Body of a Girl

by Leah Stewart

  “Like what? Heroin?” She shakes her head, frowning. “We draw the line at dope. Never even shroomed or dropped acid. I had a friend who dropped acid in college. She said she thought the walls were bleeding. Doesn’t sound like any fun to me.” She watches me take a drag, a smile playing over her lips. “Allison’s a pack rat,” she says. “You should see the shit she kept. Clothes she hasn’t worn since tenth grade. You saw all those shoes in the hall. I don’t know what the needle was for, but I know it wasn’t heroin.” She leans in close. “I knew everything about her,” she says. “You can bet I would’ve known that.”

  I hand her the joint. She believes what she’s saying, but I might tell someone I knew everything about Hannah, and I didn’t know she had ever done cocaine. “Can I ask you something?” I say. “Why did you want me to come with you?”

  “I like you, Olivia,” she says. She inhales and lets it out slow. “You want to know what she was like.”

  “Yes,” I say. Was, she said, the truth slipping through her unwillingness to believe it. “What was she like?”

  “She was fun. She was . . . generous. She . . .” She gestures helplessly with the joint, trailing smoke.

  “Yes,” I say. “But what was she like?”

  “We were closer than sisters,” she says, her eyes watery and bright. “I loved her.”

  Later I sit on the bed, the needle in my pocket, and watch as Angela rummages through the dead girl’s bureau. “I’ve never seen this before,” she says, holding out a pink sweater.

  “Can I see that?” I ask.

  Angela hands it to me and I check the tag. It’s angora, a petite small. Joan Bracken’s sweater. “I think this belongs to Joan Bracken,” I say.

  “Who?”

  “The skinny woman down the hall.”

  “That figures,” Angela says. “It’s ugly as shit.”

  Angela says Allison just borrowed the sweater, and keeps saying it, until I’ve told her three or four times that Joan Bracken said it was stolen. Then she says maybe Allison did it on impulse, maybe she did it to fuck with that anorexic bitch, maybe she didn’t do it at all and Joan Bracken is lying. “At any rate,” she says, “it doesn’t matter now.” She takes the sweater from me and stuffs it back in the drawer, then slams the drawer shut and stalks out of the room.

  I sit for a few minutes, bouncing on what feels like a brand-new mattress. This apartment has central air, like David’s, and I think how nice it would be to sleep on a firm new mattress and wake up cool every morning, instead of glued to the sheets by the sweltering heat. Allison’s bedroom is even messier than mine, clothes draped everywhere, an ashtray trailing ash onto the dresser. The trash can beside the bed nearly bursts with her garbage. I lean forward to peer into it. Tissues. A broken eyeshadow, powdering everything around it a glittery bronze. I think of Evan and his front-page Satanist magazine, and gingerly lift away the tissues that form the top layer of trash.

  Below I see balled-up notes, an empty toilet paper roll, a box the right size for jewelry. I plunge my hand into the trash, turning over more papers, more soft, damp tissues, the crinkly foil wrapper of a chocolate bar, until my hand meets something sticky and slick. I jump back as though stung. It’s a used condom.

  In the bathroom I wash my hands five or six times. I don’t want to think about what I just touched, the queasy intimacy of it. I wonder if that happens to Evan in his rummaging through people’s garbage, if he puts his hands on used tampons, dirty diapers, wet pieces of dental floss that cling to his fingers like cobwebs, and if, when he does, he shrugs it off as part of the job and goes on digging.

  I dry my hands on one of Allison’s towels. Reaching for the doorknob, I hesitate. I go back and wash my hands again, my fingers turning a faint red from the hot water, and then I wipe them on my shirt. I’m thinking about my options. I could confront Angela with this evidence and ask her again who Allison’s lover was. I could take it to the police. Surely they’d want to analyze it, compare whatever they found to the result of the rape kit. To do that, though, I’d have to touch it again. I look at myself in the mirror. I look harried and pale. My mouth is dry from smoking. I put two fingers to the pulse in my neck and feel how quickly my heart is beating.

  I go to the door of the bedroom and listen for Angela. I can hear her moving around in the living room, picking things up and setting them down, talking to herself in a low, bewildered murmur. Satisfied that she’s not about to catch me rifling the room, I start with the desk by the window.

  A “to do” list, dated the day of her death. Get groceries is at the top of it, and then a list of other things she’ll never do: Mail demos. Call Grandma. Return videos. Allison had that curlicue handwriting girls perfect in elementary school. My handwriting used to look like that too, before I grew up.

  Underneath the list is a letter from someone at a record company, saying he found her demo tape “promising” and that he would like to hear more. David might have written her a similar letter; his address could be somewhere in her desk, one more possibility for a future of lights and smoke and crowds. In the moments before she died, I wonder if she thought about all these things she would leave unaccomplished, or if the pain and terror drove everything else from her mind.

  The top right drawer is a jumble of letters and postcards, birthday cards from Allison’s mother—To a Special Daughter. I pick up a postcard of Memphis at night, lights shimmering in the dark river below. I turn it over “Allison,” it says, in careful childish print, “I hate the Boy Scouts. Today they made me eat powdered eggs. I miss you. It makes my stomach hurt. Your brother, Peter.”

  I set that on the desk and keep looking.

  A letter from Carl, dated last October. “You are the most precious person to me. Why are you building a wall between us? You say I seem like a completely different person, but you go out of your way to treat me like I’m not the Carl you’ve always known. Don’t shut me out. If you love me like a friend, like you said, then I can handle that. As long as you love me. Please, Allison.”

  A piece of paper folded into a tiny rectangle with a pull tab, the way we used to fold notes in high school. “PRIVATE!!!,” it says. “DO NOT READ.” I open it. It’s from Angela. “A, I don’t know what to do about Bryant. Help. Tell me what to do. A.”

  Two sentences on the back of a receipt. “Where are you? I’m out looking for you. R.”

  I look at these letters and notes, spread out across the desk. I miss you. Tell me what to do. Where are you? Love me. Please. I imagine them, still writing these letters, putting them in a drawer because there’s no one to read them now. All these people adrift without her, like planets that once circled a star.

  • • •

  I take a quick glance in the closet, running my hand down the long row of brightly colored shirts and dresses, silk and cotton and slick polyester. I hold one of her dresses up to myself. The skirt wouldn’t even reach halfway down my thighs. The shiny black material gives off a faint odor of smoke and sweat. Strange that I can still smell her, days after she has gone.

  Hanging up the dress, I move on to the bureau. I’m hurrying now, thinking Angela’s going to wonder what I’ve been doing in here so long. I open the drawer where Angela found the sweater and run my hands over the cotton and wool and linen jumbled inside. The angora is soft beneath my hand. I shove that drawer closed and open the one above it. Allison Avery was one of those girls who wear matching bra and panty sets. The drawer is a mess of lacy pink and purple and red things. I pick up a black satin bra and put my fist in one of the cups. Then I realize what I’m doing and drop it back in the drawer. I wonder what color set she was wearing the night she died, if the panties the killer kept look like any of these.

  What am I going to do with all this, the matching underwear, the letters, the condom, the detritus of this girl’s life. I sit on the bed, imagining the girl’s mother discovering the bag of dope in the refrigerator, the condom in the trash, confronted with this fact of life none of us can
get used to, that everyone we know has a world we can’t enter.

  I run my hand across the smooth wood of her headboard. Some instinct makes me rise up on my knees to peer down into the space between the headboard and the wall. Sure enough, there’s something wedged there. By forcing my arm down until it feels like my shoulder is going to wrench out of the socket, I’m able to reach it, sliding it up the wall until I can hold it in both my hands.

  It’s a rectangular box, about six inches long, and the lid is painted with a silvery-blue fish. I open it.

  A large metal spoon. Another needle. A tiny foil package, which, unwrapped, reveals a white pellet, about the size of an aspirin.

  I close the foil back around the pellet. Then I close the lid and stand for a moment weighing the box in my hand.

  Angela calls my name. “Coming,” I shout back. I wedge the box back into that space and leave it there. When I find Angela in the kitchen, she hands me another joint and leans forward to light it for me.

  We are sitting on the floor in the living room, near the stereo. Being stoned makes everything around me look sharp and bright, and I feel I’m coming close to understanding something. Maybe the girl’s death had nothing to do with Carl or the condom in that trash can and everything to do with that box and the needle inside my pocket. Maybe she did know the people who killed her. Maybe they sold her drugs. I touch the needle through the fabric of my pants. Right here in my pocket I could have the explanation for everything.

  “Listen,” Angela says. She pops a tape in the cassette player and hits play. There is a click and a whirring sound, and then a female voice says, “April 24, 1997.” Her voice is husky, lightly flavored with a southern accent. I hear an intake of breath, and then she begins to sing, a John Prine song called “The Speed of the Sound of Loneliness.” I try to imagine what Angela is feeling right now, as the disembodied voice fills the room. A cough cuts short the last note. “Ah shit,” the voice says. There is a loud click, and then the whirring again. Angela removes the tape and holds it in her hand. She strokes the tape with one finger as though the plastic were the dead girl’s skin. Then she folds in on herself. Her back shakes with sobs. She barely makes a sound, rapid breathing, a gasp, an almost inaudible moan.

  There is not a foot between us but I don’t reach to touch her. One thing I know is how to hold myself apart. I know how to absorb another’s life until it’s as familiar as my own and when the story is over I know how to put that life away with my clip file. What I don’t know is how to feel what she feels, the hot unbearable rush of it.

  I watch, as always. Then I reach out and pull her to me. With my arms around her I rock us back and forth. Her tears are hot and wet against my neck. “Allison,” she says. “Allison.”

  On the way to work I stop for coffee and a doughnut. I’m taking deep breaths, blowing out hard as though I could expel the dope from my system with the air from my lungs. I’ll just spend the morning at my desk until the high wears off.

  Walking through the newsroom, I keep telling myself no one knows, no one is staring at me. When I checked my eyes in the rearview mirror they were big as ever and clear of any red. “Good morning,” Evan says when I sit at my desk.

  “Good morning,” I say brightly. “How are you?”

  “Tired,” he says, and yawns to demonstrate. “I was here late last night finishing up my story.”

  “Which story?” I pick up today’s paper and scan the front page.

  “That story,” he says, pointing. “Haven’t you seen the paper yet?” I read the headline: SUSPECT INVOLVED IN CULT ACTIVITIES, NEIGHBORS SAY. Evan says, “The Satanist kid who killed that ten-year-old. Allegedly killed.”

  I skim the story. A plastic skull in his locker. The witchcraft magazine Evan found in his trash. An upside-down cross a teacher thinks she remembers him wearing on a chain around his neck. “Well,” I say. “I guess he did it.”

  “Are you being sarcastic?” Evan taps his pen on my hand.

  “No,” I say. “He probably did do it.”

  “These things add up,” he says. “They might seem small, by themselves. But two and two equals four, you know. It always does.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” I say. “I believe it.”

  After Evan turns back to his computer I pull the needle from my pocket and study it, holding it out of sight beneath my desk. I grab a notebook and write: Heroin. Where did she get it? Who did she do it with? I don’t imagine she had a solitary habit. Someone had to introduce her to the drug. Someone had to sell it to her. I think of Carl, telling me Allison Avery lived dangerously. There are only so many ways to live dangerously if you’re a middle-class girl. I write them down: 1. Sex. 2. Alcohol. 3. Drugs. “Whatcha got there?” I hear Evan say.

  I turn and see him leaning over his desk, peering under mine. “Doing a story on me now?”

  He winks. “Better be careful what you put in your trash.”

  “I’ve got nothing to hide,” I say, curling the needle inside my palm. I don’t want him to see it. It’s my story, my secret for now.

  He sinks back down in his chair. “Seriously, what’s in your hand?”

  “Nothing,” I say. I drop the needle on the floor and hold up my hand, “See?”

  He studies my face. His eyes are a warm brown, and he has the long eyelashes mascara is supposed to give you. “What’s wrong?” he asks me.

  “Nothing.” I’m fighting an urge to put two fingers to the pulse in my neck, my heart beating double-time with marijuana and caffeine. “What makes you think something’s wrong?”

  “I know you, Olivia,” he says. “You’re not yourself. Is it this story? Is it getting to you?”

  I meet his gaze, looking right into those pretty eyes. For a moment I know how good it would feel to curl up inside his arms and let him rock me until I fell asleep, nowhere safer than in his embrace. I look away. “Evan, I’m fine,” I say. “Nothing gets to me. I’m one tough bitch, remember?” As I say it, I believe it. A feeling passes through me, almost like elation. I say, “I can handle anything,” and grin at him until he smiles back, relieved.

  • • •

  I spend the rest of the morning in the paper’s library, looking at clippings on heroin use in the city. The library is shelf upon shelf of boxes filled with envelopes filled with cut-out articles. My fingertips turn black as I go through them. The clippings are flimsy between my fingers, their brittle paper easily torn. I learn that heroin is now so pure it can be snorted or smoked, that the emerging junkie demographic is young, twenty-something hipsters, often from middle-or upper-class backgrounds, that heroin-related arrests in the city are on the rise. I get this last piece of information from an article on crime statistics with my byline above it. I sit staring at the letters spelling out my name. I have no recollection of writing this, no memory of making the phone call to Lieutenant Nash, who’s quoted here. I look up at all the shelves of boxes and think how many other stories I must have forgotten, how many facts and opinions have passed through me and out into the world, gone now, as if I had never known them at all.

  I put the clipping away and lift another one from its envelope. It’s a story by Peggy, about three years old, on drug use among middle-class kids. I skim it. Most of the kids Peggy quoted were using pot and cocaine. There are a few quotes from a junkie named Paula, who says she grew up in a normal family, making A’s in math and science, before she found heroin. “Even though it’s screwed up my life,” she says, “nothing is better than getting high. It’s the best feeling in the world.”

  Carefully I fold the clipping along its creases and put it back in the envelope. I’m having visions of dark houses with bad green carpeting, Allison Avery passed out on the floor. In Peggy’s article, Paula says she knows about thirty users. There can’t be too many sources for heroin in this city. Maybe Peggy can put me in touch with Paula, with someone who can tell me about what Allison Avery was putting in her veins.

  Back in the newsroom, I see Peggy walk
ing in my direction, reading something and frowning. I stop her and ask if I can talk to her about an old story.

  She leans in toward me, still frowning. “You’ve got newsprint all over your face. Hold still.” She takes a tissue out of her pocket and wipes the side of my nose. “Hazard of the job,” she says, and laughs. Then she turns back to the papers in her hand and starts walking.

  “Peggy,” I say to her back. “Can I talk to you about this? It’s important.”

  “Catch me later, kid,” she says. “I’ve got a meeting.”

  When I get back to my desk, I remember the needle and bend down to retrieve it. It’s not there. I straighten up so fast I crack my head on the desk, and I’m sitting there cursing, pressing my hand to the bump forming on my head when I notice the needle off to the side, next to my trash can. I must have kicked it over there when I got out of my chair. I take a quick glance around. Evan is gone. Everyone else is on the phone or frowning at their computer screens, fingers flying over the keyboards. I grab the needle and drop it inside my bag.

  I call my house to check my messages, wondering if Carl has called, if Peter has called. My head aches. I count four rings and then a woman answers. “Hannah?” I say, though it doesn’t sound like her voice. The person hangs up, so I dial again.

  “Hello?” the same woman says. Hannah sometimes brings a co-worker home for lunch. I rack my brain for the woman’s name.

  “Hi, is this Alice?”

  “Who?”

  “Sorry,” I say, thinking that’s the wrong name. “Is Hannah there?”

  “Who?” she says.

  “I must have the wrong number.”

  “Okay,” she says.

  I dial again.

  “Hello?” It’s the same voice.

  “Is this 555-5999?”

  “Uh . . . hold on,” she says. There’s a silence. “I don’t know. The number’s not on the phone. Who are you looking for?”

  “Hannah.”

  “She’s not here, but you can come over if you want,” the woman says.