The Comfort of Monsters

by Willa C. Richards

  Dee and I sat down on the curb. She combed my hair with her fingers. I shivered, blinked into the loudness of the night, and panicked.

  “I can’t see anything,” I told her. “I think I’m blind.”

  “You’re perfectly fine,” Dee said. “Look at me.”

  She took my face between her hands and pulled my eyes wide like she knew what she was looking for: obvious signs of blindness. Then she gently closed each eye and kissed both eyelids. I imagined her lipstick leaving rose-colored stains. I leaned in to her for a second.

  “Everything’s all there,” she said.

  “Thanks, Doc.” I shoved her away.

  Leif and Erik came to sit down next to us. Leif lit a cigarette that we all shared. Dee coughed her way through it, and we teased her. She was a sport about it. She always was. The crowds were thinning out. Leif once told me he’d loved to carry Erik around as a baby. Leif was eleven when they brought Erik home from the hospital. He toted Erik all around the house, supporting his soft head the way his ma had shown him, and he gave his baby brother the grand tour of their little apartment. Here’s the fish tank; when you’re old enough to pinch, you can feed them. Here’s the kitchen; when you’re old enough to chew, you can eat Cocoa Pebbles. Here’s the living room; when you’re old enough to crawl, you can wrestle me.

  Erik’s nose was bloodied. “Sorry,” he said to us. “That’s never happened before.”

  I suspected that wasn’t true. I put my hand on his knee. “I’m still glad we came,” I said to him. I hoped Leif would say something that would support this sentiment.

  “I wish,” Leif started. He swallowed two times. “I wish you were different.”

  Erik put his head between his knees. Dee rubbed the back of his neck.

  Sometimes I wished Dee had been different too. She was twelve when she began to grow tiny budlike breasts. She itched them mindlessly when it was just the two of us. My own breasts had come in at thirteen, and by fourteen, they were already about as large as they’d ever get—the girls at school called me a washboard. Dee’s breasts outgrew mine quickly, and this, among other things, was part of the reason people always thought she was older. She also had an air of confidence about her, which, later, older men would like. When I tried to adopt this affect, it seemed to scare them away. Apparently, it was sexy on her.

  Once we were waiting for Peter to pick us up from the local pool. We had towels wrapped around our waists, and we were sitting on top of a picnic table with our feet dangling on the bench. I stretched out long on the wood and let the sun warm my stomach. Dee tried to tickle my ribs, but I shoved her hand away. There was a group of boys riding their bikes in circles around the parking lot. It was obvious to me, even from minimal observation, that they were working themselves up to do something stupid. At the time, I figured it was some dumb trick on their bikes that would land at least one of them in the hospital. But when they pulled their bikes up to our picnic table, I knew immediately what they wanted. I had a hard time deciding what age they were—fifteen, maybe sixteen, definitely older than we were. The leader of the group was jostled forward by the others, and he dramatically wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

  “Hey,” he said stupidly.

  I said nothing, and tried to look everywhere except at the boys, but Dee stuck her neck out as if to say, Go on . . . Where had she learned these postures?

  “Oh,” he said. “I just wanted to say I like your boobs.”

  Dee rolled her eyes. The boys behind him hooted and whistled. I could tell by his reddening face that he had not executed the original plan. Dee had scared him—caused him to veer from his original course. She turned her head slightly toward me and started twirling my wet hair between her fingers. I shivered. The boys retreated like a losing army. It was as if she did not believe men could hurt her, or maybe she just acted that way. Somehow she made men feel like she was always out of reach, as if she contained many secret parts of herself that no one could control.

  Federal Rules of Evidence

  Article IV. Relevance and Its Limits

  Rule 401. Test for Relevant Evidence

  Evidence is relevant if (a) it has any tendency to make a fact more or less probable than it would be without the evidence; and (b) the fact is of consequence in determining the action.

  March 2019

  I was fired from my last job at the law library, in part because I often missed weeks of work without explanation, and also because my boss suspected I was stealing books. Though, as he put it when he fired me, “We’re not accusing you of anything per se, but we are letting you go.” He would have been right to accuse me, because I did steal books, compulsively and without remorse. Rumors of my kleptomania followed me during my subsequent search for work. Henry, the last man I’d loved, had secured that job for me, and my dismissal from it was one among many reasons he cited for ultimately ending things between us.

  The first book I ever stole, a tattered copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, was from UWM’s library. It happened like this. It was a few days after the anniversary of Dee’s disappearance: She had been gone four years at that point. I was having a very bad day. I woke up from a terrible night of sleep during which I was unable to tell if I was awake or asleep but all the while certain I was having nightmares, which could have just been bad thoughts, or memories, of the summer Dee disappeared. (It was common for memories of that summer to play on a never-ending film loop in my mind even when I wasn’t interested in viewing them. I attributed this phenomenon to my efforts, immediately after Dee disappeared, to petrify these memories in my mind and body.) I went to work feeling angry and anxious, and prone to rehearsing my list of reasons I hated my job and my life more generally. I was pushing a large cart of books to be returned to their shelves when I noticed Edith Hamilton’s book. I am certainly no mythology buff—in fact, though I once tried to get interested in it on account of Dee’s passion for the subject, the material honestly bored me. I never could remember the names or the stories associated with these names, which I know seems crazy, given their oral nature, but I just never loved the stories the way other people did. So much slaughter, and incest, and rape, and suicide. Anyway, one day in middle school, Dee stumbled upon Edith Hamilton’s book, which she’d found abandoned on the school steps. Though she would have happily returned it, there was no name written on the inside cover and no indication that it was a library book. So Dee kept this tattered copy, and for years it seemed she brought it everywhere with her. She became obsessed with the book, and of course, that was how she began to call me Pegasus, and how the nickname took off with some of the rest of the family as well. She told me to imagine I was a beautiful winged horse.

  “But what are my powers?” I asked her.

  “What do you mean?” she whined, already annoyed with me. “You can fly!”

  “But what else?”

  She humphed and thought, and then her eyes went wide. “You can make magical springs appear with your hooves. Oh, and you’re an inspiration to the muses,” she said. I shrugged, not particularly satisfied, but the nickname stuck. Later, she would tell me that my mother was Medusa, and I liked that, and we both laughed.

  Anyway, when I saw the book on the cart, I grabbed it and rushed into the nearest bathroom, where I picked off the bar code. I threw this bar code into the toilet and flushed it down. Then I hid the book in the front pocket of my sweatshirt until later in the day, when I had the chance to put it in my bag. After I stole that book, I got into a bit of a habit. If I saw a book that reminded me of Dee, I would take it in the bathroom, scratch off its bar code, and take it home to my apartment on the East Side, where I added it to my sad illicit library. Sometimes the book would not remind me of anything at all, but I still felt I had to bring it home with me. I piled these stolen books in gravity-defying stacks inside my apartment, and I never, ever opened them once I brought them home.

  After Henry got me the job at Marquette, I be
gan stealing law books. These were the books I did open. I tried to study them at home, particularly Graham C. Lilly’s An Introduction to the Law of Evidence, but they were so dry and inscrutable. I felt I needed to steal more books to help me explain the ones I’d already stolen. It was a vicious cycle, and I guess I got careless. People whispered. I wasn’t embarrassed. Who knows why they didn’t follow up—maybe out of respect for Henry, or maybe because I was too pitiful to punish. Either way, by the time I was fired, I had amassed hundreds of dark green and burgundy law books.

  Shortly after I was fired and Henry and I split for good, I was watching a movie when Dana called. It was late. I saw her name flash on my phone, and I felt a sickening lurch of fear. I grabbed the phone and pressed pause on the movie.

  “What’s wrong?” I said. I mashed the earpiece against the side of my face, fearful that I wouldn’t be able to hear her.

  “I need . . .” She stopped. “I need a ride.”

  “Drop me a pin,” I said. “I’m coming.”

  I followed the directions to the pin and found myself west of the city in an unfinished housing development. I parked the car in front of a locked gate. A harsh floodlight flickered on, and the blinking red light of a rotating security camera shone in the dark. A danger sign posted on the gate depicted a prone stick person being electrocuted. Beyond the gate, the skeletons of half-built homes were scattered across several acres of grassy knolls. I called Dana, but she didn’t answer. I couldn’t get out of the car. I kept my hands on the steering wheel. In the distance, I thought I saw a flare of blue light erupting from a pipe. Another flare of light flashed on the horizon; I couldn’t have imagined it twice. I fixed my gaze beyond the empty houses and tried to see where the light was coming from.

  When Dana rapped on the car window with her knuckles, I spooked. She had the hood of her sweatshirt pulled tight over her face, so at first I wasn’t even sure it was her. When she turned to look back the way she’d come, I could barely see the outline of her face. I unlocked the car door, and she threw herself into the passenger seat and then relocked the doors herself. Her clothes were wet, and water dripped from her fingertips.

  We agreed that she could stay at my place, because she didn’t want to face her parents that night, but that I’d have to call her father. Pete was harried and short with me, as if the whole thing were somehow my fault, but he was okay with her staying over as long as she came back first thing in the morning.

  While she showered, I tried to tidy up the place. This mostly involved throwing shit away: empty wine bottles, candles burned down to their last grimy, unlightable layer of wax, cartons of cigarettes, takeout containers. Then I tried to shove all of Dee’s files into my makeshift study. When I’d first moved in, I had hoped to use the small room to write, but I never bought a desk, and over time, I stopped writing completely. Until I started writing this, I hadn’t written in over two decades. I housed all the files on Dee’s case in the study: transcripts of the interviews we’d conducted, the various iterations of her missing-persons report, the paltry Journal articles that ran and were mostly ignored. I’d absorbed Ma’s files when we’d moved her into the Lutheran Home, as well as the ones that Pete no longer wanted at his house. Now I was the only keeper, and the files had begun to spill out into the living room.

  I was still trying to shove the files back into the study when Dana came out of the bathroom. Her hair was wet but combed now, and she was wearing a pair of my pajamas. We’d hung her wet clothes on the backs of the kitchen chairs. She seemed calmer.

  “What’s all that?” she asked, motioning at the files.

  “Nothing, nothing,” I said. I shoved a box of papers past the threshold of the study and shut the door with effort. “Come on,” I told her. “Come sit with me.” She nodded. We sat on the couch together. She pulled her knees into her chest. Her feet were still pink from the heat of the shower.

  “I can’t swim,” she whispered to me as if this explained everything.

  “Oh, you know how,” I protested. I remembered summers when she and Soph had splashed for hours in the shallows of Lake Michigan.

  “Not well,” she said.

  “We can get you lessons.”

  She glared at me like I was missing the point. Probably I was.

  “There is an old quarry out there,” she said. “But a long time ago, they filled it all with water. It’s deep. Miles deep, I think. I mean, that’s what the boys said. I was afraid . . . I mean, the boys said they were going to throw us in. So I kept thinking about floating down to the bottom. How long it would take to sink. I felt like if I fell in, I would just be floating down to the bottom, like . . . forever.”

  I had the urge then to hide her. I didn’t say anything back to her for a long time. A bus sputtered in the street below my apartment. We did not look at each other.

  “What boys?” I asked her finally.

  She shrugged like she was sick of the whole conversation, though we’d only just begun. Like I’d disappointed her with the wrong kind of question. I was embarrassed.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Where’s Henry?”

  “What?” I said stupidly. I was trying to buy myself time to think. I hadn’t told my family yet that Henry had finally left me for good. I couldn’t bear to hear their objections. Pete especially was concerned that I’d end up alone, so he’d thrown his unequivocal support behind Henry, even though he’d barely known the guy. Besides, Pete had never understood that I had always, since Dee disappeared, been alone.

  “I mean, why aren’t you with him?”

  “Henry and I,” I started, and then stopped. “Hey, I’m tired. Okay?” She nodded. I gave her a pillow from my own bed and tossed a knit throw over her. When I leaned down to kiss her forehead, she squirmed away and shoved her face into the crack between the couch cushions. I kissed her wet hair. She pulled the blanket over her head.

  In the morning, I found her sitting cross-legged in stacks of Dee’s case files. She had begun to organize them.

  “Stop,” I said.

  “Why?” she asked. “This stuff is a mess. Everything is all over the place.”

  “I don’t care.”

  She looked up at me. Her hair was messy from sleeping on it wet, and her eyes were dull and still a little sleepy. I felt for a moment like we were in some twisted Christmas-morning nightmare—a child in her pajamas surrounded by stacks of missing-persons reports.

  “Get dressed,” I said. The sharpness in my voice made her spine go a little straight and I regretted it. She didn’t mind, though. She was probably used to it from Pete. “We have to go.”

  In the car back to her house, she harassed me about letting her come back to go through the files. She said her dad never let her look at anything related to Dee. She felt she had a right to know. “I’m old enough now,” she told me confidently. I didn’t say anything. There was no minimum age that would make Dee’s case fathomable. I was forty-eight and still couldn’t understand the whole of it. “Plus,” she kept going, “I could help you.”

  “Help me how?” I eyed her.

  She shook her head at me, amazed. “I told you. You need to be ready.”

  I knew Pete had done his best to keep the details of Dee’s case from his girls, but as these things go, it had only made Dana more invested in discovering these details. I didn’t know if keeping the story from the girls was truly for their benefit, or if it was for Pete’s own peace of mind. I guessed he needed to compartmentalize, which I understood. But even when they were young, they sensed more than Pete presumed.

  One night I was babysitting them when Dana brought it up. Dana was seven and Sophie was five. The girls had refused to fall asleep alone, so I climbed in Dana’s bed and sandwiched myself between them, one under each arm. We haggled for a while about the number of books to be read, and by the time we’d settled on three and the girls had made their selections, Sophie was almost asleep. By the end of book two, they were both asleep. I carried Sophie to her
own bed, and I was just about to leave the room when Dana bolted up.

  “Auntie Peg?” she cried.

  “I’m here,” I said. “Close your eyes.”

  I went to sit with her on the bed. I reached for one of the books we hadn’t read yet and started to open it, but Dana put her small hand on the cover so I couldn’t. She shook her head. I could see her forming the words in her mind before she said them.

  “What if I disappear?”

  My mouth went dry.

  “What do you mean, baby?” I said. “You’re not going anywhere.”