“You know, I wasn’t planning on running away.”
“Sure, I know.” He shrugged. “I just thought you could use some company.”
“I guess I know what you thought.”
He tucked his shoulders up around his ears.
They crossed another side street. The road they were on began to curve.
“Do you want to go to the park?” Willis said.
“Okay.” She followed him around a corner. A bulwark of trees ended that street two blocks away. “You aren’t going to fail your exams because of this, are you?”
“Because of walking to the park?” His voice went incredulous. “I’m not that dumb.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m not that dumb.”
It was almost stuffy under the big trees, the vegetation green and moist from a morning’s sprinkling. Willis seemed to have a destination in mind. She trailed him through the trees and across a stretch of grass and daisies to the park’s farther side. There was a baseball diamond there with a little league game in progress. The yells of small boys tagged after them down the grassy bank of a ravine, where a stream crooked its way around big gray boulders. Willis scrambled on top of one of these and sat. Grace followed suit. The stone was rough and warm under her hands and bare legs. The air musical with water. The sunlight dappled. Grace propped her arms on her knees and watched the stream curl around their rock. It curled, and curled, and curled.
“Thanks,” she said eventually. “This is good.”
“You used to come here a lot.”
She didn’t know what to say to that.
After another long pause, Willis said, “You know, Mom doesn’t mean to upset you. She’s just trying to help.”
“Is anything secret in your family?”
Your family hung in the air between them. Willis plowed bravely through. “She just wants you—”
“—the way I was. Not the way I am.”
“And how is that, Grace?” He was tense. Intense. “You don’t say anything to anyone. You don’t do anything. How are we supposed to want you like that? It’s like you’re just, you’re locked inside your head and you won’t, you don’t want to let anyone else—” He broke off. There were some people coming up the beaten path above the stream.
Young men, boys Willis’ age. Six of them. They saw Willis and Grace and bumped one another to a stop.
“Hey you guys,” one of them said, a tall skinny blond boy.
“Hi,” Willis shortly said.
Grace said nothing.
“Hi, Grace,” the same boy said.
“Hi,” she said.
She doesn’t know who you are, one of the other boys whispered too loud.
She doesn’t even know who she is, someone else whispered back.
“Shut. Up.” The blond boy glared at his gang, then shrugged and tried a grin. “They’re just morons. Ignore them.”
One of the whisperers shoved him in the back. The other one said, “Come on you guys. We’re gonna be late.” There was a general movement up the path.
The blond boy watched the rest of them go, then turned to Willis. “We were getting together a game after the kids are done. Did you want to come up? We could use another infielder.”
For the first time Grace noticed the glove he carried. Baseball, she thought. Why remember what that was, and not that Willis played? It made her sick sometimes. She turned back to the stream.
“No, thanks,” Willis said. “I still have to study for physics.”
“Yeah, I was at it all morning. But you go cra— I mean, you can’t study, you know. All day long.”
“You go,” Grace said under her breath.
“I guess I won’t,” Willis said to the blond boy.
“Okay,” said the blond boy. “Well, I’ll see you around, Will.”
“Sure,” Willis said.
“Hey, it was nice seeing you, Grace. I’m glad you’re feeling better.”
She turned her head and waved, squinting as if against the sun so she wouldn’t have to see his eyes. He gave a half-finished wave in return and started up the path.
“That was Ted,” Willis said.
“You should have gone.”
“Don’t have my glove. Anyway, I should get back to the books.” He stood. “Are you coming?”
She got to her feet.
“He used to have kind of a crush on—”
“Willis.” She closed her eyes. Swallowed. “Please?”
He ducked his head and started up the trail.
viii.
She had gotten into the habit of clearing the table after supper. While the other three talked amongst themselves, she could come and go, separate, silent, permitted. Maddy used good china, and the plates weighed satisfactorily in the hand. That night Willis excused himself early to get back to his books. While Grace scraped green beans into the bin she heard Nat say to Maddy, “You have to admit, that makes a nice change at least.”
“What do you mean?” Maddy asked.
“Housework and homework with no arguments.”
There was a strange pause. Grace stood with the clean plate in one hand, a silver fork in the other, listening. Maddy spoke so low she had to strain to hear her:
“How can you joke? Nathan, how can you possibly joke about this?”
“Maddy.”
“After everything—”
“You know I didn’t mean—”
“—she’s been through—”
“Maddy. Now come on.”
“Everything we’ve been through!”
“Maddy, she’ll hear you.”
A chair scraped. Grace looked at the door to the dining room. The kitchen was lit only by the small bulb above the stove, and the figure in the doorway was silhouetted by the brighter light beyond. She thought it was Maddy at first. But as her sight darkened about the edges and bees began to sing inside her ears, she heard Maddy’s feet running on the stairs, and she knew who it was.
The other Grace.
The other Grace wanted to come home.
The plate broke in three upon the floor, and then she
ix.
woke in the pink bed. Yellow sunlight slipped through green willow leaves to swim across the emptied walls. She remembered taking the posters down, remembered the hospital, the roadside, the kitchen. The other Grace was gone. She was herself still. Or was it again? She got up, the floor smooth and distinct beneath her bare feet, and found yesterday’s clothes atop the vanity table. They were folded neatly but still wrinkled, still with the tiny grass ends clinging to the cotton shirt from when she had lain on the lawn while Maddy fixed dinner, pork chops, new potatoes, green beans that had scattered as significant as a constellation behind the moon of the broken plate—
So. Herself, still. But for how long?
How long?
x.
The neurologist ordered more X-rays. Willis graduated with college acceptances already in hand. Summer ripened into something hot, fragrant, and slow. And eventually, after too many careful weeks, Nat and Maddy and Willis all went back to sleeping with their bedroom doors closed.
Grace realized, as she eased the front door shut behind her, that she had not been outside at night since the night she’d spent in the rain, the first night she could remember. It was more frightening than she had anticipated—she was closer than she had thought to that wet and nameless girl—but it was liberating, too. She was free of the expectations she could not live up to, the needs she could not fulfill. Free to be herself, a girl who was no longer haunted by the lost, no longer—she shivered, rubbed her bare arms in the warm, streetlighted midnight air—no longer haunting the family who could not admit they had lost the girl whose ghost she was. So: freedom, she thought. Life.
Willis had taken her on tours of the town and countryside since school had ended. Cruising in Nat’s new blue Ford with the radio to fill the silence, or even better, to give them something to squabble over like any brother and any sister—Grace felt a pang of
disloyalty as she walked the route Willis had often taken, skirting the park and turning onto the broad avenue that led to the highway. But of course they were not brother and sister, not really, and those July rides had been for Willis what they had been for Grace: an opportunity and an excuse to escape Maddy’s watchfulness, Nat’s wistful concern. They were waiting, all of them, even Willis, waiting for the other Grace to return. Waiting for the false Grace, herself, to disappear.
So she was disappearing. Let them stop waiting, let them get on with their lives. Let her get on with hers. The other Grace could come tomorrow, next week, next year. She could come right now, in the next step, as Grace crossed under the blinking red lights of the deserted downtown street, but Grace would not hold herself in readiness. She was not an empty vessel waiting to be filled. She was going to invent the new Grace so completely, fill herself so full with herself that she would never be crowded into non-existence like the other Grace had been.
The way was much longer on foot. There were whole blocks she had forgotten, or never noticed; the neighborhoods that had breezed by under the Ford’s wheels, bright, busy, prosperous in the sunlight, were empty and grim, steel grilles over windows and doors, the sidewalk cracked and seeming too wide. She was frightened in the dark, exposed under the streetlamps, rabbit-like before the headlights of the few passing cars. She remembered the black-and-white that had picked her up that night, the first night, and walked warily, watching for the shadows of recessed doors. Her calves ached by the time she reached the on-ramp, and the light-headedness of fatigue gave her something new to worry about.
The aging night grew cool. The highway folded itself into a wood of tall, leafy trees. The smell was delicious, of sap and earth and hidden water, familiar as a dream. Grace shared the verge with bold raccoons and other creatures she only glimpsed in their retreat. Traffic was rare.
At the first gray hint of dawn, she came upon a roadside rest stop. There was a gravel lot, cinderblock toilets, a caged light over a payphone on the wall. A hundred moths swooned into the electric light and clung, exhausted, to the wall all around. Grace went into the toilet to drink cold water from the tap. And there she was in the mirror above the sink, her tan faded to yellow by the ugly light, her blue eyes shaded by fatigue.
Maddy’s blue eyes. She turned away from the mirror, and the thought.
A picnic table had been crowded between trees at the edge of the lot. Grace groped her way onto the table top, and although she had only meant to rest until her legs stopped hurting and the sun was up, she lay down and fell instantly asleep.
xi.
Sunlight on her face. Birdsong. A car went by. She sat up, stiff, catching herself on her elbow when her arm sagged. Eyes hot, legs stiff, throat dry. A car went by. Her first thought, as always, was not what happens now, but what happened last. The dark highway, the animals, the fear.
Maddy’s wet hands gripping her own.
She rubbed her palms over her face, then sat sleepily, her forearms folded on her knees. There was not much to look at: the highway behind her, the cinderblock building before her and the green trees beyond. A car went by. She thought vaguely about where she was going—somewhere, anywhere, she had thought in Nat and Maddy’s house—but her future was blanker even than her past. She tried to imagine adventure, tried to imagine herself competent and brave, but other images kept intruding, her memory so sparse that they leapt out complete and shining. Nat in his pajamas sweeping up broken glass. Maddy slicing lemons. Willis driving Nat’s car, working neat’s-foot oil into a new glove, walking beside her on the way home from the park—
A car went by.
And suddenly, the fear that had been plaguing her for so long, the terror of losing herself to the self that had been lost, or to a whole other self different from either, reversed itself: a mirror-reflected fear no less grievous than the other.
For she imagined walking down some street somewhere, anywhere, walking, dreaming of walking, waking to find herself still walking—and no one there beside her to ask her if she was all right.
No one there to call her by her name.
A car went by.
Eventually, after a long, long pause balanced between one fear and the other, Grace levered herself to her feet and walked, limping with a cramp in one calf, to the payphone on the cinderblock wall.
THE NEW ECOLOGY
It was almost quitting time when Millennium saw the Nerd again, lurking outside the donut shop in his car. She went straight home to the boarding house and packed her bags.
Sonia from down the hall leaned in the doorway, a newspaper in her hands. “So, what is it? Cops? Debt collectors? Ex-boyfriend?”
Jeans, underwear, T-shirts. “More like Lectroids from Planet Ten.” Bike shorts and helmet.
“Huh?”
“Forget it.” She tossed the duffel to land with a thump by Sonia’s bare feet.
“Hey, watch it.”
“Sorry.” She zipped up the sleeping bag on the bed, folded it in half and started to roll.
“Well, I don’t blame you for leaving, whatever it is,” Sonia said, rattling the newspaper. “It’s getting pretty weird around here. Did you hear about this thing at the park by the aquatic center? Seems some crazy welder or someone turned the jungle gym into kind of a real jungle—or anyway, a plant, like one of those fly-eating plants, what are they called, Venus flytraps? They say some kid went to play on it and almost got trapped inside. Serves her right if you ask me, you got to be pretty dumb to play around on a thing like that, but can you imagine the amount of work—”
Millennium stopped listening. The sleeping bag’s frayed strings were too short, and anyway, she already knew more than the paper did about the kid-eating jungle gym. It wasn’t until she heard Sonia say something about their landlord that she tuned back in.
“What?”
“I said, does Mr. Chang know you’re leaving?”
Shit. She tossed the bed roll by her duffel bag and looked around the room to see if she’d forgotten anything. “Not yet,” she said. “I’ll call him from the bus station.”
Once she’d bought her ticket she used a pay phone to make two calls. The first one was to Mr. Chang.
“Moving out? You mean October first, right?”
“No, I mean five minutes ago.” He started to sputter. “Hey, be glad I’m paid up to the end of September.”
“One month’s notice, or one month’s rent!”
“Kiss my ass.”
The second one was to her folks, collect.
Press one to accept the charges.
Beep.
“Millie?” Half worry, half hope. “Where are you?”
“Kelowna, Mom.” A beat to let the relief/disappointment set in. Then, “But I’m moving to Vancouver.”
“Oh, Millie.”
“It’s Em, Mom, remember?”
“I thought you liked it there.”
“Yeah, well, not really.”
“You said you didn’t want to go back to the coast after what happened in Victoria.”
“I’m kinda running out of places to go, Mom.” She knew it was a mistake even as she said it.
“You could always come home, Em.”
She winced. “You don’t want that, Mom. Trust me. You really don’t want me home.”
“Oh, honey, of course—”
“It’s getting worse, mom.” She hadn’t meant to say that either. Her throat started to close. “They’re getting stronger. And there’s some guy following me around.”
Hiss of a long distance line. Finally, “Millie. Come home. We can always find a way to manage.”
“You know I can’t.” She pressed her knuckles hard against her mouth, pain to kill the betraying quaver. “It’s better if I keep moving, mom. I’ll be fine. I’ll call you when I have a place to stay.” Before she hung up, she added, “Give my love to Dad.”
What with the Ones getting themselves into the paper again, she’d already been thinking about leaving, even be
fore she saw the Nerd. She had picked Kelowna to begin with because it was a new city with a fast urban sprawl gulping up the farms and sage brush that had once filled the Okanagan Valley. A city too new to have awoken to its power of creation yet—that’s what she’d hoped for. Instead it seemed to be working the other way around. The city Ones were far livelier than she’d anticipated, adapting with an ingenuity that was half thrilling, half terrifying: witness the jungle gym. Still, she might have stuck it out at least until winter, when things usually quieted down, if He hadn’t found her again.
The Nerd.
A bulky shape behind the wheel of a rusted-out Civic, a face red and shiny in the heat, a plump hand pushing heavy glasses up his nose as he sat reading a book and waiting for her to show.
Nemesis in coke-bottle lenses.
She had to laugh, even as the fear tightened its coil in her gut.
Vancouver.
September was a good time for finding work. She moved into a cheap room in a house off Commercial Drive, and by the end of her second day she had a job riding for a courier service downtown. It was Indian Summer time, warm sunshine with a cool wind off the harbor. Even with the smog trapped by the mountains east of the city the riding was a pleasure, especially after the baked heat of August in Kelowna, and the Vancouver traffic was a thrill, pure distraction from nine to five. The rest of the time she waited for the city Ones to know she was there.
She didn’t have to wait for long.
The Small Ones found her first, as they usually did. Her fourth night in the attic room that smelled of curry and mold, she heard the scritching of metal claws on the walls outside. Lying on the sagging bed, sleeping bag open to her waist, she turned her head toward the small window across the room. Her skin tightened, trying to lift the hairs on her arms. Her breath came short. She’d never get used to it. Scritch, scrabble scratch. Never. A moving gleam showed in the window, a leggy shadow against the streetlight. There was no curtain or blind. Scritch—tap tap tap.
Bold fucker. She sat up.
Flash, swirl of legs and out of sight. Scrabble scritch and the patter of stucco on the rhododendron two stories below. Not that bold.
In the Palace of Repose Page 6
