Grace (12 page)

TUESDAY, NOV.
6

The next morning Joel and I were eating our Malt-O-Meal cereal when my father hobbled into the kitchen and sat down at the table. My mother handed him a cup of Postum, then left the kitchen to get ready for work. Dad poured some milk into his cup and stirred until his drink turned the pale color of caramel.

Then he casually began sifting through the stack of mail on the table. When he got to the electric bill he stared at it almost as intently as Joel had stared at the Vargas poster the first time he saw it. “Holy cow.”

Joel and I looked over at him.

“Our electric bill went up nearly ten dollars. You boys need to start turning the lights off. You think money grows on trees?”

“No, sir,” I said.

“Joel?”

“No, sir.” Joel turned and glared at me.

My father pushed aside the mail and started reading the paper. After a few minutes he looked up. “Here's something for you, Eric. Do you know a girl named Madeline Webb?”

I looked up at him. “No, sir.”

“Hmm,” he said. “It says here she goes to Granite Junior. You're in ninth grade, aren't you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You sure you don't know her? She's in your grade.”

I shrugged.

Joel furtively glanced at me, then put more strawberry jam in his Malt-O-Meal.

“Look, here's a picture of the girl.” He turned the paper around to show me. It must have been an old picture of Grace. Her hair was shorter now and she'd gained some weight.

“Oh, her.”

“Then you do know her?”

“She's in one of my classes.”

He turned the paper back around. “This article says her parents think she's been kidnapped.”

“Why would they think that?”

“Because she's been missing for days,” he said sardonically.

“I mean, maybe she ran away or something.”

He looked up at me. “If she ran away she would have left a note or packed a bag.”

I took a couple more bites of my cereal while my dad moved on to the sports section. “Tex Clevenger retired from the Yankees. Might as well go out on top. Joel, don't you have his card?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I guess eight years is long enough to throw a ball around.”

When I finished my cereal, I asked, “Could I take that page?”

Without looking up, my father asked, “Which page?”

“The one with the article about the girl at my school.”

He handed me the local section.

“Excuse me,” I said. I carried my bowl and the newspaper over to the sink. As I rinsed out my bowl Joel joined me.

“Thanks for getting us in trouble,” he said.

“You don't know it's the heater. Besides, she'd freeze to death without it.”

“Yeah, and now she's in the paper. Someone's going to find her and we'll be dead.”

“No one's going to find her and I'm the one who's dead, not you.” I rolled up the paper. “I'm going to show her the article.”

I said goodbye to my parents, grabbed my schoolbag, and went out the front door. But once outside, I doubled back and ran to the clubhouse. As I opened the door I could hear music coming from my transistor radio.

“She-e-e-e-e-e-e-ry babe-e-e-e-e-e-e-e…”

I crawled inside, a little winded from running. “Grace.”

She raised her hand. “Wait, I love this song. It's The Four Seasons.”

I waited for the song to end. “
Come, come, come out tonight…
”

When it was over she turned to me. “Okay, what?”

“You're in the newspaper.” I unfolded the paper and read, “Middle School Student Missing. Madeline Grace Webb, daughter of Stan and Holly Webb, has been missing since October eleventh.”

“Let me see.”

I handed her the paper.

After she finished reading the article she dropped it on the floor. “I hate that picture of me.”

“There's a lot of people looking for you.”

She did her best Cagney imitation. “They'll never take me alive, copper…”

I picked up the paper. “I'm glad you think it's funny.”

“Stop worrying so much. Everything will work out.”

“How do you know that?”

“I saw it in the candle.”

“You did?”

She nodded.

I had no rebuttal to that. “Okay, I'm off to school.”

“Say hi to everyone for me.”

I turned back.

“Just kidding.”

As I walked to the bus stop all I could think about was how I hoped the candle was right.

“I'm kind of like Anne Frank,” Grace said as I crawled through the clubhouse door. She was sitting in the corner holding a small, yellow vinyl book with a locking strap.

“What?” I said, instead of “who?,” which was appropriate since I had no idea what she was talking about.

“Anne Frank.”

I nodded as if I understood. “Does she go to Granite?”

Grace laughed. “She was a Jewish girl who hid from the Nazis during the Second World War. Didn't you read the book?”

“No.” I had never heard of it.

“They were going to send her family to one of those death camps, so they hid in the back of a building. She kept a diary the whole time. Just like me.”

“You keep a diary?”

“Every day.” She held up the yellow book.

“What do you write in it?”

“Whatever I feel like writing.”

“Like what?”

“Things I did. People I talked to. Stuff like that.”

“Am I in there?”

“Of course. You're all over the place.”

“Can I see?”

She looked incredulous. “No. You don't just show someone your
diary
.”

“Then who do you write it for?”

“Yourself.”

“That's dumb. You already know everything that happened to you. It's like telling yourself a secret.”

“…and people can read it after you die.”

“What good is that?”

She frowned. “Maybe it will give someone hope.”

I guess I was just too selfish to think of that.

As I look back, I realize just how much things have changed since those days. America was a different place. More private. Children were considered the property of their parents and what happened in someone's home was no one's business but theirs—not the school's, not the neighbors', not the church's, and especially not city hall's.

While we lived at my Grandmother's house there was a family across the creek from us. The Williamses. They had, I think, twelve or thirteen kids. I was never really sure how many; counting them was like counting fish in a pet store tank. Biggest family I had ever seen.

The kids, singularly and collectively, were meaner than wolverines. It seems that at least one of them got in a fight at school every day, though oftentimes with each other. Teachers at Granite used to say, “Someone needs to discipline those children,” but I don't think that was the problem. Their dad taught Sunday school at the church we went to. His pet sermon was that if you spared the rod, you would spoil the child, as if anyone wanted his advice on child rearing.

I think Mr. Williams spoiled his children with the rod or belt or whatever else he could get his hands on when the spirit moved him. The Williams children would come to school with more bruises than a two-week-old banana. I figured their fights at school were just their way of making everyone else look, if not feel, like them.

The only time my father ever beat me was when I was eleven years old and we were still living in California. One summer my mother's cousin from Phoenix came to stay with us. She had two of the most obnoxious boys I'd ever seen. Our parents were visiting and so they told us to go outside and play. Joel and I took them out to play basketball in the driveway. They shoved and pushed a lot. Then one of them tripped Joel on purpose. Joel hit the concrete and skinned up his knees and palms badly enough to draw blood. Joel was only seven at the time and he started to cry. I was already mad at the boys for tripping Joel, but then they started teasing him for crying. Before I knew it, I punched the older of the boys right in the nose. He let out a yelp as blood ran from both his nostrils.

“You're gonna get it,” his little brother said. “We're gonna tell.” Then the two of them scurried inside to tattle.

Two minutes later my mom stormed out of the house. I was sitting next to Joel helping him brush gravel from his knee. I assumed she would take my side when she heard the whole story. Heck, I thought she'd reward me for standing up for my brother. Instead she dragged me by my arm into the house. Once inside, my dad took off his belt, something I'd previously only heard about, and whipped me on the backside five times. I can still remember each stroke. Then my parents made me apologize. I had never been so glad as when their station wagon pulled out of our driveway. I don't remember who I was more mad at, the boys or my parents.

The next month passed like a dream. I suppose this happens in most relationships, but Grace and I had settled into a routine, almost like a married couple. With all the publicity, Grace was no longer safe walking outside in daylight. Even the library had posted a “missing girl” poster on their front door.

The thickness of her red pouch had dwindled and I had to start bringing her food again. I sneaked food from home or the Queen when I could, but I was also spending much of my paycheck feeding her. I knew Grace felt bad about this. She apologized and thanked me, usually in the same breath. And while she wasn't eating as much as she had when she first came, she still seemed to be gaining weight.

During the day Grace spent her time reading, listening to the radio, and writing in her journal, but mostly just waiting for me to get home from school or work.

Her routine necessitated a change in my schedule as well. On the nights I worked I would come straight home, tell my parents good night (if they were still awake), then slip out my bedroom window.

We held hands and took long moonlit walks either on our street or in the surrounding neighborhoods. We talked about things I still think about today. Grace had a wisdom about life that far surpassed mine. On one of those walks we talked about love.

“Do your parents love each other?” she asked.

“Yeah. I think so. They still fight sometimes, but they always make up.”

She pondered my reply then asked, “Have you ever been in love?”

“I don't know,” I said softly. “How do you really know when you're in love?”

She stopped walking and smiled at me. “When you don't have to ask.”

 

I never told her, but I knew in my heart that everything was moving toward some kind of flashpoint. I didn't know how or when it would arrive, but it was coming. I could feel it, like the tremor of a distant approaching freight train.

One evening we walked about a mile to a small park just east of Seventh and Forty-fifth. There was no one there but us. The trees were barren and the ground covered with snow. We sat on a bench and Grace lay her head in my lap, looking up at the stars.

“What am I going to do?” she asked.

I didn't answer because I honestly had no idea. “Where's your
real
father? Won't he help?”

“I don't know who he is. He was gone before I was born.”

“Do you have any other family?”

“I have an aunt in Denver. But my mom got in a big fight with her.”

“About what?”

“I don't know. My mom just said my aunt's awful and she'll never talk to her again as long as she lives.”

I ran my fingers through her hair. “Maybe you'll have to go back,” I said.

She just closed her eyes. I knew she never would.