Grace

by T. Greenwood

  Mrs. D. was the art teacher at Trevor’s school. A lot of kids were creeped out by her; some of the younger ones even thought that she was a witch or something. She did look a little bit like a witch, with the small hump underneath her moth-hole-riddled green sweater, with the threadbare black wig she wore. She smelled dusty and old too, like wet books. Some kids cackled whenever she turned her back, called her Nanny McPhee, but Trevor liked Mrs. D. So what if she was old and strange? She was a good artist, a good teacher. The fruit she drew always looked like fruit: bananas and apples and a pomegranate, its seeds spilling out all over the table like the insides of the buck that Trevor’s dad shot last year. Plus, Mrs. D. was always giving him things to bring home—a box of waxy oil pastels, some tubes of acrylic paint that she was about to throw away. One time she gave him a set of colored pencils that weren’t even opened yet. Besides, Trevor liked being in the art room. He loved the smell of paint and paste, the dusty, musty scent of it all. He liked the way the canvases looked like boys leaning against the brick walls. He liked the paint-splattered floors, the rough wooden worktables, the high ceilings, and the quiet. It was almost like being in a library here; and when the doors closed behind him, he felt suddenly secure, sheltered, at peace.

  He opened the box and pulled out a camera. A real camera, heavy and black with a glass lens: the old-fashioned kind. For the last few weeks, they’d been doing a unit on photography, and this camera was like the ones each student was allowed to sign out, but this one was brand-new.

  “Have you ever had your own camera before?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  He thought of the slide show she’d shown them last week. Ansel Adams, that was the landscape guy. Some old lady who took pictures of flowers. But Trevor had liked the picture of people, the portraits, best. Faces. Mrs. D. had explained that photographers could be artists, that a good photographer uses the light to make ordinary or even ugly things beautiful. He thought about the kind of pictures he might take, about the faces he knew.

  “The school will probably do away with the darkroom eventually. Move everything to digital. But for now, I can still teach you how to develop the film. How to make prints.” Her head shook back and forth like a bobblehead doll, her voice made of tissue paper. “I want to see the world the way you see it, Trevor.”

  He wasn’t sure why Mrs. D. took such an interest in him. He wasn’t a good artist. Not like Angie McDonald in his class, whose paintings always looked like what they were supposed to. The things he drew never matched what was inside his head. He couldn’t get what was up there on the page, and he wasn’t sure anybody would want to see that anyway. But since sixth grade, Mrs. D. had looked at him like she saw someone special inside there. Nobody had ever looked at him like that before.

  He’d been thinking a lot lately about the way people looked at him. He’d grown so much since last year, he barely recognized himself in the mirror. He’d outgrown every pair of pants, every pair of shoes he owned. He felt like the Incredible Hulk, busting out of his own clothes. Kids had always been mean to him, teased him, but now the same kids moved away when he walked down the halls at school, pretending like he wasn’t there but still making sure to get out of his way. His teachers, except for Mrs. D., now looked at him like he was one of the bad kids. Like he was the troublemaker. His mother looked at him with sad eyes mostly, though he knew she was trying not to. If pity were a picture, it would be a picture of his mother. His dad’s face was full of worry too, though he tried not to show it. His little sister, Gracy, was the only one who didn’t look at him with some shade of disgust or disappointment. But she was only five; what did she know?

  “Thanks,” he said and took the camera from Mrs. D. and turned it over in his hands, excited to give it a try. He peered through the viewfinder and twisted the lens only to focus in on Jolyn Forchette, who was jealous and smelled like green beans, scowling at him from across the room. He crammed the camera into the backpack with the math homework he hadn’t turned in and a banana that had been sitting in there so long it had turned brown and soft.

  “It’s already loaded,” Mrs. D. said. “Just shoot.”

  He forgot about the camera as he made his way to the cafeteria for lunch. As the sea of students parted for him, liquid and flowing, whispering and sneering, he kept his head down, his gaze at the floor. He tried to make himself invisible, though that’s nearly impossible when you’re six feet tall in the seventh grade and you wear a size ten shoe. Still, he tried his best to disappear. But then as he made his way past a group of snickering and pointing seventh-grade girls, he started to feel that bad metal feeling. Corroded. That was the only way to describe it. Like his insides were rusted out, like one of his dad’s cars at the yard. He could even taste it sometimes way back in his throat. He tried to swallow it down hard, but the metallic taste lingered on his tongue, made the insides of his cheeks itch.

  He tried to ignore them and went to a table near the hot lunch line. He only had $1.50, which didn’t go far in the à la carte line. The few times he’d tried to get a decent meal there, he’d wound up starving by the end of the day, his stomach roiling and furious. Only losers got hot lunch, but at least the hot lunches filled him up. He threw his backpack down into a chair and grabbed a tray. That was the other good thing about hot lunch; there wasn’t a wait, so there would actually be enough time to eat after he got back to his table.

  Spaghetti. That meant there would be bread too and those electric orange cubes of cheese. Gray-green broccoli and chocolate pudding with skin on top. He was hungry. His mom had made eggs and bacon and hash for breakfast, but he felt hollow now. His body burned through fuel faster than his dad’s pickup.

  He pushed the brown plastic tray along the metal rollers and he watched as a group of seventh-grade guys went right to the table where his backpack was. He grabbed a carton of chocolate milk from the bin filled with ice and glanced over at the table, hoping they’d notice his pack and go somewhere else.

  “Here you go,” the lunch lady said, handing him a sloppy plate of spaghetti. He took a pair of tongs and grabbed a clump of cheese cubes and three spongy slices of garlic bread.

  The guys didn’t seem to notice Trevor’s backpack holding his place. They were all sitting at the table, laughing and eating their à la carte burgers and French fries. Trevor shoved the money at the hot lunch cashier and made his way over to the table.

  “Fee Fi Fo Fum,” said one of the kids.

  “That’s my backpack,” Trevor said softly.

  “That’s my backpack,” mimicked the kid in a girly voice. He had red hair that covered one eye like a comma. Ethan Sweeney. Of course.

  Trevor reached for his backpack but Mike Wheelock, with his greasy black hair and a Patriots jersey, grabbed it first.

  “Hey, freakshow, what do you keep in here? Body parts? I bet he’s got some dead chick’s head stuffed in here,” he said, laughing.

  “Just give it,” Trevor said.

  Mike started to unzip the backpack and stuck his head in to inspect.

  “Ew, what’s that smell?” he said, jerking his head back. The banana.

  The other guys leaned over to see inside. And suddenly Trevor felt the metal turning into quicksilver, mercury rushing through his veins.

  “What’s this?” the Sweeney kid asked, reaching in and grabbing the camera from Mrs. D.

  “I said, give it,” Trevor said. He thought about Mrs. D., picking out the camera and paying for it out of her own pocket. He thought about what the kid might do to it.

  “Give it, give it,” Ethan mocked, his voice high and sharp.

  Normally, Trevor just tried to ignore these guys, but lately, he couldn’t seem to control himself. It was like this new body of his, these new hands, had a mind of their own. So the next thing Trevor knew, the tray of spaghetti was flying onto the floor and his fists were swinging, though they connected with nothing but air. The whole cafeteria erupted, the chanting starting small and growing bigger, lik
e a heartbeat. Fight, fight, fight.

  His eyes stung and his mouth flooded with the taste of metal. But before he had the satisfaction of his fist making contact with Ethan’s face, someone was yanking his collar hard, choking him. He shook his head like a dog on a chain, and the hands let go, making him stumble backward.

  “All right, that’s enough. Break it up,” Mr. Douglas, the janitor, said.

  Trevor blinked hard and when his eyes focused again, he noticed the way the sunlight was shining through the cafeteria window, casting his own shadow, enormous and dark on the filthy cafeteria floor. And he thought about the gift from Mrs. D. About the camera. About how he might capture this picture: his own terrifying silhouette and all of the other kids’ faces staring at him with something between fascination and horror.

  Elsbeth looked at the catalogues that came in the mail with the models in their bathing suits and flip-flops and dreamed herself somewhere warm. It was April, spring everywhere else but here in Vermont, where yards were still laced with patches of dirty snow and you could still see your breath, like ghosts, when you went outside. Her girlfriend, Twig, went on a cruise for Christmas last year. She and her boyfriend flew down to Miami and then got on a ship to the Bahamas. She came back the color of a ripe peach with streaks of sunshine shimmering in her hair, like she’d captured the sun itself and brought it home with her. This was one of those things Elsbeth ached for, another one of those things she knew that she and Kurt probably wouldn’t ever be able to afford to do. Still, she marked the bright green two-piece in the Victoria’s Secret catalogue with a coupon for mayonnaise she clipped earlier, and set it on the kitchen table next to the stack of neglected bills.

  Elsbeth had worked at the salon all morning and then picked Gracy up from her half day at kindergarten after lunch. Gracy had fallen asleep in the car on the way home and, thankfully, stayed asleep as Elsbeth carried her inside and put her in her bed. Trevor would be at school for another couple of hours, and Kurt would be at the yard until suppertime. There was a roast in the Crock-Pot, so supper was taken care of, and so she had exactly two more hours of peace. Two more hours when she didn’t have to tend to anybody else’s needs except for her own. This was her guilty pleasure. This solitude. Sometimes she just lay down on the couch and closed her eyes for the whole two hours, waiting for Gracy to call for her and break the spell. She knew she could be, should be, catching up on the laundry. She knew she had dishes to do, grout to scrub, floors to mop, but this was the only time of day when she could hear her own thoughts. The only time of day when she was completely and absolutely alone.

  She lay on the couch and glanced at the magazine. The model was bustier than she was, with more up top and in the rear than Elsbeth had. The model had flowing auburn hair, while Elsbeth’s was the color of coal tar pitch. She wore it in a ponytail most days like she used to when she was a little girl; it made her feel younger than her thirty years. The model was smiling, and her teeth were even and white like Tic Tacs or a row of shiny Chiclets. Elsbeth hadn’t seen a dentist in a decade. And when her wisdom teeth came in, they undid all the work the braces she’d worn in junior high had done. Still, she knew she was sort of pretty to look at. She had her dimples and big wide eyes. She was no Victoria’s Secret model, but her stomach was flat and her legs were long and strong. She tried to picture herself in the bathing suit, but the only real beach here was way up at Lake Gormlaith, and only teenagers wore two-pieces there. She thought of the summers when she was still a teenager: those humid nights spent drinking wine coolers and skinny-dipping. She wished she’d known then that she should hold on to that feeling—of strawberry-flavored Bartles & Jaymes on her tongue and cold water on her naked skin—because now it was so far away it felt like a whisper too quiet to hear.

  She closed the magazine and then closed her eyes, calculating how many minutes of freedom were left. She tried to remember sunshine, the smell of suntan lotion. The sound of loons and the splash of bodies in water. But just as she was drifting off, floating on her back looking up at a dream sky full of stars, the phone rang, rattling her nerves. She sat up and quickly grabbed it off its cradle so it wouldn’t wake Gracy.

  “Hello?” she said softly.

  “Mrs. Kennedy? This is Principal Cross.”

  Elsbeth closed her eyes, took a deep breath. Waiting.

  “I just wanted to let you know that Trevor will be staying after school with us again today.”

  “What happened?” she asked. She could hear Mrs. Cross sigh on the other end of the line.

  “There was an altercation.”

  “A fight?”

  “More of a confrontation really.”

  “What does that mean? Is he hurt?”

  “No one is hurt. Mr. Douglas, our custodian, was, thankfully, able to stop the boys before it got physical.”

  “So it was an argument?” Elsbeth asked. Mrs. Cross drove her crazy.

  “Mrs. Kennedy, Trevor’s behavior is becoming disruptive. This is the third time this month that he’s served detention. If this had escalated into a fight, if anyone had gotten hurt, he’d be facing suspension.”

  “But no one was hurt?” she repeated.

  “No. Thankfully, not this time.”

  Elsbeth, exasperated, stood up. She could hear Gracy stirring in the other room.

  “You may pick him up from the office at four o’clock,” Mrs. Cross said.

  She nodded and hung up the phone, looked at the glossy redheaded model smiling at her. Mocking her.

  She didn’t know what was going on with Trevor lately. He’d always had a hard time at school, with other kids. But he’d never been violent before: always more apt to flee than fight. And Principal Cross was new this year; she didn’t know Trevor, hadn’t seen what he’d been through since kindergarten. All she saw was this big kid always on the verge of a brawl.

  Quietly she went to the room that Gracy and Trevor shared, and Gracy smiled up at her from her soft nest of blankets and pillows. Elsbeth sat down on the edge of the bed and stroked her hair. There was a sleepy seed in the corner of her eye that Elsbeth delicately extracted with one pale pink fingernail.

  “Hi, Mumma,” Gracy said sleepily.

  “Hi, baby. Did you have sweet dreams?”

  Gracy nodded. “I’m still sleepy.”

  “Okay, baby. Go back to sleep.”

  She never said it out loud, but she worried that she loved Gracy more than she loved Trevor. It was one of those truths that made her feel ashamed. What kind of mother admits that? What kind of mother even thinks something like that? But even when Trevor was just a baby, she remembered feeling like he didn’t belong to her. Like she didn’t belong to him. With his white-blond hair and skin, his ice-colored eyes, he certainly didn’t look like her. It was like Kurt had made him all by himself, as though she’d had nothing at all to do with it. Even after nine and a half months of carrying him around in her belly, there were times when she would watch him playing or sleeping and she had to remind herself that he was her son. Her child.

  Of course, she was only seventeen when he was born. Nobody should be having babies at seventeen. She hadn’t even put away her baby dolls yet when she was seventeen; when Kurt used to sneak into her room at night, she’d turn them all face-down on her dresser so they wouldn’t see what they were doing. She was still just a girl when she got pregnant. So for a long time, she thought maybe it was just because she was such a young mother. Maybe she resented Trevor for the loss of her freedom, blamed him for all the things she had to give up: for the prom she didn’t go to, the pep rallies, the bonfires, her position as first chair flute in the band. For all the other summers she might have spent drinking wine coolers and swimming naked at the lake.

  But as he got older, she realized it wasn’t as simple as that. Trevor wasn’t like the other children. At the playground the other mothers sometimes shook their heads at Trevor, whispered when they thought she wasn’t looking. He didn’t look like the other little boys, and he didn�
��t behave like they did either. For one thing, he was so sensitive. He’d cry about just about anything. If something was too loud, if he didn’t want to leave, when someone refused to play with him. He threw tantrums, big tantrums. Those times, she’d scoop him up in her arms and walk away from the huddled mothers, wincing as he kicked her thighs, scratched her arms, and sobbed into her hair. But despite feeling protective, angry at these women with their well-behaved toddlers, she couldn’t help feeling a little bitter too. Angry at him for being such a crybaby. And she realized what she was feeling was shame. She was ashamed of her own son. It made her feel awful.

  And then seven years and two miscarriages later, Gracy was born, and she knew for sure that while there might be something wrong with Trevor, there was something far worse wrong with her. Because the minute Gracy was born, she remembered feeling a whole new kind of love. Not love like she felt for her mother, for her grandpa. Not even the kind of crazy love she used to feel for Kurt. But a love so big it felt like something liquid. Something that soaked her; she felt heavy with it. A mother’s love.

  Gracy was a beautiful baby: eyes as big and dark as Junior Mints. Her hair, like Elsbeth’s, was the color and thickness of molasses. She almost never cried, and when she did it wasn’t because she was angry or frustrated. She never threw her body across the room and into closed doors, never tore her own hair out like Trevor did at that age. She cooed and smiled and didn’t shrink away from Elsbeth’s touch. (That’s what killed her more than anything, the way Trevor retracted from her. It made her feel found out, accused.) Grace was just that, just the smallest bit of grace. Elsbeth’s sweet reward for the agony that was Trevor. Her mercy.

  Now that Trevor was older and things seemed to be getting worse rather than better, she didn’t know what to do. She tried so hard to be a good mother. To make Trevor feel loved and special. But it felt false, like she was pretending, and she worried that he could sense this. That maybe she was even to blame for his problems, that she had failed him in some terrible way.