Body of a Girl

by Leah Stewart

  When I’m sitting, he shuts the door, and goes around to his side. He’s got a cross hanging off the rearview mirror. The cab is immaculate, no trash on the floor and just a baseball cap sitting on the seat. He swings himself in and shuts the door. Then he sinks back into the seat. “Like my truck?” he asks.

  I nod, staring out the windshield at the dark parking lot. I glance at my door to make sure it’s still unlocked. Casually, I rest my hand on the door handle.

  “Let’s see,” he says under his breath. “ ’Scuse me.” He leans across me to open the glove compartment. His arm brushes against my knee. His head is inches from my breast. I press my body back into the seat. He’s whistling through his teeth, searching through the compartment. Now his arm is almost resting on my thigh. “It’s in here somewhere,” he says. I don’t know what he’s going to pull out of there. If I’m lucky it will be a small foil package. If I’m unlucky, it will be a knife, or a gun. I’m trying to breathe normally, keep my body from touching his.

  “Here we go,” he says. He straightens up. In his hand is a slender white joint.

  “Marijuana?” I say. My voice is heavy with disappointment. “Don’t you have anything else?”

  He lowers his hand, frowning. “Like what?”

  “Like heroin,” I say.

  He laughs. “Oh, girl, I don’t do that stuff.”

  “I was just hoping.”

  “You don’t look like a junkie,” he says.

  “I’m not.” I turn my face to look out the window.

  “What are you then, a cop or something?”

  “No,” I say. I must not sound convincing. He turns on the light and takes my chin in his hand, studying my face. “I don’t think I know you after all,” he says finally. “I thought you were a different girl.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. I push open the heavy door and jump down from the cab. Walking away, I pull the wig from my head and run my hand through my own damp hair. “A totally different girl,” he yells after me. I don’t turn around. I wipe the lipstick off with the back of my hand.

  In my car I sit and watch him climb out of his truck and walk back to the bar, shaking his head. His hands are jammed down into the pockets of his jeans, and even from here I can see the outline of his triceps. When he opens the door to the bar a burst of laughter explodes into the parking lot, cut off sharp when the door shuts again behind him. Every turn I take just brings me to a dead end. It’s like I’m traveling through a maze, the place where she died both the beginning and the end. She runs ahead of me, calling catch me if you can.

  David finds me sexy in the wig. When I walk in his front door carrying it in my hand, he looks me up and down and says, “Have you been to a costume party?”

  “I was undercover,” I say in a teasing tone so he’ll think I’m joking. I put the wig back on to show him, and he walks around me like I’m a car he’s thinking of buying, running his fingers lightly across the middle of my back. “I like it,” he says in my ear, then wraps his arms tightly around me. “Hey you,” he murmurs. “Looking for a good time?”

  “I don’t even know you,” I say.

  “Want to?” he asks.

  He leads me into the bedroom, where he takes everything off me but the wig.

  • • •

  In the middle of the night, I wake up. The place is quiet, and when the air conditioner starts up it seems to roar like a jet engine. Even David’s breathing seems too loud. I can’t sleep anymore and I wonder what I’ve been dreaming. A faint light comes in the window, and I can make out that the closet door is open. When I look at it, my conviction that someone is in it is as strong as it ever was when I was a child. I sit up and stare at it, telling myself that it’s empty. I crawl to the edge of the bed, trying not to disturb David, and reach out to push some shirts aside. Nothing but swaying clothes, shoes in a neat row. I ease back under the covers and pull the sheets to my nose, but my stomach still burns with stupid fear.

  I get out of bed, and go to the closet, throwing the clothes to either side. I see nothing, but it’s a walk-in closet, and someone could still be standing behind the coats all the way at the back. On hands and knees I crawl to the back of the closet, the heavy coats draped around my head. My hands find a stray belt, a pair of running shoes, then the back wall. The wall is cool and I press my face against it, remembering when I thought if I went into the back of my closet enough times I might eventually find a door. I always went looking for a way out when something frightened me. One night when I was nine and home alone, the phone rang and a man’s deep voice asked for my mother. I said, as I had been taught, that she was in the shower. “Go get her, then,” the man said, and when I said I didn’t want to bother her and asked if I could take a message, he took a deep breath and said, “Do you want me to rape your mother?”

  “No,” I whispered. I was shot through with terror, the kind that turns your body cold.

  He laughed and said, “I know where you live.”

  I dropped the phone and ran. When my mother came home she found me shaking at the back of the closet.

  I can still hear it, the arrow in that disembodied voice, how much he hated me.

  I close my eyes, and the thought flashes through my head: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. It almost makes me laugh.

  A hand touches my back.

  I scream and scream. Arms wrap around my waist and haul me backward, and I fall against a body, still screaming. “Olivia, for God’s sake,” David shouts. “It’s me. It’s me.”

  I sit up. My pulse is pounding so hard inside my neck I can feel the skin above it is moving. “You scared me,” I say.

  “No shit,” he says, running his hand up my arm. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I’m an idiot.”

  “Poor baby,” he says. “Did you have a bad dream?” He takes me in his arms—and I have to put it that way, because when he wraps his six-foot-three self around my five-foot-two body, that’s how I feel—taken, enclosed, held somewhere between security and fear.

  14

  For the thirty-fifth day in a row the temperature was above ninety degrees. Two old ladies were found dead in their apartments yesterday. I wrote the story this morning. Already this summer six people have died from the heat.

  I’m waiting for Peter outside the Four Corners, fanning my face with my hand. It’s been a long and frustrating day. I can’t keep Allison on the front page. Forensic evidence has all but eliminated Russell Freeland as a suspect. I couldn’t reach him for a quote and space was tight, so a small story is running on an inside page. Only suspects and murderers get front-page coverage, and often even murder’s not enough.

  Peter emerges from the restaurant, saying good-bye over his shoulder to someone inside. He’s wearing his busboy outfit, a white button-down shirt tucked into black pants. He’s got the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and his hair is mussed, his eyes are heavy-lidded with exhaustion. “I can’t believe how hot it is,” he says when he sees me waiting on the sidewalk. “It makes me want to lie down where I am and go to sleep. I read in the paper today some old lady died.”

  “There’s been a couple,” I say. “Old people with no air-conditioning.”

  “You wrote that story,” he says. “It’s weird to see your name in the paper.”

  “Wasn’t much to it. I just talked to the cop on the phone.” He’s not really listening, pulling his shirt out of his pants and unbuttoning it. Underneath he’s wearing a white T-shirt.

  “Where are we going?” I ask him.

  “Where my sister went. Isn’t that what you said you wanted?” He shrugs out of the button-down and balls it up in his hand. “My car’s just up the street.”

  When we get to his car, Peter opens the passenger-side door for me and grins, as though this is a trick he’s just learned. His car smells of smoke and faintly of sweat. I glance in the back. The seat is covered with cassette tapes. Ratty gym shorts and a pair of old running shoes
are on the floor. He gets in. “Sorry about the mess,” he says. When he starts the car, the radio blares. “Shit,” he says, switching it off quickly. “Sorry.”

  He pulls the car out onto the road. “So why do you want to do this?”

  “I want to talk to people who knew her,” I say. “I’m hoping someone can help us find a connection the police might have missed.”

  “You mean like someone who knows who killed her?” He swallows. “I thought the cops said it was a stranger killing.”

  “It probably was, Peter,” I say. “I just want to check it out.”

  “I guess that can’t hurt,” he says as we come to a stop at a red light. “The police haven’t found a goddamn thing.” His voice fills with fury and he says again, “Not a goddamn thing,” and drives his fist into the steering wheel.

  I don’t say anything. He lets out a long breath. Then the light changes and we pull on through. I watch the streetlights go by outside the window, wondering if anyone loves me as much as Peter loves his dead and buried sister.

  “Are we going to the Lizard Lounge?” I ask, and when he nods I say, “I’ve heard a lot of drugs move through there.”

  He gives me a wary glance. “Are you still thinking about that?”

  I reach inside my bag and pull out the box, holding it out to him in my palm. He looks down at it, then back at the road, gripping the steering wheel hard. “Where did you get that?”

  “You recognize it?” He gives me a tight nod. All he says is, “It’s Allison’s,” but something about his face tells me he knows what’s inside. “You lied to me before about the heroin, didn’t you?” I say.

  “It’s weird the way you say ‘heroin,’ ” he says. “Her-o-in. So formal. Say junk. Smack.”

  “Junk,” I say. “Smack. You lied to me.”

  “Yeah,” he says, his voice heavy with sarcasm. “How’d you know?”

  I open the box to show him the needle, the spoon and the tiny foil package nestled inside. He takes it from me and touches the needle with one finger, his face gone pale. “You know what this is, don’t you?” I say.

  “Of course,” he mutters. He doesn’t look at me. “Where was it?”

  “Your sister’s apartment,” I say. “I told you.”

  I nod, and he lets out an aggrieved sigh. “Where?”

  “That was you, wasn’t it? You searched her room.”

  He doesn’t answer. He runs his finger over the spoon and I wonder what he’s thinking, if he ever saw his sister use it. “Why did you take it?”

  I hesitate. “I didn’t think your mom should be the one to find it.”

  “Thanks.” He shoots me a grateful smile.

  It gives me a pang of guilt, the way he believes whatever I say. “What can you tell me about it?” I ask him gently.

  Shrugging, he lifts the foil package from the box and then drops it back in again. “Whatever you want to know,” he says. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

  “Can you show me where this came from?” I ask. “I want to meet the people you and your sister knew.”

  He stares at me as though this is not what he expected me to say. Then he nods, slowly. He smiles his transforming smile at me, and I wonder if I’m ever going to see it when his eyes aren’t wet with tears. He stops the car at another light, and with his free hand he reaches for the back of my head and pulls me to him to press his lips hard to mine. “Thank you,” he says, kissing me again and again. “Thank you.”

  I’m almost laughing, trying to say “You’re welcome,” though I’m not sure what he’s thanking me for. Maybe for keeping his sister’s secrets. Maybe for wanting to know what they were. By the time he lets me go I’m dizzy. My hand shakes when I reach for the box. Peter doesn’t let go. “Maybe I should keep this,” he says.

  “I don’t think so,” I say. “What if your mother catches you with it?”

  “I guess you’re right.” He lets me lift it out of his hand. “She sometimes searches my room,” he says, and laughs without humor. “I even have to hide my cigarettes.” While I tuck the box back inside my bag he lights a cigarette. I notice his hands are shaking, too.

  The light turns to green, and Peter whips a U-turn in front of the oncoming cars. “Where are we going?” I say, bracing myself against the dash.

  “You don’t want to go to the Lizard Lounge,” Peter says. “I’ll take you where you really want to go.”

  A guy opens the door wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. He’s pale and so thin that his ribs protrude. I have an urge to run my fingers along the first ridge of bone. He looks at me and his face is blank with confusion, his eyes small and rimmed with red. “Hi,” he says. His face is familiar. He was there the night I took Peter home from that bar.

  “Hi, Nate,” Peter says, stepping up beside me.

  Nate’s face clears. “Mr. Avery,” he says, offering him his hand. “How are ya, sir? Come in, come in.” He moves aside so we can step into the apartment. We’re standing in an entryway, carpeted in brown, with an open litter box in one corner. Ahead of us a long hall stretches away. When the door is closed Nate looks us up and down, smiling. “Hey,” he says, pointing at me. “Friend of Allison’s?” As her name leaves his mouth, he shoots a worried look at Peter.

  “Olivia,” I say to Nate, holding out my hand. Instead of shaking it he lifts it to his lips and leaves a wet kiss on my skin.

  “Charmed,” he says. Then he throws his arm around Peter’s shoulders, still holding my fingers loosely in his other hand. “Pete, my good man,” he crows. “Why haven’t you brought this lovely young lady around before?” Peter’s not looking at Nate, but staring down the hall. Inside his pockets his hands are balled into fists. “I know this little boy has a way with the ladies,” Nate says to me in a confidential tone. “But wouldn’t you prefer a man?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know any,” I say. Nate throws back his head and roars with approving laughter. “Let’s go in,” he says. “The rest of the gang is in the living room.”

  We walk down the long empty hall to a nearly silent room. Six or seven people recline against cushions on the floor. I recognize two others from that night—Steve, who hails Peter, and the girl he was tormenting. She’s sitting in a corner, her head back against the wall and her eyes closed. Every face in the room is flushed an unhealthy red, and then I notice that even the walls are glowing that same color. At first I think this is a trick my eyes are playing. Then Nate says, “You like my new bulbs?” and points at a lamp in the corner. It’s a relief to see that the red light is real, and not some fever vision.

  There are only three pieces of furniture, an armchair, a tiny sagging sofa, and a rickety coffee table. On the tiny couch is an electric guitar, a four-track on the coffee table. Nate sees me looking at it. “I just recorded something,” he says, “Y’all want to hear it?”

  “Sure.” I stand looking around while Nate busies himself hooking the four-track up to his stereo. His walls are hung with rock and roll posters and glossy ads he’s cut from magazines, most of them featuring the same thin, stringy-haired model. Peter sits on the couch. I perch on the edge of the ratty armchair and look around. There’s a reddish-brown stain toward the bottom of one wall. “What is that?” I point at it.

  “Puke,” Nate says. “I don’t clean if off as a reminder not to do speedballs.”

  “What’s a speedball?” I wrap my arms around my stomach and lean forward, trying not to look at the stain. I wonder how much time Allison spent in this apartment, if she laughed or looked away when she first saw that mark on the wall.

  “Cocaine and heroin,” Peter says. I shoot him a look. He’s staring at a Rolling Stones poster, his face a blank.

  Nate nods. “Almost killed me,” he says, and laughs. “It’s ready.” He sits on the couch beside Peter and presses play.

  For a moment there’s no sound but the faint whirring of tape casters. Nate closes his eyes, settling back against the couch. A guitar starts up, playing chords wi
th the distortion turned up high, and then Nate’s voice comes in, droning lyrics I can’t make out. What seems to be the chorus starts, and Nate sings along with himself: “Oh, baby, I’ve been livin’ on the edge, drivin’ all night just to see you.” Then the voice stops, and I hear the unmistakable gurgle of a bong hit.

  Nate opens his eyes. “Isn’t that cool?” he says. “I got the idea right before you came.” He nods at me. He nods all the time, like a doll whose head is loose in its socket.

  “It’s really cool,” I say. A pleased smile spreads across his face. It makes me sad. The sound of another bong hit comes out of the speakers, and he points at the stereo, grinning at me.

  “Are you playing that shit again?” Steve groans from the floor. He clambers to his feet and comes over to stand behind my chair, leaning so heavily against it that I tilt backward, looking up into his face. His features are thick and droopy, as though the pull of gravity is stronger on him than the rest of us. “I know you,” he says to me. “You knew . . .” He shoots a look at Peter and doesn’t finish the sentence.

  “Allison,” Peter says sharply. “You can say it.”

  “How did you know her?” I ask, looking at Nate.

  “College,” Nate says. “We had a couple classes together. Chemistry.” He gives a barking laugh. “I sucked at it. She let me copy her notes. She’s cool.” He frowns. “She was cool,” he says softly. Then he touches Peter’s arm. “I’m sorry.”

  “Goddamnit,” Peter bursts out, jumping to his feet. “Stop fucking apologizing.”

  “I’m . . .,” Nate starts. He stops, uncertain. Peter strides out of the room. I hear a door slam.

  “Shit,” Steve says under his breath.

  With some effort, because Steve’s weight is still pulling the chair backward, I slide forward and get to my feet. Nate watches me, saying nothing, and I head to the back of the room and into the kitchen, looking for a closed door. When I see it, I go to it and knock. There’s no response. “Peter, it’s me,” I say. “Can I come in?” I hear his voice on the other side, though I don’t know what he’s said. I open the door.