Body of a Girl

by Leah Stewart

  I walk in the bedroom and stop, clutching at the doorknob. Someone has cleaned it, just like the other rooms, but someone else has come after them and rifled through it. The dresser drawers are wedged open with bright pieces of fabric, as though the person were in too much of a hurry to fit the clothes back in. The bedclothes are rumpled, the mattress slightly askew, and a box of trinkets protrudes from underneath the bed. The wastebasket is empty. The papers on the desk have obviously been shifted since they were first stacked. The searcher didn’t line them up properly before putting them back down. I don’t know who it was—maybe the cops. Maybe Angela, Peter, Russell, or someone else, looking for some remembrance of Allison, looking for evidence of her misdeeds or theirs.

  I check behind the headboard for the box. It’s untouched. I pull it out and open it, touching the spoon, the needle, the foil with my fingertip. Then I close it and drop it inside my bag.

  In the living room I find the videotapes stacked against the wall beside the television. Someone has put them in order, one through eleven. I run my finger down the stack. Two are missing. Five, the one I took, and nine. For a moment there is nothing I want more in the world than to know what is on that tape. I take number one off the top and put it in the VCR. For the next hour I sit watching tape after tape, the moments jumbling together in my mind.

  Allison, wearing the pink wig and a short black dress, singing. She throws her head back and opens her arms wide to make room for the last enormous note, and then when she lifts her head again I can see it in her eyes, the triumph, the way her body tingles with the knowledge of her own power.

  Allison and Angela sitting at the kitchen counter, smoking a joint and talking, with the long pauses and low voices of the very stoned. “I just have to be myself,” Allison is saying. “I don’t know how to be anything else.”

  Allison, onstage, beating out a rhythm with her hand on her guitar.

  Allison, running her fingers through her hair.

  Allison, laughing.

  Allison. Allison. Allison.

  The camera zooms in on Peter’s face. He rolls his eyes, then puts a cigarette in his mouth and leans forward to light it.

  Allison’s voice says, “This is my baby brother, Peter. Isn’t he adorable?” Peter’s face fills the frame. He crosses his eyes and sticks out his tongue.

  The camera shakes with Allison’s laughter. “I’m teaching Peter to dance,” her voice says. The picture bobbles as she sets the camera on the tripod and then she appears in the frame, holding out her hand to Peter. Peter shakes his head. “Come on,” she says. “If you’re going to the prom, you have to learn to dance.”

  “I do not,” he says. “People don’t dance this way at the prom.”

  “Come on,” she says. “It’ll be fun.”

  Peter sighs, and puts his hand in hers. I watch them dance, Allison leading, Allison singing, dee da da dee da da as they spin around the room. Peter joins in. Dee da da dee da da. They start spinning faster and faster, a blur of dark hair and smiling faces, until finally Allison collapses laughing on the couch, saying he’s worn her out. He stands grinning at the camera. Then he holds out his hand to her. “One more dance?” he says.

  She shakes her head.

  “Please?” he says.

  “All right,” she says, and bounds up and into his arms. I watch them dance. I look at her hands clasped behind his neck, his hands on the small of her back. I see the way he’s looking at her, and I know what it means. Russell was right. He whirls her around, and when they come to a stop he keeps on holding her. She laughs, and tries to step away, but he just tightens his arms around her waist. “Let go,” she says, still laughing. She beats lightly on his shoulders with her fists. “Let me go, little brother.”

  He shakes his head and says nothing.

  “Come on, Peter.” She’s not laughing anymore. “Let go of me. I know you’re stronger than me. It’s not funny.”

  He still doesn’t speak, a strange smile frozen on his face. Allison begins to push as hard as she can against his shoulders. “Goddamnit,” she says, breathing faster now with the effort. “Let go!” She throws all of her weight against the arms around her waist and in that moment he lets go of her and she stumbles back against the couch. I can’t see her face anymore, just her torso and her thighs. “Jesus,” she says. “Grow up.”

  Peter is still in the frame. He says nothing. A slow flush creeps up his neck and into his face, and he turns away like he’s ashamed to look at her. “What is wrong with you?” she says, moving out of the frame so no part of her is visible anymore. Then the camera shuts off.

  I sit for a moment watching the static on the screen. Whether he admitted it to himself I don’t know, the desire that drove him to hold her like that. I don’t know if now his sorrow is shaded with guilt. I don’t know if the faint resemblance between me and that dead girl explains why he let me hold his hand at the funeral, why he kissed me that first night in the car.

  There’s one thing I do know.

  I’m jealous.

  I find Evan eating his lunch in front of the twelve o’clock news. When I walk in, Lydia McKenzie is promising surprising new developments in the Allison Avery murder case. “She’s a little late, don’t you think?” Evan nods at her serious face, his mouth full of sandwich.

  “Unless they’ve got something else.” A sick feeling rises in my stomach.

  “What could they have that you don’t have?” He pushes a bag of chips toward me.

  “Nothing.” I take a chip. “Sorry your story got bumped.”

  He shrugs. “Bishop wants us to go out with him after work.” He glances at me, then looks back at the television. “To celebrate your big stories.”

  I watch him, trying to read in his face whether he’s angry or jealous or mocking. His tone was neutral.

  “It’s coming on,” he says.

  We watch as one of the correspondents stands in front of 201 Poplar and relates the things everyone has already read in the paper. Cut to the Averys exiting the police station. Dr. Avery stops. A slight breeze lifts her blond hair away from her head like wings. Around her the shouted questions intensify. She calmly says, “I’ve given my statement to Olivia Dale. You can read it in the newspaper. That’s all I’m going to say.”

  “Wow,” Evan says, as we watch her walk away. “You’re really the anointed one.”

  “Strange isn’t it,” I say. On-screen the correspondent’s lines are almost word for word from the article I wrote. “She has a way of making me feel like we’re in league together.”

  “For what?” Evan asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I’m trying to figure that out.”

  I find Dr. Gregerson standing in the hall outside his office, hands in his pockets. His mouth open a little, he’s staring at nothing, and for a few moments I don’t register in his view. Then he blinks, straightens up, and says, “Miss Dale? How can I help you?”

  We sit in an exam room, the tools for a pelvic laid out on the table beside us. He tells me what he’s already told the police, that Allison could somehow have gotten the keys to the med cart and stolen the morphine herself. Or Allison could have persuaded one of the nurses to do it for her. “We’re forced to give everyone a lie detector test now,” he says. “It’s a real shame.”

  I think of Angela. She must top the list of suspects. I hope she passes that test.

  The doctor says he never saw any signs that Allison was using. He says that it never occurred to him to wonder. Then he asks me, “If you already know all this, why hasn’t it been in the paper?”

  “I’ve had it in bits and pieces,” I say vaguely. “I’m waiting.”

  He nods as though that makes sense. “I hope there’s an explanation.”

  “So do I,” I say.

  Out in the hall, I put my notebook in my bag and shake his hand. Then I frown, as though a thought has just occurred to me. “Doctor,” I say, “were you and Allison ever involved?”

  He blanches
. “What kind of question is that?”

  “I’m sorry.” I turn to go.

  He touches my arm. “No,” he says. “But I was very . . .” He searches for the word. “I was very fond . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” I say again.

  When I was younger, scraggly-haired strangers with tattoos came to our church youth group to tell us they had had wild sex and done drugs and now they were reborn and sorry and here to tell us to keep going straight and true, take a bypass around that city of sin. They had done those things, though, tasted sin and survived to set it aside, and didn’t that make them some kind of heroes?

  If Allison Avery had lived, some day she might have had a husband who grinned when he said to the children, “Your mama had a wild youth.” And she would have smiled and kept her secrets. But she died, and so in one version of her story she is stupid and reckless, she is a warning, a bad example.

  I haven’t written that version, and this is what I could have answered when the doctor asked me why.

  This is America, land of rebels, land of puritans, land of hypocrites. I print that she did drugs, and Allison Avery is a bad girl come to a bad end.

  I don’t, and she stays what she is now. The perfect victim.

  Bishop and Evan and I walk three abreast up the sidewalk to the M&O. I’m in the middle, my arms linked with theirs, and we’re laughing. Bishop keeps calling me his “little girl,” talking about how far I’ve come since the days when it made me nervous to approach somebody on the street with a question. At one point he bursts into a chorus of “Sunrise, Sunset.”

  Inside they insist on buying me a beer, and then Evan proposes a toast to the overpass, and then we toast Bryce for being so willing to let go of my hand. For the next two hours I rehearse my stories, my reaction to the break-in, my roll down the hill, my trip with Russell to the police station. I let them admire me. I don’t tell them about swinging off the Averys’ deck on a tree branch, Peter’s arm around my waist. I don’t tell them I’m thinking about going to the Lizard Lounge to talk to the people who might have known Allison, who sold her drugs or know who did.

  When we say good night outside, Bishop hugs me and kisses me on the cheek. “You’re a damn fine reporter,” he says, his eyes a little misty. “I’m very proud.”

  Over his shoulder Evan rolls his eyes and grins. “Me too,” he says. I hug him. “Just don’t break your neck,” he says, his breath warm against my ear.

  I head back to my car, twirling my key chain on my finger and humming to myself. I’m as awake as if I had consumed an entire pot of coffee, my head buzzing and my cheeks flushed. I feel like I’m about to burst out of my skin. “Allison, Allison,” I say under my breath. I’m going to go back to that bar, and maybe the people there will tell me what turn in her life took her to the place where I first saw her.

  I’ll tell them I’m looking for the best feeling in the world, and see what I can find.

  Before I get out of the car I glance at myself in the mirror. My own face shocks me, it’s so at odds with the way I feel. I look haggard—pale and plain. There are dark circles under my eyes, and my hair is limp against my cheek. In my button-down shirt and knee-length skirt I look nothing like the sort of girl a guy would walk up to in a bar. I look nothing like Allison Avery.

  I dump my bag out on the passenger seat. The pink wig is a splash of brilliant color against the beige upholstery. I pick it up and turn it over, running my fingers over the slick strands. Then I put the wig on, looking in the rearview mirror to adjust it on my head. I open one more button on my shirt and pull off my dark panty hose. In my bag I find a never-opened tube of red lipstick. I run it over my lips, paint my lashes with mascara. “Hello,” I say to the unfamiliar girl in the mirror.

  Inside the bar it’s almost as dark as outside, and I stand in the doorway for a minute while my eyes adjust. Cigarette smoke sits in the air. I glance into the side room, where the pool table is. A guy with long hair tucked behind his ears is lining up a shot. His opponent stands with his hands folded around the top of the cue. I can see how thick the muscles of his arms are beneath his skin. He glances at me and lets his gaze linger, looking at the wig. Immediately I duck my head and look away. Then I force myself to stand up straight, to turn and look right back at him. He’s not watching me anymore. He’s watching the other guy sink a perfect shot.

  There’s no band tonight and the place is not crowded. A couple sits at the bar, a group of college-age guys in baseball caps spills out from two tables. As I walk past them I watch them from the corner of my eye. They’re drinking beer, smoking Marlboros, and paying no attention to me. One of them tells a dirty joke and the rest laugh uproariously, smacking the table with their open palms.

  At the bar I swing myself onto a stool and order a bourbon on the rocks. With the cold drink in my hand I turn from side to side. A big-haired girl sits at the side of the bar next to a boy whose curly hair is damp against the back of his neck. He leans in close to her and she laughs, spluttering into her beer. He puts his hand on her shoulder. Her whole body inclines toward him, her eyes raised to his.

  Behind the bar the bartender washes glasses, his face set and businesslike. “Excuse me,” I say, leaning on the bar. He comes toward me, wiping his hands on a rag. “Can I get you something else?” he says.

  “Actually,” I say, “I was just wondering if you knew Allison Avery.”

  “Allison Avery,” he repeats, slowly. “Sounds familiar. What’s she look like?”

  “She’s about my height,” I say. “Dark hair. She might’ve worn a wig like this one.”

  For a moment he stares at me. Then he says, “I think I know who you mean. Singer, right? Real sexy voice?”

  “That’s her. Does she come here much?”

  “Look.” He lowers his voice. “Maybe you don’t know this. She’s dead.” He takes my silence as shock and says, “I’m sorry. It’s been all over the news.”

  I lower my voice to a conspiratorial murmur. “I know she’s dead. I’m looking into it.”

  He raises his eyebrows. “You a cop?” He sounds skeptical.

  I look at him, saying nothing. “Can you just tell me if anyone else in here would know her?”

  Studying the faces, he says he’s not sure. “I don’t think she’s friends with any of these guys,” he says. “They might know who she is.”

  I thank him and he goes back to washing glasses. I turn on my stool and lean back on the bar with my elbows, scanning the room. The stage is empty except for a tall stool and a microphone stand. She could have been there, propped on the stool, laughing into the microphone she held close to her lips. I look at the guys playing pool, the guys getting louder and louder at the table. Any of them could have sold her drugs. Maybe the long-haired guy leaning down to sink the eight ball had a crush on her and she turned him down. Maybe his friend thought she was a rich girl and he could scare her into paying him more, came up behind her and wrapped that big bicep around her throat. Maybe he knocked her to the ground with one of those powerful hands. The guys laughing at the table look like harmless college kids. They could have meant to play a prank on her. She could have gotten frightened and scratched one of them, and he hit her, and the whole thing turned on that moment, a second blow following that first the way one drink leads to another. As I watch them now they urge each other on, one of them shouting, “One more round!”

  Even the couple at the bar could be the ones. Out of the corner of my eye I watch them come together to kiss, opening their mouths wide, his hand sliding up her side to the curve of her breast.

  “You look kinda familiar,” a male voice says. “Do I know you?”

  I turn to see the man from the pool table beside me, one of his thick arms resting on the bar. He has small eyes under bushy black eyebrows, a nose that looks like it’s been broken. “Maybe,” I say. “You might.” I take a sip of my drink. The bourbon is warm in my throat.

  “I think I do,” he says. “I think I’ve seen you here befor
e.” He snaps his fingers and points one at me. “I danced with you once.”

  I look him up and down. It’s dark in here and the wig hangs over my eyes. I think it’s the wig he recognizes, that he danced with Allison, held her close. He might be the one who knows. “That’s right,” I say.

  “I’m Vance,” he says. “I like that wig. It’s different.”

  “Thanks,” I say. I set my glass down on the bar, letting my fingers hover just above his arm. “I remember those biceps,” I say.

  He grins and flexes his arm for me. The muscle pops out obediently. “Go ahead and touch it,” he says. “Girls always want to.”

  I lift my hand and run my fingers along the muscle. It’s firm, and his skin is taut and warm. It doesn’t give beneath the pressure from my fingers. I wrap my whole hand around it and squeeze.

  “Hard as a rock,” he says, and I let go. He raises his hand to signal the bartender. “Can I get you another drink?”

  “I was hoping for something a little stronger.” I raise my eyebrows and smile at him.

  “Ah,” he says, nodding. “I know just what you mean.” He leans in close and lowers his voice. “Let’s take a trip to the parking lot,” he says. “I’ve got just the thing in my truck.”

  As we walk through the bar, past the college boys, he puts his hand in the small of my back. “Jerome,” he says to his buddy, who’s playing pool with one of the boys now. “I’ll be right back.” Jerome lifts his head, looks me up and down, and grins. “Sure you will,” he says.

  He drives a truck with an oversized cab, jacked up on huge tires. He walks with me around to the passenger side and holds the door open for me. I stare up at the black leather seat, thinking maybe this isn’t such a good idea. “Go on,” he says. “Climb in.”