The Night Gwen Stacy Died Read online

  “I get off at eight,” Sheila heard herself say.

  In her mind, the slot machines glittered. Coins spilled from them to the floor. People threw up their hands. People raised their glasses. When she closed up the station and started to ride her bike home, she was a little hurt that he never showed, though obviously he had no intention of doing so from the start. She had to reason with herself on the ride home—that casinos were desperate and lonely places, that she wasn’t even old enough to gamble, and that anyway, the place didn’t exist!—to stop conjuring an image of Peter playing slots alone, to stop thinking of the fact that he hadn’t come back for her.

  But after this day he rarely missed one of her shifts. Peter made it a point to sit with her for a few minutes in the station, long enough for a cigarette and a conversation. After he’d been coming in for a while, Sheila asked Donny if he knew of any Peter Parkers. “Sure I do,” Donny said. “Spider-Man.” No, not Spider-Man, Sheila had explained patiently. Just some guy. “Some guy who thinks he’s fucking Spider-Man,” Donny said. But Peter Parker was just a guy who drove a cab at night and who would stay for five or ten minutes when he came into the gas station if he was between fares. Sheila was supposed to discourage patrons from loitering like this—there were some shady characters who drove up and down the Coralville strip after nine—but she liked Peter Parker. He had nice hair, dark, overgrown, with strange waves that fell into his eyes if he leaned in to look at something closely, like if he was spilling the contents of his pockets on the counter, searching for a five. There was always dirt under his fingernails when he rested his hands on the counter, and his hands were broad and calloused, like maybe they served him in a particular way that had nothing to do with gesticulation or the exchange of money. Donny was probably wrong about Peter Parker. It was a common enough name. Anyone could have it. But it gave Sheila a welcome diversion to reroute her brain in the direction of secret identities and second lives. It seemed a fine way to pass the time to imagine that the dirt under his fingernails was residue from saving the world.

  “I’m home!” Sheila called through the house after slamming the door behind her. She walked into the kitchen, and her mother appeared, standing over the sink with a sponge in her hand, Sheila’s father beside her with a towel. After thirty years of marriage, they still washed the dishes together every night. They took turns being the one to wash, the one to dry.

  “Hi honey,” her mother said. “We’re just cleaning up from dinner.”

  Sometimes they waited for her to eat on the evenings she worked in the station, but if she got off too late, they’d save a plate of whatever dinner had been for her to heat up in the microwave.

  Her parents hadn’t wanted her to take the job at the Sinclair station. Her mother thought it was a job for a man—the tire grease, the cigarettes. Her father thought gas stations on the strip weren’t safe at night.

  “Some crazy idiot could come in and rob the place,” her father had said. “And then what are you going to do, a girl alone in a gas station?”

  “I’d give them the money,” she had said. “And I’d call the cops. Same as you would.”

  “You just better hope that’s all you’d have to give,” her father said, “in a situation like that.”

  “Like what else?” Sheila had asked, but her father said nothing. Was the implication that she would be sexually accosted or attacked? Was this why it was irresponsible for a teenage girl to take an evening job at a gas station? Because the possibility existed that certain men couldn’t resist whipping out their genitals and making demands of other people? One always needed to suspect! One needed to be steadfast, vigilant! Especially girls like Sheila who were charged with applying themselves. For example: the option of college was made available to girls like Sheila by generations of struggle, and now she wasn’t even going to apply? She was going to work in a crappy gas station to save money for some ambiguous plan?

  “Good thing I’m almost eighteen,” Sheila had insisted. “Old enough to make some of my own decisions, I’d guess.”

  But of course she was living at home. Her father was always quick to bring up that fact. She was living in his house. None of it mattered anyway, Sheila had liked to tell everyone, because by the end of the year she’d be fluent in a completely foreign language, and living in another country as well.

  “This country’s not good enough for you?” her father had asked recently. He had caught her making French vowel sounds in the hallway while carrying a basket of laundry up to her room.

  “That’s right,” said Sheila. “Too many rules.”

  “Because the French don’t have any rules,” her father said.

  Sheila shrugged her shoulders. “Je ne sais pas.”

  She didn’t know, not really. That was why it was so difficult to have an argument about her plans. When posed the question of what exactly she would be doing in France, Sheila was hard-pressed to generate a response that sounded acceptable to most of her adversaries. The truth was that her goals were somewhat modest. She imagined she would have a job in a shop or behind a counter somewhere. She imagined she would rent a room with a window that opened onto a street with traffic. Maybe there would be friends, some sort of community, but mostly she saw herself negotiating the city streets with a bicycle, its basket filled with the vegetables whose names she knew how to pronounce. The point was only that this place existed, and she could get to it. The point was only that for a time she would be there, and there was not here.

  Her father had studied her hard around the eyes. He said, “You can’t start a life in a language you don’t understand, Sheila.” Sheila had been ready to say more, to defend the fact that she already understood loads of conjugations and vocabulary, but her father hadn’t taken his eyes off hers. He held her stare until she looked down at her fingernails. Historically, in the family hierarchy, her father was the parent with whom Sheila could have a reasonable dialogue, a good argument. When things became heated, her mother got a breathless look and went to fold laundry in the other room. But lately, her father was the quiet one, as if defeated by the thought of competing with a foreign country for his daughter’s affection. It was Sheila’s mother these days who would say things like, “Honey, we just don’t understand why you feel you need to do this.” As if Sheila had announced that she was going off to war, as if she were proposing to irrevocably disown them all.

  “I mean, how will that work, exactly?” her mom had asked. “Are you going to come home for Christmas, or are you just going to start celebrating holidays with a bunch of foreigners instead of with your family?”

  Now Sheila opened the fridge and found a plate of some kind of meat and mashed potatoes. Her parents finished washing the dishes and hovered around her briefly, like insects, like hummingbirds.

  “How was your day?” her mother asked.

  “Fine,” Sheila said. She peeled back the plastic wrap and set the microwave for two minutes.

  “Learn anything at school?” her father asked like some dad on television.

  Sheila thought for a second. She thought, a scalene triangle has no equal sides, no equal angles. She thought, je veuille, tu veuilles, elle veuille. Also, something about the Ancient Mariner and his albatross necklace.

  “Not really,” she said.

  Her father nodded and folded his towel on the counter. Her mother kissed her forehead.

  “Turn off all the lights before you come up, sweetie,” her mom said.

  Sheila sat at the kitchen table with her plate. There was a time when her parents would sit with her and keep her company while she finished eating, but that time seemed to have passed. There was a time when there were things to say to these people—her parents—things to explain, to ask, to offer, and it made her bottom lip tremble in the start of what could be, but was not, a sob, to watch her father fold his towel and take the stairs slowly up to his bedroom, the weight of his hand on the banister, because maybe it was her fault that in seventeen years she had already ex
hausted the possibilities for communicating with the people who had produced her.

  Sheila sat under the cool light over the kitchen table, raking her fork through her mashed potatoes, flattening and raking, flattening, then raking, conjuring a white field on her plate, an alien terrain that required her attention, a plot of land that required nothing so much as her specific and ardent and immediate care.

  IN THE MIDDLE of the night, it was always the same. The dreams told the dreamer, pay attention. The dreams told the dreamer, consider this and consider that, and for the most part, it was fine to consider these things, to engage the subconscious in the exercise of willful consideration.

  Always the dreams told the dreamer, Let’s pretend the world is this way for a few minutes, I mean, no big deal, no commitment, just something to do until you wake up.

  Come on, say the dreams, it’ll be fun.

  Imagine: A stairway. A city map. A girl in her underwear. A lion lives in your basement. A migratory bird explains microclimates in the Pacific Northwest. A train runs on the output of your mental energies.

  Hypothetically speaking, none of these dreams would present a problem. The dreamer actually thought of these dreams as enjoyable. But there were other dreams, too. The other kind started the same way, with a directive—pay attention. But this time it wasn’t a suggestion; it was more like a demand. It was more like a threat. These dreams felt more like lived events that would happen somewhere to someone if the dreamer didn’t intercept them in time.

  Here’s one: You are driving to Chicago. Why Chicago? It’s difficult to say, but every fifteen to twenty miles the signs on the road are counting down to that city, so in the logic of dreams, this word, Chicago, becomes synonymous with destination. A beautiful girl sits beside you in the car. A gun rests in the glove compartment. The gun is small and cold; you know this because before it was in the glove compartment, it was in your hand, pointed toward the girl. The girl you know from somewhere, she’s been in your dreams before, but you can’t place her, you can’t name her in the same way you can name this place where you’re going.

  There is a sense of urgency. The windows are open and the breeze picks up your hair and slaps at your cheeks and chin. The mile markers count down: fifty miles, then fifteen, then the unknown skyscrapers are a visible glow ahead in the distance. You hear a radio playing softly somewhere. You see a parking lot, a pigeon flap one wing helplessly, crushed metal floating in stacks down the surface of a narrow river. An entire scrap yard of flattened cars, half of them inching downstream, the sun catching the light off a resilient fender. The other half stacked on top of one another in an empty lot, their true colors muted by all the dust that has settled. The dust is the residue from nearby explosions. Sometimes there are explosions, the dream advises. You try to pay attention.

  Then there is the cramped apartment you don’t recognize. What happens next is the thing you can’t shake. You see a man walk into the room. His eyes are clear and slightly familiar. The rest you see in fragments, flashes that blur and fade around the corners. You see him walk into the bathroom with a clenched fist, open his fist above his mouth, and invite the small trail of white pills into his body. They stick in the man’s throat, and you see him start to cough, to choke. You see the man start to moan, and everything that follows. By now it is impossible to stop watching, to turn it off.

  He reminds you of someone you know. In the terror logic of the dream, the vision, the threat, the premonition, you understand that you are the only one who can save him from himself.

  AS SHEILA DISMOUNTED in the school parking lot, she always inhaled as much of the outside air as she could before heeding the last warning bell, locking up her bike, and submitting herself to the eight-period day. She caught her breath with her hands resting on her knees while she watched the rest of the student body—her peers—disengage from cars, embraces, conversations, and wander, group by group, into the building. It was senior year. Everyone had already become whatever they were going to be to one another for the rest of their time together. Alliances had been formed, rivalries established, and now the name of the game was hang on like hell to what you had worked to get, and hope for the best. Reinvention was futile; deliverance was not up for discussion.

  She walked into first-period English and took her seat.

  “Okay, people,” Mrs. Gavin was saying, “announcements. Listen up.”

  Good morning, said the voice over the PA. Can I have your attention please? Annual blood drive starts tomorrow. As always, type O, we’re depending on you! The votes are in and the theme for Spring Fling, as decided by popular demand, will be Girls Just Wanna Have Fun! The voice over the PA reminded the students that it was Spirit Week and said they should feel comfortable expressing their school spirit by creatively incorporating the colors of the Cougar—blue and orange—into their manner of dress. The students were reminded that hats, bandannas, head-coverings of any kind were not permitted. Tshirts with offensive language or Tshirts bearing explicit product insignia, also unacceptable. The students were encouraged, as always, to use good taste when selecting socially appropriate ways to show their school enthusiasm during Spirit Week. There would be a pep rally the following Friday in anticipation of Spring Fling, which was something everyone could look forward to, but, of course, the antics that ensued during the last school-wide pep rally would not be repeated.

  The announcements droned on. Sheila made a pillow of her crossed arms on her desk and placed her head there. No matter what was said over the PA on a given morning, Sheila could rest assured that it did not apply to her. She had been fairly successful up until this point of her high school career existing just on the periphery of whatever was going on.

  She knew how to give a straight answer to a question. She knew how to make eye contact. She had decent grades, mostly Bs. She had two physical assets: wide eyes, long legs. This physical evaluation was not Sheila’s own. These were only the facts; these were the parts of her body that boys’ eyes rested on when they glanced in her direction. Otherwise, everything about her was expected. She was on the skinny side, and tallish—but not so tall that her height summoned attention—with long, light brown hair. Light brown, dirty blond—the same hair everyone had.

  She had one ally in the cafeteria: Anthony Pignatelli. Anthony was the only real friend she had hung on to since the start of high school. She knew some people assumed they were a couple, and as far as Sheila was concerned, people could say whatever they wanted about her and Anthony Pignatelli. He was a normal kid, and he made her laugh. Which was more than you could say about most people.

  To the untrained eye, the cafeteria might appear to be simply a place for students to eat, but in fact, it was composed of two disparate social spheres, universally referred to by their relative size: Small Caf and Large Caf. Small Caf was crowded—skinny girls shared metal folding chairs at the most populated tables—because it was preferable to squeeze together than to surrender one of their own to Large Caf. Large Caf, by contrast, was underpopulated. Empty chairs abounded. Much in the way that a deserted city with formerly big ambitions might feature large parks and grand, sweeping avenues but a few too many boarded-up windows as a result of its waning population, the space in Large Caf made it quite easy to detect who was eating alone; who had shimmied a folding chair up to the end of a table to seem a part of it but was, in fact, not; who clearly must be recognized—even by the residents of that respective Large Caf table—as extraneous.

  Freshman year, before Sheila had understood all of this, she’d sat at a Small Caf table while half its residents were still in the lunch line—a table of girls. The girls did not make any attempt to remove her, but when the table had reached capacity and Jessica Reynolds had to pull up a folding chair from another table, someone finally leaned in and made contact. “Who are you?” the girl asked.

  “Sheila,” Sheila said.

  “Sheila,” the girl repeated slowly amid laughter, nodding as if homing in on some shared truth.
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br />   Sheila took a bite of her sandwich. This had been back before she completely gave up on the entire student body. This had been back when she still cared about things like what other people thought.

  “To Sheila,” someone raised a Pepsi in the air, and the table drank to her.

  Sheila forced a smile.

  Then someone else raised her drink, and it happened again. It happened six times during the lunch period. Sheila finished her sandwich and never stepped into Small Caf again.

  She was wary of groups. There was an impenetrable exchange of glances, an unspoken etiquette to which she had never felt privy, and tables in Small Caf obviously operated by these same unknowable rules. Sheila had always preferred the company of intense and loyal outsiders. If there were only two people in a given conversation, there was not as much room for error, margin for misinterpretation. As a child, her only friend had been a reclusive raven-haired girl in the neighborhood named Amelia. Amelia’s father was perpetually away on business, and her mother had a habit of sleeping until noon and spending the day pacing around the kitchen in lacy pajama shirts, refilling her glass from an endless supply of a blended drink. Amelia’s family was from Miami, and the way that Sheila’s own mother pronounced the word Miami, Sheila had the impression it was an untrustworthy landscape: polluted and dangerous. She had always thought Amelia’s mother very glamorous, but Amelia did not agree. Amelia was not allowed to come out of the house and play until her mother woke up, so Sheila would often spend the long late morning hours camped outside of Amelia’s bedroom window with a folding chair and a notebook, and together, through the screen, the girls would write plays with titles like Amelia and Sheila Save the Day and Amelia and Sheila Save the Day Again. On summer nights, they gave performances on the concrete patio of Amelia’s yard and all the adults would line up folding lawn chairs in the grass: clapping awkwardly, making stiff chitchat during intermission. When Amelia was eleven, her family moved back to Miami. “Well, that’s the way it goes, honey,” Sheila’s father had said. “That’s life.” This had seemed an unnecessarily heartless assessment of the situation, but it was true. She and Amelia wrote letters for the first few months, but before long, they fell out of the habit.