Forged in Grace (28 page)

I hold back sobs as Marly speaks for me. As the ambulance shuts its doors and eats gravel on its way out, suddenly Drew is standing in the doorway to my little studio, panting as though he ran here. I have an empty feeling that this might be the last time the three of us stand here together.

I think of Sara, how I will have to tell her.

“
What happened?” he asks. His brow softens a tiny bit at the sight of Marly, standing, not in any kind of obvious labor.

“
I think.” My voice halts in my throat. “I think I just killed my friend.”

Every second I sit answering the officer
’s questions out in Drew’s yard, is a worse agony than the last. I all but feel my mother’s life draining away, my healing gift reducing to a faint trickle. My eyes keep trying to fold in on themselves, and I close my eyes and try to look grieved rather than near passing out. I keep my arms folded across my chest, my hands tucked beneath my armpits. My clothes are stuck to me with sweat.

Marly stands off to the side of me, talking to an officer, a woman with acne-scarred skin who sizes Marly up. The officer is frowning at her like she
’s one of those high school girls who made school a living hell for the not-pretty. In a way, I think, she did. I can’t help myself, even now as I look at the officer’s acne scars and I think: what a shame; I could heal those.

I don
’t see the point in lying, so I tell officer Bailey, the one who is droning on at me, as simply as I can that I do a form of natural healing that is like massage.

“
No, I’m not certified in the state of Nevada,” I answer truthfully. “I’m not certified anywhere.”

His questions are banal, run of the mill, how I knew Gus, if he paid me money, if sexual favors were exchanged. I try not to laugh, sound caustic, but I
’m near ready to come apart with exhaustion.

The officers finish near the same time, say they
’ll be in touch, and then Marly strides toward me, as though we’re going to share some kind of post-mortem. But I turn away. I turn away from the hope in her eyes that everything can ever go back to how it was.

Running away. You’re running away.
The accusation is in my head, and I’m already defending myself. Yes, I’m running away, toward the one person I should never have left. My mother.

The cab pulls up to the blue two-story house with the red brick walkway, and I see with dismay that the shrubs have shot up and sprouted unruly feelers that grope anyone daring to walk past. The red geraniums spill out in unchecked profusion, choking out once sprightly little marigolds.

I debated calling first, but that felt too much like asking permission.

As I stand on the sidewalk, clutching my travel bag, the front door opens and a tall blonde woman dressed in a pink jogging suit emerges. She jumps when she sees me and clutches the gold cross at her neck as though to ward off a demon.
“You startled me,” she says. “I didn’t see anyone there.”

“
Sorry,” I say, sure that it’s more than my simple presence that startled her; I’ve left off a wig or scarf today.

“
You’re Grace,” she says matter-of-factly.

So my reputation precedes me. How Ma must tell people about me:
Grace, my burned child. Don’t jump when you see her, she can’t help how she looks.

“
Doreen.” She points at herself. “She’s sleeping now,” she says, pointing at the window that is Ma’s bedroom.

“
That’s okay, I won’t bother her.” Although I have every intention of doing just that.

She wiggles her fingers at me in a semblance of a wave and hurries off to her car. It
’s only as she squeals away that I see the magnetic Hospice sign on her passenger side door and suddenly every footstep feels heavier.

The screen door squeaks in pain when I open it. It was my job to apply the WD-40 to all the hinges in the household, getting up on a chair for those I can
’t reach otherwise because Ma’s weight has ruined her knees. I enter the foyer and recoil from a distinctly musty stench. It’s cloyingly hot inside; the fans scattered in different rooms are all turned off. Bags of garbage not cinched tight are piled from kitchen to living room, disgorging food particles and paper, flies buzzing in obsessive circles. Those that are closed—and I can only guess the Hospice folks are responsible for those—have been gnawed open by the opportunistic cats. One of them darts in front of my foot and without much thought I try to kick it but I miss. There is suddenly nothing cute about these fuzzy little scavengers. I suspect they’d gnaw on one of our corpses if hungry enough.

The veil that covers the mirror in the entryway is hanging down, suspended by only one tack. I skip past it, refusing to look.

The walls of the house feel like big wet lungs around me and smells like something much worse.
Did I really spend my life here?

Magazines litter the dining room table; what looks like the entire contents of Ma
’s old art supplies closet are clustered on the couch; dishes are stacked in the sink, crusted with half-eaten soups and buzzing with flies. Tears climb up my eyes but stick, gathering in my head, making it pound.

I walk as quietly down the hall as I can, not so that she can sleep, but to keep my presence a secret. But it
’s impossible to do this quietly. The Diet Coke cans are all over the hallway, kicked aside, many of them crushed, as though by people who had to get to Ma in a hurry, with no care for what looks like random garbage.

Her bedroom door is slightly ajar, and the telltale flicker of television draws bizarre shadows in the crease. I
’m afraid to look in.

“
I see your shadow.” Ma’s voice rents the stillness. I inhale and push the door open. Past the piles of boxes and brown paper, and several taller hills of clothing, she lies in bed with the covers pulled up to her chin, looking unnervingly small beneath her mounded covers. Sweat trickles down my brow. It must be eighty degrees in here.

I make my own path, skirting as much as possible, careful not to step on anything, and sit at the edge of the bed, taking in her features. Her cheeks are sunken. Her color is hard to assess in the dim room, but it looks ashy.

“You lied to me about getting better, didn’t you?”

She sighs, looks up at the ceiling.
“I didn’t want you to come rushing home like this, Gracie. The doctors don’t really know how much time I have left, but I knew I wasn’t going to waste it on pointless chemotherapy and surgery, or make you give up any more happiness.” She reaches her hand up to my face, a gesture she hasn’t made since I was a girl, and strokes my rough cheek. “You look different,” she says.

I laugh.

“It’s not in your features,” she says with a snort of impatience. “Come hug me.”

“
I can’t,” I say. “I can’t even touch you. I’m a danger, it’s all gone dark…”

“
Hush.” My mother holds out her arms to me. “You can’t hurt me.”

That
’s what Gus said, what I believed, but she’s frail, so close to death. Her belly is swollen with the common bloating of her illness—though I can tell by the slack hang of flesh on her legs and arms that she’s lost too much weight too quickly to be good.

“
I’m going to get a cool washcloth,” I say, though I’m not sure for whom, and move toward her bathroom.

“
No, Gracie, please…don’t,” she calls after me. I don’t hear the true desperation in her voice until I’ve walked straight into the center of it. I never, ever went into her bathroom—the only off limits room in the whole house.

From the ceiling hang dozens of little mesh baskets bleeding lipsticks and eyeliners, like bulging tumors. The edges of the room are piled high with crumpled tissues and toilet paper, dark with yellowish-orange discharge, rising in such height, that if I could actually reach the window to open it, they would spill out like moths into the yard. The toilet bowl is stained a disturbing reddish brown, and caked in layers of grime I don
’t want to linger on. The shower holds nothing but bottles and random trash, so that it can’t be opened without danger.

The only clean things in the room are a stack of baby wipes. I pull several from the box and pour cold water on them, the tears building to a staccato throb in my head. The once white sink is trashed, and iridescent gold and blue eye shadow glimmers from a hundred tiny cracks, like a vein of crystal.

I left her to this.
This reality is a punch to my diaphragm, bringing me to my knees. I left her alone to drown in her own refuse.
What kind of daughter does that?

When I emerge, stifling the tears, she
’s staring at me with wide eyes, mouth drawn, sorrow etching what’s left of her once plump cheeks.
How have we spent all these years behaving as if this is normal?

“
I’m serious, Gracie, come over here and sit with me.” She holds out her arms and the child in me can’t resist; I walk there slowly, making my way around detritus on the floor, sit beside her, suddenly aware of the sweet-rot unwashed scent of her, the reality of how rarely she has left this bed since I’ve been gone. I want to say so much. She takes my hand, and the burning center inside me that has been throbbing since I left Gus’s lifeless body suddenly stills. My serpent is at once awake, however, and begins to move through her. Within seconds I travel the sorrows of my mother’s body. I fold into pockets of flesh and feel, beneath them, the cutting remarks my grandfather used to carve her down to bone, until she was so empty and hollow that the only thing to fill her up again was food. I slide through the lesser scars of appendix removal and a broken humerus. Through the runnels of the two kidney stones she passed, and through the memory of a baby that came very close to term—the older sibling I might have had—I am tossed into memories of my own, surfacing like sea monsters in dark water.

The time I slammed my hand in the car door, palm and back of hand the color of wine grapes for several weeks; the time the rope swing at the lake had cut so deeply into my shin that I needed stitches; a case of pneumonia so bad they had had to put me in an oxygen tent. But as my own memories flash through me, I realize I
’m feeling them
through
Ma. They are
her
memories of my pain, seared deep into her very cells. I press on, determined to make it to where her illness hunkers. There’s a momentary resistance, like passing through a thin, permeable membrane before I reach the cancer, a dark vortex at the center of her.

I feel the cancerous pebbles, tendrils of sticky sludge holding them down, the perfect manifestation of dark feelings turned inward—self-loathing, disappointment, hatred, fear, disbelief that a loving God could have let such a thing happen to her beautiful child. In the dying walls of her womb, I have a vision of… myself: a shriveled, wounded child, fighting for breath, tortured by pain. I am seared with small hot pins to the heart, an emotional pain that
’s worse than anything I have ever experienced bodily.

I try to pull away from that feeling, but it dogs me, makes me feel weak and tired. I try to begin the work of removing the cancer stones, but the energy rebounds and I am catapulted backwards, my hands repulsed from Ma
’s body as though I’ve been pushed.

“
My ability is gone,” I moan aloud. “I can’t heal anymore.”