Body of a Girl

by Leah Stewart

  “Thanks,” I say. He doesn’t hear it, and I don’t repeat it. I just turn away and walk back to my car.

  When I get home, the house is dark. On my way through the living room I bump against the flimsy coffee table Hannah and I found out on the street and one of the stacks of magazines cascades onto the floor, scattering across a cardboard box with half a pizza still in it. I know if I went in the kitchen I would find a sink full of dirty dishes, a counter dirty with bits of food and the occasional cockroach, and an overflowing trash can surrounded by crumpled paper towels that didn’t make it in. The couch is draped with clothes, some mine. I settle down among them and watch the clock on the VCR blink 12:00. I’m working on an angle in my head, thinking I can use this incident as the lead-in to a series about domestic violence in Memphis, or violence against women in general if I tie in today’s dead girl. I think of making a list—get stats, call a shelter— but I’m too tired to go digging through my bag for my notebook, or even to turn on the light. It seems like a million years since I stood over that dead body this morning.

  I say to myself, I could have been shot. No matter how hard I try I can’t make myself believe it.

  One thing I know, when you read about what happened tonight in the paper, it will never occur to you that I was there.

  4

  When I open my eyes, my roommate, Hannah, is standing over me. She is wearing a black cardigan over a sleeveless pink cotton sundress that buttons up the front. She looks as though she has no idea what the season is and is trying to allow for all possibilities. “What are you doing here?” she says.

  “I live here,” I try to say. My tongue feels swollen inside my mouth. I sit up. “Aren’t you hot?” We don’t have central air, just window units in our bedrooms, and the heat is like another presence in the room. I must have fallen asleep in my clothes, my shirt soaked through and clinging to my skin.

  “Why did you sleep on the couch?” Hannah sprawls beside me and turns on the television.

  I look down at my rumpled skirt. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “David called like three times last night,” she says.

  “What did he want?” I put my wet face in my hands and rub it vigorously.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “He’s your boyfriend.” She says this with scorn. Hannah believes in being alone. She thinks no woman enters a relationship with a man without sacrificing something. She’s afraid of men who want more than sex from her. When we’re out late at night, she’ll walk home by herself, because she wants everyone to believe she’s afraid of nothing.

  “What time is it?” I ask. “Aren’t you going to work?”

  “Aren’t you?” she says. “It’s quarter of ten.”

  “Oh my God.” I jump up. “I’m late. Why didn’t you wake me?”

  “I thought you needed the sleep,” Hannah says without looking at me. She is watching a music video; a very young, very undressed girl with frightening wide eyes is looking bewildered in a close-up. Her hair is straight and unwashed. She is so thin that the thrust of her lips seems violent after the deep hollows of her cheeks. “How could anyone find that attractive?” Hannah says. I notice that she doesn’t change the channel.

  Hannah herself is thin, though not as thin as the video girl. Her cheekbones, her collarbones make elegant lines beneath her skin, pale as soap. She’s a green-eyed redhead—another reason she shouldn’t be wearing pink—and her hair is a rich red-brown, cut short to her chin and smooth against her face. She dated a guy in college who used to call her “red velvet,” which she hated. She is tall and in every way lovely, a fact that she steadfastly refuses to acknowledge. “Did last night go okay?” I say.

  “Obviously.” She leans her head back to look at me. “Don’t I look okay?”

  “You know what I mean. What happened to your date?”

  “We had a drink, then I sent him home.” She makes a face. “He was an eager puppy.”

  “Did he lick your face?”

  “My neck, actually.” She shudders. “Let’s not talk about it anymore.” She turns back to the screen. The video girl rolls over and over on a carpeted floor, her long white legs bony and exposed. I can see what she would look like without her skin, the shape of her skull, the enormous caverns for her eyes. It makes me feel sick. I keep watching. I’m a television junkie. I get sucked in by all those imaginary lives. I become involved in commercials. So even though I’m late for work I stand there until Hannah says, “Sit down. You’re looming.”

  “I can’t,” I say. “I’ve got to get ready.”

  “So go get ready,” she says.

  “Are you going to want a ride to work?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Are you going to hit the curb like last time?”

  “Memphis woman kills roommate with couch pillow,” I say. “Police say Dale, twenty-five, snapped after third bitchy comment in five minutes.”

  “Quote this,” she says, giving me the finger. But she laughs, and gets up off the couch to give me a quick hug. “Good morning,” she says.

  My bedroom is strewn with clothes, on the floor beside the open closet, across the unmade bed, hanging out the open drawers of the dresser. This is why David almost never comes here. I stuff jeans and underwear back into the drawers, push them shut with my hip, and find something on the bed to wear.

  When I come out of my bedroom Hannah is no longer in the living room, though the television is still blaring. I turn it off and go looking for her, slinging my bag over my shoulder. She’s sitting at the kitchen table, her head bent over today’s newspaper. I come up behind her and look at the paper over her shoulder. There I am, front-page lead. “I’m leaving,” I say. “Do you want a ride?” Hannah is working as a temp; right now she’s doing data entry at a hospital near the newspaper.

  She doesn’t say anything.

  “Hannah?” I say. “Do you want a ride?”

  “You didn’t tell me you were on this story.” She says it like an accusation.

  “You didn’t ask,” I say. “Hannah, I’ve got to go.”

  She looks up. To my surprise, her eyes are filled with tears. “Olivia,” she whispers. “I know this girl.”

  “Are you serious?” I say. I slide into the seat beside her and grab my notebook out of my bag. “How do you know her?”

  She doesn’t say anything, staring at me.

  “How do you know her?” I repeat.

  “What are you doing?” she says. “Do you think you’re going to interview me? I just said this girl I know is dead, and you take out your notebook?”

  I feel a flush creep up my cheeks. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry.” Slowly I open my bag and put the notebook away. I make my voice gentle and say, “How do you know her?”

  “I didn’t know her well,” she says. “I knew who she was. She went to my high school. I probably talked to her twice.”

  “It’s still a shock,” I say. I hesitate. Then I ask, “What was she like?”

  “She was a high school girl. I don’t know. She seemed okay. She was one of those girls who always had a couple of guys following her around.”

  “Was she the type who invites that? Or couldn’t she help it?”

  “I don’t know,” Hannah says. “Should she have helped it?”

  I shrug.

  “Come on,” Hannah says. “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t be one of those girls if you could.” A pink flush mottles her pale throat. “I mean,” she says. “Not that you’re not.”

  “I’m not,” I say. “And I don’t want to be.” I turn my gaze from her face to the newspaper and read my lead. The body of a 24-year-old Memphis woman was found yesterday in Tom Lee Park.

  Hannah sighs. “I can’t believe it. That’s a pretty nice neighborhood, where she lived.”

  “Let it be a lesson to you,” I say. “Don’t walk home alone.”

  “She wasn’t walking two miles home, Olivia,” Hannah says. “She was right outside her building. That’s why there’s
no point in living in fear. You can’t avoid danger.”

  “Maybe,” I say. “But you don’t have to invite it.”

  “You think I invite it?” She’s turned toward me, her eyebrows raised.

  I meet her gaze. “Sometimes.”

  “How did this girl invite it?” She shakes the paper at me, crumpling the girl’s smiling face.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “You . . . don’t . . . know.”

  “That’s right.” I look at my watch. “I’ve got to go, Hannah.”

  “See you later,” she says without looking at me.

  I push my chair back with a clatter. At the kitchen door I turn to look back at her. She leans forward over the table, her shoulders hunched in tight, running her hands over the newspaper, trying to smooth the creases from the dead girl’s face. “I don’t know,” I say to her back. “Yet.”

  “The big bad reporter,” Hannah says. She doesn’t stop what she’s doing. “I bet if you keep trying, some day you’ll know everything.”

  On the porch I stand and take a deep breath. No one is visible on our dead-end street of duplexes and small brick houses. Everybody’s blinds are down.

  Our street opens onto a road with wide lanes and an arching corridor of trees, running alongside Overton Park, where the zoo is, and the art museum. When I had regular working hours, I would go running through the wooded areas, past the museum and the baseball fields and the picnic tables. When the path disappears into the woods it’s like you are the only person in the world, the smack of your footsteps and the rush of your breathing the only sounds you hear. Through tall thick trees the sunlight makes dust glitter like gold shavings in the air.

  Once I made the mistake of going there close to sundown, and when the light faded the whole place changed. Somewhere near I could hear a car moving far too slowly, and then I heard somebody shout. I started running like someone was chasing me, the blood pounding in my ears, and when I burst out of the woods the families had vanished from the fields and picnic tables, as though they all disappeared the instant the sun went down. I forced myself to walk calmly to the car.

  Hannah and I moved to this neighborhood to be safer. We used to live on the third floor of an apartment building on Madison, across the street from a nightclub. We went there sometimes for a drink, and at night we could sit by our windows and watch the people going in and out, drunks stumbling off the curb, girls in high heels leaning against guys, their laughter echoing down the dark street. I was a general assignment reporter, covering south Memphis and DeSoto County, Mississippi. Church ground breakings, programs for inner-city youth, Graceland’s battle against Elvis copyright violations. One Saturday, when the cops reporter called in sick, they sent me to the station to go through the day’s reports. It wasn’t the robberies, the assaults, the murders that shocked me—I had been reading my own paper. I had been hearing it every night on the evening news.

  But three women had been raped the night before, one in the alley of the nightclub across the street from where I lived. It had happened at eleven o’clock, while inside the music was still playing and outside the people ambled tipsily down the street. Why hadn’t I read about it in the morning paper? From our window, Hannah and I could see the part of that alley where the trash cans were. Then it disappeared into darkness.

  Hannah and I knew some of the regulars by sight, and we noticed that one had stopped appearing, a middle-aged blonde with a bad dye job who wore heavy makeup and tight skirts, shirts cut short enough to expose a roll of flesh at her waist. She drank too much and leaned in close to men when she talked so that they could look down her shirt at her heavy white breasts. We thought maybe she was the one. I didn’t want it to be a girl like us.

  I went into work Monday and looked through a month’s worth of papers, trying to find a story or even a brief about a woman being raped. I couldn’t find a single one. Next I checked the weekly breakdowns of crime statistics for each Memphis neighborhood, maps that show you what to look out for on your street: car theft, breaking and entering, homicide. There was no statistic for rape, as though the terrible things that happen to women are either too shameful or too commonplace to report. Flushed with indignation, I went to the managing editor and asked him why we never ran rape stories. An hour later he was having a heated conversation with the news editor.

  This is how I ended up on the police beat.

  This is how I came to find myself sitting down with women like the one I interviewed last week, who was dragged off her front porch on a quiet street by a stranger with a knife. He took her in her own backyard and raped her, and she didn’t fight it. She said, “I knew he might have AIDS. I thought, I can die now or I can die later.” She is still waiting for her test results.

  This is my city. Every morning in Memphis people eat their breakfasts over the list of crimes in the newspaper. Every summer thousands of people gather at Graceland in the terrible heat of mid-August to mourn a man who died twenty years ago. They cry as though it were yesterday.

  At my desk, I spend some time on the phone, getting nowhere with the medical examiner’s office. I hang up and watch Bishop ambling across the newsroom, hands in his pockets. Bishop is one of those men who always gets called by his last name, so that his first name seems to have nothing to do with him, like most people’s middle names. I wouldn’t even know his first name if I didn’t see it in his byline every day—it’s Martin.

  Bishop is white, thirty-seven, with a high forehead and straight black hair that sweeps back from the middle of his head to end just below his chin. He wears John Lennon glasses, and lets his front teeth show all the time. To work he wears khaki pants, sneakers, and short-sleeved plaid button-downs, and he always has a little notebook in the breast pocket of his shirt. He drives a Dodge Colt with no seat belts and a jagged gap where the glove compartment used to be. If you saw him on the street, you might think he was the kind of man who still lives with his mother, but he has his own apartment and a series of girlfriends, mostly career waitresses. His nonnewspaper friends are all martini drinkers who throw a party every other weekend. I’ve never gone to one. I don’t like parties. When I asked Evan about it, he just shook his head and said, “Whew.” Bishop kissed me once in the back room of a bar, near the rest rooms and the pay phone. It was a very gentle kiss; he didn’t even touch me, just leaned way forward and pressed his lips to mine. “Well . . .,” I began when it was over.

  “If you didn’t like it, I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.” He touched my arm so lightly I could only just be sure that he had touched me, and then he went back to the table. The truth was, I did like it. But I was drunk, and that can explain a lot of things.

  Now Bishop catches my eye and winks. I wave him over and he comes, whistling between his teeth. “Do you have a source in the ME’s office?” I ask him.

  He props his hip against my desk. “The streets are crawling with my sources,” he says. “Can I help you with something?”

  “The girl from yesterday,” I say. “I’m not having any luck getting cause of death.”

  He straightens up, nodding. “I’ll be back.”

  I’m watching him walk away when the phone rings. “Olivia Dale,” I say, tucking the phone between my ear and my shoulder.

  “Hi,” a male voice says. “This is Peter.”

  There’s a beat while I try to think who Peter is. Then I see the front-page spread across my desk and I realize. “Hi, Peter.” My voice melts with concern when I ask, “How are you?”

  “Um . . . .,” he says, letting his voice trail away. He sounds matter-of-fact when he says, “Have you heard anything more?”

  “Not yet,” I say cautiously, wondering if he’s hinting at something. “I haven’t been to the station yet today.”

  “Okay,” he says.

  “Have you heard anything more?”

  “No,” he says. “Nothing.” Then he bursts out, “Not a goddamned thing!” His breathing grows labored. I say nothing, giving him
a moment to compose himself. When he is silent, I say, “Peter? Did you want to talk about something?”

  “I saw your article,” he says. “You quoted me. It’s strange . . .”

  “Yes,” I say. “I know.” I make my voice low and smooth, like what would be my phone-sex voice if I had one, like I want to wrap this voice around him, soft and warm. “I’d like to be able to say more about your sister.” I pause. I don’t know what he wants, but as long as he’s called I might as well get what I can. “Are you close?”

  “Of course,” he says. “She’s my sister.” His voice veers close to the edge of hysteria.

  “You’re lucky,” I say gently. “Not all siblings are close.”

  “Do you have a sister?”

  “Yes,” I say, then stop, the word a lie I didn’t even know I was going to tell. “I mean, no. I am a sister. I have a brother.”

  “What would he do if something happened to you?” He asks as though he really thinks I know, as though he’s seeking a model for his own behavior.

  “You mean, how would he feel?”

  “No, no. What would he do? Would he sit around looking at photo albums, like my mother?” His voice drops to a whisper. “Would he go looking for the guy?”

  “No, Peter, definitely not,” I say. The fact is, I have no idea what my brother would do. If something happened to me, part of him would probably be saying I brought it on myself, the line of work I’m in too dangerous for a girl. “He would know to leave that to the police.”

  “So what would he do?” he asks again. Then, almost as if talking to himself, “I don’t know what to do with myself.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I guess he would grieve.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah.” There’s a silence. “How?”

  “That’s different for everyone.” I venture, “It might help to talk.”

  “Yeah, to who. My parents are . . . I don’t want to talk to my friends. I don’t have a girlfriend.”

  “You can talk to me.” I hold my breath during the silence that follows.