“What’s it to you? Like you know every fucking guy over there.”
I could feel Dana’s eyes on the backs of our heads.
When we got to the Lutheran Home, Wolski was outside smoking a cigarette. I followed his gaze to two MPD patrol cars parked across the street. Two shadowy figures shifted inside one of the cars.
“What’s all this?” Pete gestured at the cops.
Wolski shrugged. “The kid asked for police protection.”
“MPD’s for hire now?” I asked him.
“Certainly looks that way,” he said.
“They really don’t tell you shit over there, do they?” Pete said. Wolski let this one go.
At the doors, two more cops drank the shitty nursing home coffee and cracked jokes with each other.
“This is, hands down, the most boring detail I’ve ever been on.”
“Aw, shit, man. I don’t know. You ever done suicide watch? That shit is brutal.”
Wolski flashed his badge at them and they clammed up. As we passed, one of them let his eyes linger on Dana twenty seconds too long. I glared at him. His eyes glazed over and he sipped from his Styrofoam cup.
In the community room, Thomas Alexander was running his long thin fingers over the piano’s keys as if dusting the instrument. When he noticed us, he leaped up from the bench and attempted awkward hugs with each of us. Pete stuck his hand out instead, and Wolski merely sidestepped and patted the psychic on the shoulder. He tried to kiss Dana on the lips, but she turned her head away. I held the pearls out to Thomas Alexander so as to avoid physical contact, but he pulled my hand in and closed his dramatically over mine. The pearls hung out the sides of our clasped hands. I squirmed. Wolski’s face turned a bit white when he saw the necklace. Thomas Alexander’s eyes lingered on Wolski’s coloring. Then he turned back to me. He let my hand drop and brought the pearls close to his lips like he was going to kiss them. He inhaled. He frowned.
“Thank you for doing this,” he said. “I know how hard it must have been.”
I nodded. Wolski elbowed Peter in the ribs. “Would you excuse me and Pete for just a minute?” Wolski asked.
I glared at them. I tried to make a face that perfectly meant Do not leave me with him. But Thomas Alexander smiled. I imagined he spent many hours a day in front of a large mirror practicing this smile. The sheer stamina of it astounded me.
“Absolutely, gentlemen,” he said. “We’re still getting set up here.”
I wasn’t in any kind of mood to make small talk, so I went to where Ma was seated at a table.
“Hi, Mama,” I said. She looked up.
“Did you bring the item?”
I nodded. “Thomas Alexander’s got it,” I told her. She breathed a sigh of relief. It was clear she hadn’t thought I’d bring it.
“Where are the boys?” Ma asked.
“They had to step out for a minute, apparently,” I told her.
She frowned. “They just got here, dammit.” I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t think of anything useful to say. Ma waited. I waited. A windstorm started up outside. It whipped tree branches against the sliding glass doors. I had to work not to hold my breath. Something felt wrong. No. Everything felt wrong. Eventually, Pete and Wolski hurried back in. They gave me identical glares. I made a face back to them, like, What did I do now? They shook their heads.
One of the assistants arranged Thomas Alexander’s chair in front of Ma. The chairs were close enough that Thomas Alexander could easily reach out and touch my mother. There were only a couple of inches between their knees. That seemed too close. The assistants started shepherding us away from Ma and the psychic. We waited near the walls.
Ma sat quietly with her ankles crossed and her hands in her lap. She was wearing a flowery dress I hadn’t seen on her in a long time. It hung off her shoulders so she looked a shrunken version of herself. Thomas Alexander had a large drawing pad out in his lap, and he clutched a black felt-tip pen tightly in his right hand. In his left hand, he held the string of fake pearls. It was quiet. No one spoke, and the only noises I heard were the storm whipping outside and the dull whir of several hundred televisions running at the same time. Thomas Alexander began to draw on the pad. He drew large looping circles without much thought. He closed his eyes. He fingered the pearls. Once again he put them up to his lips like he could taste them. He let out a long sigh. He mumbled. Ma leaned in. I couldn’t hear anything he was saying, if he was saying anything at all. The circles on the pad got smaller and smaller so it looked like he was drawing a dark tunnel which we were all falling into. I thought for a minute I would explode for wanting to end the scene, but Thomas Alexander did it for me. His eyes snapped open, and he threw the pad and the necklace on the ground. “Stop,” he yelled.
“What the hell?” Ma crossed her arms over her chest. “What the hell is going on?”
Pete and Wolski glared at me. Thomas Alexander stormed toward the door. “The necklace was not hers,” he said to me. Thomas Alexander’s entourage rushed after him, and they did so in a manner that told me this was not the first time they’d set everything up just to break it down minutes later. The wind kept up outside.
Wolski took me by the arm. “I gave you that fucking necklace,” he growled.
“Are you sure?” I asked him. He nodded. “I thought . . . Dee . . . They were in the box . . . I remembered . . .” I choked out. Peter pinched the bridge of his nose. Ma was still sitting in her wheelchair with her good arm clasped over her chest. I backed out of the room. No one tried to stop me.
Wolski had developed a thing for me over the past ten years. I hadn’t done anything to encourage it, except one bad year on the Fourth, when I’d stumbled to his place and drunkenly fucked him. I didn’t remember most of that night, and I especially didn’t remember the part when we slept together, but Wolski did remember. He still remembered. I didn’t know who, in our family, knew. But I had guesses. Peter, for one. Suze, maybe. I didn’t call Wolski or talk to him for a good seven months after that, but he left me long voicemails and he wrote me letters and I thought about reporting him as a stalker because it wore on me to keep saying no. But he was so much a part of my family’s life by then that it didn’t seem feasible to avoid him anyway. I told him he had to stop, and he said he would try. He got married and had a kid, a girl, Kelsey, and he got divorced and then married again, and the whole time he slipped in and out of love with me, or that’s what he said. I tried not to think about it too much. He was like a brother or an uncle to me. I assumed the proximity of our lives had just spun us into too tight an orbit with each other: Now we couldn’t escape even if we wanted to.
That’s how I felt about much of my life. I’d thought about leaving Wisconsin before. But as long as I was in Wisconsin, I kept some irrational hope alive that Dee would turn up, and I knew I’d never forgive myself if I was gone when she made it home. I was attached to the state with a heavy anchor. I figured I’d die, like Ma, without ever living anywhere else, maybe without ever leaving the city again.
Once, one of my friends from school, Veronica, had submitted some of my poems to a writing residency in Bulgaria. If you were accepted, the whole trip was paid for; you spent a month writing and workshopping your work with other writers, presumably looking out over the Black Sea and drinking copious amounts of wine. It was the kind of thing that Dee and I would have dreamed about. I was accepted, and Veronica came by my apartment with a bottle of sparkling wine and my plane tickets. I was so angry that I refused to speak to her for a year. She didn’t understand how I couldn’t ever leave. Not many people did. I don’t think she really ever forgave me for giving that fellowship up, and I certainly never forgave her for submitting my poems. I lost a lot of friends this way. Hell, I had lost Henry this way.
June 1991
Late in June, Erik showed up at Mount Mary with his arm hanging sickly from his shoulder and a mouthful of blood. Dee was tougher than she looked, and the sight of a lot of blood had never been enough to make
her queasy. Besides, she’d always been more maternal than I was. Though I’d never learned the art of comforting people, Dee always knew what people wanted to hear. I never said the right thing or the thing that was needed. It will be okay. We’ll figure it out. I’m here for you. But as she told me on the phone, “I’m not a damn doctor.”
Leif was at work, and I was pulling on jeans with one hand and tripping over the phone cord. “I’m on my way, baby,” I told her.
“You better be,” she hissed. “It is four-thirty in the damn morning, and I’ve got campus security on my case for routinely letting ‘a suspicious person’ into the dorm.”
I held my tongue. (I wanted to say maybe they meant Frank.) “Be there in ten,” I said.
We were lucky Dee’s roommate was out of town, because the room wasn’t built to hold more than two bodies at once. Erik was splayed out on the dirty carpet. He looked like he was part of some modernist art exhibit. Dee’s paintings threatened to topple down on him from all sides. He cradled his left arm tight against his chest, and his eyes were squeezed shut. There were thin lines of blood dripping down his neck and pooling in the hollow of his collarbone. Dee looked ready to fight me.
“He needs to go to a hospital,” I said. Erik flung his head wildly from side to side. He was in a bad way. He smelled like he’d drunk a whole bottle of whiskey.
“Thank you for that astute observation, Margaret,” Dee said. I flinched; I hated it when she called me Margaret. “I already told him that.”
“Best we can do is clean him up, and then we’ll get Leif to help us take him to the ER.”
She nodded and began to get to work. She got Erik to sit up and swish some water and then spit it back out. We eventually coaxed him to drink water. Dee dabbed away the blood on his face and neck and tried to get a look in his mouth, but he wouldn’t let her. We didn’t touch his twisted arm; I guessed it was dislocated or broken. Dee cooed while we worked, and though it would have annoyed me, Erik seemed to respond to it. He relaxed at her touch, and he put the ice she’d pilfered from the cafeteria on his swollen jaw. When we took his shirt off to throw it in the wash, we saw his arms were bruised in the shape of long thin fingers. He cried a little bit when we eased his bad arm out of the shirt, and this seemed to exhaust him so much that when he laid his head back down on the carpet, he fell asleep fast and hard. Dee propped his head up with a pillow and threw her comforter on top of him.
I had only a couple of minutes before I needed to pick up Leif at Ambrosia, but Dee and I went outside and sat on a bench underneath some old grapevines. The summer leaves had only just begun to grow back, and we could see the sky getting light through the arbor. The sun was coming up now, and there were nuns on their knees in the chapel singing, we could hear them; Dee said they sang every morning. We leaned in to each other and listened. I wanted to say I was sorry, not just for mixing her up in this but for every ugly thing in the world. I’ve never loved someone the way I loved Dee; I loved her so much I wished I could make the world more deserving of her. I wished I could get rid of all this muck. And that wasn’t even the whole of the way I loved her; it’s a difficult thing to explain. The only thing I can say for sure is that I would never love anyone else in the same way.
“Do you know what happened?” I asked her.
“He wouldn’t say, but I think it’s pretty obvious,” Dee said. She examined the blood underneath her fingernails.
“He says he gets in fights at the clubs,” I said.
“Every night? Peg, don’t be dense. His boyfriend beats him up,” she said.
I flinched; she was rarely so frank.
“I’m getting scared,” Dee whispered.
“Of what?”
Dee hesitated. I thought of Erik’s face on Bradford Beach the other day: a stripe of fear he’d tried to hide from me.
The singing had stopped. The nuns filed out of the chapel and walked through the grapevine. I was acutely aware of the blood under my own nails. The nuns’ robes brushed our bare knees as they passed us, and Dee stayed quiet.
The truth about that summer, at least the part of it before Dee went missing, and after too, I suppose, is I was so caught up in my own sad state of being in love that all I could do was play a dumb game of comparison with her. Dee and I were competing to see who could be the most adult, which was only proof that we were still children.
When we were girls, we used to play a game we called next-door neighbors. We’d pretend the upstairs of our house was a little town—the separate rooms represented our own homes, the grocery store, the coffee shop, the library, or whatever other locations we needed for that day’s game. We’d pretend we lived in that tiny town together, and every time we played, we were caught up in all kinds of small-town drama—fighting over fences or tree lines, gossiping over whose son was dating whose daughter, planning parties for town events: festivals, and markets, and parades. I’d told Leif about this game, and he’d been shocked. He seemed embarrassed for me. He said there was no imagination in that kind of play. He said we’d chosen a boring imitation of reality to play in. But we never saw it like that. I think for Dee and me, when we were girls, almost nothing was more exciting than the prospect of being grown.
One “grown-up” habit Dee adopted when she moved out of Ma’s house, along with the purely aesthetic cigarette smoking and beer drinking, was dieting. Dee had always been skinny. She had an obnoxiously tiny waist above round, beautiful hips. She’d always wanted the Twiggy figure, but I’d told her men were crazy for bodies like hers. She never did believe me. When I went back to Dee’s dorm to check on her and Erik a few days later, I found them lying in bed together, sipping from red SlimFast cans.
“What the hell is that?” I asked them. Erik giggled and took a big gulp. He had a chocolate mustache.
“I wrote the company a letter, and they sent me a bunch of promotional samples.” She hopped out of bed and opened her tiny dorm closet. Inside were three cases of the cans stacked beneath her dresses. She pushed aside several long, shimmery gowns, getups I didn’t think she had any reason to own, and fished inside an open box. “It’s really good. Here, try it.” She handed me a can, and I sniffed it. I tried to read the ingredients, but I didn’t know any of the words. I took a sip.
“Tastes like chalk,” I said.
Dee shrugged and finished off the can. She closed her closet and stood in front of the mirror on the back of the door. She rose up on to the balls of her feet and lifted her shirt, turning this way and that way in front of the door.
I shoved her away from the mirror. “You ought to eat some real food. You’re both too damn skinny as it is.” Admittedly, Erik looked better than when I’d seen him writhing on Dee’s floor a few days before, but he still had the look of someone climbing out of a hole. His left arm was snug inside a hospital issued sling and his eyes were heavy like maybe he was popping painkillers.
“Frank says I have a billion-dollar body.”
I laughed despite myself. “A billion dollars, huh? Not a million?”
“Frank says Atlantic City strippers have million-dollar bodies.”
I wanted to kick him in the nuts, but Dee liked him. I didn’t know why, but she did. Maybe she sometimes felt the same way about Leif. I pulled her shirt back down over her stomach. “Bodies aren’t for sale, Dee.”
“Oh, come on.” She tousled my hair. “It was just a compliment.”
“Fucked-up one, but sure.”
“Jealous?”
“Not in the least. That’s a white-trash compliment.”
“You want to talk about white trash? When’s the last time Leif took you out on a date?”
Erik’s face reddened. He attempted a laugh, but it came out choked and ugly.
I tried to remember my last date with Leif; after we’d moved in together, the idea of dates hadn’t made much sense. I thought I remembered a meal we’d had earlier that spring at a Mexican restaurant with a patio. We’d drunk a lot of tequila and then put our numbed toes
in Lake Michigan’s winter water. The city left the lifeguard towers up on the beaches all through the winter, and we’d climbed one together and huddled in the wide chair, watching the tiny white lights of the shipping freighters floating on the horizon.
Dee must have seen something sad in my face, because she came close to me and nuzzled her nose in my neck. “It’s not a contest, Pegasus,” she said gently, though of course she knew it was.
It took me a long time to admit, but Dee was always more adventurous than me. Even when we were much younger, she enjoyed proposing ridiculous dares, teasing me while I agonized over consequences, and then finally, in frustration with me, completing the challenge herself. It was in this way that I learned a defense mechanism that ultimately established one of the crucial dynamics of our relationship—at some point, I began returning her dares with even more outlandish dares of my own.
Interstitial
Name: Felicity Hale
Relation: Roommate
Interviewed on: July 10, 1991
Interviewer: Peter
Peter: When did you last see Dee?
Felicity: July third.
Peter: She didn’t stay at the dorm on the Fourth?
Felicity: Dee did not stay here on the Fourth. I didn’t either, but I knew she hadn’t spent the night because her bed was still made up, and it was full of shit, and if she’s spent the night, that shit’s usually on the floor.
Peter: When she doesn’t stay here, where does she usually stay?
Felicity: Uh, Frank’s? Peg’s? Your ma’s place?
Peter: How often did she stay at Frank’s?
Felicity: Maybe a couple of times a week.
Peter: Did she say where she was going on the Fourth?
Felicity: She said probably Peg’s. She packed an overnight bag. And then I saw Peg in that red convertible come to pick her up. That’s a nice car. Dee said it belonged to Peg’s boyfriend, but she also said he worked at Ambrosia, and I don’t know how someone affords that kind of thing on a factory salary.
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