Forged in Grace (8 page)

“
Don’t look. It makes it hurt worse when you look.” I know exactly what it’s like to wake up totally changed from your former self. I can remember Adam as a young resident in training, holding a mirror tilted upward at a careful angle so that all I could see in it were the tiny pinhole dots of ceiling tiles—a galaxy of symmetry. Thirteen years before I raised that mirror with terror, bits coming into view as foreign as if I had stepped off the plane onto Mars. There was no
me
in this view, only raised, raw, red mounds of flesh. C
hewed, ruined, scourged, masticated, swollen, raw.

“
What did you do to me?” she says now in a tight, low voice.

Why didn’t I call 911 and make them take her to the emergency room? What kind of a friend am I?
“I’m so sorry Marly. I just didn’t want to fight you…”

Slowly she pivots toward me.

“That’s…not…possible,” I say when I see her.

No bruises. No swelling. No traces of blood. Her few chicken pox scars are gone and her skin is truly glowing. I am grateful to have so few hair follicles, for those remaining are all standing painfully on end. Marly walks toward me and I have the urge to back away, like she has been made undead.

“You healed me, Grace.” Marly’s eyes are wide and bright. They unnerve me.

“
That’s ridiculous.” My voice is a barely audible whisper. “That’s impossible.”

“
Grace, I’ve r
ead
about this type of thing. Marly runs her hands across her face. “I looked like Mike Tyson’s handiwork last night. There is a bowl of bloody water by my bedside, so you can’t tell me it wasn’t real.” She runs a finger down her smooth cheek. “You have a gift, Grace.” She sounds euphoric, like she is about to fall at my feet and kiss the hem of my skirt.

I
’m not saying it’s possible but…How? Why now?”

The top of her head seems to grow taller with the widening of her eyes.
“What do you mean ‘why now!’ Grace, you always…always saved my ass.” She bows her head, and I have a bright and unwelcome flash of memory:
Marly in a yellow dress, smeared with blood.
“You’ve never
tried
until now, have you?”

I stare at her, forming a protest.
Of course not! Touch is painful to me.
I close my eyes, rest my palms against my cheeks, and take a deep breath, wondering if I’ll feel that serpent-like energy again.

Marly circles her right wrist with the fingers of her left hand with a suddenly wistful expression.
“Oh,” she says softly. “It’s gone.”

“
What?”

She looks up at me with ocean-dark eyes.
“Oh…it’s stupid.”

“
Well now I want to know for sure.”

“
I had a scar from the fire.” She sounds afraid of what I’ll say.

“
I always wondered if you had any, if you were burned.” A laugh, slightly hysterical, wants to escape but I bite it back.

She keeps rubbing the skin, as though burnishing a piece of silver.
“It was a part of me I was used to. But it’s gone now.”

There
’s something more under the surface that I can’t read, but I’m so shaken by what’s happened I can’t begin to sort out her unspoken feelings, too.

I stand there for several minutes, breathing in and breathing out, trying to clear my mind. If I could, if I did remove Marly
’s scars, what could I do for my own body? I hold an image of my cheeks as they were before…smooth and freckled, my eyelashes long and reddish-blonde. I’d thought myself plain, especially in comparison to Marly. Now, I’d consider myself a supermodel to look that way again. Foolish as I feel, I place my hands on my face. After what must be ten minutes I feel something—the strain of holding my hands up to my face. My shoulders ache and I drop them with a sigh.

Marly looks at me, hopeful.

“Nothing.”

“
It was real,” she says, “what happened. You can do it again.”

Her certainty makes me uncomfortable. I want to put our feet back in the real world.
“
Whatever
happened, you do realize we have no proof now that
Loser
attacked you. There’s nothing to take to the police.”

Chapter Eight

Of course I know that the women swimming in serene circles in the blue-tinted water of the “mermaid grotto,” are not magical, but even so, I’m spellbound. They’re scantily clad in shiny, shell-shaped pasties and eerily realistic fish tails that move effortlessly through the water. They hold their breath for a stupendously long time, as they swirl and swoop, blow kisses and press their gleaming cleavage to the tank’s glass. They look real. They look capable of dragging a man underwater and enchanting him.

“
Is it hard to do?” I press my face to the tank. A short man cranes behind me on tiptoe to get a better look, but I’m not moving. The tank bottom is tiled in mosaic blue and greens, and all through the water, long green ropes sway and wave like algae. Tiny iridescent fake fish “swim” on clear wires through convincing coral displays, and little cave-like alcoves emanate colored light. A mermaid weaves in and out of this underwater grid, displaying her wares to the glass, wiggling her tail and torso suggestively, then grasps a rope of “algae” and swings herself up to catch a breath of air. The way she breathes is seamless: her head disappears into a silvery-gray “sky” that can’t be seen from the tank level.

“
That tail weighs ten pounds alone, and you have to seriously work your stomach muscles. While holding your breath and trying to look alluring,” Marly whispers.

“
They pay well for this?”

“
Well enough for the girls. I’m in charge of the team—scheduling, hiring, firing, payroll. So I make a good wage with health benefits. Tips make up for the rest.”

One of the mermaids winks at Marly, who chuckles.
“Fern—gotta watch out for that one. I think she’d like to parlay this gig into a topless affair if she has her way. It’s something in the Vegas air, I think. Makes exhibitionists out of us all.”

As if Marly needs any help in that department.

“What you can’t see is the ‘beach,’” Marly waves at a phantom landscape outside the tank. “There’s an area where mermaids go to ‘sun themselves’ and that’s where patrons can stick cash into little nets. But if you don’t work it down here, you aren’t going to get much up there.” Marly sighs and folds her arms. “Truthfully, there’s something beautiful about this. I love the illusion. Let me show you the outside area.”

Marly gently touches my arm to direct me through an in-door tunnel composed of transparent Plexiglas walls. At her touch, a bubble of memory expands in slow motion, offering a dizzying world of sound and color, a night that changed everything. As girls, when she wanted to convince me of something she always made physical contact—firm fingers finding the soft skin of my wrists, an arm encircling my waist in a collaborative huddle.
“
Trust me
,” whispered in a hush.

Subtly, I pull my hand back before memory can yawn open and pull me too deeply in. Live, silvery fish swim in artistic clusters over our heads, under our feet, and on either side of us separated only by these thin walls of plastic, an ocean womb. Then the tunnel spits us out into the bright February day, onto a fake seaside. The sound of waves hitting the shore is uncanny. If not for the chill in the air and the sight of pirate clad waiters, I could easily believe that we are at a real beach.

“Here, sit,” Marly points to a chaise lounge. “I’ll be right back.” A dark-haired young pirate comes to take my order—lemonade.

Marly reappears and makes her way to me at the same time that a petite strawberry-blonde with enormous dimples and wearing an aquamarine bikini and sarong comes bounding up. She looks like she
’s going to bounce right into Marly’s arms, but stops short, and Marly draws herself up taller, her body suddenly stiff.

“
I’m so glad you came back,” the woman says to Marly. “It’s been a total clam bake without you.”

Marly smiles.
“Grace, this is Sabrina, mermaid and barkeep. Sabrina, this is my best friend from childhood, Grace.”

To her credit, Sabrina makes only the briefest blink, as though adjusting her contacts, then puts out her hand. But I swear the thought running through her mind is something like:
Woah, what happened there?
“Nice to meet you.”

I fear I
’ll embarrass Marly if I explain why I don’t shake hands, so I take Sabrina’s hand in mine with a deep breath. My hand pulses and then I have a vivid feeling of irritation in my bladder. The quick way Sabrina drops my hand has nothing to do with disgust at my ruined thumbs, I can tell; I think she felt something pass between us. I exhale with such force that she stares at me. I don’t need to tell her she has a bladder infection; I can tell by the way she stands with legs crossed, that she already knows. I’m stunned into dumb silence for a minute and throw Marly a heavy glance, hoping she’ll see that I’ve felt something again. And this time, it’s almost like a diagnostic; no visuals, just a sure-fire feeling that this woman needs an antibiotic.

Marly raises an eyebrow, signal received, but plays it cool.

“There’s been so much dirt since you were gone.” Sabrina’s hands fly out like flowers unfurling. “Fern almost got arrested for going to a customer’s hotel room, but they couldn’t prove anything.” Marly’s eyebrows lift delicately, as if she is only feigning surprise. “Leila and Jane came out publicly as a couple, and Hank—” she turns to me and adds, “that’s the owner. He’s trying to get them to do a pseudo-lesbian number in the tank, and I think they’re filing a sexual harassment suit against him.”

Marly shakes her head.
“I was gone a week!”

“
Oh, and…” Sabrina looks at me as though unsure if she should say the next thing. “Your ex was by. He had one hell of an attitude.” Sabrina raises an eyebrow and shrugs.

Marly sighs, compresses her lips and nods slightly.
“Sorry about that.”

A ship
’s horn vibrates the air around us, making me jump. Sabrina says, “Sorry chicas, I’m on!” and dashes away with a lithe energy I envy.

“
As you can see, there are no secrets in this fish tank,” Marly wrinkles her nose in the direction of her mermaid coworkers on the beach. Their fishnets are already heavy with cash from men in Hawaiian shirts and khakis.

I shrug, suddenly feeling off-kilter, like I can
’t rely on gravity to hold me to the earth.

“
I get off in a few hours, so we can go do something fun. Maybe tomorrow you can come to work with me, not be at the mercy of cabs.”

Fun. That feels further away now than it did back in Drake
’s Bay. Marly is pregnant. She’s under attack by an unhinged ex, and I appear to have turned into a conduit of some kind. “What do you think that was the other night? What happened to us?”

Marly shrugs but her face softens and her eyes have the far-away glaze of someone caught up in a fantasy.
“I don’t know. Even if I did, it wouldn’t change how miraculous it was.”

Her certainty challenges me.
“I’m sure it was a fluke. We were tired.”

Marly chews on her lower lip, a swoop of hair obscuring her cheek, making her look like the girl I knew so well once.
“Grace, what about your family—maybe something happened to you as a kid. Didn’t your mom go to church for a while? Any faith healing sort of thing go on?”

“
We went to AA meetings, Marly. Lots of coffee and cookies, and the Lord’s Prayer, but definitely no faith healings.”

“
Well, have you ever had anything weird happen before?”

The words are hovering in my mouth.
How about thirteen years of weird. Thirteen years of pain without a source and visions without a cause?
Some part of me resists telling her.

“
Maybe,” is all I offer.

“
Maybe?”

I rub the spot between my eyes, feeling the halo of a headache coming on.
“After the fire. After recovering a little, I mean…they put me through all kinds of psychotherapy for my self-image, and on a ton of drugs but…there were, are, little things no one can explain.”

Her eyes gleam.
“Yeah, like what?”

“
Phantom pains. Visions, I guess, except they’re often vague, and not always… What does it matter?”

Marly squints, adjusts the iridescent green tank top of her out-of-water uniform.
“It matters because I’ve got an idea.”

I stare at her from under the brim of my hat.
“What idea?”

Marly tightens her ponytail.
“I’d like to be your manager, or handler, of sorts. Look, don’t think of it as exploiting you but directing your talent. People charge money for lamer shit, Grace.” Her hand grasps mine before I can think to step away.

Come on, Grace, they seem nice. Two tall, handsome guys beckoning us into a night of adventure—what kind of girl would turn down such an offer?

Almost a reflex, I step away from her, as though she is a wave I can keep from crashing on me, and she drops my hand. “I’m not a circus act, Marly! Whatever that was, it was a one time thing. We have no evidence I could repeat it.” Yet I recall how my body felt when I laid my hands on her—powerful, vivid, alive with energy, as though I was not contained or diminished but expansive, as big as the universe. “There’s no way that my hands are capable of doing more than making people uncomfortable.”

“
You gave me a look when you shook Sabrina’s hand. You felt something, didn’t you?”

Now that the moment
’s gone, I feel sure it was my own imagination. “I don’t know, it felt like…okay, like she has a bladder infection.”

Marly
’s smile is big, smug. “Ha! The girl gets chronic UTIs, Grace. She thinks it has something to do with the chlorine water of the tank. Holy shit, see!” She holds her hands out like she’s inviting worshippers into a shrine.

It
’s still not enough to convince me. “What if we were just drunk?”

Marly
’s eyes narrow, as though she’s waiting for me to chastise her again, her tone brittle. “I was not drunk, Grace. Not when I drove us home, and not…after.”

Surrounded by all this fake blue water it
’s hard to even remember the roaming, wild heat that surged through my hands last night.

Marly turns to me. Her eyes beg me not to break her gaze.
“I believe in you, Grace. I’m living proof. And there are people who need what you can offer. What could it hurt to try?”

On my lips are words rushing to remind her of a night that began with the promise of dancing, after hours, like those fairytale princesses, pulling the wool over our parents
’ eyes, and ended with the two of us in the back of a police cruiser. But that was different. Wasn’t it?