Forged in Grace (25 page)

Something is off with him, but there
’s too much flurry of people tossing their cards and their words of praise at me to walk over and talk to Gus. Plus I expect the exhaustion to hit me at any moment. Sara is my designated driver home, and there are even two beefy guys Gus hired in case I need to be carried, unconscious, to the car and up to Marly’s apartment.

But the blackout does not come. I feel high. Euphoric, buzzing. Like I could sprint for miles, or swim a lake.

Gus strides by on his way to chat with someone, and I reach out to talk to him, thank him, offer him something. As I do so, my hand shakes so badly it looks as though I’m waving frantically. Gus responds by waving back. My teeth bounce off one another, and suddenly the shaking is so fierce it’s like I’ve been submerged in ice water. Sara is the first to notice it; I’m sure I look odd in the dark room, the blue light, like I’m doing a strange dance rather than being unable to control any muscle in my body.

When she reaches me my jaw feels like two castanets being whipped together, and the room is so blurry I have to clamp my eyes shut to keep from throwing up.

I feel arms guiding me to the very table I just performed my work upon, voices speaking in low, worried whispers, as though I’m not right there, fingers cool and jarring on my searing body. I’m waiting for the blissful blackout sleep to come, the relief of it, but it won’t—just wave after waves of these spasms, seizure-like and constant, my muscles bunching and shaking painfully.

“
Call a doctor,” Sara calls out firmly. This ignites a sudden, brief interlude of strength in me that allows me to shout, “No!”

No hospitals. Never again will I lie, unable to control my own body, at the hands of strangers gazing down at me under lights so bright they burn.

Gus is there then. “Pppplease…” I manage. “Sash….”

“
Sasheen,” he confirms.

“
It’s 4:00 a.m.,” Sara insists in a tone I imagine her using with her psychotic patients—kind, but firm, ready to take you into hand.

Gus
’s voice is even firmer, “Call her.”

As my body shakes it seems to disgorge images, pieces of the people I touched tonight. Adrift in a centrifuge of sensations—electric impulses up my legs, cords of heat undulating through my arms—a cowering child, a woman screaming as loud as she can, a fist smacking a cheek, and then soft, steady warm hands stroking mine.

The shaking doesn’t cease all at once, but it lessens the moment Sasheen appears and holds my hands in hers. As she begins her usual work, it feels like nothing more than a massage—working each of my fingers through her thick palms, even my warped, enlarged thumbs—she is not shy, and her touch causes first pain as the tissue resists and then gives and then seems to spring open more deeply, releasing both tension and pain. The shaking subsides in slow passes.

As she works I feel like one of the caged birds back at the
Wildlife Center in Drake’s Bay, flexing her wings for the first time outside of captivity, terrified of the freedom before her, and yet knowing she has to go.

When I can finally open my eyes without the world blurring, she
tsks
at me. “You need rest.” I’m looking at her upside down, her strong chin and high cheekbones making her face into a commanding, scary mask. “What did I say, Grace? You can’t heal the world of all its problems. You’re not God. If you don’t listen, it’s gonna get worse.”

I
’m a shamed child, an obedient dog. I nod and limp quietly with Sarah to her car, held up on either side by two silent brawny men. All the way home I wait for it to hit, the sleep of all sleep that is sure to follow.

It doesn
’t come.

I don
’t sleep all night, though I am no longer tired after Sasheen’s restoration. I feel as though time has stopped, as though I’m stuck in a waking dream, mild and pleasant.

Marly doesn
’t come out of her room until it’s time for work, and then she’s off, toast in her hand, hair in a ponytail, a blur who won’t even stop to say goodbye.

And though I know I should heed Sasheen
’s words, my body feels amazingly good and I wonder if perhaps I’m starting to reap the benefits of my own healings.

And that is why I do not cancel the healing scheduled the next day.

Chapter Twenty-Four

My hands bob to the surface of my client
’s hip rather than staying in the depths where healing takes place. My focus keeps drifting back to the look of hurt and resentment in Marly’s eyes as she realized I had agreed to do a healing at Gus’s show but not taken on her cause of healing all the world’s children. I wrench myself to the present.

“
Name’s Ellie,” the woman had said when she stepped into my little office at Drew’s, the scent of freesias and lilacs blowing in from the open window. She is somewhere between old and elderly; she looks like the rich wife on
Gilligan’s Island
, her fine pale blue cotton dress expensive and crisp, like it can only be dry-cleaned.

She gestures at her hip.
“It’s like lightning in my leg. Keeps me up at night and I can barely get around by day.” Yet she’d slid into the chaise lounge with barely a hitch.

While I can feel the brittle corrosion of some arthritis in Ellie
’s joint, it doesn’t feel capable of causing the level of pain she claims to have.

My sigh is irritated; I hope she doesn
’t notice. Though I’ve grown used to Vegas heat, it feels especially scorching today. Beads of sweat perch on my upper lip and behind my ears of all places. My knuckles ache. Ellie lets out a moan meant to simulate relief—dramatic and showy. She does this, however, right as I move my hand
away
from the locus of her pain. I fight back the next sigh; clearly I have a faker on my hands. My fingers now began to itch, and I badly want to pull them off her and scratch them.

I never promise my guests a healing duration; some are short and swift and some I can hardly touch, offering little more than pain relief. I am about to proclaim us done when my serpent catches a scent it has been leading me to on the sly more often. My hands move to a spot between her breasts. I feel the strum of her heartbeat, muffled beneath the tomb of her ribs, as though her chest is a sarcophagus and her heart is buried alive.

The top of my head is so hot that I take my eyes off her, looking for Marly. Before our fight, she would have been at the ready with a bottle of water, suggesting a break. But of course she isn’t here.

Ellie doesn
’t open her eyes and the tomblike heart calls me back to her.

My serpent moves through a gallery of images: blurry at first and then painfully clear. A towering woman holds a switch made of sharp wood; a cowering toddler sits in a puddle of her own urine; a shivering girl lies in a thin nightgown, tied to her bed.

“I’m so sorry for your pain,” I whisper. Her eyes lock on mine and I want to offer her more. I can see the echo of the images in her hazel eyes and know she felt me touch it.

“
You don’t know my pain,” she says in a teeth-clenched whisper so full of hostility my hands ache with the energy. Before I think better of it, something defensive passes between my hands and her skin, something like an electric shock that makes a snapping sound and causes her to sit bolt upright. I smell—hallucinate?—smoke.

“
Ow!” she cries, pushing my hands off of her. It feels as though she’s wrenched the cord out of the socket, breaking the electrical connection, leaving me gasping and burning. Sweat boils in all my remaining pores. Her movement is so fast I’m not sure I really saw what I think I did: a hole, roughly fingertip sized, burned into her perfect skirt.

“
You hurt me,” she says, so softly that I’m not sure I heard her. “Fraud!” she shouts, struggling to stand.

I try to help her up but she shakes me off. My limbs feel wrapped in wool and drenched in hot water, my spine, sharp, as though the vertebrae are knife-edged.

“I told you the pain was in my hip but you tried to touch my breast! I don’t know what kind of operation you think you’re running but you don’t have me fooled!”

Lights dance up behind my eyes. My lips feel melded together, my tongue gluey. I sway in place, so hot that I am sure, at any moment, I will burst into flame.

Ma leans over me with a cool washcloth, humming Vivaldi. The room is so dim I can’t make out anything but her bright eyes and the sound of her voice. “Ma, why can’t I heal myself?”

“
Shhh,” she whispers. “Don’t talk. Save your strength.”

“
Please, let me—”

She presses a finger to my lips, but it feels tiny, thin, not like Ma
’s fleshy digit at all. My body jolts awake. I was dreaming. It’s Marly’s face looming over me. Marly’s finger on my lips. “You suffered serious heat stroke, Grace. Don’t work up a lather.”

“
I thought you were Ma,” I whisper, my voice weak and crackly sounding.

“
Ha, yeah, well the resemblance is uncanny.” She grins big.

When I smile, pain spikes across my bottom lip.

“You’ve split your lip.” She presses the cold cloth there, which comes up blotted with blood. “Let me go get some Neosporin for that.”

She hurries back with the sticky salve and applies it.
“It’s all my fault—I’ve been horrible to you, Grace. Let’s just be friends again. Forget everything we’ve said. Start over. That lady was a nut. I know her kind.”

“
How could you have known,” I croak.

“
I
need
to apologize, Grace. I’ve been acting like a fucking child. I’ve been, well, let’s just say that I don’t understand why you’re still here. I understand if you’re staying just for her.” She pats her belly.

I struggle up to sitting: the euphoria is gone, the sense that I can do anything, stay up all night, heal the world…all gone. I feel like a lump of clay—left to dry and crack.
“I haven’t felt this bad since I was in the hospital. Like I’ve been microwaved.”

Marly
’s face has finally started to swell with the weight of pregnancy, making her look plump and hale. Backlit by the small lamp she looks like a medieval nun come to tend me back to health. “Grace.” Her voice sounds thick. “I’ve been thinking about how to say this. I’ve tried so many times that I’m just going to say it while you can’t run away.”

“
Don’t, let’s not apologize for anything,” I say.

She shakes her head.
“I have to. The night of the fire. I…I still have a nightmare. I’ve hit the bottom of the tree house, the smoke is curling in my lungs, and the whole thing is blazing. The longer I stand there, the longer you burn. I’m just stuck to the spot. Then I run, I run and run and run. Like by running I can wrench time back on its axis.’”

And just like that, I know she isn
’t talking about a dream. I remember with visceral clarity a summer day at the beach with my father. He always let me play in the waves close to shore, the ones that barely reached my shoulders and sent me soaring on a jetty of water. But this day, I’d gone out further than usual, and by the time I realized that the wave was bigger and faster than I could handle, its foaming head had descended upon me. I was pounded into the gritty ocean floor, saltwater and sand forced into my throat and nasal passages so that I could not breathe or find my sense of direction until I emerged, gasping at last. I feel this same way now.

“
Nightmare?” I ask, trying to steady the emotion shaking my voice. “Or memory?”

Marly bites her lip and puts her face in her hands for a second. I feel as though all sound has been absorbed into a vacuum.

“I hated you for not showing up,” I say. “I thought for sure you’d be there at my bedside the next day in the hospital. But you couldn’t face me, because you’d already abandoned me. That’s what you’re saying, right? You left me to burn?”

My words sound so logical, clean, but all of a sudden the thrum of my heartbeat pounding returns to me, loud, as though it can drown out the truth of what I
’m saying.

Her face is crimped, as though she
’s suppressing a pang of nausea. “Oh Grace. I didn’t know what to do. I know I should have stayed, waited until the paramedics got there, told you it would be okay. Honestly, I was sure you knew how I ran away, that you remembered, and that’s why you didn’t seek me out. And since we’ve come back together, I’ve been waiting for this perfect time to tell you—as if there is such a thing. I was going to when you came to my gram’s house back in Drake’s Bay, but then, it felt so good to have a real friend again. I don’t deserve your friendship.”

I reach for words that might comfort one of us, but find none. Finally I ask her to take the note out of my wallet—one written in Marly
’s gram’s impeccably neat and tiny handwriting that I’ve kept for thirteen years.

Grace, I know how important girlhood friendships are. Before I married, my best friend Annie was the world to me. We taught each other a great deal. I love my granddaughter, fierce, Grace, and I think you do, too. She’ll be staying at my house for just one night. It’s all her parents will allow. This Saturday. If you can get away, it might be the last time you see each other for awhile.

—Oona D.

Marly
’s face is stone, ice, everything suspended, and then the leak starts in her eyes, crumbling her features as the tears drip off her cheeks. She lifts her head high. “Always thought better of me than anyone else, my gram,” she says at last. “If only she knew me better.”

I know she
’s thinking of the night she took a fireplace poker to that guy’s knee—perhaps the night that sealed our fates, forbidden as we were from seeing each other until her grandmother sent me that note.

The night of the fire Marly and I both squealed the moment I poked my head through the door of the tree house.

We hugged tightly, and I pretended not to notice the band-aids still stuck to her wrists. It had been nearly a month since we’d stood in each other’s company, a physical ache in my bones relieved the moment I set eyes on her. The normally bare tree house room was decorated in candles, a wild illumination of flickering light that made her look like some fairytale princess come to life in a white beaded dress with flapper fringe. She had day-glo pink leggings on beneath it and her black Converse sneakers.

“
Um, what are you wearing?” I asked, then regretted it in the sinking of her eyes.

“
I thought this final act deserved a kind of ritual. Rituals require costumes.”

I didn’t like the way she said
“final act,” even though I knew that her parents were threatening to send her to boarding school, that Bryce was most likely taking a new job in Seattle, and that she had something important to tell me.

“
I just thought we should, you know, like, make this moment significant.” She parted her dark-blonde hair like drapes to either side of her shoulders, and plopped down on the faux-Persian carpet. “Now you pick something,” she said.

In a pile behind her were a bunch of vintage dresses and beaded sweaters, but I felt silly putting them on. I selected an old yellow boa, a fringe of feathers that ringed my throat over my frayed tapered jeans and dark blue Esprit sweatshirt.

“Aren’t you going to sit down?” There was something odd in her wide-eyed stare, her eager grin. She plunked several more fat candles down before her. Then she tipped an already lit candle in, and lit each one, white wax dripping in little puddles onto the floorboards.

“
I hate Seattle. I hate rain. I hate men,” Marly said. She ripped several hairs from her head and dropped them into the large candle flame where they curled into oblivion and puffed off a sulfurous odor. “What do you want out of your life?” she asked.