When we moved Dee’s belongings into the storage locker, the company had been selling the contents of a unit whose owners hadn’t paid the bill in months. I tried not to survey their property too closely: family portraits in extravagant frames, jars of rocks and sand, kids’ artwork, a messy box of rusted tools, a set of expensive kitchen knives. Where were these people, and what had happened to them? Did they know that strangers were picking through their things? Did they know that after today their photos would end up in a landfill? I wondered about the contents of every single locker. I wondered about the people who had put their belongings in these boxes. Now I was one of them. We put Dee’s stuff away seven years after she disappeared. Ma wouldn’t have anything to do with it because she didn’t approve of us breaking down Dee’s room and carting her belongings away. Pete and I had both hoped out of sight would help push Dee a little further out of mind for Ma. But as with everything else we tried, she interpreted it incorrectly. She thought we were giving up. She thought we were accepting Dee’s fate.
I toyed with the idea of driving to the storage locker but decided I couldn’t do it. Instead I opened a bottle of wine and began sifting through a box of Dee’s stuff that I kept at my apartment but hadn’t looked at in years, maybe since I’d moved there. It contained an odd assortment of things that I’d kept with me over the years: some photos of the two of us, some of Dee’s jewelry, little notes she’d written me. I sat on the floor of my apartment with the box and my wine and tried to find something suitable for the session. I didn’t really know what I was looking for. I found a picture of Dee painting in her studio at Mount Mary; I thought I’d taken it, but I couldn’t be sure. Dee stood in front of the canvas with her back to the camera. The camera had caught her just as she looked over her shoulder. She was surprised or maybe about to laugh. The backs of her knees looked oddly childish in the photo; she’d had the tendency to hyperextend her knees when she stood still. I put the photo back in the box. My mouth went sour. I found a string of fake-looking pearls that I remembered Dee wearing in high school. She had loved things like that—dainty country-club shit that always looked elegant on her but phony on me.
I closed the box and was about to shove it back into a corner when I noticed a box Dana had organized and relabeled in a swooping script—Transcripts. Tentatively, I flipped open one of the cardboard flaps to find a neat stack of witness interviews we’d conducted shortly after filing Dee’s report. I wasn’t sure if I had read all of them. I’d often preferred to get someone’s recap of the interviews rather than reading through them myself. It was odd to think of all the documents I’d kept in that room, files I’d never even read, maybe.
I opened another bottle of wine, and when I was drunk enough, I called Henry. He picked up after the fourth ring. Like he’d been deciding. I breathed into the phone.
“Peg?” he asked. His voice pierced me with a spike of longing. The last time we’d spoken, he’d been angry with me, but in a restrained way, like he felt I was too fragile to truly admonish. This in turn had made me very angry. I had tried to hurt him. I supposed I’d succeeded.
“Can you come over?” I asked him.
“No,” he said without hesitation.
“I think we’re going to find her, Henry. I’m feeling ready this time.”
“I’m happy for you,” he said. He had written a script out for himself. A playbook. I didn’t mind.
“You’re sure you can’t come over?”
“Take care of yourself,” he said, and hung up.
Once when Henry and I were having dinner at Pete and Helena’s place, Pete had pulled me aside while Henry was in the bathroom. He’d grabbed me by the upper arm. He could almost fit his whole hand around what passed for my bicep.
“What the hell are you doing?” Pete asked me. His voice was low.
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re using Henry like some kind of emotional punching bag, and it’s really uncomfortable.”
I was taken aback. “Am I?”
“I don’t know how many times we have to tell you. You don’t get to treat people like shit just because something shitty happened to you.”
“Happened to us,” I corrected him. He let go of my arm, and I massaged the place where his fingers had gripped me.
Henry specialized in dystopian literature. Though his classes were very popular, I cringed to imagine him teaching. We’d met at UWM, where I had been an assistant librarian for a time. He had a spacey, aloof handsomeness, the kind of attractiveness one acquires from being totally unconcerned about personal appearance. For some reason, I had been quite attracted to Henry’s wrinkled clothes, the ink stains on his fingertips, his overgrown facial hair, the bewildered way he sometimes looked around as if to say, How the hell did I get here? He pursued me with a confidence that did not seem to be supported by his appearance. I thought that was funny. It’s only men who can get away with that kind of thing—the unabashed swagger in the very average body. Though he’d asked me to marry him twice, I couldn’t entertain the thought of a wedding. During the six years we’d dated, Henry never saw my apartment, and when he finally did, a few weeks before Ma decided to hire the psychic, he officially ended things.
If, during our time together, I had used Henry as an emotional punching bag, I think we evened the dynamic out because generally, and with a few (very few) limits, I allowed him to use me as an actual punching bag in bed. One of the greatest pleasures and surprises of our time together was discovering Henry was a little kinky.
We were fooling around late one night after a considerable amount of wine, and I was lamenting how bad my day had been, how little I’d gotten done, how much a piece of shit I was. Usual writer stuff. Henry stopped me. He got very close to my face and kissed me very gently. He kept his lips close to my face so that they brushed against me while he whispered, Tell me every bad thing you did today. He kissed me lightly and I tried to move toward him. Everything, he said. So I began: I ate pie for breakfast. He bit my bottom lip hard but then licked both my lips. I was instantly wet. What else? he whispered. I procrastinated on the Internet for an hour after that. He took off his belt, flipped me around, and hit me hard once. The sound of it scared and delighted me. He crawled on top of me and brushed the hair away from my ear. What else? I said, I smoked two cigarettes. Oh dear, he said, that’s very, very bad. He went to his drawer and got out an old tie. He tied my hands behind my back and made me kneel on the ground. He hit me twice with the belt. The second time I cried out. He pushed me down so my shoulders were on the ground and my ass was in the air. He put his face beneath me, between my legs, and he licked me from anus to clit, and I cried out again because it felt so good. Then I think he lost his patience with the game and the moaning noises. He fucked me harder than he ever had before, and when he came inside me, he collapsed on top of me, and we both fell down onto his bedroom carpet. He left my hands tied.
We sometimes called this little game what did you do? I was allowed to say anything during these games, and Henry would never bring it up outside the game. The punishments were mostly of a sexy nature. They rarely hurt or left a mark. Often I felt refreshed or cleansed after we played. I don’t know if catharsis is real, but I swear I felt the guilt sloughing off me like dead skin after we fucked like this. Sometimes I wanted to say the real stuff, not the petty things I knew I shouldn’t be doing (smoking cigarettes, drinking during the day, buying lottery tickets, eating Taco Bell) but the stuff I carried around. How I’d lost Dee, and Leif, and Erik, how I’d given up on writing, and mostly on living. How I wanted to live stagnantly, dumbly, mutely, like a fish in a glass bowl or a mosquito larva hatched into a dirty puddle and doomed to stay a larva living out its days in muck, because that’s what I believed I deserved. Sometimes I wondered if the real punishment for these things should be death. That, I would think, only seemed fair. I remembered what the serial killer had said when he’d finally been caught. I should be dead for what I’ve done.