Forged in Grace (18 page)

In the silence I wait for an apology from Marly for how she behaved. A memory comes to me instead, one of my own, of Sasha Lerner
’s hangdog eyes as she refused my invitation to the movies. “You probably should stop asking,” she’d said. Every time I invited her along, Marly found a way to make me feel guilty for doing so.

“
Do you remember Sasha Lerner?” I ask Marly.

Marly purses her lips but then nods.
“I couldn’t stand her,” she says. “She always had to be Little Miss Know it All, the one who was always right, even when she was wrong.”

This isn
’t how I remember Sasha at all. In my memory she was just an eager, earnest girl who lived in the wealthy part of town with one divorced parent one half of the week, and the low-budget canal with the other the remainder of it. “Why’d she stop hanging out with us?”

Marly sniffs in air and closes her eyes.
“I told her that you could only have one best friend.”

Chapter Sixteen

A week later

Gus and I pull up to a big hall. A banner outside announces
Healer Faire.
That extra ‘e’ at the end puts me in a bad mood. I can all but feel the pretension seeping out the doors in a cloud of incense and essential oils.

Gus inhales deeply. A pack of women in gauzy dresses, with fairy wings painted on their cheeks, shoots Gus wide-eyed looks, and this emboldens me to stand up straighter, with confidence. With him at my side, my face is the least surprising for a change.

Booths display the beautiful, jagged edges of enormous crystals; special water that has allegedly been touched by particles that speed up natural healing responses; herbal companies offering murky tinctures in dark glass bottles. “Oh look, there’s a fortune teller,” I point to a booth hung with black velvet drapes.

“
I know, there’s a lot of, shall we say, healing for show here, the kind that left a bad taste in your friend Drew’s mouth. We’re headed back there.” He points to the back of the big building where a smaller series of booths exhibit no wares or goods, just people sitting in comfortable chairs, or standing beside tables and chairs.

He brings me to a woman in a little booth with a massage table and a chair. She is big—both tall and wide, though her roasted-almond colored flesh is taut and strong, as though she is nothing but muscle. Her long black hair is glossy and in the most elaborate French braid I
’ve ever seen, coils of it weaving in and out like an M.C. Escher drawing.

“
Sasheen—this is Grace.”

Sasheen eyeballs me, smiles slightly, and nods. She takes my hands and pulls me toward her as though directing me onto her lap. Her grip is forceful, strong enough that even a month ago I would have cried out in several levels of pain. I feel commanded by her powerful energy, which speaks to me louder than any words—though she hasn
’t spoken any. She motions to the massage table. “Sit,” she says.

There
’s no way I’ll make it up on the tall table by myself. “Do you have a stool?”

Her eyebrows form a funny little peak, and then she laughs.
“No,” she says. “Just get up there.”

The defense is prepared in my head: how my bad right leg and my scarred underarms make these kinds of actions difficult, but under her unwavering gaze I feel afraid to say no. Somehow, with a great heave and inhale, my butt meets table.

She scoots a rolling chair toward me, presses her fingers into her eyes as though they hurt, sniffs, then looks at me. “Like you, I don’t use any props. It’s just this vessel of mine, and that’s all. Unlike you, however, I know where it comes from, and what I want to do with it.”

“
You don’t know what…” I begin to say, but the words falter. I don’t even know what it is I’m about to accuse her of.

She doesn
’t even stop to acknowledge I’ve spoken. “You can call it whatever you like: Gaia, Jesus, the Great Spirit, the Archangel Michael, Beelzebub, the Ghost of Christmas Past—until you connect with it, you’re always going to run out of energy. You can’t run a vehicle on water—well, you can, but you’ll get shot for trying—” she breaks off into peals of laughter, slapping her own knee. “What I’m saying, Grace, is that you’re running yourself dry. And what’s gonna happen, if you don’t plug into that bigger source, is you’re going to start stealing it from your own body.”

“
I already hurt.” As if on cue, my hands start to throb. “My body aches every time I…” In her presence—she’s like a mighty oil field compared to my tiny backyard trickle—I find I don’t even want to say the word “heal.”

“
Lie on down,” she says, and though I really don’t want to, I do.

Sasheen puts hands on me that are as warm as the red rock when the sun hits. They feel like irons, smoothing me out, then she begins to knead me, a welcome and also somewhat unfamiliar sensation; it
’s been so long since anyone could touch me without consequence. At first she avoids all those places where I’m a fusion of my own self and skin grown in labs. But it isn’t long before her hands seem to pry apart frozen places in me: she goes for the taut skin beneath my arms; she is unafraid of my bad right leg. I can’t even cry out, the pain is so sharp and startling, so different from burning, itching—this pain is all sharp, clear and transparent. I pant like a dog in the sun.

When she
’s done, we are both sweating, and tears are pouring down the sides of my face as though she uncapped a bottle that has long been overly full.

She sits by my side with absolutely calm and quiet. Her solid presence beside me as I lie there, crying, reminds me of the last time my mother left the house with ease to come to me, when I was scraps of ruined flesh in a hospital bed. I can vaguely make out the memory of my father behind her but that drifts into smoke.

She leans in close to my ear. “If you don’t let them go, you carry them in your body. They corrode your heart and spirit next.”

When she
’s done with me I feel slightly bruised in some of the places she massaged deeply, but also lighter. I’m achingly thirsty and down 32 ounces of water in one sitting. Gus takes me to lunch at an outdoor café.

“
One of several times when I was trying to get clean, I went through a natural healing route. Even did something they call a ‘shamanic healing’—” He chuckles and nearly chokes on his falafel. “It started with primal screaming and ended with an enema!”

Laughter rises up in me in such an effortless way that it feels therapeutic, as though whatever Sasheen broke free can now dissipate and leave me.

“Did it help you get off drugs?”

“
For about a week.” He smiles. “Turns out that the siren call of heroin is more powerful than any shaman. Or, I should say, any false shaman. Never worked up the nerve to see the real deal—a friend went to one down in Brazil. I wanted to, but I was terrified. Heroin is like this big Tony Robbins salesman with perfect teeth who makes you believe that you can do anything…as soon as you drag your unshowered ass off the couch, empty the weeks’ worth of garbage, and burn the clothes you’ve been living in. At least for awhile. And then you’re just hoping to score so you don’t go into withdrawals, where you feel like your skeleton is being ripped out through your teeth.”

I try to imagine being in the grips of something that powerful. There was a time when we were girls when I felt that life without Marly was unthinkable. Weekends where she was grounded or I was warned to take a break, that our separation was so painful I thought I might actually die.

“So what did finally get you off the heroin?” I can still see the vague echo of him and a woman crumpled into lifeless curls on a dark floor somewhere.

For the first time I can suddenly see the
“real” face inside Gus’s inked one—an ordinary, dark-eyed man, probably the kind you’d barely notice passing you by.

His eyes go shiny.
“My daughter died.”

It
’s like all the organs in my body are momentarily squished flat, no room for breath.

“
Oh,” I whisper. “I didn’t know.”

“
That’s when I tattooed my face,” he says. “I didn’t tell you when we met—I don’t often, because how do you just, in casual conversation with a stranger, say all this. I checked myself into a rehab clinic. A lot of people in my shoes would have just let the heroin kill ‘em at that point. All I know is that I
wanted
to feel pain. I wanted to feel the death of the addiction, my every endorphin center in my own brain completely shot. And I did. I died a few times over myself in that fucking hell hole. And when I was finally clean and sober, then I kept on dying for a good long time after in my grief.”

It isn
’t necessary to touch him to feel the edges of his pain—like something jagged and bright moving through me, chopping and tearing as it moves.

“
What happened to your daughter?”

Gus looks at the table, his fingers drawing circles upon circles there.
“My girlfriend, Maya’s mother, she was sick, too, I mean with the heroin. She made a dark choice, thinking we’d never get free.”

I
’m struggling to figure out what he’s hinting at when he finally says, “She took Maya with her.”

The weight of this truth, that he doesn
’t mean she kidnapped her child, is so heavy I have the urge to lie down on the ground, sink into the heft of the sorrow.

But Gus shakes his head.
“This—” he points to his face, “is an amalgam of pictures Maya drew for me over the years. Best way I could think to honor her, after quitting dope, that is.”

He frowns at his food like he
’s no longer hungry. My own appetite has also fled.

“
I just ask you one thing, Grace, now that you know more of my story.”

Looking at him now, at the red and green rendering of a young girl
’s hand, the doves, the symbols now tell me a different story.

“
Don’t relate to me in pity. Don’t feel sorry for me. I’m as responsible for her death as her mother. And I make my peace by living my life, by doing what she would have wanted.”

He
’s left me speechless. I want to touch him, console him, but I simply hold his gaze as long as he’ll let me.

Before he drops me off at Marly
’s, he puts his hand on mine. “Grace, I want you to know you can use the earthship anytime if you need a place of your own to heal. I know it’s not super convenient, but it’s quiet and peaceful…and cool.”

“
What about Sara?” I am keenly aware of both her presence and her absence in our latest interactions.

He tilts his head back slightly.
“She works all the time, Grace. And when it comes down to it, it’s my place. I’m extending the invitation.”

When I let myself back into the apartment, I am both lighter and heavier than before I went out for the day. But I
’m left with one powerful certainty: I can’t keep healing people at random. I need to choose, focus this force, whatever it is, in a direction that makes the most sense for me.

Marly comes out of her bedroom clutching a book.
“How was the hippie faire?”

“
Profound.” I do my best to ignore her tone. “But I didn’t meet any hippies. I did meet a woman who does healing work…not quite like me, but I feel amazing. “And,” I toss my purse onto the couch before heaving myself after it, sinking into the pleasantness of allowing my body to relax. “Gus offered me use of his house, or earthship, whatever they call it, for future healings, too.”