The same day I spoke to my mother, I was reading the serial killer coverage in bed, with my eyes barely open and drifting off to a bad sleep, when someone knocked on the door. We rarely had visitors to our place, and I tried to pretend like I wasn’t there. I hadn’t the slightest intention of answering the door or speaking to anyone. I rolled my face into my pillows, which smelled musty and wet because I hadn’t washed them in a long time. I pulled the covers over my head. The knocking intensified, so I reached to the floor where Leif had left his gun the night before. I picked it up and padded to the door.
“Margaret,” Peter yelled through the locks. “You better open this goddamn door.” I fumbled with the locks, and Peter swung the door open. He was tired, and his hair was in need of a wash. I had forgotten my mother said she was sending Pete, and I was surprised he found me so quickly.
“How did you find me?”
“What? Like you’re some kind of Houdini. I got the address from Leif.” He eyed the gun in my right hand. “Jesus H. Christ. Put that fucking thing down and get your things. We’re going to the station so you can give your statement, and then I’m taking you home.”
I couldn’t move. He grabbed the gun from me, and I spooked and jumped away. And that was when he finally saw me.
“What the fuck is this?” Peter asked. The large soft pads of his thumbs traced both of my cheekbones where my bruises were now fading. I shivered; it was the gentlest thing I’d felt in weeks, since I’d curled up to sleep that neon nap with Dee before the Fourth.
Then Peter took in the apartment with a wide-eyed swoop, rotating his head on his shoulders like I’ve seen cartoon owls do, and I saw the place through his eyes. The dirty floors, the grime on the baseboards, the dust collecting in the spaces where the ceiling met the walls, the takeout containers and half-smoked joints and ashtrays, empty whiskey and wine bottles, books with pages torn out and littered like heaps of half-alive beings near the bed.
“Do you . . . live here?”
I nodded weakly. His eyes were wide. Under different circumstances he would have reveled in the idea that he’d found me out and that he would have the opportunity to rat me out to Ma.
“What happened to you?”
“I got mugged,” I said.
“Mugged,” Pete repeated. His eyes narrowed to slits.
“Let’s go. I’m ready.”
I went into the bedroom where I started throwing dirty clothes into a duffel bag, into which I also threw Fear of Flying and my birth control pills. There was a great crash from the other room. When I went into the living room, Peter had punched a hole in our wall.
“I’ll be outside,” he said.
Peter was smoking on the stoop, and when I came out, he flicked his cigarette butt into an old gallon-size pickle jar that Leif used as an ashtray. Peter took my duffel from me, which was annoying but I wasn’t about to say, and he threw it into the trunk, opened the passenger door for me, then started the engine. I got into the car and looked at the apartment: the peeling paint, the ill-fitted windows, the scruffy grass in what passed for the front lawn.
Before we drove away, Peter said, “Goddamn. When Ma finds out about this. She’s already catatonic on account of Candace. If you hadn’t answered the damn phone, I swear. She was a day away from filing a report for you too. But we also know how you can be . . .” He eyed me. “Sometimes you fall off the grid. But Dee . . . Dee never misses her dates with Ma.”
I turned to the window. I pulled the mirror down from the visor and set to powdering away the fading scars.
“She’s really missing?” I asked Peter. He gave one tight nod. My stomach clenched, and I felt instantly carsick. I tried to process the information, but it seemed like it was happening to another version of myself in another world.
“How come you didn’t know?” He eyed me. “You two have one of your fights?”
Images from the Fourth flashed hot on the back of my eyelids when I blinked.
“Something like that,” I said. I was afraid to ask, but I needed to know: “How long has it been?”
“I don’t know, Peg,” he said grimly. “You tell me. Officially or unofficially? Ma filed the report on the ninth. Dee had promised to do Ma’s hair that morning, nine a.m., and you know Ma. You gotta be on time. Dee didn’t show. Ma drove to her dorm. Her roommate said she’d seen Dee pack a bag on the third. All of which you would have fucking known if you’d answered the goddamn phone.” He paused. He breathed. “What the hell happened between you two?”
I swallowed. Tried to get the days straight. “The day before the Fourth, Dee called me to say that she’d found Frank out.”
“Who the hell is Frank?”
“She’s been seeing him . . . since March, at least, I think.”
“You think?”
I nodded. Peter’s hands on the wheel were white. His fingernails were tattered and bloody. They looked like they hurt. “This is the first we’re fucking hearing about him.”
“Well, he’s a piece of shit. She doesn’t want you two to know about him. I honestly didn’t think he would be around as long as he was.” I threw my hands up. He motioned for me to just go on. “Anyway, on the third, she called to tell me that she found another woman’s thong at his place and a driver’s license with another name, issued from Ohio, right? She said she was going to have it out with him, and I convinced her to wait on it and come spend the Fourth with me and Leif.” Peter huffed, but I kept on. “So the night got away from us, and when I woke up, Dee had left without a word.”
“Hell of a story, Peg,” he said.
“We need to find Frank. We find Frank, we’ll find Dee. I’m sure of it.” I could hear panic rising in my voice. Pete shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “We should start looking for him now. We don’t need the police. Come on. I know some places we can start.” The bowling alley came to mind. I clawed at my seat belt.
Pete put his hand on the flat part of my chest. I threw his hand off. “You need to tell the detective.”
I began to sob then. Long, exhausting wails over which I felt I had no control at all. “Please stop the car,” I cried. “Please. This is crazy. I can find her.”
“You’re not listening,” Pete said. There was a certain automation to his voice; had he learned this in law school? “We’ve already tried. When we couldn’t reach you. We’ve already tried all that stuff.”
“You didn’t . . .” I struggled to think clearly. “You couldn’t have . . . You didn’t know about Frank. I have some ideas. We can go now.”
“You have to tell the detective,” Pete said. “That’s where we’re at with this now. Okay? You’re not getting it, Peg. She has already been gone for at least fourteen days. We need real help now.”
Fourteen days. Did I even believe that number? I didn’t know what they’d already tried, where they’d already looked, so maybe I still wasn’t convinced. I thought maybe Frank had tried to make up for his bad behavior by taking Dee on some gaudy trip to the Dells or Door County. Or maybe she was holed up with Erik in a high-ceilinged Walker’s Point loft belonging to one of Erik’s flavors of the moment. I didn’t dare voice these hypotheses to Pete, who I could tell was losing patience with my incredulity. Fourteen days? It wasn’t possible.
I clutched at my seat belt. Milwaukee gushed by me in my peripherals; I felt I was being swallowed by its pathetic skyline. Peter drove white-knuckled and hunched over the steering wheel like we were about to hit heavy rain, though the sky was blue enough to see through.