by Leah Stewart
Me, I stop and take notes.
The dirt all around here is crisscrossed with tire marks—some of them made by my car, some of them made by hers. It’s impossible to tell now which is which, until her tracks split off from mine, the cops’, the other reporters’, and veer into that cordoned-off space. There they swerve over a blood-darkened patch of dirt and pass out again, heading off, away from here, the place where Allison died.
5
The Lizard Lounge, where Angela was waiting for Allison the night she died, is the main venue in the city for small bands. I pull into the parking lot, late to meet David. The building is square and windowless, with Lizard Lounge spelled out in green neon script below a giant lizard with pulsing yellow eyes. Before I go in I stand for a moment in the hot parking lot, watching the eyes blink on and off. I hate meeting David at clubs. It’s always too loud to talk, and he’s only interested in the music. I don’t know why he insists I come. About tonight, he said, “This band could take off, I’m not talking just local, and I think they’re going to sign with us. You gotta come.” David is an A&R man for a small Memphis label. He and his friends sit around smoking joints and cigarettes and talking about Stax and Big Star and seeing Al Green preach at the Full Gospel Tabernacle. Memphis, they say, will rise again. “Memphis is the pop culture Bethlehem,” David likes to say, waving his beer bottle in the air. “Elvis may have been born in Mississippi, but Memphis,” and here he leans back in his chair, tilting so far on two legs that I always think he will fall, “Memphis is the birthplace of the King.”
When I walk in the bar, the music hits me in the chest, the girl singer’s baby-doll voice rising like a scream. I give my money to the bored bouncer, and while he checks my license I read the band names scrawled in red marker on a bulletin board. The Barnacles. Guys and Dolls. The bouncer hands me my ID back, taking a long suspicious look at my face. “It’s really me,” I say, and he waves his hand to indicate that I can go past him into the bar.
For a moment I see nothing but dark figures bobbing in unison, smoke hanging in the air from their heads to the ceiling, and I think that if Allison Avery had walked into this room on time Saturday night she would still be breathing now. I wonder if we’ve ever been here on the same night, bumped against each other in the crowd.
I can’t even see the band over all the people, just the face and hair of the bass player, a tiny severed head bobbing in time to the beat. Then I see David, back by the bar, leaning against a stool with one foot on the rung. I stop, watching him. It’s one of those moments when the world swings around and a person you’ve had in your bed looks like no one you’ve ever seen before. I’m looking at a man, back by the bar, tall and unremarkably attractive, tufts of his brown hair sticking up like he’s been running his fingers through it. His hands are large and thick-veined, the fingers long and graceful. He wears a T-shirt and jeans over a lean muscled body just starting to get softer.
He’s not smoking, but by the way his knee jiggles I can see he’s itching for a cigarette. I think, That’s why he’s stood his hair on end, and then he’s David again, my boyfriend of nearly six years.
“Good timing,” he shouts when I reach his side. “They just went on.”
“Sorry I’m late,” I shout back.
“What?” He removes an earplug from one ear.
“Sorry I’m late.”
“That’s okay,” he shouts. “I didn’t notice.”
“You didn’t notice?”
“You’re always working,” he says. “I expect you to be late.” He gestures behind him at the bar, eyebrows raised, to ask if I want a drink and when I shake my head he asks me if I’m sure. Then he turns and orders himself a beer. While he’s waiting he points across the bar and shouts, “Hannah’s here.” I follow his gaze. At first all I can see is a swarm of bobbing, oblivious faces, and then a girl with a frozen grin that pulls her lips back so far it looks painful. She steps aside, and I see my roommate on a tall stool, leaning her elbows on the counter that runs behind her along the wall. She is not so much sitting as propped, one long leg dangling off the front edge of the stool so that her foot hovers inches from the ground. The other foot rests on the rung. A man is standing beside her, talking and gesturing, and though she nods at something he is saying, her eyes are focused on the stage, and her head is tilted away from him. Her red hair slides forward across her face. Even in a resting position, something about Hannah always suggests motion.
“I think that guy’s in love,” David says, his voice lower now, his lips inches from my ear. “Poor bastard.” David himself used to have a crush on Hannah. I listened to him talk about it for six months before he turned his attention to me.
I watch as the man leans in close to Hannah, touching her lightly on the knee. He says something in her ear, and she turns to look at him, raising her eyebrows. She shakes her head slowly, and then he says something that makes her laugh. Whatever the question was, though, the answer is still no, and after a moment he walks away, across the bar to the bathroom. Hannah spots me then, lifting her hand in a wave. She slides forward off her stool and disappears into the crowd.
I lean back against David’s warm chest. Over my head he watches the band I can’t see and I watch the crowd, trying to picture the dead girl among them, laughing with a beer in her hand as a boy gazes at her, desire in his eyes. On my tiptoes I tilt my head back and say David’s name over and over until he hears me and takes the earplug from one of his ears. “Do you know a girl named Allison Avery?” I shout up at him.
He frowns. “Who?”
“Allison,” I say, enunciating each syllable, “Avery.”
He shakes his head. “Doesn’t sound familiar. Why?”
“She wanted to be a singer,” I shout. “Just thought you might have heard of her.” He keeps shaking his head. “Can you ask around? Maybe someone you know knows her.”
“Sure,” he says. “Remind me.” Then he puts the earplug back in and turns his attention to the stage. The crowd parts enough so that for a moment I can see the girl up there singing, thrusting her pelvis at the microphone like a female Elvis. Then she disappears again behind the bobbing heads before me, and I come down from my tiptoes and see Hannah stepping out of the crowd. She never looks like she’s pushing people aside. They part for her, like curtains on a stage. “Here she comes,” David says in my ear with amusement, “Miss America.” Then he raises his voice and says, “Did you make a conquest?”
Hannah rolls her eyes. “He asked me to do coke with him,” she says. “I took a rain check.” Then she turns to me and touches my arm. “You look tired,” she says. “Hard day?”
“The usual,” I say. “You’re not going to, are you?”
“Do coke? No. I don’t like it. It makes me feel like my heart’s jumping on a trampoline. Besides,” she says, grinning, “I’m already really stoned. Why taint a perfectly good downer with an upper?”
“You’ve done coke before?” I’ve known Hannah for seven years, lived with her for five, and yet she still manages to have secrets.
“A couple of times.” She waves a hand vaguely. “Did you talk to that Carl guy?” she asks, and when I nod, she says, “Creepy, isn’t he?”
“He had a thing for the dead girl,” I say. “Classic stalker. Like that guy Hardwick in college that used to follow you home.”
She shudders. “Remember when you saw his room?”
“That was awful,” I say. A friend of mine lived on Hardwick’s hall, and once when I was passing by I happened to glance in through his open doorway. The room was a shrine to Hannah, pictures of her all over his walls. Some of them he’d cut from the school paper or yearbook. Several were snapshots, like he’d been lurking behind bushes, snapping her picture as she laughed, or searched through her backpack, or sat talking over lunch, gesturing with her spoon. It was frightening and sad, and the worst part about it was, I was jealous. I stood there looking at Hannah, every expression of hers captured. The girl in the pictures was my fri
end, and yet she wasn’t, because I’d never looked at her this way before, as an obsession, a symbol of unattainable perfection. She was so beautiful and remote. I couldn’t help but feel it, the terrible strength of his longing for her, and I was jealous. I don’t know what part of it I wanted, to long, or to be longed for.
I look at David. His eyes are on the stage.
When the set is over, and the bouncers turn on the lights, David says, “Come meet the band.” I trail after him across the dance floor, through the dispersing kids looking dazed in the sudden brightness. David pushes the door to the dressing room open, and I see him framed there, walking toward one of the guys with his hand out to shake, saying, “Great set, great set.” I stop and let the door swing closed. I stand with my hands in my pockets and watch two girls bump into each other, then scream, “Oh my Gawd,” and dive into a frenzied hug. If I went in there, David would after a moment introduce me, and they would all say how nice it was to meet me and maybe shake my hand, and then I would stand there trying to look interested while they talked about the acoustics, and how the mix sounded, and how David thinks next time they should open with a different song. And tonight I know what I would be doing while I pretended to listen to the baby-doll singer’s opinion on crowd reaction, because it’s what I can’t stop myself from doing when I look at every careless girl in this place.
I would be picturing her dead.
When David finally comes out I’m leaning with my eyes half closed against the wall, and he doesn’t see me. He walks past me and stands looking for me, turning his head from side to side. He’s muttering something under his breath, but I can’t make it out. Then the singer emerges from the room, wearing a tight tank top, a miniskirt, and thigh-high boots, her bleached blond hair moussed into disarray on top of her head. She goes up behind my boyfriend and touches his arm. He turns, smiling. She stands on her tiptoes, her hand on his shoulder while she talks to him, cocking her head ever so slightly to the right. He listens intently, nodding, and then finally she stops talking and he says something back, gesturing toward the stage with his hand. She stands so close to him I can barely see through the space between them.
Finally she takes a step away from him, walking backward, and says so I can hear it, “So I’ll see you later?” He nods, and she turns to go back into the dressing room. Watching her go, David spots me. Her eyes glance over me without seeing me and she disappears through the door.
David strides over, grabs my hand and shakes it a little. “Where did you go?” he says. “Do you know how embarrassing that was? I said, ‘And this is my girlfriend,’ and turned around and you weren’t there.”
“I wasn’t in the mood,” I say.
He stares at me. “You weren’t in the mood,” he repeats slowly, then he turns away from me, shaking his head. Across the bar, the same man is talking to Hannah. I catch her eye and she smiles. “Do you want a ride home?” I mouth.
She shakes her head. “I’m going to walk,” she says, her voice traveling the nearly empty room.
I go over to her. “You can’t walk,” I say. “It’s the middle of the night.”
“I’ll be fine, Olivia.”
“Let us give you a ride. It’s not safe.”
She sighs. “I want to walk,” she says. “I’m going now. So I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?” She turns to the guy, who has been watching this exchange with wide eyes, and tells him that it was nice to meet him, and then she says good-bye to David and walks out the door. I watch her go, and I wonder if Allison Avery had that easy grace, if she took her pretty body and marched it down the streets at night.
I leave the guy standing there without a word and go to David’s side. “Let’s go,” I say. “I want to follow her.”
“She’s fine, Olivia,” he says.
“It’s too far for her to walk.”
“She walked here, didn’t she?”
“I’m serious, David,” I say. “It’s not safe.”
He sighs. “All right. Let’s go.”
In our two cars we go after Hannah, and when I come alongside her I roll down my window and ask her to get in. “Go away,” she says, not looking at me, still walking. “Or I’ll call the police.” I glance in my rearview mirror and see the guy from the bar running as fast as he can down the sidewalk toward Hannah. When he catches her he grabs her arm and holds her there, breathing hard. “Are you all right?” he says, casting a suspicious glance at me. “Are these guys following you?”
Hannah laughs, the sound echoing down the quiet street. David must have had enough, because he honks his horn twice and pulls a fast U-turn. When he passes me, I see him leaning out his window waving for me to follow. I take another look at Hannah, and she, too, is waving for me to go. I swing my car around and go after him. I watch Hannah in the rearview mirror until I can’t see her anymore, striding up the sidewalk like she couldn’t be safer while that guy does his best to put his arm around her waist.
David lives on Mud Island. I follow him down Third past a series of dark and empty parking lots, my headlights shining on the white signs advertising $5 All Day. The cars bump over the trolley line to the Auction Street Bridge, and we are out of downtown, over the river and onto the island. We turn into David’s neighborhood and pass down streets lined with houses that remind me of childhood beach vacations, the temporary homes I remember seeing squinty-eyed through the car window at night as we pulled, finally, into town. David’s taillights disappear ahead of me as I slow down, looking at the houses. The buildings look lightweight, wood painted in pale yellow, the windows angled and huge, and inside ceiling fans, spider plants with their tangled shoots dangling from the hanging pots. I can’t help but feel that here life isn’t quite real, as though no one ever has to vacuum, the dusting and the polishing and the washing done with precision by unseen maids.
When I pull into David’s driveway, he’s letting his dog, Lou, out of the house. The dog stands on his hind legs, his tongue reaching for David’s face, and the two of them do an awkward circular dance. Finally the dog sprawls on the ground, and David sits on the front steps. He doesn’t look at me as I approach. He’s rubbing Lou’s stomach vigorously, one of the dog’s legs flapping helplessly in the air. I sit down beside him on the steps. He takes a cigarette from a pack and lights it.
“Thought you were quitting.”
“I’m working up to it,” he says irritably, still annoyed with me. I lean back on my elbows. My body is heavy with exhaustion, but my mind is jumping and the music has left a high ringing in my ears.
A young redheaded woman strolls by with a large white dog. David waves, and Lou lifts his heavy head, ruffs softly, and then returns to sleeping, his barrel chest heaving as though he’s just run a mile. “It must be nice to feel that safe,” I say.
“This is a good neighborhood,” David says. I close my eyes and open them again. The woman has passed on. The street has the cheerful misty look that comes from bright artificial lights at night, and sometimes a breeze shifts the air that sits wet and heavy on my skin.
David is quietly singing “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” by The Police. It’s his favorite song. I know a great many facts about David: his favorite songs, his fear of heights, his statistics: twenty-seven, six feet three, and 190 pounds, give or take one or two. Hair: brown, that shade that tells you he was blond as a child. Eyes: gray. I can remember the first time I was close enough to notice that they weren’t blue, as I had thought, but gray, and how that made him seem unusual, intriguing, mysterious. I can’t remember how it felt to think those things about him.
“You know her?” I say.
“Hmmmm?”
“That girl who just walked past.”
“The redhead? I don’t know her name. I just run into her sometimes when I’m out walking Lou. Lou really likes Petra.”
“Who’s Petra?”
“Her dog,” he says. “That big white dog.” A firefly blinks, inches from David’s face. “You know,” he says, “that was
the first time I’d been to a club in at least three weeks.”
“That’s not like you,” I say. When I first knew David, he was constantly searching for new and better fake IDs, not because he wanted to drink, like most of our friends, but because he wanted to go see bands. After a good show, he’d come back and tell me that he thought this band had something, his face shining, as breathless with excitement as if he were in the band himself. “Someday I’m going to discover someone, Olivia,” he’d say. “Someone big.”
“I don’t know,” he says now. “If I know a band is good, that’s one thing. But I haven’t got time to waste on crap anymore.”
“What about all those lectures you gave me?” I say. “ ‘You have to take a chance, Olivia. You never know what you might find.’ ”
“Yeah, well,” he says. “I get tired of coming home with my ears ringing and smoke in my clothes. Too many bands confuse loud with good, you know?” Lou rolls over on his back, paws flopping in the air, and David leans forward to rub his stomach hard. “I came home from work today and took Lou out in the yard, and the bastard ran off,” he says. He thumps Lou. “You bastard.”
The dog is part hound, and so stubborn and half stupid, chasing anything that moves. Every now and then I come in the room and find the two of them in a frenzy of love, Lou pinning David to the carpet, vigorously licking his face with his washcloth of a tongue. Lou and I don’t really get along. “I left him out in the yard and went to the bathroom,” David says. “When I came back he’d run off. I had to walk two blocks over before I found him.”
