The Night Gwen Stacy Died (26 page)

HIS CAPTOR, THE KIDNAP
victim, the messenger, the angel, the girl with the gun, the girl with the name of
Spider-Man’s first love, Gwen Stacy, sitting across the table from him, her hand in
his.

He had heard it said that when human beings screw things up beyond repair, make a
complete mess of what they’ve been given, sometimes there is need for intervention
from elsewhere, help from the next world, but really, who would believe such outrageous
claims, but the weakest, the most desperate and dependent. But perhaps he was one
of these. What else could explain it? And what sort of next world could it be that
would send an angel down looking like this? With a handgun tucked in the waistband
of her jeans, with interrogation tactics and the stray dog as her sidekick. To imagine
an angel wearing no bra and a shirt so thin you could see everything. And now she
was leaning into the table across from him; she was trying to get his attention.

“Your brother,” she said.

She had made him macaroni and cheese for dinner, and they were eating it together
when she started again with the things that she knew, the past he was always already
working to forget, and Novak put down his fork to listen, to hear her better and accept
the news she had clearly come to deliver.

“Your brother,” the angel-kidnapper repeated.

For all his stubbornness, it could take so little to shift the will. For months he
could think only of his errors, his oversights, his solitary work and meals and bed
and bathroom. But at the sound of the girl’s voice acknowledging that he had a past,
Novak found he wanted to be in the place where he was, to be in his kitchen, at his
table, to be a man with his past and his slowly shifting present that was now, he
could see, starting to become something different already.

“He’s in Chicago,” the girl said.

He felt his heart shift in his chest to conjure it: Seth, as a boy of six, with his
dark, sly smile and nine-thirty bedtime.

“He’s come here to find you.”

Novak closed his eyes. He held the girl’s hand inside his own. To imagine that decades
after disappearing, so long after a clumsy exit from his prior life, his brother would
seek him out. Novak raised the girl’s hand to his face and pressed the thin bones
of her knuckles across his mouth. There was no way to compare the feeling of being
forgiven to anything else in this world.

Novak knew what it was to disappear, and he knew what it was to be on the opposite
side of it, the receiving end of the act, to be the one at home, sitting on his hands,
waiting for word. His father disappeared when he was eleven. This meant that for eleven
years, Novak had felt like he had a normal life, before he had nothing but an overworked
mother and a baby brother who he had to look after. His father had been in the Marines
for many years, even before Novak was born. He knew how to sail, and all the different
parts of a ship. He knew how to read a compass. He had given Novak a compass of his
on an old gold chain. As long as the arrow points north, he explained, you can never
get lost. Exact coordinates could always be determined. It was tricky, because this
sort of thing could allow you to feel safe, at home in the world. When his father
was away, in some unimaginable sea that was impossible to conjure up from his Iowa
bedroom, it helped to think these spaces existed somewhere—there were numbers, degrees
of longitude and latitude that corresponded to the places his father went. But even
within the most precise coordinates on earth, it’s possible to lose one’s way: say,
at night, say, in a storm, tropical winds cutting across the south Pacific all that
summer with little regard for even the most able and well-equipped vessels, to say
nothing of the men inside; it is possible to exist in a space that can be found on
a map, but to eventually breathe in water and sink to the ocean floor.

It was only a few months after his father didn’t return that his mother started to
show, low in the belly, but she was eight weeks away from delivery before she would
sit Novak down and explain to him that he would soon have a brother. From then on,
his mother threw herself into the business of preparing for this baby, and when the
baby came, no one talked about the father. Novak knew for a fact that his mother never
told Seth anything of his father, for Seth had come to assume that his father was
different than Novak’s. Novak never told his brother differently, because he had never
been completely sure. Also, there was the fact that it was easier not to think about
him. This skill he had learned from his mother. The more time went by without speaking
of his father, the easier it became to live without him. If the fact of Seth’s birth
was a reminder of the man who had brought him into being, then it was better to imagine
that he had come into this world by alternative means, through the act of another
man, a stranger, or without any father at all. The only thing that suggested that
Seth had come from any common origin was his name; when he was born, the baby was
given the name of Novak’s father, the man whose return, not six months before, he
and his mother had given up on.

Now, standing at the kitchen sink, washing the dishes from the meal the girl had made,
Novak tried to run over what he could still remember of Seth, but it was difficult.
It had been so long that Novak found that in his memory, the image of his brother
had conflated with a thousand images of home.

Doing pull-ups on the bar in the garage while Seth counted, his voice still like a
girl’s, always speeding up the litany of numbers to try to get Novak to pull his chin
onto the bar faster.

Beyond the garage was the field where the lake would freeze in the winter and Novak
had taught Seth how to find the weak spots in the water, and how to find the tough
spots that could resist the weight of them both, sliding in boots across the width
of it, taking turns.

“You’re not scared of falling in?” he asked Seth.

Seth shook his head.

“Think there’s any fish down there still?”

“If I fall through and see any fish, I’ll bring them back up with me,” he said.

In his memory of home, he and Seth were always on their own. His mother was always
at work, though it wasn’t her fault; she had to raise them. Novak understood that
he was supposed to take care of Seth when his mother was at work; he was supposed
to fill the areas where a father would have been. He tried. He told Seth stories at
night to help him get to sleep. He passed on his comic books when he finished reading
them. The spring he left home, the spring he tried to leave the world for good but
then settled on Chicago as an alternative, he had felt he couldn’t keep up with all
the ways he was expected to fill in for absences left in the lives of others. His
mother thought it was selfishness that prompted him to swallow so many of her sleeping
pills; she’d said as much at his bedside in the hospital where he woke up, and maybe
she was right. But after playing father to Seth, after trying to be a confidant and
support to his mother for too long, and then learning that he had also been standing
in as a surrogate son and lover and—he couldn’t say what else—to Edith; he had come
to understand, finally, that he wasn’t doing anyone any good as himself. It was around
this time that the only thing that settled him was imagining the exact coordinates
of this pitch-dark place in the pit of the sea. Chicago was supposed to be temporary,
a neutral territory, a place to stay while he processed the shame of his failed attempt
to abandon his family. But weeks passed, then months, and the longer he stayed away,
the more the shame grew, the more difficult it became to imagine a way to return.

The night he left home, Novak had poked his head around the corner into Seth’s room.
It was late and his brother was asleep, but for a second he saw Seth’s eyes flicker
open, his head on his pillow, without moving. He waited for a moment longer, but Seth
didn’t stir. His body still had been so tiny at six he barely filled half the twin
bed. Though it seemed impossible, Seth would be nearly thirty now, ten years older
than Novak had been when he left the boy alone with their mother.

He made the girl a bed on the sofa. She insisted this would be more comfortable than
his bed, and Novak didn’t argue. He unrolled the sleeping bag that he had bought for
camping but never used, and offered her his own pillow, the only one in the house.
It was late, and they both needed sleep. The dog was already asleep in the corner
under the kitchen table. She was accustomed to seeking shelter from the elements,
burrowed inside or under whatever structure was available. He showed the girl where
the switch for the overhead light was, and where she could place her glass of water
so it wouldn’t spill if she got up in the night. The girl sat on the couch and began
to unlace her shoes. “Thanks a lot,” she said.

Together, they had devised a plan. At first the girl had wanted to go to Seth right
then, but it was the middle of the night, and that wasn’t the way Novak wanted to
meet his brother after so long, waking him from a dead sleep. He convinced Gwen that
they should get some sleep themselves; then, first thing tomorrow she would go to
Seth and she would bring him to Novak, and there would be time to talk, time to start
to explain. They had discussed exactly how it would happen. Novak smoothed the sleeping
bag at the foot of the couch and began to walk back to his bedroom. Before he turned
out the light, he looked back over his shoulder again at the girl, who now was removing
her socks and fitting them neatly into each of her sneakers. He paused.

“Where did you come from?” he asked the girl.

“Iowa,” the girl said. “I told you already. Anyway, you didn’t need me to tell you.
You said my face was all over television.”

“Yeah,” he said, “but what were you doing in Iowa?” He was embarrassed to admit that
her presence conjured the supernatural, that he only could imagine otherworldly messengers
barging in unannounced and bearing the type of news she carried around. But, clearly,
this was just a girl; he could see it in the way she folded her socks and the way
she ran her fingers through the knotted ends of her hair.

“Nothing really,” the girl said. “I went to high school. I was working in a gas station
when I met your brother.”

The footage from the security camera flashed in his brain for a second. He remembered
the unidentified man with the black hat, his posture, his shoulders. There must be
some mistake. He felt he was losing the thread of all the facts he had accumulated;
he was starting to feel confused again. He saw the footage weeks ago. It was possible
the police had named their prime suspect by now.

“Just this little nothing gas station on the Coralville strip,” the girl said, and
she smiled a little in the corner of her mouth, like her brain was stuck on the tail
end of remembering something.

Novak said, “My brother kidnapped you, didn’t he? Is he the one the cops are looking
for?”

The girl was stretched out on her back, staring up. The half smile disappeared from
her mouth’s corner, and her voice went hushed. She said, “Your brother’s the one who
rescued me. He’s the one who got me out of there.”

Novak added this new piece of information to the story. “You’re his girlfriend,” he
asked. “Something like that?”

Gwen smiled.

Novak looked at the girl and tried to imagine his brother with her. He tried to imagine
his brother at all. Standing beside the girl in his sleeping bag was the closest he’d
been to his brother in years. Here in his sleeping bag, on his couch, was the girl
Seth loved. He said, “What’s he like?”

“Peter?” She bit her bottom lip.

Novak blinked. He swallowed. He said, “Is that what you call him?”

Gwen looked at the ceiling.

Novak nodded, beginning to understand the rules in operation here. He said, “Gwen
Stacy is kind of an unusual name for a gas station attendant.”

The girl continued staring up. She spoke to a crack in the ceiling. “Can I ask you
something then?” she said.

“Yeah,” Novak said.

“You’ve read all those comic books too, right?”

“They were mine,” Novak said. “A long time ago.”

The girl nodded. “In the comic books,” she began, “when Gwen Stacy dies,” she said,
“why doesn’t Spider-Man save her? I mean if he saves everyone else?”

Novak looked at the girl in his sleeping bag, this sweet little twig of a whisper
of a woman who looked after his brother, and he felt sorry then that Seth had to be
the one to seek him out, that he hadn’t had the fortitude or the balls to do it himself.
“I don’t know, honey,” he said to the girl. “It’s sometimes harder with the ones you
love.”

Novak went into the bathroom to get ready for bed. In the medicine cabinet were the
vials of pills, still lined up in a single row. There were different colors for different
prescribed uses; some calmed and deadened the nerves, some helped you get to sleep.
Novak regarded the tiny white ones, the ones that he took in the evening. He poured
a pile of them into his hand and traced a path through the uneven heap with his fingers.
They looked strange in his hand, like a palm full of sugar or sand, a pile of something
better housed elsewhere. There was always something in their color and uniform size
that calmed him, like tiny waves in the narrow ditch of his hand. It called to mind
the place at the pit of the sea, the way he had felt when he had swallowed enough
of them to return to the place his father was. But this was the problem with thinking
that way, preferring to hobnob with the dead, to snub the living, and then to think
of Seth, alive and nearly thirty now, and practically on his way. There was the toilet.
He had a strange impulse to flush the entire vial of pills down it, how he wouldn’t
want his brother to come and see so many of the same sorts of pills he had swallowed
so many years ago. But this was unreasonable, of course; they presented no threat
to anyone now.