The Night Gwen Stacy Died (32 page)

FOR HIS BENEFIT ALONE
, his brother was telling the story.

The cops were there too, they were saying Mr. Novak, I’m going to have to ask you
to be quiet or leave the room, but Jake was not being quiet, and he was not leaving
the room. He was telling the story. Peter had forgotten how good at this his brother
had been. Jake perched at the foot of Peter’s bed, and in the inches between them
there was a space taking shape that had nothing to do with the cops, with the law,
the hospital regulations, the day of the week it was, the city they happened to be
in. Jake knew the story scene by scene. He started at the beginning.

“There was once a boy who was bit by a spider,” his brother said.

“An orphan,” said Peter.

“A recluse,” Jake nodded. “An absolute nobody.” His weight shifted the bed. A fly
buzzed in circles around the ceiling tiles. The television weatherman predicted strong
winds and rain. The new day would not come for hours.

UNDERWATER IS ALWAYS
the reverse of the world above. The coyotes know it as well as anyone. They understand,
there are places where all worlds collide. The known world and the world of other
things, underlings, alternates, substrata, substitutes.

It sometimes seems to outsiders like the coyotes are just listing every word they’ve
ever heard of, reading aloud from some secret underwater dictionaries.

The coyotes surround the floating girl in the water, say,
sweetheart
, we’ve been meaning to have a word. Take a load off. Let your guard down. Make yourself
at home.

A house, a home, thinks Sheila.

Let bygones be bygones, continue the coyotes. Let sleeping dogs lie.

You’re not dogs, Sheila says, you’re coyotes. She’s grabbing for loose ends of the
story here, like she’s lost her place in a long and lonely book. Now where was I?
she wonders.

Oh dear, the coyotes roll their giant watery eyes, this one is going to need an education.

THE REST WOULD COME
later. The scholarship to study science. The attention of the two prettiest girls
in school. The villains who give up at the end of each issue but always return. The
way he would shout, “Spider powers, I love you,” before he knew better, and how he
would hold the limp body of the girl he loved more in his arms. But his brother was
starting at the beginning. His brother was trying to prove something.

The cops were repeating the names
Parker, Stacy
, writing them down in their notebooks as aliases for the perpetrator and his victim.
You could see them thinking
copycat crime.
You could see them thinking
get all this bullshit down now and hand it off to the prosecution later.

The cops were telling a different story.

They were saying, “Abduction, kidnapping, larceny.” Also: “Grand theft auto, false
imprisonment, willful endangerment of a minor.”

Peter looked at Jake.

Jake said, “When his uncle Ben is killed, Peter is raised by his aunt May alone. She
is like a mother to him. He has no father.”

“And he feels responsible,” Peter said.

His brother nodded. “And he feels responsible—” he repeated, but he trailed off, paused
in his telling, and he looked to the black surface of glass that was the window in
the room. Peter looked at Jake, feeling the shared terrain of the story start to shift
into something else, to wander off course, and Peter was going to fill in the gaps,
to help his brother along with the detail that followed which might have slipped between
the cracks of memory, when his brother said, “Seth.” Peter looked up in recognition
as if to say,
yes, I’m here, I’m listening
, but Jake was still looking at the flat black plane of the window when he said it,
like there was someone else out there listening as well.

THE COYOTES CONTINUE
in their underwater interrogation. You were trying to steal someone else’s story
and pass it off as your own? You were borrowing something that didn’t belong to you?
They drop hints.

I was not, the girl stammers.

Oh yeah? What’s your name? the coyotes ask her.

The girl pauses. She feels around for her wallet for evidence, identification, a clue,
but it isn’t anywhere around.
NO!
She thinks,
WAIT!
She thinks,
POW! ZAP!

Wrong! shout the coyotes as if they can read her thoughts. Imposter! You think an
ID would prove anything? The coyotes are laughing at her now, it seems. Official documents,
ha! Stories too, just a different kind. They mean nothing here. But don’t play around
with us—you know this much already. Now, try again, the coyotes demand. Who are you?
To what do we owe this visit?

The girl waits, she is thinking.
Être sans histoire
—again. How awful it feels to be without a story, to exist between stories, in this
terrible netherworld where she isn’t one thing or another.

Look, the coyotes explain, gentler now. We don’t have all day. They eye one another
nervously, and it’s clear that they do have all day. They are always down here treading
water. It is Sheila who doesn’t have all day, is what they mean by this. It is Sheila
who has been underwater for longer than would be advisable already and who is running
out of stored air from above.

Then they lean into her ear and Sheila can feel the tough wiry fur around their snouts
scrape the edges of her face when they whisper. She is trying with everything she
has to concentrate on what they are going to tell her.

AND JAKE SAID
, “It was our father’s name first.”

Peter felt his throat tighten, and he felt the impulse to swallow but could not. He
said, “Our—”

“—father.” Jake nodded. “You have his name. Mom didn’t know how to talk about him
after he died,” he said, “but someone should have told you.”

Peter could feel all the air in the room behind his ears, building pressure there,
like tunnels under water. He said, “How did it happen?”

Jake shook his head. “I know it was an accident. I know he was in a boat. There was
a storm and no one survived it.”

Peter was thinking of water. He was thinking of swallowing water, of the enormous
and awful bodies of water that always exist in dreams.

On the television, the weatherman was chatting with the anchorman. The five-day forecast
evaporated from the screen as they went live to local coverage. The water of the lake
continued to float behind them, black and giant as a piece of carbon paper.

EXPLAIN IT, IT
starts simple and gathers speed fast. There are always entire worlds that exist alongside
the one you think you’ve chosen to live in. Sometimes you chose the worlds, and sometimes
they chose you. Here is Paris. Here is Iowa. Here is a story you couldn’t stop reading
as a child about a girl who cut off all her hair into the kitchen sink in the middle
of the night and ran away from home. Here is a list of all the dirty words you knew
at twelve. Here is the same list at fifteen. Here is the first boy you ever kissed.
Here is the one who wants to become your family. Here is your family, same as always:
your mother, your sister, your father with a hold on you so firm your feet start to
lift off the linoleum of the kitchen floor.

Slow down, Sheila implores of her underwater lecturers. I can’t keep up.

You want to keep up? ask the coyotes. So these things matter to you?

There’s no more time left to be anything but honest.

Yes, Sheila says. Please.

The coyotes are speaking slowly now for her benefit. One at a time, they’re listing
the names of places where stories begin, places where choices start to make landscapes
appear one way, or another.

Welcome to Paris, the coyotes begin again. Welcome to Iowa. Welcome to Chicago. Welcome
to Montreal. Welcome to Kathmandu.

Kath-man-what?

But it seems the places are irrelevant, their names arbitrary. They all exist. Flights
can be purchased between them. This is evidence enough.