Unmaking Grace

by Barbara Boswell

  Grace looked at the board—the next train leaving was on the Cape Flats line, and she sped to the designated platform. A rushed, unfriendly guard clipped her ticket at the turnstile. She had exactly one minute before the train’s departure. She broke into a jog to get to the third-class section on time. She jumped into an overcrowded carriage just in time, pushed through the mass of people, and sank down onto the bright orange seat. A wave of exhaustion crashed over her. Please, God, let Sindi sleep through tonight, just this once. She tried to empty her mind, but her thoughts kept gathering around the letter at the bottom of her brown bag. Like a loose tooth, it worried her. What was she to do? Burn it? Shred it? Open it? She sighed as the train rolled out of the station and closed her eyes, mindful of staying awake for the short journey to the next station, where she would disembark.

  As the train gained speed, a blind man shuffled through the carriage to the rhythm of “Guide Me Oh Thy Great Redeemer,” which he sang while banging a tambourine. His sidekick, a boy no older than twelve, followed in his wake, stretching out an inverted hat. Grace pretended to be asleep as they passed her, but the hymn had a calming effect, and she kept her eyes closed, giving herself over to the rhythmic movement of the train.

  Grace could tell by the jerking movements of the carriage that they were nearing her station. As the train slowed to its final halt, she forced her reluctant eyes open, and there he was, right in front of her: Johnny.

  Chapter 14

  Was this another vision? She’d been seeing Mary a lot since Sindi’s birth. Was Johnny up to the same ghostly tricks as her mother? Was this a conspiracy of ghosts to pull her to the brink of sanity? No, no. This Johnny was flesh, breathing before her and staring at Grace in that quiet, intent way she remembered well. He was not the Johnny she had summoned a thousand times to her mind; time had clearly left her hand on him. The eyes were deeper set, with fine lines feathering the skin around them; his skin darker, but still freckled in that boyish way. They sat there, frozen, staring at each other without any movement between. The train shuddered to a halt, and Grace rose, gathering her bags, without taking her eyes off him.

  “Grace.”

  She saw him mouthing the word without a sound escaping his lips.

  “Grace!”

  This time he spoke her name into the air filled with the warmth of strangers’ bodies. The train stopped, the doors slid open, and the crowd rearranged itself as more passengers entered. Grace started toward the door, then turned to give him one more look. He was getting to his feet. She moved on and stepped out of the train, onto the platform, where it was already getting dark. She turned again, and there he was behind her. She faced him as tears gathered in her eyes. They stood motionless, each probing the other’s eyes, until the train pulled off and disappeared around a bend. Johnny was here, in front of her. Real. Grace’s head spun as she grasped fruitlessly for words.

  “Is it you?”

  An unnecessary question, but one she felt compelled to ask. “Is it you?” she implored again.

  “Grace! Oh my God! Yes, it’s me,” he laughed.

  The sound of her name in his mouth dislodged decades of holding it all in, keeping it all together. Grief and relief flooded her body, rushed to the surface of her skin and poured out in an incoherent jumble of words and tears. Reserve snapped. Words clattered across the concrete of the station platform.

  “What happened…where were you? Why? Why didn’t you find me?”

  Johnny. Johnny. Johnny.

  Tears were streaming down her cheeks. Johnny was laughing and crying too. “You are alive!”

  As she uttered these word, an awareness grew that at that very moment, she, too, felt alive, maybe more than she’d ever felt before. His name was that first breath you take after holding your head under water for a long time; the first shard of daylight after a dark, horrible nightmare.

  After ages, he replied simply: “Yes, it’s me. I’m alive, Grace.”

  Words bubbled from her: how she thought he was dead, that they’d killed him. How she couldn’t bear it after her mother.

  His hands moved onto her shoulders, steadying her shivering body.

  “No, I didn’t die, as you can see. They kept me for a while—I came out of detention after three months.”

  “What did they do to you, Johnny?”

  He shook his head slowly while smiling his sweet, gentle smile.

  “It doesn’t matter now, Grace. It doesn’t matter. That was a lifetime ago.”

  “But why? Why didn’t you let me know? You must have known I was worried, that I cared….”

  Her words pierced the air; her whole body had become one big question, greedy for answers. “Didn’t you know that I cared?”

  “By the time I came out you were gone, Grace.”

  “Why didn’t you look for me? Why didn’t you find me?”

  Grace thought of the years she had spent at Aunty Joan’s apartment, long days of obsessive trips to windows; looking out, scanning the streets, waiting to see him walk up to the front door. Or days when she’d be walking down a busy street or strolling on the beach—how she would endlessly scan the crowds. And then the sudden flicker of hope at the sight of a boy with a familiar build, a certain height, a certain type of curl at the nape of a brown neck. Once she had followed a boy through the city on a Saturday morning, trying not to be noticed but desperately keeping him in sight until she could see his face. Grace had looked for Johnny everywhere, seen him everywhere and nowhere, until all hope forsook her, and she gave up wanting him back. But she had never quite shaken the reflex of scanning a crowd. It became like breathing, this scanning of men a certain age. And here, on a day when she hadn’t been looking, he’d appeared.

  “I was right here, Johnny, all these years. Waiting, praying. I waited for you every day. Why didn’t you find me?”

  The question had hardened into reproach. She knew it was unreasonable—they had both been children when he had disappeared, and nothing bound him to her.

  “I thought about it, Grace, God knows. But when I came back home, you were gone. I wanted to look, but nobody knew where you were. They said your grandmother had taken you away. And anyway, I didn’t know if you wanted to see me.”

  “Of course I wanted to see you!” Grace was crying again.

  He gently clasped her arm and led her to a bench on the platform. A soft evening fog enveloped them as they sat, Grace trying to steady her breath, Johnny thoughtfully rubbing his hand, as if rehearsing an important speech in his mind.

  “I thought about you every day,” he finally declared. “I wondered about you, wondered how to go about finding you. I heard about your mother. And I wanted to see if you were okay. I know how close you were….”

  Grace felt the fog around them seep into her head, swirling there in a murky despair. He knew about her mother. Of course he knew; they were right next door.

  “But honestly, Grace, I was in a bad way when I came out. It was hard to find myself again, let alone someone else. Those were not good years.”

  Her heart, so used to breaking, broke again at these words. They had both been broken, in very different ways: Grace by the man of their house, Johnny by men heading a different order; but all of them, men who needed ruthlessly to control, to snuff out rebellion, to keep the putrid peace in their respective regimes. Men who didn’t brook dissent. Men who had been revealed as fearful cowards after the protective armor of violence had been stripped from them.

  Sitting now, close together on the bench, after the initial deluge of words and tears, both Grace and Johnny had lost their tongues. She had so many questions. What had happened to him in prison? Grace’s mind got caught on the fleshy image of a man called Benzien—the malignant name had stuck with her—whom she’d seen on TV just the previous week, demonstrating to an audience the everyday evil he had casually sown. She had snapped the TV off, not wanting to have even an echo of that monster’s past in her home, her space. How many Benziens had Johnny encountered?
And what had he lost to them?

  It was almost completely dark when Grace gathered her stuff and got up to leave.

  “Do you live nearby?” She nodded, yes.

  “Let me walk with you. You shouldn’t walk alone in the dark.”

  They walked together in silence, through the subway, onto a little side street, and up the hill toward Main Road. Droplets of mist suspended in the glow of streetlamps clung to their hair and coats.

  “You know, Johnny, you were my only friend.” He smiled but said nothing.

  “Besides my mother, I had no one but you. You don’t know this, but you made life bearable for me.”

  They walked on in silence, but as they got closer to her street suddenly Grace didn’t want him near her house, near David and Sindi. Johnny symbolized her old life. He was a living, breathing ghost from her past, and she didn’t want him contaminating the new.

  “I’m okay here, Johnny, I’m just a few streets up. I can make it alone.”

  He nodded, stopped on the corner and awkwardly patted her shoulder as she turned to continue on her own.

  “Grace!” he called, after she had progressed a few steps. “Do you have a pen? You look like an office lady.”

  She noticed then his steel-toed boots, the same type her father used to wear. Grace dug in her bag and handed him a ballpoint pen.

  “And a piece of paper?”

  After scratching around for something for him to write on, her hand fell on the hard edges of the unopened envelope. She pulled it out, briskly folded it over to hide her address, and handed it to Johnny, who scribbled something on it, then held it out to her.

  “This is my number. It’s my home number. Phone me. I’m home after seven, usually. I’d like to keep in touch.”

  The envelope hung in the air between them for a few moments. Secret upon secret, Grace thought. What was she letting into her life? The past was racing faster than she could run, insisting on making its presence felt. She took the envelope and stuffed it back into her bag.

  “Really. Phone me.”

  She nodded. “Goodbye, Johnny.”

  Grace turned and walked up the damp, dark hill without looking back.

  David was frantic when she reached home, bombarding her with a series of questions while holding a crying, writhing Sindi. The baby seemed to be reproaching her too. Grace apologized, blaming the taxi drivers’ strike, and scooped both of them into her arms, soothing ruffled feathers.

  Soon anger and worry had dissipated. She and David ate a simple supper of roast chicken, and the nighttime routine swallowed the rest of the evening. In bed Grace tucked herself snugly against her husband, who had, for once, turned in early too. Her arm crept around his waist, first gingerly, then pressing him toward her. She buried her face in the back of his neck. She sensed the shock in his body—Grace was always needing space, always finding ways to needle a little bit of distance between them—then felt him relax into her. He sighed contentedly. She sensed a question in him but felt it dissipate as she pulled him in tightly toward her. She knew she had been difficult for David, who was always kissing, stroking, needing touch. Grace found such demonstrations of affection stifling, an invasion of her body, even more so after Sindi’s birth and an endless need for her mother’s body. She was always holding, bathing, stroking, nourishing the child, and David’s physical needs were too much after days of having her body colonized by this little person. Her husband had been starved of physical affection, Grace knew, guiltily; and at the times when she could bring herself to bear his advances, she had a habit of folding one arm tightly across her chest, as if to preserve some little part of herself.

  But on this night, the night of Johnny’s coming back, she needed David, wanted him with a physical hunger that surprised her. Inhaling his sweet, slightly musky smell, she banished the day’s events from her mind, as he turned, folding in toward her.

  That night the house on Saturn Street permeated Grace’s dreams. In her nocturnal travels, she walked up to the front door, frightened, knowing that an important task awaited her inside. Sindi was in the living room—she could see her through the big front window—and Grace needed to get her out as quickly as possible, but as she reached for the front door, it shifted out of her grasp. Several times she woke, drenched and breathless, only to fall asleep and back into the same dream, while David slept like a baby.

  Chapter 15

  Here is the thing about living a secret: you have to have the stomach for it. Some people thrive on the little charge they get from doing something illicit, something not even those closest to them would suspect. When Grace thought about it, she knew that her father must have been such a man. Grace, however, was not a woman who could live a secret. It was one thing to leave the past where it belonged, but when it came back in the form of letters and people? No. Those kinds of secrets were too heavy for her, and the thing at the bottom of her bag, the thing which had now doubled its danger with the scribbling of a few digits on its surface, gnawed at her. She could not quite believe David had said nothing when her face must so clearly have spoken of her guilt. The knowledge of what lay in her bag pulled her spirit down; made her wonder what the hell had possessed her to keep this thing, the defining thing about herself, from David. Her father was a murderer. He had murdered her mother, yet her husband had no idea. The father of David’s wife, the grandfather of his daughter, was a killer. What if this thing was genetic? What if Grace had it in her too—didn’t David have the right to know? Would David still love her if he did? There was not only that, the murder, but also the lie. She had told him that her parents had died in an accident. Even if she came clean about it now, what would it say about her that she had been with David for years and had not entrusted him with the truth? David was a lovely man, a gentle man. Grace had known, instinctively, that if she had told the truth before their marriage, it would not have changed his feelings for her. He loved her deeply, this she knew. The facts of her childhood would probably have made him even more protective of her. This struck Grace as his weakness: his goodness, and his belief in the innate goodness of others. David had not seen the ugly side of life as she had. The childhood he’d described to Grace was happy and uneventful. The worst trauma he’d experienced was his father dying at too young an age, of a heart attack. That loss had sealed his relationship with his mother, Gwen. She was one of David’s primary confidantes. He did not know the propensity for violence that lay just beneath the surface of every human being, even those closest to us; had no idea of the intimate cruelties that could inhabit the architecture of a life. He had not been hurt in that way, ever, by those he held dearest. It made him vulnerable. He trusted and depended wholly on Grace, a trust unreciprocated by his wife.

  Although she loved David as much as she had loved any other person in her life, Grace had never fully surrendered herself to him. She carried within her the silent knowledge that she would be able to walk away from him at any moment if needed. Grace had had a backup plan since the day they promised fealty, a plan she could execute if she ever needed to leave: a bit of money stashed in a bank account he knew nothing of, extra sets of clothing for her and Sindi in a drawer she could empty in one minute with the sweep of a hand; ID book and bank card securely stored; cash tucked in an envelope at the bottom of another drawer. If needed, Grace could disappear with Sindi in less than ten minutes and never have the need to look back. Or so she thought. David was innocent of these things she kept in shadow. Although he was very much the head of the household, the back door from the marriage that Grace left ajar gave her a sense of control, a feeling of having the upper hand. A woman should always be with a man who loves her a little more than she loves him. Grace could still hear the authority in Mary’s voice as she’d imparted this bit of advice. Grace believed it, even though Patrick’s brand of love had gotten her mother killed.

  Sometimes this need for control shamed Grace, but she needed it all the same. It gave her a measure of comfort with being owned, in that peculiar
way marriage allows, by a man. Aunty Joan’s advice had contradicted Mary’s. As always, they had different approaches to the question of men. Joan had drummed it into her: never be dependent on a man. Make part of your life your own, so that you’ll be able to walk away if you need to. She didn’t have to say the unspoken, that Mary would still have a life had she been able to do this.

  The weight of Grace’s old and new secrets grew daily, strangling what little vitality she had left out of her and waking her in the middle of the night. Should she tell David about her father? What would he think of her? And what about Johnny? In her mind, Grace’s life had been sharply delineated by her mother’s death. Everything she knew before that line had inexorably been drawn through it had disappeared or been taken away from her: her mother, her home, Johnny, even her clothes and little treasures collected as a child. On the other side, she had spent most of her life longing for these things: Mary, Johnny, a feeling of home. She had gone some way in creating a home and a family with David, but there was always the ache of some essential part of her missing. Her mother, obviously, but Johnny was tangled into that loss in ways Grace couldn’t always unravel. Now he was there. It was just like him to walk back into her life on an unassuming night. And although she didn’t want her life disrupted by what was done and buried, she longed to see him again. God, he had survived those desperate years. Grace wanted to know how. She felt an excruciating need to know his story and to share hers with him; to stand their stories side by side and enmesh them like the twin helix of a strand of DNA.

  She thought about how to welcome Johnny into their lives. Invite him for tea? Introduce him to David? The thought of them meeting was like a brick to her stomach. How would she explain Johnny? If she introduced him as a childhood friend, David would bustle with questions about what she had been like, what they’d done together, which parent she most strongly resembled. David had tried a few times after they were married to excavate some happy memory, surely she must have had some—but she refused to speak about her parents at all. The few pictures she owned of them revealed young, smiling faces unaware of what life held for them, entranced with each other. She had offered these reluctantly to David along with a portrait of Mary which had been prized while she was alive. In it, Mary shone. David had remarked on Mary’s beauty, stirring the old discomfort in Grace. There was the gold cross, Mary’s, which always dangled around Grace’s throat. David had never seen his wife without it.