Voodoo Heart (22 page)

Even though Grace didn’t talk about her current life during our walks, or about her accident, she still managed to tell me all kinds of intimate things about herself. She told me about her parents, her childhood. She told me about how, as a little girl, she’d wanted to be a policewoman, then an acrobat, then a deep-sea fisherman. She told me about her mother, about how she’d made Grace beg for change when they first moved out west, beg everywhere from the boardwalk to the bus station, where a man had once thrown a penny right into Grace’s mouth.

No one had ever talked to me in such a way before, never so openly. It was weirdly arousing. It felt like watching someone undress right in front of me; it felt like standing next to them and being handed layer after layer of clothing. And the more she talked, the harder it became for me to ignore the need for her I felt building in me. I tried, though, because I understood that she was here with me only for the summer, just until her face healed. And it was healing all the time.

By the second week I knew her, a kind of settling process had already begun. Her features, the ones that were swollen and bulged out of place, had rapidly started taking shape, gathering ominously toward the center of her face. But part of me refused to see these changes. Part of me already believed that something would happen to stop her from leaving. Something miraculous, or even terrible.

Here’s what Grace told me on one of our walks: one morning, while she and her mother were wandering on the beach, they found a dollhouse washed up on the sand.

“It was so creepy,” she said. “I’d been asking for a dollhouse—it was like the one thing I wanted for my birthday that year, my eighth birthday—and suddenly here one was. Just sitting there on the sand in perfect condition. Even the tiny windowpanes were intact.”

We were walking along the edge of a brook that had long ago dried to chalk. It was three weeks to the day since I’d met her. The wind blew strongly. The shadows of clouds kept skating over us before we saw them coming.

“My mom and I had this game,” said Grace. “Whenever we found something washed up on the beach, we would try to guess whether it was flotsam or jetsam. Flotsam is what gets washed overboard in storms—it’s things swept away by the sea. Jetsam is what’s thrown overboard if a ship is in distress. What people get rid of to make the ship lighter so it won’t sink. There’s really no way to tell which is which after the fact. I mean, if the ship wrecks, everything gets mixed up together, the stuff people wanted to keep and the stuff they got rid of. It all becomes the same thing.”

The metal detector gave a few clicks around a patch of scrub. I rooted around for a moment but couldn’t feel anything substantial, so we went on.

“So my mom wanted me to guess which the dollhouse was,” said Grace, “flotsam or jetsam, but I didn’t want to. The idea of some girl my own age on a ship about to sink was really scary to me, you know? And then, right as I was looking at it, the whole house just fell in on itself. It collapsed in a heap on the sand.”

Grace’s calves moved up and down in gentle swallowing motions as we walked. “Keep talking to me,” I said. “I love listening to you.”

She smiled at me over her shoulder. The light that afternoon was kind, and her cheek looked like a smooth, snow-covered field broken only by the wiry black fencing of her stitches. “It’s easy to talk to you,” she said. “I like who I am with you. I love her, actually.”

“Can I try kissing you again?” I said. We’d kissed a few times before, but it had always hurt her face too much.

“Stay still and let me kiss you,” she said, and then she leaned over and brushed her lips against mine, first the top one, then the bottom. Next I felt her tongue tracing my lips, gently sliding between them. Before I knew it she was kissing me harder, really pressing her mouth against mine. I kissed her back. Our teeth kept clicking together. I felt the bag beneath her chin bulge as it was squeezed between our necks—the liquid inside felt warm and viscous—and I worried that it might pop, but she kept at it, pushing harder now, hardly kissing so much as driving her mouth into mine, wedging and ramming. When she finally stopped and pulled away I saw blood inside her mouth.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

“No,” I said.

“I just don’t want to go back yet,” she said. She tugged on the collar of my shirt. “And I like you.”

“Kiss me again,” I said. And she did.

To this day, I remember everything she told me. I even remember exactly what we found scavenging each day. The afternoon Grace told me about the dollhouse, we discovered a bottle cap, a green stone she thought was pretty, and the horn from a phonograph, smashed so badly you wouldn’t believe music had ever passed through.

By July we’d started making love, but rarely, only once every few days. Grace wanted to more often: she asked me to, but I had to be careful; it would have been too much. Already I couldn’t sleep without her. When she wasn’t with me, my house seemed to buzz with silence. I tried to keep some distance between us, but she began talking about driving with me back to California. We didn’t have to stay out there, she said. We wouldn’t. We’d just hang around long enough for her to settle some things, some business matters, and then we could go anywhere we wanted—we could even come back here. She said she loved me. I couldn’t stop myself from being hopeful, from expecting things. I bought a book on driving across the country and drew little stars next to all the places I wanted to take her.

But her face was taking shape. The drainage bag had vanished, along with the stitches beneath her eyes, inside her mouth. All that was left of the face I’d known was a ghostly blueprint of white scars, and even that was quickly melting into the fresh pink skin underneath. At certain moments she looked like someone else entirely, someone strangely familiar whom I’d seen or met many times over, but somehow managed to forget. At first she acted as frightened about all this as I was. Not just frightened of what was happening, but also of what I’d think about her. The day the last of the stitches came out, I had to convince her to come out of her bedroom.

“It doesn’t matter what you look like,” I said into the keyhole.

“You’ll see why I don’t want to go back,” she said, crying. “You’ll know what I used to be like.”

“I know what you’re like now,” I said. “That’s all that matters.”

When she finally opened the door and I saw those flawless crescents of flesh beneath her eyes, I felt my blood drain. She’d become beautiful to a degree that felt difficult for me to understand. Her face didn’t look like a face anymore. It was like a sail she’d raised between me and her real face, a tall white sail that could carry her anywhere she wanted to go. And as much as I didn’t want it to matter what she looked like, as much as I told her so, it
did
matter, and I wanted the healing to stop, to slow down at least.

But of course it didn’t slow down: her skin tightened, her cheekbones surfaced. Streaks of copper appeared in her hair. I tried to ignore it, but sometimes looking at her made me so sad that I could barely speak. Grace began to make arrangements. She started taking calls from Petyr. At first she spoke in a brief, clipped manner, but soon she began to really
talk
into the phone. She joked and laughed and wound the cord around her finger. Occasionally she used a miniature phone hooked up to her ear by a cord, a phone that left her hands free and made it look like she was talking to an invisible stranger in the room with us.

I began to think of California as a weak but constant force pulling on Grace, a growing undertow. I was certain that if I didn’t go with her, I would lose her altogether, that she would just vanish behind its long curtains of sunshine. Sometimes, at night, watching her sleep, I wished for her face to go back to how it had looked when I met her. I actually fantasized about changing it back myself.

All of this happened in a matter of weeks, not months. It felt like it happened as fast as I’m telling it to you.

Near the end of July, just a couple of days before we were supposed to leave, I took her to the yearly picnic to celebrate the end of the tourist season. I warned her that a lot of the town would be there, that people would probably come up to her, but she insisted. We could bring Petyr, she said. It would be like our first real date. Food. Dancing. Romance.

I went out and bought a new pair of shoes and a tie with tiny downhill skiers on it. I asked a woman in town to make me a little ladybug out of tin, which she did, cherry red and covered with shiny black dots.

On the day of the picnic, Grace, Petyr, and I drove down the hill and into town in my truck. Before we even got within five blocks of the picnic, though, it became evident that everyone in town was attending. Parked cars lined the avenue, some up on the sidewalk and others left right in the middle of the street with the keys on the driver’s seat.

The picnic took place on the lawn behind the mayor’s house. He’d set up tables on the grass, which were already filled by the time we arrived. There must have been five hundred people crowded on the lawn, not counting the many children threading their way between the knots of adults, giggling and swatting at one another.

I felt Grace tense up at the sight of all those people—the joints in her arm locked—and I grew nervous too.

“We don’t have to do this,” I said.

She gave me a kiss on the cheek. “I want to show you off,” she said.

A band from Canada played country songs in French beneath a tent at the edge of the lawn; couples had already begun to dance in a loose ring. As we crossed the lawn to the food, I felt Grace beginning to relax, but my own anxiousness only grew worse. People were staring. Most of them tried not to be obvious about it, but I could feel them looking at us, at Grace.

“Wade, are you all right?” said Grace.

I told her that I was.

“Hey, they’re all staring at me, not you, okay?” She took my hand. “They’re wondering how I landed the hottest stud in town.”

“Grace…”

“Come on, let’s dance,” she said. Before I could refuse, she kissed my hand and led me toward the tent.

We stopped at the edge of the moving ring of couples. I put my hands on Grace’s waist and pulled her close as we entered the flow of people and began to dance across the grass. Her skin was a deep brown and smooth as the underside of a shell. I felt my heart relaxing. I caught sight of Petyr standing by the edge of the tent, and I watched over Grace’s shoulder as he tapped one foot in time to the music. Every few moments he’d let himself be swept along with the couples; he’d post his arm as though he’d found a partner and take a few graceful steps in the direction of the dance before hurrying off the floor and returning to the spot where he’d begun.

“I want to fly away with you in a blimp,” I said to Grace. Everywhere, hoppers leapt out of the yellow grass. The feeling was like dancing across the surface of a fizzing glass of champagne.

She laughed. “A blimp? Like a zeppelin?”

“A blimp. I want to fly across the country with you in a blimp. Just coast, the two of us weightless up there.”

She put her head on my shoulder and we kept dancing like that, swaying back and forth, while the other couples moved around us in unison, spinning, rising and falling like the working parts of a carousel. I kissed her neck and closed my eyes.

“Wade!” said Haymont, dancing next to us with his little daughter standing on his toes. “I didn’t think you’d come today. You two about make the cutest couple here.”

“I don’t know how that’s possible when you’ve got the prettiest girl around,” said Grace. She winked at Haymont’s daughter, who pressed her face into his belly.

Haymont laughed. “She’s a shy one tonight. She’s actually a big fan of yours.”

Grace thanked him, though I could tell that, as always, he was making her uncomfortable.

“So, a little birdie told me you’re taking Wade away from us. I get such a kick out of picturing him out in California,” he said, and gave a big coughing laugh that nearly shook his daughter off him. “Wade driving down Hollywood Boulevard with the palm trees whizzing by. Waving to the stars.” He laughed again, staring too hard at Grace.

“Let’s go, Daddy,” whined Haymont’s daughter.

“Bailey, don’t be rude, now,” Haymont said to her. “Daddy’s having a conversation here.” But when he turned back to us, Grace had already put her head on my shoulder.

Haymont waited a moment. “You two have a good night, now,” he said, finally.

We thanked him and he waddled off, maneuvering his daughter like a marionette.

“Not all of California’s like that,” Grace said into my neck. “That’s just a small part. Besides, we’re not going to stay.”

“I know,” I said, but as we made our way around the ring, Haymont’s words stayed with me. I could feel him watching us, feel other people watching too. Making no bones about it now, just staring from their tables. And I knew so few of them. I could hardly pick out a familiar face. I saw a young girl whisper something to her mother and point at us. I saw her mother laugh into her napkin. I realized that this was what California was going to be like. People I didn’t know gawking at us, laughing. Laughing because it was funny to see someone like me with someone like Grace. I caught sight of Petyr again, dancing alone by the edge of the tent, and a series of images flashed through my mind, images of myself alone in California, alone at all the places I’d read about in my guidebook. On the beach. On the pier beneath a swarm of seagulls. At the aerospace fictitious museum, standing before an enormous, dangling model of the moon. I held Grace tighter against me, but even as I did I grew angry. It seemed like too long ago that I’d been happy alone, that I’d preferred it that way, and now I was suddenly following someone to the other side of the country. Someone I’d only known a matter of months. Someone who was just vacationing in my life. Someone who would leave me; who, in her own mind, had probably already left.