State of Grace (6 page)

“It was ‘that night,'” people said with a sad shake of their heads whenever Edith Spencer's name came up. “It made her scared of her own self.”

It also made her paranoid. Nothing happened in the vicinity of Edith Spencer's house that went unnoticed. She spent much of her time looking out the windows. Everything that happened was noted in her spidery handwriting complete with date, time, and the manner
of the event. When she died, dozens of boxes of notebooks were found, labeled by date and year. Infractions ranging from barking dogs and suspicious cars to detailed accounts of the activities of her next-door neighbor's rambunctious children were noted.

I'm sure one of the events she detailed in her notebook was the conversation we had the day I decided to make myself so much of a nuisance that my mother released me from house arrest. I was determining where to start digging random holes in the space between our garage and the fence that separated our lot from the Spencers'. I could hear Mrs. Spencer working in her backyard garden and whistled to let her know I was there.

“Nancy, is that you?” she called over the fence. “Nancy? John?”

“It's me, Mrs. Spencer,” I said. My mother was adamant that my sister and I call any grown-up Mr. X or Mrs. Y until they gave us permission to use their first names. Mrs. Spencer never gave that permission.

I heard a soft grunt from behind the fence and knew she was climbing onto the stone bench so she could look over. Within seconds, her pale, wrinkled face appeared over the top of the wooden slats. She studied me for a moment and then frowned. “What are you doing with that shovel, Birdie?”

I looked up at her, unsure about how to answer. “What do you mean?” I could hear the defensiveness in my tone and cringed when she gave me one of her meanest “don't you sass me” teacher looks in response.

“You're holding a shovel and you look like you're going to dig something up,” she said. “That
is
what one usually does with a shovel.”

I hesitated and searched my mind for what I could say that wouldn't cause her to call my mother and tell her what I was up to. “I'm . . .” I looked down at the shovel. “I am going to dig a hole . . . for my hamster . . . Darwin. He died. Heart attack. He was eating his Hartz pellets . . . you know, the green ones, and he was stuffing them in his pouches and I guess he got one lodged in his throat because he began to cough. And then a big chunk of green food flew out and then he sort of just grabbed his chest and died. It was really sad.”

She narrowed her eyes. “That makes no sense.” She studied me for several seconds before shaking her head and disappearing behind the fence. I assumed she had returned to her gardening, but after a few moments, I heard her voice again. “I'm sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you,” I said. “He was very special.” When she didn't reply, I moved away from her property and began to dig.

By the time my father pulled into the driveway, I had blisters on my hands, mud caked to my shoes, and smears of dirt and clay on my face. The hole was easily a square yard in size and a foot and a half deep.

“What are you doing, Birdie?” he asked as he got out of the car.

“I'm digging to China,” I said. “Mom won't let me go outside of the yard, so I decided to see how long it would take me to dig to China.”

He stood over the hole and surveyed my work, a smile tugging at the corners of his lips.

“Ummmm,” he said. “Well, it looks like you're off to a good start.”

“I am.” I was surprised he wasn't angry and decided to up the ante. “By the end of summer I should be halfway there.”

“Umm hmmmm.” He looked toward the house. “Do you know what we're having for dinner?”

I looked at him, both irritated and exasperated.

“Dad, I'm busy,” I said. “I'm working on something and this might not be the right spot. I'll probably have to dig in a couple of places to find the right one. There could end up being holes all over the yard.”

“Well, be careful,” he said and began to walk toward the house. “Don't fall in.”

I stood in the hole and watched him jog up the stairs, pull open the door and step inside the house. The door banged closed behind him.
Unbelievable!
I stared at the closed door.
This has to be part of their plan
, I thought. But they don't know who they're dealing with. This was just the first of many holes. And if that didn't work, well, then, Natalie and I would figure out a new plan. Between the two of us, we would outsmart our parents at their own game.

Chapter 7

I stood in the shadow of the house and watched as the man drove slowly down the street, headlights off, navigating by the light of the full moon. Although his face was obscured by the darkness of the car interior, I could sense his eyes raking the yards and houses, casing the neighborhood. The car itself was long, gray, and silent as it slid past our house. What, or who, was he looking for? I found myself imagining his motives, picturing the contents of his trunk. A knife? Rope?

The car rolled past with a quiet crunch of grit under tires and I took a deep breath, exhaling slowly. He was gone. We were safe. I turned and began to walk toward Natalie's house. I wasn't sure why I was going there. I just knew I had to talk to her. I wore dark clothes to blend in with the night and felt slightly giddy at my invisibility. In my fist, I clutched a butcher knife I'd taken from the kitchen. It was my protection against people like the man in the car. In some ways, I felt like the predator. I walked quickly and quietly, looking from side to side as I went. One block down, one to go. Natalie wasn't expecting me, but somehow, I knew she would be up and that she would come outside. There was something I had to talk to her about—something that only she would understand. There was urgency to my step. I wanted to be there already. The pleasure I used to have of sneaking out of the house and moving silently in the night was lost in the knowledge I now had of the dangers that were everywhere. Rather than enjoying the freedom of being outside without anyone knowing, I was jumpy, on edge. I had to get to Natalie's. I had to talk to her. I was single-minded, which is why I didn't see him until it was too late.

He was crouched behind a car parked in Mr. Tucker's driveway. He was tall and dark and moved quickly and silently. He, too, had a knife, I realized as he grabbed me and put a gloved hand over my mouth. My body tensed and the butcher knife I had brought for protection dropped uselessly from my hand.

“Don't say a word,” he hissed in my ear. “I have a knife and I would think nothing of gutting you like a fish. Do you understand me?” My heart thudded in my head. My chest hurt. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't think. My body ached. My bladder released. “Do you understand me?”

I nodded.

“You didn't think I saw you, did you?” he whispered in my ear. “Oh, I saw you, all right. I've been watching you a lot more than just tonight. I've been watching you with your friends . . . at school . . . around town. You've been playing hide and seek with me, but I knew where you were all along. You broke into my house and saw my special pictures. Well, now I'm gonna' show you what them pictures mean. We're gonna have some fun, you and me.”

It was Don Wan.

He picked me up, hand still over my mouth, and carried me to his car, which was parked down the street. He was breathing heavily by the time we made it to his car. He fumbled in his jeans pocket for the car keys. He held me pressed against him. His body was hard and unyielding. His breath came in short gasps and I felt him tremble slightly as he located the keys and opened the trunk. Inside I saw the rope and the gray roll of duct tape.

“Now, I'm gonna take my hand off your mouth so I can get a couple things out of the trunk and you're gonna promise me that you will not make a peep, okay? Because if you do, I'm gonna knock you out and when you wake up, you won't like what happens to you. Do you understand?”

Again, I nodded.

He slowly removed his hand, watching me carefully to see if I would disobey.

“That's a good girl,” he said as he reached into the trunk and felt around for the rope and tape. His eyes never left mine and he
smiled as he watched me tremble with fear. “You're scared, ain't you? You shouldn't be. This is gonna be fun. By the end, you'll be begging me for more.”

I don't know how I summoned the courage to scream, but somehow, I did. My throat, paralyzed by fear, suddenly loosened and the sound burbled from my mouth. It was high-pitched and shrill. It was the sound of terror and revulsion. The sound made my throat raw. Strong hands grabbed me. Shook me.

“No!”
I screamed. “
No!
Help me! No!”

My teeth rattled in my head.

“Birdie!” my mother yelled. “Birdie! Sweetie. Wake up. Wake up. You're having a bad dream. Birdie! Birdie!”

I stared at her, disoriented. I was in my room. In my bed. In my sweaty nightgown. I felt relief and confusion. It seemed so real. I could still smell his sour body odor in my nose. I felt the bed and was relieved I hadn't really lost control of my bladder. For the second time that week, my mother held me to her body and rocked me. I couldn't stop shaking.

“It was so real,” I sobbed into her neck. “It was so real. He had a knife. And he knew about me. He knew who I was. He had been watching me.”

“Shhhh,” my mother said. “Shhhhh, sweetheart. It's okay. I'll never let anyone hurt you. Shhhh . . . It's okay.”

My father popped his head into the room. “Everything okay, Bird? Bad dream?”

“Uh huh,” I said, my sobs subsiding to sniffs and gulps of breath.

Thirty minutes later, I lay alone in my bed. I could hear the soft murmurs of my mother and father talking in the next room. I tried to make out what they were saying, but couldn't. So, I lay on my side, curled around the pillow from the top bunk, and tried to dissect the dream. If I could understand it, I thought, perhaps I could take some of the scariness out of it. I knew the events were the combination of Don Wan's drawings and my mother's fears that something would happen to us. All of the elements made sense. But rather than making me feel better, the reality of the things that
caused the dream made me feel vulnerable and fragile.

I told Natalie about the dream when she came over the next afternoon.

“It was Don Wan,” I said. “He was the one who grabbed me in the dream. I mean, it was him and it wasn't him. You know how dreams are, where someone is a bunch of people at once.”

We were standing on the edge of the hole I had started the day before. Grace was supposed to show up at any time and I wanted to talk to Natalie about the drawings before she arrived. “So, what should we do?”

“I don't know.” She stared down into the hole. “If we tell our folks, we're going to be in so much trouble. But somebody needs to do something. Drawing naked pictures of kids is weird. I mean, I knew he was a pervert, but . . .”

We were silent.

“Why do you think he drew so many of Grace?”

Natalie shrugged. “She's pretty. And she's sort of . . . sad and mysterious. You know? She always seems to be thinking something secret.”

I considered Natalie's description. She was right. There
was
something about Grace that drew people's attention. Sometimes, it made me jealous, but most of the time I just chalked it up to Grace being . . . Grace.

“Do you ever wonder if she's okay?” I asked finally. “Mom always asks me about her.”

Natalie nodded. “My mom does, too. And then when I tell her stuff, she just shakes her head and says, ‘That poor girl' or ‘What the hell is Brenda thinking?'” She raised her eyes to meet my gaze before looking uncomfortably away.

“Do you think there's anything we can do?” I asked finally. “You know, to help?”

Natalie shrugged. “Not really. I guess, just be her friend. I mean, her dad is totally busy with his girlfriend and her mom doesn't seem to care what she does or what happens to her. What do you think?”

“I don't know,” I said finally. “I just feel bad for her.” I looked down the street. In the distance, I could hear the sound of a lawnmower.
Grace was nowhere in sight. “Want some Kool-Aid while we wait?”

Natalie's normally pale cheeks were already flushed from the heat. She grinned. “Grape?”

“Probably.” I gestured toward the house. “But just to warn you, Granny's here.”

“Even better,” Natalie said and started toward the house.

My mother's mother was at best, eccentric and at worst, slightly crazy. Her exploits and those of her brother were known throughout Edenbridge. To be fair, my grandmother came by her craziness naturally. According to my mother, it ran in the family. The younger of two children, Granny adored her older brother Hugh, who was tall, handsome, and extremely good with numbers. Of course, by the time I met him, Hugh was just a paunchy old man who wore polyester pants and silver-tipped cowboy boots. But in his day, he was apparently the star of our small town. And wherever Hugh went, so did my grandmother. The two were inseparable—even to the point that my grandmother dated Hugh's best friend, Dale.

The trouble began when my grandmother and Dale walked into her parents' kitchen one morning and announced that they were going to get married. Apparently, Hugh, who was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and reading the newspaper, stood up, looked at the ring, and announced that the marriage would happen over his dead body. He then strode out of the kitchen, out to his truck, and drove away.

“That was the last time we spoke for twenty years,” my grandmother would say, shaking her head.

“But why would he do that?” I would ask. “What made him so angry?”

“Who the hell knows,” my grandmother would say, lighting a fresh clove cigarette. “All I knew was that if he could act like that, I could, too. So I married your grandfather the next day. We eloped, went across the state line. My folks were so angry . . . Ach!” She waved her hand in dismissal.

This was the way of my grandmother. Everything was dramatic. She did nothing halfway. If she was told she couldn't do something, she would do it anyway. She did what she wanted, when
she wanted, and how she wanted. It was challenging to the rest of us, most especially my grandfather who more often than not was responsible for tying up the loose ends left to flutter in the wake of my grandmother's vague conception. This was especially true of her collection of animals.

My mother's parents lived on five acres of land about ten miles west of Edenbridge. And it was on this property that my grandmother built her own private menagerie to which she added animals, on whims. She had chickens, ducks, a goat, two horses, a pony that collectively belonged to “the grandkids,” although we never rode it, and a handful of cats that roamed the property feasting on mice, rats, moles, and whatever small birds they could bring down. And then there were the dogs.

My grandmother fancied herself a dog breeder and show person of unparalleled skill. Her dog of choice was the black and tan dachshund. And it was here that she spent most of her time and energy. To her credit, she had some skill when it came to breeding, training, and showing her dogs. She traveled around the Midwest to dog shows and frequently came home with purple ribbons and trophies that sat in limp, dusty piles on the shelf that ran along the wall of her office.

At no time would she be seen with fewer than three yipping weenie dogs jumping like dark pieces of popcorn around the inside of her car or, if they were on leashes, around her feet. And such was the case on the day she sat in my mother's kitchen wearing a Zuni-inspired shirt-dress she'd collected on her last trip to New Mexico, smoking her clove cigarettes and offering unsolicited advice about motherhood. As Natalie and I entered the kitchen, Blitz, Britta, and Edelweiss leapt from their slumber at my grandmother's feet and rushed toward us in an excited frenzy. Because of their German heritage, all of my grandmother's dogs were christened with German names.

“Come give your grandmother a hug,” she said through the exhaled cloud of spiced smoke. “So, what were the two of you doing out there in the yard?” she asked as she reclaimed her smoldering cigarette and took a drag.

“I'm digging a hole to China,” I said grabbing a handful of potato chips and offering the bag to Natalie. “Mom won't let me ride around town, so I'm going to see if I can dig to China.”

Granny turned to my mother and raised her jet-black eyebrows. Her natural hair color was actually a light brown, but she insisted on dying her hair and eyebrows black. It was, she would tell people, a throwback to her “Indian blood.” My mother shrugged.

“Maybe you should get the girls a dog,” Granny said. “It would be a good watchdog, too.”

My mother sighed. “Mother, for the last time, I don't want a dog. I grew up with dogs and I don't want one now. I like having a clean house. I like not having to clean up dog sh—” She glanced at me and stopped. “Excrement.”

My grandmother stared at my mother incredulously. It was as if they didn't have this same conversation every time they were together. She turned to me.

“Birdie, wouldn't you like to have a little puppy?” she asked. “I just had a litter and there is one little sweetie I think you would just love. She's ornery, spunky, and just a little rotten. Her name is Hexe. It means ‘witch' in German.”

I looked at my mother.

“We are not getting a dog. And if we do, it's going to be an outside dog that is bigger than a cat.”

Granny looked down at her dogs, made kissy noises, and began to speak in her puppy voice. “Don't underestimate the ferociousness of the dachshund.” She shook her head violently from side to side, talking to them rather than us. “No, no, no. Don't do it. No, don't do it. They're ferocious. Yes, they are. Yes, they are.”

I glanced at Natalie, who was watching the exchange with amusement. And, suddenly it occurred to me that maybe a puppy was what Grace needed. Something warm to curl up on her bed at night. Something sweet and loving that she could pay attention to and that would pay attention to her. Something that might protect her.

“Actually,” I said. “What about Grace? I'll bet she would love a puppy. I mean, she couldn't afford to buy one from you, but if you
wanted Hexe to go to a good home . . .”

Granny looked at my mother.