The Grip Lit Collection

by Claire Douglas

  I call Damon to let him know about tomorrow’s appointment. He’s coming, he tells me, and once he does, I realize that’s exactly what I was hoping he’d say. A little voice in my head whispers that if I really care about him, I won’t allow him to, will insist on going by myself. What if one of the guys Max has written paper on decides to jump and Carmichael’s too busy with his own clients to pursue? Or Max wakes up, asks for Damon and Damon’s nowhere to be found? Not one but two compelling reasons for Damon to stick close to the greater Hartford area. I’m afraid, though, that I won’t be able to get through the encounter with Mom without him so I don’t raise either reason, keep my needy, miserable mouth shut. I tell him I’ll pick him up at his grandmother’s house in the morning, bright and early.

  As I replace the receiver in its cradle, I wonder how I’ll hide from my conscience till then.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I’m in the Bakery Arts Café in Brattleboro, Vermont, sipping an Italian cherry soda. The table I’m sitting at is flush against a picture window next to a box of underwatered plants. Through the smudged glass I can see Damon. He’s across the street, standing in front of a bookstore, browsing through a rack of secondhand paperbacks. As he leans over to examine the spine of a book on a lower rung, the sunlight touches his heavy black hair.

  I drag my soda closer, hope the sugar will give me a jolt. All morning I’ve been tired but wired, percolating with nervous energy. Now, though, the nervous energy’s gone, and I’m sagging. I’d had a restless night, thoughts and feelings pulling me every which way. Memories, too. One in particular.

  It was morning, winter break my junior year. Nica was laid up in bed, sick with the flu. Mom knocked on my door, asked if I’d let her take a few shots of me curling my lashes so she could finish the session she’d started with Nica the week before. My heart thumping high and hard in my chest, I said sure, as if her request were no big deal, an everyday thing. I dog-eared the book I’d been reading and followed her into the bathroom. Standing in for Nica should have been a cinch since we looked so much alike except for the hair, and Mom had taken care of that by winding a towel around my head. All I had to do was do what Nica did: act natural. It was that easy, and yet it wasn’t easy at all, not for me. As soon as the camera turned my way I stiffened. And the harder I tried to relax, the stiffer I got until I couldn’t even fit my fingers into the loopholes of the curler. I watched in panic as first irritation, then disappointment, then boredom crept across Mom’s face, listened in dread as the clicks of the shutter became more and more listless, less and less frequent. If I was miserable, though, it wasn’t for long. Nica appeared in the doorway, ghost-complected with ringed eyes, none too steady on her feet. Gently she removed the curler from my hand. I stepped back. Looked on as Mom took shot after ecstatic shot.

  The bells above the door jingle. I turn. I wasn’t sure she’d show, but suddenly there she is—my mother. After Nica died, she lost her looks: the pockets under her eyes puffed up; deep grooves etched themselves between her brows; and her once effortless slenderness became sinewy and gaunt as she was stripped to the bone by grief. She’s found them again, though. Is back now to the way she was. Coming toward me in tight black slacks, sleeveless black shirt, cat-eyed sunglasses with white rims, a camera dangling from her neck, her step is light and quick. Nica in twenty-four years. And when she calls out my name in greeting, I find I can’t say anything in response. My throat has swollen shut, is aching with her cool loveliness and my involuntary happiness at seeing her.

  When she reaches me, I say, “I ordered you a large coffee, house blend,” then twist to the side, put my cell phone in my bag, to avoid a kiss.

  She starts to open her mouth.

  I head her off at the pass. “Unsweetened. The milk’s on the side. Skim.”

  “Thank you, baby. You know, I’ve never been here before.” She removes her sunglasses and camera, lays them on the tabletop, then does what she does whenever she sits down at a restaurant: sweeps her gaze like a lighthouse beam across the room. It’s why I automatically gave her the eyes-out seat. I can see her taking in the details: the mugs with the Kurt Vonnegut quotes on them; the sign-up sheet on the wall for the Authentic Movement Workshop; the two girls at the table across from ours, both paint-spattered, one with a shaved head in a T-shirt that says YEAR OF THE ZOMBIE, the other self-consciously spearing melon chunks out of a bowl with a palette knife. And I can tell by the twitch of her mouth that she’s about to start making fun of the place.

  “If there’s a category of human being on the planet I find more repugnant than the hipster, I can’t for the life of me think what it is,” she says, sipping her coffee, eyeing the two girls. “The clothing with the provocatively worded slogans, the on-purpose bad haircuts, the hopelessly bored expressions on their pampered middle-class faces. They want to be artists, settle for being artsy. If I could, I’d round them all up, ship them off to some deserted island, drop a bomb on the island.” She shifts her glance to mine, eyes twinkling, like her meanness is some delicious treat she’s sharing. “Though arguably that would be taking things too far.”

  “You’re showing your age, Mom.”

  She lets out an easy laugh. “Then I better not start reminiscing about the rawer, rougher Bohemia of my day.”

  “Better not.”

  “Okay, let’s change the subject. Do you want to tell me how you’re liking Williams so far?”

  “Not really.”

  That laugh again. “I don’t seem to be having any luck here. Why don’t you pick the subject.”

  After a pause, I say carefully, “Thanks for meeting me on such short notice.”

  “Your invitation was so mysterious how could I resist? Like something out of a spy movie. I almost wore my trench coat with the collar turned all the way up.”

  “Not possible.”

  “Why? Because you think I’m too vain to cover my face?”

  “Because I know your trench coat’s still hanging in the downstairs closet.”

  Her gaze—light, amused, faintly mocking—doesn’t waver. “Is it?”

  “In between Dad’s parka and an old windbreaker of Nica’s.”

  “That’s a raincoat, actually.”

  I envy her coolness and hate it at the same time. Trying to keep my emotions in check, I lift a piece of the toast I’d ordered, slowly and meticulously spread marmalade on it. “I don’t suppose you’re coming back to pick it up, are you?”

  “Not any time soon, no,” she says.

  “That’s it then for you and Dad? The marriage is over?”

  “Looks like.”

  “So you stay with him just long enough to screw up his life royally and then split. Nice.”

  “What are you talking about? Screw up his life how?”

  My nasal passages begin to prick and burn, and I realize with horror that my eyes are filling with tears. “How do you think?” I say, ashamed of the sound of my voice but unable to control it, everything coming out in the same snotty yet wounded tone. “By making him turn down Chandler’s severance package. He could have started over somewhere new. But, oh no, you couldn’t leave the school. Who knows why. Some weird spite thing probably. And then something better came along and you couldn’t get out fast enough. Now because of you he’s stuck.”

  Her eyes widen. “No, baby, you have that backward. He made me turn down the severance package.”

  I stare at the toast in my hand without recognition, put it back on the plate. “What?”

  “If he’s stuck, he only has himself to blame.”

  I feel a wave of panic rising. I try to quell it, telling myself that Mom’s lying, that she forced Dad to stay at Chandler. I know this to be true. And yet when I try to remind myself exactly how I know it, the reasons aren’t so clear in my mind.

  Mom leans into the table, anger jerking at her features. “My daughter was murdered at Chandler, Grace. Murdered. You think I was interested in hanging around? Admiring the chalk outline of her bod
y from the kitchen window? I wanted out. But your father refused. It was the one time in his life he put his foot down with me and it’s a big part of the reason I left. He wouldn’t move forward. Wouldn’t or couldn’t, I’m not sure which. All I know is that back was the only way he wanted to go, and the past was the only place he wanted to be. And if I had to stay in that house—if I had to stay with him—for another second I—” She breaks off, breathes shakily. When she continues, it’s in a more modulated tone: “I didn’t mean to run down your father. He’s a good person, and everyone deals with grief in his own way. He did what he thought he had to do, just like I did what I thought I had to do. I needed what you had in college. I needed an escape. And when I found one, the Brattleboro fellowship, I took it.”

  She’s looking at me, and I can see that she’s expecting a response, but I’m too disoriented to give her one. She’s telling me the truth. I can’t know it for a fact because I can’t hold up my memory of that horrible spring to hers, compare the two, since the period between Nica’s death and Jamie’s party is, for the most part, a hideous blur to me. Yet I can feel the truth in her words. And, casting my mind back, I realize that Dad’s never actually said that Mom was the one who told Chandler to take their offer and shove it. I’d just assumed. And this assumption was a keystone for me, a foundation, the block of certainty upon which I’d piled all sorts of other assumptions. And now that it’s been removed, I find myself teetering dangerously.

  A short silence becomes a longer one. Finally she says, “I’ve missed you, you know.”

  I stare at the napkin in my lap. “Yeah, right.”

  “I have, Gracie.”

  “That must have been why the phone was ringing off the hook with calls.”

  “I didn’t call because I didn’t want to talk to your father, confuse him, get his hopes up. Not because I didn’t want to talk to you.”

  “I have a cell phone like every person in America besides you. You could’ve called that.”

  “It’s true. I could’ve. But I told myself that you were getting ready to go to college, move on to a bigger and better phase of your life. That I’d only remind you of what you were trying to forget. That you’d want to talk to me someday, but that, for now, you’d want your space.” She pauses, as if she’s considering her words carefully or as if they’re hard for her to say. “I thought I was making things easier on you, but I see now that I was making things easier on myself. I’m sorry.”

  It’s an apology, a real one. I look up at her, and, when I do, panic leaps in my stomach. I’m not sure why panic. Maybe because I see what I think is tenderness in her face and, once I see it, I understand how badly I’ve been wanting it from her. The dangerous kind of tenderness too. The kind that will peel back my skin and flesh, bend my ribs, expose the wet, trembling heart at my center.

  “You know what I was afraid of when I was walking over here?” she says. “I was afraid you’d look different.”

  She’s gazing at me, deep into my eyes, and, as she does, I can feel her intuiting everything I’ve suffered, everything I’ve endured, knowing it all without me having to say even a single word. My throat swells again, and there’s a pressure building inside my chest. Then she lifts her hand, starts to reach with it, making like she’s going to bring it to my face. I try to hold myself in, stay self-contained, keep my cheek from leaning out to meet her fingertips.

  “But you don’t,” she says. “You look exactly the same. You’re just the same.”

  Her words are like a slap to the face, hurting me but waking me up, too. How could I have forgotten? That she seems perceptive and sympathetic but is really neither? That I love her but that I don’t trust her, not for a second? And, most importantly, that I can never, never as in never ever, make myself vulnerable to her?

  I catch her hand roughly by the wrist. “No touching,” I say. “My skin’ll break out.”

  Mom looks puzzled, even a little hurt, but vanity as a motivating force is something she understands all too well, so she nods her head.

  “Anyway,” I say, “how’s your work going?”

  An emotion flares in her eyes—panic maybe or fear—and when I spot it, I have to hold back a smile. The question I just asked only sounds dull and innocuous; it is, in fact, as sharp and bloody-minded as a straight razor, because, as she and I both know, without Nica there’s only one way her work can be going: shittily.

  I remember that day in February when Mom received the call from the gallery in Chelsea, her reaction—a mixture of shock that it hadn’t happened for her yet, shock that it was happening for her at all. The theme was to be Nica from the age of Nica’s Dream on up, an extended portrait. Mom had one problem, though. Nica was refusing to be photographed. Of course, Mom had been photographing Nica for years, had hundreds upon hundreds of images stored. But after sifting through all the material, Mom decided she needed a final image, something new, something that would, in her words, “both close out the show and break it wide open.” Only Nica wasn’t going to let her get it. Mom didn’t seem too shook up, no doubt figuring she still had plenty of time, that Nica’s anger couldn’t stay white-hot forever, and that when it cooled enough to touch, the photo would be hers. But then Nica went and got herself killed. And unless Mom’s worked some kind of magic or miracle—and from the shadow flitting across her face right now, I’m betting she hasn’t—her career’s about to die a premature death, too.

  “The show’s just a month away now,” I say.

  Mom picks up the container of milk, pours it in her cup, turning her dark coffee pale. Then she picks up her spoon, starts stirring. Stirring and stirring. “A little more,” she says. “Five weeks.”

  “Still, you must be in the final stages of the selection process.”

  She stops stirring. Taps the spoon on the side of the cup, lays the spoon next to the saucer. “Yes.”

  “Has she—what’s the name of the gallery owner again?” I ask, knowing full well.

  “Aurora.”

  “That’s right, Aurora.”

  I’d met Aurora once. She’d come by the house, stopped off on her way back from a trip to Boston. A tall woman in her early thirties, dramatically thin, in black tights and crimson lipstick. “You’re the other daughter,” she’d said brightly when Mom introduced us, smiling without looking at me, only having eyes for Mom and Nica.

  “Has Aurora seen any of the photos yet? Besides Nica’s Dream, obviously.”

  Mom, her voice so low I have to lean in to hear her, says, “Aurora prefers prints to CDs. She’s driving up from New York this weekend.”

  “This weekend, huh?” I say, really starting to enjoy myself. “That’s a lot of pressure. I mean, nothing’s set in stone yet, right? If she likes what she sees, it’ll be the making of you, a whole new level of exposure and recognition. If she doesn’t, though, she won’t show the work or represent you. Must be nerve-racking.”

  Mom looks down and away, raises one shoulder in a shrug.

  “So, how did the showstopper turn out?”

  “The showstopper?”

  “You know, your final image. Did you end up using one of those old pictures of Nica? Bet you found something you didn’t even know you had.”

  Mom closes her eyes. “I found something,” she says softly, the lie so transparent I almost feel sorry for her. Almost.

  “Where is it?”

  “In the studio.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “You want to see it?” Her voice has now sunk nearly out of hearing.

  “How about we swing by after coffee?”

  She opens her mouth, then shuts it. Just nods.

  “Great!” My appetite suddenly returning, I pick up the abandoned piece of toast, take a bite. Then another.

  “A little harder, maybe,” she says.

  I swallow. “What?”

  “You. You’re harder. At first I thought you looked exactly the same, but you don’t. You used to have a dreamy, tender quality. It’s gone. Wi
thout it you look more like Nica. More like me, too, actually.”

  To an outsider it sounds like I’ve just been insulted. I haven’t been, though. Nothing makes Mom’s lip curl faster than innocence. She’s always been clear about how unappealing she finds the trait, how moist and sticky she thinks it is, how close to stupidity. So her telling me I’m hardening up is a compliment. And, of course, being compared to her and Nica is the ultimate compliment. I feel my cheeks flush. I try to duck my head, keep her from seeing my pleasure, but she catches my chin.

  “The dreaminess has burned off almost entirely,” she says, turning my face this way, viewing it from different angles. “You should sit for me sometime, let me photograph you.”

  When she says this I nearly laugh out loud, at my susceptibility as much as at her shamelessness. The one-two punch: softening me up with flattery, then hitting me up for a favor. I can practically see the thought bubbles coming out of her head: Aurora’s not driving up till this weekend so I’ve still got a few days. Nica’s gone but I have Grace and she’s better than nothing. Maybe I can pull the show out of the toilet after all.

  I bare my teeth at her in a grin. “No thanks. I’m allergic to having my picture taken. Remember?”

  She shrugs. “Up to you.”

  Nice bluff, I think sourly. Sick, suddenly, of the cat-and-mouse games, I decide to get to the point. “I asked you to meet me for a reason. There’s something I’ve been wondering about.”

  She folds her hands in front of her, cocks her head to the side, letting me know she’s all ears.

  “Why did Nica break up with Jamie?”

  She looks at me, eyes shuttering and unshuttering several times in rapid succession. Then she says, “Shouldn’t you be asking Jamie that?” Her voice is smooth and unhurried, but it’s too late. She’s already given herself away with those stuttered blinks.