Forged in Grace (27 page)

With each floor I pass on my way up to the apartment in the elevator, I feel as though I
’m rising through layers of understanding. Truth walks off the elevator with me. Marly is a vault of secrets, each one worse than the last. I tick them off on my fingers, those she’s unburdened herself of: the baby, the bracelet, the relationship with Drew, her marriage. The fire.
What more does she hold?

A decision makes itself when I walk into my room and see the edge of my black suitcase poking out from under my bed just a notch, as though it moved of its own accord to point me homeward.
Ma is too proud to ask for my help, and I’ve been a fool. If there’s anything left of my ability to heal, I’ve got to save it for my mother
.

I
’m well-packed when Marly finally comes home. She’s sweaty and smells of the metallic whip of wind. “Are you…leaving?” Her voice is a tight rope.

“
I need to see Ma, to help her, if I still can.”

Her eyes dart from the suitcase to me several times, an idea working its way round her brain.
“I’m coming with you.”

It takes a painful effort to act civil with her.
“No, don’t be silly. You were right—it’s not necessary for you to come.” I look out at the hazy sky through her window. On her balcony, her pots of bright geraniums are folded in on themselves, a day’s heat away from death.

She sets her mouth in a hard line.
“I want to.”

I want to reassure her that I
’m not going home forever, that I’ve built something here, something that belongs to me. I have a purpose, even friends. Going home is just to make sure I have nothing to regret when it comes to my mother, but I can’t say the words. I don’t owe her anything. “I need to go alone.”

“
Fine,” she says, in that tight way I remember from girlhood arguments. “But Grace. You’ve got a client tomorrow. You’re not going to leave someone hanging, right?”

That is exactly what I
’m going to do, if my electric hands are indicative of anything.

“
Marly,” I say. “Something’s happening to me, maybe to the healing. It’s changing. I hurt some people today, in the mini-mart, just by touching them. And these were light, tiny, nothing touches.” I find her eyes, try to gaze in as accusing a way as I’m capable.

She tilts her head back, gives me a wary eye.
“What am I supposed to say, Grace? Don’t give in to the dark side? I don’t even know how or why it works in you at all.”

It’s all because of you!
I want to shout. The miraculous and the mundane, the healing and the darkness.

“
It’s like I was a live wire, and everyone who came into contact with me felt it, ok, and those were minor kinds of contact… If there’s anything left, it’s for Ma.”

Marly folds her hands over her belly, and the gesture makes her look so self-righteous I want to slap her.
“Your client is Gus.” She still can’t keep her contempt for him out of her voice, even now, even when he’s nearly a saint in comparison.

Truth sinks in further.
“You’d like it if I hurt him, then, wouldn’t you? You’ve never liked him.”

Her lips roll back as though she
’s going to swear at me, but she gets them under control, shakes her head. “You act like I’m some kind of monster.” I try to ignore the look of hurt on her face. Then, softer: “I would take it back if I could.”

My body feels suddenly heavy. I want so badly to lie down somewhere cool. I
’m not going to let her work out her conscience now, not yet.
Why now, Gus?
“Well then. I’ll talk to Gus, tell him why I can’t help him. Then I go home to my mother. I’ll take a cab.”

She shakes her head so slightly it looks like a tic.
“I’ll drive. You shouldn’t do another healing alone.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

It’s funny how you can stop viewing something, or someone, as strange after a long enough time. How the sight of Gus’s face is no weirder than looking at Ma’s. Having him here, alone with me in my healing space, feels even more intimate than it did in his odd desert house.

I
’ve asked Marly to wait inside Drew’s house or in the yard.

“
That was really something, you at the show,” he says. “I wish you could have seen yourself the way I saw you.”

I
’m not feeling up for another discussion about how I should be more accepting of myself, and the way I feel today, that empowered version of me is almost a dream. I rub my palms together, consider their pale slender length, except for the thumbs and a tiny reddish scar on the inside of each index finger.

“
So what ails you? Hepatitis?”

He snorts.
“I’ve lived with hepatitis C since I was a teenager, but my liver never could hold up to all the shit I poured into my body. It’s just about worn out. And they won’t let me onto a donor list, though I’ve been sober a long time. There are good people out there who never did anything to their bodies who need organs.”

“
You’re a good person,” I’m quick to point out.

Gus snorts.
“I don’t allow myself those kind of platitudes, Grace.”

“
Do you know that the liver is the only organ in the body that can regenerate itself?” I ask. “Doctor trivia. Picked that up working for one.”

“
I didn’t know that,” he touches the spot atop his shirt where his liver resides. “Why do you think it does that?”

I shrug.
“I bet we’ll figure out in some hundred years or so that pieces of the liver can be transplanted onto other organs and make them grow, too. Who knows.”

“
Or maybe God speaks in metaphors,” Gus says, patting his liver as though it’s a great book he’s holding close.

“
How do you mean?”

“
I don’t know. Seems interesting that the organ meant to filter all the toxic crap we take in should also be the only one that regenerates. You only get one heart, one brain, one stomach, but your crap filter, it’s renewable!” He barks a phlegmy laugh. “I never asked you about your life back home, it just occurred to me,” he says. “It’s like you sprang fully formed from Zeus’s head or something.”

“
Funny you should mention my home.” A heavy sigh escapes me. “I’m going home tomorrow. My mother’s sick.”

“
Oh, I’m sorry. Going for good?”

“
I don’t know.”

Gus looks down at the floor.
“I’m not here so you’ll magically fix me,” he says. You know how you said you see visions of people’s pain when you touch them? Little movies in your mind?”

All too well.

“I was hoping you might be able to help me wake up a few more memories of Maya—really bring ‘em into full relief. She’s slipping away. Some days I can’t even picture her face. It’s a pain I want to feel.”

I have the same reflexive urge to shout
“no!” as I did with those parents in the intensive care unit. “Can I ask why? Is it to punish yourself more? Because I’m not going to help you—”

“
I don’t mean to be rude, Grace, but if you haven’t had a child, you don’t know what it’s like to love someone so much more than yourself. Not in the way that commercials try to sell you. It’s like…”

I
’ve never allowed myself to imagine having a child.

He tilts his head up to the ceiling,
“You love with your cells and organs. You love in a way that has teeth. It’s not just big, it’s an animal thing. So when you lose that child, that animal is forever gnashing those teeth and howling at the moon and starved of the love it felt.”

His voice is thick. I can feel grief collecting inside and around him like static electricity.

“So, if we could wake up a memory of her, that animal in me is going to hurt, probably badly, for awhile. But it’s a worthy hurt.”

The only person I
’ve ever let myself love so fully was Marly, when we were girls, and maybe Adam.

“
I came here today, Gus, only to tell you that I don’t know if I can even try. Something’s…going on, with the healing. It feels wonky.”

“
Define wonky?”

“
I mean, the last few people I touched recoiled like I was delivering an electric charge.”

“
Oh yeah?” He grins.”Touch my hand now.”

“
No,” I clutch my hands to myself.

“
Come on, Grace. Do you think I’m afraid of a little shock?”

“
But what if it’s worse?” I ask.

Gus
’s grin stretches to an “I dare you” smile. In his presence I don’t feel the weight of Marly’s confession, just a sense of lightness that even in my scarred up state, I am enough.

“
Try me, Grace.” He claps his hands together like we’re about to arm wrestle. “Try me. I am not afraid of pain.”

Very slowly, I lower my hands onto his outstretched palms, like that game Marly and I played as girls, where you had to move fast to avoid getting your hands slapped. The penalty for getting hand-slapped was worse; you got a cheek slap, too, and sometimes one of her cheap rings would graze the skin, leave a tiny flesh wound.

As my hands close in on his there’s a ticklish sensation in my palms, one short shock and a crackling sound and then suddenly Gus is laughing and the air smells sharp like just after a rain.

And then I
’m laughing, though it’s ridiculous that I should be able to do so after all that’s happened, but it’s something about Gus—the freedom in him releases something in me.

“
You can’t hurt me, Grace. Or no more than sliding down a slide at the local playground.”

He kicks off his shoes and climbs up onto the table, his weight sinking grooves into the soft pleather.

I touch the tips of my fingers together. No further sparks emit. I take a deep breath. When I close my eyes to let my serpent take over, I find my head full, a cluttered drawer like something in Ma’s bathroom, spilling out caked cosmetics, old and crumbling.
Flame warping wood. Flame seeking skin
.
Marly tilting her candle in
. My hands are so hot I’m afraid to touch him again. I shake my head as though it will settle the debris, and hold in my mind an image of cool, flowing water.

I stay behind his head, place my hands on his chest, one over each lung. It
’s important not to go too directly in sometimes.

“
Hell, your hands are on fire,” he says.

I almost wrench them off, thinking he means it literally, when, without its usual meandering preamble, the serpent yanks me around his body, traveling a red highway of blood cells gone bad.
“It’s not from drugs,” I say softly to myself. It’s not the hepatitis, either. What’s making him sick feels like hot, carbonated water, burbling and rumbling through the veins, aggravating the heart, lying in wait. It hides and lurks. I feel it beneath the veins, in the bones, gathering strength, ready to spread. The word
leukemia
presents itself to me.

It
’s more than I can heal—not all at once, at least. There are no dark tumors to scoop out, no sticky patches of cancer vines to clear away; it’s a molten force that burns through every part of him.

My serpent backs away, but I force myself forward, trying to find the teeth of his memories of Maya. There are ripples of her face—a vague outline, dark curls, small lips, small fingers curling around the tail of a stuffed cat. Small feet in tiny white shoes stumbling over a dirt path: a face with big brown eyes. I go searching for more, past half-carved images of color and light until we land. I see her only for a split second, squatting, and she
’s holding a big old camera, barely able to hold it, photographing the ground, ants marching there. Sunlight filtered through trees.

“
Yes,” he says, takes a big, deep breath and squeezes my hand so tightly I squeal, afraid my fingers will break.
Then I’m reeling backwards and away from him, and it’s Harlan’s face I see, my father—kids around town called him Han Solo, he looked so much like the young Harrison Ford. His dark brown bangs slip over his eyes as he nods at me, “Yes, just like that, darlin’.” I’m standing on a big rock, perched in front of a duck pond, smiling big enough to reveal my latest lost tooth, an enormous gap in the front of my face.

My mother is standing just to the right of him, shading her eyes against the sun and staring off in the distance. She is so beautiful. They love me so much…

Gus gasps, coughs, reaches toward me as though a part of him is caught in my arms, and then makes an alarming dog-like whine. All Gus’s images are blown away like smoke in a fan. I’m being drawn into his body by an incredible vacuum, as though the void of his daughter needs to be filled. I pull my hand out of his, causing a charge of pain to surge through my arms. His body convulses twice, and he heaves as though trying to cough again. He stands up, a sleepwalker barely awakened, and eyes wide, he begins to tilt toward me, but there’s no way I can hold him, and so I stumble out of the way, watching in horror as he hits the floor with a thundering boom, and then goes completely still.

I instantly check for a pulse, but it
’s so weak it’s like listening for a miner at the bottom of a shaft; I can’t be sure I feel it at all. I shout for Marly, “Call 911!” at the same moment that she’s thrusting open the door saying, “What the hell was that?”

“
Oh my god,” she says at the sight of Gus toppled on the floor.

“
It was me; I should never have done this one!” I moan, pacing the room. “I knew something was going bad in me, I knew it.”

“
Grace, no, you can’t do this to yourself—”

I rear back, away from her touch.
“I wasn’t ready. I needed time first. Time. What if it’s gone? My mother needs me, and now what?”

Marly, swollen and heavy, stands staring at me as though she
’s looking for a rope to throw and drag me out of a thrashing sea. Gus’s body is so still I’m afraid to look again for his pulse, afraid to touch him for fear that this force turning dark inside me will finish him off.

“
This is all your fault!” I shout. And I realize I mean everything: The tree house, the fire, bringing me to Vegas, pushing me to heal, betraying my illusion of us, of our perfect bond, a second time.

Marly shakes her head, her eyes wet with tears as she dials 911 on her cell phone.

We are still standing there when the paramedics arrive. I move back to the corner of the room as the men work. A foamy puddle of drool has wet the carpet beneath his mouth. His face is dark purple. CPR is done, then they pull out the awful paddles, and I cringe away, tucking myself almost into the ficus tree, away from the charge of electricity, as though I am a lightning rod and it is another form of fire come to finish me off.

They shout
“clear” and the paddles strike, and before long they’re wagging their heads sadly and wheeling in a stretcher.

I have the terrifying feeling that I won
’t be able to take another breath, and I’m nearly hugging the wall to hold myself upright.

When the outcome is clear, the short, stocky bald paramedic comes back to take a report.
“What happened here?” he asks Marly.

“
It was just a massage,” Marly says, chin up, as though defying him to ask why he was clothed, why there is no massage lotion or sheet to cover him with. “He must have a heart condition.” I suddenly see her in the same stance talking with Officer Markson, thirteen years earlier. Bottle of peach schnapps tossed behind her in the tall grass at the side of the road, breasts thrust in his direction.
“We were just taking a walk, officer. I didn’t throw anything, officer.”

The paramedic looks from me, with my bad thumbs and birdlike frame, to Marly, gravid with pregnancy. He taps a pen against his top teeth, eyes narrowed, as though trying to reconcile the likelihood of either of us giving a massage to the tattooed man now cold in the van.
“We’ve called the police, so stick around.”