Forged in Grace (23 page)

Chapter Twenty-One

Behind the cereal in Marly’s cabinet, fumbling with the feeling of doing something I shouldn’t, I find what I am seeking: a half-empty bottle of pale amber tequila, and that cool bottle of vodka she’d set out like a taboo prize some months back. What I want is to drink just enough to swoon my serpent into a dazed state, to make it lazy and ineffective. Adam has been here all day, alone, in a hotel room, and I want to go to him. I
need
to go to him. There may be no one else who understands as deeply as I do what it means that my mother has cancer. And there is, of course, the other reason, which still feels like a joke played by some reality television show; I want to catch him before he realizes that there is nothing to love in one so damaged as me.

I fill a small glass, drink, and sit, waiting on the couch to feel that sensation that is like swimming without making any effort. When it hits, I call a cab.

Of all the fancy hotels in Vegas that Adam could treat himself to, he has chosen the Best Western. A step up from a Motel 6. He is frugal to a fault; I’ve been in his house enough times to know that it could benefit from fresh paint, new furniture—he lives surrounded by his father’s old belongings as though he inherited the Senior Lieb’s persona, not just his practice, after he died.

By the time I
’m standing at his hotel door, knocking, my mind feels like a raft that’s been pushed away from the shore of my body. It’s a pleasantly freeing sensation and makes me wonder why I’ve spent so many years avoiding the very substances that could give me this lightness of being.

Adam pulls the door open with one hand, his laptop balanced in the other hand, a pen clutched between his teeth. He
’s wearing thin cotton plaid pajama pants, a plain white T-shirt. I’ve never seen him so stripped down and I feel almost embarrassed, as though I shouldn’t look.

“
Grace!” He almost drops the laptop. It teeters precariously as he maneuvers it to the bed and plops it down, the pen falling from his teeth, forgotten.

“
I’m sorry for chasing you away earlier.” I step into the room with a potent sense of crossing a kind of threshold. “I’m in a very strange place,” I mean emotionally, but I suppose I mean geographically too.

He nods, but doesn
’t smile, his bangs sliding across his forehead.

My body feels like a blur beneath my head. Why am I here? I move into him, fold my head against his chest. It feels so right, and yet, like I
’ll get into trouble for being with him.

“
You’re crying.” He alerts me to the fact before I even realize it. “What’s wrong?”

“
My mother has cancer.”
I don’t know what’s happening to me.

His shoulders slump and his gaze softens on me.
“Oh God, no. I’m sorry.”

I nod.
“It’s not right, not fair.”

He leans into the wall behind him and cradles me.
“I said that a lot in my residency—it’s not fair. I kept telling my father I was going to give up on medical school, join the Peace Corps. He pushed me, said there’s always suffering in life, so why not be one of the few who can actually do something about it.”

I smile, thinking that maybe what I do qualifies in this category, too. Only I can
’t tell Adam this.

“
I’m going home, to help her.” I look up at him, seeking validation. “She needs me.”

He pulls slightly away, frowns.
“You seem happy here.” I can’t read his tone. Does he not want me to come back to Drake’s Bay?

“
But I can help her!”

He shakes his head.
“How? By doing what you’ve always done all these years, Grace? I think you seem happier now than I’ve ever seen you.”

I want to throw myself at him, part rage, part desire to be comforted.
You have no idea what I can do, because I can’t tell you—you’ll laugh at me, tell me I’m crazy.

Instead, I do the bidding of the alcohol that
’s strumming my veins like a rare instrument…I step out of the easy-release dress I put on. In a moment, I’m standing there in my bra and underwear—the only set I own that contains lace: red. I’m hoping its frills will distract from the patchwork squares of dark and light skin that criss-cross my chest, that it will call Adam’s attention directly to my breasts, what little I have. From below, with the exception of my butchered right leg, I am smooth skin, slender tummy, hips that swell into womanhood.

I grasp Adam
’s hands and slide them to my hips, hook his thumbs into my underpants and push downward. He groans and his hands slide to the firm soft skin of my buttocks, knead it with his strong fingers, push my underwear to my ankles, and then, using his foot, slides them off me completely. He drops to his knees and kisses my stomach in slow, soft circles, presses his face into my downy hair and breathes me in. Visions waver in and out of my mind—but I don’t allow myself to linger on them—the alcohol makes that so much easier.

His mouth rises up my stomach, teases my bellybutton, then his fingers are unhooking my bra and his mouth is—glorious, hot—a shock of surprise against one nipple, then the other, until his mouth is finally on mine, light and gentle.

“You won’t hurt me,” I say, but he pulls back sharply.

“
You’ve been drinking,” he says, his expression pinched, as though I’ve hurt him somehow.

“
Just a little,” I say. “I was nervous.”

He sighs and steps away from me, averts his gaze from my body that is pulsing with need for him.

“Not like this, Grace.”

He can
’t be serious. “What? Why? I’m an adult, I’m here by choice.”

“
If you needed to drink first, that doesn’t feel like a confident choice.”

I want to stomp my feet, throw a tantrum. But that which would explain my behavior is only going to make me sound insane.

With the urge to bolt, I quickly pull my crumpled dress from the floor and hold it against my body, to cover me.

“
Please don’t go.” He frowns at me, voice soft, and holds out his hand. “I want to, Grace. I just don’t want to be something you regret. Stay the whole night. Stay with me.”

I
’m rigid with indecision, fear that too much time alone will lead to me revealing my secrets and driving him permanently away. But he did come all this way to see me. I exhale, then sit down beside him on the bed’s edge.

“
Do you remember when you started working for me, how you wanted to become a nurse? Do you still ever think about it?” he asks.

I remember the way the slightly musty smell of his office used to excite me—it was a place where I was useful, where I did not have to navigate piles and stacks and rotting things with my every step. I remember holding up the medical instruments, high with the idea that I could do for others what was done for me in the hospital.
“Maybe that was just my way of having hope,” I say. “That I could have a normal life.”

He laughs.
“Why is everyone so preoccupied with normal,” he loops his arm around my shoulder. “I think we’d work really well together.” He clutches me closer. “That’s all. I know you’d be great with patients—you have so much empathy for the suffering of others.”

I feel myself tense beneath his arm.
I didn’t choose that suffering. It’s not like my empathy is some sort of noble event in my life.

I don
’t like the parental tone in his voice, like he disapproves of what I’m doing, which probably looks like a lot of nothing. “I just don’t know what I think. Don’t you get bored in general practice? Do you ever think of specializing? Picking a focus?”

He leans back onto the bed and I want to slide my hand up his shirt, tease the pale brown tufts of hair there.
“All the time,” he says. “There are days I’d like to give up my practice altogether, go volunteer my time with victims of war and other such saintly enterprises.”

“
You don’t have to give up your practice to do that.”

“
I know. But it’s really easy when all you have going on is work, like being on auto-pilot.”

“
Is that guilt?” I press my face into his chest. With closed eyes the world tilts slightly behind my eye, as though I’m on a boat that’s hit rough water.

“
Maybe,” he says. “But I’m not interested in being the guy that guilted you into coming home to the job of caretaker when you just got away.”

“
Most people figure this stuff out when they’re like eighteen, not twenty-eight,” I say into his shirt. “I’m a really, really late bloomer.”

“
That’s not your fault, Grace,” Adam says quietly. I sit with that a moment. In an instant, I can see flames behind my eyes, can smell the singed sweet smell of burnt flesh. Young Adam, the shy, awkward resident of thirteen years ago, rises before my eyes giving me an apologetic smile. “
You’re going to be ok,” he’s saying. “Until then, I can always tell you really stupid jokes.”

The alcohol is making me heavy, sleepy. I crawl up onto the bed and lay my head on the pillow. Next thing I know, I
’m peeling my eyes open in the dark, the only light an incandescence from the street seeping in the curtains. The digital clock says it’s 4:00 a.m. I’d been dreaming of thick fogs, dense muddy pits into which I kept falling, unable to pull myself free. My dress has come off; most likely I shucked it off in a fit of night heat, which happens to me often. The sheets are almost painfully stiff beneath my naked body, next to Adam, who is still clothed. He senses my movement and reaches for me, hands pulling me at the waist back toward him, so that we are spooned, cupped, a fit so sweet I’m surprised it’s only the first time our bodies have done this. He’s firm against me, and I’m nearly breathless with desire.

“
The alcohol has worn off,” I whisper.

“
What about…?”

“
I take birth control pills for my hormones,” I say softly.

“
Turn on that lamp,” he says.

“
No…”

“
I want to see you.”

He doesn
’t wait for me, but leans across me and does it himself.

“
I don’t want you to have any doubt.” He leans down to kiss my ruined mouth, then my neck, tracing the scars and grafts.

But I can
’t have it sweet and slow—that will only give my serpent further chances to investigate Adam, disgorge his memories or feelings in ways I may not be ready for. I pull him to me like he’s a raft I’m clinging to, open myself, cajoling him, though I can feel how he’d like to take his time.

I dispense with caressing and instead, press him against me, as though I can imprint him on my body, scar myself with him. It
’s a moment’s pain, a rush of sweetness that persists, the smell of charred skin and burnt hair alive in my senses again exploding outward into sparks that fill my whole body, and then we’re both lying there in a sweaty daze as though we’ve survived an earthquake.

“
Grace, you…”

“
I’m sorry,” I whisper. Is this how it will be for us? Me, never able to look at him, let this joining unfold slowly?

I sit up.
“I should go,” I say.

“
It’s five in the morning!” he says. “Was it so awful?”

I stroke his chin.
“Not awful at all.” Then I bend down and kiss him. “I have a lot to figure out.”

I rise and dress quickly, because if I stay he will want to talk, demand answers I don
’t want to give.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Two days later

Gus leans in close, fingers soft and masculine smelling.
“Can I?” he whispers.

Can he? How else can we do this if he does not?
My breath is a stone skipping a lake as I nod. His fingers make contact and I am embarrassed by the gasp that escapes me.

“
Do you feel my touch there?” he asks.

“
Some of it. There are places with no sensation.”

“
Show me where you feel me.”

I inhale deeply, then reach up, guide his fingers with the lightest touch to my cheek.
“At the center of the scars is a nerve bundle that somehow escaped the flame and the scalpel.”

His finger lingers there, lightly, yet I feel nothing that is not centered in my own body—cells lifting themselves toward his touch, heat passing between pores. I close my eyes, not because he is hard to look at—though he is at this proximity, as I must be—but because it is too raw to be so close, like the doctors who stared past my humanity, seeing only my wounds. I
’m wearing a simple white shawl over my bra, draped around my shoulders. He removes his finger and I feel a rush of…something, disappointment? Guilt? I’m not sure. And then he is all business behind his camera. Turning me, propping me, posing me—with and without my shoulder length red wig, the one most like the hair I actually had. Hair Marly used to twist into silky little braids that would not hold unless we secured their ends with tight rubber bands that ripped when they came off.

I don
’t know how long he snaps, his digital camera something my father would likely scoff at—or maybe not, what do I know, having no contact with him; perhaps he’s made the switch from the art form he loved so much when I was a child. My neck aches after awhile, and Gus sees my fatigue, setting the camera down. He comes to me and rubs my neck, strong thumbs kneading the base. I don’t want to relax into him, because it’s wrong; not twenty-four hours ago I was in bed with Adam, and Gus has a girlfriend, and worse, whatever desire is passing from him to me is purely fetishistic. I am an object of his lens, a woman of strange power.
You called yourself a woman
, says a voice that matches Ma’s in my mind.

I ache to be one again, the way I was with Adam.

The tips of his fingers are kneading away tension, lighting nerves awake, sending signals to the southern hemisphere of me, when a voice rents the moment and has me ready to cower. “Why didn’t you say you were working,” says Sara, who is suddenly in the doorway. In person she is never as luminous as the photograph of her on his back wall. Today her face needs sleep and lots of water to plump up to its rightful beauty.

“
Because I didn’t expect you,” he says, with no tone of defense, which surprises me. Maybe I’m making it all up in my mind, this fleeting desire his body language suggests. I’m crazy to think he could find me attractive.

“
Mmmm,” she says, arms crossed. “My shawl?”

Gus sighs and if I were wearing a shirt I
’d happily toss the fabric back to her. She turns then to look at me. “You look very natural in that wig,” she says kindly. “You had straight hair, didn’t you?”

“
Uh, yeah.” My heart jogs the way my legs want to. She smiles wearily at me. “I can tell.” Then she turns and walks off to some other part of the house.

“
I really should go,” I say, reaching for my clothes.

Gus shakes his head.
“Wait, not yet, I want to make you a print. There’s a shot in here, I can feel it, a really good shot.”

Though my own shirt is thin cotton, it feels as protective as a big downy jacket right now. Gus plugs in his camera to his computer.
“Sit, go ask Sara to make some tea,” he says.

The idea horrifies me.
“I’m not going to bother her.”

His computer makes little beeping noises.
“Grace, she’s not upset. She’s not jealous. If that’s what you were thinking.”

I shake my head, embarrassment prickling at me.
“I didn’t, I don’t….”

“
Art is an intimate process—it can seem to butt up against other libidinous aspects…but I’m not some womanizer, if you’re worried.”

“
I know you don’t find me attractive,” I say, crossing my arms across my breasts, feeling rejected though I know it’s foolish. “It’s something about me, what I represent, how I help you make your art, or the healing thing.”

“
Aha,” he says to the camera screen, as though he hasn’t heard anything I’ve said. He hits more buttons and then a printer beside the computer disgorges an image. It’s 5 by 7, and as it grinds out the pixels of my own face, a tremendous anxiety builds in me.

“
I don’t think I want to see.” I rise looking around for my bag. But it’s too late, he’s pulling it off the printer shelf, blowing on it and then thrusting it in front of me.

“
That’s who I see,” he says.

There
’s a woman in the photograph, turned to the right, where the vast majority of my face is the least blemished, a solid semblance of lips. The side of me that took the least heat—literally. The wig is balanced in such a way that it follows the curve of my jaw, exposes a delicate ear, a suspicious but not unlovely eye.

It all suddenly makes sense to me.
“I’m the ugly, made beautiful. Sara’s the beautiful, made ugly.” I feel tears burning my voice. “It makes for good juxtaposition, right?”

Gus opens his mouth as though to protest this truth, but then closes it.
“Not in those exact words, Grace. I was hoping you’d agree,” he says.

“
I guess I sort of thought…you were my friend, first.” I push the paper image away.

He frowns, a red and a green stripe meeting across his brow.
“I am, Grace. The two things aren’t mutually exclusive.”

“
But maybe they are.” An embarrassing trickle emerges from my nose, forcing me to sniff it up. “For me.”

He stands there, staring at me as though I
’m speaking another language.

Sara
’s suddenly in the doorway again, hair down, looking a bit more relaxed. “I told him you’d feel this way,” she tilts her head in a friendly way. “Exploited. Objectified.” She’s holding a drink, something amber colored, fat square ice cubes suspended in it. “For a guy who’s been through so much, sometimes he lacks basic empathy. I’ll drive you home, if you like.”

“
Come on,” Gus shoots Sara a side-eyed sort of glare, “you’re beautiful, Grace.”

“
I’m beautiful when you prop and pose and light and wig me, you mean,” I say.

He snorts.
“Isn’t that what women feel they have to do? Aren’t they always ripping out their body hair and applying make-up and paying hundreds of dollars to have their hair color changed? Who the fuck cares! We see what we want to see anyway, Grace, and I’m not talking about vanity.”

“
I wouldn’t know,” I say, even though I know I sound petulant.

Sara takes a sip of her drink.
“Come on, Grace, let’s talk in the other room while the
artiste
has his tantrum.”

I shake my head at the way they can speak so openly, if not a little unkindly, about each other in front of each other. My parents always spoke in barbed hints and laced statements that could easily be denied when accused.

She leads me to what is like a living room, though it resembles more of a fancy wine-cave, with a skylight made out of plastic bottles full of water that pull in light and look vaguely like lit bulbs.

“
Normally I’d be the first one to tell you to tell him to go fuck himself,” she says cheerily, as if we’re talking about picnics and puppies. “But here’s the thing,” now she drops her voice to a whisper. “He’s sick. I think serious sick, though he’s trying to keep it from me. It’s hard to tell under all that ink, but he’s not looking well. I think it’s something he got when he was using.”

I
’m struck dumb by the knowledge that he’s sick but hasn’t once asked me for a healing.

“
He’s not going to ask.” She anticipates me, then finishes her drink. “And I don’t want to beg.”

“
Of course I’ll help him.”

“
Then let him use your photos in the show.”

Confusion thunks down, a heavy curtain between us.
“Don’t you want me to
heal
him?”

She frowns.
“He’s been looking a long time to finish this project, Grace. I’m not sure he’s got a lot of give left in him after this.” Sara tucks a hank of blond hair behind her perfect ear.

“
You’re saying he doesn’t want to be healed?”

As if he can hear us, which seems unlikely, Gus makes a frustrated groan from the other room, then there
’s a sound of something crumpling and being smashed, as though with a fist.

“
I’m saying I don’t think he
can
be healed.”

I realize she
’s not talking about some needle-borne virus, but about Maya, his lost child.

I feel the imperfect edges of coercion and pity scraping against one another inside me.
“Okay, I guess.” My voice sounds thin, unconvinced.

“
Good enough.” She sets her drink on the table. “I’ll tell him, and if you like, I’ll drive you home.”

As we
’re nearing Marly’s apartment, Sara says, “It would be really cool if you’d consider doing a healing as part of the opening of the show. That way, you get something out of it, too.”