Grace

by T. Greenwood

  When he leaned over to kiss her, she was so startled she caught her breath. If she’d known it was coming she would have prepared, she would have known to hold on. And later, if she’d had any idea about how quickly and suddenly all of this could fall apart, she would have braced herself.

  But it wasn’t until two months later when she was sitting on the floor of her bathroom, clutching the pregnancy test in her sweaty hand, that she knew all of this was about to disappear: a decade of friendship, everything in the entire world that she loved.

  She knew she could have dealt with it quietly. She could have (like Lena had sophomore year) driven to a Planned Parenthood in a town where no one knew who she was, and had this taken care of. But the very thought of it made her body rock with something between sickness and sadness. Every time she considered her options, she thought about her mother’s hands, folded in her lap quietly at church. She wasn’t sure why this was the image that came to mind, but it was. Her mother’s straight spine in the harsh wooden pew at St. Elizabeth’s. Her clean, polished nails and her carefully ironed skirts. Her Realtor blazers and the scarves she wore around her neck, the orange line of her foundation at her jaw. She didn’t think of God or Jesus or Mary or the Bible or the dark confessional. She thought only of her mother.

  She knew she would need to tell her mother, and that once she did, then all of the possible options would also disappear, leaving her with only one. She was going to college in one year. She had her list narrowed down to Georgetown, Amherst, and the University of Vermont. Ty wanted to go to Middlebury, which was close to UVM. Close enough that they could see each other all the time. But if there was a baby, there would be no college. Not for her anyway.

  Her mother was surprisingly calm. Perhaps it was because she knew exactly what Crystal should do. When there is only one solution, then you simply do what you must. By the time they had finished their Diet Cokes at Rosco’s where she’d met her during her lunch break, her mother had found an adoption agency on her BlackBerry, scheduled an appointment with her own OB / GYN, and written down the names of the prenatal vitamins she should pick up.

  It wasn’t until that night, lying alone in her bed, listening to Angie sleep, oblivious to everything that had transpired, that Crystal allowed herself to consider the other option, the one that she knew was ridiculous, but also the only one that seemed to make any sense.

  What if she kept the baby? What if she simply went through the pregnancy, took the prenatal vitamins, went for her monthly visits to the OB/GYN, and then at the end, in the spring when the baby came, she just brought it home? Ty could still go to college, and she would just go with him. She could take night classes. Work part-time. They could rent a little house. She imagined a backyard with a hammock. She dreamed the lemonade. Why did that idea have to be crazy? As she lay in her childhood bed, it didn’t seem crazy at all. It seemed real. She practiced what she would say, rehearsed the words until it was like a prayer, and she fell asleep to stained-glass dreams, whispering this strange rosary.

  She waited until they were walking home after school to tell him. They’d only been back at school for a week, and it was still very much summer outside, despite the fact that vacation was over. “Carry me,” she said, getting behind him and jumping on, piggyback. She buried her nose in his neck and tightened her legs around him. He took off running and when they got to his house, he spilled her onto the grass, lying down with her. They stared up at the blue sky and he reached for her hand. “I hate calculus,” he said. “I totally failed that last test.”

  “I’m going to have a baby,” she said. When she closed her eyes, she saw stars instead of the sun. She could feel every single blade of grass beneath her. His hand went loose for a moment before it tightened around hers again. She should have known what this meant, but she didn’t want to.

  “Okay,” he said.

  She opened her eyes and rolled over on her side to look at him. “Okay?” she asked, her throat swollen.

  “Sure,” he said, but there was a shadow that passed across those wild eyes.

  “Okay,” she’d said, as if it were this simple. An agreement. An understanding.

  And that was that. She told her parents that night over dinner that she’d decided to keep the baby. That there was nothing they could do to change her mind. In six months she would be an adult, and she and Ty would do this together.

  “He won’t stay,” her mother had said softly, but the words were sharp. They felt like splinters.

  “Yes, he will,” she had said.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head, looking at her like she was some stupid puppy instead of a girl. “He won’t.”

  Her mother was right, her mother was always right, and sometimes it made Crystal hate her. Because only a month later she heard a rumor that Ty and Lena had hooked up at a party. That Ty had gotten drunk and told a bunch of people he was too young to be a dad and that Crystal had probably gotten pregnant on purpose, to keep him around. Apparently, he was crying on Lena’s shoulder all night, Lena, her friend, and someone saw them disappear into a back bedroom together.

  She asked Lena first, because she couldn’t bear to hear it from Ty. And Lena just shook her head and kept saying, “I’m sorry, Cryssy. I didn’t mean to.” As if she’d accidentally slept with him. As if it had all been some unfortunate thing that couldn’t have been prevented.

  She went over to Ty’s house later that afternoon. Lucia was in the kitchen washing vegetables from her garden. Crystal sat down in the chair by the window and Lucia made her tea. Ty didn’t come home at all, and when the sun went down, Lucia said softly, “Sweetie, you should go home now.”

  That was the last time she went to Ty’s house. And she and Ty never talked about what happened. He just disappeared. Poof. Just like she should have known he would. At school, she stopped using her locker so she could avoid seeing him. She had the counselor help her get her schedule changed so that she wouldn’t have to see him in calculus or AP chem.

  At first she tried to imagine herself alone with a baby. With Ty’s baby. She thought about what her life might be like. She even insisted for a few months that this was what she wanted, when she really wondered if it was simply what she deserved. But then in January when she slipped on an icy patch on the sidewalk on her way home from school, landing hard on her tailbone, and a truck full of assholes drove by with their windows rolled down, laughing and gawking at her, belly-up on the ground like a beetle on its back, she realized that her mother was right. When she couldn’t stop crying for three days straight, she knew there really only ever had been one option.

  She met the Stones two weeks later. Arrangements were made. Her father started to take her to their house once every two weeks so they could watch her grow, and then, in the spring, she took Willa for a walk and just hours later, the baby came.

  And now the baby was gone. There only ever had been one choice.

  The couple that adopted her was from Burlington. He was a music professor at the university, and she was a poet. Crystal looked up her books of poetry on Amazon. She read all the sad poems, all the pregnancies and miscarriages captured in tidy little stanzas. The Stones had been trying for ten years to have a baby; that was almost as long as she had waited for Ty. She looked at Mr. Stone’s syllabus on the university’s website. She studied the photos that the agency sent, read their carefully crafted pleas. She knew they were written by the woman; they were almost like poems themselves. The careful meter of loss. When they finally met in person, at a coffee shop on Church Street and then later at their house near the university, they both hugged her like she was their own child. She’d liked them at the beginning, but by the end, she couldn’t stand to look at their hopeful, eager faces. All that aching want made her sick.

  They’d offered an open adoption, but the idea seemed crazy to her. What kind of person could witness their own child growing up in someone else’s house? How could that be fair to anyone? When you sold a car, you didn’t show up at t
he new owner’s house and expect to drive it. You didn’t go by on the weekends to give it a wash in the driveway. Of course, she knew a baby wasn’t the same thing as a car. But regardless, it was still an exchange. By giving the baby up, she got her life back. But what kind of trade was that?

  She used to count the ways she loved Ty. Now she only counted the ways he’d ruined everything.

  Trevor’s mind was like a steel trap, like the ones Pop set out near the garden to catch raccoons and skunks. It was a violent thing, with sharp edges. It caught its victims and wouldn’t let them go. It bit into their hindquarters, held them captive. At night when he tried to sleep, it was like this: all those thoughts trying to come loose, gnawing at themselves, while the steel teeth of his mind refused let go.

  When Mrs. Cross called him and Ethan into her office, she’d made it clear that there were no chances left. She’d made them sit next to each other, facing her behind the rickety old desk as she explained how close to suspension, if not expulsion, they were.

  “You behave like animals,” she said. “And this is not a zoo. This is a school.”

  Ethan rolled his eyes, and Mrs. Cross’s face grew flushed, as though someone were squeezing her around her neck. Trevor almost wondered if he should remind her to breathe. “If there is one more incident. So much as a scuffle ...” she started, and Ethan yawned. “Mr. Sweeney? Am I boring you?” Her voice was so tight it sounded like it might snap.

  “No ma’am,” he said and straightened up in his chair, stifling another yawn.

  “And you, Trevor? Do you find this conversation tiresome?”

  “I didn’t yawn,” Trevor said, flabbergasted. He’d been sitting there listening politely for the last ten minutes. What did she want him to do?

  “Well, I certainly hope not. Because this is it. You have no more chances, mister. No more free passes. You will both be eighth graders soon. It is time to set aside any of the grievances you might have with each other and work on getting along. I don’t need you to be friends, but I do need to trust that you aren’t going to attack each other.”

  The idea that he still had a whole year left at this stupid school made his body buzz. He could hardly wait for high school. Two Rivers High was a union school, with about five towns feeding into it. It was big enough he figured he might be able to start fresh, or at least get lost in the crowd. But he had to get through not only this school year but the entire eighth grade before that would happen. And if what Mrs. Cross said was the truth, one misstep might get him kicked out. His biggest fear was that it might happen even if he didn’t do anything wrong. If Ethan started something, it wouldn’t matter if he stood there like a rock and took it. She was determined to punish them both.

  And so at night, instead of sleeping, his mind clamped shut tight on thoughts of school, of Mrs. Cross with her soft-serve vanilla hair and her anxious eyes. She made Trevor think of the rabbits he and his dad hunted in the woods behind their house, the way she darted and flashed in and out of sight. Inside the metal jaws of his mind were images of those closed classrooms, the antiseptic stink of the bathrooms, the girls with their sneers and the boys with their fists. As Gracy slept, cooing and mumbling gibberish, Trevor ground his teeth.

  The only time Trevor could forget about school was at the salvage yard. Trevor’s dad had decided that they needed to start putting stuff up on eBay so they could get out-of-state customers too. Trevor had already been going to work with him on the weekends, but his dad said if he came to the yard after school and took pictures of the inventory, then he would give him a 2 percent commission on anything that sold. Trevor had always liked going to work with his dad. Beal’s wife made homemade orange doughnuts, and his dad let him make hot cocoa from the packets for customers with the hot water that came out of the water machine. He brought comic books, and sometimes his dad asked him to help organize stuff or find things out in the yard. Other times, he just let him climb the piles. When he was really little, he used to sit inside the wrecked cars and pretend he was driving, messing with the stick shifts, turning the steering wheels. If he ignored the weeds growing up through the floorboards, he could almost imagine that he was traveling down a real road, the interstate. A superhighway. But now he was here to work.

  “So I need photos, good ones, of everything,” his father said.

  “You’ll need a digital camera for that, Dad,” Trevor said.

  “Beal’s got one. It’s not great, but it’ll do the trick.” He reached across his desk and grabbed a stack of papers. “This here’s the inventory, all of it. I sorted it by category, that’s the first column. See? All the Air-Conditioning / Heat items are together. Then comes the subcategories. Like here, see? AC Compressor, AC Condenser, Actuator, et cetera, et cetera. Then comes the Make, Model, and Year. The location, where you find it in the yard, is last. I made a blank column at the end where you’ll write in the number of the picture file. It’s real important, especially for the stuff that looks all the same.”

  Trevor took the stack and scanned the items. There were hundreds. Thousands. This could take him months. He wondered if his father expected him to be there all summer too. “What if I can’t find this stuff? I don’t even know what a compressor looks like.”

  His father scowled. “Then you ask somebody for help. Me and Beal are never too far away.” His father handed him the camera, a flimsy and scratched little silver box. It felt like a toy in his hands after the camera Mrs. D. had given him. “Where do I even start?”

  “At the top. It’s alphabetical. Accessories is the first category. Most of that’s in the trailer out back. Bed liners, floor mats, jacks. And when the camera batteries run out, come get me. I got another batch charging up.”

  Trevor took the camera and the first several pages from the stack. He could do this, and he could use the money to buy film for his camera. To get it developed. They hadn’t started working in the darkroom at school yet, and he was anxious to see what his photos looked like. It actually wasn’t nearly as bad, as boring, as he thought it would be. It was almost like a treasure hunt; as he dug through the rubble of fenders and dashboards, the stacks of odometers and steering wheels and stereos, there was a certain satisfaction each time he was able to match something on the list. He snapped the photos, recorded the image names, and then at five o’clock his dad would come get him and they’d go home for supper.

  Here he could forget about school. The job gave his brain something to do. It wasn’t until later when he lay in bed futilely waiting for sleep that his mind snapped down on what another year at that piece-of-shit school really meant. At the yard, he didn’t think about Mrs. Cross looking at him like he was some sort of pit stain. He didn’t think the bad thoughts, about making Mrs. Cross and everybody else regret the way they’d treated him. He didn’t think about Ethan Sweeney’s squinty eyes and Mike’s stupid face. At the junkyard, looking at the world through the viewfinder, he was the one in charge. It was only at night that the snare clamped down. Bit in hard and left his mind punctured and bruised, exhausted, by morning.

  At work, Crystal watched the woman with the little girl and noticed for the first time how striking the child was. Almost difficult to look at. She reminded her a little bit of Ty’s sister Dizzy, with her black hair and dark brown eyes.

  It was Memorial Day weekend, which thankfully meant a short week at school and the chance to pick up some extra shifts at work. She’d been picking up a lot of extra shifts lately, squirreling her money away. She told her parents she was still saving for college, but that was a lie. She didn’t know what she was saving the money for anymore. She had almost $4,000 in her bank account, though, and her parents had no idea. Plus, she actually looked forward to going to work lately. After dodging Ty all day at school, it was such a relief to disappear into the cold, clean aisles of Walgreens. She felt untouchable there. Safe.

  She didn’t notice them at first. Walgreens was packed today. Everyone in the entire town of Two Rivers seemed to need something. Charc
oal and ice, condiments and paper plates flew off the shelves as though the entire world might be convening later for one giant picnic. Sunscreen and swimming goggles, blow-up water wings and water pistols. The official start of summer had come, despite the chilly edge to the air and the swarms of black flies that made most outdoor activities unbearable. So when the woman came up to her, the little girl riding on her hip, and said, “Excuse me, miss?” she expected someone looking for the citronella candles.

  “Yes?” Crystal responded, looking up from the jammed pricing gun. “Can I help you?”

  “I hope so,” she said. “I need to get this film developed. Do you guys even do that anymore?”

  The woman was clutching a Ziploc baggie with three old-fashioned rolls of film inside.

  “Oh sure, of course. Is anybody over in the Photo Department?”

  “No,” she said. “Not that I could see anyway.”

  Fucking Howard. He was supposed to be manning the photo department, helping people upload their pictures, making prints.

  “Here,” Crystal said. “I can help you.”

  “Hi,” the little girl said suddenly, lifting her head from her mother’s shoulder.

  “Hi,” Crystal said back. Her eyes, that was it. They were almost black. Hard to look at.

  “Most people have digital now,” Crystal said as she walked the lady and her daughter to the photo counter.

  “They’re my son’s. He’s got one of those old-fashioned cameras. It’s for school.”

  “Cool,” Crystal said.

  She helped the lady fill out the order envelope and then slipped the rolls of film inside. “It takes about three business days to get these back.”

  “Oh, you don’t have one of those machines in the store?”

  “Not anymore,” she said. “Did you put your phone number on here so we can call when they’re ready?”

  “Uh-huh,” the lady said.