Unmaking Grace

by Barbara Boswell

  They spoke often of Mary. Driving around the upper contours of Signal Hill, the city twinkling below them, they would call her back from the dead and breathe her into the present.

  “You know, I loved your mother,” Johnny said one night. “It was like she recognized something in me, something good, that others didn’t see. I mean, at first she was stuck up. Remember that first time I came knocking at your door?”

  They laughed at the memory.

  “If she’d had a gun, she would have fired it in the air to get rid of me. But once you got to know her…your mother was good to me.”

  “How? Tell me how she was good?” Grace implored.

  She knew her father had liked Johnny and taken an interest, but Mary? She had not seen any explicit expressions of affection. Mary had softened toward him over the course of their acquaintance, but definitely regarded him as one would the help.

  “Did you know she gave me a pair of your father’s old shoes?”

  Grace hadn’t known that.

  “Yes, she did. I had never owned a pair of shoes besides my school shoes until that day. That was so good of her, to think of me like that. She didn’t have to do that, you know.”

  Grace smiled and fingered the cross of gold around her neck.

  They sat in silence as headlights blurred into points of swishing light below. Grace felt she could have stayed there forever, in the warm car with soft rain tapping the roof and Good Hope’s smooth love songs on the radio.

  “The funny thing was, I never even wore them. Just having those shoes was enough for me. They made me walk a bit straighter somehow.”

  Grace turned and smiled at him.

  “Your father was a good man too.”

  Grace started. They’d hardly ever broached the subject of Patrick after that first night.

  “I know what he did was horrible, unforgivable. I can’t even begin to imagine what that did to you. But sometimes people can do the most horrible things, things that define them for the rest of their lives. That doesn’t mean that there wasn’t some good in them. That doesn’t mean we should forget about that good, the small kindnesses they showed.”

  Grace held his gaze. “Don’t you dare talk to me about the goodness in that man,” she said. “What do you know? Just what the hell do you know about living in constant terror, always waiting for the next blow?”

  “More than you would think,” Johnny snapped back. Grace retreated. He was right.

  “You should go and see him, you know,” Johnny persisted. “You don’t have to make him a part of your life. Just go and talk to him, before it’s too late.”

  “What? What are you talking about? What do you know about my father?”

  “He’s out of prison,” Johnny replied. “Been out for a while now. I see him sometimes, around the place.”

  Grace felt betrayed. Johnny had known this information about Patrick and he had kept it from her. Now he was urging her to go and see him?

  “You must be insane!”

  “He needs to…”

  “What? What the hell do you know about my father’s needs?”

  It was clear to Grace now that there was some kind of relationship between Patrick and Johnny. She thought about the letter for the first time in a while. Unable to face its contents, she had locked it away in a little drawer at work. She knew it had to be from Patrick. Johnny was the only other person who could have written to her, but he had never mentioned sending her a letter so she knew there was only one other person who might have contacted her in this way.

  Had they been conspiring against her? At this thought, Grace exploded with rage.

  “You’ve seen him? You’ve seen that bastard?”

  “Yes,” Johnny said calmly. “He lives close to me. He needs—”

  “I don’t care what he needs. Did he care about what I needed? A mother—that’s what I needed most. He took my mother away from me, and I will never forgive him. He took everything. I left there without any clothes, nothing. You tell him from me to fuck off!”

  They drove home in silence. Grace vowed to herself for the thousandth time to break things off. Johnny was in on something with Patrick. Continuing this madness would almost certainly bring her father back into her life, along with a whole lot of explaining she’d have to do to David. She got out of the car a few doors from home, as was her habit, and slammed the door shut without saying goodnight.

  But she couldn’t stop with Johnny, no matter how hard she tried. Every time they parted, Grace quietly resolved to stay away, that this would be the last time. She’d be strong for a few days but that familiar longing would form in her stomach, an emptiness that could only be soothed by him. Grace was in trouble. She was recklessly gambling with her life and the lives of Sindi and David, and enjoying it. Perhaps Patrick had been right, and she had been destined to become the slut her mother supposedly had been.

  When these thoughts threatened to overwhelm her, Grace assured herself that everything would be okay. Hadn’t she suffered enough in life, and wasn’t she entitled to this bit of happiness? It was all right to steal some joy with him, her Johnny—he was her first love, and if the horrendous events of the past had not happened, who knew? They would probably have been together and married. If only, if only. Sindi would be his. That was how it should have been—yet another thing Patrick had taken away from her. The mess that was her life was squarely Patrick’s fault.

  Despite her resolve to end the affair, it continued. As their three-month “anniversary” came up, they looked forward to spending the stolen night together. Johnny had picked her up from work—a risky move—and they were on their way to Grace’s favorite restaurant in Muizenberg, on the other coast, when the inevitable happened. Grace was laughing, happily chirping away at Johnny as they drove through the city, when they stopped at a red light. They’d become careless, daring the world to look at them, to find out. As Johnny turned to her, Grace leaned in and brushed his cheek with her fingers. It was a simple gesture, not overly demonstrative, but the kind of touch that signaled the sort of intimacy a married woman should have with no one but her husband. A playful, tender gesture at the end of a tiring week and the beginning of an exciting night. Her hand lingered on his face, and Grace turned to find herself looking into the eyes of Gwen, her mother-in-law, who had pulled up at the light beside them. The two women’s faces froze as they recognized each other. No smiles, waves, or acknowledgments were necessary. The weight of Gwen’s silent grasping of the situation filled the car. Both cars moved off as the light changed.

  Nausea rose from the pit of Grace’s stomach. She demanded to be taken home—Johnny, puzzled, wanted to know why.

  “His mother, David’s mother, she was in that car next to us. She just saw us.”

  Johnny grimaced, then tried to reassure her. They hadn’t been doing anything right at that moment, had they? Nothing obviously wrong. Grace had told David she’d be out with friends. Could it not be explained in this way, that Johnny was one of those friends?

  “Don’t be stupid!” Grace screamed, tears streaming down her face. “Of course she could see what was going on.”

  Johnny’s mood shifted from concern to anger.

  “Stop it, just stop it, Grace! Stop crying this instant. You were happy enough to get into this in the beginning, remember? What did you think—that we’d be able to go on like this forever? This was going to happen sooner or later. And what kind of man is your husband anyway to let you go about like this, so freely, every week? Maybe he already knows. Maybe he’s not man enough, or maybe he can’t deal with this. Maybe he’s relieved. Looks to me like he’s turning a blind eye.”

  The words felt like a physical blow to the stomach. With anger rising in her throat, Grace cast a fresh eye on Johnny, this Johnny she had never seen before, who had never spoken to her in this sneering tone.

  “I’m sorry, Grace, to be so direct,” he said, and now his voice was devoid of malice, “but come on now, surely by now he must be wonderi
ng.”

  He had no business, no business at all to be talking about David like that, to even have David’s name on his tongue. David, her good and solid David, didn’t need to have his name besmirched like this.

  “Don’t you dare!” Grace hissed. “Leave David out of this.”

  Johnny laughed a shrill, thin laugh, throwing his head back in exaggeration. The venom was back in his voice as he attacked. “I have to leave him out of it? Me, who has never even met this wonderful man of yours? Who is the one running around on him? If he’s so wonderful, why aren’t you home with him?” Grace had no answer, except her usual demand to be taken home. They drove together in silence as darkness pressed down on the car. Traffic in the opposite lane whizzed past them, throwing erratic strobes of light onto Johnny’s face, cloaking him alternately in darkness, then light. Now you see him, now you don’t—a new game of hide and seek invented itself between them. Johnny lit a cigarette, passed it to Grace, and lit another for himself. Grace inhaled, picturing her carefully constructed life about to come crashing down. At this very moment, David would probably be opening the front door to his mother, happy as always to see her. He would have Sindi on his arm. Right now, he would be leaning forward to kiss his mother on the cheek as he always did; she would enter the house through the hallway, and in the living room she would proceed to destroy Grace’s life. What a fool she had been. She wanted to get away from Johnny immediately, wished she had never set eyes on him that day on the train.

  Johnny pulled into an emergency lane at the side of the road, snapped off the car’s headlights, and with an impatient swoop, lit another cigarette.

  “I told you, I want to go home,” Grace protested weakly.

  “I will take you home, but first, you listen to me.”

  His voice bore an authority unfamiliar to Grace. She blinked the tears out of her eyes and sat up, on guard. She was not used to this.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do. I’ll take you home tonight, but this will be the last time I leave you on the street. Tonight I come up with you, we tell David everything, you pack your bags and we’re gone. You’re leaving him—tonight.”

  “Are you mad?”

  Grace was starting to feel afraid of this new, assertive Johnny, the one no longer whispering declarations of love but making firm plans. She had no idea who he was, or what he was capable of.

  “Where’s the madness in that? We can’t go on like this. Let’s make a clean break.”

  “What about my child? Have you thought about her? Where is she in your plan?”

  His silence swelled like a fresh bruise, filling the car.

  “I’m not just running off with you,” Grace said. “I hardly know you.”

  “Oh, you knew me well enough to fuck me.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that.”

  “Like what, the common whore that you are?”

  The slap landed on his face before Grace knew what she was doing. She wanted to say something to defend herself, but the words piled up against the inside of her throat, and her tongue became a dead weight. She struggled with the door handle in the dark, desperate to get away from this man. Johnny grabbed the fumbling hand, reining her in.

  “I’m sorry, so sorry. Grace. No.” He snatched both of her hands and kissed them. “I didn’t mean that. It was just the heat of the moment. I love you, Grace. I want you to come with me. Leave him. We’ll work out the baby somehow. Just come with me.”

  Grace sat back and leaned her head against the headrest. Johnny loved her. She could see it right there, written on his face. She could feel it in the grasp of his hand on hers. But he had called her a whore, the way Patrick had called her mother a whore, and later, Grace too. Maybe this was love. Maybe love grabbed ahold of you and made you so crazy that it wrung the worst shit out of you and made you spit it at the beloved if you thought they were leaving you. Maybe love did that to you. Johnny loved her, of that she was sure. She could feel it, and the rage happening between them was part of it. She had never felt this angry at David. But David hadn’t dislodged her insides and rearranged them quite as Johnny could with just one word. This, here in the car, smacks and tugs and calling your woman a whore, this was love.

  And she loved him too, more than anyone. Anyone except Sindi. She loved David, but in a different way. David was her rock, her best friend, but it had become like living with a brother. They were family and always would be, since Sindi bound them in blood, but Johnny—this was the kind of love that knocked you off the course of every known thing. It shook you by the shoulders and woke you up. To look at him was to feel again the course of long-suppressed love rush through her into a well of tenderness. Only Johnny could touch the concealed places of her joy and pain; only he was strong enough to bear these with her. He had relit something inside her that she thought had been snuffed out, woken a spirit that found itself soaring in his presence. She could not, would not, give this up. “Where would we go, if I left? Where do you live? I don’t even know that.”

  “Look, you’re going to have to take a bit of the truth here, Grace, to get to the other side, where things will be good for us. I’ve been living with someone. It’s not serious. I never told you because it isn’t really that serious between me and her—I was planning on leaving anyway.”

  Inside of Grace’s chest, something splintered. The sound of blood rushing and buzzing dizzied her. Johnny had someone else. He had been going home to a woman, sharing a life, a bed with her. What could she say? She had known it, felt it, but hadn’t been willing to face it. Now the fact slapped her in the face.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “I just told you why…it wasn’t important enough. You were going home to your husband every night. Did you expect me to be a monk? It was always going to be over quickly with her anyway. I can leave her tomorrow, tonight even. I told you, it’s not serious.”

  “And then what? You leave tonight and then what?”

  “We’ll get a place together, you and me, Grace. We’ll get a flat close by to the baby. You’ll be close enough to see her.”

  “I’m not leaving her! I’m not leaving my baby. And her name is Sindi! You’ve never even said her name.”

  He punched the car window with his fist, sighed, and threw his head back.

  “Calm down, Grace. Just think now, logically. We won’t be able to have her at first. But we’ll work it out. You’ll have your baby. Think about it. A life together, out in the open. No more once-a-week, after dark. I know that I can make you happy, Grace.”

  He smiled and his eyes lit up. The lines on his forehead softened, and Grace started to feel better. He had come back into her life for a reason: surely it was no accident, meeting him on the train out of the blue like that? She hadn’t even been thinking about him that day, and he came back. And weighing the two men, callous as that seemed, on the scale of her emotions, one thing was clear: Johnny was the love of her life. Once David found out everything about her—her father, her mother, the sordid details; Johnny, the lies—he probably wouldn’t want her anyway. He would realize he deserved better. He deserved a decent, honest wife who didn’t have a past life waiting to explode into the present. He should have a girl from a good, solid home who could match him in solidity and respectability. Not her, not Grace, born in shame and raised on a diet of humiliation.

  Johnny knew all of this, and still he loved her. He saw all of her and wanted her. In him, her shame could rest and die.

  “Are you sure you want this, Johnny?”

  “Absolutely,” he replied. No wavering.

  “Are you sure you can take us on, both of us, me and Sindi?”

  “Yes.”

  So sure and so confident: that settled it for Grace. He loved her. He loved her. He had come back for her, and he loved her. It was always supposed to be him. Fate had thrown a cruel twist into their story, and now they were correcting it.

  They drove back to Grace’s home in silence, having fixed their plan
s. They would go into the house together and confront David and his mother. Or, rather, they would allow those two to confront them. Grace would tell David it was over. She would pack some things for Sindi and herself—it would only take a minute—and they would go to a friend of Johnny’s for the night. They would both take the next day off work. First they would take Sindi to daycare, and then they would find a place to rent. Tomorrow they would begin their new life together: Grace, Johnny, and Sindi.

  They arrived at the front gate to find the house shrouded in darkness. Gwen’s car was not parked against the curb next to the gate, where Grace had expected to see it. Surely she had driven straight to David, to share the news with her son? Gwen would not just have come and gone after delivering such devastating news. Surely not?

  “Wait, Johnny. Let’s just wait on this.”

  “What? Why?”

  Grace felt her courage fading.

  “Something’s not right; it’s not right to do it this way. I owe it to David to do it on my own.”

  “Bad idea. You don’t know what he’ll do. He might hurt you. Let me come with you.”

  “What? He’d never do that. He couldn’t hurt a fly. No, please. Let me do this on my own. Trust me, Johnny. Let me go up there tonight one last time and tell him my way.”

  “Why? Now that we’ve decided, what could you want there?”

  “I owe this to David at least. I know him, I know what to say. He would never hurt me. Just allow me to do this last thing for him.”

  Johnny’s eyes darkened but he nodded assent. More words were exchanged, and he agreed to pick her up the next morning at eight. Grace climbed out of the car after an earnest “I love you” and slammed the door with finality. The taillights of his car were two tiny red pinpricks by the time Grace turned to ascend the steps.