Late in June, Erik showed up at Mount Mary with his arm hanging sickly from his shoulder and a mouthful of blood. Dee was tougher than she looked, and the sight of a lot of blood had never been enough to make her queasy. Besides, she’d always been more maternal than I was. Though I’d never learned the art of comforting people, Dee always knew what people wanted to hear. I never said the right thing or the thing that was needed. It will be okay. We’ll figure it out. I’m here for you. But as she told me on the phone, “I’m not a damn doctor.”
Leif was at work, and I was pulling on jeans with one hand and tripping over the phone cord. “I’m on my way, baby,” I told her.
“You better be,” she hissed. “It is four-thirty in the damn morning, and I’ve got campus security on my case for routinely letting ‘a suspicious person’ into the dorm.”
I held my tongue. (I wanted to say maybe they meant Frank.) “Be there in ten,” I said.
We were lucky Dee’s roommate was out of town, because the room wasn’t built to hold more than two bodies at once. Erik was splayed out on the dirty carpet. He looked like he was part of some modernist art exhibit. Dee’s paintings threatened to topple down on him from all sides. He cradled his left arm tight against his chest, and his eyes were squeezed shut. There were thin lines of blood dripping down his neck and pooling in the hollow of his collarbone. Dee looked ready to fight me.
“He needs to go to a hospital,” I said. Erik flung his head wildly from side to side. He was in a bad way. He smelled like he’d drunk a whole bottle of whiskey.
“Thank you for that astute observation, Margaret,” Dee said. I flinched; I hated it when she called me Margaret. “I already told him that.”
“Best we can do is clean him up, and then we’ll get Leif to help us take him to the ER.”
She nodded and began to get to work. She got Erik to sit up and swish some water and then spit it back out. We eventually coaxed him to drink water. Dee dabbed away the blood on his face and neck and tried to get a look in his mouth, but he wouldn’t let her. We didn’t touch his twisted arm; I guessed it was dislocated or broken. Dee cooed while we worked, and though it would have annoyed me, Erik seemed to respond to it. He relaxed at her touch, and he put the ice she’d pilfered from the cafeteria on his swollen jaw. When we took his shirt off to throw it in the wash, we saw his arms were bruised in the shape of long thin fingers. He cried a little bit when we eased his bad arm out of the shirt, and this seemed to exhaust him so much that when he laid his head back down on the carpet, he fell asleep fast and hard. Dee propped his head up with a pillow and threw her comforter on top of him.
I had only a couple of minutes before I needed to pick up Leif at Ambrosia, but Dee and I went outside and sat on a bench underneath some old grapevines. The summer leaves had only just begun to grow back, and we could see the sky getting light through the arbor. The sun was coming up now, and there were nuns on their knees in the chapel singing, we could hear them; Dee said they sang every morning. We leaned in to each other and listened. I wanted to say I was sorry, not just for mixing her up in this but for every ugly thing in the world. I’ve never loved someone the way I loved Dee; I loved her so much I wished I could make the world more deserving of her. I wished I could get rid of all this muck. And that wasn’t even the whole of the way I loved her; it’s a difficult thing to explain. The only thing I can say for sure is that I would never love anyone else in the same way.
“Do you know what happened?” I asked her.
“He wouldn’t say, but I think it’s pretty obvious,” Dee said. She examined the blood underneath her fingernails.
“He says he gets in fights at the clubs,” I said.
“Every night? Peg, don’t be dense. His boyfriend beats him up,” she said.
I flinched; she was rarely so frank.
“I’m getting scared,” Dee whispered.
“Of what?”
Dee hesitated. I thought of Erik’s face on Bradford Beach the other day: a stripe of fear he’d tried to hide from me.
The singing had stopped. The nuns filed out of the chapel and walked through the grapevine. I was acutely aware of the blood under my own nails. The nuns’ robes brushed our bare knees as they passed us, and Dee stayed quiet.
The truth about that summer, at least the part of it before Dee went missing, and after too, I suppose, is I was so caught up in my own sad state of being in love that all I could do was play a dumb game of comparison with her. Dee and I were competing to see who could be the most adult, which was only proof that we were still children.
When we were girls, we used to play a game we called next-door neighbors. We’d pretend the upstairs of our house was a little town—the separate rooms represented our own homes, the grocery store, the coffee shop, the library, or whatever other locations we needed for that day’s game. We’d pretend we lived in that tiny town together, and every time we played, we were caught up in all kinds of small-town drama—fighting over fences or tree lines, gossiping over whose son was dating whose daughter, planning parties for town events: festivals, and markets, and parades. I’d told Leif about this game, and he’d been shocked. He seemed embarrassed for me. He said there was no imagination in that kind of play. He said we’d chosen a boring imitation of reality to play in. But we never saw it like that. I think for Dee and me, when we were girls, almost nothing was more exciting than the prospect of being grown.
One “grown-up” habit Dee adopted when she moved out of Ma’s house, along with the purely aesthetic cigarette smoking and beer drinking, was dieting. Dee had always been skinny. She had an obnoxiously tiny waist above round, beautiful hips. She’d always wanted the Twiggy figure, but I’d told her men were crazy for bodies like hers. She never did believe me. When I went back to Dee’s dorm to check on her and Erik a few days later, I found them lying in bed together, sipping from red SlimFast cans.
“What the hell is that?” I asked them. Erik giggled and took a big gulp. He had a chocolate mustache.
“I wrote the company a letter, and they sent me a bunch of promotional samples.” She hopped out of bed and opened her tiny dorm closet. Inside were three cases of the cans stacked beneath her dresses. She pushed aside several long, shimmery gowns, getups I didn’t think she had any reason to own, and fished inside an open box. “It’s really good. Here, try it.” She handed me a can, and I sniffed it. I tried to read the ingredients, but I didn’t know any of the words. I took a sip.
“Tastes like chalk,” I said.
Dee shrugged and finished off the can. She closed her closet and stood in front of the mirror on the back of the door. She rose up on to the balls of her feet and lifted her shirt, turning this way and that way in front of the door.
I shoved her away from the mirror. “You ought to eat some real food. You’re both too damn skinny as it is.” Admittedly, Erik looked better than when I’d seen him writhing on Dee’s floor a few days before, but he still had the look of someone climbing out of a hole. His left arm was snug inside a hospital issued sling and his eyes were heavy like maybe he was popping painkillers.
“Frank says I have a billion-dollar body.”
I laughed despite myself. “A billion dollars, huh? Not a million?”
“Frank says Atlantic City strippers have million-dollar bodies.”
I wanted to kick him in the nuts, but Dee liked him. I didn’t know why, but she did. Maybe she sometimes felt the same way about Leif. I pulled her shirt back down over her stomach. “Bodies aren’t for sale, Dee.”
“Oh, come on.” She tousled my hair. “It was just a compliment.”
“Fucked-up one, but sure.”
“Jealous?”
“Not in the least. That’s a white-trash compliment.”
“You want to talk about white trash? When’s the last time Leif took you out on a date?”
Erik’s face reddened. He attempted a laugh, but it came out choked and ugly.
I tried to remember my last date with Leif; after we’d moved in together, the idea of dates hadn’t made much sense. I thought I remembered a meal we’d had earlier that spring at a Mexican restaurant with a patio. We’d drunk a lot of tequila and then put our numbed toes in Lake Michigan’s winter water. The city left the lifeguard towers up on the beaches all through the winter, and we’d climbed one together and huddled in the wide chair, watching the tiny white lights of the shipping freighters floating on the horizon.
Dee must have seen something sad in my face, because she came close to me and nuzzled her nose in my neck. “It’s not a contest, Pegasus,” she said gently, though of course she knew it was.
It took me a long time to admit, but Dee was always more adventurous than me. Even when we were much younger, she enjoyed proposing ridiculous dares, teasing me while I agonized over consequences, and then finally, in frustration with me, completing the challenge herself. It was in this way that I learned a defense mechanism that ultimately established one of the crucial dynamics of our relationship—at some point, I began returning her dares with even more outlandish dares of my own.