Body of a Girl

by Leah Stewart

  Then it is so quiet I think Hannah has gone until I feel her taking off my shoes. She comes to the head of the bed and holds out my contact case. “Here,” she says. “Pop them out.” The small effort of sitting up makes me nauseous.

  “This is going to be really bad,” I say.

  “When I drove by, after I dropped you off, you were spread-eagled on the front steps, right under the light. It was like you were in a spotlight,” Hannah says. “It scared me. I ran home. What if you had passed out like that, on the street outside the bar?”

  “I was sitting up properly,” I lie. “I was careful.”

  “You were passed out, Olivia,” she says. “After all those lectures you’ve given me. All that talk about inviting it. You idiot.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it anymore, okay? Please?”

  Hannah slips my earrings out of my ears. She says nothing. I know she won’t say anything tomorrow, and if I’m lucky I won’t even remember just how bad and scared and stupid I feel right now. Hannah runs her hand across my hair. She shuts out the light.

  7

  Tiny black and white kittens live underneath the porch of the house next door. One day I spent an hour trying to entice them closer by waving a stick, clicking my tongue. One came within inches of me before bounding away. It was sunny, the kind of sunny when patches of grass seem spotlit, and the hairs on my arm were golden in the light. Across the street a man and his two daughters were washing their car, and the light bounced off the car and off the water that pooled in the street. The houses here are all the same, one brick level, hunkered down low to the ground. I don’t know any of my neighbors. I wanted to follow those kittens onto their own lawn but I didn’t want their owner to come out and yell at me.

  I don’t see the kittens now. I’m sitting on our front porch drinking a glass of water. The sun beats down like noon, though it’s only 8:30. Today is Allison Avery’s funeral, and I am so hungover I can barely stand. I can’t stop picturing myself, sprawled here like a dead thing, like a careless, stupid girl. This morning I pulled off my clothes before the mirror, searching my body for signs that someone had touched me, that someone else had pulled up my skirt. There was nothing, only the red marks my own fingers left where I pressed them hard against my skin.

  My body feels like it’s trying to turn itself inside out. If I call in sick they’ll think I don’t want to go to the funeral. I’ll get assigned a new beat, or even fired. I’ll be known as the one who didn’t have the stomach, for alcohol, for blood, for death.

  So I have to get up now, and go stand in the shower, and try to keep from vomiting when I bend over to shave my legs. I have to put on a black dress and find my notebook and have Hannah take me to my car, because the funeral is this morning and I have to be there. I have to get up now.

  I have to go.

  At funerals I try to stay away from the immediate family, and in that way try to make a bad thing better. I don’t care what Peggy says about quotes. I get what I get. At first it looks like I’m going to get nothing, because when I try to walk into the funeral home, an undertaker comes up on quiet feet and asks me to leave. So I wait, leaning against my car in the hot parking lot, trying not to throw up. I flip open my notebook and scan my notes. Drank too much, it says across the top of one page. I shut the notebook. When everyone emerges, blinking into the sunlight, I follow them, over the arch of the Dudley Street Bridge, under the intricate wrought iron sign for the Elmwood Cemetery.

  I once wrote a story about this cemetery and the eighty thousand corpses I called “inhabitants” in the paper. Annie Cook, a madam who opened her bordello to the sick during the yellow fever epidemic in 1878. Robert Church, the city’s first black millionaire. Dorothea Henry Winston, daughter of Patrick Henry. Fifteen hundred yellow fever victims tumbled together in mass graves called No Man’s Land. This is a beautiful place, bursting with greenery, and narrow winding roads take you past ornate statues of angels and the dead. As I get out of the car, through the damp still air comes the sound of a bell.

  At the graveside, I see the brother, Peter, with his parents, two people of whom I can only say: moderate height, dressed in black. It’s not a good day for black, my dress clinging to my skin. The newspaper photographer, Bryce, snaps a picture and the father shoots an angry look in his direction. I keep my distance from Bryce, standing on the other side of the crowd. I fan my face with my hand. My stomach lurches.

  I don’t know how I’m going to write this story, because I can’t keep my mind on anything. I keep reaching down to smooth my black skirt, as though I’m going to walk up to someone asking for a quote and discover it hiked up around my waist. I snap to attention after a few minutes, and I don’t remember what I’ve been thinking about. I scan the crowd. Peter’s mouth is set in a straight thin line, his eyes fixed on some point in the distance. The mother has an almost identical expression on her tight face. The father’s shoulders shake as he reaches in his pocket for a handkerchief. Angela is demure in a tailored black dress. Her hair is up, tendrils sticking to the back of her wet neck. With her head bowed she stares resolutely into the grave, lifting her hand from time to time to wipe her eyes with a crumpled tissue. She seems to have learned a lesson—no mascara runs down her cheeks.

  Carl stands right behind Allison’s mother. The material of his jacket strains as he raises an arm to squeeze the mother’s shoulder. He leaves his hand there a moment and she reciprocates, holding his thick fingers in her own slender ones. He sees me and gives me one of his tentative smiles. I lift my hand in a greeting, then look away. Toward the back is the dead girl’s neighbor, the young woman from Mississippi, without her children. She is openly weeping, her hands cupped around her face. The only other face I recognize is the doctor’s. A pretty blond woman leans against him, her features arranged in an expression of polite sorrow.

  Near the grave of Allison Avery stands a tall stone angel with spread wings, her face a picture of heavenly rapture, her eyes uplifted. This is a tribute to Mattie Stephenson, a girl who came to Memphis after her fiancé married another and broke her heart. I remember her story. The audiotape guide I rented at the cemetery office said she “gave her life” nursing victims of the yellow fever epidemic. Imagine a time when so many people died in this city that bodies were piled in the streets, so numerous that no one could identify their faces before they were hauled away. I doubt it was possible, then, to care when one more person died.

  There will be no statue, no angel, to mark Allison Avery’s grave, just a plain granite block engraved with her name, the dates of birth and death, the words “Beloved Daughter.” People who come here won’t notice the headstone, except perhaps to note the shortness of her life. She won’t be mentioned on the next audiotape, though like Mattie Stephenson she was young, and this city took her life. What could they say Allison Avery gave her life for?

  I manage to stand for fifteen more minutes before a wave of nausea hits me so hard I feel like I might faint. As fast as I can I walk away, trying to step lightly on the gravel path, and then when I can’t go any farther I duck behind a bush and throw up. I’m on my hands and knees on the ground, beside the flat tablet engraved with the score to “Dixie.” After I stop shaking I crawl backward, retreating from the mess I’ve just made, and put my head down on the ground between my elbows.

  “Miss?” a woman’s voice says from behind me. I turn my head a little and catch a glimpse of an older woman in church clothes. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” I whisper. She hesitates for a moment before she walks away, leaving me alone, she thinks, with my grief.

  I don’t see Peter when the burial is over, so I go looking for him, walking off between the headstones. I’m holding on to my bag with both hands like it can keep me standing up straight.

  I turn a corner, and there he is, lying lengthwise on a bench with his feet still on the ground, as though he had been sitting but couldn’t support his own weight anymore. His open black jacket hangs off either sid
e of the bench; his white shirt is untucked and pushed up, his hands resting on his bare stomach. He hasn’t seen me, and I watch as his fingers explore the bottom of his rib cage, pushing on the bone as though he’s surprised to find something that substantial inside his own body. He lifts his hand to his face and runs a finger around an eye socket.

  When he sees me, he turns his head and frowns, his hands going quickly to pull down his shirt. “What do you want?” he says. “Leave me alone.” He wants to sound angry and dismissive but his voice cracks over the words. He closes his eyes, the simplest way to make me disappear. This seems to happen very slowly—I can see his eyelashes tremble—and then he starts to cry.

  “Oh,” I say, and approach him, taking his hand. His hand doesn’t move so I close it in both of mine and rub his fingers as though to warm them, though they’re as hot as my own. My face is so close to his I can feel his breath. He opens his eyes, squinting up at me. “You’re that reporter,” he says, trying to steady his voice. “What are you doing here?”

  “I was sent here,” I say. I wonder if he thinks the photographer is right behind me, ready to snap this picture, if he thinks I’m already writing the caption—“Boy, 17, mourns his sister’s murder. The killer is still at large.” And then I can’t stop writing captions in my head—“Peter Avery, 17, brother to the dead girl.” “Brother, 17, lets reporter hold his hand.” I picture this photograph in the paper—me, all in black, crouched over his body, shadowing his face. I sit on the far edge of the bench, still holding his hand. His whole body shudders. Then there is a whispering sound, and after a moment I realize that it’s him, saying something under his breath. “Oh God,” he says, “oh God oh God oh God,” until it’s not even like words anymore, just breath, just painful breathing. I am not good at this. Questions cluster in my throat. Who’s the boyfriend? When’s your mother going to talk to me? It would be heartless to ask these things now. I think, Win his trust. I consider touching his soft cheek, splotched red with crying. If I were another sort of person, I would take him in my arms but I just hold his hand until he stops crying, with a deep breath that he holds for a long time.

  He sits up and says, “I’ve got to find my parents.” He’s still holding my hand, and in this moment I realize that he is holding it, it’s not just me hanging on.

  I squeeze his hand again and he gives me a terrible smile. “It’s just me now, you know,” he says. He’s not crying anymore, but I can see the film of water balanced on the skin that rims his eyes. Then he stands, taking his hand from mine, and pulls himself up tall. He tucks his shirt back in, straightens his jacket, and rubs his eyes hard. “Do I look like I’ve been crying?” he says, turning to show me his face. His nose is red, his eyes pink and watery.

  “No,” I lie.

  “Good,” he says. He nods once, sharply. I watch him walk away.

  For a long time I sit there with one hand pressed to my wretched stomach, the other flat on the bench where the stone is still warm from his body. I don’t know what it’s going to say underneath my byline in tomorrow’s paper. All I can picture is a big blank space, two columns of nothing under my name.

  It takes me all afternoon to write the funeral story, fifteen inches I would normally pound out in less than an hour. My mind feels as wrung out as my body. When I’m finally done I send it to Peggy and leave, telling her I don’t feel well. I’m halfway to David’s house before I remember the Reverend James Freeland’s anticrime meeting. “I’m not going,” I say out loud, even as I’m turning the car around.

  Half an hour later I am sitting in the basement of the Brighter Day Baptist Church. One of the long fluorescent lights flickers—brighter, dimmer—above my head while the Reverend James Freeland describes “why we’re all here tonight.” I’m not sure why I’m here tonight, as this story is probably destined for the weekly Neighbors section unless somebody with a gun shows up to mug us all right now.

  I shift in my metal folding chair, slowly unsticking one thigh, then the other, knowing from experience they’ll just get stuck again. I glance up at the reverend’s face, heavy with sincerity, and back down at my feet tapping lightly on the slick gray floor. The long tables, the low ceiling, and the metal and plastic decor, the lingering smells of cooked meat and disinfectant—I could be sixteen again, sitting in a prayer circle at my parents’ church, head bowed, looking at my pink flowered dress, my hands in my lap. Here is the church, here is the steeple, open the doors . . .

  “. . . Olivia Dale,” the reverend booms out. I jerk my head up to see everyone half turned and smiling in my direction. “I want y’all to tell her how the crime in this city has touched your lives and your neighborhoods, and how we’re going to fight back. We’re going to send out a message today.”

  Of the twenty people in this room, all but four are women, one a young man who looks to be about my age. He’s slouched low in his chair, his arms crossed over his chest, and doesn’t turn his face toward me. Everyone else looks at me expectantly. I lift my hand in a tiny wave. “Hi,” I say. “Thank you so much for asking me here. I just want to listen, and then if it’s all right I’ll ask you some questions at the end.”

  Clothes rustle and chairs creak as they turn their attention back to the front. One woman keeps her eyes trained on me. She is a heavy dark-skinned woman with darker shadows under her eyes. I smile and nod at her. She nods back, but does not smile. Then slowly she turns herself back around.

  They talk for a while about the drugs infiltrating their quiet, middle-class neighborhood, where many of them have lived for twenty years or more. A sixty-something woman named Katie Mae Olson remembers sleeping on her porch without a worry. Someone else describes hearing gunshots in the distance, seeing people she’s certain are drug dealers pacing on corners, watching strange cars prowl her street. “We’ve got to unite,” she says. “We’ve got to give them someone to answer to.”

  “Amen,” the reverend says. “When I see a strange car I walk past it so they know I’m watching. They’ll get the picture they’re not wanted and leave. It’s a prime fact,” he says, leaning forward in his chair, “if we sit back and do nothing, our quiet community can change overnight.”

  I take notes while they talk about the need for increased police presence in South Memphis, about long waits for officers to respond to 911 calls. I make a note to myself: check average response time. Someone mentions the possibility of a petition calling for increased manpower. One man talks about starting a Neighborhood Watch.

  Then the heavyset woman pushes up onto her feet. “My daughter Tamara was eighteen years old when somebody shot her dead on the sidewalk near our house,” she says. “Eighteen.” She grips the back of the chair for support, though when she speaks her voice is slow and even. “The police came, but they never found out a thing, and the monster who did that to my baby is still out there. That was last year, a year ago May fourteenth. You think anybody cares about that now? There’s been a hundred murders since.”

  I copy her words into my notebook, thinking it’s probably closer to 130, 140, thinking this is good, I’ll probably use this. I write down: Check stats. Get her name.

  “Nobody cares,” she says. “Nobody’s got the time to care.”

  A murmur goes up of “we care” and “we love you.” She turns her head toward me, her eyes trained on my face. “And that white girl,” she says. For a moment I think she means me, and I work to keep her gaze, resisting the urge to sink down in my chair. “She’s all over the front page. When my Tamara died, not one reporter came to ask me anything. Not one. What’s the difference between Tamara and that girl but that she’s white? Both young. Both gone. Both dead and gone.”

  I drop my eyes to my notebook. I write it down: nobody cares.

  Katie Mae Olson has risen from her chair to put her arm around the woman. “We care about your Tamara,” she says, her voice rising with indignation, “and we’re going to fight. This used to be a nice place to raise your children, and we’re going to make it that
way again. We’re not going to stand for crime anymore.” She turns to me. “You put that in the paper,” she says. “We’re tired. And we’re not going to stand it. Not anymore.”

  They all turn to me now, so I ask, “Do you think you can make this neighborhood as safe as it used to be?”

  “I hope so,” Reverend Freeland says. “Residents used to be able to sleep out in their backyards at night without fear of some maniac running and raping and cutting somebody’s throat. I don’t know that we’ll ever again be able to sleep in our homes and not worry about whether or not we’ve locked our doors.”

  Katie Mae Olson tightens her grip on Tamara’s mother, who sags a little against her. “I’m sixty-eight years old, and I’ve lived in this city all my life,” she says. “I’ll tell you one thing, it’s not what it used to be.” She looks around the room, taking in the upturned faces of her neighbors. “But I’ll live here till I die, and I’m damned if I’ll give up until then. This is my city.” Her voice rises as she leans toward me. “You tell everybody that. This is my city too.”

  I write that down and circle it. I can already tell her quote will be my last graf. It’s the perfect way to end.

  I’m walking through the dark parking lot toward my car, the fat yellow moon hanging low in the sky. I can feel the humidity settling into my hair, the temperature probably only ten degrees lower than it was before sunset. When I get home I’m going to strip naked and stand in front of the air conditioner until it goes away, the stickiness in my hair, between my breasts, at the backs of my knees.

  Somewhere behind me a man calls out, “Hey.” Without stopping, I glance back over my shoulder. The young man from inside is walking toward me, one hand lifted in my direction. “Hey, wait,” he calls out again. I turn to face him, taking a couple of steps backward. He ducks his head and jogs toward me.