“Jesus. Truck driving?”
He didn’t say anything. I began to panic.
“Please don’t leave me too,” I begged. My throat was suddenly dry, and my tongue stuck to the top of my mouth. I was embarrassed to beg.
“You can come with me,” he offered. “You should.”
I shook my head. “You know I can’t,” I choked. “Dee . . .”
“You just said it yourself . . . you think she’s gone.”
“Don’t say that,” I cried. “Don’t you fucking say that.”
I pushed him as hard as I could. I wanted him to fall. I wanted to hurt him, but he merely teetered backward off the log. Still, he scrambled to stand up and step away from me. His eyes were wide and wild. Maybe he thought then that I was gone too. Maybe I was. Maybe I was just then beginning to feel beyond the shore of my own deep despair. I thought maybe, in the weeks before, I had been feeling Dee’s missingness like something too hot or too cold to touch—carefully, tenderly, barely at all—and now I was beginning to understand the intensity, the insanity, even, of really feeling it. I could see then the huge, monstrous shapes of the feeling forming inside me.
“Give me the keys,” he said. “I’m sorry. I can’t. Stay here. With you.” I dug in my pocket for his car keys and threw them at him. He didn’t blink, and then he started back up the bluff. I stayed on the log and tried to listen for the car’s engine to start up, but all I could hear was the soft lap of the lake on the beach. I listened and listened. I felt Dee’s absence growing wider and wider inside me.
I had to walk three miles to a pay phone to call Peter to come pick me up. When I got him on the phone, he was out of breath and confused. What did we tell you Margaret? You’ve got to tell us where you’re going. Who you’re with. How long you’ll be. Always. The shortest bouts of silence from me could throw him and Ma into a panic. I had started asking everyone because I truly didn’t know the answer.
“Pete,” I said. “What are we going to do?”
“Where the hell are you?”
I told Pete about Leif leaving, and Pete called the man I loved a degenerate, and I clenched my jaw. The phone cut out. I was out of money.
December 2019
Thomas Alexander expressed some disappointment that he’d been unable to come up with the right location, but he was saved from any publicity (good or bad) regarding his recently botched case for two reasons. First, his serial killer episode would turn out to be his most watched to date. It aired to record viewership and garnered millions of streams. Some critics, even the ones who’d awarded him the truly terrible television award, called this show thrilling and utterly engrossing. It reenergized his career, they said. Even if we’d had access to the national outlets that covered the psychic, there wouldn’t have been any interest in or room for our story. His publicity people did an excellent job controlling that narrative. Though, as Dana later pointed out to us, we could have tried publicizing it ourselves, on social media. But we hadn’t been fluent in that language, and we hadn’t allowed Dana to teach us. Pete and Helena had severely restricted Dana’s access to her social media accounts in the wake of the incident with Cal. And who knows if any of it would have caught on, given the sheer amount of Internet content the serial killer episode generated—GIFs, memes, spin-off TV shows, public appearances, tweets, viral photos. The content seemed endless. I found myself avoiding the news and the Internet just so I didn’t have to see or hear anything about the show.
Second, our story about Dee and the psychic was doubly subsumed by the piece that Charlie Makon published in the Journal Sentinel. This piece enjoyed widespread acclaim and was covered on all the major news networks. Makon went on the circuit: the morning shows, the cable news shows, the late shows. It was jarring to see his baby face pop up all over the news. The piece’s popularity grew. He stretched his fifteen minutes. And in some ways, it turns out, the piece deserved it.
It was true what Makon had tried to tell me that day at the nursing home—his piece was tangentially about my sister, though her name was never mentioned. In essence, the article covered the long reign of a powerful prostitution empire in the city of Milwaukee. For decades, beginning in the eighties, the business had offered, among other services, discreet escorts for high-profile men in Milwaukee. A number of famous Milwaukeeans had used these services at one time or another before the business collapsed: former mayors and police chiefs, important businessmen, and the like. Frank’s real name (Anthony Cavelli), embarrassingly for the Milwaukee Fire Department, of which he was now chief, was on the list that Makon had acquired. But in the end, rich men seeing prostitutes was not news. Most of the men had their lawyers put out statements denying any knowledge of or involvement in this business. Statutes of limitations were invoked.
Rather, the most controversial and most discussed aspect of the article concerned the MPD’s involvement in the business. These revelations came at a particularly bad time for the police. Makon alleged that several detectives and beat cops were paid a weekly stipend (the amount varied) in order to provide information that helped the service elude police investigation, and in order to derail investigations that could threaten the business. Most disturbingly, Makon reported that a handful of MPD detectives had neglected and, in some cases, even sabotaged active missing-persons investigations, especially if these cases involved (a) a client of the business or (b) a young woman. Makon had a source inside the department. I knew immediately, if there was a conclusive list of the detectives that this business had bought out, that Wolski’s name would be on it.
I understood then that Frank had made up his story about Dee and that Wolski had either believed him, or been paid to believe him, because Frank had a history of soliciting prostitutes from this business. Wolski saw what he wanted to see. Whether he would admit it or not, he had used Frank’s story to justify Dee’s disappearance to us, then to protect himself and Frank from any further investigation. These revelations had an odd effect on me. I felt certain memories begin to sew themselves together: Wolski was not just a so-so cop, he was a corrupt cop, and there had never really been a chance he would find Dee because he’d never really looked for her.
I called him as soon as I’d finished the article.
“So, you made a whole bunch of money hiding these people’s shit?” I yelled at him. “Good for you. You’re fucking disgusting, you know that?”
“Watch your tone,” he said. His voice was hushed. Hoarse. “It’s a bad system. I’ll admit that. I was doing my best with a bad system.”
“Oh, fuck you,” I told him. “A bad system? You made a choice. I always, always knew you were a piece of shit.”
“You know I’m not,” he said. His voice became disgustingly whiny, desperate. I felt sick. “You know me. You know me. I didn’t have a choice. You don’t understand.”
“I do. Do you remember when you first took my statement? Do you remember when you got the photo? You never believed me. You never trusted me.”
“Don’t blow this out of proportion, Peg. I’ve always cared for you. I wasn’t the one who hurt your sister.” I had a memory of him saying the same thing in 1991, upset when people began scrutinizing the MPD alongside the serial killer: Jesus H. Christ, it’s like these people forget who the actual criminal was.
I hung up on him while he was pleading his case, asking if we could meet to discuss this, if he could tell me his side of the story.
Next I called Pete. I needed to hear a calm, rational take on the piece. He picked up immediately, and I knew I would not get that take from him. He was animated, loud, rambling. I had to tell him to slow down.
“Don’t you see what this means, though?” he said finally, exasperated that I was struggling to keep up with him.
“Yeah, Wolski botched our case.”
“Of course,” he said. “But also, it might give us probable cause to pressure the DA to reopen her case. All the cases he worked could be reviewed now.”
I closed my eyes. This was
not what I’d wanted to hear. I don’t know what I expected. Maybe an apology? I felt like my family had, at times, blamed me for Dee’s disappearance and for the way her case had collapsed so early. Worse, Wolski had then cast doubt on my version of events. From the first interview, he’d treated me with such suspicion, I’d begun to think of myself as a suspect. He’d made me doubt myself. So of course my family had doubted me. I had been hoping Pete would see this too.
“I’m so tired, Pete,” I said. “Even if they do reopen it. There are statutes of limitations and all that.”
“Not on murder,” Pete said with too much enthusiasm. I recoiled at this response. His position couldn’t have been further from my mother’s. She no longer cared to pursue any legal avenues related to Dee’s case. She had maintained one goal for a long time: to find Dee’s body. And after the psychic’s botched reading, I began to understand. What would we gain by knowing? What would it change? Nothing.
“We’ll see,” I told Pete. I wasn’t at all hopeful: Nothing had ever moved the dial before.
May 1992
I wanted to die, and I wanted my death to be slow and painful. Emma Bovary’s death came to mind. I told Pete this when he picked me up from the side of the road on the day Leif left. He said, Don’t you ever fucking say something like that again, Margaret, Jesus Christ.
At Ma’s, I took off all my clothes except my underwear and my T-shirt, and I climbed into bed. I fell asleep for fourteen or fifteen hours, and when I woke, I lay still and I remembered. Leif called the home phone for me, but I refused to touch it, so Ma would bring the phone into the bedroom and lay it on my stomach, where I could faintly hear his voice speaking into my belly button. Peg? Baby? Should I come back for you? I want to come back for you. Will you come with me? Please, baby. Come with me. I didn’t mean what I said about us breaking up. I was in a bad way. I’m better now, and we should be together. I’d let him go on for a while before, with effort, I’d hang up the phone. Sometimes when my mother came with the phone, I’d listen a little longer to Leif as he talked about the books he was reading, about what he was seeing and feeling. I never said anything, though. I stayed in bed and refused all food for two and a half weeks.
My mother began whispering with Suze and Pete about having me committed to a place where they’d force a tube down my throat and pump me full of liquid food. I stayed in bed and watched the way light moved on the leaves of the trees outside my window. I tracked the shadows in my childhood room and learned to love the reality slippage that occurred in my hungriest, saddest states—I could remember with such lucidity in those states: Dee and me playing underneath pine trees, riding bikes together; later, drinking wine and running from men; watching her paint, watching her put on makeup; the night I met Leif, the first time we had sex, the way he held me at night, how he smelled just fresh out of the shower or just home from work. I wanted to stay in these memories for good, and this seemed possible only if I stayed hungry and shadow-watching.
Once, some three weeks or so after I’d climbed in bed, Pete, Suze, and Ma came into the bedroom with a bowl of creamy root soup, which I used to love as a child. Instinctively, I curled myself up into a ball and rolled toward the wall. I put my hands over my head to protect my mouth. Protect the slippage. Pete grabbed my hands and pushed them down to my sides. He rolled me onto my back. Suze held my head. I looked into her eyes, and she was crying but not making any noise. Even after Dee had been gone, after we’d known, because it is known when things like this happen that after a certain time, the person you love is dead, even after we’d admitted, separately to ourselves but never openly to one another, that Dee was probably dead, that Frank or Tony or whatever the hell his name was probably killed her or had her killed, and probably put her body in the incinerator at his parents’ cemetery, even after all that, I still hadn’t seen Suze cry. But now long, contiguous tears rolled down the slopes of her cheeks and into my face. I spit and bit at Ma as she moved toward me with the soup. She had brought a spoon, but eventually, she abandoned the utensil and just dipped her index finger deep into the bowl. I squirmed and fought the three of them, but I was not strong then, I had never really been strong, and I was tired, very tired, and Ma was able to run her soup-filled finger up and down my gums. I tried to spit it out, but I felt myself swallow some of it, and I could feel it go down my throat and into my stomach, where it ate away at the memories and the slippage so that I was yanked, by my brother’s hands, and my aunt’s wet cheeks, and my mother’s fingers, back into the reality of our lives. This was our routine every day for almost a week before I was fully back in reality and I could smell the smelliness of my own body.
“I won’t live without her,” I said. My thoughts became bright crystals in front of my eyes; I could see my life clearly now, spinning out ahead for years and years, without Dee. It was unbearable.
My mother put a wet washcloth to my face. It shocked me awake. “There is no other choice,” she said. “Let’s get you cleaned up.” I rubbed my arms where Pete’s hands had bruised me through the skin and into the bone.
I had been forced awake, and once out of this sleep, I realized, for the first time but not the last, that I had disappointed my family. I had acted like a child in the face of this disaster, and I would be treated like a child until I proved myself otherwise. So it was at this time that I committed myself to proving that, no matter what the police said, Frank had disappeared my sister. Yes, I’d failed my sister, but Frank, he was the monster. I needed him to be the monster.
December 2019
After her final stroke, both sides of my mother’s face sagged like she was a robot that had been completely unplugged. At the hospital, I kissed her lightly on the forehead, and then Peter dragged me back out into the hallway. The girls and Helena stayed inside and crowded around Ma’s bed.
“We have a problem,” Pete said.
“Okay,” I said.
“We’re not going to have any money to bury her,” he said.
“Jesus, Pete, she’s still breathing in there,” I said. “Do you think it’s really appropriate?”
“I know. I know,” he said. His shoulders were hunched around his ears. He rubbed his face. “But we don’t have a lot of time.”
“You don’t have anything left?” I asked him.
Pete gave me a hard look, his eyes narrowed. “Do you?” he growled.
“Okay,” I said. “Fair enough.” I knew that Pete had footed most of the psychic’s exorbitant forty-thousand-dollar bill. Suze and I had tried to help, but I had been unemployed and draining my savings dry for the past few months, and Suze had almost no savings to speak of. “What do you want to do?” I asked him.
He studied his fingernails. I had an image of him rubbing those bone fragments between his fingers. I wondered if he’d loved those bones the way I had when I’d first seen them.
“I think we should sell off the plot Ma bought for Dee,” he said.
I nodded. It made sense. It also made no sense. It was the best solution, but I never would have said it.
“You’re right,” I said.
“Am I?”
“We don’t have any other choice, right?”
“Right,” he said.
“She can’t know, though,” I said.
“She won’t know,” he said.
He squeezed my shoulder.
The night Ma died, she repeated Dee’s name over and over again. We were there with her, Pete and me and Suze and Helena and the girls. I felt, irrationally, that Ma’s incessant repetition of Dee’s name was an attack on me. I felt, that night, that what Ma was really saying was: How could you have lost her? How could you have let this happen to her? How could you do this to me? I cried hard, dry sobs through the whole thing.
Some of us tried to get her to drink water, but all she did was gasp and say her youngest daughter’s name on a loop through and into the night until she pulled me close and waved the rest of them off. She whispered. I strained to understand.
“You know.”
“Know what, Mama?” I cried.
“I lost two babies,” she said. “What kind of mother. How did I lose two . . . Dee, and there was another, and Dee . . .” And then the loops started again, and all she could do was say Dee’s name until early in the morning, when she died with her teeth bared and her mouth open in the shape of the sound Dee’s name makes.
Though Ma had worked for most of her adult life as a unioned typist, and then for the union itself, and her savings were once substantial (she had planned to divide this among Dee, me, and Pete), by the time she died, she was absolutely bankrupt: She’d paid the second largest chunk of the psychic’s bill. Pete was still working on those installments, on the verge of bankruptcy, and Helena told me she thought they might lose their house.
In the end, we didn’t have enough. Pete went to speak with the funeral director, who offered to buy back the plot that Ma had purchased for Dee, in order to cover the costs of our mother’s coffin and interment. Pete, Suze, and I all voted to sell the plot, which we knew was a kind of betrayal of Ma’s trust, and of our commitment to bringing Dee home. Pete said if it happened (we never said when anymore), we would find a spot for her. Suze cried for the first time in a long time, and though she’d voted for this option too, she would remain permanently angry with us all for following through with the sale.
At the funeral, I felt as if I should climb into Ma’s cheap coffin and be buried alive with her. During the burial, we tried hard not to look at the empty plot next to our parents’ graves.
At the wake, Dana showed me videos of the cathedral of Notre Dame on fire. Did I know, she asked, that parts of it had caught on fire last spring? I did not know. Apparently, the most recent attempts to restore the cathedral had caused the fire. Dana clicked the button on the side of her phone so the screen went black.
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