Forged in Grace (7 page)

“
So the baby isn’t his?”

“
Oh it is,” she says, peering into her bedroom. “But it doesn’t give him claim to my life.”

Her logic defies me.
“Okay, but this is creepy. Aren’t you afraid?”

She sighs, squinting at the living room as though deciding what to set right first.
“It takes more than tipping over my furniture to scare me.”

“
We should call the police.”

Marly shakes her head with a sigh.
“Police don’t make things better, Grace. Especially when a guy’s got a temper—calling the cops on him just aggravates things. Anyway, don’t sweat it okay? I’ve got a deadbolt on the inside.”

After we
’ve done a thorough inspection of the apartment and are sure it’s empty, Marly cracks open the freezer and withdraws a tall bottle of vodka and pours it into two clean, white mugs sitting in the dish drainer. Then she bends down and sets the kitchen table chairs back on their feet.

I sit primly staring at the cup of vodka, the scent conjuring the film developing chemicals my father once kept in the garage.
“Well,” I say, as much to myself as to her, “Life is already more interesting here than in Drake’s Bay.”

“
Oh yeah.” Marly smiles and knocks back her drink.

“
You think you should be drinking?” I ask. Not the actions of someone with the intent to keep a baby.

She looks at her glass with raised eyebrows, as though surprised to find alcohol in it.
“No, I should not be drinking. Or smoking. What I should be doing is figuring out what I’m going to do about the unexpected spawn, but…”

She stops her explanation and stands up, stretching out her lower back.
“I have an addictive personality, or something. Perils of life—and work—in a town bent on hedonism. You’re going to love Beneath the Waves,” she says quickly. “My mother thinks I’m a stripper, or a hooker, which is so like her, never giving me any credit. But wait until you see it, the illusion is pretty spectacular. I could have had a million waitress jobs, working in casinos or hotels, but this is something special.”

“
It has to beat working at a doctor’s office,” I say, though I feel a rush of regret for leaving Adam to his blood drive without me. He’d tried so hard to hide his disappointment by looking busy, but he couldn’t hide the frown, the heaviness that weighted down his voice. Whether he meant to or not, we forged a bond from that first day thirteen years ago when he came to my hospital bed with gentle derisions of the nasty nurses, making me feel as though I was still the same old Grace, no matter who I see in the mirror now.

Chapter Seven

That night we head out to the casino at the Bellagio, which, like many of the hotels and casinos on The Strip, stands tall and looming with a Roman sort of imposition—the setting for a spectacle or an alternate version of reality. Inside it’s like I’ve stepped into a child’s carnival brought to life—art and whimsy merging into objects that are either larger or smaller than they should be in real life: a gigantic poppy flower that towers over us, hot air balloons fit to carry Thumbelina off. It’s mesmerizing and dreamlike in the best of ways, and the air smells of the perfect marriage of food and perfume.

Marly was right about one thing: nobody looks twice at me in the neon-light of the casino, which is bustling with high-dressed women bearing spray-tans and heels one can only teeter in. I
’m wearing the only dress I have that is not an effort at full-body concealment—eggplant colored rayon that drops to my ankles in a full skirt, cinched at the waist with a patent leather black belt. Knee-high, black going-out boots that I rarely go out in. It’s a far cry from the form-fitting numbers on most of the women we see around us, and even from the short, pale pink flapper style dress Marly’s wearing that makes her look Amazonian, but it accentuates the parts of me that Ma is always telling me to play up—my small waist and long torso.

“
The first time I played slots at a casino,” Marly says, standing as close to me as she can get without taking my arm, “I blew three hundred dollars in an hour, half of what I brought with me.”

The rows of slots look like tiny glittering robots, but nothing that would cause me to lose time or money.
“Is it really that addictive?”

She nods.
“Be careful.” She taps my arm and smiles. Beneath that tiny tap blooms another Marly—eyes too bright with liquor stolen from her parents’ cabinet.
Just a taste, Grace.
“But not too careful.”

Marly orders herself a Shirley Temple but encourages me to have a real drink.
“It helps you sink into the experience,” she says, handing me the cocktail. One gin and tonic morphs into two. I am surprised to find I am not, in fact, immune to the anticipation that comes just before pushing the slot button. Is this frizz of possibility what Ma feels at night when she orders from the shopping channels, the promise of a shiny new bauble compressing the truth of the disorder that sits layered around her like the rings of ancient trees?

In the dark of the casino, surrounded by people immersed in their own private gambling, I feel a sudden urge to join them, to walk amongst them and run my hands along their shoulders, touch the seams of their shiny dresses and smooth, silk shirts. I
’m confident that from a distance, with my bad side pointed away from the machines and the rest of my face obscured by my wig, I look like a perfectly ordinary girl who could get away with such a thing.

Because I should, I try a slot, feel the electric sense of possibility when I drop in my coins, and a rush of elation when the numbers spin. It
’s only after I’ve played nearly all my change that I realize I have, indeed, become caught up in the hunger to win something. Marly flits in and away, coming and going, as she has friends all over the casino.

“
Hey,” she says in a slurry whisper some hours later, “that guy is looking at you.” She points to the poker table where a man does appear to be looking my way.

“
He’s been staring at you every time I’ve come over here,” Marly insists. “He’s checking you out.” A nearly metallic burst of alcohol exudes from her, and her words have an inebriated slither. In her comings and goings over the past hour, she’s been drinking, and heavily.

Words, for a moment, elude me. I
’m upset that she’s
drunk
—and also insulted by her gleeful tone.

“
Marly, even if there was a
chance
he’s looking at me because he finds me remotely attractive, what should I do, go take him back to a hotel room somewhere?”

Marly purses her lips and folds her arms.
“You’re not being open-minded,” she says.

Her words poke something old and tender, and my tongue is loosened by the liquor.
“Okay, if we’re going to call things like they are, you should cool it with the drinking. Or study the effects of nicotine and alcohol on a fetus.”

Her glazed eyes seem to flash fire, though I know it
’s only the reflection of the casino lights. “Oh thanks very much Nurse Jensen. I’m the one who wakes up every morning feeling like I swallowed shit, who has to pee every five minutes. I don’t need to be lectured by you. There are lots of different ways of being in pain, Honey. And trust me when I tell you that yours is not the worst.”

The alcohol makes me feel underwater, numb to the outrage just under my skin. I stand there gawking as Marly storms away from me. Not six hours in Las Vegas and we
’ve already had our first fight?

My ears suddenly feel assaulted by a million pings and beeps, an ever-growing drone of conversation that swells and swells around me. My breath comes in gasps, and my chest feels heavy. A large man in a cowboy hat roughly brushes past me, his body scraping my side with a rush of pain and light. He spins me into the orbit of three young women who put out their hands defensively, their fingers like hot pokers repelling me. I try to murmur apologies but my tongue is glued to my mouth. My purse feels like a bowling ball in my hand and I reach for the nearest thing to lean on—a tall potted tree. It gives way beneath my weight and the next thing I know I am slumped on the floor, bruising my hip and back. I sit there, mortified, an object on display that pull the slavering gazes of gamblers my way for a moment. I want to pull something over my head. But before a well-meaning security guard can help me, Marly is suddenly there again, eyes wide in something like horror, I hope, at her own behavior.

“Oh Gracie, I am so sorry!”

She puts her hand out but I wave her away and help myself up to standing, painfully.

“I behaved like a total cu—” she begins.

I wave at her to stop, then grip my purse more tightly to me.
“Let’s just get home. I’m exhausted.”

“
Of course.” She nods vigorously. She seems to have sobered up, or maybe I was imagining she was drunk—I don’t want to dwell on it. The idea that she could have said those things to me while sober is worse.

Marly drives us home after agreeing to my lay person
’s sobriety test—walking a straight line and reciting the alphabet backwards. I almost forget everything that happened as we hit The Strip now, the gin in my veins making me feel as though I’m floating. The first thing that registers is light, neon and…moving. It pulses, shimmers, glows from the mammoth buildings like the world’s biggest candy jar full of colored light, announcing shows and services, girls and adventure.

“
It’s like a bizarre dream full of symbols that add up to a meaning I should be able to understand,” I say, almost to myself.

“
Mmm-hmm,” Marly sounds deep in thought herself.

Most of our ride back to the apartment is silent. We both wince getting out of the car, though for different reasons—the parking garage smells like urine and garbage, assaulting my nose after the strangely perfumed scent of the casino.

“All kinds of shit shifts in your body when you’re preg—”

A man is suddenly standing behind Marly, taller than her. I scream and he darts forward, grabs me sharply. Pain disproportionate to his grasp assaults me, as though someone is jabbing me with a sharp stick.
“Don’t fuck with me!” he says in a high, strained voice, and pushes me. Suddenly I am face-down on the hard cement of the parking garage. Terror flares an urgent pressure to my bladder. Marly’s scream sounds more angry than afraid, but it is soon muffled, as though behind a hand.
I hope she bites him!

Marly shrieks,
“The baby’s yours, okay? It’s yours!”

I hear fists or feet making contact with flesh, a guttural cry that is his and then his echoing retreat, footsteps slapping concrete. In the tepid amber light of the garage Marly looks down at me in a daze of blood and tears. The tears look painful as they squeeze out the ravines between her swollen eye, down the slope of her misshapen, probably broken nose, and flow into the turgid river of blood that forms a gelatinous line down her neck. Fingertip-sized red marks bloom on her arms. Her hands protectively cradle her belly.

“We should go to the ER,” I say, sounding shrill and breathy.

“
No!” The word sounds painful; the top of her lip is split. I remember the pain and effort of trying to talk through my own burned lips.

“
At the very least, the police should photograph you. This is…this is a crime, Marly. You can’t let him treat you like this and get away with it!”

Marly only sobs harder at this.
“No hospital. No police.”

“
Then let’s get upstairs.” I can always call emergency if I have to, I reason.

She nods.
“I just feel so stupid.”

I am never more thankful for the elevator in the garage.

“Are there security cameras?” I ask, craning around for some.

Marly shakes her head.
“Been broken for ages. Cheap fucking place.”

I get myself up to standing without her help, still bruised from my fall at the casino. She wobbles as she walks, one shoe on, the other dangling from her finger, its heel broken. We ride up to our floor in the silence, neither of us looking into the mirrored walls. She doesn
’t ask me for help, but I guide her nonetheless into bed, and fetch absurdly inadequate supplies: wash cloths (all unfortunately white), ice, Neosporin, and a bowl of lukewarm water. Wiping blood off her face and neck, the water in the bowl turns a disturbing crimson. She winces each time the cloth nears her nose.

Without much thought, almost in a trance, my hands move toward her belly; I want to reassure the baby inside that someone is looking out for it. When my hands make contact with Marly
’s skin, a sizzle that is at first as painful as always, becomes more like a vibration, as if I’ve laid my hands on the hood of a running car. At first, I chalk it up to the complex biology of pregnancy—all that extra blood and fluid, but rather than my usual urge to pull away, my hands want to keep moving, like a command ending directly in my finger tips. The images ripple, too fast to fully understand: the beat of feet on cement; a glinting sharp steel edge; a foot kicking a gray metal door, a smell of sulfur and then just a dark gray watery surface. My hands move, smoothing across her belly in soft strokes, then up toward her face. When I cup her cheeks and nose in my palms she sighs and melts into relaxation.

My hands continue down the sides of her ribcage, following this trail of energy that is serpent-like in its movement. It feels…other than me, though familiar, is the only way I can explain it to myself. She sighs, closes her eyes, and her heartbeat steadies, so I keep it up, as though pulled by an invisible cord, no idea how much time passes. Eventually though, fatigue rushes at me like a sudden tunnel and I collapse inside it, too tired to bother going to my own room.

Marly’s shriek of alarm wakes me. I am alone in her bed, still in my clothes. On her night table sits the bowl I cleaned her face with, the bloody water now a murky brown. Marly shrieks again, the sound coming from the bathroom. My leap is so fast that the skin of my right leg stretches painfully in indignation. In the bathroom she is turned sideways inspecting herself in the mirror.