“Everybody says Paris is overrated anyway,” Dana said.
“Who says that? Nobody says that,” I told her sharply.
She eyed me. “Dad says you’re stuck here,” she said.
“I’ve found it harder and harder to leave,” I admitted. “So I guess that’s right.”
“Well, I’m leaving as soon as I can.”
I nodded. I remembered what Erik had said. I’ve got to get out of this fucking city. I thought about Leif at Erik’s funeral, where he’d met Erik’s husband: They’d been married ten years. I thought about Leif’s son, who, he’d told me, was only a couple of years younger than Dana. I thought about Ma’s body, pumped full of chemicals, stuck under the ground. I thought about how far Ma had come: All she’d wanted was Dee under the ground with her, and now she’d never get that either.
“I hope you do,” I told her, even though I hoped nothing of the sort. She smiled and rubbed the insides of her wrists absently. Then she took up my hand and squeezed it.
The truth was, if there was a truth, I loved Milwaukee the way I suspect many women “love” their bodies. I am intimately, painfully aware of the city’s flaws, occasionally obsessive even, but aware also that it’s the only one I’m ever going to get. We can’t ever really know what it’s like to live in another body, to have a different family, to be born into another time, in another city.
Dana leaned in to me. “I have something else to show you,” she whispered. She unlocked her phone again, swiped and scrolled for a few seconds, and then handed it to me. “Read it,” she said, and then she went to keep her sister, Sophie, company.
Dana had left her phone’s Web browser open to an online petition, one that had already garnered millions of signatures. The petition demanded that the current Milwaukee mayor, the district attorney, and the attorney general’s office reopen the cases of five MPD detectives. Each of these detectives, the writer argued, had been in the pocket of an illegal for-profit enterprise, and their cases, particularly the cold cases that remained unsolved, should be reopened and investigated with renewed vigor and integrity. Of course, Wolski was one of the five. He’d been on paid leave since the article had come out, and he would remain there until, the police said, they had time to investigate the allegations internally.
There were links to Instagram posts that had gone viral. People were reposting the petition as I spoke. I watched the numbers climb as I sat there. Jason just signed. Alex just signed. Robert just signed. Were these real people? The petition prompted me to sign too, and I clicked the button and saw my name appear briefly and then disappear, and then the website was asking me for money and I locked Dana’s phone. I scoured the funeral crowd for her. She was rubbing shoulders with Sophie, both in prim funeral attire, sipping kiddie cocktails. Dana handed her little sister her maraschino cherry. There was something about the language of the petition: I knew Dana had written it. She had just turned fifteen.
August 1992
About a year after Dee disappeared, Suze moved in with Ma and me. I don’t think Ma asked her to do it, but maybe Pete did. He was trying then to make up for lost time in law school at Marquette, and he felt guilty for leaving us alone more and more often. When Pete helped Suze move a pickup truck’s worth of her belongings in, she explained that she was worried things were getting a little bit too Grey Gardens at our house.
The day Suze moved in, Ma and I looked around, and we were shocked to discover that she was right. We hadn’t cleaned the house, really at all, since the summer Dee went missing, and in that year we’d allowed everything to pile up: newspapers, catalogs, recyclables, files, bills. I had a hunch Ma was frightened to throw anything away because the possibility always remained that there was something we might need, something pertinent to Dee’s case, in all this stuff.
Suze came in and set about trying to organize some of the chaos, though I noticed she was careful, very considerate, with what she threw away, and she always, always cleared it with either Ma or me first.
But even as we continued to hoard documents, Dee’s case became colder and colder, and the files seemed more and more useless. There was never anything new to learn. This was all we knew and (we would eventually accept) all we would ever know: Dee left me in Riverwest and no one, that we knew of, ever saw her again. One anonymous tip put her in Frank’s parents’ cemetery late on the Fourth of July. Frank, though he’d clearly been cheating and had lied about his name, had an alibi for the Fourth of July (he’d spent the day at a big block party where at least twenty people had seen him), and he was, apparently, living in Ohio at that time. The police told us so many times, No body, no crime. And though we all worked overtime over the years pursuing increasingly far-fetched leads, and trying to get publicity for her case, and drum up interest in the media or within the police department, one by one we began to let things go.
One of the first things to go was the hotlines, which we dismantled in part because they became heinous. People are very cruel. Sometimes the callers would leave prank tips: kids calling in to say they knew where Dee was, leaving addresses to adult video stores, and the like. More insidious were the people who pretended to be Dee. Sometimes they would say things like I left because I never loved you. Any of you. Sometimes I fantasized about finding these people and killing them or torturing them. Once, right before we shut down the lines, we got a call from a local psychic offering us unlimited, unfiltered, absolute access to our loved one for the very low fee of only ten hundred-dollar monthly payments.
“The absolute nerve of these people,” Ma said to me. I nodded and Suze unplugged the phones.
January 2020
After Ma died, I received a manuscript in the mail. It was from Leif. He had, despite my substantial doubts, finished his book. The novel was a fictionalized account of his relationship with his brother. Leif had stuck a yellow Post-it on the cover page that said only, Thoughts? And though I began to read it, I couldn’t make it through the whole thing. I couldn’t bear to have Leif’s voice living inside my head for two hundred and fifty pages. All I could hear was what I’d lost.
I skipped to the end where Leif had reimagined the months before his brother’s death: a whole chapter in which Erik had finally called Leif and invited him out to Cali. Lance cooked elaborate vegetarian meals for the three of them, and they took the dogs for short walks around the property; they made up for lost time. I was crushed by these depictions, especially the sugariness of them, and they left a bad taste in my mouth as if I’d eaten too much candy. My tongue felt as if it were coated with chemicals. It seemed unfair of Leif to worm his way into the end of his brother’s life, even fictionally, because Erik had been so adamant that Leif stay away. Though I was curious if this imagining had comforted him: How much had it soothed his guilt? I waited for the part at the end where this fictional Erik would tell this fictional Leif what had happened to my fictional Dee. But, at the end of his life, this version of Erik never said anything about Dee.
In another section of Leif’s book, I found the story of the last Fourth we spent together. I was astounded to discover that in Leif’s telling of this story, Dee, though mentioned, is merely a backdrop for our acid trip. And though he mentioned the photo, he did so only to explain that somehow he knew Erik had seen it and that, after seeing it, Erik disowned Leif altogether. Leif didn’t even mention that Dee was the one who took the picture. And according to Leif’s book, it was incidental that she was there but crucial that I was there, when really, it was so obviously the opposite. How could he tell it this way?
I realized then that we must choose to believe the stories we’re told. Even the stories we tell about one another. We dedicate ourselves to our own versions, and yet we are slow, reticent even, to admit how much we participate in the creation of these stories we tell about our lives and about the lives of those we love. Sometimes now, for practice, I tell myself all of the stories at once. I say, Here are the scenarios; here are the possibilities. What does it mean that each and every
one could be made to seem as probable as the next?
Sometimes, for example, I let myself fantasize that Dee had left with Erik, and that they’d gone to live somewhere warm near the ocean. That they’d grown old together. Sometimes I lived in this reality—where Dee and Erik were still alive and moving through a different, better world that didn’t need so desperately to hurt them. Other times I imagined the kind of scenarios I never used to, before the psychic, before the article—the ones in which maybe Frank killed her or maybe he didn’t. Maybe it was a stranger. Maybe it was an old boyfriend we’d never known about. Maybe it was Frank’s wife. Or maybe it was an accident. Maybe she’d gone for a swim and been carried away in a river or taken out to the middle of Lake Michigan, where she’d sunk into the shipwrecks that were decomposing in the deepest beds of the lake. I allowed myself these possibilities and more. But even so, I was never able to shake my belief that the most compelling possibility, that Frank had murdered my sister and destroyed her body, was also the truest.
Epilogue
It was a year or two after Charlie Makon’s article came out, and during a period of intense scrutiny of police departments nationwide, that public pressure to reopen several cold cases finally drove Wisconsin’s attorney general to make a statement: The Milwaukee Police Department would be revisiting a few of these detectives’ cases. Dee’s case had made the list. Dana, who had just gotten her driver’s license, came to my apartment to tell me the news. I was too tired to react, even though I felt something rising quickly and then falling inside me. She asked if I wanted to go to the beach. I said yes.
I was expecting Bradford, but we drove north in the bright, hot Wisconsin summer. The heat from the highway rose in great shimmering waves. The cornfields were wide washes of green in our peripherals. The whole world took on a comforting blurred quality: everything soft and rushing by. Dana watched me with sharp, darting eyes as we edged closer to Milwaukee’s outskirts. I expected her to get off at each exit (because truthfully, this was the farthest outside Milwaukee I’d been in thirty years), but she kept going past Cedarburg and Watertown until we got to Sheboygan, and I said nothing. I checked my pulse. It was surprisingly steady. The farms became less green, less bountiful, and more desperate, like they were hanging on by the spindliest of threads. I knew what that was like.
When we got off the highway, Dana glanced at me again. “You good?” she asked.
I nodded, but I was unsure.
“Dad says you don’t want the case reopened.”
“That’s not true,” I told her. I sensed she was fishing for a thank-you. She wanted me to tell her she’d done a good job with my files, with the petition, and with the pressure. I wasn’t capable.
“Well, why would he say it?” she asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I’m in a different place than I was before.”
“So you accept it? You accept what happened?”
I stared at the side of her face. Her cheeks were flushed. “No,” I said sharply. “Don’t ever think that.”
“Well, then, we have to keep trying, right? You should give them your files.”
I thought about the stolen law books, the reports, the transcripts, even the newspaper clippings I’d kept on the serial killer. In the end, it hadn’t added up to anything. “I thought you said there was nothing there.”
“No.” She paused. “I see the whole picture now. After the article. I think there’s plenty on him.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said, but without conviction. I’d been drained of so much already—I couldn’t lose anything else.
We drove past strip malls and half-planted cornfields and truck-stop diners. The temperature dropped ten degrees. Finally, we arrived at an old state park with wild grassy dunes and long winding stretches of eroded beaches. My parents had taken us to this park once or twice when I was a girl, though the beach had been grander and less eroded then. There was so little left now: The parking lot ended mere feet from the water. Dana parked the car due east, and ahead of us, Lake Michigan churned up frothy whitecaps for miles. A song our mother used to hum to us, and which Dee had loved singing aloud during car trips, rang in my head. Oh, Agnes, won’t you go with me? We’ll be married in style / And we’ll cross Lake Michigan, so blue and so wild / Oh yes, love, I will go with you, leave Wisconsin behind . . .
On what was left of the beach, I spread my sweater out for us to sit. The sand was warm but damp, and the air smelled like pine, granite, exhaust. I thought Dana would sit down next to me, but she stripped down to her bra and underwear and ran straight into the waves. I heard her laughing and screaming at the cold shock of the water. I wanted to stop her or tell her to be careful; I wanted her to come back. But I was also proud and grateful that she was unafraid. She swam laps and did handstands: Her pointed feet bisected the watery horizon.
After she was done swimming, she sat at the shoreline and let the waves lap at her feet for a few minutes. Then she began to dig a hole, on her hands and knees, as if she were a little kid again. I thought maybe she was going to build a moat and castle. All of her selves flashed in front of me. She was a child, she was a woman, she was my sister, she was not my sister, and then she was exactly what she was: a sixteen-year-old girl digging a hole in the sand. It meant nothing to me. Lake Michigan shone behind her. I shielded my eyes and was seized with the sensation that she would be swallowed. I called to her, so she stopped and stood. She peered down at the sand, and her long, thin body cast a huge oval shadow over the hole.
“Come and see,” she shouted. “Look what I found, Auntie Peg.”
I shook my head at her, comfortable where I was and fatigued from the drive. The sun had built a comforting circle of warmth on the top of my head. “Bring it to me,” I shouted at her.
She jogged over and plopped down next to me, spraying cold lake water on my shoulders. Goose bumps rose all over her arms and legs as she stretched out.
“What is it?” I asked her.
“What’s what?” she said. She put the crook of her elbow over her eyes as she lay down. I felt then, for the millionth time, the pull of the long, thin thread that tied this girl to my sister. I held this thought as long as I could, but eventually, it dissolved into the heat of the day.
“What did you find?” I asked Dana.
She laughed. “Oh, there wasn’t anything there.”
I looked back toward the hole she’d dug and saw she was right. Already the depression had been washed away.
Author’s Note
To reiterate the warning at the beginning of the book: this is a work of fiction. That being said, the narrative intersects with a very real place and a very real set of circumstances, and where it does, I did my best to honor the city of Milwaukee, its people, and those specific circumstances the city found itself in during the summer of 1991. In doing so, I relied heavily upon the following resources: the Milwaukee Journal, Anne E. Schwartz’s The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough, Richard Tithecott’s Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer, Dirk C. Gibson’s Serial Murder and Media Circuses, the Wisconsin LGBT History Project, and the Wisconsin Light. A special thank you to Don Schwamb for the invaluable work he does and for connecting me to Jerry Johnson. And a very special thank you to Jerry Johnson for our conversation and for letting me use the edition of the Wisconsin Light that appears in the book. This blending of fact with fiction necessitated some massaging, and any factual inaccuracies that result from this massaging are mine and mine alone.
Acknowledgments
Getting this book into the world was no small feat, and it was certainly not something I could have done alone. I am full of gratitude to all those who helped—in big, in small, and in wine-related ways—along the way. A huge thank you to my editor, Sara Nelson, for taking a chance on this book, right before the end of the world no less, and also to Mary Gaule and the whole team at Harper for giving this book a home. So much love and gratitude to Samantha Shea, who has sup
ported this project from the very beginning and beyond, through its many, strange iterations. I am so grateful to have such a generous, sharp-eyed reader of my work. You truly are, as someone once said to me about you, “One of the good ones.” I would also like to thank my advisor at UWM, Professor Valerie Laken, whose guidance, support, and dedication helped usher this book into its final form. Thank you also to professors Liam Callanan, Rebecca Dunham, Kristie Hamilton, and Joe Rodriguez for reading the book and discussing it with such enthusiasm at my dissertation defense. A special thank you to the whole family at Thief Wine in Milwaukee, especially Phil Bilodeau and Aimee Murphy, and all my thiefsters, for the laughs and the love, for your friendships and encouragements during difficult times, and of course for all the wine that fueled this book and beyond. I would also like to thank all of my writing teachers from years past, without whom this book would not have been possible: Kai Carslon-Wee, Amaud Johnson, Judith Claire Mitchell, Marilynne Robinson, Ethan Canin, Kevin Brockmeier, Nimo Johnson, Charles D’Ambrosio, and Bennett Sims. Thank you to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Truman Capote Trust, and especially Lan Samantha Chang, Connie Brothers, Deb West, and Jan Zenisek, who have taken good care of writers, myself included, since forever. Thank you also to Jennie Lin for your friendship and for reading very early drafts of this book and reporting back with encouragement. Thank you to two of my oldest, and dearest friends, Aaron Raasch and Tess Snodgrass, for sticking with me, even and most especially when I didn’t deserve it. I’d also like to thank my family for their continued love and support. Every single one of you shaped me and shaped this book. To my siblings: Simone Bruhy is an inspiration, a living superwoman and still the coolest wearer of an eyebrow piercing I’ve ever met; Amanda Bruhy, whose art inspired what appears in this book, is a hell of a strong woman; Nicholas Richards, who is a talented musician and a man with a powerful and beautifully strange brain; and Emma Richards, who is a powerhouse of a human, a tender lover of sweet things, and my best friend always—you are all my home, I love you all. A special thank you, (and apology?) to Emma Richards for reading every single draft of this book. Your contributions to these drafts, and our conversations about them, were invaluable to me. To my nephews, Emmet Johnson, Aidan Johnson, and Langston Bruhy-Hale, thank you for being lights in my life. To Aidan, thank you for teaching me so much about love, beauty, and loss at such a young age. I still think of you often. To my parents, Dr. Patricia B. Richards and Dr. John D. Richards, you have given me everything, so many gifts, my siblings included, and I will be forever grateful. Thank you especially for your support during this process, and for always, always, listening. I love you both. Finally I would like to thank J. M. Holmes whose belief in this book has never wavered, even when mine had begun to do so quite dangerously, and whose love and light and bravery and beauty have expanded the scope of my life and my work, quite literally, as Joan Didion once said, from a short story to a novel.
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