April 2019
After the second consultation with Thomas Alexander, another even greater wave of destabilizing uncertainty shook me. It was much worse than what I’d felt after realizing the necklace was not Dee’s. This time I sensed I was waking from a spell of unconsciousness. The memories I’d curated so carefully for the previous thirty years became, inexplicably, irredeemably strange to me. I’d spent the decades since we’d lost Dee taking care of my memories the way other people take care of their families, their homes, their bodies. I had sunk all of my energy into remembering the months before Dee went missing. And for the first time since she disappeared, I began to wonder if I had done a bad job. I saw their fabricated nature more clearly. I understood then what Dana had been trying to tell me: She had wanted me to be ready, to be so confident in my story, in my case against Frank, that I could not be destabilized. But, I had not been ready for this version of events. Or for any version that differed from my own.
Because this possibility, that Erik had killed Dee, though it seemed absolutely improbable, had in one morning made clear to me the fickleness and the fragility of all my memories. I felt a different kind of fear then. Certainty is like a drug: a great comfort. When it’s lost, the effect is that of withdrawal: fever, nausea, sweating, headaches, intense, unending pain, and above all else, an ocean’s worth of desire to regain that which will make the pain stop.
I thought about the family from the video I’d watched. How the psychic had disappeared the deadness in those people’s eyes, even though what he had said to make this deadness disappear had probably been wrong. Still, in the moment, it had worked. I went into the bathroom and stared into the mirror. The deadness was still there. It ate light. Maybe mine was more intractable. Maybe mine was permanent. I didn’t know. I wished it would go. I stared at myself for six long minutes, and the hugeness of my pupils brought the photo to mind again.
For the first time in thirty years, I had the urge to call Leif, who, after he left me in Milwaukee, had called me regularly, though I’d often shirked his calls or said nothing on the phone while he talked. When he first left the city, he called once a day, then it became once a week, then once a month, and finally, once a year. I’d answer and let him talk. Let him tell me every little detail about his life that he cared to share. Sometimes I’d hang up if he started in on a topic I couldn’t bear to hear. Other times I’d let him run on and on about his new life: a son (who looked like Erik), a wife he saw every few months in Idaho, the house they were refinishing, the book he was writing (and had always been writing), his inability to find his brother anywhere along his trucking routes. And much later, the admission that Erik had died of cancer. Leif had been invited to his brother’s funeral by Erik’s husband, Lance, a small bustling man who was a professor of botany at the University of California–Davis. They’d lived a quiet life together off campus with two dogs and several overworked bookshelves. Erik had an art studio behind the house, and he’d sold his ceramics at the local farmers’ market. I drank for days after hearing this news. I was overrun with jealousy, and something a notch sharper than grief. I wanted so badly to one day discover that Dee, somehow, had lived this kind of life too—full of wide-open vistas and safe, easy love.
But I never said a word back to Leif, not even when he’d revealed the news of Erik’s life or death. After hanging up the phone, I’d feel as if I were waking from a bender. There was always a thick greasy splotch on my phone’s screen, which made me sick to see. For a long time I believed that withholding my voice from him was a kind of punishment, though it may have hurt only me. I became an open, empty container into which Leif poured all his muck. Maybe I liked it.
I wanted suddenly, though, to tell him what the psychic had said about Erik, or what the psychic claimed Dee had said. I also hoped that Leif might have some kind of evidence that would prove, beyond a doubt, that Erik could not have possibly done this. I needed him to corroborate my case against Frank too.
I called him and the phone rang and rang, and finally, I left a long, barely intelligible message describing the few weeks since the psychic had arrived. When his voicemail cut me off with a long, harsh beep, I couldn’t be sure what had made it in the message and what had been left out. After I put the phone down, I went to the bathroom to throw up.
July 1991
It took two days for Leif and me to come down. He said maybe the acid was laced with something else; he said he was sorry. My face was split wide open. He’d hit me harder than he remembered, and I was black and blue and swollen for a week afterward. When the drugs left my system, I knew something had gone rotten between us. I didn’t know if it would stay rotten.
Leif tried to touch me, and I hissed or spit or clenched my teeth at him. I said, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, though I meant it for myself. He slept on the floor next to the bed in a tangle of blankets, and I saw bruises on his thin, bony hips when he changed. Once, as I was falling asleep, Leif whispered to me from the floor. “You liked it,” he said. It was not a question. Dee’s voice echoed in my head, I like it.
I rolled to the wall and put my forehead against the stucco. I didn’t leave the apartment. I didn’t go to work. I didn’t write. For almost two weeks after the Fourth, I lay in bed for entire days and nights and held my own face. I didn’t try to reach Dee, though my missing her was like a wide-open wound. I was afraid of what she might say. It hurts to think now that I spent this time embarrassed and afraid for myself when I should have been afraid for her.
One morning near the end of July, Leif came home early from third shift, around 1am, and turned on the news. Dried milk chocolate flaked from his forearms. A reporter stood in front of the Ambrosia chocolate factory. The police had arrested a former Ambrosia employee they believed was responsible for the murder of more than fifteen young men. Leif and I watched the reports like they were one long, bad movie; we couldn’t stop. Our phone rang and rang. We ordered Chinese food and slipped the money under the door and retrieved the food after the man had left so we didn’t have to see any real human faces except our own.
Here is what they said they found in the serial killer’s apartment: four severed heads, seven skulls, two hearts, arm muscles wrapped in plastic, an entire torso, three bags of human organs, four entire skeletons, a pair of severed hands, two severed and preserved penises, a mummified scalp, and two dismembered torsos dissolving in a fifty-seven-gallon drum of acid. The reporters kept vans and cameras outside every place this man had ever been in Milwaukee—the chocolate factory, his grandmother’s house, his own apartment building, the bars he’d frequented. Some of these bars were the same bars we’d been to with Erik. Leif and I watched these places on the screen. I still don’t know what we were hoping to see or not see. I worried Erik’s photo would flash on the nightly news, and I sensed Leif worried too, though he never would have acknowledged our shared fear. Our phone rang and rang. I had competing urges to call Dee, because I wanted to know if she’d heard from Erik, but I also wanted desperately to unplug our phone. I was afraid of what she might say about Erik, about the Fourth, about me. I did neither, and Leif and I kept watching and waiting and I was certain, and I was right, that the world had ended.
Whenever something really spooked Leif, he took to sleeping with the gun on the floor next to our bed. After I banished him to the floor, he slept next to his gun. I hated this habit, and I knew a gun wouldn’t have saved us from the serial killer anyway, or from the kind of evil that had produced him, or the kind of evil apathy that had let him flourish, but I couldn’t blame Leif either. He needed the Band-Aid, and who was I to point out the ridiculousness of his solution. The fear was always real. A couple hours after Leif had gotten home, and after we’d turned off the news, and let the stillness soak the apartment, someone banged on our door. Leif took his gun to the peephole and peered through. He opened the door, and Erik was standing there, skinny as hell. He looked a little wet, like he’d been in a rainstorm and his clothes had never dried. Ther
e was a sweaty sickness on his face; his lips were cracked and dry. I could see he’d been biting them raw. His chin had a bloodstained tint to it. I touched my own sore face.
Leif doubled over and began to sob. I had never seen him cry. I wished he would put the gun down, but he kept it in his right hand. It dragged against the floor as he cried. Then he held Erik, and I remembered the story he used to tell about the day they brought his baby brother home from the hospital—how he’d carried him all around his own tiny world of that flat and given him a tour of his new home. He held Erik’s shaky frame so tightly I was afraid he’d break one of his brother’s bones. Erik sagged into him.
“I’m sorry,” Leif sobbed. “I’m so sorry.”
“Leif,” I cried. “Enough.” I couldn’t bear to watch the scene any longer. (Or maybe now, in my memory, I can barely stand to recollect the moment—this, if I had ever seen Dee again, is what I would have said.) Leif punched his brother in the shoulder, and Erik rocked back on the threshold of the apartment. I shivered at the sight of Leif’s fists. I was like an animal afraid of the place where I’d been hurt.
“Get in here and shut the damn door,” I said. They were rattled by the edge in my voice. Erik threw his large, thin body down on our sofa, and he ran his hands up and down his face. A debilitating sense of relief rushed over me—I felt as if I were watching the scene from underwater. I am ashamed to say that the source of the relief was not just that Erik was safe and alive, though of course I was thankful for that. But I was also relieved that I wouldn’t have to call Dee to ask if she’d seen Erik. Now I see this was a selfish mistake. An easy way out. I don’t know for certain if it cost me Dee, but it could have.
“Where in the hell have you been?” Leif asked Erik.
Erik’s right knee shook rhythmically. I wanted to put my hands on it, but touching Erik felt almost like touching Leif, so I kept my arms crossed tightly across my chest.
“Shit is crazy, right?” Erik said. “I mean, Jesus. I can’t believe any of it. I just can’t believe it.”
“What do you need?” I asked. He looked hurt. I had a memory of huge waves crashing on Bradford Beach. The lake was always threatening to wash the whole man-made shore away. One day maybe the lake would shrink or disappear completely, and we’d be left with a barren lake bed full of the fossilized remains of monstrous animals. You’re making it worse.
“I thought you’d be worried,” Erik said to Leif. “I came back.”
“I know, buddy,” Leif said. “I know. I’m sorry I kicked you out.”
“Are you going to lose your job now?” Erik said.
Leif knitted his brows. “Why the hell would I lose my job?”
“Everyone’s saying this guy hid bodies in the big vats at Ambrosia. A business can’t come back from something like that.”
“That’s nonsense,” I said, though I supposed, given the news accounts, it was probable.
Erik turned to me and saw my face for the first time. “What the hell happened?” he asked. Leif’s face reddened, and I hated him for it. He’d done this to me. The least he could do now was keep it a goddamn secret.
“I got mugged,” I said. This was my new official story.
“Jesus,” Erik said. “I’m sorry. This fucking city, man. Unbelievable. I told you it’s not safe around here.”
Leif’s face began to pale, and the redness faded. It pained me to see how relieved Leif was to know his brother did not believe him capable of beating me. Erik came to me and opened his arms. We’d hugged many times before, but I was skittish now. I stepped back and got embarrassed.
“It’s late,” I added and stomped to the bedroom and slammed the door.
“She okay?” Erik half whispered. I put a pillow over my head and tried to burrow into the dirty nest of blankets on our bed, but the walls were too thin.
“I don’t know,” Leif admitted, and for some reason, this admission made my heart grow for him. I hated myself for that. I hated that I still had room for him. I was beginning to understand that I’d always have room for him.
“I’m taking you to Ma’s tomorrow. She’s probably worried herself into a heart attack about you by now.”
“Fuck.”
I wondered how long it had been since either of them had seen their parents. Leif didn’t get along with his mother, but Erik had been close with her before he’d come out. I’d never met her; Leif said he didn’t like his mother mucking around in his relationships. I always pictured her with long blond-gray hair, fine features, strong hands.
“I won’t see him, though,” Erik said. Neither of them got along with their father, who, from what I’d gleaned, was a large, mostly quiet man who was prone to violent outbursts.
“Understood,” Leif said.
“I’ve got to get out of this fucking city,” Erik said. Leif was quiet.
When Leif finally came to bed that night, he set the gun gingerly on the floor and tried to get in next to me. I was wide awake, and I rolled over and put my hand in the middle of his chest. I pushed him to the edge of the bed, where he sat with his back to me. He sat there for a full minute, all hunched over like he’d been kicked in the stomach.
“Don’t,” I said. He nodded into his hands and slipped off the bed. He toyed with his gun until he fell asleep. I listened to the swift swish and click of him loading and reloading the clip.
May 2019
Dana showed up unannounced at my apartment after the second session with the psychic. The place was a mess and I’d already started drinking, but I felt I had to let her in. When I unlocked the door, she stood in the doorway and surveyed the apartment behind me.
“You’re getting worse,” she said.
“Thanks, Doc,” I said. “You hungry?”
I had nothing to offer her, but this seemed like the right question. She shook her head. Her eyes were a little runny with makeup. I wasn’t sure if it had worn off over the course of the day or if she had been crying earlier. She sat on my love seat and put her composition books and her phone on the coffee table. Her phone did not stop buzzing. She tucked her feet underneath her. “This is about what the psychic said.”
“Oh, baby,” I said. “Please. Not tonight.”
She opened her notebook. Her phone buzzed again. She ignored it. “Just hear me out.” I said nothing, so she continued. I itched for my wineglass, but I’d left it in the kitchen. “Before Aunt Dee went missing, Erik was missing first. Isn’t that right?” I nodded. Her voice affected a distinctly adult tone that pained me to hear. “But according to your records and the interviews”—she tapped her pen on a starred bullet point in her notebook—“Erik showed up at your apartment near the end of July. My dad and Grandma reported Aunt Dee missing on July ninth.” I thought on this. I nodded. “Didn’t you ask him if he’d seen Dee?” she asked me. “You saw him after Dee disappeared, right? Didn’t you ask him if he’d seen her?”
“No,” I told her. “I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“I wasn’t in the best place at the time . . . I didn’t think . . . I didn’t know I needed to ask.” I was embarrassed to admit this. I swallowed. My saliva tasted sour. “I didn’t know she was missing yet.”
“Right,” Dana said matter-of-factly. That she did not judge me for this admission surprised me. She continued, “So. If Erik knew something, anything, about Dee being missing, don’t you think he would have said something to you?”
I nodded slowly.
“He didn’t know,” she said. “It couldn’t have happened the way the psychic said.”
In spite of myself, I clenched my jaw. I suddenly understood my mother’s admission at the last session: I don’t care about any of this. We just wanted to find Dee’s body. And we no longer cared what the psychic said about what happened as long as he found her, and as long as I could finally prove to the police that I wasn’t just a traumatized hoarder. Or that’s what I told myself. I guessed my mother had a similar rationalization. I shook my head. “I didn’t t
hink it did happen like that,” I told Dana. “It’s ridiculous.”
She eyed me and frowned. “You seemed upset, though.”
“I did?” I believed I’d mastered the art of stoic reactions. Maybe Dana knew me better than I thought.
She nodded. “Most of these files”—she gestured toward my study and pointed at her own notebook—“they’re about Frank.” I didn’t like hearing this name out loud, and I especially didn’t like to hear my niece say it. “You’ve basically been stalking him.”
“Dana,” I warned her. “I have not been stalking him.”
“All of your evidence—it’s all about Frank, though.”
I paused. It was true. When Dee first disappeared, the police had not taken Frank seriously as a suspect, and even after Wolski finally spoke with him, they still decided to chase down a series of alternative and ultimately unfruitful leads. Meanwhile, I’d done the opposite. I’d spent the past thirty years focused solely on documenting Frank’s behavior before, during, and after Dee’s disappearance. I had rarely considered other possibilities than the one that involved Frank.
“Your father will be upset with me if we discuss any more of this.”
She shrugged. “He doesn’t care. And besides, I’m afraid if I don’t tell you, no one will.”
“Tell me what?”
She bit her lower lip. “You really don’t have that much on him.”
The Comfort of Monsters Page 16