  “You saw the body?” he asks, and when I nod, he shakes his head. “I don’t know why you have to look at things like that.”

  “The other detectives like to show me homicides,” I say. “They get a kick out of it.”

  “Because you’re a girl,” he says.

  “So how come you don’t want me to see them?”

  “Because you’re a girl,” he says, and a slow grin spreads across his face.

  “I can’t win,” I say, and I’m surprised by how grim it comes out sounding when I meant to be joking. “Who was she?” I say. “Tell me about her. I need to know.”

  He hesitates, shaking the photograph like a sugar packet between two fingers, then finally he gives it to me. It’s not the crime scene photo I expected. In the picture, a young woman stands holding a beer in one hand, an expression of exaggerated surprise on her face, eyebrows up, mouth open, laughing. A guy in a baseball cap is kissing her cheek. She has shiny dark hair that falls to her shoulders, green eyes, a large mouth. It takes me a moment to understand that this is the girl whose crumpled body I stood over this morning.

  Morris tells me that her friends reported her missing this morning, after looking for her since late Saturday night, when she didn’t show up to meet them. Neighbors saw her car parked out in front of the apartment building, instead of around back in the lot, so the cops think she must have run in to get something, and somebody got her when she came back out. She worked in the outpatient clinic at the Madison Medical Center. Her name was Allison Avery.

  I’m looking for something in her face, some detail, that will tell me who she was. She laughs up at me. She could be any girl who went to my college, any girl I pass between stores at the mall.

  Morris reaches out to take the picture back. “Good luck,” he says.

  “Can I keep this?” I ask, holding on to the picture.

  “No,” he says. “But I’ll let you make a photocopy.” He looks from the photo in my hand to my face. “You look a little like her,” he says. “Same hair color. Same shape to the face.” In the air he traces the curve of my cheek.

  “She was prettier,” I say. I drop the picture on his desk. He doesn’t contradict me, just picks the photo up and stares at it. “What about the car?” I say.

  Morris shakes his head. “Haven’t found it yet.”

  “You got any thoughts on this?”

  He frowns.

  “Point me in the right direction,” I say.

  He sighs, hunched over his desk. “How long you been doing this? Months?”

  “Three,” I say.

  He nods. “Long enough to know,” he says. “Nine times out of ten, girl dead like this, it had something to do with sex. You know that. She turned him down, slept around on him, whatever. If it’s a stranger, maybe he raped her and got carried away, or scared she’d identify him after.”

  “What’s your guess here?”

  “None of this is for the paper?” He waits for me to nod, then says, “I’d say the way she was found, outside, some stranger grabbed her, drove around trying to figure out what to do with her. Boyfriend kills you, it’s usually at home. He shoots you or beats you to death. Now, could be a premeditated thing, or could be she was out someplace with a guy she knew and he brought her there.” He hunches down lower, his voice heavy with exhaustion. “You know,” he says again. “We’re gonna be looking for any boyfriends, any exes, trying to figure out where she was those missing hours between when she left work and when the neighbors saw her car.”

  This is all he knows. “Thanks,” I say. “I really appreciate it.”

  He stares at the picture, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. He says, “She was just your age.”

  Outside the interview room, I sit and make a list in my notebook. Get family. Go to workplace. Call Peggy. Where’s the car? Boyfriend? Cause of death? Call medical examiner. Get milk. Deposit check. Do dishes. Call Mom. It’s not a list I need to make, but it passes the time. I’m hoping to catch the family coming out after they talk to the cops. They’re easy to identify because they’re always crying. I draw a series of little flowers across the bottom of the page, thinking about the dead girl’s body. When I close my eyes it’s not the image that I see. It’s the words I wrote in my notebook—T-shirt, string, blood.

  I’ve been a full-time reporter for three years, and I can’t remember half of what I learned in college, but these words are growing in me like weeds. It’s been three months since they put me on the police beat. All summer I’ve had photographs of dead bodies fanned across my desk, buried under stacks of paper until I come across them looking for something else. It’s not these pictures that appear in my dreams, but the words I used to describe them.

  Again and again I check my watch, every second putting me closer to deadline. After a long time the flowers on my notebook page have overtaken the list, and I’m thinking this may be a lost cause when a couple walks out clinging to each other. The man has obviously been crying, the woman has the look of someone who’s just been slapped, and her cheeks are red, the rest of her face white as paper. I’m certain these are the girl’s parents. I stand up slowly. The trick is to make it sound like you’re giving them some kind of opportunity, and never, never ask how they feel—that’s for television reporters. Refer to the victim in the present tense, say nothing directly about her being dead, ask whether she has a boyfriend, because more often than not it turns out to be him. Be polite. Be apologetic.

  “I’m very sorry to bother you,” I say, “but I wanted to talk to you about your daughter.”

  “Are you a reporter?” the woman asks.

  “Yes, ma’am.” I’m staring at her face. She looks familiar. I can’t place her.

  “We can’t talk to you right now,” she says. Her voice breaks, but she doesn’t move to find a tissue, or bury her face in her hands or her husband’s shoulder. Instead she stares angrily at me, even while tears start down her cheeks. I notice that her husband doesn’t comfort her. His eyes never move from her to me, as though as long as he doesn’t look at me, I’m not here.

  “I know this is difficult,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

  “Difficult?” she says. “What do you know about it?”

  It’s a conversation I’ve had so many times I feel like I’m watching it from outside, like something on a television drama. There’s only so many ways you can say these things, only so many ways they can respond. What was she like, I’ll say. She was our daughter, they’ll say. We loved her. Some people are eager to talk, grateful for your desire to listen. Some, like this woman, have to be coaxed.

  “Ma’am,” I say as gently as I can, “I just want to write about Allison’s life.”

  “If she weren’t dead,” she says, “you wouldn’t give a shit about her life.”

  They turn their backs on me and walk away. I listen to the sound of their footsteps receding, then I glance at my list and put a line through Get family. I rummage through my bag for my car keys. Go to workplace is next.

  “She’s just a nice, nice person,” the receptionist at the Madison Medical Center keeps saying. Tears are starting in her eyes. “Just the nicest pers
on in the world.” She has also told me that Allison was a nursing tech in the clinic, that she had a big smile and was good with patients. I resist the urge to drum my fingers on her desk.

  One thing I know, people hardly ever say anything about someone that couldn’t be said about anyone. I don’t know if this is because lately the people I talk to are almost always talking about someone who’s dead, and therefore immediately becomes a nice girl, a great guy, a loving mother, a generous friend. I’m beginning to think it’s because this is how people see each other, as members of these sad generic categories. Allison Avery, Nice Girl.

  The receptionist tells me Allison was friends with Angela Schultz, one of the nurses in the clinic. She directs me down the hall to the third door on my right.

  “Thank you,” I say. “You’ve been very helpful.” She never even asked me who I was. People don’t, in general. If you ask them a question, they answer it.

  Before I tell her, Angela Schultz doesn’t know her friend is dead, and the way her eyes empty and her face drains of color when I say it, I think for a moment her heart has stopped.

  Angela is one of the friends who was supposed to meet Allison Saturday night, so from her I learn that Allison had some errands to run after work and then was going home to change and drop off her groceries. She was supposed to be at the Lizard Lounge at nine. I write that down, Lizard Lounge, and sit staring at the words. I’ve been there, with my boyfriend, David.

  “How long did you wait before you called her?” I ask Angela.

  “Half an hour,” she says. “Allison was always late.” At midnight, after calling Allison’s house, her parents’ house, and another friend’s house, Angela called the police. That’s all she knows, and she’s choking as she talks, so it takes me a long time to get her to say it. Angela is another version of the girl I saw in the picture this morning, her hair dark and sleek and pulled back from her face, her features even and unremarkably pretty. She is made up in the manner of a respectable southern girl, light foundation, peach lipstick, muted eyeshadow, and mascara that’s now smudged around her wet eyes.

  This won’t be the last time today I’ll bring this news to some unsuspecting friend or relative. It’s exhausting, my throat tightening with the grief of someone I don’t know, for someone I’ve never met.

  When you’re told something terrible about someone you don’t know—your cousin says her sister-in-law is dying of cancer—you have a moment of anxiety about what to say. Maybe you’ve met the woman once, and for a moment you really do feel bad, but in the end you’re just going to say, “That’s awful,” and let some silence pass before you talk about something else. When you’re a reporter, you’re always talking to strangers who have just had something terrible happen to them. In college, I interviewed a famous journalist for the school paper. “In Vietnam, the rivers were thick with bodies,” he said. “Either you had the stomach for it or you didn’t.”

  I have the stomach for it.

  If I didn’t I couldn’t sit here listening to Angela Schultz talk while the image of her friend’s dead body rises in front of me, as real as this live woman’s face. “That’s all I know,” she is saying, her hands covering her eyes as she begins to rock back and forth in her chair. “Oh God. Not Allison. Oh God. Oh God.” I write in my notebook: all she knows. She lifts her face, ghoulish now with black streams of mascara tears, her lipstick half chewed off. “Are you sure it was her? Are you absolutely sure? Did you see the body?”

  I hesitate. Then I nod. “It was her. I’m sorry.” She wails and drops her head again. The room is a typical examining room, chair, rolling stool, someone’s diploma framed on the wall. Altogether sterile, except for a vase of lilies tucked in the corner of the counter, near the sink, and a framed photograph nearby on the wall. I go over for a closer look while behind me Angela’s wails quiet into sobs. It’s a staff photo. Allison and Angela smile on either side of a tall man in a white lab coat who must be one of the clinic doctors.

  I’m glad I’ve seen these pictures of the dead girl’s face, and not the eight-year-old senior yearbook shot they’ll probably run on the front page. If you die young, they always pull out those high school pictures. No one really looks like that—the false smile, the cocked head, the hands folded awkwardly against the cheek.

  Next to the picture, you’ll see my byline. Then the copy. The victim was twenty-four years old. She was a nursing technician from a middle-class family, and she had just moved into her own apartment in Midtown a year ago. Saturday night, she worked late at the office, went to the grocery store for a few things, and drove to her apartment. She was late to meet friends at a Midtown bar, so she parked her car on the street in front of the building, instead of behind the building in the lot. When she came back out, hurrying, maybe checking her watch, someone grabbed her. What happened next is not entirely clear. I’m guessing that they’ll tell me someone drove her in her own car to Tom Lee Park, raped her, beat her, and killed her finally by running her over.

  Her name was Allison Avery. She was a nice girl.

  I turn from the picture. Angela is folded in on herself, not making a sound. I go toward her and let my hand hover over her shoulder, not quite close enough to touch. My voice low, I ask her if Allison was seeing anyone, if she had been on a date lately, if anyone had shown any interest in her.

  She shakes her head, not looking up.

  “She didn’t have a boyfriend?”

  Angela lifts her face. She says no with such finality, her eyes so deliberately fixed on mine, I’m certain she is lying.

  “There was no one?”

  “No,” she says again. We stare at each other for a moment. Then she returns her head to her knees. I stand looking at her bent neck, the wisps of hair escaping from her bun. Who could Allison’s boyfriend be, that her best friend would keep him a secret, even after death?

  A man comes hurrying in, like the answer to a question. I recognize him from the picture on the wall. He steps between us and scoops Angela up into a standing position and into his arms, as easily as lifting a baby. He is startlingly handsome, between thirty-five and forty, with a strong jaw and dark hair lightly touched with gray. He wears a wedding ring. “Is it true?” he asks me.

  “I’m afraid so, sir,” I say.

  Angela shudders and presses her face to his chest. She’s going to leave black smudges all over his straw-colored linen jacket. “I’m so sorry,” he whispers. “Poor girl.” I wonder which of them he means.

  When I ask, Dr. Gregerson tells me what I expected, that Allison was a hard worker, a good worker, a nice girl. She used to bring in flowers for the office, unasked, which is, finally, a detail I can use. She liked carnations, because they last a long time, but every once in a while she brought in lilies because, she said, they were too beautiful to resist. “There, in the vase,” he says. “Those are hers.”

  Straightening up, out of his embrace, Angela carefully pulls her loosened hair back into place. Her sobbing has slowed into an occasional hiccup and she seems oddly calm, her eyes glazed over. Over her shoulder I see the doctor noticing the black and tan traces of mascara and foundation on his jacket. I’m staring at his face, eyes narrowed, looking for signs of grief. He brushes at the streaks of makeup, frowning, then catches my eye and drops his hand, embarrassed. After a moment he lifts the same hand and squeezes Angela’s shoulder.

  “Angela,” I say gently, brushing my fingertips lightly against her forearm, “do you have a picture of Allison I could borrow?” I move to indicate the framed photo on the wall, though I’d prefer to have a shot of the girl alone. I open my mouth to give the speech about why we need a picture—personalize the crime, make it visceral—but Angela just nods, reaching numbly for a red purse and extracting a wallet. She flips it open to one of those plastic picture holders and slips a small photo from its casing. She says nothing when she hands it to me. “Thank you so much,” I say. I look down, and there it is, the high school yearbook photo, teased hair framing the dead girl
’s carefully made-up face, some boy’s class ring heavy on the hand beneath her chin.

  Angela is saying that if I really want to write about Allison I should know she had a secret ambition. She wanted to be a singer in a rock and roll band.

  “She’s too practical to give up her job for it,” Angela says. “She had gigs around here sometimes.” When I nod, she goes on. “That was what she really loved. If you saw her up there, you knew right away, the way that big voice came pouring out her little body, it just washed you away. That was her. That was who she was.” She tells me Allison’s voice made your heart ache—it was the sound of longing, just hanging in the air. It moved you, she says. You couldn’t help but cry. And now she’s crying too hard to say any more, but that is enough.

  It was the truth, what I said to Allison’s mother. What you want to write about is someone’s life, even if her death is the reason you’re writing about her at all. Allison Avery has slipped out of her category, and I come out of what used to be her office scribbling in my notebook, circling lilies, underlining rock & roll, crossing out nice girl, nice girl, nice girl, all down the page.

  2

  My next stop is Allison’s apartment building. It’s a tall wide building, fairly new. I park my car in front of it, just like she did, and stand in the parking lot trying to imagine what it would feel like to have a stranger grab me from behind, whether I would scream, or freeze, or elbow him in the groin like the heroine in an action movie. Everything seems clear and sharp in the bright sunlight. The front of the girl’s building is perfectly landscaped and it’s impossible to imagine anything bad happening here.

  Inside, I stand outside the door to her apartment, listening for sounds that would indicate the police were still inside. Nothing. Maybe they’ve already been and gone. It’s just a white door like all the others on the hall. Slowly, I try the doorknob. Locked. Below the brass apartment number Allison hung a drawing of the New York skyline, sketched in bright streaks of pink and purple on a deep black background. With my finger I trace the brass 13, a good number for a girl with such terrible luck.