The Night Gwen Stacy Died

by Sarah Bruni

  “It’s eleven-thirty,” he said.

  Sheila blinked. “So?”

  “So, your mother asked me to come up and check on you. We weren’t sure if you were alive up here.” He smiled.

  “Oh, I’m alive,” Sheila said. She rubbed her sore head in her hand.

  “What time did you get home last night?” her dad asked. “And don’t feed me any B.S.”

  Her father never swore when the girls were younger, but now he had started in his own way, through a self-censoring system of initials he used that let him really say what was on his mind: “What the F. is going on here?” he’d ask. “Looks like a whole lot of B.S. if you ask me.”

  “Not so late,” said Sheila. “Before midnight?”

  “And Tuesday night?”

  Sheila paused. She tried to remember. “I slept at Andrea and Donny’s.” It had been the night they went to the bar.

  “Yeah,” her father said. “I know that because I talked to Andrea. But you didn’t call us and let us know you weren’t coming. We’ve barely seen you all week.”

  “Sorry,” Sheila said. “I guess I wasn’t thinking.”

  As a girl, Sheila had been closest to her father. He was her favorite. When the family played games or sports of any kind—badminton, Monopoly—it was always Mom and Andrea versus Sheila and Dad. They won at everything. “Ten to zip, we whip!” Sheila would taunt through the checked wires of the badminton net, and her dad didn’t care at all when she threw her racket into the air to celebrate their victory, even when it got stuck in the branches of the sycamore tree, although Sheila’s mother thought this behavior illustrated poor sportsmanship. But lately, when she tried to crack a rare joke with her father, even the idiotic sort of joke dads are supposed to love, Sheila’s dad would give a forced snicker and look back at the television.

  “Are you making it a point to spend as little time here as possible? We haven’t seen you for dinner,” her father said.

  Sheila looked at the carpet on the floor of her room. She understood how she looked to her father—like a girl without a brain in her head, without a sense of place, of pride, of respect for her roots or thought for her actions. But she sometimes felt that she thought too much, that she considered every option too deeply, took every half-thought of a possibility too seriously. Bloom, bloom, bloom where you’re planted, the choir from the church where Sheila’s mother had taken her as a child used to sing. But what about cross-pollination? What about those shockingly colored hybrid plants you sometimes saw at the farmers’ market? No one ever sang about them. She said nothing.

  “I guess it’s your life,” her father said finally. “You’re going to do what you want with it.” Then he turned to walk down the stairs.

  “That’s right,” said Sheila, and she backed away from the door and willed herself not to cry.

  She sat on her bed for only a few minutes before deciding to leave the house for the day. Sheila sometimes spent her Saturdays at Andrea and Donny’s, sifting through the newspaper, painting her toenails, writing out French flashcards. Today, she dressed as fast as possible and went to Andrea’s without eating or brushing her teeth or hair.

  “Hello?” Sheila called as she opened the door to her sister’s house. She could already hear the whirring sound of early spring landscape maintenance—the neighborhood determined to take back the lawns frost had destroyed—and through the sliding back door of her sister’s split-level house, she saw Donny in a sleeveless undershirt, pushing a lawnmower in slow diagonals across the yard. “Andy?”

  She found her sister sitting on the couch in the living room, hovering over a needle and thread that she moved between two hands. “In here,” Andrea called out, but she didn’t look up from her lap. Sheila went to the kitchen and poured a glass of water. Then she sat down next to her sister.

  “Hey,” she said.

  Her sister smiled.

  Andrea had recently joined a cross-stitching circle, and she was working on a throw pillow that was going to say LOVE MAKES THIS HOUSE A HOME, but so far it just said THIS H, because you were supposed to start from the middle and work out to the ends to make sure it came out even. Love Makes This H. a Home, thought Sheila, Love Makes this F-ing H. a G.D. Home.

  “What’s the big difference supposed to be between a house and a home?” she asked.

  “Who knows?” said Andrea. “The words are really just decorations.”

  The cross-stitching group that Andrea had joined called themselves the “Stitch-n-Bitch.”

  “I’m not going to lie,” Andrea said. “The bitching is more fun than the stitching.”

  They met every Wednesday evening in somebody’s basement.

  “It’s a good hobby,” Andrea said. “You could use one.”

  “I have my own hobbies,” said Sheila.

  “Yeah, like what?”

  Sheila cleared her throat and pulled a French flashcard out of her purse.

  “Words,” her sister nearly spat. “They don’t mean anything. What if you needed to actually say something?”

  “Like what?”

  Her sister frowned at the needle and thread in her lap. “How should I know?” she said. She seemed to think about this for a second. Then she said, “Say you were in trouble. Say you needed to say, ‘I demand to be released. I’m a citizen of the United States of America and I want to speak to a lawyer.’ What if you needed to say something like that?” asked Andrea.

  Sheila knew the verb to want, but not to demand. She knew to leave, but not to release. The limits of her skills in the language were considerable, the gaps in her knowledge more gaping than she’d realized.

  Sheila exhaled and clutched at her glass of water. “I guess I couldn’t say it,” she said. It felt awful to admit to it.

  Andrea shrugged. “Yeah,” she said, “Or you could just say it in English.”

  The following Monday Sheila walked though the halls like a ghost. She spent the entire lunch period locked in the last stall of the girls’ bathroom so as not to have to face Anthony. Following French class, Sheila lingered and approached Ms. Lawrence’s desk. Ms. Lawrence was busy erasing the day’s lesson and chalk dust filled the air between them. Sheila cleared her throat.

  “Miss Gower,” Ms. Lawrence said, straightening up, “what can I do for you?”

  Ms. Lawrence’s English voice was slightly higher, more nasal, than her French voice, and immediately it put Sheila on edge. In English, she sounded more like any other teacher, less like an ally.

  Sheila leaned into Ms. Lawrence’s desk. “I wanted to tell you that I’m going to Paris,” she said. “In the fall.”

  Ms. Lawrence’s face brightened instantly, and Sheila felt her chest open again, her breathing steady. “That’s wonderful, Sheila,” she said.

  “I just thought you would like to know,” Sheila said.

  “Of course, how exciting,” said Ms. Lawrence. “Just think of how much your French will improve! If you need a recommendation or anything of that sort, I’d be happy to write you one. What type of program is it?”

  Sheila watched Ms. Lawrence’s manicured fingernails pick a piece of lint off her sweater while she waited for her to say something.

  “Oh, it’s not really a program,” Sheila said. “I’m just going.”

  “I don’t understand,” Ms. Lawrence said. “You mean you’re going on vacation?”

  “No,” said Sheila, “to live. I’ve been saving for a while.”

  “You know people there? Family?”

  “Not really,” said Sheila.

  “I see,” said Ms. Lawrence. She bit her bottom lip.

  It was quiet for a second.

  “It’s very expensive, Paris.”

  “I thought I could maybe get a job when I get there.”

  The chalk dust was settling around them. Sheila thought she could feel it drifting off the edges of things in the room.

  “Have you thought about Canada?” Ms. Lawrence said finally.

  “Canada,” S
heila repeated. Like Canada-Canada? Like Canada-north-of-Minnesota-Canada. She felt suddenly like she was going to pass out.

  “Because Paris is,” Ms. Lawrence paused. “How do I put it? Well, there’s ‘Paris,’” and here she extended her four fingers as if to place a quote around the word, “and then there’s Paris. The Paris that our textbook talks about just doesn’t exist, not really.”

  “What?” Sheila said. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean sometimes our expectations of a thing create a kind of unreality.”

  Sheila wondered if Ms. Lawrence was insane.

  “I mean it’s a city like any city. Yes, it’s wonderful, but there are Burger Kings there too, for example. There are ignorant drivers. There are thunderstorms. There are bills to pay and waiting rooms. The common cold. I mean I could keep going,” Ms. Lawrence said, but she trailed off.

  “So Paris is Coralville,” Sheila said.

  “Oh, there’s a thought! How interesting!” Ms. Lawrence laughed. She shook her head. “I don’t want to discourage you. But a place like Montreal is also really lovely, and it’s so much cheaper too, and closer to home. If you’re looking for an adventure, I mean. If that’s what you’re looking for.”

  “An adventure,” Sheila repeated. She repeated it again biking down the Coralville strip to the gas station after school. As if all she had been looking for was a cheap and convenient thrill. As if she had memorized all that vocabulary and all those conjugations to move to a place where it snowed so much that underground tunnels had to be dug so the people could still get to work in the morning without using the actual streets. “Maybe give it some thought,” Ms. Lawrence had said. “Just as an alternative. We could research some options together.” Sheila swerved slightly across the white line of the road and was brought back to the task of pedaling by the sharp horn of a driver.

  “Get on the fucking sidewalk!” the man yelled out his window at her as he sped past.

  Yes, of course, Sheila thought for the instant in which problems conflate in one’s brain and this seemed like the solution to everything that had steered off course in her life, I should get on the sidewalk! But if there had been a sidewalk, she would already be on it. SHARE THE ROAD a bright yellow sign sprouting from the concrete advised, as if it were that simple a thing to share something as open and straight and endless as a road. “There is no fucking sidewalk!” Sheila screamed back, near tears, pedaling fast, but minutes later, to no one, after the man had already driven off and was surely by now circling around the mall in pursuit of parking.

  Sheila sat in the gas station and waited for Peter. She didn’t know what she would say to him, but something was going to be said. She understood, irrationally, suddenly, that she needed him to walk into the station. It was toward the end of her shift, shortly after she’d decided that he would not come in at all, that she heard the sound of his engine cutting in the lot by the bathrooms, and she turned to see the headlights of his cab just as he switched them off. Sheila lifted the stack of flashcards from the counter and placed the top one—la carotte, le céleri, la pomme de terre—directly in front of her face.

  Peter walked into the gas station and stood at the counter.

  “What’s going on?” Sheila asked, looking up from her flashcard. This close to her face the words on her flashcard meant nothing at all. The letters blurred. The letters made her feel uneasy. “Slow night?”

  Peter reached into the pocket of his jacket and placed a shiny gun on the counter. He didn’t say anything. He just took it out the way someone might take out a set of car keys and placed it up there as if it had been uncomfortable in his pocket.

  “Uh, what’s with the gun?”

  “A proposition,” said Peter.

  “What is a gun doing on my counter?” Sheila clarified. Her heart beat faster, but it wasn’t fear exactly that directed her blood to move like this.

  “Have you ever been to Chicago?” asked Peter.

  “No.”

  “I’m going to Chicago,” said Peter. “I thought you might like to come with me.”

  Sheila knew she wasn’t putting in twenty-plus hours a week at the Sinclair station to go to a place like that.

  “I was going to leave the country soon,” she said.

  Peter shrugged. “So I’m heading east. It’s on your way.”

  “What’s in it for me?” asked Sheila.

  “If you don’t want to go,” he said, “I’ll go without you.”

  It occurred to her then that maybe this was one way to leave a place, with a boy and a gun. This was teamwork, having a plan.

  “What’s the plan?” she asked. “I’m assuming there is one.”

  Peter cleared his throat. “I will hold you at gunpoint. You will empty the cash register into my duffle bag. We will drive to Chicago. Fast,” he added.

  A city is a city, she thought, is a city is a city. Is that what Ms. Lawrence had been trying to tell her? She thought of her father as he had looked standing in the doorway of her bedroom. She raised her chin and looked straight into the eye of the security camera.

  “I don’t even know your real name,” said Sheila.

  “Sure you do, Gwen,” he said quietly.

  He looked at her queerly, smiled at her with his eyes, as if they two were in on something wonderful, some unnamed thing she wanted.

  “Point the gun at me,” said Sheila.

  Peter Parker did as he was told.

  FOR A LITTLE OVER TWO hours, Peter had been driving up and down the Coralville strip with a gun in the glove compartment. It wasn’t even his glove compartment. It belonged to Yellow Cab number ninety-seven, the taxi he drove most nights. Any one of the inebriated clients he might pick up—and, working nights in a town bordering a college town, a good percentage of his clientele was inebriated—could get curious in the front seat and find the gun nestled between outdated city maps and his emergency stack of Dairy Queen napkins. Peter removed the gun from the glove compartment while stopped at a red light; he admired its petite muzzle and short black trigger, then he lay it down quietly on the passenger seat. He didn’t know if it was loaded; he had been afraid to open it up and find out. Better not to know, better to allow himself to be in awe of the certain danger of it, to use this danger as backup, a motivation to walk into the gas station and say what he had seen.

  What he had seen was the girl, the gas station attendant who showed up in his dreams. Often she appeared in her underwear. In these regular dreams, the girl’s underwear was always white cotton with lace trim. She spoke French to him in these dreams, but not much else happened, and anyway Peter didn’t understand French, so she could have been saying anything—“Nice weather we’ve been having,” or “Can I borrow your car?”—the stuff of everyday necessity. Still, these dreams were nice. They did nothing to upset Peter.

  He was on his way to the gas station now. Perhaps she would be expecting him, because it was almost eight and he hadn’t yet been there. Peter pulled off onto the shoulder of Highway 6, half a mile from the station. He picked up the gun from the passenger seat. The shotgun rides shotgun. But it was a handgun, and he was hoping the girl would want to sit beside him.

  He had been driving a cab for the past five years, but he had been coming in to visit the girl when his shifts were slow only for the past month or so now. She was nice to look at even if she sometimes acted like she didn’t want him around. The first time he’d come into the station, the girl stared at his ID for maybe a full minute, but she hadn’t said a word about it.

  “Something wrong?” Peter had asked her.

  The license he carried in his wallet was a fake he’d made some years ago on the occasion of his twentieth birthday. But everyone called him Peter anyway, so it didn’t seem to make much of a difference. Unless he had to sign his name for some tax or employment purpose, this was the license he pulled from his wallet. His face was getting old and familiar enough around town not to be asked for identification much, so there seemed to be little rea
son for an adolescent gas station attendant to make him feel self-conscious about it. “Is there a problem?” Peter repeated.

  “Not unless there’s something I’m missing,” the girl said, in a way that made it seem as if he were the one with the staring problem.

  The next time he went in to buy cigarettes, Peter pulled off the cellophane and knocked one out from the pack. “Do you mind?” he asked, raising the freed cigarette halfway to his mouth.

  “You’re not allowed to smoke in here, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said. He started to make his way toward the door when he heard her say, “Unless you’ve got one for me?”

  Peter turned to face the girl, regarding the entire wall of cigarettes behind her, in every package and variety imaginable—hard packs, soft packs, filtered, unfiltered.

  “I just want one,” the girl said. “I’m not really a smoker.” She reached out her hand, and Peter placed a single cigarette between her fingers.

  After that, he’d made a habit of coming in. The girl would have his pack waiting for him. While Peter finished his cigarette in the station, the girl would tell him random facts about foreign countries she thought he’d appreciate. “In Paris, you can bring dogs everywhere,” she’d say. “Into restaurants and everything. Nobody cares, it’s just the culture.”

  “Hmm. Sounds like a health code violation,” Peter would say.

  “You’re really arrogant,” the girl said, smiling, “if you think your health codes are the same as everyone else’s.”

  It was around this time the girl had started showing up in his dreams.

  But more recently, there had been no French, no underwear. What Peter kept seeing in his sleep—it had happened every night this week—could not exactly be called a dream, and he knew better than to call it that. It was closer to sensing something while awake—complete with smell and taste and touch. The things Peter saw weren’t always the most important things. They were often isolated and individual, not enough to affect more than a few other lives.