Forged in Grace (30 page)

“
I’m so sorry, Grace,” he says, and I know he means it.

III 

Chapter Twenty-Nine

It’s only as I’m leaving my father’s house that I realize I am going back to Las Vegas. There are too many threads unfinished.

From the airport I go straight to Marly
’s work, since I don’t know if I can stand the emptiness of her apartment. Only one mermaid is swimming in the cool aquamarine tank when I arrive. Marly told me they never leave it empty; the illusion must never be broken, even if there are no customers. I stand for a moment regarding the lone woman who swims with the strength of an athlete, dragging her sequin-studded tail, clutching the seaweed ropes to thrust herself through the tank. There’s no sign of Marly, so she must be up in the office buried in paperwork, staying off her ankles, which swell with the heat.

Sabrina, however, is tending bar. She sees me and waves, but something dark gathers in her eyes.
“Grace, oh it’s good you’re here. Marly was worried you weren’t coming back. And frankly, I was a little worried, too.”

“
Why? Is it her health? Early contractions?” My pulse picks up.

Sabrina sets down a beer stein.
“Despite how tough she can seem, she’s kind of…easy to influence. I think especially when it comes to guys.” She looks away from me, as though checking who might be listening. “You should talk to her. She’s running payroll upstairs.”

I make my way past the bathrooms, through a seashell curtain and up the back stairs to the office. The door is shut and I experience a
déjà-vu
of the moment I came to find her at her grandmother’s funeral months ago. A spiky anxiety climbs my spine as I knock.

“
C’m in,” she calls out, exhaling a harried sigh.

I push inside. She
’s sitting on the floor, with a big pillow propped up behind her, papers in a pile between her outstretched knees. She’s partially in her seaweed green uniform—tight tank top stretched over her big belly, shimmery net shawl around her shoulders, though she’s wearing black sweat pants and flip-flops. Her hair is greasy, however, lank and piled in a mess at the top of her head, strands falling out in all directions. Dark circles rim her eyes, and though she quickly tries to hide it under her shawl, there are four fingertip shaped bruises up her left arm.

“
What happened to you?”
I was only gone four days
!

I
’m expecting defense, denial, protestations, but instead, Marly pushes herself off the ground, papers fluttering off her lap and lunges into a hug. I’m caught off guard, and stumble backwards into the door, bruising my back.

“
Sorry,” she cries when I squeal my discomfort. “I really missed you. I was afraid I’d really lost you forever this time.”

“
Okay, okay. Just sit down. It’s okay.”

Marly shakes her head.
“No, it’s not okay. It’s not.” She clutches her arms and rocks backwards on her feet and I have to fight the urge to do the same thing. “I really thought you wouldn’t come back.” Her voice is so small and childlike I want to lay her head in my lap.

“
Honey,” I hear myself soothing. Oh these old familiar words. “What happened? Tell me.”She looks down at her feet, and wiggles her swollen toes. “Loser wants to fight for custody of the baby when she’s born. He won’t give me a divorce if I don’t agree to that. I just wanted to talk to him.”

“
Marly, you went to him by yourself?”

She unconsciously strokes her bruises.
“It was a public location. I thought he’d want to talk. I told him I never had any intention of pressing charges for the incident in the garage.”

“
Why’d you tell him that? Don’t give him anything!” I understand it’s too late, that she’s already done the things she’s talking about, but scolding her is only thing that keeps me from feeling the scrape of guilt for leaving.

“
He knows about Drew. I think he’s been following me.”

“
I think the word for that is ‘stalking.’” I may have no personal experience with relationships, but I’ve watched enough episodes of
Oprah
over Ma’s shoulder. “So, what did he do to you?”

She bites her bottom lip and hugs herself.
“He just has this way of talking, you know, coercive and, and I feel like I have to listen. So he wanted to walk, and at first I wouldn’t so he grabbed my arm, and squeezed, and I just, I didn’t want to make a scene. That’s what Sonya taught me so well: don’t make a fucking scene.” She’s breathing too fast. “So I walked with him, and the next thing I know he’s found some alley and he backs me up against the wall and he starts jabbing his finger into my chest, right over my heart, really hard, yelling, and calling me a whore, and telling me that he will do whatever it takes to get the baby from me if I don’t work with him. He has friends all over Vegas, he says, who will do whatever he needs them to do.”

She
’s hiccupping and crying now.

A tar-like energy is slithering through my veins, twisting out my limbs. I want to do this man harm. My fingers feel hot. She
’s panting and I’m afraid if I don’t calm her down she’ll go into early labor.

“
Grace, you know what? I need to breathe. I can’t breathe in this office with its…choking walls!” She leans past me, shoves the door open. “Come with me for a drive, please?”

“
Are you okay to drive?” I ask once we’re outside, though she’s already breathing slower. We climb into her car, and soon enough the desert unspools like a bride’s train behind us. Though I know it’s absurd, I think of mob movies I’ve seen where long drives lead to a desolate location, and a bullet in the back of the head.

Marly is wedged tightly into her seat, belly almost pressed into the steering wheel, seatbelt cutting a painful-looking path between her breasts.

“You must think me weak, an idiot, just like that broken, fucked up girl you had to rescue all the time, Grace. I don’t know why you came back.” She’s driving a little fast, and now I’m wondering if I’ve made a mistake. “Listen to me, I didn’t even ask about your mother,” she says, voice almost sing-song.

“
I couldn’t heal her. It didn’t work.”
What if I’ve used up my healing potential? What if all I’m capable of now is harm?

Marly stares at the windshield as though it is her duty not to turn away from it, though I know she is afraid to look at me.
“It’s my fault. I stressed you out.” Then her hand smacks my cheek so fast it’s as though I imagined it. “I’m sorry, Grace. I don’t know what’s wrong with me lately.” She swerves around something in the road I can’t see, and am not entirely sure is even there.

My pulse is hammering in the joints of my jaw, clenched shut.
“Pull over.”

“
What?”

“
You need to stop driving. You’re freaking me out. Pull over. Let’s just stop.”

“
I’m fine. Driving is cathartic.”

Marly reaches out and touches my hand.
“Sorry I slapped you,” she says.

The layers of all that has happened slam into me. I
’ve lived so long without my father, the idea that he might be back in my life now is as overwhelming as the potential loss of Ma. Confusing waves of pain ache and sting, leaving my chest with the hollow, empty feeling I used to get once I was released from my pressure garments for a little while.

“
Just slow a little, okay?” Marly takes the speed down a notch, just enough to stop my pulse from hammering. A thought I’ve long held but never asked is out of my mouth before I can think better of it. “How did you lose your father?”

She wipes sweat off her brow.
“Aneurism,” she says “Thirty-two years old, handsome, strong, in perfect health. And blammo—dead in minutes.”

“
Oh no. That’s awful.”

“
He was pushing me in a jogging stroller. He’d gotten on some healthy jag after my mother nagged him about his weight.” She barks a laugh. “He’d gone off the beaten path—out in the Cascades, where there are all these man-trampled trails that aren’t officially trails. It took hours for another jogger to find him and by then I’d worked my way free of the stroller straps. I was just slumped on top of him, wailing.”

“
Oh Marly.”
I can’t even imagine
.

“
Bryce manipulated me with that info. Told me if I didn’t listen to him, didn’t do what he said, I’d die just like my father.” She pushes in the cigarette lighter as though she’s going to have one. “I’ve spent pretty much every day of my life waiting for the same thing to happen to me.”

I snap a look at her.
“You have? You never told me any of this.”

“
You never asked. There are a lot of things you never asked, Grace.” Marly pulls herself upright, as though I’ve said something offensive. “That night in the tree house, do you know that I was trying to talk to you about something important?”

It feels as if all the air of the desert has gone unnaturally still.

“I knew that you kissed him.” Her voice is a needle.

Nausea instantly overtakes me.
That kiss.
What was that kiss?
I’d always thought it was confirmation that I was desirable, that I was like Marly.

She clutches her belly with one arm.
“I waited for you to tell me about it. I’d seen him do it when I was coming up the stairs, and I was ready to punch him, tear him off you. But you never said a word to me. You didn’t say anything, and so I knew.”

“
Knew what?” I manage.

Marly turns her head slowly and when she looks at me, her eyes are glassy and sharp.
“I knew that you liked it.”

“
I was fifteen,” I whisper, as if it is an apology.

“
I was ten,” she says. “When he started.”

Understanding emerges with a sickening lurch, as though I
’ve always known: his leering smiles, the way he was always close enough to touch an exposed body part, so quick it could hardly be suspect—hands brushing thighs, shoulders, butt. That kiss—I thought of it as a moment of desirability but it was an expression of perversion. I thought she hated him because he wasn’t her dad, because he was too young for her mother. “Oh god,” is all I can manage to say. Then, “I’m so sorry, Marly. Did you tell anyone?”
Why not me?

“
My mother. Big mistake.” Marly looks away and the dropped eye contact comes as a relief. “I was sent to Langley Porter, the mental hospital, Grace, less than a week after you were burned.” Her voice is unnervingly calm. “She thought I was acting out, and she’s always accused me of punishing her for my father’s death.”

“
I had no idea,” I say.
I should have asked more questions.
Maybe I didn’t want to know.

“
Everything is Bryce’s fault. If not for him, we wouldn’t have been in that fucking tree house with all those goddamn candles, and none of the rest would have happened. I hoped that’s what my mom was coming to tell me when she was here, that he was dead. That it was something awful, too, like he got painfully crushed in a car accident or was accidentally dismembered by chainsaw.”

A lone bird wheels in the sky for just a second outside the window of the car—something fierce and proud, like an eagle, though too far away too tell. I squint away from the ball of sun that sears my retina. When I look back at Marly she
’s a black outline against the bright desert day. A weighty grief pins me to my seat, mine and Marly’s mingling indistinguishably, as though we exchanged pieces of each other in the fire.