Grace

by T. Greenwood

  “Welcome back, fudge packer!” Ethan hissed, and then they were gone, running down the hallway.

  Trevor looked down the hallway and Mrs. Cross looked back at him, her eyes like slits. He closed the locker, shifting his backpack onto his left shoulder, and as the bell rang, he rushed down the hallway to his homeroom.

  When the last bell rang at the end of the day, he waited for the halls to empty out and he quickly cleaned out the locker, dumping mountains of soiled paper towels into the trash cans. He scrubbed the locker with the powdery soap from the restroom until it was clean. He watched carefully to make sure no one saw what he was doing. No one needed to know about this. He wouldn’t tattle. He wouldn’t start school off this way.

  After school, he went to the woods, trudging through the heat and thick foliage, aware of the heft of his breath, the heaviness of his body, the way the earth yielded to him. Inside the caboose, he lay on his back in the darkness. With the sheet metal now secured in the windows, there was absolute darkness. Not a single ray of sunlight could find him in here. He could not see out, and no one could see in. Blind. Deaf. Dumb. Alone. This was his dominion, his kingdom. His own private tomb. He knew what he needed to do, but he wasn’t sure where to begin. He would need things, things he didn’t have access to at home. He would need chemicals. Equipment. He would need privacy. He would need to be left alone.

  Elsbeth would try. She would give it one last shot. Kurt had promised he would make things right again. Pop would move out, Kurt would quit his night job, they’d rent Pop’s house out and everything would be back to normal. They’d get Trevor some help at school. Maybe they’d even finally be able to get away. Maybe this winter.

  Winter would be here soon; despite the heat of an Indian summer, the leaves were starting to turn. Just a sugar maple here and there. A bright bloom of red amidst all that green. Within a few weeks, the color would have bled through, the color spreading through the trees like something contagious. The air would chill. The sky would first brighten and then grow dark. Snow would come. The dark, cold chill of winter would be here.

  She tried to remember back to those autumn days years ago, when she and Kurt were young. She tried to recollect the good feeling of his scratchy sweater against her cheek at football games. The cold bleacher seats beneath them, the hot cocoa warming her hands. The feeling that her life was just about to begin. She tried to recollect the anxious feeling she got in her stomach when she waited for him to call. The nausea that came when she knew it might be hours, a day, before she could see him again. She tried to recall the way she held her breath then. The way she thought she might explode with the need for him to touch her.

  She tried to remember what it felt like when she was falling in love. The way the rest of the world blurred as the two of them remained sharply in focus. As though nothing else in the entire world mattered except for his hands, his lips, his hair, his throat, the thick, hot feeling of him inside her.

  After she dropped the kids off at school, she called the salon and told Carly that she would be a little late. She didn’t have any clients scheduled until eleven o’clock, so she’d only be letting down the walk-ins. She had time.

  She drove downtown and parked in the far end of the big lot in front of the JCPenney. She could feel her whole body trembling. She checked her reflection in the mirror, startled by the dark circles under her eyes, and then got out of the car, suddenly more determined than she had been before.

  Inside, the smell of the perfume counter was thick, sweet, almost sickening. Her nose tickled; she thought she might sneeze. A lady with a pair of glasses on a gold chain around her neck smiled at her, lifting a glass bottle of perfume up, offering to spray her. She started to shake her head and then stopped—Why not?—offering her the inside of her wrist. The spray was cold. She lifted her wrist to her nose and she was overwhelmed by the smell of gardenias.

  She made her way past Men’s Wear and Juniors and Children, touching the soft hems of dresses and blouses and coats. She wandered past the Baby section and into Lingerie. She touched the lace bras, the sexy boy shorts and thongs, filled her hands with little plastic hangers.

  “How many?” the saleslady asked, barely looking up from the jeans she was folding.

  “Three,” Elsbeth lied and disappeared behind the dressing room door.

  She tried on bras and teddies and robes. Examined herself, tried to imagine how she might look through Kurt’s eyes. She touched herself cautiously, imagining Kurt’s fingers on the inside of her thighs.

  She knew that if she looked at the price tags on the items she’d picked, she’d lose her resolve. And so she carefully pulled the tags off, shoving them into the pocket of a robe she left hanging in the dressing room. Then she pulled her clothes back on over a black lace bra and pair of matching panties, and returned the three bras to the saleslady.

  “Find everything okay?” the woman asked. “Can I get you a different size?”

  Elsbeth smiled. “No thank you ... I’m on my way to work. I’ll come back another time.”

  On her way to the front of the store, she stopped at a rack of little girl dresses. She picked one that she knew Gracy would like, took it to the register and set it down. “Just this,” she said and pulled out her credit card, feeling the lace of the stolen lingerie cool against her fevered skin.

  Beyond not going to school this fall, Crystal didn’t have a plan, not really. But she did know that regardless of what she decided to do now, she couldn’t depend on her parents for much longer. Her mother wouldn’t speak to her after their trip to Burlington except when she absolutely had to, and her father had only taken her aside and said sadly, “You have until January first. And then you either go to college or you move out.” Every moment in her parents’ house was wrought with a sense of exasperation and finality. They were slowly giving up on her. She recognized this acceptance of failure from a year ago when she’d told them she was going to keep the baby.

  She’d deferred her acceptance to appease them. What they didn’t know, or didn’t want to acknowledge, was that she had no intention of ever enrolling. She pictured that girl, the one she might have been, sprawled beneath a shady tree, books spread out before her. She mourned the loss of this girl like the loss of a friend. She tried to imagine an alternative future, but every time she tried to conjure tomorrow, there was nothing but shadows. She waited for the shadows to take shape, to emerge, for their edges to sharpen. She trusted, because she had to, that they would eventually speak to her.

  In the meantime, she knew that whatever she did, she needed to be smart. She had a job, and she had $6,000 in the bank. It seemed like a small fortune, though she knew that once her parents kicked her out it wouldn’t go far. She knew she’d need to be careful about how she used her cash. She needed to think like a grown-up, like an adult.

  The first thing she would need would be mobility. If she didn’t have a car, there was no way she could even get to work. No way, once winter came, that she’d be able to get anywhere. She looked online, rode her bike past the used car dealership in town, checked the ads in the local paper. She considered asking her father for his advice, but quickly reconsidered. She knew that if she asked for his help, he’d only scoff at the pieces of shit she could afford. He’d balk at the stupidity of buying a vehicle with a hundred thousand miles on it. He’d make her take anything she had her eye on to his personal mechanic, who would likely deem it a deathtrap. He’d shake his head, throw his hands up. And so she found herself alone in the old man’s driveway, sitting in the driver’s seat of a 1985 Volvo wagon, talking to him through the rolled-down window.

  “I’ll knock the price down to a thousand if you’ve got cash,” he said.

  The man’s name was Roger Lund, and she’d seen his ad on the bulletin board at the Walgreens, the blurry photo. The handwritten specs.

  “It’s got a leak, the power steering fluid, you should know that. I’m an honest guy. I just keep a jug in the car. It’s a slow leak, nothin
g that you should worry about.”

  She sat in the car, gripping the steering wheel, nodding. The tan upholstery was torn but soft. A pine tree freshener hung from the rearview mirror. She peered into the cavernous backseat. The car was huge. She could fit everything she owned in the back. She could load up everything she had if she needed to. She could practically live in here.

  “It handles real good in the snow too. Weighs about a ton,” he said, patting the enormous hood. “A real good, safe car for kids. You got any kids?”

  She looked at him, shocked. “I’m only eighteen,” she said and then realized how ludicrous it was that she was alarmed by his question. She pushed the thoughts of the baby, a car seat, out of her mind. “No, I don’t,” she said.

  “Well then, here’s the name of my mechanic. He’s worked on this car since I bought it new for my wife. She passed away last year.”

  “Thanks,” she said, taking the slip of paper and stuffing it in the visor, noticing that there was a silver St. Christopher medallion tucked in there too.

  “Is this yours?” she asked, holding the medallion out to him.

  “You keep it. He’ll keep you safe on the road.”

  Something about this simple gesture made her eyes fill with tears.

  “Won’t get far without the key, though,” he said, chuckling and reaching into his coat pocket. He handed her the key through the window. In exchange she counted out ten one-hundred-dollar bills from the envelope they’d given her at the bank. A thousand dollars. She’d never spent so much money on one thing in her whole life. The very thought of it nearly made her heart stop. But the most important thing was taken care of now, and as she maneuvered the giant boat of a car out of the old man’s tiny driveway, she felt a rush of something she hadn’t felt in a long, long time. As she drove through town, past Ty’s house with her own parents’ faces smiling from the For Sale sign, past the Walgreens, past the on-ramp to the interstate, she felt the wonderful trill of possibility.

  She parked the car on Ty’s old block so she wouldn’t have to tell her parents right away, and she walked past his house slowly, peering at the curtainless windows and empty driveway. The Tibetan prayer flags his father had strung from the porch roof were gone now, the faded rainbow-colored mailbox replaced by a plain brass one. She stopped the car and looked in her rearview mirror to make sure no one was coming. Then she got out of the car and ran across the street to the empty house.

  She was a little girl again as she made her way up the footpath, skipping over the cracks, counting the stones. When she got to the front porch, she ran her hand along the railing, careful to skip the spot right before the top of the steps. She’d gotten a splinter there once before. Lucia had taken it out with tweezers, distracting her with a homemade pomegranate popsicle. The lockbox was on the door, but she knew almost right away what the combination would be. 1993, the year Ty and she were born. 1993 was Lucia’s PIN number, the password to everything. Her fingers trembled as she tried the combination, but it was with steady hands and a thumping heart that she slipped the key into her palm and then used it to open the front door.

  Inside, the house was empty and light. Without curtains, the sun had full access. Scuffed wood floors; she knew the origins of most of the scars: from the ancient upright piano Lucia could never decide where to keep. From Ty’s skateboard. Dizzy’s roller skates.

  She went upstairs slowly, anticipating every groan and sigh of the stairs. When she got to the landing, she felt ill. But she pressed on, down the long hallway, past the girls’ rooms to the place where the attic stairs pulled down. She climbed the ladder to Ty’s room and felt her entire body aching, like something hollow, as empty as an abandoned home.

  She just needed to see if it was still there. The secret they’d sworn to keep. If it was gone, then she knew she’d be able to let go. Because it would mean that he had as well. She went to the window seat that looked out over their back lawn, studying the tops of the trees. The branches were bare now, just frail gray bones. When she and Ty had sat here that afternoon, they had been vibrant and green, obscuring the view of the graveyard beyond. Today she could see the stones in their tidy rows. All those sad memorials.

  “What should we name her?” Ty had asked, touching her stomach with his fingertips, as though reading Braille. He’d pushed his fingers down beneath the waistband of her jeans, and she’d felt like she might pass out as his fingers dipped and probed.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “We don’t even know for sure that it’s a girl.”

  “What about Grace?” he asked.

  “Huh?” she asked. Her eyes were closed now as she felt his fingers moving against her.

  “Grace.”

  “Why?” she asked, her breath getting caught in her throat, her hips moving toward him, magnetic.

  “Remember the time Mom took us to the graveyard and we made those rubbings?”

  She remembered; it was summertime, and the grass was freshly cut. The smell of it was so strong she wondered if smells were alive. They had big sheets of butcher paper, a box of sixty-four crayons.

  “You got hot and my mom told you to lie down on one of the stones because they were cool,” he said. “And I remembered thinking you looked like a sleeping princess. I almost kissed you to wake you up.”

  “You did not,” she said, smacking his arm.

  “I did.”

  “We were only five!”

  “I was an early bloomer.” He smirked.

  She rolled her eyes.

  “I used to go back to that gravestone all the time. Remember? It didn’t say anything except GRACE in big letters. I remember thinking that was the most beautiful word in the whole world. It’s a word that means a lot of things. But the definition I like best is divine favor. A favor from the gods. Like she’s a gift.”

  Crystal studied his face, looking for something she couldn’t name. Grace. “You’ll stay,” she said, a question. A plea. “We’ll do this together?”

  He looked at her, his face as serious as a granite stone, and nodded. Then he pulled his pocketknife out of his pocket and scratched the word into the windowsill.

  G-R-A-C-E.

  Now she ran her finger over the wood, over the word. The only word that ever mattered. He didn’t sand it down or even scratch it out. He didn’t destroy it; he only left it behind.

  Trevor must have been crazy to think he could do this on his own. He’d managed to get the sheet metal up to block the light from the windows of the caboose, but so what? He didn’t have any of the other stuff he needed. What he had was a cave. A dark, cool cave where no one on earth could find him. After school every day, he went to the caboose and tried to figure out a way to make it work, making lists of what he needed, sketching out diagrams and plans. Maybe it was a stupid idea. Maybe he should just be content with having this quiet place where no one would bother him.

  The last time they were at Pop’s, Trevor had found a battery-operated fan and a small generator. He’d asked his father if he could have them, and when he asked what for, Trevor said, “The fan’s to put next to my bed.” It was still hot. Summer still hanging on, resisting the inevitable chill of autumn. “And I just wanted to mess around with the generator. See if I can make it work.” What he figured he could really do with the fan was create some ventilation in the caboose. And the generator actually did work; he’d need it to power the equipment. He’d also found an old utility sink in Pop’s backyard. He thought he might be able to rig it up somehow. But all of this was useless without the necessary equipment. The chemicals. And the only place he was going to find that stuff was at the school.

  Being at school was like walking through a minefield or getting lost in some awful fun house. He never knew when Mike or Ethan might just pop up, never knew when the next ambush might be. He tried a different route from class to class each day, hoping to throw them off course. But while he could elude them one day, on other days they seemed to anticipate his every move. Their taunts followed
him; their words like snakes, hissing and curling around him, when he least expected it. He still sought solace in the art room, though without Mrs. D. there, it wasn’t at all the same safe haven it had been.

  The new art teacher, Mr. Franklin, had told them they would be doing a short unit on photography and then promptly showed them a bin of cheap digital cameras and two ancient computers, only one of which had Photoshop on it. Trevor’s heart had sunk.

  “What about the darkroom?” he’d asked quietly. He almost never spoke in class, in any class, and his voice seemed to startle everyone, including himself.

  “Those chemicals are terrible,” he said. “Completely toxic. The district’s concerned with liability issues. Besides, it’s an antiquated art form.” Mr. Franklin probably would have thought that Mrs. D. was an antiquated art form herself. He couldn’t have been older than Trevor’s mom.

  Trevor thought about all the rolls of film in his drawer. He could barely remember the images he’d captured anymore. Gracy, his muse, had grown so much since he started taking pictures. He bet that she’d look like a different girl in the pictures he’d taken over the summer. He loved that the camera helped him to freeze time, to hold onto something that won’t last no matter how hard you try to make it. But until he developed the photos, they were just dreams captured in their canisters. Worthless.

  During the first week of school, he’d somehow mustered up the courage to ask Mr. Franklin if he could spend his lunch periods in the art room. Mr. Franklin had looked at him suspiciously but said, “Ah, why not? But I’m on lunch duty, so I’ll be in the cafeteria. You can hang out here as long as you don’t mess with anything.” He’d raised his eyebrow at Trevor, as if gauging whether or not Trevor was trustworthy.

  Mr. Franklin was unimpressed by Trevor’s art. He fawned over Angie’s sketches and paintings (which were beautiful but strange—mostly wide-eyed girls with giant bellies). But he pretty much ignored everyone else. Mr. Franklin was young and handsome; all the girls in the class giggled and whispered whenever he turned his back. Trevor studied him. He was tall and athletic-looking. He wore soft, worn jeans and sweater vests over crisp white cotton shirts. He always had the shadow of a beard, and his hair curled over the top of his shirt collar. His voice was deep. His hands large. Trevor wondered what he was like as a kid. If kids had ever picked on him. He doubted it. Trevor missed Mrs. D. and her ratty sweaters and musty breath. She was like a cozy chair, a favorite blanket. He felt disconnected without her there, a balloon that’s been cut loose in a building, hovering above everything. Untethered and precarious but still captured. One move in the wrong direction and he might just pop.