Falling From Grace (Grace Series)

by S. L. Naeole

“Wow. Even I never thought of something like that. Score one for the new guy.” The muttered statement went a long way to keeping the smile I had on my face.

  We rode in near silence to the cemetery, the thought of where we were going and why heavy in both of our minds. Mount Calvary Catholic Cemetery was a few miles out of Heath in Newark. It was a simple cemetery that boasted no fancy entrance or signs. The sign that greeted visitors was quite rudimentary: Simple wooden planks were painted brown, while the name had been painted on with streaky white letters.

  Mom used to bring me here when I was a little girl. There were many old civil war graves here, and we would play a game where we’d pick a headstone and create a story about the person’s life. I was always saying things like how they were mythical creatures, or super heroes whose alter-egos had to die in order to protect their secret identities. She would always give them normal lives, but that they had made small, but significant impacts to the lives of those around them.

  I remembered one particular headstone, where a mother and child had been buried together, their dates of death the same.

  “Annaleigh and Katherine MacDonnell, died on June 12, 1890.” Mom had read, her fingers touching the weathered engraving, lovingly tracing their indentations as we both knelt down on the damp grass. “Annaleigh was a beautiful woman who was the town’s only teacher. She had a sister and two brothers, all of whom had reddish gold hair. She gave her daughter, Katherine the same hair color, although her eyes weren’t blue like her mother’s, but the chocolate brown that were the same color as her father’s.”

  She took my hand and placed it on the almost imperceptible carving of a cherub above the names. “Annaleigh would have been a great mother, and Katherine would have been a beautiful, bright, and sweet natured girl had they survived past childbirth, but the angels came to take them to Heaven instead.”

  “Why, Mommy? Why did the angels take them to Heaven?”

  A sad smile came over her face. “Because the plan God has for each of our lives isn’t always the same plan we have for ourselves, Grace. Sometimes, our deaths have more of an impact than our births. It can inspire people to do great things, even greater than they would have had the deaths not happened at all.”

  She helped me to trace the wings on the cherub, and sighed. “The death of these people might have changed the world, Grace, so we sometimes have to look at death not as something sad, but as something to be glad for. Sometimes death changes our lives in ways we never expect. It can bring with it every emotion; we have to learn to recognize the ones that help us and the ones that hurt us. And we also have to be willing to accept that with everything else, death also brings with it love. That is why we must always be grateful and appreciate it, even if it brings some sadness with it.”

  She wiped a tear away from her eyes with her free hand. “I’m sorry baby. I’m making you all nervous and worried, aren’t I? What do you think about Annaleigh and Katherine?”

  In all my childish wisdom, I answered, “I think she was a super hero, and she didn’t want her child to be taken away by evil mutants who wanted to turn her into a monster, so she ran away and pretended to die. I think that she put a doll in her coffin and she really ran off with a handsome hero who took her away to someplace safe forever and ever.” I pointed down to the ground.

  My mother brought me to her chest and hugged me very tightly. She kissed the top of my head and rocked me gently. “Your story is much better, baby. So much better than mine.”

  That was the last of our stories. We were coming home from that visit when we had the car accident, and other than that and waking up in the hospital, I remember very little from that night. Everyone said it was a miracle I had survived without any burns, because our car had been turned into a big, black hunk of metal, and my mother’s body was burned beyond recognition.

  I was brought back from my memories by the motion of the car coming to a halt. Graham put the car into park, and I looked out the window. There were elm trees surrounding us, with headstones scattered all around the green carpet of grass. It was such a beautiful place, despite the amount of sadness that overwhelmingly blanketed everything here.

  With a sigh, I took a hold of Robert’s vase and waited for Graham to open my door. He exited the car and walked around the front before opening my door and helping me out as I tried not to spill any water. The smell of freshly cut grass was so thick, I could actually taste it. Despite the morning growing late, I could also feel the moisture from the night, smell it on the trees, and even the headstones.

  “I’m going to go and walk to Gran’s marker. Will you be okay getting to your mom’s?” Graham was already looking up a hill a few yards away where his grandmother’s grave was located.

  “Yeah, you go and do what you do. Mom’s isn’t that far away.”

  He nodded his head and started trudging through the soggy grass clippings. I turned to the area of flat grass that held the grave of my mother and headed towards the small granite block. Each step reminded me of the steps I had taken as a child on the day that she had been buried.

  I could see my feet, dressed in white tights and black patent leather shoes, slogging through muddy grass as a somber Dad walked ahead of me, his head bowed down and his hands clasped behind his back. I could see the hem of my blue dress, swishing back and forth between my knees as I kept walking. I was biting the nail on my thumb, trying to occupy myself in some way because I didn’t want to cry. Everyone else was crying. Some, like my mom’s family from Korea, were sobbing very loudly and grabbing me into very rough hugs, speaking things that I couldn’t quite understand very loudly into my face while rubbing their tear drenched cheeks against mine.

  Dad was numb, and completely oblivious to my confusion and fear. Graham’s parents, Richard and Iris, who had both genuinely liked mom, came with Graham but wouldn’t let him near me while I was being manhandled. Surrounded by so many people, so many relatives, I had never felt more alone and more scared.

  Everyone kept whispering about the miracle that was my survival, only they all made it sound more like a crime. How had I survived with barely a scratch while my mother had to be mourned in a closed casket? Why had my mother crashed her car in the first place? Had I distracted her? The accusations that were in Erica’s soliloquy weren’t something she had just made up to rile me. While I had questioned myself of the very same things, these thoughts had been on the minds of so many people in town it was impossible to escape them, even after nearly eleven years.

  When I came up to her headstone, the vase in my hand, I felt the rush of sadness that almost never happened during my visits here. I leaned down, slowly sitting on the damp ground, and placed Robert’s vase next to the large granite rectangle that listed Mom’s name, date of birth, and date of death. Beneath the two dates was the number 91, her favorite Psalm.

  I kissed the simple marker and laid my cheek against it, tracing her name with my fingers. “Hi Mom.” The cold granite felt amazingly comforting against my face, now covered in hot tears. “I have so much to tell you…it’s incredible. It’s like an entire lifetime has passed since I last came here, and so much has changed.

  “I have a new friend. Her name is Stacy, and I could probably bet safely that she’s the only other Korean girl in all of Heath. Her family runs the Tae Kwon Do school near the bakery and she teaches there. She’s something else. She actually laid Graham flat without even touching him!”

  I had to stop for a moment and think about how I was going to approach the subject of Robert. As silly as it was—knowing that mom had been dead for over ten years, and that I was talking to her headstone and not directly to her—I still felt awkward broaching the topic. I knew that it would have been the same had mom been alive and we were having this conversation at home in the living room.

  “I-I’ve met someone. I know that the last time I was here, I told you that I was in love with Graham, and I was working up the courage to tell him. Well, I did, but it didn’t exactly go the way t
hat I had hoped. It didn’t even go the way that I expected. But it’s okay. Things are good between us, now. Better than good, actually. But I realized after all of that that I didn’t know what being in love really was.

  “I thought that what I was feeling for Graham was the kind of love that you talked about having with Dad. You know, the kind that made your heart seem like if it were removed from your chest, it would fly away because it beat so fast? I didn’t really understand what that meant, didn’t know just how deep and life changing that was until I met Robert.

  “Oh Mom, he’s like something out of this world. It’s as though I stepped off of the page that was my life and walked into a completely different book! He’s kind, and sweet, and beautiful, and he cares about me. He might even love me, if I dare to stop being so self-conscious all the time. But Mom, more than that is the fact that I love him. I love him so much. It’s like my world was in perpetual sleep mode, and then he came and made the sun rise, waking me up to a whole new world.

  “I can’t even begin to describe it. Just seeing his face when I close my eyes makes my heart seem ready to run away and join him, wherever he is. I have trouble keeping my thoughts straight around him sometimes, which is ironic, since he can read them. But he doesn’t think I’m weird, or a freak, or anything like that. He actually sees me as beautiful, Mom. Me! He sees who I am, sees my memories, sees my mistakes, and he doesn’t think any less of me. He couldn’t tell me otherwise.”

  I reached down and pulled the pink and white flower out of the vase and stared at it. It still looked vibrant and healthy, as though it had been cut just seconds ago. Leave it to an angel to pluck the most perfect blossom that seemed like it would bloom forever.

  “He gave me this flower to bring to you. Can you imagine how inadequate I felt, knowing that he brought you flowers before I had? Well…one flower, but you know what I mean. I guess I’ll just have to bring you an entire bouquet now, huh? Oh Mom, I’m so happy…it’s weird. Things were going downhill so fast. First with Graham, and then with Dad—did you know that he and Janice are having a baby? I felt so angry, like he was betraying you or something. I don’t know why. You’ve been gone for so long, and I know that you’d want Dad to be happy—you wouldn’t have wanted him to feel bad about finding that with someone else.

  “And I understand all of that now; I understand how important being happy while we’re here truly is, because I can appreciate it now. I can appreciate what it feels like to be happy—completely and fully happy—because of Graham, and Stacy, and Robert.”

  I put the flower back in its glass home, and returned to tracing the engravings. My finger was a lot wider than it was the first time I had done this, but my emotions were the same as I realized that I’d have to leave soon.

  “I miss you, Mom. I miss you so much, and the only part that hurts me now is knowing that you can’t share all of this with me. I don’t know how the whole heaven and angels thing works, but I’m sure it’s not like I can simply have Robert send you a message or anything.

  “I just want you to know that I’m happy, Mom. I’m truly, truly happy. You don’t have to worry too much about me, alright?”

  I kissed the stone once more, my fingers tracing the nine and one, and began to recite the psalm that those numbers represented—a ritual mom and I had had after our cemetery visits. She loved to sing the psalms; some of my earliest memories of her were singing them while cooking, or cleaning. Some kids had “Mary Had A Little Lamb”; I had psalms 91 and 121.

  This was how Graham found me, with my face pressed against now warm granite, my hand partially covering the lettering that marked this to be my mother’s final resting place, and my voice, repeating the same few verses over and over again in a sing-song voice.

  When I finished, my traditional good-bye to my mother complete, I looked up at him. And her.

  “Lark! Wow, wh-what are you doing here?” I stared, stunned at the beautiful and ethereal being who could have been one of the very angels I had just sung about.

  “I do etchings of the stones for art class.” She pointed with her walking cane to a bag that was slung across Graham’s chest, its canvas material stained with charcoal. “I’ve got a few good ones from what I could feel. A mother and child, a former civil war soldier, and I was in the middle of getting a rubbing of this woman who had the most unusual name when he came along.”

  I could do nothing for a while but gawk at her. Apparently Graham didn’t think anything was unusual about a blind person doing charcoal rubbings of gravestones. Judging by the look on his face, he probably thought it was the coolest thing since power steering.

  “Did you say you made a rubbing of a mother and child?”

  Lark nodded and reached for the bag, lifting the flap that hung over the opening and then pulling out a leather folder. She counted two sheets and then pulled out the third. “Here it is. An Annaleigh and Katherine MacDonnell. I was intrigued by their joint date of death. It seemed that Annaleigh died in childbirth, and Katherine along with her. Very tragic.”

  I looked at the rubbing, my finger running along the empty space where the names had been engraved. “I remember them,” I mumbled.

  “You remember them? They died over a hundred years ago, Grace,” Graham laughed.

  I looked at him, feeling incredibly guilty for not having revealed that part of my life with him for some reason. “My mother and I used to come to the cemeteries when I was a little girl, and we’d make up stories about the people who were buried. Mom said that Annaleigh had been a teacher, and that Katherine had been her first child. I said that they were super heroes.”

  I waited for the laughter to come, but none did. Lark looked thoughtful. “I used to do that. I used to pretend that I had been friends or lovers of the people that had died, and that I was grieving over some great tragedy. I can’t see the television so I’d just create my own soap operas in my head.”

  I looked at Graham, expecting something, anything to come out of him that sounded like a snort, a guffaw, a chuckle. Instead he just stared at Lark, his eyes wide, his mouth slightly open, as if wanting to say something but not knowing what. I realized that was what I must look like around Robert.

  He’s too far gone right now to think about anything worthwhile to say. All I hear in his head are the sounds of polish folk songs for some reason.

  I blinked in shock. I didn’t know if it was because Lark was sending her thoughts to me, or because I knew what she was hearing and why, and she didn’t. That’s what his grandmother used to sing to him when he’d have nightmares.

  She looked surprised. How odd that you’d know what he was thinking about, and understood it, while I couldn’t. I suppose that’s what comes of having known someone for so long.

  I nodded my head once, making sure that Graham didn’t take too much notice. “So, um, Lark, what name was it that you were rubbing when Graham found you?”

  “It turned out to be his grandmother. Her name sounded so odd. ‘Bronislawa’ just doesn’t seem like a name one would find in a cemetery in Ohio. I had to get a rubbing.” She gave Graham a dazzling smile, and I could have sworn I saw his eyes cross.

  “She was a very scary woman to everyone except Graham. To her, he was the sun, the moon, and all of the halogen bulbs in between,” I pointed out. “She used to yell something at me all the time that I never understood, but Graham told me that she was scaring death away from me, to keep him from putting his hands around my throat. She frightened me so bad once, I was forbidden to go near her after that.”

  Lark’s face was calm, but I could see in the way her mouth no longer appeared loose and carefree that something I said had upset her in some way. Stupid superstitions.

  I understood the sentiment. Mom had said the same thing when she had heard what was being said. It had been Dad who no longer felt I should be around Graham’s grandmother, and rather than argue with him about it, mom relented.

  “Well, I asked Graham if he wouldn’t mind dropping me o
ff at the mall on your way home. I’m going to meet up with some friends and pick a few last minute things before tonight. It’s only a few minutes away from here by car, and he said he didn’t mind.”

  At the sound of his name, Graham’s eyes refocused and he started blinking rapidly, his eyes dry from ogling Lark all this time. “Uh, yeah. I didn’t think you’d mind, Grace, you know, since we’re on this whole trusting friendship thing.”

  “Why would I mind, Graham? Lark is Robert’s sister and like she said, it’s only a few minutes away.” As we walked towards the car, I had to suppress the smug smile that I could feel creeping up on me. The knowledge that people couldn’t help but be affected by an angel’s presence, and that Graham was more than affected while I had been able to resist somewhat was strangely satisfying. When it came to angels, Graham the football hero was bested by Grace the Superfreak.

  “Why do people call you a freak?”

  The sudden question sent both Graham’s and my heads snapping in Lark’s direction. Our faces both held shock and anger. I knew his anger stemmed from his built in need to defend me, but mine was at the fact that she had read my mind, and made no secret of it.

  “Why are you even asking?” I looked at her. Why don’t you just pick through my memories and find out?

  “Yeah, why are you asking?”

  Lark shrugged her shoulders. “I was just wondering. It seems to me that most of the kids here in Heath just needed someone to fill that slot in the yearbook, and your name was picked out of a hat or something. I was wondering why.”

  “Well, why don’t you ask them why they call me a freak?” I snapped.

  Lark raised an eyebrow, my challenge doing nothing but boring her. “I did. All I got were ridiculous comic book style explanations that had little to do with anything. You don’t have tentacles coming out of your back, you’re definitely not green, and you’ve no mutant powers or anything. I think the only thing freakish I’ve heard about you is the size of your forehead. Just a little too wide. Kind of Imax-y. Other than that, you’re about as normal as they come.”