Healing Grace

by Lisa J. Lickel

  “It was dirty and mousy. I’m trying to clean it up.” She smiled at his antics while she sorted through some laundry. “But I may have to throw it away.”

  “We always had mouses. Trigger helped clean ’em up.”

  “Trigger?” Grace looked back from the hall where she was headed with a stack of folded towels.

  “My kitty. Daddy said she was fast on the draw!” At this, he did look up at her, smiling wide, big-eyed and dimpled, innocent as the sunrise. He let go of the car and came toward her. She stiffened. Memories of another little boy threatened to overwhelm her.

  Peace, Grace, peace. It was long ago. You don’t have to go there again. You cried enough back then.

  “Can I see my room?” he asked, smile gone.

  She was probably scaring the poor kid to death. Forcing a smile back on her face, she said, “Sure! Which one?” and followed him down the hallway alongside the wide staircase she had yet to scrub, to the second door on the left, the one across from the kitchen. It was little-boy-sized with a closet under the staircase that tunneled through the house. Eddy went to sit on the floor in front of a dusty window which looked out on a sorry playhouse in the backyard.

  “This is where my bed used to be.” His voice cracked and he sniffed. “You don’t know where Trigger is, do you?” Fat tears rolled faster and faster down his thin cheeks.

  The clump-clump of a heavy tread on the porch steps and a shadow crossing the other window signaled another visitor, saving her from doing more than patting the child on the shoulder for a moment. A different man, an older version of Eddy’s father, stood outside.

  “I’ve come to see if Eddy is here.”

  They both heard the snuffling sounds coming from inside.

  “I’m sorry he bothered you.” The man made no effort to introduce himself, and Grace was too uncomfortable in his stern presence to demand his name, although she didn’t doubt that he was Ted’s brother, Randy Marshall, the name on the mailbox of the house next door.

  “He’s not bothering me. He came to visit me earlier. I hope that was all right with his father?”

  The man did not rise to her bait. She gave it one more try. “Yes? He is welcome to stay here for a bit, if it would be easier for you.”

  “No. He knows he no longer lives here. Eddy!”

  Grace jerked her head as he called past her into the house. He stood with fists planted firmly on his hips, his expression stony and distant.

  This was not a happy person—not at all. Should she let Eddy go with him? “He’s not in any trouble, I hope? Or am I?”

  A sarcastic eyebrow raise was his only response. The child came running, picked up his police car and skipped through the door, but not before thanking her with his expression: the faint flash of a dimple and blink of long, black, damp lashes. He did not appear fearful of the man, so she decided the situation was, again, none of her business. It was not her problem to care who watched over her neighbor’s son.

  Grace continued to fold laundry into piles on the coffee table, the easy chair, and the arm of her “new” sofa. These lulling, comforting routine motions of dealing with familiar activities helped ease her into accepting this place as home. She’d tied some brown-striped sheets as slipcovers for a couple of mismatched chairs from her favorite store—the resale shop. She wondered what the local gossips had to say about her. What would they do if they really knew her and what she’d done?

  Her simple touches coordinated the furniture well against freshly-painted beige walls. Her walls in Tennessee had a touch of gold in the paint, but that formality wouldn’t work here. At least the room no longer smelled of cigar smoke, vomit, and mouse urine. She wondered who had smoked the cigars.

  The old brown and tan braided wool carpet was sacrificed to the mouse droppings, and with it gone, she’d done her best to clean and wax the narrow planked oak floors. At one time a dog had obviously occupied the place, one which did not always make it outside to do its business. She put an end table over the biggest black stain. The drapes were gone, revealing the beautiful wood casement around the windows. The corner of one window was cracked. How much would it cost to replace the whole thing? Mundane thinking kept the other whispers at bay; the ones that reminded her of her calling, of her purpose in Michigan. She struggled to tune them out with busy work. Exhaustion would quell the dreams. At some point she’d see what kind of work she could do here. Absolutely nothing to do with the medical field, though.

  A ray of brilliant sun beamed though the low cloud bank at that moment, glancing off the glass on the coffee table and stinging her eyes. She closed them. No. I told you. No.

  She ached from washing and polishing the sashes and the panes and flexed her shoulders. Think about something else, Grace, girl. Get your mind on anything else but what you’d done before.

  Yeah…let’s see. Maybe she could offer her services as a professional decorator. She chuckled. There were houses like this in her home town. They came from a kit and were personalized later. Marie had been exceptionally chatty at the library, filling in the gaps about Ted’s grandparents leaving the main house to their daughter and son-in-law’s growing family and building this place next door. There were more touches, personal ones, made through the years in wood paneling in the living room and plastered ceilings and light fixtures. Two square rooms on the second floor looked out over the slope-roofed front porch. There was a walk-in pantry behind the kitchen and a miniature bathroom stuffed between it and Eddy’s former room.

  Grace could not bring herself to take one of the bedrooms upstairs for her own. Ted and the Mrs. must have occupied one of them. Just a feeling, but it was enough to keep her away. Besides, how would she carry furniture all by herself? The cupboards in the kitchen were plentiful for her needs. The former pantry was large enough for a single bed and comfortable.

  A week after his initial visit, Eddy’s father limped up the walk on her side of the hedge and found her in the yard, puttering in the late afternoon sunshine.

  That hedge was not big enough. Maybe she could install a fence? An electric one with…

  Was he attempting to be friendly? She could assure him she was fine and send him away…

  Surely he didn’t need anything. He lived with his brother, didn’t he? She had nothing to offer, nothing, nothing, nothing. Please, don’t ask me…

  “Hello, there. Nice day for a walk,” she said when he came within hearing range.

  “Hi.” Ted settled both hands on top of the single crutch and let his gaze roam the yard. He shifted feet awkwardly. “I hope you’re doing well.”

  She assured him she was.

  “Um, Shelby is in the hospital. They think it might be food poisoning. She’s the only sitter Eddy’s ever had. I called around but it’s such short notice. There’s no one else to ask. My brother, Randy, you met him the other day… Well, he’s out of town on business. I’d take Eddy along to the clinic, but this is a long test. I don’t—”

  Then, please, don’t. “That’s all right. What are neighbors for?” She returned his tense smile while mentally hearing fingernails across a classroom chalk board. “He’s welcome to come here for the afternoon. I’m not—I’m not doing that much, anyway. I’m not an ax-murderer or child molester, either, in case you were wondering.”

  His eyes did not crinkle at the corners, like happy people smile. Too much brotherly love? His skin looked papery. She forced herself to stop her automatic clinical analysis. Should she ask who Shelby was? Folks around here were so familiar with themselves they forgot others didn’t know them. Not that she wanted to. Know them.

  Ted leaned against a pillar on the porch. “Okay, thanks. And I wasn’t wondering. I saw you go into the library. I don’t think ax-murderers read much.”

  After he returned to his side of the hedge, Grace stalked into the house, slammed and locked the door, crawled into bed and held her stomach until she fell asleep.

  When he returned the next day with Eddy in tow, he dug in his hip pocket
for a slip of paper, which he held out to her with a shaky hand. “Here’s my cell phone number and the number where I’ll be if you need anything. I should be back by four-thirty if the taxi is available. Eddy will eat anything you give him. He’s a good kid, generally.”

  The subject of their discussion gave her a saucy grin and transferred his grip from Ted’s hand to hers. Yeah, right, sure.

  Grace wondered about the reliability of taxi service in such a small town. Should she offer to drive him? She had not gotten a landline yet, either, and was contemplating not bothering. Her own cell phone had disappeared sometime during the trip here and she hadn’t taken the time to figure out something new. She did not take the slip of paper from Ted. “I don’t have any way of reaching you.”

  His brows went up and he immediately held out his phone. “Well, why don’t you take this phone, then? The number for the doctor is plugged in here.”

  She took it from him, holding it between her thumb and forefinger as if it might bite. He quickly showed her how to use it and then said with a grin that Eddy could help her if she forgot. Eddy held onto her hand with a two-fisted grip. He gave her a radiant look when his father mentioned his expertise.

  Despite her declaration that the child was welcome, Grace felt wide-eyed and wholly incompetent to care for a boy this age for more than a fifteen-minute checkup as she watched Ted lean down to hug his child and give last-minute admonishments. He was clad in a polo shirt and cargo shorts today. His left arm trembled even more than when they first met. She stoppered her professional curiosity once again before meeting his skeptical look. Maybe someday she could ask what had happened, but not yet.

  Chanting internally “act normal, be normal, you deserve a normal life after all you’ve been through,” she watched Eddy wave his father off to the waiting cab, apparently unconcerned that he was being left in the care of a virtual stranger. Maybe the fact that he had lived here once made a difference. Maybe the child was simply a happy-go-lucky kid, used to being left in the care of others. Like the mysterious Shelby.

  It had been so long…so long since she’d been alone with a little boy. What would they do all day? Eddy played on the living room floor while a radio scratched out a quiet generic piano station in the background. He didn’t seem to mind the lack of television and she promised they would look in the playhouse later after her laundry was put away.

  Grace put the folded towels in the bathroom cupboard and followed him into her room with a pile of things held in both arms. She had scrubbed the walls and ceiling and removed most of the shelves. She was still mulling a choice of wallpaper to cover the worst of the patched places.

  Eddy looked about him with awe. “This door was always closed. I peeked once when I was a little kid. There were big boxes all over and it was cold.”

  The door had been closed, hmm? Every corner of the house held some secret to pique her curiosity. But it was none of her business what had happened to Ted’s wife and nothing would make her ask the little boy where his mother was.

  With efficient, practiced motions she remade her frameless bed.

  “Thank you, Lord, for my dryer,” she muttered under her breath as the fresh grass and sunshine smell billowed up at her.

  “What, Grace?” Eddy made faces at himself in her rusty bureau mirror. “What did you say?”

  “Nothing, sweetie. Let’s go look at the playhouse.”

  “Yippeee!” Eddy dodged outside past her.

  The little house was filthy inside, strewn with leaves, and dead bugs of every type littering the floor. Chewed fragments of white plastic surrounded a play stove and refrigerator like snow, mixed with the typical brown pellets of mouse droppings and a suspicious pile of shredded newspaper and grass in a corner. It looked long abandoned.

  “Did you ever play in here?”

  “Uncle Randy said no, not even when we lived here. He told Daddy to keep me out. It was too dangerous.”

  So, the stern man from yesterday was Randy, as she had thought. Curiosity got the upper hand of her vow not to care. Caring wasn’t the same as knowing helpful information. Like who else might be coming around the hedge this summer. “Hmm… Where are, ah, Uncle Randy’s kids, now—your cousins?”

  “Just one cousins.”

  “Oh? Is your cousin a boy or a girl?”

  “Boy,” Eddy replied, swiping his fingers along a thick web in a window sill.

  Twenty questions time. How hard do I pump a neighbor’s child for information and still not get too involved with the people here? Okay—one more.

  “Does your cousin live around here?”

  Eddy squinted, put a hand on his chin and then crossed his arms in obvious imitation of some adult. Grace kept her smile in check.

  “No, I don’t think so. Jimmy only comes in the summer. I don’t like him. He’s lots bigger than me. He punches hard.”

  What kind of woman had spent enough time with him to bear his child? He was so…surly. And gruff.

  She decided that was enough interrogation about the Marshalls for now and tuned belatedly back into Eddy’s conversation.

  “But this is your house now, right, Grace? You can let me play here if you want to, right?”

  “It needs quite a lot of fixing up. Tell you what. If you help clean it up a little, we can see if your Uncle Randy is right about it being too dangerous or not. Then, only if there’s nothing wrong, you can play in here when I say it’s okay.”

  The little guy seemed satisfied with her cautious answer.

  They were still outside when Ted returned from his appointment. Hazy sunshine beat down, promising a change in weather. Spring was passing on into full summer and the grass needed to be cut again.

  Ted’s frown as he made his way across the lawn, skirting the patch of bare earth that she had begun to dig for a late flowerbed, made her wonder what was up.

  Eddy threw down his little shovel and shouted, “Daddy! Grace says the playhouse is hers now, so I can play in it!”

  Out of the mouths…he would get her into trouble even in his innocence. She swiftly cut in. “That’s not quite it, you know, Eddy. I said we’d clean it up and see if it was safe first, then ask your dad. Remember?”

  She studied Ted whose brow still furrowed. Lines etched the sides of his wide mouth. Her heart hiccupped.

  “We’ll talk it over, son. Uncle Randy’s home. Why don’t you go over there now?”

  Eddy galloped across the yard to the other side of the overgrown lilac and yew tree fence row. Ted leaned on a cane that replaced the crutch today. He grimaced and cranked his neck sideways to look at her, wavy black hair falling across his eyes. He reached trembling fingers to brush it away.

  Grace pushed away the desire to reach out and feel the stubble on his cheek, to soothe the line of pain between his eyes and clenched jaw, to massage the muscles with her tingling touch. She tightened her grip on the handle of the broom she had been using to sweep out the musty playhouse, feeling drained.

  “I have to have another MRI tomorrow,” he said. “Shelby isn’t able to keep Eddy yet… I hate imposing like this, but, could you…”

  “Yes,” she said shortly. “Eddy may stay here with me tomorrow.” Pity had come and staked a claim. More than a needle stick, more than stitches, more than…say it…cancer…this relationship was going to hurt. Her soul already bruised deeper every time Eddy touched her, spoke to her, turned his head at her like…

  She shook her head to dislodge the pain-filled memory. Sean was gone.

  At least Ted didn’t share any information about his condition with her. She could stand not knowing his diagnosis a little longer. The longer it took to learn, the longer it would be before that urge to touch him, that urge to care, that urge to try to help would overtake her good sense. When she failed, she’d have to run again, and she’d barely gotten settled. “What time?”

  “Would seven be too early?”

  “No. Is there something I should know about this Shelby you keep mentioning? Is
she Eddy’s mother?”

  “Oh! No, no. Eddy’s mother is… No, she’s Eddy’s regular babysitter. Childcare provider. She has a small business in town taking care of a few kids. She’s known Eddy since he was born. She’s really good with children. Especially since she can’t have any of her own. Well, she tried… Sorry. She’s just sick.” He frowned. “Eddy’s mother…she’s not in the picture. Never really has been. We’re divorced. I have full custody. I don’t think what Shelby has is contagious, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “The thought crossed my mind.”

  Ted shifted his feet and took a step with his cane. “Uh, well, I can’t be taking advantage of you, Mrs. Runyon. I’d like to pay—”

  “I don’t want to talk about that now.” Grace turned on her heel and stomped back into her house as loudly as her tennis shoes would allow. Money would never be a reason to do anything. Never. Never again. If she ever used her gift again, it would be like an emotionless business exchange, a fair deal, and not a promise that she would make it all go away. If she agreed to help someone it would be because she could, not because she had to. And she didn’t have to help anyone here.

  But maybe she wanted to.

  She could choose.

  She’d resorted to an over-the-counter decongestant to ward away the nightmares when chamomile and eucalyptus had failed to calm her enough at bedtime. Still, memories of Woodside sifted through her, nostalgic as the scent of the tea roses that climbed her mother’s trellises. They’d brewed rose hip tea together after she’d been in the hospital. Her family had never lived anywhere else. Besides college, the only other house in which she’d lived was with Jonathan, after the wedding. There, by this time in late April the dogwood and redbuds were nearly done blooming and summer established. Everything about Michigan was foreign to her, the clothes she wore, the musty scent of the box hedge, and the grass outside. The sandy soil and the humidity. She felt out of sync, like hearing a steam whistle seconds after seeing the release. How long could she stay here, how long could this be home before she’d ruin it and have to leave?