Body of a Girl

by Leah Stewart

  “Who is this?” I ask.

  “Who is this?” she says.

  “This is Hannah’s roommate.”

  “Oh shit,” the woman says, and drops the phone. I hear her shout something, then there’s a crash, followed by a click and a dial tone.

  I pick up the phone to call the police, then hang it up again. It occurs to me that our neighbor Denise could be in our side of the house. Or she might have heard something. So I dial her number instead.

  “What are you talking about?” she says. “You know I don’t have a key. No way was I in your side of the house.”

  “Have you noticed anything?”

  “Everything seems peaceful,” she says. “Maybe you dialed the wrong number.”

  “I know my own number.”

  “Well maybe the wires got crossed,” she says. “These things do happen.”

  I ask her to call me if she hears anything, and then I hang up. If I call the police and it was just a wrong number I’m going to feel like an idiot, like when I make a doctor’s appointment and complain of symptoms and the doctor says, “Can’t find anything wrong with you.” On the other hand I should know my own number. I dial it again. The answering machine picks up, and I listen to Hannah’s voice calmly saying that we’re not home. “Hello?” I say after the beep. “If anyone’s there you better leave because I’m calling the police. Do you hear me? I’m hanging up and calling the police right now.”

  I hang up, and stare at the phone. Then I call Hannah.

  “It probably was Denise, making long-distance calls on our phone or something,” Hannah says. “That woman’s crazy.”

  “That makes sense,” I say.

  “Think about it. Why would a burglar answer the phone? And why would Denise get so snippy about it if it wasn’t her? And, if it wasn’t her, wouldn’t she have heard people breaking in? We can hear her having sex and someone breaking our door down would surely be louder than that. You know what else? She lied—she does have a copy of our key. We traded keys a long time ago in case we ever locked ourselves out.”

  “I forgot about that,” I say.

  “Let’s check our phone bill for calls to Cookeville.”

  “Why Cookeville?”

  “That’s where she’s from.”

  “Who?”

  “Denise,” Hannah says. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I’m a little jumpy,” I say. “So you don’t think I should call the police?”

  “No,” Hannah says. “I’m sure it’s fine.”

  I don’t want to tell her that I’m scared, that I want to call the police. I don’t want to be a child imagining a bogeyman in the closet, screaming at nothing.

  Peggy appears at my desk and motions for me to hang up the phone. When I do, she says, “An abandoned building’s collapsed downtown. Get on it, kid.”

  I’m out the door in less than five minutes.

  I spend the afternoon studying rubble. The story runs front page, with color art of the building, caved in like something in a war zone. When I get home at six-thirty, all the lights are on, but Hannah’s car is not parked anywhere on the street. I sit in the car a few minutes, staring at the front door. It looks untouched. Maybe Denise left the lights on. Just to be sure, I walk around to the back. The storm door is hanging open, but that’s nothing unusual—it’s broken. I’m feeling silly for even worrying about this now, but when I get closer I can see that the main door is cracked open, and the light picks up broken glass all over the kitchen floor. “Fuck me,” I say.

  I bang the door open and jump to the side of it like someone in a cop show. I fumble in my bag for something heavy, cursing myself for not thinking of this before I opened the door. I grab and drop a roll of Tums, a pen, and my notebook before I find my makeup bag, heavy with lipstick and bottles of moisturizer. With this in my hand, I swing around the door, crouching low.

  Glass is all over the floor. The window on the kitchen door has been shattered and the lock is smashed. I step on a cockroach. It crunches horribly and I gasp, then clamp my hand over my mouth. Giant moths are flitting insanely around the kitchen light. It looks like a camping trip in here. I drop the bag on the table and grab an empty champagne bottle. The weight of it feels good in my hand.

  I ease down the hall toward the living room, sliding my back along the wall. There is no sound but the swishing of my shirt against the wall, the whisper of my breathing. I clutch the bottle with both hands. Soon I can see the television. The VCR is still on top of it. I step into the room, letting the bottle dangle at my side. I take a quick inventory—stereo, CDs, answering machine, telephone, Hannah’s computer. The living room looks undisturbed.

  I tiptoe back down the hall to the bathroom, even while I’m thinking, No, you idiot, don’t go in there, and with the bottle raised in my hand I whip back the shower curtain. Nothing. In the bedrooms, I peer under the beds, check the closets, my heart pounding inside my ears. Nobody.

  Then I sit on Hannah’s bed and stare at the wall, rolling the champagne bottle between my hands. The adrenaline is fading, and I’m stunned by my own stupidity. There could have been someone in here with a gun. There could have been a man waiting in the living room to rape me and beat me, turn me into a police photograph Sergeant Morris would hand to Bishop in the morning.

  The front door slams shut, and I jump up. I consider hiding in the closet, and then I think that it could be Hannah. But I can’t call out, because if it isn’t her, I don’t want to give away where I am, so I stand out of sight just inside her door, with the champagne bottle raised, and when she walks in the room, she sees me and screams.

  I drop the bottle on the floor. “It’s just me,” I say.

  “What the hell,” Hannah says, breathing hard. “You gave me a heart attack.”

  “Someone broke in here. Go look in the kitchen.”

  I listen to her footsteps go down the hall, stop, and then come back. “What a mess,” she says. “Did you call the police yet?”

  While we wait for the police, I tell Hannah what I did when I got home. I can’t be still; I pace around the room while Hannah sits on the couch. Caught up in my own story I’m starting to believe I could have handled it. If I’d found people here I would have knocked them out with the bottle, stood over them until the police arrived. “I felt like a Charlie’s Angel,” I say. “I didn’t stop to think. I was hardly even scared.”

  “But why did you take out your makeup bag?” Hannah says. “Wouldn’t it have made more sense to hit them with your whole bag?”

  I stare at her. “Jesus Christ, Hannah,” I say. “I’m a fucking idiot, okay?”

  “I just wondered,” she says.

  “Next time I’ll remember that.” I pretend to take notes. “Hit them with your whole bag.”

  “Fuck you,” she says.

  “No, fuck you,” I say. Then to my embarrassment I burst into tears.

  “My hero,” she says, but nicely.

  “Shut up,” I say. “Don’t you ever shut up?”

  She stands up and puts her arms around me. “You were very brave,” she says. “I mean it.”

  At first we thought nothing was missing. They went through my jewelry box and tossed things aside—real pearl earrings, savings bonds, my passport—but took none of them. Then we realized they’d taken a gold necklace of mine, some earrings of Hannah’s, a case full of my mixed tapes and an old Walkman, two pairs of cheap sunglasses and some loose change that was on Hannah’s dresser. They also took a bag of shake from Hannah’s room. We didn’t tell the cops about that. “Probably high school kids or junkies,” one of the cops said. “Looking for quick cash, stuff they could stick in their pockets. It was probably an impulse break-in, too stupid or too high to plan it better. You said they answered your phone?”

  “You got lucky,” the other one said, looking around at our TV, our VCR. “You got the stupidest burglars in the state of Tennessee.”

  After the cops left I called David, and he came right
over. Now he’s fast asleep on his side, facing away from me. With one finger I write my name on his back. I’ve been awake half the night, thinking about what was on those mixed tapes, especially a particular one I made in college. I don’t think I can re-create it. I know it was the greatest mixed tape I’ve ever made, but even so I can remember only half of the songs. To make the tape I borrowed some CDs from my roommates, and the sad fact is I don’t even like those people anymore.

  I get out of bed and go through my bag looking for the needle I found at Allison’s. Sitting on the edge of the bed, holding the needle in one hand, I watch David sleep. I take the cap off and press the point of it with one finger, gently, not enough to break the skin. David rolls over toward me, murmuring something, and in that moment I accidentally press too hard. A drop of blood bubbles out. I rub it round and round between my finger and my thumb. I don’t know what any of this means.

  I’m going to find out.

  11

  In the morning David leaves before I’m fully awake, heading home to shower and let out the dog. He says in passing that he’s going to call Allison’s parents today, and I tell him not to say he knows me.

  “Why not?” he asks, pausing at my bedroom door.

  “I’m a reporter,” I say. “They don’t like me.”

  He nods. “I’ll just say she sent me a tape.” Then he’s gone, a man with a mission.

  Hannah calls our landlord to tell him he’ll have to fix the back door, and I go into the kitchen to see what’s left of the monster bugs. I spot some moths high up on the wall, near the ceiling, and my impulse is just to let them be, but I make myself climb up on the counter to catch them in my hands, one by one, so I can let them go outside. If I think too hard about their little wings beating against my palms it makes me shudder but as long as I keep my mind on the job I’m fine. I’m listening to the murmur of Hannah’s voice in the other room, the gentle rhythm of the southern accent I almost never notice anymore. She laughs. I’ve known her so long, I could recognize her just by that sound.

  Hannah comes in and watches me, leaning against the opposite counter. I’m trying to catch the last moth in my palm, it keeps fluttering away, and having an audience is making the muscles in my back tense up.

  “Oooh, almost,” Hannah says as I miss the moth again.

  “What do you want, Hannah?” I say.

  “Rude,” she says, and crosses her arms across her chest.

  “Sorry,” I say. “This is frustrating.” I get a wing between my thumb and forefinger. The moth flaps furiously, in a panic, and I’m trying as best I can to cup it gently in my hand without pulling its wing off.

  “You got it,” she says. I hold the moth between my hands and step backward, carefully, off the counter and onto a chair. Hannah opens the door for me and I open my hands to let the moth go. It just sits in my palm. “Go on,” I say, shaking my hand out the door. It holds on. Finally I toss up my hand like I’m serving a tennis ball and the moth flies away.

  “It liked you,” Hannah says, and laughs.

  I brush my hands together. “I wasn’t so crazy about it.” With the glass off the floor and the bugs gone, the kitchen almost looks normal. Hannah follows me out and down the hall into my bedroom. She sits in my desk chair and watches while I get dressed. She says, “What are you doing tonight?”

  “I’ll probably have a drink with the guys after work,” I say, pulling my shirt over my head.

  “Want to do something after that? I feel like I’ve hardly seen you lately.”

  “Sure,” I say. “I’ll call you.”

  She smiles at me and stands up. “Good,” she says. At the door she pauses, holding on to the door frame. “Listen, you really were brave yesterday. I was impressed.”

  I pull a pair of pants off a hanger. “Thanks,” I say, but she’s already gone.

  In the newsroom I’m a celebrity, everyone lingering at my desk to hear the story. After an hour, I’m making it funny, acting out the way I jumped to the side of the door, pretending that I brought my fingers up and together like a gun before I rotated into the room. Peggy laughs and laughs, and then stops and looks serious. “Don’t do that again,” she says. “Next time call the police.”

  “Next time call me. I’ll come right over,” Bishop says. “I’ll rescue you.”

  “That’s okay. I’d rather be a Charlie’s Angel than a damsel in distress,” I say. “Next time I’ll just get a real gun.”

  “You’re not serious,” Peggy says.

  “Of course not,” I say, though I can imagine how that would feel, the cold weight of a gun in your hand. “Anyway, I’m hoping there won’t be a next time.”

  “Amen to that,” Bishop says. He puts his hand on my shoulder and squeezes it before he ambles away.

  “I’m glad you’re okay,” Peggy says. “Be more careful next time, okay, kid?” She grins. “I mean, there won’t be a next time. Just be more careful.”

  As she turns to go, I remember the story I wanted to ask her about. “Wait, Peggy,” I say. “I want to talk to you about a story you did on drug use.”

  She laughs. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

  “It was about three years ago. You talked to a junkie named Paula.”

  She frowns, and when she speaks her voice is chilly. “What about it?”

  “I was wondering if you could put me in touch with Paula, or if you know of any other sources. I’m looking for some background on heroin use in the city.” The whole time I’m talking, Peggy’s shaking her head.

  “That was a while ago,” she says. “I don’t think I can help you. That culture, it changes by the minute.”

  “Anything you could tell me would be more than I’ve got now,” I say. “It’s important.”

  She sighs and leans forward against my desk. “There’s a bar called the Lizard Lounge. That’s where Paula made her connections.”

  That’s where Allison Avery was supposed to be the night she died. I write Lizard Lounge in my notebook. “I know the place,” I say. “Thanks a lot.”

  She looks at me and nods slowly, not saying anything, a faint hint of a frown between her eyes. After she goes back to her desk, I sit and try to make notes. AA was a junkie? Why wouldn’t Angela know? I chew on my pen for a minute, then write: Why doesn’t P want to talk about it? The whole time I just keep thinking, Next time, next time, next time. I look at the page and see I’ve written that down. Next time. I drop my hands hard on the desk and push myself up. My chair rolls back, clattering into Evan’s desk. The impact sends a stack of papers sliding. I stand perfectly still, realizing that everyone in the newsroom has turned to look at me. For a moment, I am at the center of a waiting silence, the eyes of all these curious people on me, watching, judging. Then I hear voices and the clicking of keyboards and I let out my breath.

  Peggy is beside me. “Are you okay?” she says, her voice low with motherly concern.

  I look around. Evan immediately begins gathering his papers. Bishop catches my eye and looks away.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “Why?”

  “No reason,” Peggy says.

  “I’m fine,” I say again, laughing a little. “I’m just going to the bathroom. I didn’t mean to be so loud.”

  “Okay,” she says, nodding at me. “Okay.”

  In the bathroom I lean in close to the mirror and look myself in the eye. I hold my gaze steady. Once again, I have newsprint on my face. I wet a paper towel and wipe it off.

  Outside it’s raining, beating faster and harder against the roof. I’m glad I’m in here, where it’s cool and dry and nothing can touch me.

  At lunchtime I head home for an hour, telling Evan that I just want to make sure no one’s having a party in my living room. I say it like I’m joking and he smiles. When I get home, I sit in the car for a few minutes, wishing I had one of David’s cigarettes. I’ve been smoking too much lately. It’s not raining anymore, and the street is quiet, the noon sun beating down on silent houses, toys aband
oned in patches of unmowed grass.

  I get out of the car and walk up to the house carefully, like it’s an animal I don’t want to startle. The front door is shut. I walk around to the back to see if the house looks secure. The screen door hangs open a little. I push it closed. It won’t stay so I find a rock to prop against it. I walk back around to the front door, grab the doorknob and turn. It’s locked. I throw my shoulder against the door. It doesn’t move.

  I step off the porch and cup my hands around my face to peer in the living room window. Nothing moves inside except the dust that floats in the sunlight. I pretend that I don’t know the people who live here, moving my gaze over their ratty furniture, their piles of clothes and books and magazines, the CDs scattered across the floor. These people are young and messy and careless, the whole living room like the jumbled inside of somebody’s junk drawer.

  A car passes by, slowly, and I turn. How strange I must look to the neighbors, standing in the bushes with my heels sinking into the mud, a voyeur outside my own home.

  Inside, I glance in all the rooms, holding my bag tight against my side. No one. In my own room, I peer into the corners of my closet. Nothing but a row of work clothes, suit jackets and blouses in muted colors. At the back I find a skimpy black cocktail dress I don’t even remember buying. I’ve never worn it, the price tag still attached.

  Under the bed there’s a jumble of newspaper and, back by the wall, a shoe I thought was missing. On the desk, more newspaper. When I open the drawers I find old notebooks, a postcard from David saying he likes Paris though his parents dragged him to the Eiffel Tower, a letter from my mother asking if I ever think about rejoining the church. I run my finger down the line of books on my shelves: college textbooks, a few novels, the AP style manual. If I were writing about the girl who lives in this room, I’d say she thinks about nothing but her work.

  I open my dresser drawers. In here the clothes are younger, brighter, tumbled together. Beneath a sweater I find my old pipe, a small gray one with the cold smooth feel of marble, a little ash still in the bowl. I turn it over in my hands. My mother, at least, would find this shocking, though I think if I were dead Hannah would get rid of it before my mother came to the apartment. If I were dead. I look around the room. What would be left in here to tell anyone who I was?