Grace

by T. Greenwood

  The little girl nodded.

  As they waited for the bleeding to stop, Crystal tried to take a quick inventory of the child’s body. She wasn’t even sure what she was looking for, but she had a feeling that something was really, really wrong in this family. The girl didn’t have any visible bruises, but she was covered with bug bites, which she had clearly scratched until they scabbed over. Her hair was in two braids that looked like they’d been slept on. She had a Band-Aid on one of her knees.

  “What happened to your knee?”

  “I fell down,” the girl said, her nose plugged. “In the backyard. Where Pop lives.”

  “Your daddy lives in your backyard?” Crystal asked, horrified.

  “No, silly. Pop. My grandpop.”

  “He lives in your backyard?”

  “He used to live in a house, but it got too dirty. There was a raccoon, I saw it. They were afraid the raccoon might bite the little kids.”

  Crystal nodded and stroked the little girl’s hair, trying not to look shocked. Trying not to whisk her straight away. But to whom? The police? Child Protective Services? What do you do when some kid tells you their grandfather is living in the backyard? When you’ve been watching her mother shoplift for months and months? Stay calm, she thought. Think this through.

  “Here, let’s see if it’s fixed.” Crystal gently took the soggy wad of paper towels from the little girl’s nose and had her lean her head forward. For the moment, the bleeding seemed to have stopped. Crystal went to the sink and wet down another paper towel, which she used to wash the dried blood from her face. She also wiped away the chocolate ring around her mouth and dabbed at the tears in the corners of her eyes.

  There was a knock at the door then, and as she tossed the bloodstained tissues into the trash can, the little girl’s mother came in.

  “Is she okay?” she asked. “You okay, honey?”

  The little girl nodded.

  Crystal rolled another wad of toilet paper, hands trembling, and handed it to the girl. “Take this with you, in case it starts up again, okay?”

  “Thank you so much. God, the sight of blood makes me so queasy. Thank you for taking care of her,” the woman said. She was smiling now. That crazy distant look in her eye was gone. Crystal wondered if the can of beef stew was in her pocketbook. She’d have to ask Howard if he rang her up.

  “You ready, Gracy Bear?” the mother said sweetly.

  Crystal’s eyes widened, and her heart started to pound hard in her chest. “What’s her name?” Crystal asked, her throat thick, suddenly feeling like she might faint.

  “Grace,” the woman said, still smiling. “We call her Gracy, though.”

  Crystal held onto the handicapped bar so that she wouldn’t pass out.

  Grace. G-R-A-C-E. The letters that spun their magic stitches across that wounded place. Grace. What were the chances? And what could it mean?

  The little girl leaned into her mother and hugged her tightly around her knees. Crystal felt dizzy and had to concentrate just to breathe. When they were gone, she lifted the lid of the toilet and vomited. Then she pressed her cheek against the cold porcelain and cried.

  Trevor walked Gracy to the pool entrance, careful not to let the kid checking passes see him. He handed her the Sleeping Beauty towel from his backpack and then slung the pack back on his shoulder. “Just show them your pass and go to your group. I’ll be back before Mom gets here.”

  “Where you going, Trevor?” she asked. “What about swimming lessons?”

  “Don’t worry, Gracy. I just have an errand to run.”

  “What kind of errand?”

  “Just go straight to your group,” he said.

  She shrugged and kissed his cheek. “Okeydokey, artichokey.”

  He watched to make sure she’d gone through the gate and then walked away as quickly as he could without breaking into a full-blown sprint.

  The address he scrawled onto a scrap of paper was downtown, about a mile from the pool. It would have been faster if he’d walked down Depot Street, but he couldn’t risk getting caught by his mom, so he took the long way, walking through the neighborhood surrounding the downtown.

  When he got to the house, Trevor glanced at the address, comparing it to the brass numbers nailed to the wall, making sure he was at the right place. The house was run-down, the porch he stood on sinking. Box fans whirred in several of the windows. There was a row of mailboxes by the front door. He scanned them, looking at the peeling labels until he saw Carmen Dubois. Mrs. D. Apt. 4.

  He slowly opened the front door, startling as, somewhere, a dog barked loudly. Heart racing, he walked cautiously into the dimly lit entrance. It smelled musty, like old cigarette smoke, and the air was thick and hot. It filled his lungs, making him feel as though he were drowning. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he could make out the grim hallway, the tilted staircase. A dusty beam of light coming from an upstairs window. He wished he’d brought his camera.

  He glanced at the doors on the main floor, and then started to walk slowly up the stairs. The paint on the railing was chipping, and the carpet on the stairs was threadbare. There was something terribly sad and lonely about all of this. For as much as he wanted to see Mrs. D., needed to see Mrs. D., he was starting to hope that somehow, despite the matching addresses, despite her name on the mailbox, he had been mistaken.

  At the top of the stairs, he could see Apt. 4, and the dank smell of mold and must gave way to the smell of something delicious. Like Thanksgiving dinner. Herbs and meat. Something warm and simmering. He approached the door and thought again about just turning around and going home. Normal students didn’t track down their teachers and go see them at their houses. Normal kids weren’t friends with their elderly art teachers. But normal kids didn’t shit their pants at swimming lessons either.

  He hesitated for another moment and then took his hand out of his pocket and knocked cautiously on the door, his heart echoing the thump, thump, thump of his fist. There was nothing but the distant sound of the dog barking, and so he knocked again.

  “Just a minute.” The voice was hers, but smaller, on the other side of the door.

  He took a deep breath. He could hear feet shuffling behind the door, and then the sound of locks being unlatched. He felt a wave of relief wash over him. This meant she wasn’t in the hospital; she was home.

  Mrs. D. looked confused at first, as though she didn’t know who Trevor was, and he wondered if she had somehow already forgotten him. She looked smaller than she did at school, more stooped. She had a cane in her hand, and instead of her black wig, she had a scarf around her head. If anyone was unrecognizable, it was her.

  “Trevor?” she asked. “What’s the matter? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  He nodded, and as he did, everything he’d been holding inside started to rise to the surface. He realized, again, that he no longer seemed to have control over any of his bodily functions. The tears were streaming down his face, hot and salty in the corners of his mouth.

  “Come in, come in,” she said, reaching for his hand and pulling him into her apartment.

  Inside, she motioned for him to sit down on the couch. The coffee table was littered with art books and pill bottles and dirty dishes. “Please excuse the mess,” she said, sitting opposite from him in a wing chair. “I wasn’t expecting company.”

  He shook his head.

  “Oh dear, let me get you something to drink. Would you like tea?” She pushed herself out of the chair, wheezing a little with the effort.

  “Can I just have some water?” he asked. He’d felt like he’d been drowning before, but now he felt parched, like every drop of moisture had been drained from his body.

  “Of course, of course,” she said and shuffled back to the kitchen.

  Trevor glanced quickly around the room. Every inch of every wall was covered with framed paintings. Many of them looked like they had been painted by students, but others were ones he recognized from the slide shows at schoo
l. Picasso, Monet, Miró. There was a fireplace, with a basket of folded laundry where the fire should be, a mantel crowded with photos, laced with cobwebs. That smell, the Thanksgiving smell, had not been coming from her apartment; her apartment smelled like turpentine, like paint. There was no television, but there were a billion books, piled up in teetering towers, all over the room. Shoe boxes of paint, brushes like petal-less flowers in glass jars.

  She came back into the room and handed him a glass. The water looked milky, but he was so thirsty he took a big gulp and then set the glass down.

  Mrs. D. lowered herself into the chair across from him again and smiled. “It’s so nice to see you, Trevor. I’m so sorry I missed the last week of school.”

  Trevor’s throat felt thick. Swollen shut. “I was worried that you ...”

  “Oh dear, no. Not this time. This old ticker’s just not as reliable as it used to be. But I’m still here. Tell me, how are you? You must be happy to be on vacation from school for the summer. What have you been doing with your free time?”

  Trevor closed his eyes tightly, willing away the smell of the locker room, the stink of his own body’s waste. “We never got to use the darkroom,” he said.

  “Oh, Trevor, I am so sorry. The first thing I thought of, at the hospital, was that I had let you down. That you’d be disappointed.”

  “You promised you’d teach me.” His voice was louder than he intended it to be. He wiped angrily at the tears that were spilling from his eyes.

  “Oh, Trevor,” she said. Her voice sounded like something fragile, swimmy and soft. Like someone trying to talk underwater. “What have they done to you?”

  He shook his head. He shouldn’t be here. Coming here had been a stupid, stupid idea. He had no idea what he thought she could do for him. What sort of comfort or protection she might provide.

  “When school starts again, will you teach me how to use the darkroom?”

  Mrs. D. reached across the messy coffee table and touched his arm. Her hands, speckled like a brown egg, grasped his. “Trevor, I won’t be back at school this fall.”

  Trevor felt the way he did in those dreams where the earth disappears from underneath your feet. “But you’re better. They sent you home. You’re not sick!” Again, his voice thundered despite his every attempt to stay calm.

  Mrs. D. shook her head softly. “I’m retiring, dear. I had planned to retire soon anyway, and I think this was a sign that it’s time for me to stop working. To take care of myself so something like this doesn’t happen again.”

  Trevor’s eyes widened in disbelief. He shook his head again. He felt like he was three years old. The rage and frustration and panic rushing through his body, escaping through the tears in his eyes, the snot dripping down his nose, the sounds in his throat.

  “Oh, Trevor, please. It’s okay, it’s okay ...” Mrs. D.’s voice was so far away, it was as though the earth had indeed swallowed him whole, and she was far, far away now.

  The next thing he knew he was weaving through the crowded rooms of her apartment and out into that dark hallway again. He could hear her voice calling after him all the way down the stairs, and even as he ran down her street and past his mother’s work and then past the entrance to the pool where he was supposed to be with Gracy.

  Crystal’s mother suggested they take a girls’ trip to Burlington to go shopping, to get the things she would need for her dorm room, some new clothes for college. In exactly one month they would be dropping her off at UVM for first-year orientation. And then, starting one week later, she’d be an officially matriculated college student.

  When Crystal was in middle school, she used to love these back-to-school shopping trips with her mother. They were pretty much the only time that she and her mom spent alone together. They’d spend the whole day walking up and down Church Street, navigating the underground depths of the Church Street Mall. They’d eat lunch at one of the outdoor cafes, Leunig’s or Sweetwaters, their bags piled in colorful heaps at their feet. But her mother hadn’t taken her shopping in over a year. She’d ordered all of her maternity clothes online and put the packages on Crystal’s bed in inculpatory piles while she was at school.

  “I’m supposed to work on Saturday,” Crystal said.

  “Take it off,” she said. “You work too hard.”

  “It’s not that easy, Mom. You have to put in requests for days off like a month in advance.” This was a lie. She could easily just ask one of the other girls to cover for her. All she had to do was talk to Howard, who would pick up the shift himself if he had to.

  “Talk to your manager. We’re going shopping on Saturday, and that is final.”

  Crystal didn’t sleep at all on Friday night. She tossed and turned, sleeping in fits and starts, awakening in a sweat each time she did manage to drift off. Angie was passed out cold in her bed, her arms flung over her head in that careless, carefree way she had. Angie never had problems sleeping. She was out within seconds of her head hitting the pillow and she barely moved all night. If it weren’t for her snoring, you might think she was dead. Crystal used to be the same way. Up until this past year. Now she was lucky to get a couple of consecutive hours. Some nights she was lucky to get any sleep at all. When she first came home from the hospital, she was waking every hour, dreaming the sounds of the baby crying, her breasts hot and angry. Even now, she slept the sleep of a new mother: the fragile sleep of someone knowing she will soon be woken.

  She had been so sure about leaving Two Rivers, but now that her departure was less than a month away, instead of thrilling her, instead of filling her with a rush of excitement, the impending exodus only made her feel anxious. Worried she’d made the wrong decision. Every decision lately seemed somehow incorrect and fraught with potential disaster. When she borrowed her dad’s car and drove to work, she’d go the long way, worried that if she went her normal route there would be a car waiting to swerve off the road into her. But then she would second-guess that notion and wonder if she’d just sealed another, perhaps worse, fate. Maybe taking this route would bring her into a head-on collision with a different wayward driver.

  And this decision, the decision to go to UVM suddenly struck her as fundamentally ridiculous. She had picked UVM because that’s where her dad had gone, because it was one of the best state universities in the country; the caliber of the school had definitely weighed in. So too had the sprawling green campus. But she’d mostly picked it because it was part of the grander scheme, the now-obsolete scheme. Ty was supposed to go to Middlebury. She was supposed to go to UVM. They were supposed to be together. They had planned weekend visits, talked about how they could take the bus to Two Rivers together for the holidays. But now Ty was not going to Middlebury. Ty was going to California, three thousand miles away. And her baby, their baby, belonged to someone who taught at that university. How could she ever go to school where the adopted father of her child worked? It was inane.

  UVM seemed like some sort of paper-cutout place, like a picture in a child’s pop-up book. Not a real place anymore. Not a real school where she would study and stay up giggling with her roommate, Fiona. Someplace where she would become both Crystal and somebody new all at the same time. It seemed like a dream upon waking, one of those delicate dreams shattered into unrecognizable slivers as soon as she opened her eyes.

  On Saturday morning, she pretended she was not feeling well, but her mother called her bluff.

  “I rescheduled four meetings with clients for this,” her mother said, towering over her bed in some terribly bright yellow blouse, like the sun herself had come in to personally wake her. “I don’t care if you’ve got typhus,” she said, laughing. “Up and at ’em.”

  Her mother was not a cheerleader in high school, but she should have been. She had the energy of one, the ability to rouse anyone, even Crystal, out of a slump. Her mother simply didn’t tolerate crabbiness. Funk was not a word in her vocabulary. She even affectionately referred to the McDonald family as “The Team.” “Come on, Te
am!” she’d say whenever she needed to rally them into action.

  Crystal tried again. “I really don’t feel well.”

  “You can sleep it off in the car,” her mother said, smiling and reaching for Crystal’s hand. Crystal knew she had no choice and allowed her mother to pull her, like a fallen runner, up.

  She tried to pretend like this was just another shopping trip with her mom, something she used to look forward to. Crystal tried to recapture that sense of propriety, of having her mom all to herself for a whole day. Her mom even made a big show of turning off her BlackBerry as they got in her car, stuffing it into the depths of her purse.

  “You don’t have to do that, Mom,” Crystal said.

  “Your father can handle anything that comes up,” she said.

  But her mother’s attempts at normalcy were transparent. And something about all this effort seemed more sad than generous. Like watching some wounded runner limp his way across the finish line. Still, she was willing to give it one last shot. Take one for the team.

  Crystal’s mother hadn’t driven her to Burlington in ages. The times she’d gone to visit the Stones when she was pregnant, her father had driven. He’d waited in the car while she toured their home (seen the nursery painted those candy colors), drank their herbal tea, listened to their lullaby voices speaking softly to the baby inside her. But now, as they pulled off the interstate, her mother was the one clutching the wheel. Not her father with his sad eyes staring straight ahead so he wouldn’t have to look at her. Not her father and his disappointment like another passenger squeezed in between them.

  “You must be getting so excited!” her mother chirped as she got off the interstate at the Burlington exit.

  Crystal shrugged. “I guess,” she said, trying hard to be cheery.

  But as they drove past the street that would have taken her to the Stones’ house, she felt like someone had tripped her. The Stones lived near the university’s campus in a crooked old house that reminded her of Ty’s house. At the front was a wide porch, and a widow’s walk was perched on the top. Mrs. Stone had explained that the legend was that widow’s walks were built for the women whose husbands were away at sea. For the women whose husbands died at sea. From above they could look out into the immense emptiness, to grieve. She wondered if there was an architectural feature designed for girls forced to give up their babies. She was not a widow, but she grieved like one; she felt the same vast sorrow. But she was not a widow. There were no names for girls like her.