Forged in Grace (2 page)

“
Marly. Why does that name sound familiar?” Adam says.

I
’ve never spoken to him about her, not even to the people in my burn group. I used to say her name to myself, the ‘M’ a smooth ride, tasting the ‘R’ on my tongue, her name a wave rolling over me just like she did, knocking me down, then righting me again.

“
She was the one,” I say to Adam. “With me, the night of the fire.”

The only one who really knows what happened to me.

Chapter Two

When I get home from work, the front door will not open all the way. My heart beats high in my throat thinking that it
’s Ma on the other side, slumped in the little walkway between door and living room. I shove a little harder and the door gives, revealing no lifeless body but a stack of slick magazines gushing over in a waterfall, releasing a stale odor of perfume from their pages. It was only a matter of time; when I leave in the morning I tell myself I will align the
Vanity Fairs
and
Vogues
with their cousins
, People
and
Entertainment
, but I never do, always too eager to get out of the crowded hallway into fresh air, not interested in a showdown if Ma notices.

I shove enough of the magazines out of the way to get in, mentally reaching for the sticky roller propped on my dresser to extract the tufts of cat hair that will collect at my pant legs by the time I reach my room. Beatrix, Alpha feline, still unspayed, and the oldest of the six cats who are all her progeny, raises her smoky blue head from a container on the dining room table. The fur at her jaw is slick with something indistinguishable, her little pink tongue rasping madly at the black plastic. I
’m afraid to check if the frozen dinner is new or old—hope my bare foot doesn’t later step in a regurgitated pile of it.

Ma should be home, but the house is quiet save for Beatrix
’s almost lewd-sounding licking. “Who needs insulation?” Ma joked last week as I rifled through a stack of
Drake’s Bay Gazettes
as tall as I am, the squint of her brow and set of her jaw warning me not to reorganize them.

Then I hear it, the thump-sigh-exhale of my mother trudging back and forth from her bedroom to her bathroom. The noise interrupts the slow-building dialogue in my head.
Does Marly really think I’m just going to show up to that funeral? I don’t owe her anything.
I’m torn between the anger—how dare she think she can leave a message like that at my workplace!—and forgiveness: surely she’s grieving; she
did
call me, if indirectly.

The anxiety is making me restless. Me, Ma, and the cats pacing our space-challenged two-bedroom house will cause a traffic jam.

I slide my jacket back on, and heft my bag up onto my protesting shoulder. Early evening is my favorite time to walk around town—no insistent sun to spotlight me; fewer people on the street, especially any I’ll be obligated to stop and talk to. As my hand grasps the front door knob, Ma’s voice snaps down the hall like a lasso. “Grace
,
can you come here please?”

One hundred and fifty pounds overweight, with painful varicose veins, my mother suffers from greater disabilities than the limp in my right leg. Our roles of patient and caretaker have long since reversed.

Atop the stacks in the hallway—I imagine them as Roman columns, ruins of a once great civilization—she’s begun to place empty cans of generic diet cola. Gold and red, arranged in interesting patterns, they are almost pretty. But they force me to move painfully slow, or else an elbow to a column sends the displays crumpling loudly, scattering cats and bringing Ma out to wail about the disorder I’ve created.

I peer into her room with trepidation. Her bedroom is dark: grey brocade curtains always closed, their bottoms rimmed with dust and whorls of cat hair, since four of the six cats spend their existence in perpetual sloth beneath her bed. Piles of clothes surround her, many of them never worn, the tags still on, all layered in a fine fuzz of feline dust. She
’s bent forward over her bed, where three big brown boxes sit gaping open. Before her are white bottles with green lettering. I try to retreat but she turns too quickly.

“
See what I got, honey,” she says, beckoning at me with a ring-laden finger. Most of her fingers bear two rings each, bought on late night shopping binges.

“
Oh Ma, please tell me it’s not more Skyn Solutions?”

She sinks down onto the bed with a heave, its springs squawking in protest, her thinning bangs floating up with the force of her exhale.

“
Improved
formula, Grace, for smoothing out roughness. And other things we need, body lotion, wrinkle solution, shampoo.”

My hand goes protectively to my head, where hair grows only in fitful, thin patches. I haven
’t used shampoo since I was vain enough to hope that a product could change what genetics had given me: fine, copper hair that hung straighter than straw—an abundance I came to appreciate too late. My shower is already cluttered with bottles; she replaces them before I can finish the old.

“
I’m about to go out for a walk. Is that all?” I hear the impatience in my voice but don’t have the energy to curb it.

Ma
’s face looks drawn, her cheeks sagging. She turns back to her boxes, freshly unwrapped, ordered off the Internet, her voice suddenly soft. “So sad,” she says. It sounds as though she’s talking to herself. “Such a nice woman. I always meant to visit her—all alone in that big house.”

It takes me a minute to determine if we
’re talking about something she read or watched, but then I realize she means Mrs. Donovan. Marly’s grandmother. In a town as small as Drake’s Bay, we know most of the folks who die. I don’t believe she ever meant to visit the woman, though—just one of those noble versions of herself in her own mind. My heart makes an arrhythmic skip as Ma turns back and gazes hard at me. In her eyes I understand: she knows that Marly’s in town. I haven’t decided what that means to me yet, but I know what it means to her.

“
Thirteen years is a long time,” she says, folding her hands into her lap, her rings creating the illusion of a strange jewelry box. “But it doesn’t mean that a person has changed all their colors.”

“
Oh Ma, you aren’t saying you think Marly’s the same?” Here I am, defending her as though I’m a teenager again.

Ma purses her lips, the shake of her head almost imperceptible.
“Let’s add it up, Grace. She never came to see how you were, in the hospital. Never wrote you a letter after she left!” Ma’s voice cracks and rises a little, the same tone she uses when she learns I’ve taken out the garbage without her, as if I might have slipped a leaky pen, a moth-chewed slipper, a scrap of something she deems precious, by her. “If she’s changed, why didn’t she put notice of Mrs. Donovan’s funeral in the paper? Or better yet, send out some personal invitations?”

I
’m tempted to make a crack about how it’s probably still in the mail mountain piled on the living room couch. Everything important I have sent to a P.O. Box near work, but Ma and I are not entirely on opposite sides of the issue of Marly’s trustworthiness. Still, I have a teenager’s urge to withhold Marly’s phone call to Adam’s office.

Ma presses on,
“For goodness sake you’ve seen Mrs. Donovan more than her own granddaughter ever did.”

I
’m no saint when it comes to helping other lonely people, usually in a hurry to rush home to my own burrow. “Mrs. Donovan and I exchanged ‘hello’s and ‘how are you’s’ in Adam’s office, not exactly deep conversations, Ma. This is what you want to tell me, to watch out, Marly’s still the same?” My sigh sounds petulant, even to me. “What, what do you think I’m going to do? Go stand on a street corner and shout her name like Brando?”

Tempt fate at the railroad tracks? See how long I can press a lit cigarette into the unscathed flesh of my arm? Swim naked in the creek?

Ma makes a kissing sound, calling for one of the beasties to come up on the bed. After some rustling, the smallest cat, Jemima, finally emerges, a calico whose unfortunate pattern makes her look like she’s rolled in dirt, her whiskers laced with subterranean dust bunnies whose composition I don’t want to consider. She leaps into my mother’s lap, a place I no longer remember the comfort of.

“
I just thought you’d want to know that Mrs. Donovan died,” Ma says.

I slip into the floral chair that
’s littered with beading and knitting magazines, all crafts Ma abandoned years ago.

“
You’re ruining them!” Ma shrieks, and when I stand with a snort of impatience, she snatches up a tiny package of tissues, smoothing it with her hands as though it is an ancient scroll portending enlightenment. A decade of this behavior has whittled down my shock.

“
Ma, I already know Mrs. Donovan died.”

Ma merely raises an eyebrow.

And suddenly my palms are slick, the base of my neck tight with the tension of exhilaration. I remember this yearning toward the forbidden, of being unable to turn away no matter where Marly beckoned. She could turn the wasteland of Drake’s Bay into a playground.
Let’s hide in the abandoned shack, scare the assholes with their stolen beers. It doesn’t hurt to just look through other people’s mailboxes…they won’t miss this shit.

“
A funeral is no place for a reunion,” Ma says. Her face is pressed into Jemima’s scruff, so I barely hear her muffled answer, “I just don’t want to see you get hurt again.”

If I believed my mother, I would feel grateful. She was my bulwark against rude glares and stupid questions for years after the fire made me into town
’s most noticed resident. My father tried, too, I suppose, but his efforts at my defense leaned toward the use of expletives, and then his fists, and then he was gone.

She doesn
’t call me back when I leave her bedroom without a response. She doesn’t need to; it’s as though she has an invisible thread attached to me, a leash that ensures I can never go far without feeling her fear for me as a constant tug at the base of my spine.

I need to think, which means I need to walk. My thoughts are crowded into my brain like too many trinkets shoved into a bulging cabinet. Tomorrow I could wake up and choose to see Marly after thirteen years, simple as strolling into a room. A public place would force her to acknowledge me. But then what? I am not the type to make a scene.

Even though the sun is already on its way down I cover my head with my favorite hat—black felt, its bell shape almost a bonnet, my face set deep within its hollow. I light out for Francis Park, a kid’s playground, emptied by early evening, where I like to listen to the creek trickle below, and breathe in the sweet smell of redwood mulch, escaping the odors of rotting garbage and filthy carpets.

Normally I take the back streets that run between our house and the park, a tunnel of anonymity, but the thought that Marly might be in town makes me bold. She could easily be refilling a thermos of coffee at Drake
’s Java, hand on one hip, chatting up the barista, making mundane events seem like epic dramas. Then again, maybe she’s a bitter woman now, more like her mother, with constant frown lines and rigid hair. Maybe time and loss have carved away some of that wild leaning toward the forbidden.

I walk with head down, marveling at the clean streets of our town, once flanked by seventies Volvos in tasteless condiment hues and now sleek with silver and black Mercedes and BMWs. I marvel where all the money comes from, money that my parents never knew how to hold onto. Ma still working as an under-paid CPA
’s assistant in town. My father? Who knows.

The downtown nerve center, as Ma calls it, is etched in periwinkle and mauve as the sun goes down, as though Edward Hopper painted Drake
’s Bay into being. Scruffy surfer boys—and a few grown men—smoke at the fringe, poised and pretty, waiting for someone to make a postcard of them.

By the time I reach The Parkade, I realize I
’ve made a mistake—the street is teeming with bodies. It’s Tuesday evening, when all the bars and restaurants do happy hour, booze for cheap. I duck my head and press forward, focusing only on the swath of green in the center of town, hands tucked into my pockets.

I breathe through my nose. Try the mantra a psychiatrist once gave me:
The visions are movies in my mind. The pain is not real.

I narrowly avoid a woman with a halo of blonde hair and a swath of red lipstick whose laugh is so eerily familiar that I stop and stare. It
’s not Marly, but I’ve given the woman a direct view of my face, and it stops her laughter cold. She pulls her soft black jacket up higher and turns quickly away.

I
’m almost through the throng when it happens. A thud into my back, pushing me forward. My back is the least sensitive part of my body, but a hand whips around to steady me, a blast of alcohol hitting my nose. A person now stands before me, dark pelt of hair, well-deep eyes, wobbling as he—wait, no, she—apologizes.