“No!” She lunged for the end of the bed. Hands grabbed. She threw herself against them. “I’m not crazy!” And free. She put her hands out, her back to the wall. “Please, I’m not crazy, I’m just scared, please, please, I’m just scared—”
“Grace. We know you’re scared. This will help.” The doctor stopped and put his hands in the air.
But the nurse stepped forward, and she had the needle.
“No! It makes it like before it’s like drowning and I can’t wake up I want to wake up pleasepleaseplease—”
The nurse took her arm. She pulled free. The doctor was there too. She fought. The door was open. She couldn’t get through.
“I’m just scared I’m just scared please—”
The needle like a bee punch in the arm.
Outside, the mother and the father. Willis. Staring.
Looking as scared as she was.
Before she was gone.
iv.
It was June and the air was balmy. Grace couldn’t believe how sweet and warm it was. Maddy had brought a summer dress for her to wear, and the light cotton felt so much like a hospital gown she had to check what she was wearing a couple of times. Before they’d left the room, Maddy had taken a pair of tiny nail scissors out of her purse and used them ceremoniously to cut the plastic identification strip off of Grace’s wrist. She put the scissors and hospital bracelet in her purse, then pushed Grace’s hair back from her face, a self-conscious caress.
“Well, don’t you look fine,” she had said.
Grace had offered a smile, but she couldn’t help looking at the door. Maddy had taken the hint. They’d run the gauntlet of cheerful nurses and candy-stripers, Maddy profuse in her thanks, and now they were outside and the air was warm, like milk and honey against Grace’s skin.
The sun was bright, too, glaring off the chrome wings of Nat’s new blue Ford. Nat was behind the wheel and he started the engine when he saw Grace and Maddy come out of the hospital door. Willis opened the rear door and held it for them like an overanxious doorman.
“Why, thank you, sir,” Maddy said. She climbed in after Grace and told Willis, “Ride up front with your father, Will. Us ladies are going to travel in style.”
Willis grinned and slammed the door, and in a minute he was in his seat and they were off. Everything felt strange to Grace. Too big, too bright, too fast. Of course it wasn’t the first time she’d ridden in a car, but it might as well have been. She looked at Maddy, at the unaccustomed smile lightening the older woman’s face, and thought that Maddy and Nat were bringing their newborn daughter home and they didn’t even know.
Of course they knew Grace’s memory was still gone. The doctors had confirmed it, as if Grace’s word wasn’t good enough on its own, but they could not explain how a girl could walk down the street and lose her memory as casually as she might have lost a button off her shirt. Grace didn’t need their explanations. She looked in her parents’ eyes and saw them see a stranger, and knew that one girl had died walking down the street that day, and another had been born to take her place. But it would have been cruel to say it. She had swallowed the pills and endured the tests, and when the doctors finally decided to release her she had smiled and tried to be glad.
And she was glad. In the back seat of the big new car, with soft air rushing in the windows and the view outside growing greener and greener as they left the town center behind, she was glad.
If only Maddy and Nat and Willis would stop waiting for her to wake up and remember who she was supposed to be.
Nat pulled into a driveway and she got out and looked up at the house. It was a handsome frame building with a wraparound porch, new but with an old-fashioned look. It was finished with white siding, and the upper windows had diamond panes. Everyone was looking at her.
“It’s very nice,” she said.
In the hall Maddy said bravely, “Will, why don’t you show Grace to her room? And I’ll start getting lunch.”
Willis started up the stairs without looking at Grace. She followed him, her hand careful on the banister. Drugs still washed around in her system and she’d been a long time in bed. Also, Maddy and Nat were watching. They would take her back to the hospital at the first sign of trouble, she knew. She kept her eyes on the risers. The banister was smooth with polish under her hand.
Willis stood in the upper hall flanked by doors. She stopped at the top of the stairs. Willis watched her as if waiting for her to perform. The doors were all closed.
“Which one is mine?”
Willis shifted his weight. “I thought maybe—”
“I think you’re supposed to make the miraculous recovery before you leave the hospital.”
His face grew red. “I thought maybe you’d have, like, an instinct. Even if you didn’t. You know. Remember.”
“What am I? Your science fair project?” Grace went to the nearest door and opened it. Bathroom. Blue and yellow. Pretty. She closed the door. “Too bad I’m not a white mouse.” She moved across the hall and reached for the doorknob.
“That’s my room.” A blurt, almost hostile. “Yours is at the end, across from Mom and Dad.”
“I don’t even know if you do science fair projects.” She opened the door he pointed at. A room with two windows overlooking the back yard. The floor was wood like the rest of the house so far, but there was a large pink and white rug covering most of it. The walls were busy with posters and snapshots of people. The bed had a pink coverlet and a great many pillows. The poster on the wall at its head was of a sulky young man with blue jeans and hair elaborately combed.
“I did this year. It looks good on college applications.”
“Mice and mazes?” Grace went to a window and looked out. The yard was fenced, green grass and a pair of big willows drooping leaves to the ground.
“A suspension bridge. I made it with coat hangers and electrical wire. You thought it was dumb.”
“Did it work?”
“Yes.”
“So you’re an engineer.”
“I’m going to be.” He said it as if he expected her to challenge his ambitions.
She perched on the windowsill. “Is that what Nat is? An engineer?”
Willis went from defensive to stricken. “Dad’s an architect. He designed this house.”
“Oh.”
He took a breath. He had never quite entered the room. “Did you want me to show you where the kitchen is?”
“I’ll give you a yell if I get lost.”
“Okay.” He hesitated. “You know Mom’s making lunch.”
“I was there when she said it.”
“Right. I just— Right.” He was going.
She was abruptly sorry for her coldness. “Wait. Willis, who is that?” She nodded at the sulky young man over the bed.
Willis looked suddenly tired. “James Dean. The actor. You cried when he died.”
“Did I?” She made a face.
“I’ll see you downstairs.”
“Okay.”
He went.
It was a nice enough room, she thought. An improvement over the hospital room. There was a desk under the other window and a dressing table with a mirror by the closet door. The mirror was half obscured by photographs taped around the frame. She bent over to look at them and saw her face, thin and pale, framed in loose brown hair. Tired blue eyes. The same eyes looked out at her from a dozen snapshots. The same face, rounder and dimpled with smiles. The same hair elaborately waved. She remembered the feel of wet hair matted with rain and chemicals and grimaced. So did the face in the mirror. She sat on the stool. The other Grace watched her, frozen in smiles, frozen in the past. Grace felt a wash of cold sweep over her, raising goosebumps and a shudder, and she pulled down all the pictures off the mirror. She stuck them together with their tape and shoved them in a drawer.
v.
She was sitting on the back porch trying to decide if she should feel guilty for being bored. She had been “home” for a week. That was ho
w she thought of it, self-consciously: “home.” She supposed it really was the only home she had, but the other people who called it that had expectations so much higher than her own. Compared to what they thought she should be, she was a transient. A guest. Is a guest with a crippled brain who is usurping the place of the lost beloved child allowed to feel bored? This was what she was pondering when the screen door opened and the girl came hesitantly outside.
“Hi, Grace,” she said. She was a small rounded girl with brown hair curled stiffly out above her shoulders. Her eyes had expectations too.
Grace said, “I guess I’m supposed to know you. I’m sorry.”
“It’s Felicia?” The girl tried not to look hurt. She smiled gamely. “We were best friends? I mean, I am your best friend.” She came and sat on the top step by Grace’s side. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t come see you in the hospital. I wanted to? But your mom said probably I’d better not.”
“That’s all right.”
“So.” Felicia had a charm bracelet that she spun around her wrist. It made a pretty sound. “I’m glad you’re feeling better?”
“I feel fine. They just let me out when they decided they couldn’t fix me.”
Felicia tried to smile without meeting Grace’s eyes, then let the smile die. It was clear she didn’t know how to respond. Grace was sorry for being unkind, but she couldn’t think of anything else to say. She didn’t feel up to the responsibility of kindness. The screen door slapped open and Maddy came out with two glasses on a tray.
“I thought you girls might like some iced tea,” she said.
As if she’d been on the other side of the screen waiting for her cue, Grace thought. Probably she had been.
“Thanks, Mrs. Elliot,” Felicia said, her voice a gush of relief.
Grace took her glass off the tray. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” Maddy paused at the door. “Felicia, did you tell Grace yet about the junior prom? I’m sure she’d like to hear how it went.”
“Oh! Sure!” Having been fed her lines the girl was buoyant. Maddy went in, but Grace thought she could sense her hovering by the door, listening to Felicia prattle on about who had danced with whom, who hadn’t danced at all. Who had broken up and who was going steady. “And Ted Branner didn’t even go, and Lucy told me that he had told her brother Mick that he was going to ask you to go steady!” She turned her face to Grace, and there was such a look on it—of laughter, of pleasurable envy, of pride at bearing News—that Grace had to turn away to hide the hurt. Felicia was talking about the other Grace. She was talking to the other Grace.
Felicia fell silent, turning her iced tea in her hands. The charms on her bracelet tinkled against the glass. She said, “Well. I don’t want to tire you out.”
“It was nice of you to come.”
“Well sure! I mean, of course. I’m just sorry I couldn’t, you know, come before?”
Grace stood up and put on a smile. Felicia got up as well.
“Okay. Well. I’ll see you later. Okay?”
“Good-bye.”
Felicia turned at the screen door to give an absurd little wave. Her bracelet chimed. Then she was gone.
Grace wandered onto the lawn to finish her tea in the sunshine. It was good. Nothing in the hospital had been hot and bright, or cold, or sweet. The grass was prickly springy soft to her naked feet. She stood in the sun until she was nearly sweating, and then she went inside.
Maddy was in the kitchen making another pot of iced tea. She said, “That was nice of Felicia to stop by.”
Grace took her glass to the sink and filled it with cold water. “Didn’t you ask her to come?”
Maddy cut a round slice off a lemon. “She had asked me to let her know when a good time to visit would be.” She cut another slice. “She wanted to come see you in the hospital.”
“I know. She said.” Grace used the dish cloth to wash around the glass rim.
Maddy dropped slices of lemon into the pitcher. “I thought the prom sounded nice, didn’t you?”
Grace rinsed the glass again and set it in the drainer. Then she stood at Maddy’s side. “You know I’m not going to remember, don’t you?”
Maddy was picking mint leaves off a supple red stem. The kitchen smelled of mint and lemon and tea steam.
“You know it doesn’t matter who I talk to or where I go. Those memories are gone.”
“You don’t know that.” Maddy went on plucking leaves. “The doctors said you might still—”
“The doctors don’t know. They don’t know anything.”
“I am not giving up on my daughter.” Maddy dropped the mint and grasped Grace’s hands. Her fingers were cool and damp, her eyes bright with tears. “I am not giving up on you, Grace, and don’t you give up either.”
“You already have given up.” Grace twisted free. “You gave up before you even started. Why can’t you let me be who I am now? I don’t want to try to be her. I can’t be her! I don’t know who she was!”
Maddy’s face suffused with pity.
She took down everything in the room. Posters, snapshots, everything. There was no room in the closet crowded with clothes, so she shoved it all under the bed. Then she rolled up the rug and shoved that under too. Then the coverlet. The stuffed bear on the dresser. The china clown on the desk. Everything. Out of sight. Gone.
vi.
The pills for sleeping stood on the table by her bed. The other pills, the heavy tranquilizers in case she panicked, were in the medicine cabinet in Nat and Maddy’s en suite. As far as Grace was concerned, they could stay there. She didn’t want the sleeping pills either, but Maddy was already upset at what Grace had done to her room. So the pill bottle sat by the lamp, and Grace sat on the windowsill looking out. It was late. A moth drifted in the open casement and wheeled about the light, throwing shadows across the pinholed walls. The willows in the back yard netted the light of streetlamps, reduced it to the spark of deepwater fish even as the leaves breathed a watery sigh. A cricket chirped.
After a while Grace got up and opened the drawer of the night stand, dropped the pills in, and slid it closed. She switched off the light. In the dark she could hear the moth whispering its wings against the lampshade, pat-patter hush. She curled up on the cotton blanket, her arm folded beneath her head, and listened. Patter-pat flick. Poor little moth, lured into nothing. Flut, flut, sigh. The windows became two rectangles of lessened darkness, and gradually, gradually, the first swell of presence began to make itself felt. As if the paper beings exiled under the bed breathed awareness into the room. Grace’s body lay as if asleep, but her eyes were fixed open. And against the slowly developing gray of the nearer window a shape revealed itself. A figure, a shadow, the shadow of a girl.
The other Grace.
They stared at each other through the darkness, the dead girl and the live, until Grace on the bed could hardly stand it. She wanted to speak, to move, even just to blink, but she could not. Her body was a stolen thing, unwilling to stir at her command. She felt she could not even breathe. As the other Grace watched, dark shadow against the stars. Timeless moment, small piece of forever. And then the body breathed.
In a convulsive uncoiling, she lunged for the bedside lamp. Numb stupid hands clutched, pressed the switch, knocked over the base. Light flared, glaring off the bare walls, throwing her shadow huge up to the ceiling as it fell. Then the lamp hit the floor, the light bulb burst, and for a frozen moment she was blind.
The door to the hallway swung open.
“Grace?” Nat’s hand swept the wall, found the switch to the ceiling fixture. Light sprang out again. “Honey, are you all right?”
She could only stare at him. His hair was too short to be tousled, but his eyes were bleary in the late-night brightness. He wore a white T-shirt and blue pajama bottoms. He sat by her on the bed and put his arm around her shoulders.
“What’s up, sleepy head? Did you have a b
ad dream?”
He was a hot and solid comfort, but he wasn’t hers. She propped her head against her knees a moment, then nodded.
“You want to tell me about it?”
She shook her head. He shifted, and she guessed he was looking at the fallen lamp. Then he gave her a squeeze.
“I’ll tell you what. I’m going to get you a glass of water. And then I’m going to clean up that glass so’s you don’t cut your feet when you get up in the morning.”
He seemed to want a response so she nodded.
“You’ll be all right if I leave you for a minute?”
She nodded again. He gave her another squeeze.
“Hang in there, kiddo.” He got up and went into the hall, and through the open door she heard him say, “Okay, Will. Just a nightmare. You go on back to bed.”
Then Maddy murmured something from their room, and Grace realized they had all been sleeping with their doors open.
Listening for her.
vii.
She felt like an experiment turned inside out. If the mouse escapes, how do the scientists react? She buckled her sandals sitting on the front step.
There was a hopscotch chalked on the sidewalk. She had gone from 9 to 3 when she heard Willis’ big feet pounding the pavement behind her. It was Saturday and he had been studying for his final exams while Nat mowed the back lawn. She could hear the mower growl from here.
Willis caught up. “Hey. Where you going?”
“For a walk.”
“Anywhere in particular?”
“How should I know?”
“Mind if I come along?”
She shrugged. They crossed the street in silence. Then Willis said, “You know, if it makes you feel any better, you’re still as much of a jerk as you used to be.”
She looked up at him through narrowed eyes, then laughed. “Thanks.”
But that only disconcerted him. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans and slouched along at her side. If he stood up straight he was almost as tall as Nat.
In the Palace of Repose Page 5
