The Night Gwen Stacy Died (31 page)

COURAGE IS A SLIPPERY
thing, difficult to grasp, and the more she caught a look at it full on lately, the
more it had a tendency to resemble running in the other direction. Sheila hailed a
cab. In Iowa you had to call ahead if you wanted a taxi. They weren’t just driving
around aimlessly, waiting for you to throw up your arm. Sheila started to settle into
the back seat.

“Where to?” asked the driver.

How easy it would have been to give the address of Jake’s apartment. Peter was surely
there by now, and to think how he would push his face into her shoulder and breathe
in her hair. She fingered the edge of the comic book she held to her chest and hesitated.

“Where you going?” the driver asked again. He sounded like he wasn’t from around here.

“To the lake,” she said.

The man caught her eyes in the rearview mirror. “Cross street?”

Sheila blinked. She hadn’t counted on this. In her mind, the lake had become a mythical
thing, not a place with cross streets one could give precise directions to get to.
She was going there to look around, confront this place Peter had dreamed for her.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Whatever’s closest.”

The man nodded, but when Sheila opened the door wider for Patch to jump into the back
seat beside her, the driver shook his head. “Whoa, uh-uh, easy there,” he said slowly.
His voice turned more aggressive then, shouting: “Get back, get back.” He had a folded
newspaper in his hand and he began to swat it around the back seat in Patch’s direction.

“Come on,” said Sheila. “Just one ride.”

The man growled. “Lady, get that thing away from my taxi!”

“We’re tired,” Sheila said. “Please.”

But the man began yelling at her in another language, pointing at Patch, reaching
for his dispatch radio, and Sheila climbed out of the cab and slammed the door; she
decided they would be fine walking after all.

The sun was already starting to set, the wind was picking up. She heard a homeless
man sitting on a bus stop bench shouting
windy city! windy city!
as if he’d just coined the epithet to compete with the sound.

You sometimes heard about how all names are false, that’s the whole problem with language,
having to refer to things somehow. You sometimes heard how there are names that only
dogs can know, at the frequency of whistles and earthquakes. How there are names that
make themselves heard only to broken bones.

Sheila was surprised by how calm she felt at dusk in the city. She felt strangely
confident in their route. She paused briefly to consult the numbers below each street
name on the signs she passed to confirm they were heading east, and from there Patch
seemed to know the way. The animal walked just ahead of Sheila, a guide or a guardian
of some kind. It made her feel less lost.

Windy city, windy city!

Sheila remembered hearing her mother say that when things are misplaced there is a
prayer to Saint Anthony that sometimes works, the bulk of which is:
Saint Anthony, Saint Anthony, look around, something’s lost that can’t be found.
In this case you don’t have to name what’s lost, but you’ve already named the saint
to whom your prayer is directed. Even in this case, you need to be specific. There
is another saint who is the patron of lost causes. Holy men and women are not above
this kind of bureaucracy.

Jude, John, Peter, Paul, Sebastian.

Michigan, Huron, Ontario, Erie, Superior.

Anthony. Not the saint. The boy in the cafeteria.

Her mother. At the sink washing dishes while her father dries.

The temperature was dropping. Mothers were cleaning up from dinner while upstairs,
girls learned their bodies in beds or in bathwater. Families concentrated themselves,
huddled around the television. Lost things waited silently in mines and wells. Everywhere
people were speaking aloud the names of loved ones and strangers.

Sheila started walking to the place where the tide was coming in. The lake was shaking
from the wind. It looked dark and uninhabitable, but certainly there were scores of
living things making a home there under the tide. A large swath of grass separated
the lake from the traffic of the highway, an expanse wide enough to resemble a park
if you could forget about the chaos of Lake Shore Drive behind it. A concrete walkway
hugged the shoreline, where the waves occasionally lapped up onto the pavement. Sheila
found a flattened patch of grass near the water and made a seat for herself there.
The tide was loud and the traffic was loud, and it surprised Sheila that there could
be so much noise in a place where she was alone. She had been sitting for a while
when she started to make out a new sound in all of the racket. It was a call, long
and low, a faraway cry, but when she looked around her she only saw a thin man, standing
on the shoulder of the road, walking with a strange gait, walking slowly, looking
now either at the traffic or at the lake, she couldn’t say which. Sheila turned to
the water. Patch chose a nearby spot to sit for a while; Sheila folded her legs beneath
her and opened the comic book in her lap.

And there she was, alive in the pages. Gwen Stacy was as pretty a girl as everyone
said—remarkably tall and thin and delicate in bone structure—and Sheila felt strange
but also a little sad, as if she were spying on another woman’s private life, the
way she imagined a man must feel each time the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen
walks into a room, how it stifled the breath for a second and how it made you want
to give her hair a little tug, to take the woman and press her firmly down under your
thumb, like the corner of a page in a book. But Gwen does not make Peter starve for
her attention. These are the facts at the start of the
ASM
# 121: It has been a while since Gwen and Peter have spent any time together. Peter’s
been in Montreal, taking pictures for the newspaper. And to see how Gwen adored him,
how she watched him from the corner of every frame they shared. It isn’t long before
she is captured. This is how it happens. She is sitting in Peter’s apartment waiting
for him to show up. She is standing by the window with her black velvet headband and
her impossibly long black eyelashes, clutching her handbag, waiting. Impatient, she
turns from the window and cradles her chin in the palm of her hand. Her eyes are closed,
her back is to the window. So it is the reader who first observes the outline of a
flying green form approaching.

Sheila looked up from the comic book. There was that sound again, that low calling.
It sounded more definitively human now, and as Sheila turned, she recognized that
it was indeed the man, the thin one from the road’s shoulder, but he had closed the
distance between himself and the lake, he had crossed Lake Shore Drive; he was closer
to the water now. Sheila continued reading; she fingered the pages, turning them fast.

By the time Spider-Man finds his love collapsed in a heap at the height of the George
Washington Bridge—in fact, the art portrayed the Brooklyn Bridge, the boys at the
comic book store had explained; you can’t trust the writers to tell it to you straight!—Gwen
Stacy is already unconscious. She will stay unconscious for the rest of her story.
So she doesn’t hear Spider-Man approach and tell the Goblin he’ll pay for threatening
the life of the woman he loves, she doesn’t hear the Goblin call Spider-Man by her
own boyfriend’s name—his true identity all along—because the poor girl sleeps through
everything.

The fight continues, villain and hero taunt each other from either side of her, and
the push comes before Sheila anticipates it. The Goblin zooms by on his remote-controlled
flyer, and it looks like it’s the rush of wind trailing behind him that knocks the
sleeping Gwen Stacy from her perch off the bridge’s shelf. Everything that follows
happens as the boys described, but it’s always more terrible to read it for oneself.

It starts with a
WHAK!
The
WHAK!
of the Goblin’s shove and is followed by that frantic cry of Peter’s.

GWEN!

NO!

FFFFTT!
His webbing gasps, flung over the edge of the bridge, which catches the girl’s thigh
with a
SWIK!
and offers a moment of relief.

But there is also a
SNAP!
and it is this
SNAP!
that breaks the hearts of disbelieving readers, the smallest, the quietest of the
sounds, lightly drawn near the corner of her neck where her long blond hair still
chases the length of her body in its flight, and you want to push your hands into
her hair and feel for where you imagine the tiny shell of her ear is waiting for word
of whether she is going to survive this. And when Spider-Man approaches the same ear,
after pulling her slowly up from the fall with his webbing, when he crouches before
her ear and says
Hey kid, what’s wrong? Don’t you understand? I saved you—
and he pushes his hands into her hair, you try to forget about that
SNAP!
, and wait for the sound of Peter’s voice to reach her ear and her eyes to flutter
open and then for the kiss. Of course this never happens. Gwen Stacy is dead. The
cause of death is uncertain. She was asleep or unconscious or poisoned or dead throughout
the entire conflict, and now you’re left at the edge of the Brooklyn Bridge with a
crazed and desperate superhero clutching the body of the woman he loves in his arms,
slurring insults in the open air at a goblin who you have to assume is hovering there
still, just out of frame.

Sheila stared at the final page for only a moment longer before closing the comic
book. She felt sick to her stomach. Gwen Stacy never had a chance. She had been out
like a light for the entire issue. She could do nothing to react to the elements of
the story that befell her. Even with her long hair and lovely bone structure and quick
tongue, even with her extraordinary boyfriend—none of it made a bit of difference;
she was a victim of circumstance, of accident, of fate—helpless to the sway of the
story that had already started happening around her.

There was the sound again. This time Patch’s ear gave a slight twitch in the direction
of the call and she stood up quickly. The man who was making the sound was fully visible
to Sheila now just on the other side of the grass. He wore a leather jacket, a jacket
too warm for the weather. Sheila stood as well; she and Patch began to walk out of
the way of his path, but the man seemed to be heading right for them. He was still
yelling something she could almost place. It might have been another language, but
he was looking at Sheila when he said it like she would understand the words. She
was just starting to run when she was able to make out the man’s call. “Hey, wait
a minute,” he was saying. The man had something to ask her. He was asking her not
to run. Sheila set the comic book down in the grass, dead weight, and picked up speed.
Patch began growling under her breath, foaming a little at the mouth; she started
to angle her path toward the lake where the water was spilling over onto the pavement.
Sheila followed.

She thought,
So this is how it starts when the goblin comes for you.

Sheila had run off the grass and was fully on the concrete walkway, along the lake,
when the man caught up with her. He closed his hand around her wrist.

“Let go of me,” Sheila said. She tried to wrestle her arm free of him, but his grip
was firm.

They were closer now to the edge of the walkway. The man’s hair was blowing all over
the place, into his eyes, away from his eyes. His eyes were watery, rimmed in red.
He looked half-crazy, but when he spoke again his voice was quiet and pleading, almost
a whisper. He looked her in the eye, and Sheila looked back at him. He said, “Stop
yelling.” He said, “I won’t hurt you. I want to talk to you.”

Sheila felt dizzy. It was dark, and she couldn’t see well. They were very close to
the water now. She heard a sharp bark, a low howl, but she couldn’t see anything.
She spoke slowly. She did not cry. “I’m not who you think,” she said to the man, but
her voice sounded wrong and raw, not at all like her own. The man looked back at her
with his red-rimmed child’s eyes and tightened his grip. Her wrist ached and she was
afraid, but he was afraid too, and then she saw him for what he was: an unfortunate,
a drunk perhaps, a lonely man in green pants by the lake at night.

The scuffle came sooner than she expected it, but it felt more like a temporary imbalance
than a certain shove. She dug her nails deep into the flesh of the man’s forearm in
an effort to free herself, but his grip was firm. He was going to hurt her if she
didn’t hurt him first. That much was obvious, an old trope from the comic books even
a non-reader like Sheila could recognize. She had to think fast to save herself. There
would be no outside intervention. She had lost track of Patch in the struggle. She
heard a nearby splash. “Patch?” she shouted, but it was quiet again. There were loose
rocks beneath their feet on the edge of pavement closest to the water there, and Sheila
struggled to keep her grip firm. The sound of their shoes in the gravel was all she
heard for a moment, and her breath and the man’s breath heaving around her, and then
the other sound came up to Sheila on the concrete all at once. It sounded like shallow
bubbles coming up from the water. It sounded like a howling under the tide. Sheila
looked down—straight down now into the water—and she saw them then. There were hundreds
of them and their fur was wet and slick and they were moving their bodies in different
directions like carp. There, the hollowed pink of an ear. There, the whisper of a
tail flapping at the water. Down here, the coyotes were saying, they were calling
to her. Here we are, here we’ve been all along, our girl, our own cub, here we are,
always here. The water there was shallow, and she could see the rocks too—sharp in
spaces, alternately pushing up, breaking the tide with their surfaces, and Sheila
felt her chest quiver as she thrust every bit of her weight over the edge of the rocks,
as she broke her hand free of his, and she smiled as she plummeted down into the water,
how they had come for her like this, and how could it be any other way. Even here
in an unknown city, at the edge of all that dark water, there were choices to be made,
there were things one could do to break free of the thread of a familiar story and
fall headlong into something else.