Forged in Grace (5 page)

I feel unsteady for a moment, dizzy, then it passes.

Marly’s voice is soft when she speaks again, “Gram was the only one, you know, that I listened to, told things to. That I trusted. Other than you. But I haven’t been able to cry yet.”

Her grandmother was a woman who spoke in hyperbole and hugged tightly. She gave us sips of champagne, made us ice cream sundaes, and let us sleep under the stars. Marly
’s tone suggests she has more to say, but she doesn’t offer and I don’t press it. She stubs out her cigarette at last. “Come on, I want to show you something I found yesterday.”

I hobble after her, back downstairs and inside her grandmother
’s bedroom, which she’s mostly packed up. All the perfume bottles of my memory are gone, the curtains pulled down to show layers of dirt on the window, and the closet is emptied. From an open box she pulls out a thick, dark green album and lays it on the bed. When she opens it, grainy old photos with rounded edges spill out, the kind of miscellaneous family pictures my mother no longer leaves in plain sight. I often wonder if Ma keeps them under her bed and pulls them out to remember her little angel.

“
Ah-hah!” Marly plunks her manicured finger down on a page. There we are, two spun sugar darlings, our skin fresh and glowing, our cheeks flush with summer sun, at age seven in yellow bathing suits, dipping our feet into a kiddie pool with looks of surprise on our faces, as if the water must have been icy. My face is a lightly freckled peach, my eyes a lovely, lucid green. Then another: Marly and me holding giant wheel-like lollypops with Mickey Mouse ears at Disneyland—her gram took us; Marly and me vamping for the camera circa 1990, wearing red lipstick, high heels and mini-dresses, mouths open in croons to Madonna.

“
Oh, I just love this one, look!” Marly peels away the plastic coating and lifts a photograph of our faces pressed cheek to cheek. Our eyes are closed, mouths cracked in grins that reveal matching gaps where teeth had fallen out. It’s been years since I’ve looked at photographs of myself before the fire. I’ve grown accustomed to the rough landscape of my skin, the gradient colors of my patchwork self.

The beauty of that other me is so real I feel it like a thumb gouge to the diaphragm. My chest is tight, as though once again stuffed into the pressure garments I wore for years, air catching in squeezed lungs. I push myself away, maneuvering off the bed, and bang my shin against the frame. Marly calls after me, but I scurry out the door, away from the image of that younger self.

I find myself at the backdoor off the kitchen and out into what was formerly a tame garden. Now it is a wilderness. It takes me a minute to realize what I’m staring up at—the ancient oak tree, its tree house long since burned to cinders, its trunk scarred with great black char marks from the night that razed me to the core.

My breath hitches higher, as though there is once again a fog of smoke crowding out the oxygen in my lungs, heat rushing up the sides of my face, so intense it wants to melt me, consume me, cut straight to the bones and reduce me to ash. Colors lick at my vision—the bright yellow of candlelight, Marly
’s eager face of thirteen years ago straining toward me.

Marly finds me folded in a forward crouch gasping, my muscles locked up.
“Oh Honey.” Her fingertips rest briefly on my back before she pulls them away. “I didn’t think. Can you forgive me?”

I nod but don
’t raise my head.
A memory of heat on my skin, my own shrill keening...
I can smell the egg-like odor of burning hair. Marly puts her hand on my chin and tilts it up, like a lover about to kiss me.

“
I thought I’d put it behind me,” I manage.

She pulls her hand away quickly. Her eyes are wet.
“Nobody puts something like that behind them.”

The weeds feel soft as I sink into them and fold my hands in my lap, tucking my thumbs in my palms. She sits down beside me; she is wearing leggings, bright purple, under her soft jersey dress, just like when we were girls.

“Grace, for years I had nightmares. The wake up screaming kind.”

I look at her gorgeous, unblemished face, her eyes imploring. I believe her. In a strange way it helps.

“But I’m a coward. I know that even my worst nightmare is nothing compared to what you went through. Even if your mother hadn’t warned me away, I didn’t think I could look you in the eye. I’m a coward. That’s the whole reason I never called or wrote.”

I take a deep breath.
“I wish you’d found a way. I needed you.”

“
I know.” She looks at me meaningfully as though she’s about to say more, then leaps up off the ground so effortlessly I am breathless at the thought of such freedom. I lean unsteadily forward and begin to ease myself upwards, my right leg protesting at the sudden expansion from sitting to standing. I’m too proud to ask for help. Marly watches me, her hand twitches and lifts off her thigh as if she is going to offer it to me anyway, but she must see the determination in my face because she lowers it again. Before I gain my balance, she puts out her arms. I am not getting through to her about the pain that touch causes me.

“
I’m so glad you’re here, Grace. I really missed you. I’ll be gentle, I promise.” The look on her face is so plaintive that I lean in for a brief moment and let her enclose me.

She smells like jasmine and cigarette smoke. Lights dance behind my eyes and as uncomfortable as it is to be clutched in her embrace, it is also the first time in ages that someone has hugged me in a way that doesn
’t feel obligatory or careful. An image forms in my mind’s eye, that of a man jogging on a tree-lined path, like a fragment of a dream you suddenly remember without context. Something about this makes me shiver and pull back quickly.

“
Stay here,” she says.

“
Why?” But she is already gone, racing off to the back of the house. When she returns she dangles a large ax in one hand, swinging it back and forth perilously close to her tanned thigh.

“
What are you doing?” But as soon as I ask it I know. “Marly, you can’t chop down an enormous tree with that! You need a chainsaw at least.”

She bites her lip as she hefts it over her head.
“I know. But we can hack away some of the evidence.”

She bee-lines to the tree that was witness to my awful transformation and swings the ax into the charred spots, making jagged little bite marks.

I watch, fascinated.

“
Come on, Grace!” She pulls back again, and the ax makes a satisfying thunk into the flesh of the tree. “It feels good,” she says. “Really. Better than therapy, and I should know—I spent years in it.” She swings again and again as if the tree has taken something from her, too.

I come closer but refuse the ax when she hands it to me.
“Marly, I can’t.”

“
Sure you can. You’re strong. Don’t let this memory own you, Gracie!”

I realize I will have to be blunt.
“I can’t raise my arms over my head.” I demonstrate, lifting elbows to ear level, where they will go no further. “Fourth degree burns. Some muscles were damaged.”

Marly releases the tool with a soft thud.

“It’s okay. I
would
chop down this tree if I could.”

Her lips tighten even though they
’re still curled into a smile. She stares for a long minute. From up in the house the jangle of an old-fashioned telephone rips through the air. Marly’s head snaps up as though she is guilty of something. “Shit. I just talked to my mother. Only one other person that I know has this number, and it’s too late for estate business.”

The phone rings on and on, the sheer persistence of it sounding urgent, demanding.

“Go,” I say. “Answer it, please.”

As she runs back to the house, I take one last look at the tree. Like me, it is still alive despite what it
’s been through. Then I make my way slowly after her.

I reach the kitchen as Marly slams the phone down. She kicks a box, dull utensils spilling into a jumble.

“What’s wrong?”

“
Nothing. It was just The Loser, my ex.” She stares at me, her mouth parted with what looks like a heavy explanation, but then she closes it. “Grace, I have to go back.”

“
What? But you just got here. I only just…” I wish I could squeeze her hand again, like when we were girls.

Marly tilts her head and pulls out her full-wattage smile, the one that raises her cheekbones to high peaks.
“Come with me.”

“
What?”

“
Come with me, Grace. Why not? Just for a couple of weeks. Tell me you aren’t just dying to get away from here?”

It
’s true—sometimes the mere sound of my mother shuffling in her pink house slippers from the kitchen to her bedroom at night, the plaintive mewing of her cats at her heels, makes me want to climb the walls. Not to mention the feeling that I am another of Adam’s pity causes, a wounded animal never to be released from captivity.

Marly eyes are shiny as she grins at me.
“Seriously.” I can tell she wants to grab my hands, as though touch is necessary to convince me of something. “Vegas is a Mecca of…the widest range of people you’ll ever meet anywhere. It attracts variety. It’s a place where it doesn’t matter what’s happened in your life, how bad you feel, or what you look like.” She claps her hand to her mouth “Grace, I’m sorry. That came out wrong.”

I force a smile.

Marly shudders and clutches herself, looking almost nauseated for a moment. “This town is so damp and cold. Doesn’t it ever get to you?”

I shrug.
“That’s the least of the things that get to me.” The truth is, other than Adam and sometimes Ma, all I’d miss otherwise are a handful of damaged animals and birds that wouldn’t even know that I’d gone.

“
I need to think about it.”

Marly nods, still clutching herself.
“Of course you do.”

She drives me home, talking the whole time about Vegas and her life there. By the time we reach my house I can see this strange and beautiful world of showgirls and billionaires, picture the restaurant where Marly manages a team of
“underwater mermaids” in a bar that caters to the patrons of fancy casinos, and a few times a week, dons the fins herself, in a floating performance.

“
I’ll be calling you in the morning, Grace.”

“
Ok. Don’t pull up all the way. I don’t want Ma to see…us,” I say.

Marly nods, but says nothing else as she drops me in front of the movie theater. The Marquee is fritzing, and in its flashing pink light I walk toward my house, like the girl at the end of the movie who knows exactly what she wants.

Chapter Five

Marly
’s headlights recede behind me as I let myself into the house. I force myself not to turn back, as if, like Orpheus, or Lot, I stand to lose her altogether. Images of Vegas—gleaned from Godfather movies, and the one where Nicholas Cage drinks himself to death—dance through my mind. I step onto dingy brown carpet, once beige, but see swatches of red velvet casino carpet under sequin-studded heels; as I pass the nearly-dead fern that reeks of cat pee in the dining room, tall, hearty palm trees wave exotic fronds in my mind. I navigate my house mostly by memory, our lights dim, picturing a lit path around a too-blue swimming pool with happy tourists playing in it. In the gloom of the microwave, sallow light leaks out from the kitchen, and Ma’s person-high piles of J. Jill catalogs—which she has long since ordered from—resemble library stacks. Not that I’ll ever be allowed to go searching for a lost copy of National Geographic, as it threatens to ruin the order that makes sense only to my mother.

From my room there comes a rustling, like one of the cats searching for a leftover bite of food in a cupboard. My door is cracked open, my desk light on.

With an unusually swift and powerful urgency I shove hard on the door. “Ma, what the hell?”

She
’s half-squatted, half hunched on the floor at my closet, leaned forward into it as though balancing for a last taste of honey in a hive. The way she throws her head over her shoulder at me, then tries to get up without success, hunkering, makes her seem like a cornered beast.

“
I’ve told you not to put anything of yours in my closet.” The words trip out of my throat with choked rage. My hand trembles on the doorknob.

Shoes I never wear tumble out onto the floor, a few shirts have fallen off their hangers, making my clothing seem foreign, as though maybe it really isn
’t my closet after all. She continues to shove and fix a pile of…something. “Stop it! I’m going to throw out whatever you put in there, don’t you get it?”

“
You wouldn’t!” she cries, as though I’ve threatened to harm one of her cats. She struggles to stand up, and though one half of me is already twitching forward to help her up, I resist, pull myself back. How dare she! At last she heaves herself onto my bed, sweating. Something reddish, knit, cranes out of my closet like a strangled creature. It’s probably more clothes that neither of us will wear, too small for Ma, too attention getting for me.

“
This is the only space I have, Ma, that’s mine, that I can…that isn’t…” To tell the truth is to risk hurting her.

“
Well I have nowhere else to put them,” she says softly, almost childlike. I think of all the closets that I can’t open for fear of being crushed beneath their contents, child safety-locks holding back the avalanches. All the cupboards that should hold dishes but are crammed full of odds and ends that should be thrown away—the empty roll inside paper towels, bottle caps, chip bags still dusted with crumbs. Even the dishwasher itself is a home to wayward pop-tart boxes and other recyclables.

Ma fidgets with something small in her hands.
“I knew where you were as soon as you didn’t come home after work tonight,” she says, surprising me. “She was over here a few days ago looking for you and I could see it in her eyes—she will bring you nothing but heartache, I promise you. I don’t want you to bring her to this house.”

I toss my bag onto the bed near her, barely resisting the urge to throw it at her.
“You kept Marly away from me after the fire—it makes no sense to me. Why did you lie to both of us?”

Ma cringes up at me.
“I had good reasons—”

“
Don’t you think that while they were scrubbing the burned, dead skin from my body, I needed a friend? How about when they cut chunks out of my legs and stitched those onto my face and neck? Think maybe I could have used a friend then?”

Ma shakes her head slowly, as though she can ward off both the past and the future. Then she stands up, signaling she
’s done talking, but I can’t let her go. Though I know I will suffer for it, I grab her wrist and bite back a cry at the scalding sensation against my palm.

“
Gracie, please,” she whispers.

Still I hold on, and it comes—an image dark and hideous—my face burned past recognition. A child, a daughter, reduced to a swollen raw mess in a hospital bed. I drop her hand.

Tears cloud my vision and pain rockets through my body as though looking for a landing spot—wrist, shoulder, neck, arms, then it’s gone. “You should have told me the truth,” I whisper. “I thought she abandoned me.”

“
Gracie, they didn’t know if you were going to make it through the night. Who do you think sat by your bedside while you moaned that you wanted to die when the drugs started wearing off? Not your father, not your little friend. No, it was
me
. You don’t have any idea what I had to do for you…” Now she’s crying.

I cradle my head in my palms, breathing through my nose. She
’s still trying to trump my pain with her own. “We’d all have been better off if I’d just died, right?”

Ma points a meaty finger at me, her eyes blazing with a look I remember from the years when we fought about me hanging out with Marly.
“How dare you say that to me! I chose to fight for your life—and I didn’t ask for your gratitude.”

“
And you
chose
to take Marly from me, the only person who can look at me like this without cringing!” My palm still tingles from where we touched.

Tears cluster in the corners of her eyes, but she wipes them brusquely away.
“Well, don’t you think for a second I made that decision lightly. She was not a healthy person—I didn’t want her influence on you when you were so vulnerable. I put you first. All that driving to San Francisco and back—I stopped painting. Stopped talking to your father. I put it all on hold.”

Inside the extra flesh of her face I almost see the lines and angles I once shared with her, our slender Norwegian heritage disappeared in each of us by different forces.
“She wants me to go back to Vegas with her. Stay awhile.”

Ma gasps, clutches her heart, and looks so pale that for a moment I fear I
’ve given her a heart attack. My own pulse is going at a breakneck speed.

She laughs, a guffaw I haven
’t heard in years, since she used to host a woman’s painting group, heavy on cocktails, at our house. “You’re just going to up and leave, are you? Pack your bags and go to Las Vegas—”

She slaps her thigh.

Perhaps she sees my determined expression, and on my face, it must be somewhat horrifying, because she stops laughing.

“
What is it you hope to do there?” she asks then, in a softer tone.

I look away from her, to the vanity dresser that belonged to my great-grandmother, the only antique in this house that hasn
’t met with ruin. Its mirror has been covered with a thin grey veil for years. Through it I can still see the faintest reflection, like someone swimming underwater. Now, that reflection is trying to gaze back at me, as though my old self is still there, wondering how to get out.

“
I want to remember what it feels like to have friends, fun, go out,” I say
. Rush against a horizon of excitement.

Ma purses her lips.

“Vegas isn’t so far from Arizona. Maybe it’s time I contacted Dad, too. At some point I have to suck up my pride.”

Ma
’s eyes reach out from the density of her face. “Oh Grace, do you really want to dredge all that up? You know it’s just going to make you feel awful.”

“
Me? Or you? I’m twenty-eight! Should I just keep waiting until it’s all over? Just wait until Dad’s dead, and I’m too old to try anything? I know you’re afraid for me, but you can’t protect me from everything.”

Ma sniffs, looks away.

“Come on, please don’t cry. It’s only for a little while. I need to do this.”

She nods, and though I know I
’ll pay for it, I come around behind her and lean into a hug. “You don’t have to, Gracie,” she says, but I stay there, and let it come, heat, a throbbing ache, my vision going hazy at the edges.

What comes is not anything horrible, but Ma and my father, Harlan, his hair still dark and thick, Ma almost thin, bent forward over a bassinet, looking at a downy, swaddled infant. It
’s a lovely image, something that would sell diapers and stuffed animals, but images of things-as-they-used-to-be give me more of a shiver than my own charred reflection.

I pull back, heart thudding, and Ma heaves a sigh so big I can read the resignation in it.

“Just be careful with that girl.”

I don
’t know if she means Marly, or if she’s talking to me, the girl I still am in her eyes, forever frozen at fifteen by a molten snap of bad luck.

In bed that night, the house shifts noisily around me, like a restless sleeper. It is probably just the cats navigating the few unpacked pathways between and around spaces we humans cannot possibly squeeze ourselves. Dare I leave Ma to all of this? She can barely rise off the floor without my help. In an earthquake, none of us would be safe in this house, but we pay our earthquake insurance and try not to think about the big fault line that lies less than a hundred miles from here. Marly and I tempted fate a hundred times as girls, and survived. Even the fire, an ironic accident in our spate of daredevil antics, didn
’t take me out. If I stay, I’m squandering a chance. I can feel it. If I leave, I’m abandoning Ma, the only person who stayed by my side.

But memory comes rushing in like ocean waves, taunting me.

We hit the stretch of Drake’s Bay Boulevard where black tar road merges into inky ocean. The moon has undressed further at the shore, enhanced by a huge bonfire that shows signs of having been raging for a while already. Cars line the road, and, below us, dark silhouettes writhe to a bass beat.

This. This is what Marly offers me.

Parties that appear out of nowhere.

Marly slings a ratty gray back-pack over her shoulder and grasps my hand tightly.
“Isn’t this fucking awesome?” she says. Her words are full of heat. As I clutch her hand while we make our way down the hillside, I feel momentarily imbued with that essence of hers that makes strangers give her their numbers on buses and men gawk at her right past their wives.

“
Oh wait, I forgot.” She stops and opens her pack, pulling out a small red piece of cloth that could be a bandana, it’s so small. “Put it on.”

I clutch the shimmery spandex material in my hand and it unfurls into a tank top.

“You’ll freeze, but it will be worth it,” she says.

She wears a hot pink baby-doll dress, its deeply v-neck revealing ample cleavage.
“Go on. No one can see us up here,” she coaxes. I look around nervously, at the ant-like people cavorting below us, and quickly pull my long-sleeve black T-shirt off. The chill ocean air raised goose bumps across my chest, my nipples hardening painfully.

Once encased in red, I feel bolder, if not exactly transformed. I leave my soft copper waves down from the hasty bun I usually keep them in, and they tumble just barely to my shoulders. In another few minutes we scramble and thump down onto hard, wet sand.

Wherever we look people wear face masks and capes, cat tails and white sheets. “I totally forgot about costumes,” I say. It’s Halloween night.