Body of a Girl

by Leah Stewart

  “I called the newspaper,” he says. “They said you were sick.” He touches my arm. “You look awful,” he says, his voice colored with shock and worry. I put a hand to my cheek. I am hot to the touch. I know how I must look, damp and feverish, my hair tangled and wet. “Can I come in?” he says. I step aside. He comes in and shuts the door and the room is dark again. “Were you sleeping?”

  I nod, leaning back against the wall. He shifts from foot to foot, looking around the room, the clothes draped over the couch, the magazines sliding off the coffee table onto the floor. “You’re just as messy as . . .,” he says, but doesn’t finish. He looks at me, biting his lip. I can’t think of a thing to say. For a moment we are frozen here, staring at each other, and then he lunges at me and pulls me into a hug, holding me so tightly that for a moment I can’t breathe, my face pressed against his chest. “I’m so sorry,” he says. One of us is shaking.

  He says that he wants to stay with me tonight, that he told his mother he was spending the night at a friend’s. Then he is whispering something, that he’s sorry, that he loves me, I think, and then he takes my face between his hands and kisses me, frantic, wet kisses on my forehead, my eyelids, my trembling mouth.

  “Wait, wait,” I say, taking my mouth from his.

  “What’s the matter?” he says.

  I shake my head. A flush is rising through my body and I am so hot I feel as if I might faint. I clap my hand to my mouth and run down the hall to the bathroom to be sick again.

  Afterwards I brush my teeth twice and stand in the shower under the cold water for five minutes. When I come out, tying my bathrobe tightly around me, Peter is waiting in the hall. “I’m so sorry,” he says. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”

  “It’s okay,” I say.

  “You’re shivering.” He rubs my arms with his hands. “You should be lying down.” He puts his arm around me and we go into my bedroom.

  We sit on the bed and he takes my hand. Cold water drips from my hair over my shoulders.

  “Are you mad at me?” he says. I look at him, his face lined with worry as he asks the question again. He seems at once much younger than me and much older. I don’t say anything. “I almost killed you,” he says, his voice breaking. “I don’t know what I would have done . . .”

  “Why did you want me to do it?” I ask him.

  “I thought that . . .” His voices trails away.

  “Tell me.”

  “I don’t know. I wanted you there.” He looks at me, his eyes filling with tears, and gives me that beautiful smile, just like the first time I saw him. “I wanted you with me.”

  “And Allison never did it?” I say. “Never once?”

  “I tried to get her to,” he says. “I told her it was the only way to really be in your body. Do you know what I mean? Sometimes everything seems gray to me, the people I know, school. Like my parents, just doing what they’re supposed to every day. Life shouldn’t be just day after day of doing your laundry, taking the car to the shop. It should be . . .” He looks up at the ceiling, searching for the right word. “It should be fierce.”

  “Why wouldn’t she do it?”

  “She said, all of that makes no difference if you die.” One corner of his mouth slides up, somewhere between a smile and a grimace. “And I said, ‘I’m going to die.’ ”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said, ‘And if you don’t?’ ”

  For a long moment he is silent. Then he says, “There’s something I haven’t told you.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” I say. I almost laugh.

  He says he’d been mainlining about two months when Allison found his stash and took it, then gave him the option of quitting or telling his parents. She stayed with him through the worst of the withdrawal, convincing his parents he had the flu. It was almost over when he woke up alone, overwhelmed with craving. When his sister came by after work to check on him, she found him headed out the door to Nate’s. When she couldn’t change his mind, she persuaded him to come back to her apartment with her, saying she would go get something to make it better.

  I watch him as he tells his story, feeling oddly distant from him, as though there is a pane of glass between us. It doesn’t quite make sense to me, why his sister would steal morphine for him, believing that it was better than heroin. He responds with impatience when I ask. “She was worried I would OD,” he says. “Because my tolerance was lower. She wanted to control the dosage.”

  “Why didn’t she give you the heroin?”

  “She wouldn’t have known how much to give me,” he says irritably. “And maybe she didn’t want me to know she still had it.”

  I nod, turning that over. “Did she give you the morphine?”

  He shakes his head. “I never saw her again. She took me up to her apartment and made a bed for me on the couch. She kissed me on the forehead and she said, ‘I’ll be right back.’ ”

  “But she wasn’t.”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I left. I just couldn’t stand it, the waiting, so I left and I went to Nate’s.” He finishes the story in a rush. “I’ve thought about this a lot. And I think when she got back to the apartment and I was gone she went racing out after me, in a panic, and that’s when they got her. That’s when they killed my sister. And then when she was in that trunk, alone and trapped, she must have known they were going to kill her. Maybe they told her they were going to rape her, maybe she could just tell.” He turns to me. “Think of it.”

  I’m shivering. “I have,” I say.

  “So she gave herself the morphine so there wouldn’t be any pain. And she couldn’t tell, in the dark, how much to use, so even if they hadn’t killed her, she’d be dead.” He takes both my hands in his and says very slowly, as though to be sure I don’t miss a word, “It’s all my fault. If I hadn’t told her I was going to Nate’s, if I had stayed in her apartment, she wouldn’t have been there when they came by. I was weak. I as good as killed her.” He shakes his head. “Nate wasn’t even there. I just went home.”

  It’s easy to believe it’s his fault. He’s right. He could have changed her path. I don’t say that. I say, “If she hadn’t taken a job at the doctor’s office, if she hadn’t gone home to check on you, if she hadn’t met Russell in college and been in a hurry to meet him, if she’d left ten minutes earlier or later . . . a thousand things took her to that moment. You can’t blame yourself.” It’s easy to believe that, too.

  He sobs, his shoulders shaking. I know he wants to believe me. I pull him toward me, so his head is on my breasts, and I rock us both from side to side. “I’ll never do it again, Olivia,” he whispers, “I swear.” He feels so fragile to me, his bones so close to the surface of his skin. I think about Allison Avery, how she would want me to hold her baby brother like this, to tell him it’s not his fault. I know her secrets, the dead girl, but that is not what I want to remember, the facts of her life stripped bare and laid on the page. I want to remember how she felt, how much she loved this boy. When he stops crying, I ease him back on the bed, and he closes his eyes as though to sleep. I curl into him, my head in the curve of his shoulder. I listen to the warm thudding of his heartbeat inside his chest. We begin to breathe in unison. I close my eyes.

  When I wake, one of us has rolled away. We are lying side by side on the bed, on our backs, Peter is still sleeping. I prop myself up and watch the gentle movement of his eyes beneath his lids, the flutter of his pulse inside his throat. I don’t want him anymore, but I do feel, in this moment, that I love him. He sighs and murmurs something I can’t understand. I would like to remember this forever, how it felt to be here now, the stillness of the room, the softness of his face in sleep.

  I am certain of one thing. It will not be like this again.

  20

  When Peter and I walk into the kitchen, Hannah is sitting at the table, eating a bowl of cereal. She raises her eyebrows. “Well, hello?” she says, making it a question. I say good morning a
nd introduce them. Then I pull out two bowls and some cereal boxes. Peter shifts nervously from foot to foot and says he’s not hungry. “Do you want some coffee?” I ask, then I see Hannah hasn’t made it yet.

  Peter says he’ll make some and busies himself with filters and grounds. I go outside to get the paper. As I leave the room I hear Hannah asking, “So how do you know Olivia?”

  On the porch I unfold the paper and look for the follow-up story on the front page. There it is, WITNESS HEARD SUSPECTS PLANNING ROBBERY, with Evan’s byline above the copy. I read the lead: “Samuel Peterson, 18, told police last night that he heard the suspects in the Avery slaying planning to steal a car and commit robbery,” and then I make myself stop and go back inside.

  When I walk back in, Hannah gives me the look I’m expecting, knowing, disapproving. I ignore her, and go over to Peter, where he is leaning against the counter and watching the coffee drip into the pot with a look of desperate concentration. I touch his arm and he smiles at me. “It’s almost done,” he whispers. I ask Hannah if she wants some, and when she says yes I reach into the cabinet for three mugs and set them in a neat row on the counter. Then I go to the refrigerator for milk. I retrieve the sugar bowl from the top of the fridge. I open a drawer and take out three spoons. This is the strangest moment of my life. I shot heroin into my arm. I spent the night curled up with a seventeen-year-old boy with a dead sister whose wig I have been wearing on the streets around Memphis. Now I am putting one spoon in each mug so that we can all have coffee and go off to work.

  In silence the three of us sit at the table and drink the coffee. I reach for the paper again and read Evan’s story. Samuel Peterson claims he heard Jared Gillespie and Cody Parker planning to drive to Memphis in order to steal a car and hold up a convenience store. He says he heard Gillespie suggest taking a car from the owner at gunpoint, because that way they could get the keys. The police now think that the abduction wasn’t planned, that, as Lieutenant Nash says, “the whole thing just escalated.”

  That should be my byline above the first column, not Evan’s.

  “Olivia?” Peter says.

  “Yeah?” I glance up. He’s leaning toward me across the table, his empty mug pushed aside. With her head bowed over her bowl, Hannah is pretending not to watch us.

  “I said, ‘I’m going to go home now,’ ” he says. “My mother will be wondering where I am.”

  “Okay.” I put the paper down, and he stands and comes around the table toward me at the exact moment that I scoot my chair back, so the leg of the chair rams into his leg. “Oh God, I’m sorry,” I say, jumping to my feet. “Are you okay?”

  He gives me a smile that looks more like a wince, and nods. Then he turns to go. I follow him down the hall into the living room, and at the door, we come together and hug. He kisses my cheek. I reach up to kiss him once on the mouth. I step back. We start to speak at the same time, and then we both stop, and then he smiles and says he’ll talk to me later, and I nod and say good-bye, and that is all. He is gone.

  I’m standing by the front door, my hand pressed to my mouth, when I hear Hannah’s voice. “The dead girl’s brother, Olivia?” she says. I turn to see her standing with her arms crossed at the other end of the room. “What is going on? How old is that child?”

  I shake my head and say nothing. She must see that I’m on the verge of tears because she crosses the room and touches my shoulder gently. “Okay,” she says, her voice softer now. “Okay.”

  When I walk into the newsroom, I feel as though everyone is going to fall silent and turn to stare. I stand for a moment at the front of the room. No one looks at me. Then Peggy lifts her gaze from the newspaper on the metro desk. She calls my name. I walk over to her, resisting the urge to tug on my left sleeve. She studies my face. “How are you feeling?” she says. I’m listening for a current of suspicion in her voice. I hear only a distracted concern. Now that I’m actually guilty of the thing she suspected, her mind is on other things.

  “I’m fine now,” I say. “Must have been one of those twenty-four-hour bugs.”

  “Good, good,” she says, turning her attention back to the paper. “Glad you’re back.”

  “About the story, the dead girl,” I say. “I want to stay with it.”

  “That’s fine with me,” she says. “Just mention it to Evan. He took over yesterday.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Thanks.” She’s not looking at me anymore. I stand here watching her. I have an urge to confess, to tell her the story of all the stupid things I’ve done, to show her the tiny mark on my arm.

  “Don’t stand there staring,” she says without lifting her gaze. “Go back to work.”

  I walk through the rows of desks to Evan’s. He watches me approach, playing with a pen in his hand. The front page is spread out on his desk. I point at his byline. “Good story,” I say.

  “Thanks.” He touches my hand with his pen. “How are you?”

  “Okay.” We both nod. He looks down at the paper, chewing on his lip.

  “You know it’s my story, don’t you?” I say. “Because I want it back.”

  He looks up and gives me a weary smile. “It’s yours.”

  As I turn toward my desk he says my name. When I look at him, he says, “I’m sorry. I don’t know how I could have thought . . .” He shakes his head. “I want us to be friends again.”

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “I’m sorry too.” I touch the back of his hand, and he turns it over and grasps mine. We stand there for a moment, our hands locked across his desk. Then Evan’s phone rings.

  When Evan hangs up, he calls me and I roll my chair over to his desk. “That was my source in the DA’s office,” he says. “She says one of the boys has confessed.” He hands me a piece of paper with a name and number. “I told her you would call her back.”

  I reach for the phone, my heart rate accelerating.

  The woman in the district attorney’s office reads me Robby Shavers’s statement over the phone. At sixteen, Robby is the youngest of the boys, and he sobbed while he told the story. He didn’t mean to kill anyone, he said, he just went along with the plan to steal a car. He thought they’d just go joyriding, something they had done before. They were cruising around in Cody Parker’s car, trying to pick out one to steal, when Jared Gillespie saw the girl, walking toward the street, her car keys in her hand. Jared and Cody got out, and Robby Shavers slid into the driver’s seat of Cody’s car. Robby watched through the window as Jared and Cody forced the girl into the trunk of her car at gunpoint. The girl was shaking her head and trying to back away. Robby rolled down the window and he heard her saying, “Just take the car. I won’t tell anyone.” Jared hit her across the face, and she fell against the open trunk. Jared and Cody shoved her in. Then Robby followed them out to the park.

  It was never part of the plan to kill anyone, Robby said, but they had trouble getting her out of the trunk, she seemed barely conscious, and during the struggle to lift her out she scratched Jared and he hit her. Then Cody hit her, and when she fell to the ground they were on her. They tied her hands. Jared raped her, Robby said. He didn’t. He hung back, listening to her scream, and then he got back in Cody’s car. He didn’t look until he heard the other car’s engine start. When he looked back, the girl’s body was disappearing beneath the wheels of her car.

  I hang up the phone. I put my hands flat on my desk. My fingers tremble slightly and are still. The picture of Allison Avery is still propped against my computer. She laughs. The boy in the baseball cap kisses her cheek. All the images I have seen of this girl alive can’t erase the first one, the one of her dead. One thing I know, I won’t forget this. I won’t get over it. Some part of me will always be afraid.

  For a moment I sit looking around the newsroom. A reporter stands up, grabs his jacket, and goes striding out of the room. Two editors stand close together, talking low, showing each other the papers in their hands. A woman leans into her phone, gesturing wildly, her voice rising. “I need to know,”
she is saying. “I need to know.” I glance over at Evan. He’s frowning at his computer screen, chewing on a fingernail. Around me the noise rises and falls, the clatter of keyboards, the ringing of telephones, the buzz of all these voices. Here in the center it is quiet.

  I reach out and turn on my computer. I pick up the phone and dial the police station. While I’m waiting to speak to Lieutenant Nash, Bishop goes sauntering past, hands in his pockets. He’s whistling through his teeth, a notebook in his breast pocket, his glasses sliding to the end of his nose. I catch his eye and smile. He smiles back at me and winks, welcoming me home.

  21

  In August, Jared Gillespie’s attorney calls me and asks me to come to the jail and meet him. He wants me to sit in on an attorney-client meeting. He won’t tell Jared who I am, he says, and everything I hear will be off the record. He wants me to see with my own eyes that Jared Gillespie is just a scared young boy.

  Both of the other boys have now confessed, each claiming that he didn’t rape her, that he wasn’t the one who drove the car. The DNA evidence will prove at least one of them a liar about the rape. About the driver, everyone seems to agree. Jared Gillespie, scared young boy.

  I meet the attorney at the county jail, just outside of Bolivar, Mississippi. Inside it’s cinder block walls, and a few men dressed like inmates, just walking around. The attorney shakes hands with one and high-fives another, a man with a mustache who gives me a slow wink. Then he walks up to the woman manning the desk. She looks up and says, “Who do you want?” Half the prison population must be his clients.