Unmaking Grace

by Barbara Boswell

  “Hello, Grace! How’s my girl?”

  Smiling. Drunk. Eyes aglow with a brewing storm. “Daddy….” She nodded.

  “Where have you been, Gracie?”

  “Nowhere….”

  “Whoring around like your mother?”

  Grace stopped struggling with the key, defeated. She wanted to hit him in his belly and see him cry with pain, but there she was, trapped between him and the security door with no chance to inflict an equivalent wound on him, no chance to get away.

  “Pick up the key.”

  His voice was low, almost a whisper, chilling to her ear.

  Grace obeyed the command. “Now unlock the door.”

  The dutiful daughter obeyed. Mama’s words—“Whatever you do, don’t let him in!”—screamed through her mind as the rest of her body went numb. From the corner of her eye she saw a convoy of cars, led by Tim’s yellow Mazda, pass by. All the men from next door were gone.

  The gate swung open. Impatiently, Patrick grabbed the keys from her and unlocked the front door. She was never quick enough. His hand closed like a vice on her upper arm, and in one powerful, practiced movement, he launched her unresisting body across the threshold and into the dark living room with its curtains all drawn. Grace picked herself up from her landing spot on the floor and sank into the dirty white couch, tightly wrapping her arms around her body. She kept her eyes on the floor, taking in the minutiae of today’s sand arrangement on the carpet. No matter how she tried to clean it (Mary had long ago given up), the sand had a way of creeping back into the house, reclaiming its lost kingdom. Steel-toed work boots came and went across the still life of the floor, carrying the upturned cuffs of dark blue jeans, resting neatly above laced shoe tongues. Grace focused hard on the brown laces, moving slowly in and out of focus, in and out of her tableau of carpet and uncontrollable sand.

  She heard the click of the front door being locked. The boots finally came to rest right in front of her, toe-to-toe with her own takkied feet.

  “Look at me!”

  She knew she had to, but she couldn’t. Her shoulders were two blocks of ice, solid, pressing the rest of her body down into the couch.

  “I said, look at me!”

  A blow landed on Grace’s left cheek, forcing movement from her stubborn head. She tried to hold back prickly tears, but they rolled down her cheeks as she tilted her head upwards, slid off her chin, and plopped onto the tops of her hands. Anger, pain, and shame coloured the contours of her face.

  “Okay! I’m looking at you now! Happy?” The voice came from some unknown place, someone she didn’t know. Her mouth was moving, contorting furiously, but it wasn’t Grace screaming, it wasn’t her voice escaping at a feverish pitch. “Are you happy now? Bastard!”

  Grace wanted this voice to stop, knowing that it put her in grave danger, but she couldn’t will it back into silence. It snaked from her throat, lashing him, cursing him. Spitting upon him.

  “Fuck you, bastard! Pig! You destroy everything!”

  Another open hand slap against her face. Tears, snot, and saliva gushed from her until she felt her head grabbed and her words smothered by his strong hands. Grace screamed, a sound swallowed by his callused palm. She tried to bite the inside of Patrick’s hand, but he only clenched tighter, until all breath escaped her.

  “Shush, shush, Grace.” His voice dropped to a mere whisper. “Quiet, girl.”

  Gradually, her convulsive sobs subsided. There was a strange look in his eyes as her body slackened under his grip. It was as if he saw her for the first time, the real Grace. He released her and sat down on a chair across from the couch.

  “Be quiet, okay?”

  They contemplated each other, each summing the other up.

  It struck Patrick for the first time: his daughter was growing up. Her limbs were long and lean, her face angular, not round and sweet any more like the little girl of yesterday. Small breast buds pushed against her shirt, hardly visible, but there when you looked. And now this manner of Mary’s, this defiance.

  A few meters across from her father, Grace thought of ways to kill him. Her bare hands would clearly not suffice, given the showdown of the previous minutes. What would it take to get one of those soldiers to plant a bullet between his eyes? She seethed, quietly.

  She had to get away! Mary, his true target, would be home soon and Grace, having made the acquaintance of his fists for the first time, knew that in this new father of hers—a man who had newly stooped to throwing her across the room—lay an unbridled appetite for violence. If she ran she’d have to get away cleanly, and there was no sign of the key near the door. The security gate, that stoic soldier guarding the front door, offering a further level of protection from the evil world outside, now trapped her with the unaccounted for evil that lurked on the inside; that wildcard—a father; the threat from within, not factored into the metrics of safety for a home. She turned the word around in her head and for a moment wanted to stretch her hands out toward him, say “Daddy,” and fold into his embrace like she did as a little child.

  Patrick’s eyes looked back at her, and when she searched them for cracks of love, they glinted like granite.

  Footsteps up the garden path. Grace tried to lurch to her feet, but in a second Patrick had grabbed hold of her.

  His voice was a sliver of a whisper. “Move again, and I’ll hit you so hard you won’t know your own name.”

  She sat down like an obedient dog. A deadly silence spun around them. They could hear Mary on the garden path, humming a tune. The clock on the kitchen wall ticked through the seconds, each one bringing Mary closer to the door.

  Grace surrendered.

  “That’s my girl,” said Patrick. And he smiled at her.

  Chapter 9

  Patrick had not gone back to his old home with the intent to inflict violence. He had wanted to talk—had wanted to tell Mary one last time to stop this foolishness. She needed him, he needed her; and now, with the police going crazy and soldiers everywhere, the child needed him too. He had been a bad father, a worse husband, but his instinct to protect those entrusted to his care had grown stronger as the country descended into madness. He needed another chance to make this right, to take up his place as head of the household, protect them. Johnny was gone, probably dead, though no one dared speak it. Grace could be next. The bastards didn’t care that they were children. It was war, and everyone was a target.

  He had meant to wait outside until Mary came home, but then he’d caught a glimpse of the child as she returned from God knew where. What the hell was she thinking? The Casspirs were swarming everywhere with their deadly cargo, ready to shoot in a moment. And here she was, idling about like someone with no cares, a vacant look about her. Was she that stupid? Patrick knew the girl could be slow at times, clever with book stuff, but just downright stupid with pure common sense. He blamed himself for that. He had left too much of her care to her mother. If she were a boy, he would have taken a much firmer stance, toughened her up from a young age, forced her to think about the world. But she was a girl, and he’d reckoned she would be okay as long as she followed the rules of the house. He had not taken into account this danger, this sickening threat of death that now hung in the air every day.

  How was he supposed to prepare a child for this, to survive this? In a sense, he was grateful that she was a girl. Less likely to be noticed, less likely to be at the front of the protests, less likely to be marked as a student leader. But some of the older girls were going at it just as hard as the boys, shouting and screaming and marching like men, imagining they were someone. Not his Grace. There she was, standing outside the front door with that lost, faraway look in her eye, not even fully conscious of what was going on around her. Like a fucking lamb walking to its own slaughter. It infuriated him—this innocence in a time of evil. It deserved scorn. Punishment. Teach her to be awake, look around, know what’s coming. He’d do it.

  His approach was perhaps too forceful, his grip on her too hard. H
e could smell her fear. It excited him. At the same time, he abhorred this weakness in his own flesh. He wanted to shake it out of her. Wanted to tell her to walk erect and proud, and not put herself in harm’s way in the first place.

  He pushed her inside the house after her fumbling with the key. He would wait there for Mary, talk to her, tell her that this needed to end. They needed to be together.

  Mary’s appearance through the front door brought a rush of emotions that surprised Patrick in their intensity. Patrick knew these things: that he loved Mary with all his heart but that with all his heart, he hated her too; that he had been with her so long he could not conceive of a livable life without her in it; that children were lying dead, their cold bodies on concrete floors in unknown back rooms, unclaimed, unloved, unkeened over. He knew that their deaths hung in the air like a sickly perfume, choking him, smothering him, inescapable; he had been doing his best to avoid the Casspirs, knowing that his rage against the soldiers inside would not be contained were he to chance upon them, that such an encounter would certainly mean death.

  When Mary walked through that door, it was like seeing her for the first time.

  Crouching next to the girl on the couch, his hand taut across her face, the silence as Mary unlocked the security gate and then the front door. Her surprise, then fear—a sickening look. It was him, Patrick. Why did she have to act that way? He was not a monster. She tried to look strong, to steady herself, but her lips had always been her weakness. The familiar quivering top lip, which had the unfortunate effect of both shaming and arousing him, and with it the irresistible desire to plant his fist there, right on the sweet, quivering spot, where her full top lip started to curve down.

  Her low voice, soothing, calming. Trying to talk him out of it. Why couldn’t she have been like this before? She knew he had the upper hand now, knew she had to speak nicely to him and not scream and nag. Her hesitation, then coming over to sit next to him on the couch, to talk him out of it, talk him down. Sullen black eyes, giving him nothing.

  He doesn’t remember how. But then there is blood. Dripping down his right hand, pooling in the cuff of his shirt, the spicy, metallic smell of it overpowering him. Blood on his face, the front of his shirt. The child looking at him with uncomprehending liquid eyes, eyes standing still in her head. Unblinking, unmoving.

  Mary, in his arms, shouting his name. Hitting the floor, him entangled with her. “What have you done? What have you done!” A pool of rust spreading below them, outward, lapping against the contours of her face in minuscule tidal waves.

  Mary. Mary. Life was spilling silently all around them. Mary in his arms, light as a feather. Beautiful Mary with coal for eyes and perfect throat, skin the color of tea. The letting go. Her beautiful throat. The darkness, blanketing them forever.

  Chapter 10

  For the rest of her life, those few minutes will inhabit Grace. Sometimes she is right back there, eternally in that present, choking on the rusty smell of blood. At other times those minutes are a song stuck in her head, unshakable, drumming out the beat to which she marches along to life. We all have our crosses to bear.

  For many years, the unfolding of events remained blurry. At first she remembered nothing. Then, gradually, images, smells, sounds swam back into consciousness the way a photograph slowly gives up its secrets after being submerged in developing fluid. Once fully recalled, they would come unbidden, in and out of her mind, floating, arriving, leaving, coalescing. Her will had nothing to do with them appearing or disappearing. Sometimes, when Grace tried to summon them, they wouldn’t come. At other times they’d converge upon her, threatening to overpower her and shred all coherence. Then they would collapse like a deck of cards, scattering across the empty chambers of her mind. There was forever after a sense of confusion, a slippage when, just as the mind got to that moment, it would reel, retract, and skip a few frames, jumbling everything. Her mind could never fully grasp that day, could never hold on to the fact of what had happened. But as years stretched by, moments of lucidity shone through more frequently.

  She remembered the crunch of the key in the security gate, the pause while Mary swung it open, the fumbling for a second key to the front door, seeing her mother’s shape on the other side of the dimpled glass. Mary’s head was bowed as she entered, and no amount of willing her to look up on Grace’s part made her take in the scene before it was too late. When Mary finally did look up, shock scuttled across her face like a cockroach scurrying from the light. Her eyes darted from Grace to Patrick and her head jerked back a little.

  “Why did you let him in?”

  The accusation would haunt Grace for the rest of her life.

  But we all have our crosses to bear.

  Mary could still have run at that point, retraced her steps and walked right back out the door. She could have gone to the neighbors and asked for help, walked away and never looked back, but they all knew, Patrick most of all, that she would never leave her daughter; not with this crazy, wild-eyed man holding his old Okapi knife to Grace’s throat.

  “No, Patrick, no.” Mary’s voice was a raspy whisper.

  No movement or sound followed. Patrick was breathing heavily like a man who had finished a long, hard race.

  “Come over here, Mary.”

  “Patrick, please, we can work this out, Patrick. Put that away, let’s just talk. Please.”

  “Now you want to talk?”

  He gestured toward an armchair for her to sit down. She put her handbag down and slowly walked toward her husband and child.

  “Close the door.”

  Mary turned, and in the moment Grace willed her to run, get the hell out. She wanted to reach out, scoop her mother up, and fly right out that door, over the rooftops and into the future, but the lead in her veins refused flight. Mary shut the door with resignation.

  “Now lock it.”

  “Please, no, Patrick. Don’t do this.”

  She started to sob, her hands pressed against the pane of the door in supplication to some unseen force. She turned back around, rummaging through her bag for her bunch of keys—taking longer than necessary, shaking.

  “Patrick, leave Grace. Let her go. Please. Let’s just talk for a while. Just you and me.”

  “Lock the door!”

  She obeyed, grinding the key in the lock one final time, turning time and the narrowing trajectory of her life with it.

  “I’m sorry, Patrick. I’m sorry. You were right. Let’s try again. You move back. We’ll get married again, what are papers…?” Tears streamed down her face, smudging her lipstick, making her mascara run, distorting her face into that of a clown. “Shut up. Shut up, Mary!”

  She whimpered, quaked. Grace had never seen Mary like this before.

  “Come and sit down. No, here. On the couch.”

  Mary obeyed, walking demurely past Grace and taking a seat next to Patrick. The whole happy family on the couch, thought Grace.

  “See what it has come to, Mary? See what you make me do? My own flesh and blood? Why didn’t you listen to me?”

  Patrick relaxed his grip on Grace and turned his full attention to his wife. Mary exhaled, folded her hands on her lap and fixed her gaze on him.

  “Put that thing away, Patrick. There’s no need for that.”

  “No, Mary. No. You are not telling me what to do any more. Throw me out of my own house. Won’t let me see my child. Who do you think you are, huh? Just who do you think you are? I worked for this. Worked for all of this around you, so you can dress in your expensive clothes and enjoy the way men look at you. Look at you! Painted whore!” He slammed his fist into his thigh for emphasis.

  On and on, Patrick’s mouth moved. Words circled like vultures in the air. Grace’s eyes rested on the knife—a short knife, looking smaller than it had felt a few seconds ago against her throat. She stared at it, fixing her entire being on it, willing it to fall out of his fingers and under the couch. Against the backdrop of the dirt-mottled brown carpet it would be dull�
��not this electric, living thing recklessly flicking its tongue each time Patrick moved.

  The shouting grew louder. With his left hand Patrick gripped Mary’s shoulder. Tears fell down her face, her expression a silent beseeching: please, don’t hurt me. Not again. She, who had finally found the courage to leave him, to say Enough! Yet he had forced his way back, back into the house, back in charge, a powerful body coiled to deliver retribution.

  Fingers tracing Mary’s lips, roughly, smearing the bright red lipstick all over her face. Evidence of her depravity, her disloyalty.

  And then, a sharp painful breath is forced into Grace’s body, exploding in her chest. A blinding shock of fresh air shakes her so that she finds herself, for the first time in her life, fully awake.

  In swift, staccato movements, Patrick plunges the knife into Mary: one, two—sharp, precise movements, and it is over.

  He has shut up, finally.

  Mary falls forward, her eyes a wounded question, Why?

  Her lips are moving but no sound escapes.

  Then he’s on top of her, cradling her before her head has a chance to hit the floor.

  “Mary! Mary!”

  Grace sits, stultified, as her parents sink onto the floor, grotesquely intertwined. Lying on the floor like one person, it seems both of them are bleeding from the same wound. Her father’s hands are cradling and stroking Mary in the most tender of movements.

  “Mary….” A softer calling, an affirmation. A recognition. Grace should have felt something. Fear, sadness, hurt.

  Something.

  But there was nothing, nothing to fixate on, nothing to look away to, nothing to grasp onto. It was as if she was swimming underwater, unable to make a sound. Then she broke the surface, gulped in air, and screamed. No words, just animal sounds. She dropped onto the floor next to her mother. Patrick had moved away from her. He was at the phone, holding the receiver in his hand. Grace screamed and screamed for her mother to hold on, as she tried, desperately, to staunch the blood from the gash in Mary’s throat with her hands.