Grace

by T. Greenwood

  The inspectors pulled up then, one white county car and then another. Kurt was loading up the truck with some stuff he thought he could sell at the salvage yard: some old starters and car stereos, a half dozen steering wheels. He’d assured Pop he wouldn’t throw any of it away and that he’d write him a check for anything that sold.

  Irene Killjoy pulled up behind the inspectors and got out of her car, straightening her skirt. “Well, let’s see what sort of progress we’ve made, now shall we?”

  Two hours later, the inspectors wordlessly got into their cars and took off.

  “Well?” Kurt asked Irene. Pop, who had come and observed the inspection angrily but, thankfully, silently had now gone back into the house, slamming the door shut and locking it behind him.

  “It looks like the major infractions have been taken care of,” she said. “Legally, the house is now up to code. However, Mr. Kennedy, from my experience, this is just a temporary fix.” She shook her head sadly, and Kurt felt his shoulders tense. “With all due respect, your father has an illness. Trust me, I’ve seen this before. The stuff will come back. He’ll just fill up all that empty space. He doesn’t need a housekeeper; he needs a mental-health professional. I can suggest a wonderful social worker who can work with him on his hoarding issues ...”

  “Hold on,” Kurt said, trying to breathe deeply so he would not lose his temper. “The house passed the inspection, correct?”

  “Well, yes. For now. But I’m fairly certain there is a deeper problem here,” she said.

  “Everything is up to code now. I think it is time for you to get off my father’s property.” Kurt raised his chin, gesturing toward her car.

  She sighed, looking at him in the same way that Trevor’s principal did. As if he were someone to pity. Some sad sorry fucker. He knew it was like putting a Band-Aid on a ruptured artery, but Jesus, what else could he do?

  “Let me see you to your car,” he said, grinding his back molars together and putting his palm against her back, pushing gently.

  “Of course,” she said and awkwardly navigated a string of mud puddles to her car.

  “We’d like to follow up with your father at the end of the summer. Unless I receive any complaints sooner.”

  “There won’t be any need for a follow-up,” Kurt said.

  Irene Killjoy got in her car and started her engine. But when she tried to back out, her car spun out in the mud.

  “Oh Jesus Christ,” Kurt said and went to the car.

  She rolled down the window and smiled. “Would you mind giving me a little nudge?” Kurt got behind the car and pushed as she revved the engine, but as her tires finally gained enough traction to move forward, the mud was already flying, splattering his jeans. Pop wouldn’t answer the door. He was probably passed out by now. He’d gone through half the bottle of Seagram’s while the inspectors negotiated the piles of stuff in his house. Kurt scratched a note on an old receipt in his pocket and stuck it with the county’s inspection pass notice to his window. I’ll come by Friday night—K.

  Trevor liked to swim. In the water, his body never betrayed him like it did when he was doing something as simple as walking down the halls at school. In the water, he felt coordinated and weightless, fluid. Free. He liked the mix of cold water and hot sun, the way the water filled up his ears, numbing his senses. He preferred to swim in natural bodies of water—ponds and rivers and lakes—but the swimming pool was the next best thing. So when his father told him that he and Gracy would be in swim camp all summer, he’d been happy.

  It was finally summer. He didn’t have to think about Mrs. Cross or Ethan and Mike or homework or anything until September. He couldn’t help but think of Mrs. D. though, and every time he did, it made him feel like he couldn’t breathe. He asked Angie if she’d heard anything, but she hadn’t; all he knew was that she hadn’t come back to school.

  He kept taking pictures, but knowing he had no one to show them to made him feel untied somehow, unraveled. He collected all the rolls of undeveloped film in his underwear drawer; the spent rolls of film were like little capsules, little treasure chests for which he had no key. His last commission check from the yard wasn’t enough to pay to process all of them, and he chose to spend what was left on more film.

  He’d finished the inventory sheets at the yard last week. He’d also helped his dad upload the remaining pictures to eBay. The increase in business wasn’t what his dad probably hoped for, but they had sold a few things so far: a starter, a catalytic converter, a steering wheel for a ’69 Chevelle. Trevor knew things weren’t going well at the shop. He could read the worry in his father’s face. He’d cut Beal’s shifts back to just a couple of days a week now, and Beal had suddenly gone from friendly and funny to sullen and irritable. Trevor figured his dad would need his help even more now with Beal only there half-time, but instead he said that Trevor could have his summer off as long as he stayed out of trouble. That wouldn’t be hard with both Ethan and Mike on the all-star team for baseball; their summers would be occupied with games and travel. If he was lucky, he might make it a whole summer without having to deal with them.

  The first week of swim camp was great. He and Gracy rode into town with his mom on her way to work, and she dropped them off at the pool, giving them each a dollar to get a soda or an ice cream after they were done. Gracy went to the shallow end where all the other little kids were, and Trevor went to the deep end. There were only four kids in his class, and two of them were eighth-grade girls, Savannah and Kylie, he sort of knew from school. They didn’t talk to him, but they weren’t mean either. The other boy was Rudy Hauser, a sixth grader who had just moved to town. Their teacher was a college girl named Lisa who had shaggy red hair and freckles everywhere. She wore a whistle around her neck and had a tattoo of a four-leaf clover on her ankle.

  Every morning, they swam laps to warm up, and then she had them work on a particular stroke for the next hour. Trevor liked the backstroke the best, because then he didn’t need to think about breathing. The hour always went fast, and then they got to take their break at eleven. Afterward they worked on their turns or diving until it was time to go. Sometimes they had races, and Trevor always won. When the session was over at noon, he picked Gracy up from the kiddie end of the pool and they went to the snack shack for Popsicles or French fries. Their mom picked them up at twelve thirty, and then they went back to the house, where he usually just changed out of his wet clothes and took off for the woods. Trevor spent every afternoon that first week walking in the woods taking pictures, hanging out in the caboose. He’d cleaned it up, brought some stuff from home (some photo books and comic books and an old beanbag chair). He took a pair of scissors and cut out his favorite photos from the Lewis Carroll book Mrs. D. gave him and hung the pictures on the wall: Alice as Beggar Girl, Agnes Grace Weld as Little Red Riding Hood, Beatrice in fancy dress. The few pictures he had of his own looked amateurish in comparison, but he hung them up anyway. The caboose was his own Fortress of Solitude. He would have been happy if summer never ended.

  But the second week of swim camp, everything changed.

  Trevor knew as soon as they showed the kid at the gate their laminated camp passes that something was different. He could feel it. He walked Gracy over to her class and pulled her Sleeping Beauty towel out of his backpack. The towel was threadbare and Sleeping Beauty’s eyes had worn off, making her look sort of creepy. He pulled his own towel out and went to the locker room and hung his backpack on a hook in an empty locker, stuffing his T-shirt and sneakers inside. Somebody else was in the locker room; he could see their feet underneath the bathroom stall door. He hurried into the shower to rinse off and then walked back outside to the pool.

  “Check it out,” a voice behind him said. “Is Bigfoot learning to swim?”

  Trevor didn’t turn around. He didn’t have to. It was Mike Wheelock. Right behind him, breathing down his neck. He ignored Mike and walked out of the locker room to the end of the pool where, waiting for him at the
deep end, was Ethan Sweeney and another kid from the baseball team. Ethan was in the water, flicking water at Savannah and Kylie, who were sitting on the edge of the pool. They were giggling, “Stop!” Just his luck, it looked like their baseball team was cut from playoffs early, and now here they were here. Of course.

  Trevor’s whole body was covered in goose bumps from the cold shower. He rubbed his arms up and down and sat down next to Rudy, who watched as Mike swaggered to the pool’s edge.

  “What are you looking at?” Mike said to Rudy.

  Rudy was smaller than Trevor, with a perpetually runny nose and acne. He knew it was awful, but he couldn’t help entertaining the hope that Rudy might just become a new target for Ethan and Mike, take the burden off him, even just for a while.

  Mike cannonballed into the pool, getting everyone at the edge wet, the two girls squealing but not really upset. When he came up for air he high-fived Ethan in the water. Trevor’s eyes stung with chlorine. The air suddenly smelled dank and musty. Rotten. He was grateful when Lisa finally showed up and had them all get into the water to do laps. Today was the breaststroke, and he glided through the water.

  “Thought you might be here for synchronized swimming lessons,” Ethan said as he climbed up the ladder after he was finished with his laps. “Water ballet?”

  “Just leave me alone,” Trevor said and moved to the far side of the pool.

  “Just leave me alone,” Ethan mocked.

  “Okay, that’s enough, boys,” Lisa said, gently knocking Ethan in the back of the head.

  When it was time to practice turns, Lisa had them all line up next to each other. Trevor swam the length of the pool as fast as he could, and when he got to the end, he executed his turn, feeling that strange and wonderful feeling of not knowing which way is up or down. Then something brushed against him. Legs. He was tangled up with someone else. He burst, disoriented, to the surface of the water, struggling for air.

  “Hey, pervert!” Ethan Sweeney screamed in his face. “Homo perv.”

  Mike swam up to them then, pushing his chest out. “What’d he do?”

  Trevor wiped the chlorine out of his eyes. He searched frantically for Lisa, who was at the opposite end of the pool, in the water, helping the other new kid with his turn.

  “He tried to molest me,” Ethan said, smirking. His face was sunburned, his hair and eyes both red. “He had a total boner.”

  “Shut up! You ran into me,” Trevor said, tasting metal in his throat, acrid. Bitter.

  “Yeah, right,” Ethan said, sneering.

  Trevor’s legs were suddenly weak; he was having a hard time treading water.

  “Guess since your old-lady girlfriend got sick, you’re lonely,” Mike said, laughing. “Sorry to hear about Mrs. D. Guess now you’re a full-on faggot.”

  Trevor felt like he was drowning.

  “What’s the problem over here, boys?” Lisa asked. She had swum over to them. She bobbed up and down in the water like a toy.

  “No problem.” Mike smiled.

  “Okay then, make your way back to the other side. We’re almost out of time. You too, Ethan.” She dipped under the water then and disappeared like a minnow at the bottom of a lake.

  Mike flicked his tongue in and out of his mouth, like some thick slug, mock making out with her.

  “That’s my fucking sister, asshole!” Ethan said and pushed Mike’s head under the water.

  His sister. Trevor let himself slip under the water, sinking slowly to the bottom of the pool, and then kicked off against the wall, swimming as fast as he could to the other side.

  At home that afternoon, he told his mother he was going to go walk in the woods. She was at the kitchen table painting Gracy’s fingernails. The whole room smelled like chemicals, clean but poisonous. Gracy looked up at him and smiled. “Can I come with you?” she asked, and he saw his mother stiffen. Not so much that anybody would notice, but Trevor did. He knew the way her shoulders looked when she didn’t like an idea. He knew the way her mouth twitched, her eyes scrunched into slits. She didn’t trust him at all anymore, not since he took off and scared her half to death. Since he threw his camera.

  “Not today, Gracy,” he said, so his mother wouldn’t have to.

  “Be back by supper,” his mom said without looking up from the delicate work of painting Gracy’s miniature nails.

  The first thing Trevor needed to do was to replace the caboose’s windows, though not with glass. What he needed was plywood, four or five sheets that he could use to keep out the light. So no one could see in. Or out.

  He went to the shed and started to rummage through the piles of stuff they’d transported over from Pop’s house. He dug through the rubble, looking for something that might work. Finally, he found a stack of sheet metal that looked about the right size. He was pretty sure his dad wouldn’t mind, but then thought maybe he should call him anyway just to check. He was doing his best to stay on his dad’s good side. He went back into the kitchen and grabbed the phone from the counter.

  “Look at my fingernails, Trevor!” Gracy said, hopping down from her chair and wriggling her fingers in his face. “Do you want me to paint yours?”

  “No thanks, Gracy,” he said.

  “Thought you were headed to the woods,” his mom said.

  “I forgot something.” He brought the phone outside and dialed the shop. He could picture his dad at the counter, tapping away at the adding machine, the tape like a snake’s tongue, flicking out of the machine.

  “Dad?” he said. “I found some sheet metal. Can I have it?”

  “What for?” he asked.

  Trevor had anticipated the question but wasn’t sure if his story would be enough to convince his father. “I’m going to build something,” he said. “A tree house or something.”

  His father had promised him a few years ago that he’d build him a tree house in the backyard. There used to be a big oak tree that would have been perfect, but during a big summer storm it fell over and crushed the garage roof. They hadn’t talked about the tree house after that.

  “Aren’t you a little old for that now?” Kurt asked.

  Trevor shrugged but didn’t answer.

  “I don’t care,” his father said. “Go ahead, but don’t cut yourself.”

  “Thanks,” Trevor said and returned the phone to its cradle in the kitchen. He loaded the pieces into his dad’s wheelbarrow. He’d need some metal screws too. The Makita. Some electrical tape or weather stripping. He returned to the shed and dug through the coffee cans of hardware that littered the wooden worktable, taking what he needed and started loading it into the wheel barrow.

  He pushed it through the pasture behind the house, into the woods, and all the way to the river, navigating bushes and trees and upturned roots along the way. Then he parked it at the river’s edge and made three trips up the trestle with all of his supplies to the caboose.

  Inside, the light coming through the cracked windows was green, as though he were submerged underwater. As if the caboose were at the bottom of a swimming pool. He lingered in that aquatic light, trying not to think about what had happened at the pool. Trying not to think about the way his whole body had ached.

  Homo perv. He had a total boner. He tried to remember what his body had felt when Ethan touched him. He couldn’t recollect anything now but the disorientation of being upside down in the water. Sometimes, he felt his body stiffen despite himself; it didn’t take much. It wasn’t his fault, though; there wasn’t anything he could do to control it. He didn’t think so, but was it possible he’d actually had a hard-on? And what if he did have one? Did that make him what they said? Was he really queer?

  He shook his head, tears streaming down his cheeks. He wiped them away with his shirt sleeve, rubbing the snot from under his nose afterward. Then he reached for the first piece of sheet metal and got to work.

  When Twig asked Elsbeth what she and Kurt were doing for the Fourth of July, Elsbeth had shrugged. Most of the time they grilled
burgers in the backyard, had some friends over, and then Kurt and his buddies would set off firecrackers in the field behind the house. But now that Kurt was working so much, they hadn’t bothered to make any plans. The yard was closed for the holiday, though, so at least he had one day off. She thought she might convince him to go to Twig’s party, to have some fun for a change.

  “Twig’s having a party up at Gormlaith this afternoon. Then fireworks tonight. You wanna come?”

  “Jesus, El. I’m exhausted. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in weeks. I just need to catch up a little.”

  Elsbeth sighed. The bed was empty three nights a week now, and Kurt was a walking zombie. When she spoke to him, she was pretty sure he was only pretending to hear her most of the time. Nodding, his eyes glazed over. She knew he was tired, but for Christ’s sake.

  “You go,” Kurt said, rubbing the back of his neck. “Take the kids. Have fun.”

  “Trevor’s not going to want to come without you,” she said.

  Trevor wasn’t any better than Kurt. Both of them moping around. Eyes glassy and sad. It was depressing. So they weren’t going to Disney World—it was still summer. Couldn’t they at least enjoy that while it lasted?

  “I just really need to get some sleep, El.”

  “Fine,” she said. “You and Trevor stay here. Take a nap. I’ll take Gracy.”

  Elsbeth spent the rest of the morning making food for the picnic. She boiled potatoes for salad, made deviled eggs freckled with paprika. She played the radio loudly and sang along. Gracy helped her make brownies, and they sat together on the back steps licking the bowl, watching the hummingbirds buzz against the red plastic feeder. Trevor took off for the woods again, and Kurt went back to bed.

  It was a beautiful sunny day. Not too hot. She tried to focus on the sunshine.