Forged in Grace (14 page)

“
You really couldn’t have warned me?” I whisper harshly to her. I know where we are. I know what’s coming. What I cannot do.

I wave like a politician, curt and short.

“How’s Sienna?” Marly asks as the tired couple approaches. It takes everything in me not to shake my head, not to simply shout, “I’m sorry, I can’t!” and turn away.

The mother—Celia—blinks.
“Sleeping. Surgery went well. Now it’s just fingers crossed, wait to see if her body accepts the lungs. Walk with us.”

Marly moves in front of me, so that if I want to run away I
’ll essentially have to push rudely past her.

I walk with these strangers, past rooms into which I try not to look. In one room the doors are thrust open and a family is gathered on a small bed, two young children gather around an older child—head bald, eyes ringed by the purple of a body in crisis. They
’re laughing, and it seems staged, as though cameras are about to film how serious illness can be
fun for the whole family!

“
Our daughter has cystic fibrosis,” Max says to me, as he follows my gaze. I can see in both of their eyes a darkness that looks like guilt—they made their child, thus, somehow, they must be responsible for her illness. I barely feel my legs beneath me; a numbness has spread up.

“
She’s fourteen,” Marly says. “Finally made it to the top of the donor list, got a shiny new set of lungs.”

Max and
Celia have to put in a pass code to take us through the next set of doors. The fluorescent lights are giving me a headache—little floating black spots pass through my left eye, and I’m blinking over and over, till my annoyed eye produces tears, which I mop up with my sleeve. Marly chances a concerned look at me.

“
Rejection rate is highest in the first few days, then months and then year,” Max says, as we finally stop outside a door that has a big yellow sign on it. I don’t even have to read the sign; I know what it says.
This is a sterile environment. The patients within have had recent surgical procedures and have fragile immune systems. All who enter must wash hands and arms with antiseptic scrub, and be wearing suits and masks.

Adam never treated any cystic fibrosis patients, but I remember an NPR story of a girl who survived a transplant, kept an audio journal of her process, everyone involved eternally hopeful. But she died.

The parents look at me with their eyes and I can feel Marly looking too, and it occurs to me that I’m supposed to say something. “What is it you’re hoping for…from me?” I ask, at last.

They both look in toward the room at the same moment. Through the Plexiglas window at the top of the door I can see the next door, and the protective plastic sheeting after that—layers and layers, no true protection, really, from a tiny microbe any of us might be carrying on our persons. Though I can
’t see their daughter from here, I imagine her in there—the scraping whoop of a machine that is breathing for her until her lungs take over. The gut churning smell of chemicals. At first, when the flower bouquets turned up in lieu of people to visit me in the hospital, I hated them. Hated their cheerful symmetry, such an easy way to check me off a list. But only a week or so into my stay I craved their scents—reminders that there was a world beyond the glare of white walls and grey equipment that kept on growing, thriving, despite it all.

Celia gives me a smile, though her eyebrows are frowning and tears pool in the corners of her eyes.
“We thought, maybe, you could help the lungs settle. Help her body accept what’s happening. It’s worth a shot, right?”

Marly
’s moved closer to me; she’s feeling nervous, sensing my urge to bolt.

“
I don’t know much, well, nearly anything about the disease,” I say. “But she’s in a sterile environment. I can’t just waltz in there.”

“
You’d get suited up and wear mask and gloves,” Marly says in a hostess’s overly-cheerful pitch. “They’ve cleared it with her doc.”

I don
’t know what compels me to do what I do next, seeing how all I want to do is turn tail and run, but I grasp one hand each of Max and Celia. Instantly I can feel the raw edges of their fear, the sharp edges of anxiety that she will not make it beyond this. My serpent merely runs alongside their grief, stroking it, acknowledging it. “I know you’re both afraid,” I say. “What your daughter needs right now is your faith in her, and your strength. Be with her whenever you can, talk to her. That’s all there is to do.”

Celia pulls her hand out of mine.
“So you won’t even try to help her?”

I shake my head gently, still drenched in her grief, which feels like a hangover crawling through my body.
“Consider if I failed?”

Max throws his head back and sighs. He puts his arm around his wife who remains rigid beneath his touch.
“She’s right, Celia.”

“
But what about later? If the lungs do take? Maybe then?” Celia persists, her eyes red at the edges, mouth curling up into desperation.

I shake my head, and find myself backing away, though I can
’t take my eyes off her. “I’m sorry.” I back up a few more steps and then quickly turn and briskly walk out of that falsely cheerful department.

Marly mumbles something to the parents and then races after me.
“Grace?” She sounds annoyed with me.

“
What were you thinking?” I shout, when we’re finally out in the stabbing day light, away from burning fluorescence and antiseptic.

She lifts her chin higher, puts one hand on her hip. Her voice comes out strained,
“I was thinking that you have a gift that could be put to such amazing use. That you have a purpose, a reason for being—and we’re squandering it on people who’ve already lived more than half their lives—old people dying of cancer and shit. Maybe that’s just natural selection.”

Her eyes are bright, the pupils pinned as though she
’s on some strange drug.

I decide not to address that last statement, which doesn
’t even sound like her. “Don’t you see what a set up it is, Marly? Children? No, I will not be the lightning rod for parents’ grief. I will not stand there in the face of sick children with no idea if I can help them! Children, Marly—parents’ hopes and dreams all tied up in one little body.”

“
What about all those doctors and nurses who helped you when you were injured? Where would you be without them?”

“
That’s a low jab, Marly! That’s different.”

“
Oh yeah, how?” She folds her arms and sets her jaw.

A couple of passing doctors in white coats glance at us suspiciously.
“Those are people with training, with medical degrees, and a hospital with legal support for when they get their asses sued. I have no protection, nothing to back me, not to mention no training.”

Her eyes are narrowed down to slits. I can all but see her Great Big Hope for curing all the children of the world spilling out of her like coolant beneath a car. Yet she
’s not conceding that she’s wrong.

She looks up in the sky as a cloud of tiny black birds wings overhead in a race somewhere.
“I wish we’d known it was in you when we were younger, Grace. I think you have a bigger talent than you even realize,” she says softly. “I think that refusing to help anyone who could use your help is…” She lasers back in on me. “Immoral.”

The word strikes me like a spear to the throat. I feel choked—saliva gathers there, as though I can vomit it back out of me. My words come out sounding strangled as I fight not to insult her right back.
“Well you’re one to talk about morality,” I whisper—afraid of what will happen if I let myself speak at full volume. “I’m just one person, not some miracle worker.” She frowns and stands up straighter, pulling herself up to her impressive stature. “You’re forgetting one very important thing, here, Marly. I have no machine or instrument, it’s all me—this broken body of mine. Nobody’s here to give me a tune-up or fix me up when I crash after healing, when I take in all the darkness of people’s pain and then sleep for two days straight.”

She flings her hands out.
“Who the hell am I, then?” she says. She turns and begins to walk back to the car.

Despite the warmth of the day, I shiver. Images of waif-like children, with bald heads and hollow, green-tinted skin pass through my mind. Babies hooked up to tubes, tiny bodies struggling for breath, writhing in pain. I have to actually shake my head to clear this hallucination—as though the ghosts of that children
’s ward walked out into the Vegas day, prepared to haunt me.

Chapter Fourteen

For the first time since I came to Vegas, I’m relieved when Marly goes to work that afternoon, though I’m left feeling as though I’ve been caught walking through a spiderweb; trails of the ghostly children clustered at the hospital and their parents’ failed hope cling to me. Rarely have I stopped to consider what it must have been like for my parents as they watched me recover my health.

Marly
’s apartment feels empty and strangely cold. I have the urge for warmth that comes from the inside, to find a place I can both be with people and be anonymous to myself. A quick internet search reveals a coffee shop called Emergency Arts that appeals to me, and the cab agency’s familiar yellow car is soon waiting for me on the curb.

Vegas in the daytime would sell nobody on nothing, I think as we drive. Drab and masculine, its buildings are not special or fancy without the wild indulgence of The Strip. I suddenly have a palpable ache for the lush greenness of Drake
’s Bay, the feeling that the ocean is just around the corner—freedom at the edge of the world.

The cab drops me off in front of what looked exciting in the online photos. Emergency Arts is a modern little arty café snug inside an old hospital building. Hidden beneath my most concealing wig—long hair that I can hide behind—I feel almost brave as I step to the counter and order myself a mocha and chocolate chip muffin. The coffee shop is crowded with middle aged people who seem to have nothing but leisure time here on a Wednesday afternoon. I
’m just about to take a seat when I realize that a paunchy older guy with a stringy, gray comb-over in a stained white shirt is staring at me. He makes full eye contact, head tilted back and up, mouth pinched, like he wants me to know he’s looking. Like my very presence offends him. He shakes his head slightly and mutters something under his breath, grinds his jaw. A shock of certainty travels through me that this is not a person entirely in his right mind, or with good intentions. I pay quickly for my food and then rush out of the café, with no idea where I’m going or what I’ll find. I just start walking down Fremont Street.

The guy in the café didn
’t get up, yet I walk with the feeling of being followed, constantly craning my head over my shoulder behind me, muddy coffee burbling up from the hole in my to-go cup, panic tightening my muscles, my heart beating too fast. It’s as though my mind only just realized I’m not in tiny Drake’s Bay, where everyone knows me, knows to avoid looking too closely or touching me. I’m in a big city known for its perversions and excess. I remember a story I read in the news, when Ma still let me read the
Chronicles
tossed onto our porch. A woman in New York lived through a small plane crash, lost her husband, her dominant hand, and most of the skin off her face. But she lived and went back to school, becoming a veterinarian. Then one day some very sick guy followed her, accused her of being a demon come to kill him, and raped and murdered her right in the middle of the afternoon with a pocket knife.

Ma found me crying into one of the cats, forbade me to read the newspapers, and to her credit, took out the trash long enough to rid those papers from my view.

I am moving so fast and with such panic that I don’t see the crack in the cement until my shoe is tripping over it, coffee flying up into the air and then back down on me like tropical rain.

I
’m not injured, just a little startled. Even more startled when nobody on the streets stops to ask if I’m okay.

It hits me all at once then, in a wave of self-pity that morphs into a weird joy: other than the creepy guy in the coffee shop, few people have bothered to look twice at me. I am not Grace-the-burn-victim and helpless wonder from Drake
’s Bay, who must be treated with kid gloves; I’m just another body among the masses. These tears I cry are of relief.

When I look up, I see that I
’m in front of a gallery. The photo in the window display—as big as the entire square of glass, is of a woman, naked except for black underwear, her body classically hourglass, hugging herself as she looks down a row of books in a tiny library, lit by one tiny, mushroom-shaped lamp.

I shake off coffee from my hands, toss the empty cup into the garbage can on the sidewalk, and enter the gallery as though it was my destination all along. Every photo, each one nearly as big as me, is a black and white of people
’s backs standing in states of partial dress before different corridors—a young boy in pajama bottoms looking down the dark hallway of a home framed by family pictures, ostensibly at night, lit only by the moon. An elderly person in a hospital gown, knobby edges of spine showing through—it’s impossible to tell if the subject is male or female—staring down a hallway marked “surgery.”

“
Do you like them?” a voice at my right ear says suddenly, and I jerk around, glad the speaker is on my good side. The squeak of surprise comes out of me before I can stop myself. I know he’s a man because of his deep voice, but I’m looking into a cartoon page, an ancient map—I’m not sure frankly what I’m seeing, so bold and all-consuming are the tattoos upon his face. There’s not a centimeter of actual skin left that isn’t inked. The design is somewhere between aboriginal and comic book. Bright blue, green and red—black stripes that look like skid marks left by a car, symbols crowding the spaces between the lines. His dark green eyes blinking out of the face make him look as though he’s peering up at me from beneath a child’s toy chest.

If he
’s as surprised by the terrain of my face, he doesn’t register it, or perhaps surprise is simply lost in a face like his.

Fortunately, Ma raised me to be polite. My nod is so vigorous my neck muscles pinch.
“I do like the photos.”

“
My show’s almost over. Glad you got to see them.” He sweeps a hand around the gallery.

“
Oh, they’re yours!” I point at one dumbly.

The tattoos over his top lip rise to meet those of his cheeks, and I realize he
’s smiling.

“
Gus.” He puts out a hand and I chuckle, both because it is so smooth and unblemished by ink, and to hide my own anxiety at showing my thumb.

“
Grace.” I shake quickly, and detect a strong, kind energy in him that makes me feel instantly at ease, releasing my hand before my serpent gets too curious.

“
Why do you photograph them from behind?” I ask.

He gazes at me for a long moment, and I force myself not to trace every image—Egyptian ahnks, God
’s eyes, the infinity loop, all vibrating just slightly with the life in his cheeks.

“
This series is about shame,” he says. “Hiding and fear, and frailty.”

I consider the image of the young boy again.
“So, you’re depicting shame, or trying to overcome it somehow?”

He smiles his twisted-picture smile again, and two tiny doves kiss on his cheek.
“I’m showing that we all feel it, no matter the circumstances.”

The question is on my lips before I can stop myself,
“So did you tattoo yourself before or after you started this series?”

A tall blonde woman in a red suit—not a tattoo, or for that matter, a blemish on her—drifts in from a back room somewhere, perches on a stool at a desk in the back of the room. She looks almost like an art piece herself.

“I tattooed myself when I got clean as a reminder of the shit that I wrought when I was high.”

“
Drugs,” I nod, as though I, too, have been there. Ma was militant in doling out the narcotic pain—initially morphine, then downgrading to Vicodin and eventually just ibuprofen—demanding I sweat it out whenever possible.

“
Drugs,” he barks a laugh. “Gateways to higher consciousness my ass.”

“
How about now?” I ask.

“
Now? Now I’m so busy looking through the lens I don’t think a whole lot about my own face. It’s a great conversation starter. I don’t look at myself very often. I still feel like me beneath the skin.”

I
’m taking in his words when he tilts his head as though he’s thinking how to frame me inside the camera and asks, “Accident, or on purpose?”

For a moment I feel an old familiar beat of indignation that he would dare call attention to me in such a stark way, followed by a quick gust of relief, like pulling off a dead toenail.

“Nobody has ever asked me that,” I say. “Accident. When I was fifteen.”

He frowns.
“Painful, I bet? Has anyone ever told you the shape of your scars is really cool?”

My nervous laugh bubbles out of me.
“Uh, no. Most people avoid talking about it at all.”

He takes a deep breath through his nose and then points to the photo behind me.
“Shame.”

“
I’m not ashamed. It’s not anything I could control,” I say, heat tightening my throat, shrinking my words.

He simply stares at me with an unwavering expression I remember from therapy—the
“go ahead and believe what you want to believe” gaze. In my peripheral vision, the blonde at her desk raises her head, as though she wants to say something, then looks back at whatever she’s writing.

“
I’d like to photograph you,” he says.

“
Me and my shame,” I say, trying to un-pinch the kink in my voice, where defensiveness pools.

He shrugs.
“You.”

“
Why?”

“
Because you’re interesting. You walk around with a story on your face, one that people are afraid to even ask you about, one that probably defines you in many ways. Interesting.”

For a very short moment I realize that this is what it
’s like for people who do not, in fact, carry a story on their face, to meet, flirt, and date.

“
Maybe,” I say.

Gus nods, reaches into his back pocket, extracts a card and hands it to me. Since we
’re doing this, I pull my own little white card out of my purse and hand it to him.

He reads it, his eyes widen, and he smiles so big that he flashes me all of his nice white teeth—a strange effect inside his wildly colored face.
“Healer, well what do you know. I knew you were interesting, Grace. Hey Gina, Grace is a healer!” He calls over his shoulder to the tall blonde, who nods and looks at me for the first time.

His wild smile is infectious.
“You should come have drinks with me and Sara, my girlfriend. I think she’d like to meet you, too.”

“
Okay,” I say, though I’m a tiny bit surprised that he has a girlfriend; leave it to me to misread flirting. At any rate, I came to Vegas to live more, didn’t I? And that means making new friends.

So emboldened by my day out, I take a cab directly to Marly
’s work to see if I can catch her on a break.

Sabrina is counting out the cash drawer and two guys stand, spell-bound by the sirens in the tank, one of whom is lazily checking for dirt under her fingernails. I know Marly would have a fit seeing a mermaid out of character, but then again it is only one in the afternoon. A single tail weighs more than ten pounds, Marly told me—and my hips ache just looking at them.

“Marly’s not…” Sabrina starts, when she sees me, but Marly herself comes bounding down the long water-encased tunnel bringing that metallic tang of wind to my nose. “Oh never mind, she is here after all,” Sabrina says.