The Comfort of Monsters

by Willa C. Richards

  I thought on that briefly. I could feel him taking control of the interview. He was telling me what happened when it should have been the other way around. I shook my head. “She would have left a message or something . . .”

  He consulted his report again. “Dee’s roommate, Felicity, told your mother that Dee had packed a bag on the third.”

  I shook my head. “Dee always packs a bag when she comes to stay with me.”

  “But she didn’t stay on the night of the Fourth, did she?”

  My heart was beginning to pound through my T-shirt. “No,” I said.

  Wolski returned this with a curt nod. He consulted his notes. “So you guys didn’t talk for almost two weeks, right? That’s what Pete said. Why not?”

  I clutched myself. I glanced at the door and wished Peter had come in with me. “We . . . we had an argument,” I whispered.

  “Was it about Frank? Maybe she left but didn’t want to tell you because you’d just had a fight?”

  I shook my head. “We didn’t argue about Frank.”

  “What happened to your face?”

  I knew I answered a beat too late, and Wolski registered it, even if he didn’t write anything down. “I got mugged.”

  “Did you report it?”

  “It seemed like you guys had your hands full,” I said.

  Wolski stood up and rifled around his desk, looking under papers and paperweights, moving pictures of men in military garb and binders empty of their paper guts, and he eventually found an official-looking folder. He slid his notes into the folder but not before I saw a stamp of red ink. I was shot through with despair. At the top of Dee’s missing-persons report were the words: Noncritical Missing.

  “What does that mean?” I asked him. He ignored me.

  What it meant, I learned later, was that Wolski did not think Dee’s disappearance was very suspicious. What he did think was suspicious was my split face. I picked up my bag to leave, but Wolski stopped me.

  “One of her friends at school said she was also sleeping with an . . .” He rifled through his dumb report again. “Erik?”

  My heart fell. “Erik is just a friend,” I said.

  Wolski stared at me. “We’ll need to speak with him as well,” he said.

  “Fine. So what do we do next?”

  “I’ve entered all her information in the system, but unfortunately, that’s about as much as I’m authorized to do unless there’s evidence of foul play. It’s not a crime to leave the city without telling your family.”

  “There is evidence.”

  Wolski leaned toward me again, and a vein bulged in his temple. “The only evidence of foul play is your split cheekbone there, and I don’t think you want it in here.” He shook the report at me.

  “I’ll need a copy of that,” I said.

  He handed me the one he’d just stamped.

  I snatched it, and I didn’t wait for him to let me out. I swung the door open and Peter jumped to his feet. I almost hit one of them when Wolski gave Peter that knowing look, the one that said, Fucking women, and then held his hand out and said “Pete” again.

  “I hate him,” I said to Peter when we were back in the car.

  Peter put his forehead to the steering wheel, and the car horn blared for several seconds. The reporters cast interested looks in our direction. They were stalking the city block waiting for someone to say something—a policeman with his guard down or even a family member of one of the victims. Jackpot. As the police released the victims’ identities, news vans began to take shifts outside the families’ homes: on the South Side of Milwaukee, in Wauwatosa, Racine, Chicago, Coventry, Ohio, the birthplace of the serial killer’s first victim. Police details were dispatched to keep reporters from the victims’ families. There was a photo in Time magazine of a little girl who’d set up a lemonade stand near the media camp in the serial killer’s hometown of Bath, Ohio; she sold Cannibal Lemonade to the reporters and whoever else for a buck a cup.

  I tugged on Peter’s arm and he lifted his head.

  “He’s not terrible,” Peter said. “I think he’s very professional.”

  “They gave us the dregs,” I said.

  He drove us back to Ma’s, and on the highway ramps, we passed over the police department and over the serial killer in his cell too. The downtown fell away from the highway as we headed west, away from the breweries and the factories churning out chocolate, and cheese, and sad, sad lives. Peter kept his eyes on the road.

  “Don’t expect Ma not to notice your face,” he warned.

  I pulled down the passenger visor and flipped open the mirror. Though the swelling had gone down, I had two long thin marks, one on each side, tracing the curves of my cheekbones; the skin underneath my eyes was puffy and red; and my lips looked larger than normal, chapped and red. Wolski’s voice rang in my head. I rifled around in my purse and came out with a makeup bag, which I hardly ever used. I set to applying a thick layer of foundation, eye shadow, some white liquid Dee had given me that was supposed to reduce bags, a smear of lipstick. I turned to Peter. “Better?” I asked.

  He eyed me. “You never wear makeup.”

  I wiped off the lipstick on the back of my hand.

  October 1979

  My parents used to own one of the oldest houses in our neighborhood in Wauwatosa. It was a cream-brick farmhouse, built in the 1860s and awkwardly annexed with beige prefab additions ever since. It was a low, sprawling structure with thick wooden beams and floors that sloped badly. By the time Peter was fifteen, he could not stand up straight in his bedroom on the second floor. After our parents had redone the kitchen, after they’d ripped out the sink and pulled up the stove and the dishwasher and the rotten wooden floors, we’d found the wooden support beams were riddled with bullets. Upstairs, in our parents’ bedroom there was a small, rectangular window that our father said was for shooting your shotgun outta. The house was full of ghosts too, though only Dee and I were aware, and only Dee could communicate with them. When we saw the bullets in the beams, we knew this house had seen it all—births and deaths, weddings and funerals—and there was a certain reverence that came from the knowledge. The shock would have been to discover the house contained no ghosts at all. When they’d wanted to build the railroad right through the center of the house, the company had paid for the house’s transfer to a lot a few acres to the south, and that’s where it stands now. Ghosts and all. When the train came through, the house rattled inside its old wooden frame. Dee and I began to consider it a kind of rocking of our childhood beds, and it would have been if the horn the conductors used had not been so loud.

  Even when we’d both moved out, Dee and I still longed for the house, and its creaks, and ticks, and sloping floors, and the bedroom we shared in the tiniest room on the second floor. How many nights had we stayed up too late talking and slowly let the ghosts fill in the spaces between these conversations, which, as the night wore on, grew longer and longer until we were listening to just the ghosts moving through the house and then to our own shallow sleepy breaths.

  During her first year at Mount Mary, Dee would often call me and say she was going to spend the night at Ma’s. Inevitably, I’d end up there too, drinking wine with Ma and Dee and sometimes Suze, then squeezing Dee’s hand in the dark before passing out in my twin bed. I know no greater feeling of safety than falling asleep next to Dee in my childhood bed. I used to think I’d achieved the same feeling while falling asleep tucked into Leif night after night, but I suppose I’d been fooling myself.

  Dee and I were in elementary school when, within a year, two things happened that made our parents want to sell that house. First the kitchen caught on fire. Dee and I were too young to completely understand how it had happened, and neither our parents nor Peter seemed willing to fill us in properly. As far as we could see, someone, probably our father, had left something plastic in the oven, forgotten about it, and then punched the preheat button. Our father was supposed to be watching us while Ma was at the st
ore. He was tinkering with an old car in the driveway when he realized he needed some crucial part from his shop. He left us on our stomachs watching Sesame Street in the living room. He looked at me and said, Don’t move. He threw some cookies at us. Dee grinned at me. She suggested jumping on our parents’ bed while they were gone. We were still arguing about what forbidden game we’d play while we had the house to ourselves when I smelled the smoke.

  In school, we’d gone to an office building that they’d converted to a fake house for the purpose of teaching children how to handle emergencies in the home—fires, tornadoes, break-ins, and the like. I felt prepared. I told Dee we had to stay on our stomachs and crawl to the kitchen door. She thought the whole thing was a lot of fun. I put my hand on the door that separated the kitchen and the living room, and it was hot. I knew we had to keep the door closed. We crawled to the front of the house and slid on our bellies through the front door and onto the concrete porch. I scanned the driveway and the small yard for our father, but he wasn’t there. Dee and I held hands and walked to the neighbor’s house. A single woman lived there with four or five pugs. They were sad-looking animals, always huffing and puffing on walks, but she loved them. They were a fixture of our neighborhood. The pugs barked when I knocked. She answered the door in a pale pink robe with cartoon pugs stitched on the pockets. Her hands disappeared into them.

  I used her phone to call 911. When our mother arrived home from the store, and our father got back from the shop, they were terrified to see two Wauwatosa Fire Department trucks parked outside our house, and smoke billowing from the chimney and kitchen windows. Our mother picked up the bag of groceries she’d just bought and threw the whole thing at our father. Where the fuck have you been? A carton of eggs tumbled out of the bag and smashed on the sidewalk. The yolks were bright yellow against the grainy concrete. It made me sick to look at. Luckily for our father, he was spared the worst of her wrath because everyone was so impressed with the calm, confident, and efficient way I’d handled the situation. Everyone was so pleased with me. Everyone except Dee.

  “Where’d you learn all that?” Dee asked me a day or two later, after the fire was fully out and we stood in the kitchen looking at the smoke-scarred walls: They had turned a disgusting ash.

  “At school,” I told her. “Emergency preparded . . . preparadedn . . . being prepared for an emergency.”

  “Wow,” she said. She frowned at me.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked her.

  “Well, I just feel like you used up our one emergency. Now, even once I learn that stuff, I’ll never be able to test my skills, you know?”

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to hope to use them. That’s the whole point of an emergency—you want to be ready, but you don’t want one to happen.”

  She shrugged. She was jealous. I could always tell with her. Sometimes I wondered if I was the only one who could see it. I know our father never did. The way he doted on her.

  “Still,” she said. “I wish I could have taken a crack at that.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Maybe we’ll have a tornado soon, Dee.” I stuck my tongue out at her.

  “Whatever, that’s dumb. Too easy.” She threw her hands up. “Everybody knows you just have to hide in a ditch and wait.”

  After the fire, there was a drug bust at the house across the street. As it happened, Dee and I were friends with the little girl who lived in that house. Her name was Tina. Dee was closer with her than I was. Honestly, I found her a bit strange, and not in an interesting way but in an unnerving way. For example, she said she could talk to the dead; she said she had a twin sister who died when they were babies but who spoke to her from the other side. She scared me, but that’s probably why Dee liked her. The two of them spent a lot of time playing fortune-telling games—using cootie catchers to guess their future husband’s name, their profession, whether they’d be rich or poor, if they’d live in the city or the country. I didn’t like these games, so I refused to participate, though I would sit and listen from time to time. They had a calm, lullaby-like quality.

  Anyway, one day after school, Dee and I were playing in the living room, in front of the modest bay window through which you could see the house across the street. The lots in that part of Tosa were pretty small. Even with the street and our small front yard, there was probably only two hundred feet between our front window and theirs.

  When eight police cars came roaring down our block, Dee, Ma, Pete, and I stood in front of the window and watched men in black vests and helmets pour out of emergency vehicles like ants from a disturbed colony. Dee looked at me, her eyebrows raised and her chin pointed slightly down, which was her way of indicating she was very interested. For my part, I was afraid. So was our mother. We don’t know who started shooting first. Probably it was the cops. Our mother shoved us to the ground and put her hands on the back of our necks so we went facedown into the carpet. Peter lingered, trying to see what was happening, and my mother swiped at his ankles to get him down to the ground.

  The four of us were there long after the shooting stopped and Tina’s father had been loaded into the back of a wagon. We heard from the neighbors brave enough to peek at the scene. We were still on the ground when our father arrived home with a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. We never saw Tina again.

  The combination of these two events threw my parents into a frenzy; they wanted to find a “safer” neighborhood and a house that hadn’t burned half to the ground. In retrospect, I’m not sure they ever had the money to actually move, especially considering the house had depreciated since the fire. I’m also not sure a “safer” neighborhood existed; Tosa was safe. But either way, for a few months, my parents spent most of their free time canvassing some of the wealthier neighborhoods, collecting brochures and, from time to time, touring properties for sale. Maybe just the act of searching made them feel better.

  Anyway, of all the houses we toured, I remember only one. It was a large white house in the Washington Highlands. This property was well outside what my parents could afford, but of course, we understood that only later. The Washington Highlands had been built on a tract of land once owned by Frederick Pabst. After he died, the land was subdivided, and some fancy city planners, influenced by the then-popular city garden movement, came in to design the neighborhood, with large lots full of stately trees, gentle hills, and creeks that ran through people’s backyards. This house too had a big, beautiful sloping backyard through which a shallow but wide creek ran. It had four bedrooms, which meant we could each have our own. It had a glass sunporch with built-in benches, where I imagined lying on my stomach for hours, reading. The best part about the house was the yard. We all begged our parents to move there. Even Peter. We cried. We yelled.

  As usual, Dee was the most animated. She ran through the backyard, kicked off her shoes, and stood in the creek splashing in the water. Get out of there, Candace, you’re destroying your clothes, our mother yelled. Our father laughed. I frowned. I knew if I’d been the one to do that, he’d have scolded me. Everything Dee did was precious to him.

  That day Dee said she wouldn’t get out of the creek until our parents agreed to buy the house. Our mother said we were getting in the car, and Dee better be in there in two minutes or else. The four of us went to sit in the car and we waited, and we waited, and we waited. It started to get dark. No Dee. Eventually, our mother punched our father in the arm. And shoved him out the driver’s side. When he returned, he was carrying a drenched, shivering Dee in his arms. She’d been sitting in the creek for at least thirty minutes. He’d thrown his old Carhartt over her so it swallowed her body. He asked my mother to drive and then he held Dee in his lap the whole way home. She tucked her face into his neck. Once she turned around to see me, and I caught her eye from the backseat. She made a prideful face, with the corners of her mouth turned up slightly and her eyes wide, that would have been impossible for anyone but me to read. It meant I won.

  But, of course, she had not won. We staye
d in our small cream-brick house for the rest of our childhood. Some days it’s hard to imagine the alternative. Other days the alternative is what makes me spiral. I like to drive by the big white house in the Highlands and park my car across the street from its grand sloping driveway. (I never drive by our actual childhood house.) I’ll walk through the Highlands imagining how our lives might have been different if Dee had gotten her way. Sometimes I indulge in the idea that perhaps if we had moved, because the course of our lives would have been so altered, she’d still be with us. I imagine her protest in the creek as an unconscious fight for her life. Other times I can see how ridiculous this line of thinking is, and then I wonder if moving would have changed anything at all. So often, more and more, I’m struck by the debilitating feeling of having no idea how I got here, or anywhere. In practice, it seems easy to trace my movements from this present moment to those past moments that led me here or there. But once I begin, the sense of forks along the way feels unmanageably oppressive. If I hadn’t done this, then I wouldn’t have done this, or this . . . The origins of consequences, like the beginnings of cracks in concrete, become too difficult to track.

  July 1991

  After Pete and I left the police department, we drove to Ma’s. The closer we got to our childhood home, the more nervous I became. This was the first time I’d seen Ma since Dee had gone missing. At first my mother seemed relieved to see me and grateful to Pete for dragging me from my apartment in Riverwest. She held my face between her papery, sun-spotted hands and cried with no noise. She gave me a wet kiss right on the mouth, like she used to do all the time when we were babies, and she pressed hard against my lips. I was reminded of the night in Riverwest when I’d thought about kissing Dee. I wished then I had kissed her. I wished I’d kissed her more and more. When my mother pulled away, my face was wet with her—her salt and spit ran down my chin. I wiped it away with the back of my hand.