The Night Gwen Stacy Died (33 page)

Enough!

Sweetheart
, the coyotes conclude, there’s nothing stable about it. If you’re reading the signs,
you’re writing the signs—they say what you see in them.

Wait, thinks Sheila. Like
action curious fear?

Duh, say the coyotes, but they say it sweetly. Of course, action curious fear. Isn’t
it obvious? When action curious fear,
être san histoire
isn’t an option.

Please, says Sheila. In plain English!

Congratulations, say the coyotes, it’s your life. You can do what you want with it.
This sounds suspiciously like something her father said to her once, and it’s difficult
to say whether the coyotes have selected these words to produce this effect, or whether
it is her own brain forging tunnels to make meaning where none exists, but as her
foot makes contact with a stone at the bottom of the lake, she bends her knees and
pushes off against it, and already she is looking up to the surface of the water now,
and her body is rising to meet a light that seems to float there. For a moment, she
sees into the next world and what is waiting in it. It’s not that she sees a place,
the details of the life that she’ll construct of little odds and ends. What she sees
in the moment is this. There will be consequences to every action. Also spoils.

Then there is the prodding and pulling and a strong light moving over the surface
of the water. Helicopters drone above. Search lights and voices. The impossible prodding
and pulling. The harsh taste of air.

THEN PETER SAID
, “Jake?”

“Yes,” Jake said.

“What was he like?”

Jake was quiet for a while, and Peter repeated the question. Finally Jake said, “He
had a beard that was every color at once when he let it grow in the summer. He knew
how to tie a hundred different kinds of knots. He loved our mother.” Then he felt
his brother push something into his hand and when he looked down there was a gold
round thing sitting there, smooth as a pebble and on a long weathered chain.

“He used to show me how to use it,” Jake said.

Peter closed his hand around the thing.

“It always points north so you know how to keep moving even when everything looks
the same.”

Behind his brother’s head was the lake on the television. He was thinking of his father,
the man he was named for but never would meet, when he saw the same cameras, the same
microphones, the searchlights.

One of the cops said, “Well, I’ll be damned,” and everyone turned at the same time
to witness the place that was being lit up in the water.

SHE WAS STILL COUGHING
to adjust to the difference, blinking away the din of the light, when she felt someone
lean in close to her ear and begin to speak.

There were news crews and cameras. There were reporters and microphones.

The paramedics were yelling, “Clear a path! A little space here!”

To her, they spoke quietly, so only she could hear. They asked her to answer things
they thought she should know, answers to questions that would be important if they
were going to let her back into the known world outside the water. They asked for
her name and for the names of her parents, the day and the year, they asked her the
name of the city where she was born, and what was the last thing she remembered. She
could see she was doing well, she was answering all their questions correctly, because
they were smiling as they were strapping her down to the stretcher, they were saying
yes, good, very good, as they were fastening the tiny needle to her wrist with white
tape and moving something cool and steel around where her lungs would be waiting beneath
the skin of her soaked dress.

PETER SAT UP
in bed and leaned into the television. He looked at the water and watched the same
sequence of events he’d seen a thousand times in his sleep. There was the footage
of the men in orange vests diving in the water. It seemed impossible that there could
be more to witness. It seemed impossible that he should have to witness it again.

“The story is still unfolding hours later,” the man with the microphone explained.
“Details are beginning to surface since the Coralville, Iowa, abduction victim, Sheila
Gower, was correctly identified by a witness who recognized her from a photo being
circulated by the Chicago Police Department. The witness claims to have tried to approach
Ms. Gower upon identifying her, but a struggle ensued—which ended abruptly with Ms.
Gower, according to the witness, ‘jumping into the lake.’ The witness’s allegation
is still under investigation as police continue in their efforts to determine how
exactly Sheila Gower ended up in the water.”

Peter closed his eyes against the rest of the story, against the part he knew was
coming, where her prone body would be pulled up from the rocks. He took his brother’s
hand inside his own. He waited for it to get quiet, the respect that was due. But
the quiet didn’t come. It started with a question, and then another, and then there
was a cacophony of them, questions that came so fast they started interrupting those
that came before, gathering speed.

Did you lose hope you would be found?

What do you want to say to your family?

What message would you send to your former captors?

He looked at the television then, and he saw her. She was in the center of all of
it, the fixed object around which all the cameras and questions were rotating, and
her long hair was still half-wet like a hundred small ropes that hung around her face.
But her eyes were open. Her eyes were following the lights of their cameras.

Could you describe the feeling of being rescued?

Any words for the witness who identified you?

Any words for your rescuers?

Sheila blinked at the camera.

Their cameras hovered between her and the viewers at home who waited to hear her say
something.

Sheila coughed. She leaned into the microphone.

SHE TRIED ONCE TO SAY IT
, and it surprised her how difficult it was to say anything, how her lungs stung to
make herself heard to all the things that flashed around her. She breathed in and
out and heard the air pull and whistle into the microphone.

She looked into the eye of one of their cameras for the place where he would be, where
she understood he would be waiting for word of what they were going to do now that
they had survived this thing together. She said his name slowly, loud enough so he
could hear it, and then she closed her eyes again against the noise of so much light.

“
SETH
.”

At first it was only a whisper. It was gravelly and dull as a stone underwater, but
there could be no mistake: now she was speaking to him alone. He began to laugh, loud
and full and from the pit of his stomach. He laughed like a crazy person—this observation
did not escape him, surrounded as he was by city authorities in his hospital bed—but
a crazy person at the moment in which desperation became something else, something
more akin to hope, and the laugh grew fat and fast, picking up speed, and still he
did not stop. Even as the cops grew short-tempered, as he watched them escort his
brother from the room, as they advised him to lose the grin, as he was read his rights—to
remain silent among them—and handcuffed to the guardrails of his hospital bed, he
felt the laugh grow in his stomach and spread to every expanse of his body, until
it filled him like the first fully formed truth; and how good it felt to accept this
fate as it was offered: to be an ordinary man—a criminal perhaps, a madman maybe—but
a man like any other, with a certain past and the rest unwritten, trying with what
he is and what he is given to deserve the love of an ordinary woman.

SHEILA CONTINUED TO CLOSE
her eyes against all of it. She felt the air shift from the wind to the still and
steady circulation of the ambulance, and their voices began to trail off and get quieter
until she could hear only the regular beep and blink of the machines around her. She
allowed herself to drift off and be carried across town to the hospital room somewhere
that was waiting, a room she had never seen, a room toward which her father and mother
would also begin to navigate now, this place where she would open her eyes, confront
this living world again and start to forge her place in it. The machines continued
to mark the time; they monitored the fluids that moved around inside her, even as
she was so still, they advised her of the general stability of things that continued
on course, things that knew what to keep doing even when you paused at an impasse
and looked up for help from elsewhere, they kept moving for you, around you, inside
you, they knew how to exist in any home you could fathom, how to get you to the next
thing without your even knowing it.