Forged in Grace (3 page)

Pain is a molten flow traveling from the spot where her unsteady fingers grip me all the way down my arm, transforming into a movie that unfolds in my mind:
Marly and me, stripped down to bras and underwear behind the “bum shack” to keep the heavy waft of pot smoke off our clothes—her bra is neon pink, like Cyndi Lauper, mine white with yellow daisies—hiding evidence of what Gabriel Diaz once referred to as “tic-tac-tits” before Marly kicked him in the jewels. Feet crunching broken bottles into smaller bits. Marly shot up straight; I scrambled to find my shirt. Too late. Poking her head around the corner was Sasha Lerner, long dark hair tangled like she’d just woken up, six-pack of Peach schnapps in her hand.

“
Thought I’d find you here,” Sasha said.

One look at her read neglect: clothes rumpled and pulled dirty off a floor, dark rings beneath eyes that cried too much and didn’t sleep enough. Marly shot me a betrayed glower.

I’d told Sasha where we’d be, I had. Marly let her tag along once in awhile, when we could get a ride or a drink off of her. I didn’t see the harm; I felt so sorry for her. She had nobody—not even her mom anymore.

“
Sorry,” Marly said, eyes drifting to the six-pack, “We were just leaving.”

Sasha looked between us, understanding dawning—she had genuinely thought herself invited.
“You don’t look like you’re going anywhere,” Sasha said, pulling out a sweating, wet bottle.

Marly circled in tight, grabbed me by the back of the head. I didn’t realize what she was doing until her lips were on mine and then it was too late. She pressed her mouth to mine, her lips hitting my exposed teeth, then pulled away and grabbed one of Sasha’s wine coolers and cracked it open. I stood staring at Marly wanting to ask
“What was that?”

Sasha shook her head and grasped a lone bottle to herself as though it could save her. Before she walked away, she turned over her shoulder and said, so low we could have missed it if we hadn’t been listening,
“You think she actually cares about you.”

“
Marly!” I said, once Sasha was gone. “Why are you always so mean to her? And what was with that kiss?”

Marly’s voice was cold gravel.
“Don’t feel sorry for her, Grace. She looks pitiful, but she’s a snake. As for the kiss…” She looked at me with a quick stab of the eyes, then away. “I guess that was my version of pissing on a tree and calling it mine.”

Sasha-of-the-Now coughs, pulls back, and the booze on her breath assaults me. She stumbles away from me with a light,
“Shit, Grace, watch out,” and then she’s off so fast I don’t have a chance to ask her if she saw it too, the movie that just played out in my mind. I know that’s ridiculous, but they are so real I want to know I’m not alone.

Sasha
’s avoided me in town all these years since the fire, and sometimes I want to apologize to her, but I don’t know for what exactly: for Marly’s behavior? For something I did? She’d already taken Marly’s hint by the time of the fire and stopped trying to hang out with us. And yet, at least
she
sent me a get-well card.

Suddenly I don
’t feel like walking anymore. It seems absurd, considering Marly’s long silence, that I should want so much to see her again. Yet I can’t help but wonder: if bits of my memory are still housed in people like Sasha Lerner, what parts of me does Marly still hold?

Chapter Three

Saturday

“
I’m sorry to make us late,” Adam says.

I get into his car with a swell of elation that he is here, that I don
’t have to do this alone. I pull in my stiff, right leg with my hand. My limp is another thing the doctors have told me isn’t real. There is nothing physically wrong with my leg, save for the patchwork scars where skin was removed from it for grafts. If we’d had better insurance I could have been sent to one of those fancy, plastic-surgery heavy Southern California burn centers, maybe added a little spa therapy into the mix, but what I got at San Francisco General kept me alive, left me with thumbs—no matter how ugly—and I’m grateful for what I got. People have suggested over the years that “plastic surgery has come a long way” and “you’d be amazed what one more surgery can accomplish.” As though going under the knife again, only to resurface as someone I still don’t recognize, would be a lark.

“
Can’t say I’m ever in a hurry to get to a funeral,” Adam says. He isn’t smiling like usual.

My stomach undulates pleasantly that we
’re going out together, even though being in public with him means weathering a few more second glances than usual.

The little bungalow house Ma and I live in is the smallest on our street, surrounded by thick pines and dense bushes; I always feel like I
’m emerging from some animal’s lair. “I could have taken a cab,” I say.

Adam grins, revealing what he likes to keep hidden: one of his top teeth crosses jaggedly over the other, like a gawky boy who
’s going to need braces. “What aren’t you telling me? Who
is
this friend? Is your past more checkered than I realized?”

“
Please,” I say, leaning back and closing my eyes. “If we’re going to talk checkered pasts let’s talk about that brassy girlfriend of yours a few years back. The cougar who smacked her gum when she talked…”

“
Fran? She was only a year older.” It could be the light, but when I glance at him, he appears to be blushing.

We roll down
Main Street, a small crowd pushing into The Sleeping Lady for music. My parents hung out there before my accident. One of Drake’s Bay’s eternal old hippies, with a long gray ponytail, always dressed in painters’ whites, dashes across the street, thinking he can make it. Adam slams on the brakes and I am thrown against my seatbelt.

Adam flings his arm out, bumping my collar bones, his fingers grazing my right shoulder. Suddenly my chest is hot, and an aura of light radiates like a migraine coming on. Worse, I see him in that flash of contact: he is thirteen years younger, holding a pair of metal scissors to my face, gauze and flesh merged together, cutting me free of my cocoon after a week
’s healing.

The car is already in motion when I emerge from the vision, my heart beating at a runner
’s pace that my body can no longer match.

“
I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he’s whispering. “It was a reflex. My sister used to do that to me when she drove.”

I rub my clavicles and look away.
“No, I’m sorry. I wish I wasn’t….” It doesn’t matter how often it happens, I always feel mortified by my body’s betrayal, reminded of a kid named Lance that Marly and I went to school with, who once had a seizure in the middle of History and woke up in a puddle of his own urine.

Adam
’s starting to protest that I shouldn’t say such things when I realize we are about to miss the street the church is on: “Oh, turn right here!”

Anthem is a Unitarian church, and though I don
’t know much about religion, I do remember that Marly’s grandmother called herself a “spiritual pilgrim” though she didn’t attend church. I remember because I felt that Ma could use a dose of that—though in Ma’s version it would probably involve sending all her extra money to big-haired TV evangelists. In contrast, Mrs. Donovan often went on Buddhist retreats and women’s goddess weekends that made Marly and me laugh until we thought we’d pee our pants, imagining a bunch of grown women running naked through the desert, painted in mud.

“
Damn it, there’s no close parking,” Adam mutters after we’ve circled the church several times. “Let me just drop you at the curb, Grace. I don’t want to make you hike from several blocks up.”

Nobody
’s walking in, so I know the funeral has already started. My knees feel jittery at the thought of going in alone, but then, I reason, this whole effort is about mustering courage.

I nod, pulling the strands of my longest, most full-coverage wig around my face as he drops me at the curb. At least finding something to wear was not a problem; most of my clothing is black.

I stand outside the church, hand poised to push open the door.
What will she think when she sees my face? Will I terrify her?
There’s a moment of dark pleasure at the thought, payback for her abandonment, but it’s replaced by something else, something older: the urge for her approval, a leech of a feeling I wish I could shake off.

I can
’t recall the moments leading up to my accident very well, and almost nothing afterwards until I was in the ambulance. The times that someone has mustered the nerve to ask me what happened, I’ve envisioned a row of candles multiplying, surrounding Marly and me like dominoes lined up for miles. Hypnotically, fire leans tenderly in, leaps from fabric to flesh, and burns every part of me in its reach. There is only one spot above my belly that it didn’t lick like a rough puppy—a large oval of unscathed skin below my right eye, cheek and half of my lips. Turn me one way, tuck my ruined brow under a swoop of wig, cover my chin with my fingers and you might think, “What a lovely girl,” as long as the lights are low. The lower half of me is a tithing ground where I offered every available scrap of virgin skin to reconstruct a version of my face that nobody recognizes. Least of all, me. Marly, however, I’m told, barely suffered a scorched hair.

It
’s been thirteen years since I last saw Marly, since I moved with arrogant ease in my teenaged limbs, thinking I had it so rough. My real self has been sleeping inside me, in my very cells, this whole time, like all I had to do was click ruby slippers or turn my ring three times and Marly would appear, and life would start again. But I didn’t conjure her; her dead grandmother did.

My pulse is like an engine revving. The sweet-acrid scent of Marly
’s old AquaNet is suddenly in my nose, though I know it isn’t possible. I press my hand to the cool wood door and push, moving slowly to attract as little attention as possible.

The church is small. Thankfully, the mourners have just burst into loud applause for whomever has concluded speaking—most likely one of Mrs. Donovan
’s students from when she taught high school English. Photographs of her looking regal and intelligent are projected onto a screen on the stage, massive bouquets of flowers heaped on either side. The photos all show her smiling, draped in her favorite shawls, hair down—she never really looked like an old woman.

The pews are packed—no way I
’m going to shove myself into an already crowded row, so I stay in the shadow at the back of the last pew. A woman rises and ascends the dais to the stage. For a moment I think it’s Sonya, Marly’s mother, but this woman is too tall, too pretty.

When she clears her throat into the microphone and then laughs at how loud the sound is, I realize it
is
really Marly. She still has the sunny beauty I remember—as though she’s lit by a special light. Smooth, poreless skin that time hasn’t touched. Curves that flowered too early but now look exactly right on her tall frame. Blonde hair that doesn’t need highlights. Hers is a Midwestern beauty, winner of pageants and a poster girl for milk and eggs, as though she might smell like wheat fields and fresh air.

“
I’m terrible at this kind of thing,” she says right away, and a few titters lend support. “As many of you know, Oona Donovan, my grandmother, would sooner spend a Sunday morning nude sunbathing on Stinson Beach than listening to a sermon.”

Marly looks up from the papers in her hand and out at the audience. A thrill of anxiety rumbles through me. I will myself smaller, hugging closer to the wall.

“So when my aunt Helena insisted we have the service in a church, I almost asked her what she’d been smoking.” She raises her brow into a wicked point.
Oh my god, this IS the Marly I remember.

“
But then I thought about what Gram herself used to tell me, when things were dark in my life. And they were really, really dark more than a few times. Gram and I had a lot in common, and I spent many a weekend at her house, oftentimes with my best friend Grace.”

I swallow, feeling like I might choke. She
’s scanning the crowd, looking for me. The shadow is suddenly not big enough as I try to scrunch into it.

“
Gram said, ‘Honey, people believe all kinds of bullshit.’ Her words, I’m not being rude. ‘It really doesn’t matter what they believe—in Jesus or Buddha or drinking fermented yak butter—so long as they have a common group to believe with.’”

Cool air rushes in behind me, and I know it
’s Adam coming in, that his sudden entrance will draw Marly’s eye and there’s nowhere for me to go. Adam makes his way to my side, and Marly’s eyes follow him the whole way.

“
I think what Gram intended for me to take away,” she says, eyes sliding ever closer to me, “is that the only way we get through the crap of life is to somehow, through whatever means, believe we’re not alone. Well, Gram was one of a very small pool of people who gave me that sense of safety, of being loved that much. Now she’s gone and I’m afraid that I might not ever feel that way again.” A sliver of softness enters her voice.

Marly has been subtly looking at the person to the right of me, then Adam: now she stops and stares at me. Her breathing is loud and ragged.

“Grace fucking Jensen?” she says loudly into the microphone. The entire church of mourners turn to look with harsh glances. “Grace, I can’t believe it’s really you!” She drops the microphone and a man in a dark suit steps up to replace it as she leaves the stage.

Hundreds of pairs of eyes now stare at me as though I
’ve wrecked the funeral. I only realize I’m not breathing when Adam says, “Grace?” in an anxious voice and does something he has not done since I was a burned teen in a hospital bed—he grabs my arm, because my knees are buckling.

Where his hand grips me, I reel back at a sharp stinging pressure, blurry images flooding behind my eyelids, light-shapes that don
’t have time to become full images. A keening sound rings out in my ears, and then Marly is in front of me. I’m waiting for the recoil, but she doesn’t even flinch. She pulls me from Adam’s grasp only to envelope me in a tight hug so firm that for a moment all I feel is a strange relief. Then prickling heat clutches my torso and a wave of nausea passes through me. I pull away.

“
My skin,” I explain, pulling back, “hypersensitive.” And yet I can’t remember the last time I was clutched in someone’s embrace; I’m reluctant to let it go.

Adam frowns, mouth open in a horrified gape, as though he is responsible for what has just happened to me. Marly shakes her head the way you do when a grand coincidence reveals itself, though this reunion is the farthest thing from a coincidence, and bursts into tears. Then she laughs and dabs her eyes with a corner of her gauzy navy sleeve, leaving behind a streak of flesh-colored makeup on the fabric. Marly—vague figure of both bad dreams and the only really good memories I have, is really standing in front of me.

“Please tell me it’s you,” she says, “Tell me this is real.”

“
It’s me,” I say. But I can’t tell her it’s real. It doesn’t feel real—it feels disjointed and strange, like those times we smoked pot she scored off Gavin Green and my head felt detached from my body.

Marly looks prepared to launch into a soliloquy of apology but suddenly people are moving toward her from all sides. She must have been the final speaker—it would be like her to organize the world
’s shortest funeral—everyone is sweeping out of their pews. Frowning older ladies clutch at her arms, circling her, and in a moment we are separated.

“
Come to Gram’s house, in an hour,” she shouts over the bodies, and then she is absorbed into them like a drop of water into a sponge, as though she was never there at all.