Wolski said that according to state law, if we wanted to excavate the spot the psychic had identified, we’d need to hire an archaeologist. He found a woman who had led the excavation of the largest cemetery on the county grounds. The Wisconsin Historical Society confirmed: There was no other archaeologist in the state who knew these cemeteries better. Wolski contacted her, gave her a brief overview of our situation, and she wrote back immediately and asked us to come in.
Pete asked if I’d go with Wolski to meet this archaeologist at UWM. I don’t know what I expected—someone in a pith helmet and a khaki vest?—but the woman we met was fashionably dressed in knee-high leather boots, leggings, and a floral-print dress. She had a streak of blue in her curly black hair. I stared at it and she smiled. She said we could call her Dr. P.
She ushered us into her office, a bright, sunny room with potted plants cluttered on the windowsills, dusty books, and pictures of children. There was an odd sculpture on one of her bookshelves: a brass pelvis through which a tiny brass human head was peeking out. The head was attached to a metal chain so one could pull the head all the way through the pelvis. Outside her office, young people stood on rubber mats, bending over skeletons—people, actual people—and taking tiny notes on pieces of paper.
She sat down and motioned for us to do the same.
“What can I do for you folks?” she asked us.
Wolski pulled out a map of the county grounds. He handed it to her. “We have reason to believe that Candace McBride might be buried here,” he told her. “I understand this land is in development.”
She nodded. “The Medical College of Wisconsin leases it from Milwaukee County. They have plans to build a cardiac hospital. But they knew what they were getting into.” She pointed at the map behind her, which had the outlines of hundreds of coffins spread in acres across the Milwaukee County Grounds. There was an empty white space, and she took the map from Wolski and pointed from the place where he’d showed her the X on his map to the empty place on her map. “See this?” she asked us. “Graves. Known graves all around this swatch. Every indication would suggest there are people buried there too.”
“So what will the Medical College do?” Wolski asked her.
“We’re going to excavate some of these graves so they can build their hospital. But they’re not breaking ground for another couple of months.”
Wolski shook his head. “We want to dig here,” he said. “Can you help us?”
She paused. I looked at her desk, where there was a Ball jar filled with dust. When I looked closer, I thought I saw the glint of bone fragments floating in the dust.
“Can I ask why you have reason to believe she’s there?”
I felt my face flush. “A psychic,” I told her. At first she thought I was joking, and then when she realized I wasn’t, she straightened her face. I immediately respected her.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s do it.”
When I got back to my apartment, Leif was waiting outside. When you don’t see someone for a long time, it’s easy for them to become frozen in your memory. When I remembered Dee, or Leif, or Erik, I thought of the way they were that summer, young and beautiful, sure, but also smug. I had been like that too once, wasting days carelessly, because I believed I had an endless supply of them ahead. But Leif had shed his smugness and taken on a humility in his carriage, which was almost as shocking to see as his gray hair or his green eyes faded to pale moss.
“I thought you said you weren’t coming back,” I said to him.
“I changed my mind,” he said. “I didn’t want you to be alone.”
“I’ve been alone. How did you find me?”
“Are you going to let me up or no?”
I unlocked the door and he followed me inside.
After Dee disappeared, something odd happened to my relationship with the city of Milwaukee. As a young woman, I believed I knew the city quite well—all its east-west arteries, and the borders of the neighborhoods through which these arteries ran, each neighborhood’s quirks, and, importantly, all of the underage bars. But after my family had pored over many maps of Milwaukee in an attempt to plot Dee’s disappearance, the city became strange and ugly to me. After I’d looked at the city on the maps, the place took on an odd, unfamiliar persona in which every shape carried some previously unforeseen potential for danger: the jaggedness of the shoreline along Lake Michigan, the crooked rectangles of the neighborhoods, the tannic rivers bleeding their way through the city to the swamps in the suburbs, the highways built up like militaristic border walls between the rich and the poor.
And upon seeing Leif for the first time in thirty years, I was reminded of this unsettling experience: the way something or someone you once loved can become frightening and strange to you. It can happen faster than you think.
Leif walked around my apartment like it was a museum. He kept a respectful distance between his body and my belongings as he wound his way around the stacks of shit spread across my living room floor. The stacks reminded me suddenly of the pictures I’d seen of those sad islands of plastic floating in the ocean: People said they grow larger every day. I had no doubt it was true. He considered the place much as Dana had the first time she visited; I could tell he didn’t want to appear too disturbed for fear of spooking me or for fear of being thrown out. But I didn’t really mind; I knew how the place looked. I understood that over the year (probably since I’d split with Henry for the final time), my living conditions had tipped perhaps irrevocably into the realm of the insane. Leif stared at a stack of library books reaching toward the ceiling; their plastic covers shone down incriminatingly at me.
“Why are you here?” I asked him.
“You asked me to come back,” he said.
“I didn’t mean it.”
“You did.”
“You can’t stay,” I said.
“I see that.” He eyed the apartment crammed with junk. “Look, we want the same thing, right? We don’t want that story to be the story.”
“I don’t think I even care anymore.” I tried out my mother’s language, but it felt wrong in my mouth, in my body.
Leif could sense that. “You know I don’t believe that,” he said.
He tried at a laugh, but it came out as a grunt. I thought of my mother. Were none of us, anymore, capable of expressing the appropriate emotion? Perhaps we had all been inflicted with a kind of emotional lability. It occurred to me that of course we had. I shrugged at him and then I became irate. I didn’t like people using my own pathetic capacity for hope against me. Not even my family was allowed this transgression. There was too much at stake. There was always so much at stake.
“He’s dead, you know,” Leif said. “Erik.”
“I know,” I said.
“I wasn’t sure you’d heard me,” he said. “I tried to call . . .”
“I . . . had a hard time with those calls.”
“Yeah. Anyway, I did enough damage when he was a kid. So this is the least I can do—I’m not gonna let this fraud tell a bunch of lies about my brother.”
Leif reached for my stolen copy of Edith Hamilton’s book (perhaps it reminded him too of Erik or of Dee), which was wedged at the bottom of a precarious stack. I turned away before the entire thing toppled to the floor. I only heard the thud of the books as they hit the hardwood.