Forged in Grace (15 page)

“
I was at the beach.” Marly’s hair flies out in a static frizz around her head. “Hi Gracie, you ok?”

Marly misses nothing, her eyes flash to the bored looking mermaid and she bolts for the tank window. With the flat of her palm she smacks it. The mermaid snaps to with startled eyes, goes up for a breath of air, then back down—suddenly ethereal and delicate, pretending to chase a fish.

“Whatcha been up to today?” Marly asks, pulling out two chairs at a table far from the two elderly male patrons who sit staring, not speaking, not drinking the blood colored liquid in their umbrella-laden drinks. I have this image of them having been brought here and dumped by some residential home for the elderly. Maybe strippers would give them heart attacks.

Rather than tell her everything, I shove Gus
’s card across the table. The card has the photo of the half-naked woman on one side. “Stumbled across this guy’s show at a little gallery near Emergency Arts.”

Marly frowns.
“Emergency Arts? What were you doing over there?”

“
I wanted to go to a cool café. Looked it up on the internet.”

Even though we
’re sitting, her knee is jittering like she’s bored or anxious. Her eyes narrow. “There are a ton of cool cafes a lot closer.”

“
Well that’s where I went, is there something wrong with it?”

She shakes her head.
“No. Yes. Well…it’s just one of the places Loser used to like to go.”

“
Oh, I’m sorry.”

Her eyes are shiny and wide for a moment.
“Wouldn’t it be funny if you saw him and didn’t know it?”

“
I didn’t see him; remember, I know what he looks like from your wedding photo.”

Marly nods, but her eyes aren
’t focused on me.

“
Anyway, the photographer of this series, which he calls ‘Shame’ was really cool. He wants to photograph me.”

Marly
’s eyes are suddenly on me with blazing intensity. “What the fuck? That’s creepy.”

“
No—he’s tattooed, his whole face…he was a genuine person, said my scars are
interesting
.”

“
Great line for getting in a girl’s pants.” Marly’s mouth twists into a sneer.

I know she
’s being protective, but suddenly I want to push my chair away from the table, storm off. “Marly! He was a perfect gentleman, invited me to come have drinks with him and
his girlfriend
. He wasn’t trying to get in my pants.” The idea is so absurd, it actually gets me to laugh.

Marly is not laughing. She drums her fingers on the table and shakes her head.
“I don’t like it. I don’t trust him.”

“
You don’t
know
him.” This is suddenly a lot like talking to my mother.

“
Well neither do you. You’d be an idiot to go anywhere with this guy. Did you tell him what you do, the healing?”

“
I gave him my card, yes, but—”

“
Oh just
great
, Grace—we know what he’s really after. He’ll take some weird pictures of you, probably ask you to get naked like the chick on his card, and then he’ll plea for a free healing for him and six of his friends, and the next thing you know you’ll wake up in some strange guy’s bed wondering why you can’t remember the night before!” Her voice is at a shrill pitch.

“
What is wrong with you?” I hear myself say. I realize it’s a mistake a second too late.

Marly
’s chair makes a rude squeak as she pushes it out. Standing tall, with the first signs of her pregnancy protruding against her tight top, she’s like a Greek goddess looming with the power to curse me. “What’s
wrong
with me? Oh, where do I even start, Grace! I’m a walking fucking disaster, isn’t that obvious? Do what you want. Just don’t come crying to me when it goes horribly wrong.”

I feel slapped as she storms off, barks
“be in my office” at Sabrina, who stares after Marly as though she is afraid of what wrath might come her way. Sabrina smiles feebly at me, as though she’d really like to give me a hug but is afraid to leave her station. The two old men at the tables look after her hopefully as though she might be part of a show.

We don
’t reconcile that night. I stay holed up in my room, pretending to read, though I can’t focus. She doesn’t knock on my door, but makes plenty of noise out in the apartment. When all is finally quiet, too quiet even, as though I am alone, though I never heard her leave, in the silence I think about her words.

I barely remember what it feels like to have a man—boy, really—seek to get anywhere near my body. There is one kiss that I held as sacred for a long time—though the adult me, inexperienced as I am, now knows it was wrong. Marly
’s stepfather Bryce, twenty-eight years old when we were fifteen, with his boy band good looks and confidence to match.

Marly and I were dancing ourselves sweaty in her room upstairs, her parents gone, or so we thought. Marly made a stealthy dash to get us cokes to quench our thirst, when Bryce was suddenly standing in the doorway, wearing a white t-shirt and jeans, muscles pressed against fabric in a way that teased my teenage girl’s overactive mind.
“You look so alive right now, Gra
ce,”
he
said, stepping into the room. Wearing a purple dress of Marly’s, my hair freed from its customary ponytail, I felt bold like her. I took a step forward and he put his hands on my hips. “I know this dress. It isn’t yours,” he said, his tone almost scolding. His eyes were the blue of beach glass. The next thing I knew, he leaned in close and sniffed my neck, perhaps a test to see if I’d pull away, but I didn’t. I liked the feeling of his strong hands on my hips, of his hot breath on my throat. When he kissed me, I wasn’t ready, his lips bumped my teeth, but I parted them quickly and his tongue made a dash, a hit and run before he pulled back, and not a moment too soon—Marly reappeared holding up cokes. She sneered at him. “Go have your own fun,” and he grimaced at her and then left.

Other than that, Gabriel Diaz had a strong but fumbling touch—his fingers always roaming: jammed under the edges of the bra I barely needed, shoved into the elastic edge of my underpants, and then, deeper, inside me, a place so sensitive I could feel the shape of his calluses.

My own fingers find my nightgown now, lift its edges, touch a part of me where heat is still a welcome sensation. Adam’s face is suddenly before me, stirring a powerful longing—and it merges with Gus’s, becomes a shifting gallery of the familiar and the unfamiliar, following the loop of infinity inked on his cheek, the doves kissing Adam’s crow’s feet, the white of Adam’s doctor’s jacket impressed with symbols in bright green and red.

I cry out into the back of my own hand.

About a year after my father left, I woke in a pocket of gray light, indistinguishably night or early morning, with a pang of anxiety that something was wrong. I padded to my mother’s bedroom, found only Beatrix, just a kitten, sleeping in a ball on Ma’s pillow. Hours later, Ma called, voice groggy. “Drove myself to the hospital, damn kidney stone gave me awful fits. Didn’t want to wake you.”

That same suffocating emptiness fills my head now, clogs my chest as I wake. It
’s 2:00 a.m. I slide out of bed and check the kitchen for signs of Marly. Her bedroom door is closed and I stand outside it, fingers just brushing the smooth cool wood of it, wondering if my scarred face would frighten her in the dark. I remember the way I used to want to touch the smooth planes of her skin, free of the freckles that plagued mine—the only feature I was glad to see fire scrub away. And play with her hair, thick and lush, that we used to torture into styles, French braids and hot curlers, since all mine did was hang lank to my shoulders, barely able to sustain a rubber band.

I twist the knob and crack the door, stepping into the room, as shadowed as the rest of the apartment is white in this hour when we should all be sleeping. Her bed is empty, neatly made, with a crisp corner folded down. I turn on the side-table lamp, surprised to see that her newest sheets have tiny yellow hearts on them, a pale shock of color.

She keeps this door closed so often that I’ve never done more than catch a glimpse of its interior—and for all that’s missing in the rest of the place I see signs of life and color here. Stuck into the cracks of her vanity mirror, at the bottom, are several photographs: The Polaroid of her mock-wedding; the entire staff of mermaids in full get-up, lounging on their outdoor “beach”; and the two of us as little girls—maybe nine or ten. It’s one of the few photos of her in which she isn’t smiling, her face a strange pout, skin curled in around the eyes. I can’t imagine why she put that one up, but I don’t want to linger on the old.

There are a handful of necklaces hanging from a white necklace tree, only silver and quartz, and a bracelet so oddly familiar stomach acid rises into my throat before I figure out why. Sterling silver chunky chain with cloisonné charms. Given to me for my tenth birthday by my father. The last time I wore it was the night of the fire, and I had always assumed that the hospital was responsible for its loss, or that it had been charred and ruined, as good as rubble at the bottom of a pile of ash in that tree house. To see it here in all its perfection, still silver, as though she wears it, polishes it—I find I can hardly breathe. It makes me wonder about that burn on Marly
’s wrist, the one she says I healed. The truth is, I don’t remember if I had already taken the bracelet off that night in the tree house. As our world erupted into flame, it seems unlikely that the first thing she would have done was to remove it from my arm. Still, it gives me that prickly feeling of adrenaline released for a confrontation.

On her bedside table are several bottles of pills—three, to be exact. One is full, looks completely untouched, little blue and white capsules. They look a lot like the Prozac that I used to take, until we realized that the drug, not my trauma, was responsible for keeping me from sleeping, and giving my skin an itchy, crawling sensation like I
’d disturbed an anthill. They finally put me on Wellbutrin, which took the harsh edge off the feelings, but I eventually got off that, too.

The other two bottles are the traditional orange prescription bottles that once littered my bedside table too, but there are no labels on them. I should not snoop; every impulse to find out what they are is wrong. I should just ask her, but I can
’t help it. The cool heft of my old bracelet in my hand is like justification. That she would have taken it at that moment when I lost so much—my anger is a clean steel sword on a lathe. My fingers close around the full bottle, and I see that it’s just Compazine—an anti-nausea drug given to pregnant women. I hold up another of the unlabeled ones to the light. It’s hard to tell their color through the orange plastic. I hate these bottles, though; they are nearly impossible for me to open without pain in my thumbs. They are red or dark orange ovals—they could be for allergies or anxiety. I don’t recognize them from anything I’ve seen Adam hand out.

I
’m still sitting on her bed, considering the pills and fingering the bracelet when I realize there’s a shadow in the doorway. I feel the cold bite of guilt.

“
What are you doing in here?” she asks, tone flat, as though I’m a stranger who’s broken into her house.