Forged in Grace (32 page)

“Grace, please!” Marly cries, and this time, her voice is so plaintive I lean toward her but as my hands reach for her a surge of heat and pain so immense causes me to cry out. “I can’t!”

“
You’re punishing me, aren’t you?” she shrieks. “Because I set…you…on fire!” She grasps my hand, an electric shock passing between us. I wait and when nothing more happens, I set both of my hands gingerly atop her low back. The pain in my hands rumbles down to a soft simmer and then dissipates, and I feel as though I’m dipping them into warm honey, though I become aware of her agony, which is a burning, squeezing sensation, ever tighter. And that’s when I understand: the baby has the cord wrapped around her neck.

“
Marly, you can’t take any breaks. You can’t rest now. She needs to come out
right now
. She’s very close—I can see her.”

Alan cranes in behind me, peering over my shoulder, his breath hot on my neck. He inhales sharply when he sees the top of the baby
’s head, her dark hair.

Marly obeys and makes a determined warrior cry, half shout, half groan. I draw up my courage and move my hands into catching position, as the top of the baby
’s head becomes her tiny scrunched face, and a shoulder, and with a last effort, Marly births the entire baby in a gush of fluid into my arms.

“
Is she okay?” Marly cries.

Even looking at the baby, I don
’t know. Her color is purplish, she makes no sound.

“
Is she?” Marly cranes toward her but she’s too weak to move.

And then the child makes a bleating wail that floods me with an emotion I cannot name, tears and giddiness overtaking me. I turn to Alan, whose expression, even with the swollen eyes, is of a man who has just found God, or been saved at sea.
“Take her,” I say, handing him the baby, “but don’t move from where you are. Marly still has to deliver the placenta. Hold the baby close to your chest until then. Keep telling her to push.”

He doesn
’t even flinch as I pass the slick baby into his arms.

“
Come here, Grace,” Marly says. Her voice is a hoarse whisper, scraped of all energy. Its weakness alarms me. I come up close to her face. “I need to tell you the truth,” she says.

“
She’s bleeding a lot,” Alan says, sounding scared. “Is it normal?”

Marly grips my hands and pulls them to her face. She feels cool. My serpent is too spent to do anything useful now. She pulls down her shirt, revealing the bruise on her clavicle she claimed Alan made in the alley.
“I did this to myself. I had that old urge to hurt myself again, like when I used to cut.” She exhales a soppy sounding breath. “It was no accident. The fire.”

“
You didn’t plan it Marly, let’s not dwell on it now.”

She shakes her head. Hair is plastered to her white face.
“I did! That was the whole point of the meeting, Grace! I did plan it. After I saw you kiss Bryce, when what was evil to me was something exciting to you, I hated you.” She’s panting between words and I’m afraid she’ll hyperventilate. “I thought if I gave you a real experience with guys our age, it would even us out somehow. But then we nearly got arrested, and your mom said we couldn’t see each other—and I slit my wrists. The minute I came home from the hospital, I made plans. I wanted us to go together. I had every intention, Grace. We would both burn up in that fucking tree house. I fucked it up. I couldn’t even die the way I wanted to.”

There
’s a loud pound on the door. Marly closes her eyes and goes very still. I leap away from her as if she is death itself.

Chapter Thirty-One

I’ve forgotten that I have Marly’s cell phone in my pocket until it vibrates insistently. I see that it’s Drew. No one has told him about the baby, nor can he know yet about the events of last night. I really don’t want to be the one to tell him about Alan, about how wrong we were.

“
Drew, it’s Grace.”

He makes no pretension that he wants to talk to me.
“Is everything ok?”

Can I really leave him hanging? Pretend I know nothing?

“Drew, don’t freak out, okay, but Marly went into early labor late last night. The baby was born. Marly’s having a little surgery, a blood transfusion, and the baby’s in the NICU.” Alan is parked there, the only one allowed with the baby, who is nestled into an incubator, too small.

Drew gasps, then it almost sounds like he
’s crying. “Why didn’t you call me?” I don’t have to answer for him. “He’s there, isn’t he. She let that asshole come, but didn’t call me?”

“
It’s not that simple, Drew. But I need to let her tell you the rest. I’ll have her call you when she’s out of surgery.”

Drew is silent a long moment. I think we
’ve lost the call when he suddenly speaks again, “Actually, Grace, I need to talk to you. Can you get away for an hour? I’ll pick you up, we can go get coffee.”

“
I’d really rather not leave if I don’t have to.”

“
Well that’s just it, Grace. The cops have contacted me, too, about that guy who died in my cottage, since it’s on my property. I think that you and I should get our details straight, so it doesn’t seem like there was anything out of the ordinary going on.”

“
My friend,” I want to correct. Not “that guy.”
And there was so very much out of the ordinary going on.
I look at the clock. 5:00 a.m. Marly surely won’t miss me for several more hours.

“
I’ll meet you out front in twenty.”

When we hang up, I think more on his words. The cops want to talk with him
, too.
Which suggests that they also want to talk with me. Which would make sense, except I haven’t heard a word from them. Marly is the keeper of all messages. Clients call her phone and she passes on the information to me. Or does she? Would she keep a thing like the cops calling me to herself?

It
’s only as I’m making my way out, toward the elevators, that the fact of being in a hospital hits me like a cold hand on the back. The obliterating smell of antiseptic, the monotonous beep-beeping of monitors, nurses and doctors in scrubs of all colors. In my memory everything was gray and cold, stinging or burning, a world of torture.

And yet.

As I step out onto the street, desert’s morning air already promising a heat that will make my sweater superfluous, my very cells are buzzing with a realization. I am alive. I’m
alive!

The sun is a hint at the dark line of the horizon when Drew pulls up. He pops the lock. I slide into his car. He
’s already showered and smelling of a slightly-too-sweet cologne that makes my nostrils twitch. Hair is gelled back on his head, skin freshly shaved. He’s dressed in a button-up shirt and khakis. Me, on the other hand: my soft cotton pants, thankfully black, are still crusted with dried fluid and blood. “So they’re okay, baby’s going to make it?” His voice rises an octave.

“
That’s what they say. She’ll need to stay in NICU awhile, to make sure her lungs are working, but otherwise okay.”

The world past the car is a blur of lights, making my sleep-deprived brain feel dizzy.

Drew bites down on his lip, the vein in his right temple popping out. “I can’t believe she let that fucker come to the birth,” he mutters to himself, as though I’m not in the car at all. Then he slams the flat of his hand against the steering wheel. “Fuck!” The car swerves and suddenly, I’m wide awake.

“
Hey, take it easy,” I aim to sound soothing. “Don’t worry—there’s no big reunion on the horizon, ok? I shouldn’t be speaking for her, though.”

“
I’ve spent five years trying to have a relationship with Marly. I have given her ALL of me, made myself available, taken care of her when she’s falling apart and off her meds and thinking a little too hard about razor blades and bottles of pills. I have put up with more than you can ever know, and for what?” He flings a hand in the air like he’s slapping a phantom cheek. “She marries another guy, gets pregnant, and keeps me dangling on a chain for whenever he doesn’t play nice. Fuck that!”

We could easily play a trump game here. I know
exactly
what it feels like to help Marly stay off the edge, to suffer betrayal at the realization that I was not the only one for her. “I think you’re forgetting who you’re talking to.” I hug myself against the cool air. It’s then I realize we are driving out of town, away from any coffee shops or restaurants that I know of. I start talking fast. “Drew, I think a lot is going to change now that the baby’s here. Marly’s ready to get things figured out in her life.”
She’s unburdened herself of all her dark secrets; wreaked revenge, even if on the wrong guy.

“
Oh yeah, she’s going to have so much time for me now that she’s a mother.”

I
’m struck by the petulance in Drew’s voice. Certainty docks in my mind. My hands, so cold for the past few hours, begin to feel hot again. The sun starts to edge up from the lip of the desert, paint splashed across a canvas. “I was really looking forward to that cup of coffee,” I say softly.

Drew says nothing, keeps driving as though I haven
’t spoken.

My adrenaline is throbbing, tingles of an almost electrical nature sparking in my muscles.
Can I jump out of the car?
But there’s nothing around, and this is the desert.
Can I overtake him at the wheel?
“It was you in the parking garage, wasn’t it?” I want to slap him. But there’s the more pressing realization that I’ve got to get out of this car.

“
Drew, listen to me, I won’t say a thing. Just turn around and take me back to the hospital, okay?”

Drew makes a low moan, which I realize is actually a sob.
“I didn’t mean to hurt her. I wasn’t going to. Just wanted to scare her. Wanted her to give him up. But then there was you—I didn’t know what to do about you.”

I want to soothe him just long enough to get out of the car, but I
’m afraid of what will happen if I touch him. I don’t know if I can reign in the storm of rage building in me.

“
I just loved her so much.”

His sudden use of the past tense alarms me.
“She loves you, too! Don’t worry. She doesn’t have to know, ok? I won’t tell. You can start over! It’s going to be ok. Just pull over.”

He
’s crying, and as he tries to shake his head and wipe tears from his eyes, he swerves into the other lane, a truck oncoming. With a scream, I grab the wheel and swerve it back, but I overcompensate and the car is going too fast, off the shoulder, and straight for an electrical pole.

I am smacked into a dream, my body gone from me, way down below. I am floating on a placid lake, smooth and content. What comes to me here in a shimmering, agonizing moment of clarity is this:
I wanted it. When Marly leaned in with her candle, tilted it toward me with intention, I wanted the purge of heat, the catharsis of undoing
. My mother is suddenly next to me. “Come home to me, Grace. I’m waiting,” she says. “But not for long.” She reaches out for my hand. “Don’t touch me, Ma!” I shout. “It’s all gone dark.”

The face frowning at me is young, female, framed in crisp blonde hair pulled back into a tight bun. Something silver glitters at her chest. It takes me a minute to realize she
’s dressed in a highway patrol uniform, and that a cruiser is parked behind her, its lights flashing.

At first she is a silent movie speaking to me with concern on her face; I can
’t hear anything. Behind her appears another face, also female. That woman is holding instruments that she brings toward me, black, silver. Something is wrapped around my arm, tight, squeezing, and something cold is slid up against the heat of my chest. It’s only then I become aware of the sound of my heart pumping as sure as ever.

The rest of the sounds follow: voices chattering, a radio fritzing with static and stern voices, cars whooshing past.

“Minor concussion,” the paramedic says to the cop. “Think she’s okay.”

They frown in another direction.
“He’s gonna need surgery,” they say, and I remember that they mean Drew. I remember that I have been a fool over and over again.