Forged in Grace (31 page)

“
I’m sorry, Marly. I wasn’t there for you. I could have told Ma and she would have personally strangled him with her bare hands.”

We
’re both able to laugh then, suddenly.

Marly shrugs and takes a deep, startled breath, pressing two fingers into her belly button.
“Woo, this little girl is kick-boxer.” She rolls down her window, letting in the whoosh of cars driving past on the road, dust spinning up in little vortexes.

“
Do you think I killed Gus?” I am in need of some reassurance.

Marly bites her lip.
“I don’t know, Grace. Your power is the first thing in years that’s really made me feel hope again. But I don’t know. Everything good in my life has always been tinged. I’ll never get free of Loser unless I pack up and move to the other side of the world in the middle of the night.”

“
Let me see the other bruise, on your chest,” I say.

She looks warily at me, at my hands.

“Don’t worry, I won’t touch it. I just want to see.”

Marly yanks down the tank to reveal more bruises, livid and dark.
“He dragged you to an alley, and poked you?”

“
Yes, people came walking by, and I sort of snapped out of it. I started walking away from him.”

“
I thought he had you backed up against a wall?”

“
Grace, fuck, do you think I’m making this up? Holy shit.” She starts to cry again, big gulping sobs.

“
No, no, I’m sorry. I’m not doubting you, I’m trying to figure out what he wants, where he’s coming from. What does he want with a baby anyway?”

“
He doesn’t. I don’t think he gives a shit about her. He wants me. Or the idea of me. He hates rejection. Don’t all men?”

I remember suddenly Marly saying about Bryce when we were girls,
“He acts like he’s my slave-owner, not my stepdad.”

“
I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to do,” Marly says in a whisper. Her shirt is still pulled down, revealing the dark bruises, her eyes dark.
Grace, I hate
him.
“I’m seven and a half months pregnant and Loser’s got money. He’s resourceful, he grew up here, and he knows this town like he built it.”

I think of the tall, dark man from the wedding Polaroid, the air of possession in his arms as they encircled Marly
’s waist like a shackle. “You could go back to Drake’s Bay for awhile.”

“
Fuck no,” she says. “Besides, he knows my gram’s address.”

“
What about Drew’s?”

“
He followed me there. Drew’s sleeping with a baseball bat by his bedside.”

Marly looks at me as though we are soldiers heading off to war. She plants a hand on my shoulder and I am rocked into a memory.
Strong shoulders flexing beneath a white shirt—the hard taste of vodka and juice still stinging my mouth. Duran Duran playing “Rio.”

“
Gotta let yourself go,” Bryce saying. “You’re not little girls anymore.”

Marly stepping between me and him.
“Go home, Grace. He’s had too much to drink.”

My vision blurs at the edges. I may not have protected her then, but now, I finally can.

Chapter Thirty

I feel swimmy, high, adrenaline on full tilt, though I haven
’t consumed a drop of alcohol. “We need to subdue him first,” I hear myself say. “Can’t just slap a hand on his face and hope it knocks him out.”

Marly nods, though she is too encumbered to move quickly, and me—there
’s no guarantee of what I can do.

“
I have pepper spray,” she fidgets with her purse as though she’s about to withdraw it. “And it’s not like we have to break in, Grace. He’ll let us in when he sees it’s me. He’ll think I’m coming to talk.”

“
Okay, then,” I say, before I lose my nerve. And we get in her car and drive.

We park and walk four residential blocks. The streets are lit by yellow halogen lamps, but there
’s also a nearly-full moon. Its bold light makes me feel bolstered, sanctioned. Marly points to his condo, one square box among many in a beige world of homogenous residences.

“
This could have been my life,” Marly whispers, her face a portrait of disgust. “I should be in that kitchen right now making dinner, then go spread my legs for him. I can’t
believe
he thought he could get away with what he did to me.”

The guilt surges through me again. If only I hadn
’t healed away the evidence. But we didn’t know. Nobody could have known.

“
Let’s do it soon, before I chicken out.” My palms have begun to ache with heat.

“
Damn straight,” she agrees, and the toss of her hair is so familiar it’s like we’re fifteen again.

Simultaneously, we take a deep breath.

Marly repeats her lines, “I’ll say we’re here to talk—that I brought you as my friend and witness. That will put him on best behavior. And you?”

I choke a little on my own saliva, cough, and answer,
“I’ll ask for a glass of water, say I got too much sun today. He’ll take one look at me and have a hard time refusing, right?”

Marly pats her purse.
“Let’s go.” She’s always one step ahead of me.

I catch up to her, walk beside her until we
’re on his porch and she jams her finger into the doorbell. There’s the glow of a TV behind blinds, signs of life. Marly folds her hands over her belly. She looks like a Jehovah’s Witness come to warn Loser of his ultimate doom.

“
Hey, what’s his real name?” it occurs to me to ask.

But the door is already opening a crack, then wider when the person doing so sees who is there, and Marly is moving forward, all business.
“Alan,” she says simply.

My brain goes on tilt for a second.
Alan
is a professor’s name, a man of letters, a kind man. It doesn’t register with this controlling man of violent temper.

“
Marly, what are you doing here this late?”

“
I came to talk. This is Grace.” She says my name with an emphasis that tells me it’s not the first time I’ve been mentioned.

The man who peers out of the door to look at me with wide, concerned eyes is a tired, rumpled-looking version of Mr. Tall, Dark and Handsome from the wedding picture. He
’s in a gray tee-shirt and plaid pajama pants. Even at this distance I can smell the yeast-tang of beer, and see its pull in the tilt of his eyelids. My heart is thrusting itself at my rib cage painfully and I am sure that at any minute my hands will begin to steam or smoke.

But then Marly makes a wincing expression and grips her low belly.
“I’m either going to piss on your doorstep,” she says through a deep breath, “Or you’re letting us in.”

Alan steps back, shaking his head and motions for us to come in with a resigned grimace that says he feels forced to do so.

How do you like it?
I think.

Inside it is a guy
’s apartment in every way. Bulky black furniture, no pictures or decorations, except a poster of football star Peyton Manning and a mysterious red tulip in a vase on one end table near the TV. Cast off work clothes, big yellow boots, dark green, and soiled cargo pants sit in piles at the base of a staircase, as if he undresses there and then goes to bed naked.

Marly does make a beeline for the bathroom, leaving me standing in the living room of the guy who once knocked me down to the hard cement floor of a parking garage and then beat the shit out of my best friend. Should I thank him for waking up my talents, or curse him for all that followed? If he recognizes me from the garage, he doesn
’t show it—but then again, it was dark; I could have been anyone.

You have some fucking nerve
, I think. But what I say is, “Can I please have a glass of water?”

His face is unshaven, and the circles around his eyes are immensely dark, like he hasn
’t slept in weeks. He looks at me like he hasn’t heard me right, like this whole moment is too strange for words, before finally nodding and heading off to the kitchen.

My hands are so hot they
’re beading up with sweat. As I watch Alan move with masculine grace through his kitchen, fetching me water, it hits me: this is all on me. I have to do this by myself. It’s only fair. Marly’s purse is on the edge of the couch. I slide my hand in, relieved to feel the tiny canister of pepper spray easily among lipsticks, wallet and keys. I clutch it in my hand and then lean into the couch, so he can’t see that hand.

He walks back toward me, glass out, as Marly emerges from the bathroom, red-eyed and grim. And that is when time enters a distorted vortex. My hand rises and hits the spray nozzle. The glass of water in his hand catapults up into the air, lands on the entryway tile and shatters as he shouts,
“What the fuck!” Stumbling backwards, he cuts himself on glass shards, hopping on one foot as he grabs at it with his hands.

Marly takes this chance to shove him down to the hard floor of his entryway, his head thudding painfully against the tiles.
“How do you like it now, Fucker?” She straddles him, a move that looks obscene as he bucks beneath her. But she’s got thirty pounds of baby weight on her and she keeps him pinned.

I run around behind his head, slap my hot hands down onto his chest thinking how much I want to make him feel what he caused Marly, how much he needs to pay. He is now the entire locus of all the evil perpetuated on both of us, a stand-in for Bryce who deserves this all on his own.

“What the fuck are you doing, you crazy fucking bitch?” he screams. And I don’t know if he means me or Marly.

“
Payback, you asshole. You’re signing the divorce papers tonight, and this custody agreement that says you get jack shit where rights to this baby is concerned.”

My serpent is a dragon filled with fury. It runs amuck, streaking through Alan
’s strong body, sniffing out hurts. Everywhere it finds one: old broken bones in his elbow and rib, an ulcer in his stomach, something much deeper inflicted by someone much bigger and older on him. It magnifies the pain, and ripples of this travel backwards and through my body, waking up pain in me, too.
The harsh rip of fire over new flesh. Skin stripped away, oozing fluid. Stitches and incisions that burn and itch.
The quick burn of a finger into my most private skin.
Marly’s eyes wide and scared, candle in her hand. “No, oh no, Grace,” she’s saying. “You were supposed to take me, too.”

The three of us complete a circuit I can
’t break. I want to pull away, but I am locked in place. Alan is screaming his agony, Marly is yelling words I can’t make out at him, then punching her fists into his stomach. Pain is enlarging in me—big waves like nothing I’ve ever felt before, gripping, deeply gouging. “I never touched you in that garage. I never beat you,” he’s crying.

“
I saw you.” Her whole body is shaking. “
I saw you
!”

“
It wasn’t me!” he says. “It wasn’t me. Ah fuck, did you just piss on me?” Dark fluid is spreading through the fabric of Alan’s pants, beneath Marly.

The waves of pain aren
’t stopping, but Marly has stopped her limb-flailing frenzy and now I understand what these waves are, what I’m feeling as it travels through Alan like a conduit from her to me. Worse, I feel the truth in his words, beneath my hands. The pain is receding and in its ebb I’m left with the knowledge that we have made a terrible mistake. He’s telling the truth.

I wrench my hands off him and sink back onto my knees, vaguely aware of a sharp gnaw of pain, most likely a shard of the broken glass.

“Oh no, oh fuck,” Marly cries. She scrambles backwards off Alan, who sits up, rubbing his chest, cautiously touching his right eye, which is now completely swollen shut.

“
What is she talking about being attacked?” he says. “You tell me right now or I call the fucking police!”

Marly clutches her belly, groaning.

“We were attacked in her parking garage, six months ago. Marly was beaten badly.” I sit there, my hands stinging and hot. If Alan didn’t attack Marly, then who the hell was it? A rape averted? A mugging gone bad?

Marly
’s moaning mounts; Alan heaves himself to his feet, stumbles, looking dizzy. I’m expecting him to come after me, reach for my throat. Instead he hobbles off to the kitchen, pulls an ice pack from the freezer. Marly has begun to whine and cry, and bloody fluid is leaking from between her legs onto Alan’s beige carpet. “The baby…I think she’s…oh God!”

Alan drops his ice pack and looks at me.

“Call the paramedics.” I don’t know how I manage to be clear-headed all of a sudden, but I am. “This baby is not ready yet.”

“
No…hospital!” Marly shrieks.

“
Do it!” I command, despite all the explaining we’ll have to do when they get here.

He nods, turns to find his phone, then back to me,
“Help her!” he says, soft but urgent.

I come up close to Marly but my hands are still achy-hot in a way that scares me. Another contraction and she groans like an opera singer warming up.
“Can’t you just take away the pain?” she begs.

Can’t I? Can I?
“I don’t want to hurt the baby. I’m afraid!”

Marly tosses her head back, eyes clenched tight.
“She wants out of me. She knows I’m evil,” she cries, tears coursing down her bright red cheeks. “And so do you.”

“
No, it’s not true. You’re not responsible for everything that happened.”

“
Grace, please, Grace,” Marly begs. “It hurts!”

I move so I
’m facing between Marly’s legs, but I’m not about to reach in and pull off her underpants, daring any contact that could injure her.
Where are the fucking paramedics?

Marly arches and wails through another contraction that lasts minutes. To my surprise, Alan comes over to Marly, drops to her side, tries to smooth her hair out of her face, but she wrenches her head away.
“I swear to you,” he says anyway, “I did not mean to hurt you the other day. I’m sorry I grabbed your arm. I’m sorry if I got pissed, but I would never beat you. I am not that kind of guy. And we both know this is my goddamn kid—”

“
Grace, damn it,” Marly howls. “Hands on me. Please, this pain, I’m not…it’s going to kill me.” Her panting is perilously near to hyperventilating.

“
I thought labor was supposed to happen, you know, slow,” Alan says, running his hands through his hair.

I thought so too. What if Marly’s right—the baby wouldn’t tolerate what we were doing, inflicting pain. What have we done?

Marly suddenly sits bolt upright, turns onto all fours. Her sudden silence terrifies me. “She’s coming,” she says in a gulp, and then begins to pant and moan again. “Grace, please!”

“
Help her,” Alan says, his voice small and choked. I feel suddenly the enormity of this for him, that he does feel some responsibility for this baby.

I flip up the soft grey folds of her dress, pull down the flimsy black fabric of her underwear with a terrible feeling of taboo, of looking into the most intimate part of Marly, the source of so many of her wounds, a place that should always have been private, given only by her permission.