State of Grace (5 page)

“Just of people,” she said. “Why do you care?”

“Were any of them of me?”

Natalie was silent and I could tell she was deciding whether or not to tell me what she saw. “No,” she said finally. “They were of Grace. They were all of Grace . . . naked.”

“We need to tell her.” I felt the panic rise up in my chest. “We need to tell our folks.”

“She's probably at the Nest.” Natalie was quiet. “Would your mom take you out there?”

“Probably not,” I said. “She's in a bad mood today.”

At the mention of her, my mother came into the kitchen and pointed at her watch. “Time's up,” she mouthed and whirled her finger in the air. “Wrap it up.”

I nodded. “Mom's making me get off the phone,” I said in my normal voice and then quickly added, “Wanna come over tomorrow?”

My mother, overhearing the invitation, frowned and shook her head. “Birdie,” she hissed, “You should have asked me first.”

I covered the mouthpiece even as I could hear through the earpiece Natalie hollering out to her mother, “Mom, can I go over to Birdie's house tomorrow?”

“Sorry,” I whispered back and then amended, “But you said they could come over here. Please? You won't even know we're here. I promise. Besides, you said . . .”

My mother opened her mouth to speak and then, seeing something in my expression, began to laugh. I could tell I had already won the battle. I heard Natalie having a muffled conversation with her mother. Suddenly, she was back on the phone. “Yeah. Tomorrow works, but I can't come over until after I clean my room.” I heard
her mother in the background. “Okay,
Mom
. Sorry. I'm back. Want me to call Grace and see if she can come, too?”

“Yes,” I said and smiled at my mother, who shook her head. “See you then.”

At the same time I was plotting how to circumvent my mother's new rules, Tommy Anderson sat in the kitchen of his grandparents' house and thought about how much he hated being stuck in Edenbridge for the summer. I, of course, didn't know Tommy then. It was only after we became friends that I learned about his experience that summer. He had been sent from Chicago by his parents with the hopes that living with his grandparents would help straighten him out. More than anything, though, it simply made him angry.

He was bored and every day was the same. Sleep in, eat breakfast, and try to ignore the sounds of the daytime soap operas his partially deaf grandmother was addicted to watching. He knew the schedule by heart:
The Young and the Restless
at 11:30 followed by
As the World Turns
at 12:30 followed by
Guiding Light
at 2. Saturdays were dedicated to cleaning and chores, so the television was off, but on Sunday mornings it was back on so anyone passing by could appreciate the efforts of the television evangelists, preaching fire and brimstone and cajoling viewers to change their evil ways and donate money.

Tommy hated Edenbridge. In Chicago, there had been a lot to do. But that, according to his parents, was part of the problem. In Chicago, he had gotten into trouble, cut class, been involved in several fights, and was twice caught shoplifting. His parents were concerned, but it wasn't until they found the drugs in his closet that they decided drastic measures had to be taken.

They thought his friends were the problem. When he told me about this later, he laughed. His friends weren't the problem. What his parents didn't realize was that they weren't leading him . . . he was leading them. It was
his
idea to skip school and hang out at the park and smoke. With his dark hair, lean body, and sly smile,
he
had
been the one who had come up with the idea of luring the cruising fags into the filthy park bathrooms and then rolling them for cash. It had been lucrative in more ways than one because more often than not, the men they beat and robbed also carried drugs with them. Weed, coke, poppers . . . each man was different. But Tommy and his friends didn't care. A hit was a hit, and trying new things was fun—especially when supplemented with the beer or alcohol Emilio's cousin, Lawrence, bought for them.

That, he thought, was the worst part of being in Edenbridge—the lack of drugs and alcohol. He had only been here for two weeks and he was itching for a fix. He didn't care what it was, just as long as it was something. Finding it was the trick. Because he was from a place where public transportation made having and driving a car unnecessary, at the age of seventeen, Tommy had neither a driver's license nor the skills necessary to drive a car. His grandfather had promised to teach him, but thus far, had managed to avoid fulfilling that promise—likely at the behest of Tommy's parents.

So, day after day he sat in the house with the television blaring and dreamed of escape. Sometimes he would explore the town. Other times he would walk down to the Mercantile and exercise his five-fingered discount. His latest acquisition was a hunting knife. It hadn't been hard to steal, given that the owner of the store was deaf, dumb, and blind. It had been easy, in fact. Tommy imagined the looks on his friends' faces when he returned to Chicago and flashed his knife. He imagined the fear in those fags' faces when he pulled the knife out and held it to their throats. He felt a tingle in his belly at the thought.

He had considered asking his grandfather to take him hunting. He wanted to try killing something and the thought of shooting a gun sounded fun. Emilio's cousin, Lawrence, had an old .357 Magnum he found in a dumpster. The one time Tommy held it, it felt big, heavy, and powerful in his hands. He had gripped the handle, hefted its weight, and shifted it from hand to hand. Holding the hunting knife made him feel the same way. He liked the power that seemed to flow through his hand and up his wrist and arm.

Maybe it was time to try it out, he thought. Get a feel for the
weapon. He glanced into the living room at his grandmother. She was midway through
As the World Turns.

“Grandma,” Tommy said. “I'm going to go for a walk.”

“Eh?” his grandmother said, glancing around.

“I'm going to go for a walk,” he said slowly and distinctly.

“Okay,” she said. “Stay out of trouble.”

Tommy nodded exaggeratedly before turning and tromping upstairs to his room. The knife was wrapped in a T-shirt and stuffed between the box springs and the mattress of his twin bed. He slid his hand inside, searching for and then finding the soft bundle. He unwrapped the knife and looked at it. The blade was shiny; the dark wooden handle deeply grained. He held it, feeling once again the power it contained. He moved to stand in front of the mirror, liking what he saw—a man who was fearless and could take what he wanted. He felt that tingle again in the pit of his stomach.

He considered how to carry the knife and it occurred to him that perhaps he should steal a leather case—something that would not only protect the blade, but also protect him when he wore it on the inside of his clothing, against the skin. That's how he wanted to have it—close to him. He grinned, rewrapped the blade, and stuffed the bundle in the waistband of his pants. Pulling his shirt over the front and turning sideways, He could still see a bulge. But, he thought, if he changed into a looser shirt, he could probably get it out of the house without notice.

As he changed, Tommy considered where to stash the knife while he stole the case. The garage was a possibility, but if he did that, there was the chance that his grandfather would find it. The same applied to the tool shed. The best place, he thought, would be someplace where no one went. Immediately, he thought of the woods near the creek that ran behind the store. He could stash the knife, walk back to the store, steal the case, and then go back to reclaim his knife. Maybe he could steal a sharpener, too.

He grinned, imagining how he would sharpen the knife to a razor sharp edge. And maybe, he thought suddenly, he could find some animals in the woods that he could hunt and kill. Suddenly, the summer didn't seem so bad.

Tommy walked awkwardly down the stairs, unaccustomed to the feel of the bundle against his stomach. He let the screen door bang shut behind him and squinted into the harsh light. The noonday sun was unforgiving and the hot wind carried a sour stench that even his city nose recognized. He grimaced, shook his head, and again wondered how people lived in a place like this. It seemed so different from what he remembered from his childhood visits. Then, it had seemed magical. The days had seemed to stretch out forever before slipping into the violet hues of evening and, finally, firefly-sparkled nights. But this, he thought as he scanned the faded houses of the neighbors and the yards that seemed drained of life and color, was just pathetic.

He bounded off the front porch and headed toward the cracked sidewalk. Like Edenbridge, it too, had seen better days. Roots had burrowed under the concrete and caused it to buckle. Grass grew up between the cracks, and in some places the sidewalk was nothing more than a spiderweb of oddly shaped chunks of cement.

The Mercantile was two blocks from his grandparents' house. The woods that ran alongside the town side of the creek were a ten-minute walk from the other side of the store. Tommy planned his route carefully. His short criminal career already had taught him that it's best not to call attention to yourself if you can avoid it. And, walking back and forth in front of the store on his way to and from the woods was something that even the old fart who owned the store might notice. He decided to take different routes to and from the woods—make it look like he was just taking a walk, checking out the town.

At the end of the block, he made a right turn, walked to the end of the block and then turned left, heading in his original direction, but a block beyond the store. He would, he thought, take this street past the main drag and on to the woods, where he could find someplace to hide the knife. Then he would go back to the store, get what he needed, and return for the knife. As he walked, he scanned the trees for squirrels or other animals he could hunt and kill. He saw a cat and made a mental note. It would do if he couldn't find anything else. A cat would be a disappointment, though,
because he really wanted the thrill of stalking something wild. Maybe he could find a raccoon or a deer.

As Tommy neared the woods, he noticed a path that seemed to lead from the edge of the cornfield into the trees. He turned and followed it. As he walked, he realized that it wasn't an animal trail but one made for and used by humans. He looked for evidence of people but saw nothing. The path was at a slight incline and as he crested the small hill, he found himself in a clearing. Directly in front of him was an enormous tree anchored by a massive tangle of thick, knobbed roots. He pulled the bundle from his waistband, placed it in the crevice between two prominent roots, and quickly covered it with sticks and leaves. He stepped back, surveyed his work and, convinced that only someone looking closely would be able to see it, turned and walked back along the path out of the woods.

I learned this part of the story later from Grace, who, unbeknownst to Tommy, was lying on her back in the Nest, her eyes closed, her head resting on the cleanest of the cushions. She wasn't sleeping; she was thinking. Unlike Natalie and me, her mother didn't insist she stay home—not that she would have wanted to. At home, she had to deal with her mother's depression and Reggie's unwanted attention. She preferred the solitude of the Nest. It was one of the few places where she felt safe and at peace. So, while Natalie and I tried to figure out how to escape, Grace walked her bike along the dirt path to our clubhouse, stowed her bike in the bushes, and climbed to the solitude of our fortress.

And there she was when she heard the noise of something moving through the trees. At first she thought it was a deer and crept silently to the edge of the tree house to look out. What emerged from the trees wasn't a deer, but a tall, slender boy with dark hair who wandered through the clearing toward the large elm we called Goliath. She watched as he looked around the clearing, pulled something from under his shirt, and then knelt to hide it in the heavy tangle of exposed roots.

From her bird's-eye perch, Grace watched him leave and wondered what was so important that he would hide it in the
woods. She considered climbing down to investigate, but ultimately decided not to. Later, when I asked her why, she said that it was out of respect for the boy we later came to know as Tommy.

“Sometimes,” she said cryptically, “It's nice to have something that's all yours.”

Chapter 6

After I got off the phone with Natalie, I wandered aimlessly around the house, stopping occasionally to sigh dramatically. My mother, who was dusting, ignored me for about five minutes before she said, “It's not going to work, Birdie. I'm not going to give in just because you're moping around the house.”

“But I'm
bored
,” I whined.

“Go read,” Mom said as she picked up the stack of coasters and wiped under them. “Or go outside. Just do
something.
”

I grunted and huffed off to my room. Only the main rooms of the house were air-conditioned, and during the day the bedrooms were shut off from the rest of the house, making them easily twenty degrees hotter. A box fan wedged in the lower half of the open window listlessly circulated the humid morning air. After the cool of the living room, I immediately began to sweat.

I didn't have to stay in my room, I reminded myself. I could go back out into the living room. Or sit outside in the shade of the enormous oak trees in our backyard. But the thought of being someplace other than my oven-like bedroom seemed inappropriate. I needed to think about the events of the past twenty-four hours. My near miss with Mr. Holmes' truck. My mother's increasingly extreme behavior. Don Wan's drawings. It was unsettling. All of it. I was unsure what to think—or what to feel.

I closed the door to my room and went to the bed. My pad of drawing paper and rubber-banded collection of pencils lay at the foot. The realization that I shared this hobby with Don made me feel suddenly nauseous and I quickly slid them under my pillow, where I couldn't see them. With a sigh, I walked over to the
window and stood in front of the fan. The hot air blew my hair around my face and I leaned in close. “Ohheeeeohhhh.” I spoke the words into the whirling blades and listened to their fractured sounds as they came through the other side. After a minute of this, I turned, walked to my bookshelves, and surveyed the yellow spines of my Nancy Drew mysteries. One of my favorite things to do, as a child, was read—a love affair with the written word which began at the hands of my mother during too-hot summer afternoons when I was too young to ride my bike around town.

When it was very hot, my mother would close down the house, draw the thick, heavy curtains together to block out the sun, and turn on the air-conditioning unit that was set into the wall of the living room. The living room, kitchen, and dining room would become dark, mysterious, and deliciously cool in the absence of sunlight. I would sit on the couch and drink in the chilled air and enjoy the goose pimples that sprang up on my arms and legs.

In the afternoons, when the temperature outside was at its hottest, my mother would sit me on the couch, go into her bedroom, and return with a book. She started with
Little House in the Big Woods
. It was the first book
her
mother read to her as well. As a child, she had loved the adventures of Laura Ingalls Wilder and wanted to share that with me. She would pour herself a glass of iced tea and settle herself onto the couch. I would snuggle in next to her as she opened the book to the spot where we had ended the day before, and began to read.

For my mother, there were rules when it came to reading books. First, at no time should you write in a book. Books were precious and writing in them served no purpose. Although that might have been a rule designed to prevent me from using the pages as an impromptu coloring book, the rule stuck and even in college, I found myself almost unable to highlight passages or make notes in the margins. Ultimately, it worked to my advantage because when I forced myself to part with the books at the end of the semester, I often received the premium buy-back price because of their pristine condition.

The second rule was that it was unthinkable to mark your page by folding down the corner. A coupon, the brown paper from a
Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, or a bobby pin were fair game and often used by my mother to mark her place. But folding down the page was sacrilegious.

The third rule was that when reading—especially reading aloud—it was necessary to always reorient one's self by rereading the last page of the chapter or section. That would, according to my mother, “get your mind back where it needed to be.” And so that's where we would start, slightly before where we left off the previous day. My mother would open the oversized paperback book and begin to read. She read clearly, with inflection, but made no attempt to distinguish between the voices of the characters. I would watch her finger as it moved beneath the words and breathe in the sweet, earthy scent of pipe tobacco that perfumed all books purchased from the joint bookstore and smoke shop. It was the safest I had ever felt in my life and probably why even today, when I am upset or scared, I turn to a book.

But somehow, after talking to Natalie about the drawings, the idea of sitting and quietly reading was unappealing. I ran my fingers over the spines of my Nancy Drew books. What, I wondered, would Nancy Drew do? She and Bess and George would expose Don Wan, who would move out of town. And then, they would fix things so my mother would stop worrying. But I knew I wasn't Nancy, and Natalie and Grace weren't George and Bess. We were girls and we had no power. We were girls who were kept at home where there was nothing to do. I didn't want to go to Grandma's. I didn't want to read. I didn't want to dig a hole to China. Or, I began to wonder . . . did I? If I had to be miserable . . . maybe she should be, too. She had said that morning she didn't care what I did. She had, in fact, suggested digging a hole to China. I grinned at the thought. It was perfect. I would get my way without breaking rules. I
would
dig a hole to China—a big hole.

I opened my bedroom door and stepped out into the cool air of the hallway. “I'm going outside,” I yelled as I pushed open the storm door, hopped off the side of the front porch, and made my way to the detached garage. Inside, in the back corner with the gardening tools, was the shovel my mother used to plant trees she pulled up
from along the banks of Brush Creek and replanted in our yard. I hefted it over my shoulder and headed out of the garage in the direction of the fence separating our yard from that of Mr. and Mrs. Spencer. Of the two sets of neighbors (my grandparents on one side and Buck and Edith Spencer on the other) my mother preferred the Spencers, for no other reason than she detested her in-laws.

Building on the lot next to them hadn't been my mother's idea. Having grown up in “the country,” living in a town—even one as small as Edenbridge—made her feel claustrophobic. She wanted the space and freedom that came with acreage. My father was agreeable to the idea until his parents, who had a corner lot in Edenbridge and owned the land on both sides of them, offered to “sell” one of the lots to him for a dollar. Always eager for a bargain, my father jumped at the deal, signed the paperwork, and commissioned the builder—all without consulting my mother who, when she found out about the deal, was furious. It was just one skirmish in their long-standing battle of wills that always seemed to have something to do with my grandparents.

My mother resented my father's parents for a variety of reasons, most of them centered on what she saw as their “interference” in our lives. As proof, she would point emphatically at the backyard and the zoysia grass that was slowly overtaking the fescue she had used to seed the lawn just after the house was built. It was an old argument that was replayed every spring and summer.

“That goddamned grass,” my mother would announce as she stomped into the house after mowing the backyard. “Have you seen it? I can't, for the life of me, figure out what you were thinking when you let them convince you to plant it.”

“They said zoysia didn't have chiggers,” my father would mutter. “I thought it would be good for the girls to be able to play and not get bit.”

It was at this point that my mother would throw up her hands in frustration.

“All
grass has chiggers, John,” she'd say. “It's grass. It's in its nature to have bugs. Besides, it wasn't about chiggers. It was just another one of their attempts to control us. It's just like that stupid truck.”

Mention of “the truck” always made my father wince. It was a story that had become legend in our family. It had been a Saturday afternoon less than a year into my parents' marriage. My mother and her sister, Glenda, had driven into Winston to see a movie and because my mother had just washed her black 1959 Chevrolet Impala convertible, my aunt drove.

“I loved that car,” my mother would sigh each time she retold the story. “It was my first car and it was so
pretty
.”

Having heard the story so many times, I almost feel as if I had been there for what happened when my mother and aunt returned home and saw the dented, white pickup truck parked in the spot previously occupied by the convertible.

In my imagination, my mother storms into the house calling my father's name.

“Where is my car?” she asks when she finds him. Her voice is anxious and panicky.

My father, I can imagine, looks up from whatever he is doing. When they were first married, he was rail-thin with a dark flattop, thick black glasses, and big ears. In my mind, he is fixing something or tinkering with a radio or something. I imagine him poised with a screwdriver in his hand and a cigarette smoldering in a nearby ashtray. Buying time, he picks up the cigarette, takes a drag and looks at my mother.

“I traded it,” he says through the smoky exhale. “Dad heard about this good deal down at the station and—”

“You traded it,” she interrupts tightly, a statement rather than a question. “For what? And don't tell me it's that battered truck outside.”

My father shrugs, trying to appear calm, but also knowing that the arguments he crafted in his head all the way back from my grandfather's service station, would only dig him deeper into the hole he had created.

“We needed a truck,” he says.

My mother stares, angry, disbelieving.

“We needed a truck?” she repeats. “Really.
We
did? John, that was my car.
My
car. You had no right to trade it without my
permission. If
we
needed a truck so badly, why didn't you trade your car for it?”

“I thought you could drive my car,” he says. “I'll drive the truck.”

I can only imagine my aunt taking in this discussion, her eyes darting back and forth as she watches this verbal tennis match.

“John, I don't want to drive your car,” my mother says acidly. “I want to drive my car—the car I brought to this marriage. I want to drive the car you traded without my permission and the car you're going to go get back. If you want that stupid truck so badly, trade your own damn car.”

My father shakes his head.

“I can't,” he says and jumps up to come around the table and stand in front of my mother. “It's done. But I've got good news. I got $100 on top of the trade. We can buy that new vacuum you want.”

Later my mother would say, “I should have known then that this marriage was going to end in divorce.” And it did. But that would come years later after many unresolved arguments.

One of the things my sister and I had to be careful of when we played outside was not to get on the nerves of Mr. and Mrs. Spencer. My mother insisted they were nice people, just old and, because they never had children, unused to the noise and chaos. My sister and I knew better, though, having more than once been on the receiving end of Mrs. Spencer click-clacking down the back steps onto their patio to tell us to quiet down because she was “having one of her spells” and we were making it worse.

“She's just nasty and mean,” I complained to Natalie one morning at recess.

She shook her head. “Actually, it's because of her vapors. I heard Mom talking to someone on the phone about it. Probably your mom.”

I frowned. “What are vapors?”

“I looked it up in the dictionary. It means she's not right in the head. Mom said it's because of what happened during the war.”

“The war?” I shook my head. “What war?”

“World War II, dummy,” Natalie said. “Someone broke into her
house while Mr. Spencer was away at the war. It made her mean.”

As was often the case with Natalie's eavesdropping, she only got part of the story correct. She was right in that Buck had been stationed in Italy during the war. And Edith, who was a schoolteacher, had indeed stayed by herself on the farm. But what happened the night a man broke in while she was asleep remained a bit of a mystery—mostly because Edith never shared what happened. What people pieced together after the fact was this: One night while Edith was asleep, a man snuck into the house. Even now no one locks their doors at night, so it is likely he simply slipped in through the front door. Whether he was there to steal something or to take advantage of the fact she was alone in the house, is unclear. In either case, the next day she showed up in Edenbridge in Buck's battered old Chevy with two suitcases in the bed. Her eye was blackened, her lip split, and her jaw bruised and swollen.

“I won't be staying at the farmhouse anymore,” she said when asked. “I'll be living with my parents until Buck gets back and then we'll figure out what to do.” That was all she said on the matter, though the fact that she refused to contact the sheriff confirmed for many that what happened was too painful and embarrassing to admit. The external wounds soon healed, but the same couldn't be said for the emotional damage. What happened that night made Mrs. Spencer ill-tempered and suspicious. Even though she continued to teach, she no longer was active in the community, preferring to go straight to her parents' home after school.

The hope was that things would be better when Buck returned from the war. But, if anything, the exact opposite was true. Instead of returning to the farmhouse, they sold it to Buck's brother and bought the lot next door to the house that would one day belong to my parents.