The Invisibles (10 page)

He helped her across the rest of the ice and then up the bank. They didn't speak on the walk back, and when they reached his
house, she told him she would walk the rest of the way by herself. He'd let her go, not objecting the way he always did, and when she glanced over her shoulder just before she turned the corner, he had disappeared.

W
ell, here we are.” Ozzie braked and turned off the engine. “Suburbia Central.”

Monica leaned over the front seat and looked at Nora. “How're you feeling, sweetie?”

“Better.” Nora sat up and looked at the white two-story house with red shutters. Buckets of white mums had been arranged on the front steps, and a raffia wreath strung with dried stalks of lavender and eucalyptus hung on the door. White muslin curtains were tied back in the front window; the number 23 had been drilled into the front of a tin mailbox shaped like a cat.

“I like the mailbox,” Monica said. “It's adorable. Look how the tail goes into a little figure eight shape.”

Nora squinted to see the mailbox more clearly. Had Grace liked cats? She couldn't remember. Maybe it was her husband's thing.

The front door opened, and a short man dressed in baggy blue jeans, a gray V-neck sweater, and dark brown moccasins emerged from inside the house. He was in dire need of a shave—unless he wore his beard purposely scraggly the way some men did these days—and his hair was mussed, as if someone had just reached over and tousled it. He lifted one hand in greeting, shoving the other one into his front pocket.

“That must be Henry,” Monica said.

Ozzie turned off the engine and inhaled. “Okay, here we go. You sure you're okay, Nora?”

“I'm fine.” Nora ran her hands over her face. They still smelled of vomit. The hand sanitizer hadn't worked; she would have to wash them thoroughly when she found a moment.

Their emergence from inside the car was followed by a flurry of hand shaking and introductions. Up close, Henry had beautiful blue eyes, flecked with little bits of gray. His teeth were small and slightly rounded like Tic Tacs, and a leather watch was fastened around one wrist.

“Thank you so much for coming.” He shoved his hands inside his pockets and surveyed them once more, this time with a slight sense of bashfulness. “It really means a lot.”

Monica reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. “I'm sorry it's been so hard.”

Henry looked startled for a moment and then nodded. “Thank you. We're just taking it one day at a time. It's all any of us can do, right?”

“Yes.” Monica nodded.

“Anyway, come in, come in!” Henry grabbed several bags and led them into a small, rose-colored living room. He stood in front of the door as everyone passed him, and then stretched out his arm, indicating two large sofas. They were a pale mauve color, embossed with gold leaves. A wooden table sat between them, decorated with a smooth black bowl. Inside was a blue rubber teething ring, the bubble-like sections of it filled with tiny plastic fish. “Sit down anywhere,” Henry said. “Make yourself comfortable. I'll put your bags in the guest rooms and tell Petal you're here. She's just finishing up in the shower.”

“Henry.” Ozzie adjusted the brim of her baseball cap and lowered her voice. “How is she? Really, I mean.”

His eyes swept over the room, as if looking for the answer. “She's doing a lot better. The doctor adjusted her medication, and that's helped a lot. And since she heard you all were coming, she's been . . .” He paused. “Peppy might be a stretch, but she's definitely been more talkative. Sort of like something lifted a little.”

“Well,” Ozzie said. “Good. That's something.”

“Oh, I almost forgot.” Henry said. “The baby's here. With us, I mean. She's sleeping now in the back room.”

Nora's heart lurched. She reached back with one hand, steadying herself against the doorknob.

“Okay.” Ozzie sounded uncertain.

“She was staying with my parents, like I told you,” Henry hurried on. “And then my mother got shingles.”

“Oh, how awful,” Monica said.

“Yes.” Henry winced. “It's caused by the chicken pox virus, which is extremely dangerous to newborns. So, obviously, we brought her back here.” He raised his eyebrows and exhaled. “She's a very good sleeper.”

“It's totally fine,” Ozzie said. “Really.”

“Yes,” Monica chimed in. “My goodness. This is your home. Your child! Don't give it another thought.”

Nora smiled her approval as Henry glanced in her direction and tightened her hand around the doorknob.

Henry nodded. “All right, then.” He disappeared into a corridor next to the living room. His footsteps sounded down the hall. A door opened and then closed. Nora did not move.

The walls were covered with paintings—three of them, enormous framed canvases of blue, purple, and gray skies. Nothing else. Just dark bruises of sky. The name “Petal” was scrawled in
the corner of each one, the
P
a giant loopy letter, the rest of the letters tiny and cramped.

“Jesus,” Ozzie whispered. “No wonder she's depressed. All she does is sit around and paint this shit all day?”

“Don't call it shit.” Monica kept her voice low, but there was an edge to it, a fierceness Nora had never heard before. “It's her work, Ozzie. Her
art.
” She slit her eyes. “And my God, what if she heard you?”

“Yeah, I know.” Ozzie took her baseball cap off and shook out her hair, yanking the rubber band from around her ponytail. “It's just . . . God, they all look so
sad,
don't they?”

“They do.” Nora let go of the doorknob finally and walked across the room to get a better look. “They look terribly sad.”

It was bad enough that the paintings didn't depict any kind of object. The space they occupied was lifeless too, devoid of any light or breath. Even the sections of white, interspersed here and there between swaths of purple and gray, seemed mute. A first line from a Pynchon novel,
“A screaming comes across the sky,”
struck her now as ridiculously appropriate.

“Well, she's been sad,” Monica said. “You know that. It's been rough for a while I would think, with the baby and then the postpartum. Maybe this is how she's been getting through it.”

“Yeah, that and a rope,” Ozzie said.

Monica gasped and then punched Ozzie hard in the arm. Nora was glad. If she'd had the nerve, she would've done the same thing.

“Well, it's true,” Ozzie said, rubbing her arm. “I'll tell you something else too, and I don't give a shit if you think it's rude or not. I can already tell she's gonna need us for longer than a weekend.”

Monica clasped her bony arms around her waist and stared at the floor. Nora sat back against the couch. The whine of a lawn mower sounded outside. A lazy beam of light floated in through the parted curtains, illuminating a sea of dust motes, swirling like so many stars above the rug. There was no way she was going to be able to stay longer than twenty-four hours, Nora thought. Especially now that there was a baby around. No way at all.

“Hi.” The word drifted down from the staircase, soft as a cloud. Nora didn't have to look up to know it was her, but she did anyway, just to be sure. Grace was standing on the third or fourth step, almost as if she was afraid to come all the way down. She was still thin, but without the usual pink in her face; her skin now had a gray, almost transparent quality to it. Her blue eyes were clouded with a heaviness behind them. One hand rested on the banister, the other fiddled with a scarf wrapped around her neck. On either side of it, her still-blond hair flowed down in impossibly long waves. Ozzie and Monica stood up at the same time, but Nora did not move. She was trying not to think about what was under that scarf.

Monica walked over to the stairs and put her hand on the banister. “Hi, baby doll,” she whispered.

Grace came down all at once and let herself be swallowed up in Ozzie and Monica's arms. She closed her eyes, leaning into them, as if she had been waiting for such a thing for a long time and now that it had finally arrived, she was afraid it might leave again. Ozzie held her fiercely, cradling the edge of Grace's chin with a cupped hand, while Monica clutched the two of them.

It had been rare for Grace to exchange hugs, even back then.
Physical contact was regarded warily, as if stepping over an unseen boundary. And yet, looking at them now, Nora remembered their second Invisibles meeting, when they had presented Grace with a little cardboard box, complete with a green dental floss bow. Inside were two strips of paper, one saturated with multiple squirts of Chanel No. 5 (for which Ozzie had had to pay Chuck Sullivan five bucks to get from his mother's bureau), the other drizzled with a blob of the burnt caramel sauce Monica had made specially for the occasion. Beneath the two strips of paper, Nora had tucked a few handfuls of the freshly cut grass she'd waited two weeks for until Mr. Richards across the street finally pulled out his lawn mower. Grace had stared stupidly at the contents when they first presented it to her until Ozzie reached over and pushed it under her nose. The patchwork of emotion that stitched itself across her face as she sniffed tentatively at it was like nothing Nora had ever seen before, a mixture of bewilderment, shock, angst, and finally, seconds before she broke down, gratitude. “Oh!” she kept saying, shaking her head and reaching for them with both arms. “Oh! Oh!”

Nora felt something lodge in the back of her throat and then twist a little as she thought of it again. She did not know what it was—until Grace stood back from the other women and fingered the hem of her sweat shirt. “Nora?” Her voice was a croak. Nora stood up and moved toward her. She pressed her nose against Grace's hair—it smelled like pot, for some reason, and potato chips—and held her in her arms.

“I can't believe it.” Grace's voice was as thin as a cobweb. “I can't believe you all really came.”

Nora knew that their presence was not going to fix whatever
was broken inside Grace, just as she understood suddenly that the brief trip would not, as she had secretly hoped, fill the well within her. But the gratitude in Grace's voice just now was as pure and full of amazement as it had been that day, when they'd given her the little box that smelled like her mother.

And for now at least, that was enough.

I
t was during the fourth Invisibles meeting that the subject of their pasts had come up. It had not gone especially well. Nora blamed herself. She should have known that the first line she had chosen to share from Albert Camus's novel
The Stranger
would be too suggestive. It was like setting a match to a bundle of dried twigs; the spark alone was all it needed to burst into flame. Indeed, after Grace read it aloud, the four of them sat there for a moment, muted and motionless.

“
Mother died today.
” Ozzie repeated the line again, the way she always did. Her voice was hard, unrelenting. “God, if only that were true.”

“Now why would you say something like that?” Grace asked.

“Why?” Ozzie's eyes flashed. “Because my mother doesn't deserve to live, that's why.”

“Well, it's a good thing you don't have a say in those kinds of things, isn't it?” Grace crossed her arms. “Only God gets to decide when people's lives will end. And I'm pretty sure He
wouldn't be too happy if He knew you were wishing people dead.”

“Oh yeah, right.
God
.” Ozzie began to rock back and forth a little. “I forgot about the Big Guy in the Sky. He's the one that gets to decide which ones of us are strong enough to hold on for three days in a locked closet without any food or water, right? Or maybe He figures it'll build character for a kid to have a mother who holds your hand over a lit gas range because you forgot to shut the door on your way into the house.”

The color began to drain from Grace's face. “I didn't . . .” she started.

“You're goddamned right you didn't,” Ozzie cut her off, the veins in her neck thick as cords. “You didn't anything. So don't tell me that after all the shit that witch put me through that I don't get to wish her dead. And don't ever,
ever
tell me that it's God up there who gets to decide whether or not that feeling of mine is wrong. Because if that's the truth, then fuck God. If my mother died today, I would stand up and cheer. And then I would keep cheering every day for the rest of my life. You want to know why? Because the world will be a better place the day she leaves it. And that's something that doesn't have anything to do with me or you or God. Period.”

Nora's mind wandered as the argument continued. How many times had she wished Mama was someone else: Maria from
The Sound of Music
maybe, or the mother in
E.T
. who giggled with her children and allowed them to eat pizza in front of the TV? Anyone except Mama herself with her sharp nose and hard eyes that looked at Nora as if she were some kind of garden slug. And yet she had never wished her mother dead, had
never allowed herself to creep up to that final possibility. What would it mean exactly if Mama died? What would that make her? She did not want to be an orphan, left alone in the world to fend for herself. Being sent to a girls' home like Turning Winds for other people to worry about did not make her an orphan, exactly. It just made her unlucky. Or lucky. It all depended on how you looked at it.

A silent moment passed. Ozzie breathed heavily. Grace was silent, tracing the faint map of veins on the inside of her wrist. She rarely pushed Ozzie to her breaking point. It had happened once and ended with them not speaking for nearly a week until Grace finally apologized. Next to her lay the new drawing she had brought to the meeting, this one a still life of the items atop her dresser: a miniature statue of the Infant of Prague, a hairbrush, two Bonne Bell lipsticks, and an old tin can filled with paintbrushes. It was beautiful, Nora thought. Beautiful and solitary and waiting, just like Grace herself, who was already in the middle of her fourth month at Turning Winds. There was still no word from her mother or the hospital.

“I don't really remember my mother,” Monica blurted out. “She died when I was two.”

“You're lucky,” Ozzie said.

“My father killed her.” Monica held Ozzie's stunned gaze for only a fraction of a second. Her lower lip trembled. She reached up and tugged on the end of one of her braids. “She was only twenty-eight. My father got a life sentence in prison and I ended up living with my grandmother. Then when I was fifteen, she died, and no one else in the family would take me. Which is how I ended up here.”

“Holy shit, Monsie,” Ozzie whispered. “Why didn't you ever tell me that?”

Monica shook her head. “I've never told anyone that.”

An owl hooted once in the distance, a mournful sound that drifted through the night air like a cry.

“Do you have any pictures of her?” Grace asked.

“I do.” Monica smiled wistfully. “Two actually. One that my grandmother gave me, and one that I stole from her.”

“I've never seen any pictures,” said Ozzie.

Monica shrugged. “I keep 'em in my top drawer, under my socks.”

“Why do you keep them there?” asked Ozzie.

“I don't know. I tried putting them on my dresser, but it felt weird. I know she's my mother and everything, but it's like looking at a stranger.” Monica paused as a slip of a smile crossed her face. “She has red hair like me, though. And the same bump in her nose. Like, exactly. My grandmother told me she used to read me that
Madeline
book all the time, and sometimes when I read it now, I'll imagine sitting on her lap. Then I'll take the pictures out and look real hard at them, to see if something about her'll come back to me. But it never does. It's like she never existed.”

“You were only two,” Grace said. “No one remembers that far back. It's not your fault.”

“How about your dad?” Ozzie asked. “Have you ever gone to see him in prison?”

“No.” Monica shook her head. “Why would I?”

Ozzie shrugged. “I don't know. Maybe he's changed. It can happen.”

Monica shook her head. She pulled hard on her bottom lip, trying not to cry. “I don't want to see him. Like, ever.”

Ozzie rubbed her back. “Okay,” she said. “I know, Monsie. It's all right.”

“How about your mother, Nora?” Monica asked, eager to shift the attention to someone else. “What was she like?”

Nora reached up and pulled on her earlobe. She took out her notepad the way she always did, and let the tip of the pen hover above it for a moment.
She liked her husband more than she liked me,
she wrote, and gave it to Grace to read aloud. It was not an inaccurate statement, and she was not going to get into any more detail. What would she say: that Mama had known what Daddy Ray had been doing to her from the time she was ten years old? Mama hadn't actually caught her husband in the act until Nora was twelve, but Nora could tell by the slit-eyed looks she cast her way over the breakfast table, or the way she would sometimes walk behind her chair and pinch the skin beneath her upper arm, that she had known before that. Would she tell them that for as much as Mama had permitted things to go on, she was also violently jealous of the attention Daddy Ray showed her child, so much so that it had taken the remote control incident, leaving Nora's head split wide open, for her to finally be removed from the home? These girls would think she was a freak if she admitted something like that, would probably turn and run screaming in the other direction if she went there. It was too dark. Too gross. Too much.

Around the group, heads nodded in recognition as they read Nora's statement; small grunts of disgust drifted toward the floor.

“So how'd you end up here?” Ozzie asked.

“She liked to throw things too,” Nora wrote. “I got hurt.”

Another round of murmurs. Monica stared at her the way a child might stare at a parent who has donned a frightening Halloween costume and burst into the room. Grace reached out and rubbed Nora's arm. Ozzie chewed on her nails.

“Is that where that scar on your forehead came from?” Monica whispered.

Nora nodded, running her fingers over the small indentation. There was nothing more to say, nothing else to write. She didn't want to talk about it anymore, either. Maybe ever again.

“You're the only one left, Grace,” Ozzie said, taking her fingers out of her mouth. Nora held her breath, but Ozzie didn't allude to the months Grace had been waiting to hear something—anything—from her mother.

They all waited as Grace traced a line on the floor, her thin fingertip collecting a tiny pile of dust. “You already know that my mother's in a hospital.”

“You said that before,” Monica said gently. “Did she get hurt? Like, an accident or something?”

“No.” Grace didn't raise her head. “It's a mental hospital.” She opened her mouth and then closed it again. “She gets really depressed sometimes. Like to the point where she can't do anything. At all. Except sleep a little.”

“Shit.” Ozzie let out a low whistle.

Grace lifted her head quickly, staring at her for a moment, as if trying to determine Ozzie's sincerity.

“I'm serious,” Ozzie said. “That sucks.”

“It doesn't
suck,
” Grace said. “Some people have it a lot worse. And she's been doing the best she can, considering my dad walked
out on us three years ago and she doesn't have any money. It's not her fault.”

“Of course it isn't,” Ozzie agreed.

Grace nodded. “Now that she's in a hospital, they'll treat her and probably put her on some kind of medicine and then she can come and get me.”

Nora noticed Ozzie and Monica exchanging glances. She held her breath, waiting for Ozzie to say something about denial or maybe even God, but Monica spoke up first.

“How'd you end up here?”

“One of the teachers at school found out that my brother and I were living with her in her car.” Grace scowled. “It wasn't that big of a deal. I think she was more annoyed that we were stealing food out of the dumpster behind the Burger King than anything else. She kept pointing at my pocket and telling the caseworker that I had a freaking hamburger in there.”

“What happened to your brother?” asked Ozzie.

“He's with my aunt,” Grace dropped her eyes again. “She could only take one of us. It's fine. He's little. I wanted him to go with her. He wouldn't have been able to handle foster care or a place like this.”

“How long did they say your mother'd be in the hospital?” Monica asked.

“Two weeks.” Grace spoke to the floor. The silence was unbearable. “I know what you're thinking,” she said, looking up. “But it's only been a little over three months. She probably just needs more treatment than she thought. She'll get there.”

“You
want
her to come back for you?” Ozzie asked.

“Of course I do.” Grace looked stricken. “She's my mother.”

“That's just a word,” Ozzie said.

“Not to me.” Grace clenched her teeth. “My mother didn't abuse me. She tried. She did her best. She loves me. And she'll be back. She will. I know it.”

Nora wondered if she was the only one who doubted Grace's words that night, or at every Invisibles meeting thereafter when Grace would repeat them again. “She'll be back for me. She will. I know it.” It was like a mantra, uttered for the sole purpose of hearing it said aloud. Maybe the words did something to keep Grace's spirit buoyed, a balloon of sorts that she could hold on to so that she did not sink. Nora could not help but wonder too, on Grace's last day at Turning Winds, exactly thirty-one months later, when she finally let go of that balloon and watched it sail away into a silent blue sky, if that had been the beginning of the end for her.

Or the end of the beginning.