Forged in Grace (17 page)

Marly swallows fast. She turns her bright smile on the crowd.
“That’s right, I take the blame. Silly me, had to go and get beat up!” There’s strain in her voice, and Drew, frowning, swoops in to soothe her, but she throws off his arm.

“
Can you demonstrate this healing ability?” Gus asks in a truly curious tone. I’m vaguely aware that around us, someone is lighting the tiki torches, as night darkens.

Marly smiles her cobra smile—the one presented to parents before lies were spouted, to Drake
’s Bay’s bumbling police officers when we were caught doing something wrong, “What, you think she’s going to slap a hand to your head and make all your tattoos disappear?”

Gus doesn
’t break his smile—he’s probably used to worse. He makes a fatal mistake, though: he ignores Marly. “Well, Grace?”

“
I don’t know.” I give a sloppy, alchol-laden shrug, recalling the first group healing in Drew’s yard. His eyes are shiny in the torchlight.

“
You really want to see a show?” Marly’s voice is high and tight. “Hand her one of the torches, see how she jumps.”

The entire crowd gasps as though she
’s slaughtered a sacred cow right before us. Drew grasps her by the shoulders and turns her forcefully away from us, then marches her off toward the desert. She tries to wriggle out of his grasp, then goes anyway.

I stand there, feeling kicked, but the crowd suddenly merges around me like a collective band-aid, murmuring their apologies for my best friend
’s behavior. “It’s okay,” I say to one woman who’s muttering in Marly’s direction. “Please, really, don’t give her a hard time. She’s pregnant, and she’s been through a lot. You don’t know her like I do.” Even as I say the words they feel hollow; my feelings are crumpled at the edges.

In the distance she looks hunchbacked as Drew ushers her off.
Know her like I do?
More and more I find myself wondering how well I really know her at all.

They
’re all looking at me with genuine concern that reminds me of the nurses in the hospital who took such good care of me, the ones who stayed to tell me jokes or smuggled in food my mother brought. Reminds me of Adam’s sweet gaze the first time he came to my bedside, a fumbling, earnest resident.

A bejeweled hand offers me another cocktail—it reminds me of Ma
’s heavily ringed fingers, rings I am aware that someday will have to be cut from her swollen body, or buried with her. I down the drink in a burning flash.

“
Okay,” I say, as the crowd still hovers. The torches flicker behind them, and I try not to focus on the fire. “Who’s got a recent injury—something noticeable and painful?”

Heads turn, people begin to pat themselves down, and then several people shout,
“Pamela!” and a willowy woman dressed in a gauzy pink dress floats toward me. Gus is suddenly there shoving a chaise lounge between us. There’s a palpable hum of anticipation, as though I can hear their hearts beating in unison. Pamela sits down on the lounge and pulls up her dress to the knees. We all gasp. A huge abrasion, raw and somewhat scabbed runs the entire length of her right shin.

“
Bike wipe-out,” she says. “Can’t ride again until this heals.”

“
Endorphin junkie!” Gus teases.

“
Guilty.” She nods, wispy hair falling into her eyes.

If I had an eyebrow, it would be crooked into a jaunty peak. I rub my hands together, just for show, and set them just above and below the injury. Alcohol makes me cloudy, thankfully obscuring whatever darker stories lurk in her body. I can feel the way the gravel and dirt ground themselves into her shin as she fell, the rough raw scrape of it, the stinging—it
’s a sensation not unlike burning. In fact, so similar is it, the healing feels easier than usual. The world around me disappears until my serpent and I are just a giant set of knitting needles, stitching flesh back together. Time passes and when I lift my hands off her leg the crowd literally gasps, a Greek chorus punctuating the spaces in between.

I feel myself swooning backwards, and then into a sturdy body. Between the alcohol and the healing, the world slips away from me like a pleasant anesthetic slipped into my veins.

What I’m looking at when I open my eyes are rounded brown corners, like sculpted chocolate. The air around me is cool, though I know it should be hot, given that this is the desert. Seeking the light source, I turn toward the window. In a hand carved chair sits Gus, eyes closed, chin tucked against shoulder. No matter how open I am, his is a face I might never get used to seeing in the morning. And this naturally leads me to the thought of Adam’s crooked smile, how comforting it would be to see upon waking. A gentle snoring leads me to the floor, where Marly is curled up fetally around a pillow, asleep, and in the farthest corner of the room is Drew, the only one awake, unrumpled, as though he never slept.

“
Good morning,” I whisper to Drew. He merely nods.

The sleepers awaken: Marly yawns and stretches, while Gus simply opens his eyes, white pearls in an elaborate jeweled setting.

“Oh Grace,” Gus begins before I can even push myself up to sitting. “That was like nothing I’ve ever witnessed in my whole life, last night. Nothing at all.”

Marly rubs her eyes, shoots a hard look at Drew.

The denial is perched on my tongue—how it was nothing, how it’s easiest to heal new flesh wounds, things that haven’t had time to get dark, deep and latched on, when a powerful understanding ripples through me: I am
healing
people with my
hands
.

“
It feels pretty amazing.” I sit up now. My body doesn’t ache!

Marly looks at me as though I
’ve confessed I’m a virgin, mouth slightly open, but Gus is not done talking. “Grace, have you considered the implications of this? The scale of it? Have you ever considered working with others? You could be the power source for larger healings. You could open your own clinic!”

“
Well she’d have to figure out how to stop falling asleep after every one, first.” Marly pushes herself up to standing with a groan, waving off Drew who tries to help.

“
I thought you were urging me to do that very thing,” I say to her. “Go bigger.”

Marly stretches, arching toward the sun. Her back makes small cracking noises, like a series of tiny lids being snapped open.
“You know what, I’m just tired and hungry,” she says, softly. “Any food in this recycled mud hut?”

I look at Gus apologetically, and he simply smiles at me. When we all emerge into the kitchen area of the house, Sara is there, hair in a messy bun, dark circles ringing her eyes. Her grimace suggests she
’s less than pleased to be greeted by a trio of strangers she only met in passing the night before.

“
Nice to meet you,” she says in a tone I might use for delivering bad news. “Sorry I wasn’t social last night and I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t stay. Spent half the night with a psychotic patient; the other half with insomnia trying to get him out of my head.”

Gus laughs, though nothing seems funny.
“Really, I was hoping you were going to cook us all breakfast.” He slaps a plastic spatula against the counter. I think he’s being sarcastic, but I can’t tell, and the crackle of silence between them makes me anxious. It’s clear, in this bright light of day, that Sara is the woman in the photographs he showed me the night before. Gus kisses her on the cheek, but she pulls away and bustles back to the room we’ve all just abandoned.

Not long after, over the heady scent of spitting bacon and eggs, which Gus assures us are both organic and sustainably farmed, he starts talking. For an hour he waxes on about the possibilities of my healing power. Every time I try to interrupt he says,
“Bear with me, there’s more,” or “Consider this.”

“
I think the problem is that you’re not finding any way to recharge yourself,” he says. “You’re like this huge engine—no, no, you’re like something out of science fiction, some great big throbbing crystal that powers a starship or something.”

“
An alien?” I offer, with a smile. “I’ve been called worse.”

“
No, bear with me.” He squeezes a blood orange half down onto a plastic dome, its juice dripping out thickly. “My point is that a little sleep and a nice meal are not enough. You need more. You need to be in contact with other healers, people who do what you do.”

Drew starts chuckling.
“Oh yeah, you mean life coaches and pseudo-shamans who offer people trips into the desert with a button of peyote?”

Gus doesn
’t laugh. “Just because you haven’t met the real deals, man, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Grace should be proof of that.”

Marly has been quiet the whole time, shoveling in food, but now she drops her fork with a clatter, a sneer pinching her brows.
“So, what, you string together twenty healers and build a machine that sucks the healing life force from their very bodies? I think I saw that episode of
Star Trek
.” She folds her napkin carefully, then rises. “I have to get to work. Thanks for letting us stay.” She sounds polite and her expression is placid, but I feel uneasy.

“
It’s Sunday, Marly.” I take a bite of my food to make it clear that I’m not done. “You work?”

“
Payroll doesn’t do itself,” she says.

Gus leans back in his chair, persisting in being unruffled.
“I always love having people over. Come anytime.”

“
What about her?” Marly points to where Sara disappeared. “She looked super happy to see us all here.”

Gus waves a hand in the air.
“She loves it too when she’s not beat.”

Marly makes a dubious humming sound.

“Well, Grace, it has been a real pleasure. Thanks so much for coming into my sphere.” Gus stands and holds his arms out wide, and I’m suddenly self-conscious of hugging him in front of Marly. But I can’t walk away after his hospitality, either.

I step in for a polite hug. Not only does he hug me tightly, he shakes me a little and makes groaning sounds like we
’re lovers about to be parted. When Gus finally releases me, we exit the cool of his house and are slapped by heat. It’s only 10:00 a.m. but I wouldn’t last an hour in this air that’s like a fuzzy hot membrane.

We slide into Drew
’s car, and I am all tensed up, waiting for it, for the onslaught, now that Marly has me, essentially, alone.

“
I sure as hell couldn’t live in a house like that,” Marly presses her palm against the car window, as if reassuring herself there’s a barrier. “Dirt all around you. Ugh. I’d smother in there.” At least she didn’t trash Gus outright.

“
You can’t deny it was about thirty degrees cooler in there, though.” Drew tilts his face into the air vent and sighs.

They launch into a conversation about living spaces and comfort that makes me feel blissfully forgotten. Desert rewinds back to city before long, and the whole night seems like a weird dream.
“Well, Marly, I have to say you were right,” I tell her as Drew pulls into her parking lot. “Vegas is a place where people are less judgmental.”

Marly guffaws.
“Please,” she says. “That was just lip service to get you to come here. People are people, Grace, no matter where you go.” She turns to Drew. “Thanks for chauffeuring us.” She gives Drew a little smooch on the lips. “You’d make a great getaway driver.”

“
I’d make great lots of things,” he says meaningfully, but Marly does not acknowledge any deeper significance. I want so badly to offer Drew some sort of pithy statement, about how she’s just hormonal, but I know it will come across as pitying. I squeeze his shoulder instead, and thank him for the ride.

“
Sure,” he says, in a voice full of sadness.

When Marly and I step into the elevator the mirrored versions of our selves look back at us—or rather, Marly looks at her feet, I look at the edges of my scars head on. Here are my shiny patches, the rough, warped circular patterns like the footprints of men on the moon. I try to see myself through Gus
’s lens. I suppose that you
could
call my face interesting, so long as you were seeing it all on its own, not comparing it to another’s.