The Night Gwen Stacy Died (22 page)

NOVAK STRAINED TO HEAR
the radio, but the kidnapper girl kept it so quiet in there, he could barely make
out the words. He smelled nail polish again. The girl couldn’t get enough of painting
her nails he guessed. He was tied to a chair in his own kitchen. At first the whole
situation felt vaguely erotic—though the girl seemed too naive to pick up on that
kind of thing. She had a pair of tiny breasts, barely visible though her T-shirt,
and a handgun that he knew she kept in her purse. But Novak had been tied to the chair
for the past two hours, and all she’d done so far was paint her nails and listen to
his radio in the other room.

He had just finished a shift at the foundry, and he was going to leave out a few scraps
for the stray before he took off for the night. The dog had been hanging around all
day, making a general nuisance of herself, but when the time came to actually seek
her out, the dog was nowhere to be found. He had started calling for her when he noticed
the dog was huddled up at the far end of the scrap yard, beside a girl. Novak noticed
nothing about the girl at first, save for the fact that she was acting vaguely proprietary
with the stray in a way that didn’t suit him. He had started to call for the animal
as if she were his pet.
Here, girl! Come, girl!
That kind of thing.

“This your dog?” the girl had asked in an odd way that, in retrospect, he identified
as a test.

“Yes,” Novak had responded tentatively.

“Ha, I’ll bet,” the girl said.

“Excuse me?” Novak asked

“This is a wild animal!” she had shouted. “You’re trying to domesticate a wild animal?”
But even as she was accusing him of this, he noticed that she was securing a ribbon
around the dog’s neck. It wasn’t until she finished with the ribbon that she looked
Novak straight in the face, and he recognized her from the security camera kidnapping
on television he’d seen a few weeks before. She looked different, of course. Her mousy-colored
hair from the photographs had been converted to a shocking blond, but there was no
question that her face was the same. The strange thing was that, in that moment, something
seemed to shift in the way she looked at him as well.

“Okay,” he heard her say, and he noticed her voice had changed. Novak looked up to
find the girl was now holding the gun. The girl was pointing the gun at his chest.
“Okay,” she said again. “You and the dog, get in the truck.”

The girl looked to weigh about a hundred pounds, it would have been easy to wrestle
the thing from her hands, but as Novak was getting into his truck, as she raised the
gun and ordered him to drive, he thought here was something he had never seen before,
and that maybe there was a reason for it all, that a pretty young victim of kidnapping
wanted to kidnap him. Perhaps there was a reward for finding her. Perhaps the girl
needed rescuing. Either way, something was actually happening, and who was Novak to
stop it? So he drove. She didn’t tell him where to drive, so he drove to his apartment.
He unlocked the door, checked the mail, and set it on the coffee table.

“Do you have any rope?” the girl asked.

He figured she meant for the dog, but once the dog was tethered in the yard, she asked
Novak to sit in the kitchen chair with his hands behind him, and he understood that
she had it in mind for him as well. When the girl had insisted on tying him to the
chair, Novak offered his wrists to her. She had his attention.

“Let me know if this is tight enough,” she had said. “Let me know if you could get
out.” This was strange, he thought; the girl seemed to assume, or understand, that
Novak had no intention of breaking free of the shackles she’d fashioned.

“No, it’s tight.” Novak answered honestly. She had tied a good knot.

After another twenty minutes of sitting there in silence, Novak was starting to get
annoyed. She had barely spoken to him. He yelled toward the front room. “Hey?” he
called. “Miss?” He didn’t know what to yell. She was the most nonthreatening captor
one could possibly imagine; it was difficult to know how to address her.

The girl craned her neck around the corner of the kitchen. Her fingernails were the
showy red of fake blood that you could buy at the drug store, confirming the smell
wafting around the place. Her face looked even younger now than it had as she was
tying him up. “Um, yeah?” she said.

Novak regarded her carefully. The gun was nowhere in sight—what the hell was there
to say? Novak improvised his way toward confrontation. “Do you think I could get a
glass of water or something? I get pretty dehydrated if I don’t drink eight a day.”

The girl looked at him hard, so at first Novak thought she was going to refuse him
the water—a small titillation—but then she asked, “Do you really drink eight? That’s
really good for you.”

Novak adjusted his wrists where they ached, a dull pain he had to work to freshen.
“Sure,” he said. “Keeps the doctor away, right?”

“No,” said the girl, “you’re thinking of apples.”

She had turned from him by then and began randomly opening the cabinets. She guessed
wrong twice, revealing first a shelf full of instant rice and ramen noodles, then
his dishes. Novak was a little shy about the disorder of his cabinets, but then he
remembered he was being held hostage and decided not to be embarrassed. “To your right,”
Novak said, just as her hand was hesitating before a third incorrect choice.

The girl pulled down a pint glass and placed it under the faucet. She set the glass
in front of him on the table, not so much to be cruel he thought, as because she seemed
to have forgotten she’d tied his hands together. Maybe all that nail polish was affecting
her brain. Novak was about to direct her to the drawer where there might be straws,
when she spoke again.

“Can I ask you something?” She seemed a little nervous suddenly, and it made Novak
uneasy. He nodded.

When her voice came out again, it shook a little. “Is this some kind of trick, some
joke between the two of you?” she asked.

Novak looked up at his captor. “Sweetheart, you’re the one with the gun. You tell
me what the trick is.”

She studied his face. “You talk like him,” she said quietly.

“I talk like him?” Novak repeated.

“I need to ask you something,” she said again. “And I need you to answer honestly.”
She looked to the kitchen tiles, looked up again. She said, “You’re Jake Novak.” It
didn’t seem to be a question at all in her tone of voice, but in her forehead there
was the perplexed wrinkle of insecurity that sometimes accompanies questions.

Novak was startled for only a second before remembering that the girl had obviously
gone through all his things in the other room, bills or mail or whatever. “Great detective
work,” he said.

She smiled distractedly, not processing the insult. Then she spoke again. “I thought
you were supposed to have died twenty years ago.”

Novak stopped shifting in his chair.

“So what I want to know,” she continued, “is who is lying to me. You or him?”

“Him who?”

“Are you from Iowa?” the girl asked.

A tiny fear was growing in his stomach now. He wanted the girl to stop talking. He
wanted her to go back into the other room and put on another coat of nail polish.

“I’m from Iowa myself,” said the girl, as if explaining all. She held out her hand,
waited a moment, then let it drop. “I’m Gwen Stacy,” she announced, but this time
she said it like a question, as if awaiting his approval. “Ever heard of me?”

The name sounded vaguely familiar, but this was not the name that was given for the
girl on the nightly news. He knew it from somewhere, but couldn’t place it.

She made her voice low, almost flirty, as if she were delivering someone else’s lines.
“
Actually
,” the girl said, “
I never thought of you as the motorcycle type before, Pete!”

She was quoting something, clearly. “Gwen Stacy,” he repeated now, getting closer
to the source. “Spider-Man’s first love.”

“So you do remember me,” said the girl. “I thought so.”

“But your real name is Sheila something,” Novak said. “Isn’t it?”

She turned on him sharply. “Why would you say that?” she asked.

“Honey, your face is all over television,” he said. “Surely you know that much.”

“Oh, her.” She seemed to be the one getting nervous now. “You thought I was that girl
who got kidnapped?”

“Of course,” he said. “Why do you think I let you kidnap me?”

The girl stared.

Novak hadn’t exactly worked out this connection himself. “I thought maybe I would
help save you somehow.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. You were going to save me by getting
kidnapped yourself?”

Novak shrugged. It did sound pretty unlikely, the way she said it.

“You are way out of line, Mr. Novak,” she said sternly. “You have no idea how far
out of line.”

But her body began to shake and she went into the other room where Novak could hear
her blowing her nose loudly, and then flushing his toilet.

He wanted to get out of the kitchen now. He thought maybe he could get her to untie
him. But then, he thought better of it. As aloof as his captor seemed to be, she did
seem to know something of his past, though a past so distant, there was no way she
was old enough to have firsthand knowledge of it. He was from Iowa. He should have
died twenty years ago; that had been his first attempt at it anyway. He had taken
every pill in the family medicine cabinet—no small feat what with Mom’s trouble sleeping—but
he had failed embarrassingly, and when his mother came to see him in the county hospital,
she had sat across the room from his bed while he slept it off, and it was only as
he was waking up that she walked over to his bed and slapped him on the mouth. His
mother retreated to the other side of the room and began to cry, though it wasn’t
clear whether she was crying for him or for herself. They had already been on their
own for the past six years, he and Mom and Seth.

Two weeks after he was released, he woke in the middle of the night, filled a backpack,
and walked to the Greyhound station in his slippers because his shoes were in the
hall closet behind a squeaky door that would surely wake his mother. He could afford
a ticket to Chicago or Detroit and chose Chicago because the bus was boarding in an
hour. He’d lived there since. Once, and years later, he had written his mother a letter
of apology; that had been eight years ago, and he never had heard anything back.

In another room in his apartment, he could hear the girl crying again, softly, but
audibly. Novak placed his head down on the table beside his undisturbed glass of water
and closed his eyes.

It hadn’t always been his plan to try to destroy himself by the age of eighteen. There
had been so much going on. By his junior year of high school, he had broken every
record in the three-hundred-meter hurdles that the boys’ track team had ever set.
He had a driver’s license and a Chevy Impala with a radio. Never mind that no one
ever came to watch him run. Never mind that he was fatherless and friendless. His
life was finally getting started. His coach had said there was even a chance of running
for a small private college, if he was so inclined, and he might have been so inclined.
There was really no saying the extent of his options then. He had reason to believe
he would have some say in his future.

He had tried out for the track team on a fluke. No one had ever suggested to him that
he was the least bit athletic. He had been sneaking cigarettes in the garage since
he was fifteen. He had never played a sport in his life. He’d spent a good chunk of
his childhood and most of early adolescence indoors with his face in a comic book.
Exercise and fresh air were neither enforced nor encouraged by his mother. But these
coaches, they couldn’t get enough of him. They threw up their hands, bearing stopwatches,
and cheered at the numbers reflected there as Novak crossed the slender white line
painted on the track. They gave him a uniform, a number.

“Good for you, honey,” his mother had said, when he’d shared the news. Then she’d
sighed heavily and looked at the calendar beside the phone. He had been looking after
his brother in the afternoons. With practice after school, his mother would now have
to change around her shifts at the hospital so someone would be home with Seth.

One-hundred-meter dash, four-hundred-meter dash, three-hundred-meter hurdles, four-by-two-hundred-meter
relay.
Novak said the names of the races quietly to himself as he drove to school or walked
through the halls, or waited to fall asleep at night. A world of hollow batons and
narrow specialty shoes had revealed itself to him in all its complexity, so there
was nothing else he wanted to do but run. It was only later that the running itself
was no longer enough, that he needed an audience for it to mean something.

As a general rule, Novak didn’t pay much notice to the other boys’ mothers in the
stands. For the most part, they seemed an embarrassing lot—cheering excessively, brandishing
homemade signs praising the speed of their progeny—it seemed a faintly disgusting
display of familial bias that made him a little glad that his own mother worked on
Saturdays. Edith sat away from these mothers in the stands. She attended the track
meets regularly, always the full four to six hours, always sitting in the top left
corner of the stands in the same red raincoat, even on the sunny days. It was halfway
into the season when Novak first noticed her, and after weeks of trying to determine
whose mother she was, and never once seeing another boy approach her, he decided she
was there for him. It was a crazy presumption; she could have been anyone. But before
Novak knelt into starting position, he would look for the orange-red streak that was
her at the top of the stands. He would focus on her raincoat until he bowed his head
at the starting line and took a deep breath.