Body of a Girl

by Leah Stewart

  After I knock on the door, I hear slow footsteps, and then a breathing silence that tells me someone is watching me through the peephole. I try for an expression that is somewhere between a smile and a sad face, and end up, I’m sure, grimacing horribly. A moment passes, and then another, but whoever watches me from the other side of that door doesn’t open it. I listen to the footsteps retreat.

  I turn to go, feeling all of a sudden tired and heavy with disappointment. Here on the porch it’s cool and shaded, and I’m reluctant to step back out into the heat. I lean against the banister, looking out from Allison Avery’s porch at the neighborhood where she lived. It’s a lot like the neighborhood where I grew up. For a moment I can hear my mother’s voice, as though from the house, saying, “Don’t go too far. Stay where I can see you.” The sun behind me bathes the street in light. A few houses down two small children squabble over a tricycle in the driveway. Over their high angry voices I hear the slap-slap of rapid tennis shoes on pavement, and then a teenage boy comes into view, running hard, right down the middle of the street. I watch him. In a T-shirt and gym shorts, he’s running as fast as he can, his long arms and legs all right angles, knees high, feet pounding on asphalt so hard every step must send a jolt through his whole body.

  As he reaches the house next door, a red sports car comes flying around the corner, headed right at him. Horn blaring, it swerves wildly just in time to miss him as he jumps aside. The boy takes a few steps after it, jabbing his arm into the air and shouting, “Fuck you.” The whooping of teenage voices trails after it down the street. The boy stands for a minute with his hands on his hips, his chest rising and falling rapidly. He shakes his head. “Goddamnit,” he shouts. Then he turns and walks back up the street in my direction, head lowered.

  When he reaches the end of the Avery’s driveway he stops and bends over, hands on his thighs, breathing hard. Then he lifts his head and squints up at the windows on the second floor. I’m watching him watch the house, and I wonder who he is, whether he knew her and has heard what happened. He’s an attractive kid, moving with an easy long-limbed grace. After a moment he opens the mailbox and reaches way inside. I take a step toward him, trying to see what he’s doing. With the sun in his eyes, he doesn’t see me. He straightens up, a pack of cigarettes and a lighter in his hand. Lighting a cigarette, he keeps his eyes trained on the house. He lifts his T-shirt and slides the pack into the waistband of his green gym shorts.

  He starts walking toward me up the lawn, looking at the ground and taking deep drags on his cigarette. That’s when I realize, he must be her brother, coming home. He’s tall, with that unformed skinniness that boys have before their weight catches up with their height, and his hair is the rich brown of good leather, with a touch of curl around his heart-shaped face. His white T-shirt is patched with sweat, clinging to his stomach and chest.

  Standing up straight, I walk down the porch steps and out onto the lawn. I don’t want to startle him. “Hello,” I call out. He stops short and looks up. He squints into the light, trying to make out my face. To him I must look like a dark outline against the sun. I lift my hand and wave as though I know him. He takes a quick step, and then another, his hand reaching out toward me. An expression comes over his face, of hope and astonishment, and he opens his mouth and says, “Allison?”

  It is a terrible moment. How badly he must want to believe she’s not dead. I take a breath but find myself speechless, and so he goes on for a few seconds thinking I am his sister. He smiles, and his eyes fill up with tears, and he is suddenly so beautiful that I can’t even look at him.

  I move forward, so that he can see my face. His hand drops to his side, and on his face there is a look of such stricken sorrow, as though I have just broken his heart. It’s gone quickly, his mouth smoothed into a thin line and his eyes blank. Turning away, he runs his free hand through his damp hair and takes another drag of his cigarette. Then he looks at me again. “Are you one of my sister’s friends?” he asks.

  “No, I’m sorry, I’m not,” I say, and to my astonishment my voice wavers, like I’m about to burst out crying.

  “Who are you then?” he says, his voice all sharp edges.

  I consider saying, “I’m at the wrong house,” but I’ll probably see this boy again, so I tell the truth.

  He looks down at the ground. Then he drops his half-smoked cigarette and rubs it out with his toe. Slowly, he lifts his T-shirt and uses the bottom of it to wipe his damp forehead. His flat boy’s stomach is bright white in the sun. “Don’t you feel bad, coming here like this?” he says, dropping the shirt. “My sister’s barely been dead one day.”

  “I do feel bad, yes,” I say. Then I just stand there, my mind turning over possibilities for what to say next. After a minute I realize my mouth is hanging open, so I close it.

  “I thought you were one of her friends,” he says, looking me up and down. He lets his gaze linger over my breasts, as though trying to unnerve me. He must want revenge for that moment when he thought he had his sister back. “You’re young to be a reporter.”

  “Old enough,” I say. I cross my arms over my chest. “I mean, I am a reporter.”

  “Now I know where I’ve seen you before. At the Four Corners.”

  “That’s across the street from my apartment.”

  He nods slowly. “I work there weekends,” he says. “I’m a busboy.” He looks me in the face now, studying me. “Your hair used to be longer, didn’t it? About to here.” He reaches out as though to touch my shoulder. “You always order the banana pudding. Once, I told you we were out and you left.”

  I don’t recognize him. I don’t know what to say. It’s too late to try the “I want to tell the world about your loved one” approach on him. I don’t know what’s become of my professionalism. Then it clicks into place, how I should be—sympathetic, regretful, even a little ashamed. “Are your parents home?” I ask, gently, watching him take the cigarette pack from the waistband of his shorts.

  “They don’t want to talk to you.” He slides another cigarette out and puts it in his mouth, then offers me the pack. I look at him. The cigarette dangles from his lips as he watches me with hooded eyes, playing the tough kid. I imagine him practicing this look in the mirror.

  I shake my head. “I wouldn’t want to talk to me either,” I say. “I’m sorry about your sister.” I start to go past him. He grabs my arm, then quickly drops it.

  “Will you put something in the paper?” he asks. He takes the unlit cigarette from his mouth and jabs it in the air. “Whatever I say?”

  “Yes.”

  “Here it is,” he says. “My sister’s dead. How do you think I feel?”

  By the end of the day I know that the boy’s name is Peter and that he is seventeen. I know where he goes to school, where he works, where he lives, and what he looks like. But I don’t know how he feels.

  The truth is nothing really terrible has ever happened to me, although before I learned to harden myself I was afraid of all kinds of things. I used to believe I would be killed by a serial killer, not someone who would just shoot you, but someone who would torture you and cut you up and scatter your body parts throughout the city. Before that, I was afraid of sharks and alligators, for the same reason, the way they chew you to pieces. Then it was death—just dying, no matter how. I couldn’t even let myself think about it without getting a cold burning in my stomach and face. Until I was twenty-two, I had never been to a funeral. Now I’ve been to the funeral of a baby shot inside her mother’s womb, the funeral of a teenager stabbed in an alley, the funerals of all manner of strangers, but I have never been to the funeral of a person I have loved.

  Allison’s funeral is in three days. It’s my job to be there. I put it in the story, what her brother said. Peggy thinks it’s a great quote. “I like the steam rising, too,” she said. “Nice touch.” It’s running front page. Headline: CITY CLAIMS 100TH MURDER VICTIM THIS YEAR. Subhead: Daughter of Prominent Doctor Found Dead. Byline: Olivia Dale.
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  It’s 11 P.M. Instead of leaving I’m sitting at my desk watching the second hand make its way around the clock on the wall. The newsroom is almost empty and quiet like it never is during the day, the only sounds the murmur of two editors’ voices and the click the clock makes when a minute passes. I just sit here thinking about that boy, Peter. A seventeen-year-old boy hasn’t shriveled me up inside like that since I was fourteen and Fred Lamar tried to feel me up on the band bus when he hadn’t even kissed me yet. I played the clarinet for seven years. At my school we were called “band fags,” and when someone asked me my schedule I said, English, Band, French, with the “band” said so quickly the a and the d disappeared. My mother wouldn’t let me quit. She said, “Some day you’ll understand it was good for you.” I hate feeling ashamed of something, wishing I could quit. I’d like to live a life where that was never true.

  The first edition is on the presses. I get up and go down the hall to the window overlooking the press room. The huge steel machines turn and whirr without stopping. I press my forehead to the glass, darkened by newsprint, and watch the pages fly by. While I watch, it comes back to me, the rush I get from what I do. I’ve stood here just like this and watched every night I’ve thought that a story was important, that what I had written meant lives would be changed. This is what I live for through the boredom of highway fatalities and armed robberies and endless hours of pretending to be busy at my desk, waiting for someone to commit a crime. It’s like driving alone for hours on a straight Texas highway, just to see the sparkling lights of a city rise over the darkness of the plains.

  The front page goes by again and again and again. That’s my story there, under that big bold headline, leading off the day’s news.

  3

  On my way out of the building, I say good night to the security guard, a plump older man with the swollen features of an alcoholic. “Be careful out there,” he says jovially. I nod, my lips pressed together, gripping my keys tightly in one hand, the points jutting out between my fingers the way I learned in a college self-defense course. The newspaper building is not far from crime-ridden government housing. When the door closes behind me, I start moving as quickly as I can toward my car, which is just outside the dim light thrown by the building’s lamps. My footsteps sound on the pavement, and when I’m close enough I bend down to make sure no one is beneath the car. Last month I wrote a story about three women who had their Achilles tendons slashed by a man lying in wait beneath their cars in a mall parking lot. He was never caught.

  I open the door, swing my legs in and pull the door shut, locking it. I turn around. I forgot to make sure no one was crouched in the back. I’m alone. I take a deep breath and relax against the seat. The car starts and I shift smoothly into first and glide from the parking lot. There is nothing I’d like better than to go home now, but I’m scheduled to meet a midnight-shift cop named Smiley at the police station for a ride-along. Peggy suggested it as a good way to get to know the cops. “Could be a story in it,” she said. “Maybe you’ll get lucky.”

  Officer Smiley is leaning against his patrol car in the parking lot, his arms crossed over his chest. A light-skinned black man, he’s the sort of cop who looks like he divides his time between his beat and the weight room, his close-cropped head a solid block on his wide, thick-veined neck. He watches me approach with the slightest movement of his eyes.

  “Officer Smiley,” I call out when I’m two feet from him. “I’m Olivia Dale.” I go toward him with my hand held out.

  He waits another beat before easing his body forward off the car and extending his own hand to grip mine. “Ma’am,” he says formally.

  I laugh. It’s involuntary, a quick nervous burst. I’m afraid to look at him again, but when I do, he’s smiling, and I suddenly realize how young he is, maybe even younger than I am.

  He walks me around to the passenger side and watches me settle in against the warm black vinyl before he shuts the door. He moves around the car with the slow wide-legged walk of the muscular, and when he gets in the car it seems to sag with his weight.

  “Thanks for agreeing to this,” I say.

  “I didn’t agree,” he says. “I was told.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Well, thanks anyway.”

  He seems tense as we pull out of the parking lot and negotiate our way out of downtown, both his hands tight on the steering wheel. Then he relaxes back against the seat, dropping one hand to his leg and jerking his neck from side to side in the weight lifter’s stretching motion. He hasn’t said a word.

  “Are you from Memphis?” I ask.

  “Orange Mound,” he says. “I stay there still. My family’s there.”

  I get him talking about his background, how he left his poor neighborhood to go to college, then decided to come back to the people who raised him and do something for the community. He tells me that he really thinks he can make a difference. I nod, working up a hometown rookie cop angle in my head, just in case I need it.

  “What do you think the city should be doing about crime that it’s not doing now?” I ask him.

  “More cops, number one. I know the mayor wants that, but nobody wants their taxes raised.” He shakes his head. “Always the same thing. Nobody wants to pay for you, but everybody thinks you should be there the second they pick up their phone.”

  “What . . .,” I start. He holds up his hand to stop me and turns up the radio as the dispatcher’s mechanical voice recites the code for domestic disturbance. He radios back and I grip the door handle as he swings the car into a U-turn. We hurtle down the street, the siren wailing our battle cry.

  The house is enormous and decrepit, one of those grand old Memphis houses with half the windows boarded up, the roof caving in. It’s quiet. “Stay here,” Smiley says. He shuts the door and leaves me cocooned inside the stifling car. After a moment I push open my door and sit facing out. I watch him knock on the door. “Police,” he calls. He leans over, trying to peer in the closest window. Then I see his body stiffen. “Hey,” he yells. “Hey.” He reaches for his gun and flings himself through the door into the house. A gunshot cracks the air and I am on my feet, running up the lawn. I trip over the first porch step and clamber up on my hands and knees. Inside a woman’s voice is rising toward a scream. On the porch I press my face to the window.

  Smiley and another man stand facing one another, each with a gun aimed at the other’s face. A woman in a pink housedress, her nose dripping blood, stands rocking herself from side to side, moaning. I draw a stick-figure diagram in my notebook so I’ll be able to describe this later, the room, the distance between the two men. I draw a squiggle of blood down the stick woman’s face.

  “Drop it,” Smiley says between his teeth. The man looks wildly from side to side. Then he spots my face against the window and his eyes narrow. He raises the gun, and I drop to the floor of the porch as a bullet shatters the window, glass raining down on my back. I hear the woman screaming, and the sounds of a scuffle, and when I rise up gingerly, pieces of glass cascading down my back, the man is on the ground, Smiley’s gun pressed to his head, Smiley’s foot planted firmly on his back. The woman’s throat is convulsing as though she’s going to vomit.

  “Damn,” I say out loud. “I missed it.” I pick up my notebook and shake off the glass. There’s a smudge of red on the white paper. I look at my hand and see that my finger is bleeding. I pluck a tiny shard of glass from my skin. My heart slams against my chest like it’s going to burst on through.

  Officer Smiley comes out the front door, pushing the handcuffed man before him. Reciting the man’s rights, Smiley looks right through me. The man stares at me as he passes, his face red and pulsing with rage. I just stand there, my notebook slack in my hand, while the woman inside keeps screaming, while Smiley walks the man to the car, puts his hand on his head and gently eases him into the backseat. He moves slowly around the car and reaches in for the radio.

  Then I start moving. When I reach Smiley’s side, he’s putting the ra
dio carefully back into place. “What happened?”

  “What happened is you almost got shot,” he says.

  I wave my hand to dismiss this. “I mean, how’d you get him on the ground?”

  “When he turned toward the window, I tackled him and he dropped the gun,” he says.

  “Why didn’t you shoot him?”

  “I don’t know.” He looks up at the house. “Shit,” he says. “Can that woman scream.”

  “What are you going to do about her?”

  “They’re sending someone,” he says absently.

  I lean into the car and look at the prisoner through the wire mesh that divides the front seat from the back. He glares at me. “Why did you hit your wife?” I ask him.

  He says nothing. A lump of chewing tobacco pushes out his lower lip, making him look like a petulant child.

  “Why did you have the gun out?” I ask.

  “To kill the bitch,” he snarls. He turns his head to the side and spits a brown puddle onto the seat beside him.

  I straighten up. Officer Smiley looks at me and shakes his head, as though to say, why did you even ask? I look down at the blood welling out of my finger in a neat little bubble. We stand together in silence until another squad car arrives, listening as the wailing goes on and on, until it just seems like part of the night, the heat, the smell of wet dirt and grass, that agonized, endless sound.

  When we get out of the car at the station, Smiley says, “Am I going to see this in the paper?”

  “Hero John Smiley,” I say, making a headline in the air with my hand.

  He laughs. “Don’t say that,” he says. “I’ll get endless shit.” He shakes my hand and goes around the car to retrieve his prisoner.