Forged in Grace (4 page)

Chapter Four

I make it a point not to come this way. The sloping Y of the streets where Bolinas merges into Cascade inspires a feeling of vertigo, as though I am suddenly at the top of a hill on a bicycle without brakes. The road is still flanked by redwoods that I remember being half as tall.

Adam parks, and we stare up the column of stone stairs, the ivy robust and shiny after winter rains. A diffuse yellow light shines out from one room in the big house. I have not set foot here since the night my childhood burned to ash.

“Should I wait?” He frowns and glances up at the house as though it might be haunted. “Are you sure your friend is in there?”

“
If she can’t give me a ride, I’ll take a cab home,” I say.

“
Don’t be silly, Grace, call me. I’ll come back. I’m less than ten minutes away.”

“
I appreciate it.” I feel him wanting to say more, but the pull of the house is so strong I forgo politeness.

Once out of the car, I want to dash up the stone steps like I did years ago, but my body doesn
’t move with effortless ease. I pause halfway up the steps to wave to Adam, self-conscious of him watching my slow climb. Adam waves back at me and starts the engine, leaving me alone to face the final steps and the front door that feels like a barrier between me and the past. I knock as the sound of Adam’s car rattles off in the distance. There’s a deep moment of silence and then the clatter of dishes abandoned in the sink, followed by footsteps echoing along a wooden floor, and finally, at the top of the half-moon window, a dome of honey-blonde hair appears. Marly wrenches open the door, sniffles as though she’s been interrupted crying, and waves me in.

The air inside is thick with a mixture of cedar chips and dime-store perfumes; the latter, Marly and I once spent hours daubing along our bodies. The couches and chairs are still draped in bright, Mexican textiles and the walls are hung with colorful masks, frames, and mirrors—a riot of ripe fruit colors. Marly
’s grandmother had called herself a
bon vivante
, and now, my adult self finally understands.

“
It’s…exactly as I remember it,” I say. The click of the door behind me sounds final; there’s no turning back.

She sighs heavily.
“I know. I still get dizzy looking at it all. It’s getting sold or donated. It’s too much memory, or I’d take some of it back home with me.” She bites the cuticle of her thumb and then I can barely concentrate; what I wouldn’t give to have a thumb cuticle to bite. I force my hands deeper into the pockets of my sweatshirt.

“
Back home?” I ask.

“
Vegas.” She looks away, rolling her head on her neck as though working out a kink, but I wonder if she just doesn’t want to maintain eye contact. My own neck tingles with the urge to do the same.

“
Are you thirsty? Hungry? I can make us a drink. Wine? Vodka?”

“
Uh, whatever you’re having,” I say.

She flips open cabinets expertly, whipping out a tall clear bottle of vodka, brand new, which makes me sad, as though Oona Donovan was waiting all these years for visitors who never came. Marly splashes red juice pulled from the fridge into two glasses and then passes one to me, downing half of hers in a flash. I
’ve never liked hard liquor, but I take it anyway.

“
Was that your boyfriend?” She gestures toward the street. My own heart thumps a question.

“
My employer,” I say.
“
He was a resident at the burn center when I was first admitted. Gave me lots of moral support. Eventually gave me a job.” I realize she’s never met her grandmother’s doctor.

“
The burn center,” she says softly to herself, as though confirming it to be true. She finishes her drink, and I force myself to take a sip of mine—sharp and sweet—as though it can bolster me for all the things I want to ask her.

“
You left that message at Dr. Lieb’s office for me, didn’t you?” My voice is barely audible, and before she can answer, I ask the thing that’s been choking my heart all these years, like the items in one of Ma’s cluttered cabinets. “Why didn’t you contact me before this?”

She bites her lip, as if weighing versions of the truth. She was never really a liar, just a selective truth teller, a reframer of events.
“You know, Gram told me how every time she went in there you looked like you were waiting for something. She asked me several times if she could bring a message. But I just…what could I say?” Now her eyes find mine with their old openness and she bites the inner wall of her cheek, an old gesture I remember well. “You can’t believe I’ve ever stopped thinking about you all these years.” She opens her palms as if to offer me something tender and small cupped there. “You have no idea.”

No idea, no contact, no word
. “You didn’t even visit me in the hospital…”

Her shoulders tighten up.
“I wanted to!”

“
So why didn’t you?”

“
Your mother…” Her eyes rove past me, then land on me, sharp and direct. “She said, in her own way, that you’d rather I never show my fucking face again.”

Her words are a fist against my chest, stealing breath.
“I never said that! Ma told
me
your stepdad got the job earlier than expected, that your family moved away a week after the fire.” Her stepfather, Bryce was short and handsome in a young ruffian kind of way, and a decade younger than her mother. Marly always forbade me idolizing him. “Gross! He’s like my dad,” she’d say in a scandalized voice. I’d persist, to get a rise out of her.

“
What
?
” Marly rears back as if slapped. “We moved
two months
later. This wasn’t like her turning me away at your hospital bed, Grace. Your mother called me, the very next day after the fire, and told me that if I ever came near you again, she’d file a restraining order. After our near-arrest, I guess I can’t blame her. But she should have told you the truth.”

My skin seems to be vibrating in her presence, heat radiating off me despite the cool February weather. The betrayed look in her eyes sends a thunder of guilt through me, even though my mother, not me, is responsible for it. I know better, but I step forward and take her hand. First comes pain, sharp and blade-like, followed by an image—the night of our
“near-arrest.”
Marly’s hand steady as she drags red lipstick across my lips, her fingers firm on my cheek. Sasha skulking in the corner. Drinks in our hands, shots of stinging liquid. A wave of giddiness, the world soon undulating. Marly pulling me to her, dancing against me, all eyes on her. And then our sudden escape, rushing after two strangers into the night, with only the slightest thought of leaving Sasha behind.

I break contact from Marly, and both of us gasp, or maybe she just coughed, it
’s hard to tell what’s in my head, what is real.

Marly sighs, then says,
“When I came by your house Friday, to tell you about the service, to see if you would speak to me, your mother said that your feelings toward me hadn’t changed. It’s cruel of her to tell you I came if she doesn’t want you to see me.”

I press my index fingers into my temples, my jaw tight, a sick twisting working through me from belly to throat.
Why would Ma lie to me?
Instead of voicing this question out loud, I simply say, “My mother doesn’t know I’m here now.”

Marly grins, like we
’re colluding, as if we’re teens again. “It’s good to have secrets from your mother, trust me. Look, I just figured she can’t get over the past. I’m the old bad influence, back in town. She wouldn’t even let me into the house; made me stand on the stoop like a salesman.”

Suddenly the stack of magazines in the foyer makes sense, why it had shifted to near-toppling when I
’m always so careful coming in. I can picture Ma at the door, flustered, facing off with a grown version of Marly, Wild Girl, the last person to ever see me as I was before the accident.

We lapse into a loaded silence and then Marly jumps up, taps me lightly on the shoulder. Her fourteen-year-old self rises like steam in my mind, in her favorite black baby doll dress with the velvet bodice and neon green tights, flopped onto my bed clutching a magazine cut-out of Johnny Depp to her chest.
I’d let him do whatever he wanted to me.
Behind her, there’s an image of me, all gawky knees and freckles.

How I
’ve missed her.

Marly begins to putter around the living room, pointlessly tidying what I know will all be packed up anyway.

“Where’s your mom?” I ask.

She raises her head sharply, eyes hard.
“Didn’t come to her own mother’s funeral, Grace. Would have hired strangers to pack this all up, can you believe that?” Tears hover at the rims of her eyes.

“
So you’re still not close?” I pick up a long orange and yellow scarf, finger its softness. It is all I can do to keep from grabbing her to me, hugging her.

Marly laughs, almost a bark, then gazes at me with such direct eye contact I look away, at the scuffed toes of my black boots. I want to ask her how she can do that: take me in without cringing.

“So you moved to
Vegas two months after the—” I can’t say “the fire.”

She plumps a couch pillow and then sits on it, exhaling as though she
’s suddenly exhausted. “No, we moved to Seattle first, for Bryce’s job. I hightailed it to Vegas when I was eighteen. I actually slept in my car on the night before my birthday, a kind of ‘fuck you’ to the folks. What was my mom going to do about it?”

I want her to ask me about the hospital, about my recovery, but she doesn
’t. And beyond that, I realize, there’s nothing to ask me. I’ve done so little, my whole life confined to a radius of less than two miles. My face feels tight and hot. I press my hands to my cheeks. “God I don’t think—”

“
What?” she demands, eyes flitting to my disfigured thumbs, twice the size of normal ones, then away again.

“
It’s nothing…”
Look at you.
Didn’t everyone always look at you?

I
’d always wanted to be beautiful like her, from the age of seven. When our friendship blossomed over hopscotch, I was all knobs and angles and she was confidence embodied in an eye-bursting package. I’m ashamed to realize that nothing has changed.

“
You’re still my Grace,” she says, a sad smile forming before she pulls a cigarette out of her pocket and lights it. The smoke smells oddly good, but tickles my throat, gives me an instant cough. She frowns at the cigarette as though it has done something unexpected. “Shit. Come outside?”

I follow her through the long hallway past the kitchen, now full of open boxes. Pans lie side by side with rusty old cookie cutters, and fistfuls of silverware spill out of tall mugs. I have a strange urge to gather these things, caress them as though they are parts of Oona Donovan, whose house I longed to escape to as a kid—a house of flow and openness, color and joy, unlike the dank nest of clutter that I call home.

We ascend a staircase to the second floor deck, overhung by two tall eucalyptus trees whose long, scythe-shaped leaves give off fragrant menthol. The wood of the deck is faded and pocked. As it creaks and groans beneath us, I suffer a moment’s anxiety at how sturdy the whole contraption is.

Marly stands, her back to me, blowing smoke rings into the distance.
“I loved it here.”

“
Me too,” I say. “Remember when your gram let us wear her old vintage dresses if we’d read Shakespeare scenes to her?”

Marly claps a hand to her mouth, smiling, an eyebrow—dyed dark, I see—rises to a delighted arch. She lifts a hand theatrically into the air.
“The quality of mercy is not strain’d/ It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven/Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest/ It blesseth him that gives and him that takes…”

“
Wow, that’s impressive. I don’t remember any of it.”

Any of it. For a second, I
’m ready to ask her:
what do you remember of that night
, but Marly’s lips veer into a pout, a cloud shading her face, like she’s had a terrible thought.