I’m going to live by the ocean.
I’m going to write a book about living by the ocean.
I’m going to do makeup for famous people.
I’m going to be a famous person.
I’m going to be a person no one can find.
I’m going to have four children.
I’m going to learn how to sculpt.
I’m going to open my own salon.
I’m going to write a book about you.
I sometimes suspected that Dee kept many of her crazier dreams to herself. We both understood, at an early age, the difference between words in the world and words in our own heads. But the thing with me and Dee was, I sometimes felt like we shared the same head, especially when we were younger. This theory was tested when we got older and we started to lead lives that intersected only because we forced them to and because we fell in love with people whose mere existence created such massive clouds in each other’s head, it was difficult to make room for much else. I sometimes wonder if that’s really what happened that summer—we were pushing each other out to make more and more room for Frank and Leif in our own heads. We didn’t leave any room to let each other back in.
At home we had a large library, which was filled not just with classics but also with poetry and science fiction, memoir and nonfiction. Ma read to us often, and often it was poetry because it was short and had the feeling of a lullaby, even if the meaning was not there. I started writing poems at eleven. Ma was thrilled, but my father was less excited. I read lots of poetry, but I didn’t understand most of it. Instead, I focused on the feeling of the words in my brain. They made a mark there like they were characters pressed into soft clay. They stayed. I would reread the books I’d read as a child when I was older and living with Leif for the first time. Those imprints in my brain buzzed and came alive anew. You can understand something new about yourself, about the way the world works, how other people’s minds move, any time you read a book of poetry. I learned it was only important to keep your appetite for the words alive. Leif disagreed. He thought this was a ridiculous way to read poetry. He had dog-eared copies of chapbooks with Post-it notes and bookmarks. He looked up every word and allusion. He took apart syntax. He ferociously memorized lines. He read poems like he was wrestling them, trying to pin them to the ground. It reminded me of the times he and his brother used to roughhouse in our flat. Using force to feel.
April 2019
When we moved Dee’s belongings into the storage locker, the company had been selling the contents of a unit whose owners hadn’t paid the bill in months. I tried not to survey their property too closely: family portraits in extravagant frames, jars of rocks and sand, kids’ artwork, a messy box of rusted tools, a set of expensive kitchen knives. Where were these people, and what had happened to them? Did they know that strangers were picking through their things? Did they know that after today their photos would end up in a landfill? I wondered about the contents of every single locker. I wondered about the people who had put their belongings in these boxes. Now I was one of them. We put Dee’s stuff away seven years after she disappeared. Ma wouldn’t have anything to do with it because she didn’t approve of us breaking down Dee’s room and carting her belongings away. Pete and I had both hoped out of sight would help push Dee a little further out of mind for Ma. But as with everything else we tried, she interpreted it incorrectly. She thought we were giving up. She thought we were accepting Dee’s fate.
I toyed with the idea of driving to the storage locker but decided I couldn’t do it. Instead I opened a bottle of wine and began sifting through a box of Dee’s stuff that I kept at my apartment but hadn’t looked at in years, maybe since I’d moved there. It contained an odd assortment of things that I’d kept with me over the years: some photos of the two of us, some of Dee’s jewelry, little notes she’d written me. I sat on the floor of my apartment with the box and my wine and tried to find something suitable for the session. I didn’t really know what I was looking for. I found a picture of Dee painting in her studio at Mount Mary; I thought I’d taken it, but I couldn’t be sure. Dee stood in front of the canvas with her back to the camera. The camera had caught her just as she looked over her shoulder. She was surprised or maybe about to laugh. The backs of her knees looked oddly childish in the photo; she’d had the tendency to hyperextend her knees when she stood still. I put the photo back in the box. My mouth went sour. I found a string of fake-looking pearls that I remembered Dee wearing in high school. She had loved things like that—dainty country-club shit that always looked elegant on her but phony on me.
I closed the box and was about to shove it back into a corner when I noticed a box Dana had organized and relabeled in a swooping script—Transcripts. Tentatively, I flipped open one of the cardboard flaps to find a neat stack of witness interviews we’d conducted shortly after filing Dee’s report. I wasn’t sure if I had read all of them. I’d often preferred to get someone’s recap of the interviews rather than reading through them myself. It was odd to think of all the documents I’d kept in that room, files I’d never even read, maybe.
I opened another bottle of wine, and when I was drunk enough, I called Henry. He picked up after the fourth ring. Like he’d been deciding. I breathed into the phone.
“Peg?” he asked. His voice pierced me with a spike of longing. The last time we’d spoken, he’d been angry with me, but in a restrained way, like he felt I was too fragile to truly admonish. This in turn had made me very angry. I had tried to hurt him. I supposed I’d succeeded.
“Can you come over?” I asked him.
“No,” he said without hesitation.
“I think we’re going to find her, Henry. I’m feeling ready this time.”
“I’m happy for you,” he said. He had written a script out for himself. A playbook. I didn’t mind.
“You’re sure you can’t come over?”
“Take care of yourself,” he said, and hung up.
Once when Henry and I were having dinner at Pete and Helena’s place, Pete had pulled me aside while Henry was in the bathroom. He’d grabbed me by the upper arm. He could almost fit his whole hand around what passed for my bicep.
“What the hell are you doing?” Pete asked me. His voice was low.
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re using Henry like some kind of emotional punching bag, and it’s really uncomfortable.”
I was taken aback. “Am I?”
“I don’t know how many times we have to tell you. You don’t get to treat people like shit just because something shitty happened to you.”
“Happened to us,” I corrected him. He let go of my arm, and I massaged the place where his fingers had gripped me.
Henry specialized in dystopian literature. Though his classes were very popular, I cringed to imagine him teaching. We’d met at UWM, where I had been an assistant librarian for a time. He had a spacey, aloof handsomeness, the kind of attractiveness one acquires from being totally unconcerned about personal appearance. For some reason, I had been quite attracted to Henry’s wrinkled clothes, the ink stains on his fingertips, his overgrown facial hair, the bewildered way he sometimes looked around as if to say, How the hell did I get here? He pursued me with a confidence that did not seem to be supported by his appearance. I thought that was funny. It’s only men who can get away with that kind of thing—the unabashed swagger in the very average body. Though he’d asked me to marry him twice, I couldn’t entertain the thought of a wedding. During the six years we’d dated, Henry never saw my apartment, and when he finally did, a few weeks before Ma decided to hire the psychic, he officially ended things.
If, during our time together, I had used Henry as an emotional punching bag, I think we evened the dynamic out because generally, and with a few (very few) limits, I allowed him to use me as an actual punching bag in bed. One of the greatest pleasures and surprises of our time together was discovering Henry was a little kinky.
We were fooling aro
und late one night after a considerable amount of wine, and I was lamenting how bad my day had been, how little I’d gotten done, how much a piece of shit I was. Usual writer stuff. Henry stopped me. He got very close to my face and kissed me very gently. He kept his lips close to my face so that they brushed against me while he whispered, Tell me every bad thing you did today. He kissed me lightly and I tried to move toward him. Everything, he said. So I began: I ate pie for breakfast. He bit my bottom lip hard but then licked both my lips. I was instantly wet. What else? he whispered. I procrastinated on the Internet for an hour after that. He took off his belt, flipped me around, and hit me hard once. The sound of it scared and delighted me. He crawled on top of me and brushed the hair away from my ear. What else? I said, I smoked two cigarettes. Oh dear, he said, that’s very, very bad. He went to his drawer and got out an old tie. He tied my hands behind my back and made me kneel on the ground. He hit me twice with the belt. The second time I cried out. He pushed me down so my shoulders were on the ground and my ass was in the air. He put his face beneath me, between my legs, and he licked me from anus to clit, and I cried out again because it felt so good. Then I think he lost his patience with the game and the moaning noises. He fucked me harder than he ever had before, and when he came inside me, he collapsed on top of me, and we both fell down onto his bedroom carpet. He left my hands tied.
We sometimes called this little game what did you do? I was allowed to say anything during these games, and Henry would never bring it up outside the game. The punishments were mostly of a sexy nature. They rarely hurt or left a mark. Often I felt refreshed or cleansed after we played. I don’t know if catharsis is real, but I swear I felt the guilt sloughing off me like dead skin after we fucked like this. Sometimes I wanted to say the real stuff, not the petty things I knew I shouldn’t be doing (smoking cigarettes, drinking during the day, buying lottery tickets, eating Taco Bell) but the stuff I carried around. How I’d lost Dee, and Leif, and Erik, how I’d given up on writing, and mostly on living. How I wanted to live stagnantly, dumbly, mutely, like a fish in a glass bowl or a mosquito larva hatched into a dirty puddle and doomed to stay a larva living out its days in muck, because that’s what I believed I deserved. Sometimes I wondered if the real punishment for these things should be death. That, I would think, only seemed fair. I remembered what the serial killer had said when he’d finally been caught. I should be dead for what I’ve done.
June 1991
We were sunbathing on Bradford Beach when Dee told me Frank had taken her on a date to a cemetery. Lake Michigan was still cold then, and entering the water was an icy shock to the system, but the sand was already summer-warm, and the sun was hot. Dee said his parents worked at a cemetery, so he’d grown up around it; he found those kinds of places peaceful.
“Come on,” I said, exasperated with her. “Talk about a red flag.”
“Well, it doesn’t look like a cemetery anymore,” she said. “There aren’t any grave markers, and it’s a bit elevated, so you can see Milwaukee and the lakefront below. It’s beautiful now. It’s one of his favorite spots.”
“I don’t know. He seems morbid.”
Dee sniffed. “You don’t know him.”
“I don’t know him, true. But I know that kind of guy.”
“Yeah, just like I know what kind of guy Leif is.”
“What kind of guy is that?” I asked her.
“He’s dark.” She paused. “And emotional.”
I sensed this was supposed to sting. “Well, that’s how I like my men,” I teased her.
“Why?”
“The sex is better that way,” I said. (Did I even believe this? I still wanted to say things to shock her, because she was so capable of shocking me.)
She rolled onto her back then, and I stared at the wide flare of her hip bones, the sharp projection of them through her swimsuit.
“Not me,” she said. “I like my men light and airy. Like they’re walking on clouds.”
That didn’t seem an apt description of Frank, but I didn’t say it. Even then I knew we saw our lovers through poorly adjusted lenses. Is it the responsibility of our loved ones to help us adjust that vision? What do we risk if we try? What do we risk if we don’t try?
Dee folded her hands behind her head. I wanted to keep asking her questions about what she liked and why, but she put her headphones in and threw her shirt over her eyes. It seemed important for us to figure this out together. I needed so badly to be able to relate to Dee, I was willing to lie to her about what I liked. I had a fear of us developing such different tastes that we’d be stranded worlds apart. Now I wonder if that’s a fear born only out of what happened, a fear I’ve mapped onto the past and onto our conversations about men and love and sex. Maybe I was listening for myself, and I never heard the important things Dee said to me about Frank.
Or maybe I never knew what the important things were. I read later about something called subjective validation, a psychological phenomenon that humans are prone to, wherein we believe a few unrelated or even random events must be related because a belief, expectation, or hypothesis demands a relationship. Is that what I’ve done here? Is that what I’ve built?
Later that same day, when Dee and I had begun to get sun-drunk and loopy, Erik stopped by. He brought a Styrofoam cooler full of Milwaukee’s Best. He was already loaded, and while what Dee and I really needed was water, we didn’t refuse the beers. We opened one after another after another. The edges of the day faded; the sun sank behind the bluff and cast a dark shadow over the lake. We paid no mind.
Erik had a jagged cut under one of his eyes. When he handed Dee another beer, she brushed the cut with the soft pad of her thumb. He pulled away.
“What’s this.” It wasn’t a question, which was maybe why Erik did not feel the need to say anything back. He took a pull from his beer and burped loudly. Dee laughed and tried to do the same, but her burp was pathetic in comparison. She kept trying.
“You guys are disgusting. And drunk,” I said. “We’ve got leftovers at my place. You guys hungry?”
“Frank doesn’t want Dee going over there anymore,” Erik said matter-of-factly.
I paused mid-sip and hiccupped. Heat rose to my cheeks. “What the hell does that mean?” I asked. Dee shot Erik daggers. The corners of her mouth went hard.
“Frank says it’s too ghetto. Where you live. It’s not safe,” Erik said stiffly, as if he were a TV reporter doing a segment on “crime in your neighborhood.” Though he was clearly poking fun at Frank’s assessment of Riverwest, I seemed to remember that Erik had said a similar thing about our neighborhood to Leif. People are always getting robbed.
“Will you shut up?” Dee said. “Just let it go.”
“What the fuck does Frank know, anyway,” I said. I felt a wave of anger.
“He doesn’t know shit,” Erik said. “He’s a bigot.” He burped again.
“Well, fuck you both,” Dee said. She tossed her beer away and it spilled into the sand. She threw her dress over her swimsuit and started running away. I got up to follow her, but Erik stopped me.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s my fault. I’ll handle it.”
“Have you met him?” I shouted at Erik as he started after Dee. He nodded and puffed his chest out. But beneath his bravado, I could tell he was afraid.
I watched him jog after her. To an outsider, they might have been a young married couple having a fight. Dee had already made it a long way down the beach, so when he finally caught her, they were just two dark specks against the lake.
April 2019
On the day of the first session with the psychic, I called Peter to pick me up because I’d woken up with a splitting headache. I had been subject to nightmare after nightmare, though when I woke, the specificity of them faded fast, and I was left with only a sense of foreboding and the thick taste of rot on my tongue. I scrubbed my tongue vigorously with the back of my toothbrush, grabbed Dee’s pearls from my kitchen counter, and went outside
to wait for Pete.
When Pete pulled up, Dana hopped out of the passenger seat, brushed her cheek against mine, and climbed in the backseat. I knew instantly Pete was in a sour mood, which clouded the atmosphere inside the car. Dana put her headphones in and leaned her forehead against the window. Pete glanced at his daughter in the rearview and then turned to me.
“I heard back from the Journal Sentinel,” Pete said.
“Oh.”
“They said they would send a reporter to the next session with the psychic.”
He darted his eyes at me. Pete had been particularly supportive of Ma’s decision to hire the psychic in part because he believed it might get us a fresh dose of press. It was odd how we’d traded these roles over the years. When Dee first disappeared, I’d tried desperately to get my family to take exposure more seriously. But as the years wore on, and I became less and less convinced it would ever matter, I gave it up. Pete had taken up that torch in recent years, perhaps emboldened by his perceived status. Even so, it hadn’t mattered. No one really picked up the story the way we hoped they would. He thought the psychic might be a new angle to get the press and the pressure we would need to reopen the case. From my perspective, the case was solved, but we desperately needed to find Dee’s body in order for law enforcement to take us seriously again. I was long done dealing with apathetic journalists over at the Journal Sentinel. They always focused on the wrong thing.
“It’s a mistake,” I told him. I tried to keep my voice light, because I didn’t want Dana to think we were fighting. We weren’t fighting. We never fought anymore. What was the point?
“Exposure,” Pete said, like it was a mantra for him. “We’ve always said, you’ve always said, this is what we need. Now we’re going to get it.”
“What’s the reporter’s name?” I asked.
The Comfort of Monsters Page 10