“You sound like Wolski,” I said.
She shook her head. “No. I mean, I believe you. I do. But what you’ve got is mostly circumstantial.”
“I know,” I told her. “That’s why we need to find Dee.” Dana frowned. For a moment I thought she was about to cry, and I felt trapped, panicked. I chastised myself for speaking so freely with her about my sister. Dana was still only fourteen, even if she often acted much older.
Her phone buzzed again. I peered down to look at the caller: Cal.
“Who’s that?” I asked her. I wanted to take control of the conversation.
“My ex-boyfriend. I broke up with him yesterday,” she said. This divulgence made her blush. “He wants another shot.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. She shrugged. I hadn’t even known she was dating. I thought of her soggy clothes hung over the backs of my kitchen chairs. Her voice trembling: I kept thinking about floating down to the bottom. How long it would take to sink. She looked at me seriously and then, in a way so reminiscent of Dee it made me shiver, she said dismissively, “I didn’t love him.”
July 1991
I hadn’t answered the phone in over two weeks, afraid it would be Dee wanting to talk about what she’d seen on the Fourth of July. I suspected, in those weeks after the Fourth, that she’d long since made up with Frank. I envisioned her enjoying languid and extravagant I’m so sorry dates followed by careful, devoted makeup sex. The thoughts sickened me. But also, I sickened me. What would I tell her about myself? How could I tell her to leave Frank when she’d seen the way I let Leif treat me? And how had I let Leif treat me? What did Dee think it meant? I don’t think I knew what it meant. Each day, I told myself I would be ready to pick up the phone, to have these conversations, to figure it out with her, because I needed her, and she was the only person in the world I loved without reservation.
When I finally did answer the phone, a day after the news about the serial killer broke, I was surprised to find that it was not Dee but my mother. Suddenly, it was clear that she was the one who had been dialing our landline for days on end, not Dee, and also that she was frantic.
“Where have you two been?” she yelled at me. I had to move the receiver away from my ear. You two.
“Who?” I asked her.
“Where have you and Dee been, and why haven’t you answered my calls? Have you seen the news? This city is out of its goddamn mind.”
“I haven’t felt good. I had the flu,” I lied quickly and without much thought.
“What about Dee?”
I shook my head, confused. “I don’t know. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Margaret,” she said. Her voice took on a frightening robotic quality. I realized she hoped we’d been together. “When did you see her last?”
“July Fourth,” I said. And then my mother lost it.
I’m so ashamed now to say I didn’t really believe her. (I carry the weight of this disbelief with me every day.) I thought the news of the serial killer’s crimes had thrown my mother into a fit of hysteria. I figured Dee and I were playing a dumb game of chicken, though truthfully, it’s hard to remember what the hell I was thinking. I think about what I was thinking all the time now. We’d done this kind of thing before, after a big fight; whoever called first lost. Once it was over, we didn’t keep score, but the bouts of silence could last weeks.
My mother told me she was sending Pete to get me. I agreed, but I didn’t have the strength to tell her Pete didn’t know where I lived.
Leif was getting ready to take Erik over to their parents’ house, but he paused, hunched over his bootlaces. “What’s all that?” he asked.
“She thinks Dee’s missing,” I said.
“Is she?”
I paused. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “She’s probably just with Frank.”
Leif shook his head. “Yeah, your ma’s crazy,” he said.
I bristled at this. “Watch your mouth,” I said.
He was right, she was crazy, but only I was allowed to say it. Leif shrugged.
Erik came out of the kitchen with a milk mustache. I remembered Erik and Dee sipping out of the SlimFast cans with their limbs all tangled up in her bed.
“What’s wrong?” Erik asked.
“Let’s go, buddy,” Leif said. He ushered his brother to the door.
I suddenly had an urge to tell Erik about my mother’s phone call. To hear what he would say.
“Wait,” I said. Leif undid all the locks on our door. Erik looked like a baby boy, with his sleepy eyes and his messy milk face. I sensed I was missing an opportunity, although I probably can see the chance only now that I know. I had no words for the thing I wanted to say to Erik then or the one thing I should have asked. I only had a feeling I could not voice. Leif took his brother’s shoulder and nudged him out the door. He locked the door behind them.
I imagined them pulling up to their parents’ house. I bet they lived in one of those tiny shotgun houses on the South Side. There were probably geraniums hanging in green plastic baskets from the front porch and a leaning arbor coated in climbing vines that was a gateway to nothing except the alleyway behind the house. I imagined the boys pulling up in Leif’s flashy car, and their ma puttering around in the kitchen, hearing the noisy engine, and running to the screen door.
My baby, she’d yell. My beautiful, beautiful baby. (It’s a well-known fact that mothers reserve the softest, sweetest parts of their love for their youngest children.) She’d run her tiny hands all over Erik’s face, and she’d thank God for bringing him back to her, and she’d thank God for giving her two beautiful sons, and for saving them from that terrible, terrible man.
May 2019
After Dana left, I drove drunk to see the old place Leif and I had shared so briefly in Riverwest. Isn’t it amazing the way time works? How our memories can stretch the shortest moments into long, infinitely unwinding wires of feeling. The year I spent with Leif in Riverwest looms so large in my life that it is easy for me to believe we lived there for decades, but it was, in fact, no time at all.
After I turned onto the street and pulled the car to the curb, I was surprised to see that the house was missing. The houses in Riverwest are tightly packed. The long, empty lot was like a missing tooth. A police car, lights flashing, screamed down the street. I parked my car and got out. The concrete steps up the short steep part of the lot and the attached railing were intact. I climbed them slowly, like maybe a thousand more steps would follow. Like I knew I still had a long way to go. In the lot, I walked through some scrubby grass peeking out of fresh snow. When and why had they knocked it down? I went from room to room. I paused in the living room where I fell down onto my hands and knees. A floodlight from one of the houses next door registered my movement and shone a bright cone of light onto me. I looked up. I thought, in only a heartbeat’s worth of time, that I would see Dee. (Sometimes this sort of thing still happens to me.) In the second floor of the house next door, the dark shadow of a human body moved. A face looking down. I stayed there, letting the snow soak into the knees of my jeans until my kneecaps froze. Two more cop cars rushed down the street. I stayed on my knees there in my old house for so long that the floodlight went off and I fell back into the dark.
When my phone rang, I felt like I was waking from a deep sleep. I had a memory of a period in my life when I didn’t eat for a matter of weeks: I stayed in bed and used all my energy on memories. Memories of Dee as a girl, of me and Pete and Ma and Suze and Dad when he was alive. Anything from before. Everything from before. I tried to remember and remember. I tried to keep anything I could. It was a long time before I became aware that no matter what I did, no matter how hard I tried or how little I ate, I could not remember the only days that mattered. And then maybe I tried to forget that fact.
“Do you know where I am?” I said to Leif.
I heard a sharp intake of breath.
“Where?” he asked.
“I’m inside our old place
.”
“Yeah? How’s it look?” he asked me. He spoke as if he thought I was unwell, as if I were a crazy person in a movie about crazy people. He was playing the sane person talking in that way the sane people talk to the crazy people in the movies about crazy people.
“It’s gone.”
“Gone how?”
“They knocked it down,” I told him.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“What’s wrong with your voice?” I asked him. “Why are you talking like that?”
“How am I supposed to talk? Huh? I don’t hear a word, not a single word, from you for thirty fucking years, and you want to critique how I’m talking?”
I breathed. I moved. The motion detector went off again, and the cone of light shone in my face. I went to sit on the steps of the building. We hadn’t spoken in so long, but it still felt easy with him, like we were always caught up, always right where we needed to be in relation to each other. That’s how it used to be, anyway; maybe I was just remembering the way it used to be.
“Do you think that’s what happened?” I asked him. He knew what I meant.
“No,” he said. There was a long pause. I thought I heard the click of a cigarette lighter on the other line. The deep inhale. “I don’t know. I suppose it’s possible.”
“It doesn’t make sense. The night Erik came to our place. He would have told us if he’d seen Dee . . . if he knew anything.” I was, I realized, mostly repeating what Dana had said to me.
“Erik didn’t tell me shit. He didn’t trust me. You know that.”
I was quiet. I knew that from the long conversations Leif had with himself while I listened. Erik had died without ever speaking to Leif again. It had been Lance, Erik’s husband, who had reached out to find Leif, after Erik had passed.
“I know,” I said.
“I will tell you this. I’m going to get my shit together. This quack you all have working for you is famous. Actually famous. If any of this comes out about my brother, I will be ready. I owe him that, at least.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I’m changing directions with the book,” he said. He’d referenced this book he was writing many times over the years. I was never sure if he was actually writing it or just talking about it.
“No one wants to read your dumb little book,” I said, and I felt very old and very childish and extraordinarily embarrassed. My cheeks were hot. I turned back toward the empty lot where our house had been. Someone in the house next door had opened the screen door and was staring at me. “I’m sorry,” I said, not to Leif but to the person whose property I was infringing upon.
Leif accepted the apology nonetheless. “I know,” he told me. His voice took on that dull, affected wispiness again. I cringed.
“Maybe you could come back.” I tried out these words and instantly regretted them. “Now.” There was a long pause, and I listened to Leif’s breathing the way he had listened to my breathing once every year for the last thirty years.
“I don’t think so,” he said finally. I nodded into the phone. The person from the house next door yelled, Hey, and I shouted back, “Okay, okay, I said I was sorry.” And I hung up on Leif.
Give the People Light and they will find their own way.
The Wisconsin Light
Community Stunned by Murders, Angered by Press Coverage
VOLUME FOUR, NO. 15—July 25, 1991—August 7, 1991
By Jamakaya and Terry Boughner
[Milwaukee] – Allegations of “homosexual overkill,” which first emerged at a murder trial in Racine County on July 19, have been reiterated by authorities and the media in reference to the separate more recent mass murder discovered in Milwaukee on July 22. The multiple murders uncovered that night are the worst such crimes ever recorded in the history of Milwaukee.
Jeffrey L. Dahmer, 31, is being held by Milwaukee police as the primary suspect in at least eleven grisly homicides. The skulls and severed heads of eleven people, along with numerous organs and limbs in varying states of decomposition were discovered in Dahmer’s apartment at 924 N. 25th street late in the evening of July 22.
Police were alerted to the murders by a man who had apparently fled Dahmer’s apartment that night. The man, who had a handcuff locked around one of his hands, hailed a police car and led officers back to the scene of the alleged crimes.
After a July 24 hearing before Judge T. Crivello determined that there was probable cause to hold and charge Dahmer, bail was set at $1 million. Formal charges were expected to be filed on Thursday, July 25. (The Light’s press deadline for this issue was 6 p.m. on July 24.) Gerald Boyle, Dahmer’s attorney, stated that his client was cooperating with police and helping to identify the victims.
Police and medical authorities believe all of the victims were men and it is likely that all were African-Americans or men of color. Dahmer is white. The first victim to be identified was Oliver Lacey, 23, of Chicago.
According to an affidavit filed in Milwaukee County Circuit Court, Dahmer met individuals at taverns and shopping malls and induced them to return to his home by offering them money so he could take photos of them. Patrons in several of Milwaukee’s Gay bars claim to have seen him in these establishments.
The relatives of Tony Hughes, 21, who disappeared in Milwaukee on May 24, fear that he may be one of the victims. Hughes was last seen leaving Club 219, a Gay dance bar on Milwaukee’s south side.
Police reported that along with the human remains confiscated at Dahmer’s apartment were photos of mutilated bodies, body parts, and homosexual acts. Police were quick to label the murders “homosexual overkill,” and that phrase was again reported throughout the local print and broadcast media.
[Milwaukee] – Members of Milwaukee’s Gay and Lesbian community, both political leaders and average bar patrons interviewed by the Light, have reacted with wide-spread shock, sorrow, and dismay at the news of the grisly murders/dismemberments discovered on Monday, July 22, 1991. The mass killings are believed to be the worst such crimes ever perpetrated in the city of Milwaukee.
Anger was also expressed over the fact that the media was seen by most as labeling the crime as being brought about, in part, by homosexuality.
“I’m disappointed with the press for the ‘homosexual’ angle,” said Stan Straka. “They were so quick to take off with it. There’s been over 90 murders in our city this year and none of them was labeled ‘heterosexual.’ This type of reporting just brings more hatred towards our community.”
Tim Grair, a member of Queer Nation/Milwaukee, commented that to him it was “a horrifying and frightening experience.” Grair went on to add: “To me this whole situation makes grotesquely clear the importance of self-awareness training and I hope this spurs more people into action with the street patrol.”
Scott Gunkel, President of the Lambda Rights Network, expressed stunned shock over news reports and added, “there can be no excuse for blaming the whole Gay community for this deranged act.”
Karl Olson condemned the “accusations that the murders are examples of ‘homosexual overkill’ which seems to imply that all Gay men are culpable. As a community we need to rise up in pride and counter the insinuations that underlie this act.” Olson urged Gay men to “affirm the power of coming out” so that Lesbians and Gay men can free themselves as well as teach others that Gays and Lesbians are “not the monsters some fear us to be.”
Olson went on to say he believed that if “this man, the suspect in the crimes, had been a self-affirming openly Gay man who loved himself and others, Milwaukee would very likely have been spared this tragedy.”
July 1991
The same day I spoke to my mother, I was reading the serial killer coverage in bed, with my eyes barely open and drifting off to a bad sleep, when someone knocked on the door. We rarely had visitors to our place, and I tried to pretend like I wasn’t there. I hadn’t the slightest intention of answering the door or speaking to anyone. I rolled my face into my pillo
ws, which smelled musty and wet because I hadn’t washed them in a long time. I pulled the covers over my head. The knocking intensified, so I reached to the floor where Leif had left his gun the night before. I picked it up and padded to the door.
“Margaret,” Peter yelled through the locks. “You better open this goddamn door.” I fumbled with the locks, and Peter swung the door open. He was tired, and his hair was in need of a wash. I had forgotten my mother said she was sending Pete, and I was surprised he found me so quickly.
“How did you find me?”
“What? Like you’re some kind of Houdini. I got the address from Leif.” He eyed the gun in my right hand. “Jesus H. Christ. Put that fucking thing down and get your things. We’re going to the station so you can give your statement, and then I’m taking you home.”
I couldn’t move. He grabbed the gun from me, and I spooked and jumped away. And that was when he finally saw me.
“What the fuck is this?” Peter asked. The large soft pads of his thumbs traced both of my cheekbones where my bruises were now fading. I shivered; it was the gentlest thing I’d felt in weeks, since I’d curled up to sleep that neon nap with Dee before the Fourth.
Then Peter took in the apartment with a wide-eyed swoop, rotating his head on his shoulders like I’ve seen cartoon owls do, and I saw the place through his eyes. The dirty floors, the grime on the baseboards, the dust collecting in the spaces where the ceiling met the walls, the takeout containers and half-smoked joints and ashtrays, empty whiskey and wine bottles, books with pages torn out and littered like heaps of half-alive beings near the bed.
“Do you . . . live here?”
I nodded weakly. His eyes were wide. Under different circumstances he would have reveled in the idea that he’d found me out and that he would have the opportunity to rat me out to Ma.
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