Wolski turned to me and reached toward my face. I flinched. He steadied me and kept reaching. He wiped my chin with his thumb and showed it to me. I’d bitten through my lip so it bled. He licked his thumb and rubbed his spit into my chin so the blood disappeared.
The Journal Sentinel reporter rushed after me as I made my way back to the car.
“Excuse me,” he yelled. “I was wondering if you’d be willing to answer a couple of questions for my piece.”
I shook my head. “What piece?”
“My piece about corruption at the MPD.”
“My brother, Peter, is doing all of that.”
“Just a few questions?” he asked. “About Wolski?”
I wanted to hurt this man. I went close to him. “I don’t know what Pete told you, but we’re trying to find my sister’s body. That’s it. What are you trying to do?”
“This was a courtesy call . . . Your brother . . . he asked,” he said.
“My brother thinks you’re doing a piece about Dee.”
His cheeks flushed. “It is . . . it is,” he stammered.
“Sure, then talk to Pete.”
I got in my car and slammed the door. No one at the newspapers could be trusted. I’d learned that a long time ago.
July 1991
It was July 3 when Dee called to tell me she suspected Frank had been cheating. I tried to sound shocked, but I wasn’t. I think I believed at the time that all men hated all women on some primal level, but some men were just better equipped to resist the temptations of misogyny. Frank seemed especially poorly equipped.
“I found another woman’s thong.” She was whispering like saying the words too loud would make them truer. “In his bathroom.”
“Son of a bitch,” I said.
“Fucking scum,” she said, but it wasn’t believable.
“What did you do?”
“I ran out,” she said. “I didn’t even tell him I found it. I just left.”
“I’ll kill him,” I said. “Or Peter will kill him. We can tell Ma and Peter together.”
Dee gulped air. “Don’t tell Peter or Ma,” she pleaded. “Please. I don’t want them to know.”
“I won’t tell,” I promised.
“It’s over.”
“I know.”
“I should go back and tell him tonight; I have to.”
“Why don’t you wait on it, babe? I’ll come get you, and we’ll catch the fireworks together.”
I held my breath while she mulled this over. “Sure.”
She hadn’t said what I knew she wanted to say, though. She blamed me for the impending breakup. Frank had cheated because he thought she’d been unfaithful too, and the only reason he’d thought that was because I’d asked Dee to look after Erik. It’s hard to tell if I’m connecting these dots only now, or if there were even any dots to connect. Her words were tinged with blame, though. I wanted to make it better.
I borrowed Leif’s car and drove to Mount Mary. Dee was sitting on the steps of her dorm, wearing high-waisted denim shorts, her mess of curls already wilting in the heat, goopy eyelashes; her face was puffy and wet. I idled the car and went to her, took her in my arms, the slenderness of her body easy to hold, and she leaned in to me hard.
“I love you,” I told her.
She nodded, nodded like it barely mattered, which I’m not sure that it did.
“Get in,” I said.
I bent the car back east. We smelled the breweries first and the algae second. Dee pinched her nose dramatically, like we were little girls again. I hated the way the city smelled that summer. During the days, especially hot ones, the air was like an infection when you breathed it, full of yeast from the riverside breweries; it was full of sugar at night, when the confectionaries churned out chocolate all through third shift, and the smell from the giant vats that pooled inside the factories coated the city too.
At Kopp’s, I bought us cheeseburgers as big as our faces, with extra pickles, ketchup and mustard, and onion rings that could have fit around Dee’s wrists. We ate them on a picnic table near the marina. Families were already picking spots for the fireworks. Children screamed and laughed and ran circles around the tables. Seagulls cried above us.
I devoured my burger while Dee picked at her pickles. “Eat,” I pleaded.
She shrugged. Her eyes were jumpy, darting from side to side. The low cut of her shirt showed sharp collarbones; the bones made hollow spaces big enough for tide pools.
“This city smells awful,” Dee said.
They’d closed the beach because the E. coli levels along Lake Michigan’s shoreline were so high and the algae blooms so thick that entire schools of dead fish washed up each day.
“I’ve got to have it out with him.”
“What good will it do?” I took a plastic knife from the white paper bag and began cutting Dee’s burger into quarters; I thought she might be more willing to eat it this way, or at least to begin.
“I want to know the truth.”
“The truth is he’s a lying fuck,” I said. Dee’s shoulders went rigid, as if I’d shocked her with an electrical pulse. “I just mean. Look. Another woman’s thong?”
Dee turned toward the marina; a slice of the sun setting over the water caught the side of her face and lit it on fire for a moment before she turned back.
“That’s not all.” She leaned on the picnic table so the wood cut into her stomach. “I also found an ID with his face on it, except it wasn’t his name; it was a driver’s license issued in Ohio.”
I frowned. Tried to make sense of what she was saying, but realized, above all else, I just wanted her to eat something, dammit. I picked up a quarter of the burger and moved it toward her lips. They were the same color as Leif’s Spitfire. She huffed and then opened her mouth and took a messy bite so the ketchup and the brown mustard spilled down her chin and she leaned back and wiped it away with the back of her hand.
Dee and I made our way through the little camps that people had set up to watch the fireworks—quilts and lawn chairs and canopies and coolers spread out over scruffy grass. Some men whistled at Dee, There’s room on my blanket, baby, or Come watch the show with us, honey. Dee made like she was deaf.
A pair of sailors in stiff crackerjacks approached us. When they were within earshot, the tall one leaned over to his buddy and said, “Too young.”
We passed them, and Dee turned around and crossed her arms over her chest, a fist to her chin in mock appraisal. “Too fat, and too old,” she said.
I felt my eyes grow wide. “Dee,” I gritted through my teeth. They started back toward us.
“Excuse me?” said the short one, the one Dee had labeled too fat.
“Run,” I said.
We turned and took off through the marina, dodging people’s picnics at every turn. Dee hurdled a set of lawn chairs and some people clapped. We ran up Lafayette Hill, leaving behind the marina and the whistling men, the algae and the sulfur. At the top of the hill, we threw ourselves down, breathless and laughing. It was quiet at the top of the bluff—the whole city had funneled into the lakefront. Below, the tiny camps looked like a Civil War reenactment, an army at rest. Dee lay down in the grass. I thought she was still laughing, but when I turned to her, I saw she was sobbing.
The first firework was a ghoulish green that turned us both fluorescent. I imagined we were divers swimming in a bioluminescent bay. The night felt heavy anyway, like water pressure bearing down on us. I imagined we were anywhere but Milwaukee. I didn’t know what to say to Dee, so I started making promises.
“We can get out of town,” I told her, touching her kneecap and moving the bone around in her skin. “We’ll steal the Spitfire and drive to the Badlands. We’ll get a loan from Peter and backpack through Spain. We’ll move to Mexico or Thailand.”
“I thought we would get married,” she said.
This seemed like a stretch to me. But I had a vision then—Dee as a little girl, folding recently purchased tablecloths into her
hope chest. Our mother had shown Dee and me her own hope chest, and while the thought of it had delighted Dee, it had disgusted me. At the 7-Mile fair, while I rifled through jewelry and records, Dee shopped for domestic items that had bored me—bed skirts and linens and bone-china sets. At the time, the assuredness with which thirteen-year-old Dee had prepared for her married life, a life I wasn’t sure I ever wanted, had impressed me. But later, I supposed, it only depressed me.
I ignored her and kept up with the proposals. “Or Canada. Let’s move to Canada. Or Oregon. Or Alaska.”
Dee said something, but a set of bright white rockets exploded over the marina and I couldn’t hear her. The entire show felt like an assault instead of a celebration. Dee cried all the way through it, and the air was sharp with smoke and sulfur.
A man came by selling rainbow glow sticks. I bought twenty of them because my favorite part was cracking the liquid alive and watching the neon flood the plastic and you can only do that once. Dee and I sat there cracking those sticks, one after the other, until there was a plastic pile of neon between us. Then we put them on, around our necks and our wrists and our ankles. Dee twisted a few together to make a crown. My God, she was beautiful, maybe the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. The fireworks kept up; I wanted suddenly to leave for real, maybe for Canada or maybe just for home, the house where Dee and I had grown up, had shared a bedroom, two twin beds, a nightstand between them, where in the night, even when we were teenagers, we used to reach our arms across the space between the beds and squeeze hands, because it felt good to hold someone you loved, even if just for a minute, before falling asleep. My bed was against the window, because Dee was afraid of someone climbing up the trellis on the side of the house and taking us in the night. I promised her I would always make the kidnapper take me before her.
The grand finale started up, and the city seemed frenetic at the bottom of the bluff, so I jumped up, pulled Dee to her feet.
“Let’s go,” I said. Below, the lake was a looking glass of purple fire, and we left before all the other people began to make their way back up the hill and into the city night.
I drove Leif’s Spitfire back to Riverwest and parked it on the street. Dee and I got high on a bench in front of the river and kicked pebbles into the murk of the water at our feet. Even in bright day, you could not see through the black water of the Milwaukee River. People said there were cow carcasses down there and a three-foot-thick sludge of tannery chemicals. Everywhere in Milwaukee, water was hemmed in by cement.
“Leif’s bringing us acid,” I told Dee.
She shrugged. “Sure,” she said.
She was catatonic, but I didn’t trust the mood. I knew it could shift at any minute, and she’d be furious and possibly inconsolable. We smoked until the smell of sulfur faded and was replaced by the smell of hot chocolate from the factory where Leif worked. I took Dee back to our apartment and put her to bed.
Dee said, “I love you, Pegasus.”
And I said, “I love you, Dee.”
Dee fell asleep fast. I set my alarm, so I’d be awake in time to pick Leif up from third shift. Then I climbed in beside Dee and pulled her in to my stomach and breathed onto her neck. There were tiny hairs all along the length of her neck. They looked sharp like razor blades but were soft like a newborn’s scalp. She was already asleep, but I leaned over her and squeezed her hand, and she squeezed it back and pulled me in to her.
I woke before the alarm because I felt something wet in the bed. Dee and I had fallen asleep still wearing our glow sticks, and we’d broken a few of them open in the night. Dee often slept with her hands between her legs, and there was a small neon handprint on the inside of her thigh. I surveyed my own body. My arms and legs were covered with the liquid, as was the bed, and my skin burned a little bit. I shook Dee and she itched her scalp. Blinked awake. Her eyes were dust bowls of sleep.
“Let’s go, baby.” I didn’t dare leave her alone. Outside, the sky was just beginning to lighten, purple clouds rolled over the city, sulfur lingered in the air, and the streets were covered with the carcasses of fireworks. Dee dozed in the car.
By the time we got to the factory, it was full-on morning. People flooded out of the front doors, eyes shielded, shoulders slumped, chocolate under their nails and on the bottoms of their shoes; I knew because of Leif. He opened the passenger door and kissed Dee on the cheek. “Hey, Dee,” he said to her. He scanned us. “Jesus, what did I miss?”
He reached across Dee and thumbed the side of my neck, rubbing at the residue of my neon necklace. He smelled like chocolate but chemicals too. I shrugged. Dee slid to the middle of the car to make room for Leif, and she pulled her knees up to her chest, her feet on the seat. Leif looked like he might reprimand her for this, so I said, “Frank’s been cheating on Dee.”
“Dammit,” Dee said. “Thanks.”
Leif said, “I see.” He patted Dee’s shoulder awkwardly and she shrank from his touch.
“Nothing’s for sure,” she said. She was slipping back into the denial phase.
“Like hell,” I said.
“Can we go?” Leif put his head in his hands, his upper body leaning against the dash. The car was too small for the three of us. I nodded and reached across Dee to put my hand on his cheek and pinch it. He flinched.
Leif contended that acid was the most patriotic thing we could do on the Fourth of July. Dee’s news didn’t seem to affect his plans; he said Dee and I could split my dose. There are so many nights I dream of this day, of this decision, of the millions of different outcomes, all of them preferable to the actual outcome, had we not taken the acid.
The three of us sat cross-legged on the bedroom floor while we waited. The shades were drawn, but outside, sparklers fizzled, children laughed and screamed at cheap fireworks that sounded like gunshots. The thick smell of propane, and grilled meat, and sulfur wafted through the open windows. By noon, the neon of the glow sticks had taken on a new and darkly significant meaning; we were marked, all three of us, though for what, it wasn’t entirely clear. Leif said, We’ve been poisoned. I said, We’ve been blessed. Dee said, You guys are toast. The rainbows on Dee’s cheekbones were unbearably beautiful, and her clavicles began whispering to me about Frank and feminism, and also blow jobs and bowling balls, and I said all this to Dee. I said, Can we trust a man who owns his own bowling ball? And Dee said, Fuck you, Peg. And the rainbows bloomed across her body again, so I put my hands over my eyes to shield myself from her light, which was warning us about the apocalypse in one year, or two years, or one hundred thousand years from now, when the sun would explode and the whole of our solar system would be wiped by collapsing light. I said this out loud, maybe, because Leif said, I know, baby, baby, baby. I thought we were all on fire. The bioluminescent bay burned on the back of my eyelids. Where had I seen the pictures of this place? Or had I invented it? A small dark bay, a cobalt sky, the ocean alight with a green pulse. I loved the pictures where the photographer left the shutter open for ages but kept the camera very still so all the captured light was viscous, like lava. I wanted my own set of sparklers. I wanted to watch the light as I turned it in circles around our bodies. I asked Leif if we had any and I opened my eyes and he was nodding and moving toward me. Dee was gone from the room and I asked after her, but Leif said, She’s okay, she’s okay, we’re all keeping it together. He kept moving toward me, my legs were still crossed, I burned after those sparklers. I wanted a set of them in my own hands. Leif was in front of me. I studied his face as if I’d never met him before. The sharp nose, the reddish blond of his hair and beard, the eyes green like that bioluminescent bay, all alive with light. I wanted him to stay away so I could keep looking and looking, but he kept moving closer, until his face was pressed against mine and the light was blurry like the red and white flood of headlights on a busy freeway at night. He opened my lips with his own and put his tongue in my mouth, running the muscle across my teeth, and I shivered. He put his hands under my armpits and pulled me to
my knees, where I knelt and he stood. He was naked. I thought I heard gunshots and laughter and I shivered again though it was hot and I sweated beneath my arms and between my legs. Leif cupped my chin, his hands were on fire with neon and light. He was moving me like a puppet. I didn’t feel anything. I wondered if he’d sucked all of my feeling into his own body—was that the meaning of possession? He opened my mouth again, this time with his hands, and he tested my throat with his fingers. I imagined the inside of my mouth swallowing all of the neon on his hands, a gaping black hole capable of eating and holding all light. He put himself inside my mouth and pressed his navel against my nose and I thought hard about how hard I wanted him, and wasn’t this what I wanted? I felt it after it happened. He had slapped me across the face while he was still in my mouth and I didn’t feel it so much as I saw the color of it, which was a sharp red rocking the waters of the bay on the back of my eyelids. He pressed himself harder into me and slapped the other side of my face, so my neck twisted against him and my body began to float from me. And this is what we did: He hit me and pushed himself deeper down my throat, and then he hit me again, and I felt myself pulling him down into me, like I could swallow the whole of his body, because I was invincible, I was large, larger than he was, even, and he tossed my face from side to side, harder and harder, until I felt him collapse under the weight of his own coming and he fell onto me and I spit everything in my mouth onto his chest. There was a noise from the doorway of the bedroom and I turned my head, which spun on its swivel, and Dee was sitting there in the doorway on her ankles, shins tucked beneath her, eyes open too wide, and she reached her arm toward me and opened her palm flat toward the ceiling so Leif and I could see her dose, which she had not taken, crumbled in her hand. She said, Can we trust a man who beats his girl? She had one of Leif’s thirty-five-millimeter cameras up against her face, and she adjusted everything slow, with enough time for me to stop her, or to protest, but I didn’t. She took the picture and the noise of the shutter was like a bomb exploding in my head.
The Comfort of Monsters Page 15