The Grip Lit Collection

by Claire Douglas

  I fall asleep immediately but it doesn’t last long. I’m awake again at midnight. At one. At two. At three. Sick of looking at the clock, watching one hour after another go down for the count, I decide to get something to eat, a Fig Newton maybe. I’m at the bottom of the staircase, a couple feet from the kitchen, when it occurs to me that Dad’s probably in it. That’s okay as long as he’s dead drunk, which he should be if tonight’s going for him the way every other night goes. But what if, for some reason, it’s not? It’ll be awkward if I walk in on him in that in-between state. I should just go back to my room, spare us both the possibility. Thinking about that Fig Newton, though, has made me want it. So for a full minute I stand there, clutching the banister, head cocked, ears straining. All I hear is the sound of my own breathing.

  I step into the kitchen. The first thing I see: Dad, at the table, pitched bonelessly forward, head buried in his arms. In front of him is a bottle of Jim Beam, capless, the warm amber liquid picking up whatever light’s in the room. As I creep past him, inhaling through my mouth so I don’t have to take in his sad, fusty smell—pencil erasers and herbal throat lozenges, anti-dandruff shampoo—I reach for the whiskey, thinking a slug or two might knock me out. Holding the bottle, though, I can feel the ridges of his fingerprints, their slight tackiness, see a bit of backwash floating on top. My stomach lurches, and I put the bottle down, move on to the cookie drawer.

  I’ve just opened it when I hear a buzzing noise. I jump back, look around wildly. See Dad’s cell an inch from his elbow. It’s facedown and lit up, the surface of the table tinged green by the reflected glow. Another buzz. Dad stirs in his chair, groans a little. I quickly walk over, grab the phone. It’s the alarm. He must’ve set it accidentally, screwed up the A.M./P.M. option.

  I’m hunting for the Off button, when I see something that stops me cold: the photograph on the screen. It’s of a sheet of loose-leaf notebook paper. I recognize the tiny, crabbed writing, know who it belongs to even before I spot the signature at the bottom of the page. Manny Flores. I’m looking at his suicide note. I read it back in April when the police showed it to my parents and me. I read it again now.

  I can’t live with what I did. But what I did, I did out of love. I never meant to hurt anyone. Now I’m a murderer too. I’m sorry. So so sorry.

  Manny

  Not quite believing my eyes, I read it a third time. A charge of purest electricity runs through me. This isn’t a murder confession. This. Is. Not. A. Murder. Confession. I know it without knowing how I know it, my intuition faster than my brain. Eventually, though, my brain catches up: when Manny’s body was found, Nica’s unsolved shooting was on everybody’s mind. Manny left behind a note in which he referred to himself as a murderer. A murderer, I’m betting, not because he gunned Nica down, but because he was about to string himself up. And the thing that he did that he was so so sorry for—it could have been anything. My guess, based on his other writing sample, “A Flower’s Lament,” is that after finally acting on his same-sex urges, he was so racked with guilt he couldn’t live with himself. That’s why he said it was done out of love. And the person he hurt? Maybe it was the other guy, thought he seduced him, coerced him into committing a sin. Or maybe it was his mother, like it would pain her to find out she had a gay son. I don’t know. I do know the note proves—okay, not court-of-law proves, proves to me, though—not just that he didn’t kill Nica, but that someone didn’t kill him to frame him for killing Nica either.

  And if Manny’s death is a straight-up suicide, has nothing to do with Nica’s, is simply a case of bad timing, then I can finally believe in the suspect list Damon and I came up with, especially now that Mr. Wallace has revealed himself not to be the dark horse. There is no dark horse. The person who killed Nica is somebody she knew, is somebody I know, is somebody on that list. And no one on it, in my opinion, could have committed a premeditated murder—an execution, basically—of some completely innocent third party, a sexually confused kid. Anyone on it, though, could have committed a crime of passion.

  I send a copy of the photo to my cell before exiting the kitchen as quietly as I entered it.

  I’m back in bed. I can’t sleep. I can’t even blink. I’m too jacked up. My mind’s gyrating, spinning back and forth between the suicide note on Dad’s cell—why’s he looking at it in the middle of the night, in the middle of a drunk? for a grieving parent reason or for some other reason entirely? what’s it doing on his phone in the first place?—and the interrupted conversation with Damon in the Wendy’s parking lot. I wouldn’t like what he had to say, he told me, and I believed him. I was convinced he was getting ready to tell me that our sex had been about his feelings for Nica, and hearing that would have devastated me. What if, though, he was getting ready to devastate me in a wholly different way? He asked me once and then again if there was anyone besides the three Amorys and a dark horse I felt belonged on the suspect list. I said no. I was lying to him, though, as he well knew. Had to have known, or why else ask twice? Lying to myself, too.

  My dad. I think my dad belongs on the list.

  In some secret corner of myself I’ve been harboring dark thoughts about him for a while now. It was his name on the tip of my tongue on the ride back from Brattleboro. So much of his behavior disturbs me: the drinking; the moving of Nica’s Dream from Mom’s darkroom to the kitchen; the refusal to leave Chandler even though he had every imaginable incentive to do so. And then there’s the feeling I get whenever I’m around him, the almost tangible sense of not-rightness. We used to spend whole days in one another’s company, were an established pair same as Mom and Nica were an established pair. But lately, when I’m with him, all I want is to not be. Maybe that isn’t proof he killed Nica. It’s proof, though, of something.

  In the café, Mom said she believed he knew he wasn’t Nica’s father. But he didn’t know Nica knew. Maybe, on the night Nica died, she went to him, told him. Maybe hearing the truth out loud and from her mouth tipped him over the edge. Maybe he’s one of those mild-mannered guys who takes it and takes it and takes it and then, all of a sudden, can’t take it anymore; gets so enraged by his own impotence and ineffectuality that he snaps, goes berserk. Six months ago—six days ago—I would have said such a scenario was out of the question. Now, though, I’m not so sure.

  I am sure that he doesn’t have an alibi for the night of Nica’s murder. Not a real one. He said he was in bed with Mom and Mom backed him up. But Mom’s a heavy sleeper—the heaviest. If she’s out, you can throw a party in her room, stage marching band practice, play a game of naked capture the flag, and she’ll be none the wiser.

  Throwing off the covers, I swing my legs to the floor. I have to finish this, I think, pulling my cell out of my bag. If Dad is the one who did it, I’ve got to find out. No more seeking the truth and hiding from it at the same time. I dial Damon’s number. Voice mail picks up. I leave a message telling him to call me as soon as he can. Then I forward him the photo of Manny’s suicide note, along with an e-mail nutshelling my thoughts on its meaning. I almost send a second e-mail with my suspicions about Dad but decide to hold off. Those I need to air in person.

  Duty discharged, I return my phone to my bag, get back into bed. Wait for sleep to come.

  Chapter Eighteen

  There’s no cell reception in the library basement, so I don’t realize Damon’s called me back until fifth period when I’m heading over to de Forest to run A Streetcar Named Desire for Mrs. Chu’s Twentieth-Century American Drama class. His message says that he’s at the hospital all morning but that he’ll be home in the afternoon if I want to come by. I spend the next two and a half hours willing time to get a move on.

  At last, the day ends. I pick up sodas, a couple sandwiches from the snack bar, drive over to his grandmother’s.

  There’s no answer to my knock. I’m about to try again when Damon’s voice shouts, “Here!” I follow the sound of it around the side of the house. The backyard is small, plain but tidy, a rectangle of
trimmed grass bordered by shoulder-high bushes. At the center of it is a LeBaron. Was a LeBaron, I should say, now a hulking mass of mangled metal. Damon is squatting beside the rear tire. He’s got one of those stubby mini golf pencils behind his ear and a little spiral notebook sticking out of his hip pocket. Grease and sweat streak his T-shirt and hands, his arms so big they strain the fabric of his sleeves.

  Seeing me approach, he breaks into a smile. “What do you think of the garden sculpture?” he says, standing up.

  Slowly I begin circling the car. “Impressive. Looks like early Damian Ortega. You should see if the Wadsworth Atheneum is interested in taking it.”

  “Does the Wad pay?”

  “You’d have to donate. But you’d get a sizeable tax deduction.”

  “Good enough for me.”

  I laugh. “Seriously, though, Damon. This is bad.”

  The teasing aspect goes out of his eyes. “Yeah, I know. And not nearly as bad as it could’ve been. I got lucky. Crashed into the guardrail, not another driver.”

  “Are you trying to fix it?”

  “It would cost more to fix it than it’s worth. I’m doing a pick-and-pull. Am making a list of parts now.”

  I’ve completed the circuit, and Damon and I are standing next to each other. He turns, kisses me carefully, without using his hands. As he leans back, though, I press myself against his entire front so I’m covered in grease. Sweat, too. He laughs, puts his arms around me. Kisses me for real.

  “Are you hungry?” I say, when we break apart. “I brought sandwiches.”

  “Get them. I’ll wash up.”

  I’m at my car, grabbing the food off the front seat when I look over my shoulder, see Damon ambling around the side of the house. He reaches a spigot jutting out of the wall, twists it, the water arcing out high and narrow, a delicate stream trembling in the breeze. And as I’m watching him drink, droplets flying off his lips, catching the light, sparkling like shards of flame, I realize suddenly that I’m happy. It’s the craziest thing, but it’s true. My life, by any objective standard, is awful, a total fucking mess: pregnant, and I don’t know how, sister murdered, and I don’t know by who—though maybe I do and it’s bad, couldn’t be worse—a college dropout working two dead-end jobs. But for the first time in my life I feel connected, like I’m part of it all. And connected not through Nica, connected through me. No longer am I on the outside looking in, an observer, forever extraneous. I’m a crucial and organic piece of the whole.

  It’s a major moment for me, and I want to laugh or shout. Instead, I stick my arm in the air and wave at Damon. It’s a spastic wave, lots of shoulder in it, hand flapping around at the end of my wrist, the kind of wave a little kid would make. And as Damon stands there, not moving, staring at me, I feel embarrassed, afraid my enthusiasm has put him off. And then he drops the hose, raises his own arm, and waves back every bit as enthusiastically.

  We eat the sandwiches in the backseat of the LeBaron, doors closed, windows down. The talk is relaxed, aimless, bland in a nice way. Neither one of us brings up Manny’s suicide note, though we both know we’ll get to it eventually. And after that, I think, we’ll get to my dad.

  But not yet.

  The conversation dwindles down to nothing. And then we’re just sitting there, sprawled across the seat, our backs against opposite doors, our legs entwined in the middle, as the day’s light changes, grows more diffuse and with a longer slant to it, filling the cab of the car with a soft glow. Though the sun’s fading, it’s still strong, and every part of my body that bends or folds is perspiring. I feel slightly, pleasantly paralyzed.

  Finally, Damon sighs. “Okay,” he says, picking up my feet from his lap, kissing the insteps, then placing them on the edge of the window. “I’m going to finish making that list. My grandmother’ll be home any minute now.”

  My hair’s hanging out the other window and I can feel the end of my ponytail swishing against the door handle as I nod at him. Leaning farther back, I close my eyes. I hear him get out of the car, pull the notebook from his pocket, flip to a fresh page. Rays of sun are lightly pummeling my lids, warming the nails on my toes. A sweet-breathed breeze floats over my face.

  I’m just about to drop off to sleep when Damon speaks. I twist my neck around, then my whole body. Spot his feet and lower legs sticking out the bottom of the car. “I didn’t hear what you said. Say it again.”

  He rolls out from under the carriage. “I said, ‘Will you pass me the owner’s manual?’ There’s a part down here I’ve never seen before.”

  “Where is it?”

  “In one of the side pockets. The driver-side, I think.”

  But it’s not in the driver-side pocket. The passenger-side, either. I’m about to tell him so, when I decide to check the glove compartment. It must’ve gotten a good jolt in the collision because it’s really stuck. I have to bang my fist against it over and over. At last, though, it falls open and I reach inside. My fingers snag on something that’s long and dark and matted. For a moment I think it’s a dead animal—a rat or possibly a squirrel—and I almost scream. Then, holding it up to the light, I realize it’s a wig, the one I wore to Jamie’s Fourth of July party. What, I wonder, is it doing in Damon’s glove compartment? For seconds on end I stare at it dumbly, as if it were beyond comprehension. And then, suddenly, comprehension’s right there, is surrounding me, coming at me from all sides, dropping over me like a net.

  Damon’s head pops up in the window. “Hey, Grace,” he says, “did you—” but the rest of the question dies on his lips when he sees what’s in my hand. He looks at me, the expression on his face something between disbelief and horror, much, I would guess, like the expression on my own.

  We’re staring at each other, gazes locked, hearts stopped, time standing still. And then the spell’s broken by the sound of a ringing phone in the house next door. I drop the wig, run to my car. I hear Damon behind me, a fading voice calling my name.

  PART FOUR

  Chapter Nineteen

  A fat little worm. No, a fat little leech. That’s how I think of it, this baby growing inside me. Fat and getting fatter by the second. I can almost feel its tiny, toothless mouth suctioned to me, gorging on my innards, slurping up my blood. I want it taken out with a tube, a knife, a hook, a Dirt Devil—whatever. I just want it gone. Now.

  Before I found the wig in Damon’s glove compartment, I believed it was some cosmic force that had planted the seed in my womb. No joke. That’s truly what I thought. A faceless male might have been the instrument, but the universe was the power behind the instrument. And this baby wasn’t a baby, it was a message: get cracking on solving your sister’s murder or else. The sore breasts, the aversion to food, the morning sickness that could strike at any time of day—all little nudges, reminders that I was on a mission, had a finite amount of time to carry it out in. But now the faceless male has a face, and the metaphorical baby is a literal one, and I can’t handle any of it.

  I am dealing with it, though. My abortion is scheduled for ten A.M. tomorrow morning—Saturday, the last day of my first trimester. I’ve already received my instructions from the counselor assigned to me at the West Hartford Planned Parenthood Center. My clothes, loose and dark in case of bleeding, are laid out on the floor beside my bed. The four hundred dollars for the procedure, forked over happily by Dad, though I know it had to hurt—the fee, I told him, for a class I wanted to take at UConn’s Center for Continuing Studies—is tucked in my wallet. And I’ve arranged to have a cab pick me up before the appointment, drop me off after since I’ll be too woozy to drive myself.

  As far as I’m concerned, tomorrow can’t come fast enough. I’m dying to get the abortion over with. Not just because it means I’ll be rid of this science fiction movie monster eating me from the inside out. And not just because the experience promises to be an unpleasant one and I want to put it in the past tense. I’m also dying to get it over with because once I do I can start using again: Xanax, Valium, Klonopin—
stronger drugs, too, if given the chance, stuff that will go off in me like a bomb, blast the brain clean out of my head. The only thing holding me back from kaboom now is the third of the ten special instructions posted on the Planned Parenthood website, the one stating that you must notify them if you’re taking any medication as it might bar you from receiving conscious sedation. The idea of being alert and in full command of my senses during the operation seems horrible to me to the point of unspeakable.

  Another unspeakably horrible idea: being alert and in full command of my senses period. So I’ve been making a compromise and taking well above the recommended daily dose of cold medicines with the may-cause-drowsiness warning labels. That way I’m never awake for more than forty-five minutes at a stretch. And during that forty-five minutes I’m half awake at best, just awake enough to wash down a handful of Benadryl tablets with swigs of NyQuil, sedate myself still further with TV before sleep swallows me up again.

  The only reason I’m not drooling all over my pillow now is because I’m waiting for Dad to go to work so I can jump in my car, swing by Ruben’s. I’d thrown away the scrap of paper bag with his address on it. Luckily, though, I hadn’t emptied my wastebasket in days. And, after a hasty search, I found it under a rotting apple core. His dealing hours at Trinity, I remember him saying, are the same as they were at Chandler, which means between five and seven thirty on Fridays. I want to arrive early. Buy as many of those anti-drug pamphlets as I can with the little money I have. More if he’s as open to accepting non-cash forms of payment as he said he was. The pamphlets aren’t for tonight, obviously. They’re for tomorrow. My reward for taking care of business at the clinic. Just the thought of slipping one of them into my pocket and my lips begin to tingle, my heart to flutter, my mood to lift.

  As I’m having this Pavlov’s dog moment, the small voice at the back of my head starts up. My conscience, I guess. Wow, terrific, it’s saying to me. You’re really managing your life responsibly here. Readdicting yourself to drugs? That’s your solution to your problems? Fuck, yes, readdicting myself to drugs is my solution to my problems. How else am I supposed to bear the pain? Just going to the bathroom is an emotional ordeal. I open the door, flip on the light, and a second later I’m sweating and dizzy, bent over as if I’ve been gut-punched, and all because I saw my face in the medicine cabinet mirror, and when I did I thought of Damon seeing my face underneath him in that guestroom bed.