“Well, I haven’t seen him in a month or maybe more, but I can’t be sure. We’ve been having some real weird shit happen around here.” She motioned to the back of the bar door, which, like the other bar I’d visited, had a corkboard filled with pictures and descriptions of men gone missing. “People just disappearing left and right, and the cops don’t seem to give a damn about it.” There was a guy waving her down at the other end of the bar, and she tossed her head in his direction.
“Thanks,” I shouted after her.
“Look at you,” Dee said. “Playing detective.”
“You’ve got a bit of cheese just there.” I tried to touch the corner of her mouth, but she batted me away.
“No, I don’t.” She laughed.
“I’m not kidding, it’s right there, here, just let me.” She pushed my arm away, and I shrugged.
She wiped her face, but there wasn’t any cheese there. She pinched my arm. “Funny,” she said. “What now?”
I got out my notebook and wrote down Erik’s description. I didn’t have a picture, but I told Dee we’d come back with one, and then I posted the write-up to the back of the door. It was a sad door, and I couldn’t stand to look at it for very long.
“We can wait around and ask some other people too.” I ordered us another round. Dee shrugged.
The bar stayed relatively empty, and we never did ask anyone else about Erik. Instead, the music got louder and louder, and Dee and I got drunk. My memories from this night are both rose-tinted and PBR-tinted. Our conversation meandered. We talked about Dee’s plans for her next set of paintings, and my plans to save enough money for a plane ticket to Europe next summer. We worried aloud about Ma’s loneliness and wondered when Suze would quit waitressing and “do something with her life,” and we gossiped about whom Peter was dating. I loved spending long hours like this with Dee. There was no one else I felt as comfortable with. We shared the kinds of things that other people might scoff off—aspirations, fears, hopes—the kind of Hallmark shit you’re not supposed to talk about out loud. But that night, even as we got drunk, and the music got louder, and the night got later, I could tell something was broken between us. We were skirting Frank, but he ghosted our conversation the whole night. I waited until I was very drunk, and Dee was mid-sip, and then I asked her.
“Have you heard from him?” I knew I was a coward for not saying his name. Her face went blank, like she was suddenly leaning very hard into the beer-induced numbness. I thought maybe she wouldn’t respond, because she began picking at her cocktail napkin. I took two big swallows.
“No,” she said.
I knew immediately she was lying. “I’m sorry.” I didn’t risk pressing her, but I wanted so badly to ask if she blamed me.
“I just miss the sex,” she said. Her cocktail napkin was shredded now. This was a clever move, aimed to distract me.
I took the bait. “He didn’t even make you come.”
“It’s not all about that.”
“Did you fake it with him?”
“Do you fake it with Leif?”
I paused to consider the question. Leif had a real fear that I lied about my orgasms. I thought I did a good job of keeping it honest. I never faked it, but I left the situation open to interpretation sometimes. And if he asked, I always told him the truth.
“Nope,” I said, but the pause had undermined the confidence of the response, and Dee rolled her eyes.
“Sure,” she said.
I felt the conversation getting away from me. “I’m sorry.” I suspected neither of us knew exactly what I was apologizing for; I hoped it would cover something I’d done or said that had hurt her over the past couple of weeks, months, years. Dee leaned in to me, and her face seemed much older suddenly. I noticed faint lines between her eyebrows and tracing her eye sockets. Ma had the same ones. Did I? She whispered in my ear. I shivered.
“You’re so full of shit. You think you know everything about what you like, and why you like it, but the only difference between us is I’m honest with myself.” She burped, and I couldn’t help but laugh. I patted her on the back, and she drained the last of her beer and went to find the bathroom.
While Dee was in the bathroom, I used the pay phone outside to call Leif. He’d skipped work on account of a bad hangover, and I knew he was home because he always ordered shitty Chinese food and watched pay-per-view porn when he was in bad shape. He was surprised to hear my voice. “Everything good?”
“I just . . . We . . . need a ride, okay?”
I wondered if the TV screen was frozen on something nasty, some improbably large-chested woman getting slapped around by the pizza guy or whatever.
“Of course. Where are you?”
I hesitated because I knew Leif wouldn’t like the answer, but I was too drunk to lie. “Walker’s Point,” I said.
“Fuck,” he said. “Fine.”
Fifteen minutes later, we were packed into the Spitfire, and Dee’s head was lolling around on account of Leif’s vigorous driving. Every little bump threw her head back into the headrest.
“Easy,” I said. He eyed me and shook his head. I put my hand on his thigh, which he allowed. “Please.”
Leif carried Dee into the house and put her, not entirely gently, on our couch. I had an image of Erik’s gangly body stretched out there earlier in the summer, and felt my knees go a little weak. I stumbled and Leif reached for me.
“You too?” He scooped me up like a baby and used his mouth to brush the hair away from my ear. “What were you two doing?” At this point, I did play. I pretended to get very sleepy, and I blinked several times slowly. I nuzzled his neck and took a bit of the soft skin there between my lips. I felt his body come awake.
Leif said, “Let’s go to bed, okay?”
He carried me into the bedroom and shut the door with his foot. Then he laid me down on the bed. It was an awkward pose, with my legs bent at an uncomfortable angle and my hands curled up near my face. I could feel my clothes were askew. I felt the night breeze from the open window on my bare stomach. I let my breath get deeper, and I kept my eyes closed. I could hear Leif shuffling around, and then I heard the click and swish of his camera’s shutter. I stayed so still. I felt him move toward me, and he started taking off my clothes. He did everything for me. He unbuttoned my jeans and slipped my shirt over my head. He tugged my pants from my hips and gently undid the clasp of my bra. He ran his hands over everything, and I stayed limp, like a rag doll. I wanted to know what he would do when he thought I was not awake. He pulled my panties down, and opened my legs for me, and stopped. I lay as still as I could. Did he think I was asleep? Or passed out? He moved my legs, and I liked the way he put me in the position I knew he liked. He kissed me between the legs, and then, before I was ready, he was inside me. He was so hard, and I was so dry, I thought I would scream, but I kept my eyes shut, and eventually, he rolled me over and starting fucking me from behind with his hand on the back of my neck and my arms lying limp over the side of the bed. When he was done and I could feel the cum dripping out of me, he rearranged me. He rolled me over and threw our sheet on top of me, and then he straddled me, I could feel his knees pressing my hips. He kissed me on the lips, and I tasted his sweat and his breath, which smelled slightly of five spice. And then I fell asleep for real.
Leif woke me when he came to bed. He flopped down heavily beside me and tried to pull me in to him. My mouth was dry, and my body was plastered to the sheets with sweat. I tossed Leif’s arms off me and padded into the kitchen. After I’d drunk three glasses of water and taken three ibuprofen, I went into the living room, where Dee was sleeping awkwardly on the couch. Through the doorway, I could see Leif’s large body splayed out on our bed. I pulled the cushions off the back of the couch and took a blanket from the bedroom. Then I pulled Dee down off the couch and curled up next to her on the floor. She reached out to me and offered her hand, which I held, even though I could tell it was sweating out the alcohol in her body.
When
I woke up, I couldn’t feel my right shoulder anymore. I sat up and reached for Dee, but she was gone. She’d left a messy note on our coffee table. Have to work at 10:00. We need to find Erik. I love you. I eased myself onto the couch and held my head in my hands. I felt the blood rushing back into my shoulder, and it burned. Leif stumbled into our living room completely naked, and he wiped crusty sleep gunk from his beautiful eyes. He hopped into his sweats and flopped down next to me on the sofa. I reached for the note, because I didn’t want to talk about it, but Leif had shed his sleepiness quickly and grabbed it before I did, then tossed it back on the coffee table. There was weed all over the table, empty Coke cans, a Kenneth Koch anthology opened to some poem Leif was memorizing. Leif shook tiny buds of weed from the note. “You two should give this up,” he said.
“Dee’s worried about him. Why aren’t you?”
Leif ignored this.
“You should be,” I said.
“Did you sleep out here?” he asked.
“No,” I lied. “I’ve been up for a while now.”
“I carried you to bed,” Leif said. “I remember.”
I shrugged. “I was drunk,” I said. I closed my eyes and saw myself splayed out on our bed. I watched Leif rearrange my legs. I was a puppet. I had an urge to hurt him, and I forced myself to stare at my hands.
“I know,” he said gently. He brushed some sticky hair from the nape of my neck and leaned in to smell me there. He kissed each vertebra in my neck softly. “God, you looked sexy.”
I wanted to tell him I’d been awake. I wanted to tell him he’d hurt me. He reached under my shirt and teased my nipples taut. He slipped his hand in my underwear, where, this time, I was wet. He moaned when he felt the slipperiness between his fingers. I lifted my hips up and he pulled my underwear down over my hips. He knelt next to the couch and nuzzled the inside of my thighs with his lips. He kissed me. I let him. I always let him.
I was fifteen when I discovered I could make myself come by holding my hips just right and my legs open underneath the heavy stream of the bathtub faucet. I was thrilled to find I wasn’t defective after all, but I was disappointed and shocked by the feeling itself. It was like someone had taken control of me from the outside and contracted my body so tightly that it only felt good because the moment of orgasm was a release from that contraction.
I felt I had to tell Dee, though as soon as I’d told her, a deep shame coursed through me, because she retreated from me slightly. Her cheeks went pink. Her eyes drilled into the center of my forehead.
“Oh my God, Pegasus,” she said. She had a mindless habit of brushing her lips and tracing their outline with the ends of her hair. “That is . . . really weird.” That was about all she said on the subject. I wanted to ask her how it was different than her friend Nicole on her bike. But I just shrugged and acted like no big deal, even though I was stung.
A couple of weeks later, I asked if she’d tried it yet, and she seemed annoyed. She was doing her homework on the couch in the living room. She shook her head and buried herself in her notebook, but her cheeks blazed. I knew she was lying.
“What?” I prodded her. “Are you too scared?”
“No, I’m just not a weirdo.” There was a certain grit, a seriousness, in her voice that hurt me and made me want to hurt her back.
“You are,” I told her. She glared at me. In a dramatic flourish, she threw her notebook on the ground at my feet. It was a cheap bright yellow composition book. It fell open on the carpet so I could see class notes written in her messy, looping handwriting, and doodles in the margins, which had become more intricate and sophisticated in the last year—profiles of classmates, landscape sketches, petals of complicated flowers. I stared at them while Dee ran up to our bedroom and slammed the door. Ma came out of the kitchen and stood in the doorway watching me stare at Dee’s drawings. She picked up the notebook and gently closed it. I opened my mouth to defend myself, and Ma put her hand up as if to say, I don’t want to hear it.
April 2019
At the next session with Thomas Alexander, I handed him the Walkman. I was sorry to see this object in his hands, this thing Dee had loved.
Thank you, Thomas Alexander mouthed at me. I scanned the room. Charlie Makon, the reporter Pete had requested from the Journal Sentinel, was making small talk with my aunt. He was in his mid-to-late twenties, with a mop of curls and a rather furtive, concerned look about him, as if he sensed someone somewhere was always talking about him.
One of the psychic’s assistants clapped her hands. I watched the journalist’s head wrench toward the noise. His curls flounced on his head. The assistant ushered all of us outside to the courtyard, where Thomas Alexander and Ma were seated across from each other in identical wooden rockers. The rest of us leaned against the walls of the courtyard and waited. Thomas Alexander’s bodyguards cast long shadows like sundials onto the gravel. I wished I could hide in those shadows. Wolski stood beside me. He gave my shoulder a squeeze and I put several crucial inches between us. Thick midwestern clouds crowded the sun. I shivered.
Thomas Alexander crossed one ankle over his knee. He held Dee’s Walkman in one hand and he balanced his drawing pad on his shin. He began drawing his dark looping circles. He muttered. His lips moved ever so slightly. I wrapped my coat tighter around me. Wolski reached for my hand, but I brushed him off. What was with him?
“Is she there?” Ma croaked out. Thomas Alexander didn’t say anything. The circles on the pad grew larger and larger. I imagined the ink leaking through all those crisp white pages and staining the psychic’s pants leg.
“We have to be patient,” he said. Ma’s right eyebrow shot up. There was no one in the world who could possibly tell my mother about patience. “There’s something here, though.” Her spine straightened infinitesimally. Probably only Pete and I noticed. What did it mean that small, even inane amounts of hope still had the power to electrify us?
“Hurry up,” Ma told Thomas Alexander. “Don’t dick around here, okay? You need to tell her that we just want to bring her home. That’s all. We want to bring her home. We’re ready for her. I’m ready.”
“She’s . . . Okay . . . I’m not sure it’s her. There’s a force. There’s a spirit here. It’s not clear if it’s her. It might be her. It’s willing to engage, though. Okay . . . it’s . . . huh . . . okay, I’m confirming it is Candace.”
Ma inched the working part of her body toward the edge of her seat, which twisted her torso in the rocker. I worried she might fall. Pete leaned toward Ma and Thomas Alexander on the balls of his feet like he was ready to jump between them. Wolski’s body was poised too; his animal brain hadn’t decided whether the moment required a fight or a flight response. My own mouth was dry and sour. I couldn’t swallow. I focused my eyes on the drawing pad, which was almost all black ink now except for the corners. I thought of the photo; almost anything, I realized, could remind me of the image. It remained disturbingly, permanently at the surface of my thoughts.
“Hang on. Okay. She’s telling me she knows this is hard for you. She knows you’ve been waiting such a long time. But she wants you to know. Hang on.” Thomas Alexander kept drawing and drawing. I wanted to fall into the black mess of ink and stay there. “The spirit says it’s important that you know this. Even though some of the family won’t believe it.”
“Can you keep her here?” Ma asked him. Her spine was a collapsed spring. All the give had gone out of it. “Please? Dee!” She was frantic and moving the right side of her body convulsively. “Dee, baby. Please, we need to know where you are. I don’t have much time, baby.”
“There’s something else,” Thomas Alexander said. His voice was monotone. Light. Like he was impersonating someone in a kind of trance. I had an image of a Baptist minister flailing on the sidewalk outside the serial killer’s apartment. Did the minister believe he had cast out the evil in the city that night? Where, then, had the evil gone?
“She wants you to know. It wants you to know. It wasn’t Fran
k. Frank didn’t do it.” I could hear Wolski grinding his teeth. I imagined soft shavings of his teeth falling out of his mouth when he opened it. I’ve heard that dreams of one’s teeth falling out are very common. I forgot what they were supposed to mean, though. Sexual frustration? The sun had disappeared, and the wind was picking up. The bodyguards shifted their weight from foot to foot, and their shadows quivered. I was still biting my lip.
“It was . . . It was Erik. She wants you to know it was him. He killed her. She called him after Frank pulled a gun on her during their last argument. So Erik went to the apartment. Frank had a big dog. There was a scuffle. Erik got Frank’s gun. He tried to shoot Frank, but she leaped in front at the last minute. Erik killed her. She wants everyone to know that she knows he’s sorry. She knows he never meant to hurt her. He loved her.”
“I don’t care about any of this!” Ma screamed. Half laugh, half exasperation. I saw Pete’s eyes widen at this admission. “I need to know where she is.”
“Ma’am, all due respect.” Thomas Alexander’s voice was smooth, like deep breaths. “I don’t . . . I can’t choose what is relayed.”
“But can you keep her? Can you do anything at all? Jesus!” Ma cried. “Can you ask her where she is? We need to—”
In a terrible moment, Ma fell onto her knees from the chair. I heard a crunch, which might have been her patellae. She hinged forward like she’d been stabbed in the back. The fits of laughter started up. Peter rushed forward and grabbed her. Half of her body laughed and laughed into his shoulder. Thomas Alexander stood up and threw the Walkman and the notepad on the ground. Why was he always throwing things?
“Stop,” Thomas Alexander yelled to no one in particular. He rushed over to his assistant to look at the photos she’d gotten. There was a bead of sweat about to fall out of a tiny dent in his forehead. Dee and I had identical dents in our forehead from when we’d scratched open our chicken pox and the wounds had scarred. Ma was ruined over these spots for weeks, but our father laughed them off. Character, he said, it gives them character. I heard Thomas Alexander ask his assistant if she’d captured Ma’s fall from her chair. Peter got Ma into her wheelchair, said nothing to Thomas Alexander, or anyone else, for that matter, and wheeled her back inside toward her room. Suze nodded at me and Wolski, and she hobbled after them.
The Comfort of Monsters Page 14