Broken Grace

by E. C. Diskin

  The sun was rising, those shadows from the window blinds had moved, and she could feel that freedom was coming, like the toxic cloud hanging over her might soon be gone. She looked back out the window at the smoke rising from a chimney into the blue sky, scattering into the abyss. She willed her memories to do the same and closed her eyes. But she couldn’t forget; every detail of her life, of that night and that morning, was forever burned into her brain.

  There was a faint knock, and the door opened. A doctor came in and sat on the arm of a nearby chair. She was obviously not here for an examination.

  “Hi, Grace. How are you feeling?”

  The doctor’s face had bad news written all over it. Grace answered quietly, “Okay,” waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  “I’ve been treating your sister.” And there it was. “I understand from the police officer outside that she’s the reason you’re in here right now. And I’m sure your feelings toward her are pretty complicated. But she’s lost a lot of blood. We operated, but there’s extensive damage, and the next few hours are critical.”

  Grace turned toward the window. She felt like a monster, wishing her dead, but she couldn’t hope for anything else.

  “She’s asking for you,” the doctor said. “I certainly understand if you don’t want to see her, but you might not get another chance, so I felt compelled to tell you.”

  Grace didn’t respond, instead reliving the moment when Lisa saw her that dreadful morning, and the fear that had gripped her as she ran out of the house. The doctor stood up to go. “Well, think about it. I’ll be glad to take you to see her if you decide—”

  “Okay,” Grace said. There was no one else left. She had to do it. It would be the last time she’d ever see her, no matter what happened next.

  When the doctor wheeled Grace into the hall, Hackett rose from his chair. “Would you like me to come with you?”

  She shook her head and he sat back down. “I’ll be right here.”

  They rolled down the hall in silence and took an elevator to the floor above. When they entered Lisa’s room, the doctor pushed the wheelchair close to the bed. Lisa was hooked up to various machines, and a plastic oxygen mask covered her face. Her eyes were closed. One of the machines beeped softly, consistently, confirming that, for now, she was alive.

  “Can she hear me?” Grace asked the doctor.

  She nodded. “Lisa,” she said, leaning down toward her. “Your sister is here. Just as you asked.”

  Lisa opened her eyes and, with effort, turned her head toward Grace.

  “I’ll leave you two for a few minutes. Just push this button,” the doctor said, indicating a red button near the bed, “and a nurse will help you back to your room.”

  Grace nodded, trying to maintain eye contact with Lisa, to stare down this monster, this woman who’d pretended all week to love her, to care about her, but she couldn’t do it. She didn’t feel triumphant. There were no winners.

  Lisa slowly raised her arm toward her face and pulled at the elastic band holding the oxygen mask over her mouth and nose. Grace watched her struggle, unable, maybe unwilling, to help.

  “We didn’t think anyone would be home,” Lisa whispered, barely audible. “His car wasn’t there. You always run in the morning. We just wanted the money. We didn’t—”

  Grace cut her off. “I told the police you killed our parents,” she said bitterly. “They found Tucker and the money you buried. It’s over.”

  Lisa’s words came out haltingly, as if each inhale caused more distress. “Tucker wasn’t supposed to die.” Her eyes began to water, as if she actually regretted her violence for once in her life. “It was an accident.”

  “Right. An accidental stabbing.”

  “He didn’t understand. The second I saw your face, I knew you were going to tell the police that I did it. You’d tell them everything. They’d believe you.”

  Grace suddenly didn’t know why she’d come. “You’ll finally pay for what you’ve done,” she whispered.

  Lisa’s eyes darkened. “You know I didn’t kill Michael.”

  Grace shook her head. “I don’t feel sorry for you.”

  “Why?” Lisa said, the utterance a monumental effort.

  Grace looked away. She wanted to be tough, to act unfazed, to be satisfied by this outcome, the one she had wished for in those last moments as she raced away from the house. But she couldn’t. The rage and shock and heartbreak suddenly came rushing back, drowning her in memories. So many memories. Too many.

  She’d returned home from work around nine o’clock, exhausted despite the early hour, mostly because she’d spent the evening playing the blushing bride-to-be, trying to feed off the excitement of her coworkers and overcome the looming weight of a decision she might always regret. She’d hoped to spend the evening with Michael, certain that his excitement about their engagement would spark some in her as well.

  But when she got home, she found a wad of cash on the kitchen table, bound by a rubber band, with a note: Let’s take a trip! She fanned through the money. He was still gambling. Their house was a dump, they couldn’t afford more, school was expensive, and yet here he was, risking paychecks and talking about a trip. She threw the winnings on the counter where empty beer bottles filled the space, and stared out the window into the dark woods, wondering if she could really marry this man. Wondering what that life looked like.

  She needed to see Vicki—Vicki, who’d known them both forever, would tell her that it would be okay. She walked to the bedroom while typing a quick text to say she’d pop over in the morning after her run.

  The lights and television were on, but Michael was sound asleep. She tried to wake him but he was like a dead man. On the night table next to him, her Xanax bottle sat opened. Only two pills left. He’d gotten into them. Yet again. She stripped out of her clothes and threw on an old T-shirt, heading back into the living room with the remaining Xanax so she could hide them again. And that’s when the horror began.

  The mail was on the coffee table, unopened, of course. Michael never paid any bills. She leafed through the stack before coming to the big envelope, addressed to her. Written on the back: H B G. She knew immediately that it was from Lisa. Lisa had signed every birthday card the same way—HBG, as if the initials of well wishes would do and the act of merely giving a birthday card, a duty forced upon her by their parents when they were young, was enough.

  She’d braced herself as she tore open the envelope. Every year since her parents had died, Lisa had done something on Grace’s birthday just to remind her that she was still playing her cruel games. The presents were always criminal, accompanied by just enough clues to make her suspect Lisa but never enough evidence to do anything about it—the keyed car on her seventeenth, the brick through the window on her eighteenth, the slashed tires last year. And now, some torment for her twentieth.

  When she pulled out the photos of Michael and another woman naked, the shock of it, the reality, was unbelievable. She looked closer. She recognized the bedroom. Lisa.

  Michael had always told Grace to stay away from her—she’d confided in him about everything Lisa had done to her, even her suspicions regarding their parents’ death. It didn’t seem possible he’d sleep with her. But then she saw the date written on the back: 12/1/13. Her birthday. The night Michael didn’t come home after work like he’d said he would. Instead, he’d been unable to remember anything, so messed up the next morning that she’d taken him to urgent care. There was no proving it, yet again, but Lisa was behind it. She and Tucker were always doing drugs. The evidence was right there—Michael didn’t even look conscious in the photos. And Lisa was capable of doing anything that entered her twisted mind.

  Grace had walked into the bedroom with the photos and stashed them in her bedside table. There’d be no waking Michael now. They could talk about it in the morning.

  That’s
when she noticed the ripped envelope on the floor. It was addressed to Michael, the return address Oaks Correctional. His dad. He must have sent it before he killed himself.

  The envelope was empty. She pulled back the sheets. There. In his hand. Maybe that’s why he’d taken the Xanax. Maybe hearing from his father had been too much to bear. He’d refused to speak to him in all those years he’d been in prison, had said it would be too painful.

  She slid the letter from his hand, hoping he wouldn’t wake now, sure that this was an invasion of privacy, but she couldn’t stop herself. She’d never faced Michael’s father—she’d been too young when it happened—but he’d been part of why she’d felt so bonded to Michael, both of them irreparably damaged by the same man. She wandered back to the living room, reading.

  Michael’s father apologized for his drinking, for all the abuse. He said Michael was a good kid and hadn’t deserved a dad like him.

  But he didn’t apologize for killing Mary. Grace’s heart wrenched. The words—or maybe it was just her vision—turned bloodred on the page. I’m sure I drove you to it and I just want you to know that I forgive you. She read that line again. I forgive you. What? She kept reading and rereading, closing and reopening her eyes, certain she was confused.

  But there was no other possible meaning. Michael—her Michael—had killed Mary? Her knees buckled and she fell onto the sofa, the paper shaking in her hands. His father recalled seeing Michael dump Mary’s body, too drunk to react at the time and uncertain of what he remembered after blacking out. But ten months after his arrest, finally sober, he’d sat in that courtroom listening to the evidence, listening to his son and his wife recount the years of abuse. He wasn’t sure what had happened that day, but he was sure that this was to be his punishment. He’d spent fifteen years in a cell, piecing together his sorry excuse for a life, the choices he’d made, and the fact that he couldn’t even defend himself because of his addictions. State-imposed therapy, he called it. When he finally remembered the truth of that day, he vowed to take it to his grave, the least he could do to protect his son.

  The words pierced like a knife, twisting through her gut. She’d even looked down at her stomach to see if it was bleeding, if her insides had spilled out. “Why?” she uttered, barely audible. “Why?” she screamed. She ran to the bedroom and shoved Michael, pummeled him, yelling, “Wake up! Wake up!” He didn’t move.

  She ran back to the living room, saw the picture of them on the mantel, and threw it across the room, watching the glass shatter as it hit the wall and fell to the floor. “We were five years old,” she screamed into the empty room. “You loved us!”

  It was just a whisper then, this voice that interrupted her confusion and shared a thought she’d never imagined. Michael, then fifteen, doing something unspeakable to Mary. She pictured her twin’s face, twisted in fear, crying out for help. What did he do to her? The sobs came harder and she threw her hand over her mouth. She couldn’t even say it.

  Their history came at her like a speeding freight train. Michael, always by her side, taking care of her, loving her. He’d played with her for as long as she could remember. She thought of that first time he’d kissed her. She’d been only twelve. He was twenty-two! No wonder her mother was against the relationship. What kind of twenty-five-year-old man sleeps with a fifteen-year-old girl? All her life, he’d played the friend, the protector, the lover, when he’d been the reason she lost Mary. She stopped to wipe her face, grabbed a nearby tissue for her nose, now running and so clogged it had grown difficult to breathe, and stood motionless for a moment. Nothing was real. Their entire history an illusion.

  “You sick, twisted fuck!” she shouted, her voice unable to contain her rage. He’d killed Mary; he’d let his father go to prison for her murder. She paced the room until she couldn’t bear to think about it anymore. She stood at the sink, a full beer in one hand, the two remaining Xanax in the other, and forced herself to swallow the pills and drink the bottle in three gulps, wiping frantically as it spilled down her chin.

  She walked into the bedroom again, sat on the edge of their bed, and stared at him, repulsed by that face she knew so well—every line, every look, every smile. She didn’t know him at all.

  The pills began to kick in, and she collapsed on her side of the bed, her insides still screaming, while her body began to shut down. Her only plan, in those last conscious moments, was to wake up Saturday, break off their engagement, and finally get out from under the web of lies and deceit. She’d get away from Lisa while she was at it. She couldn’t take this life anymore.

  But she dreamed about it: Michael touching Mary, scaring her. In the dream, they were up on the hunting platform, and Grace was there, trying to save her, to pull him off of her, to stop it, but Mary fell, her body soaring through the air, the distance to the ground growing, as if she were falling from a cliff, while Grace reached down, screaming her name.

  She sat up, shouting. She had to save her sister. And through the tears and the fury, she reached down and pulled Michael’s shotgun from under the bed.

  Her hands shook as she stood at the end of the bed and squeezed the trigger. And then the explosion came, like an alarm, blasting into the nightmare. She shrieked at the sight of the spray on the wall behind the bed, the sheer amount of blood that poured out of his body like an open faucet. She dropped the gun and ran to the bathroom, vomiting violently into the tub until her stomach had shriveled into a tiny ball of nerves.

  The hospital door opened, pulling Grace back from the memory. A nurse popped her head inside, smiled at Grace, and left, like she hadn’t realized there was a visitor, and Grace looked at Lisa, struggling to breathe, and finally whispered the horrifying truth of why she’d done it. “He killed Mary.”

  Lisa took a few breaths in the mask before moving it from her mouth again. “You’re no different than I am.”

  Grace shook her head and wiped at her face. It wasn’t true. Grace hadn’t planned any of it. And sitting on the tile floor, covered in Michael’s blood, she’d begun to shake, almost convulsively, processing what she’d done, but then what he’d done, that someone had already gone to prison for his crimes, and now she would too. Her mind began to speed up, like something outside of herself was taking charge. She needed to shower and get rid of the evidence; she needed to go for a run; she needed to go see Vicki, to be surprised when she came home to find him dead.

  She took off the nightshirt she’d slept in, now covered in blood. After dressing in running gear, she took the letter from Michael’s father out back and dropped it into the well, watching the paper slowly cascade into the black hole. She drove down Red Arrow in a daze, woozy from pills, beer, and blood, her only thought being to get rid of the evidence, to put many miles between it and her crime.

  The roads were empty. Darkness surrounded her. Tossing the items into the woods seemed like a mistake, too easily found. But as she neared New Buffalo, she saw those apartments off to the left—Bellaire—and those four big dumpsters at the edge of the lot, sitting in the darkness, just beyond the spotlights of the parking lot. She envisioned trash trucks picking up those giant bins, crushing their contents before dumping them in a landfill, never to be found. She switched off her headlights and turned into the lot. It was full of cars, but there was no one in sight when she threw the items into a bin and ran back to the car.

  But just as she put her hand on the ignition, she heard voices, laughter, beer cans being kicked across the parking lot. She slid down on the seat. Several people began walking out of the building, a party breaking up. She watched them stumble to their cars, and then she slowly turned back onto Red Arrow, hit the gas, and took off.

  The sky began to lighten as she returned to the house, like time was moving faster. Soon everything would come to light. She grabbed the stack of mail, along with the empty envelopes, threw them into the trash, and headed for the front door to take her run.

  B
ut the back door creaked open. Grace froze. She heard a footstep on the squeaky wood floor and ducked behind the island in the kitchen. And then more footsteps. Someone was inside.

  “Check in the bedroom.” She knew that voice. Lisa.

  And then Tucker’s: “Where do you think he’d put it?” His footsteps moved down the hall.

  “There!” Lisa said, her steps coming closer. She grabbed the wad of money from the counter. She was only a few feet away. If she turned toward the front door, she’d see Grace. Grace held her breath and squeezed her eyes shut, silently begging them to get out, praying for the chance to get away.

  “What the fuck!” Tucker shouted from the bedroom. Lisa jogged back toward his voice. Grace’s heart pounded against her chest, and she jumped up and grabbed the handle on the front door. The bolt was latched and just as she unlocked it—

  “Grace!”

  She slowly turned back.

  “What the fuck did you do?” Lisa was slurring, drunk, stumbling toward her from the other side of the room.

  She scanned the space frantically, terrified of Lisa’s rage, of what could happen now. It wasn’t me, Grace thought. It wasn’t me. She backed up against the doorknob, twisted the handle as Lisa came at her, and ran out the front door.

  Her hands shook as she tried to put the key in the ignition. She looked back at the house, threw the gear in reverse, and backed out of the drive, the tires spitting up gravel. Shifting into drive, she slammed her foot on the accelerator and flew down the road.

  Lisa stole his money. “Lisa was there. She did it. Lisa did it,” she began repeating under her breath. Lisa killed him. That’s what she’d tell the police. She’d come in from her run and found her there. Lisa had sent those pictures. She was a killer. “I could never do that,” she pleaded, crying, “I loved him,” the desperation, the heartbreak driving her on. Lisa had killed their parents and allowed someone else to pay for their deaths; Michael had killed Mary, allowing his father to pay for her death; so now she would make Lisa pay for Michael’s death. It was the only thing she could think of, until the universe stepped in and threw her into a tree.