Grace sat back down and glumly began poking at the slimy poached eggs until they’d both spilled their runny yolks across her plate, pooling around the base of the half grapefruit in a yellow slick. “I think I will go stay with Aunt Lorna for awhile,” Grace said. “A change of scene might do me some good.”
“I’m glad you came around to the idea,” her mother said as she busied herself in cleaning up the mess left from making breakfast. “Your father didn’t seem to think you were too keen on it yesterday.”
Aunt Lorna was her mother’s older sister, a war widow who lost her husband in the Pacific theater but never remarried, and a rigid, joyless school teacher. Whatever might happen to Grace in New Haven, it was not going to be fun or high times. “I didn’t think I really had a choice in the matter,” Grace said, “what with me costing daddy clients.” She scooped out an unreasonably small bite of grapefruit and chewed daintily at the bitter piece of mealy citrus.
This actually brought the front of the newspaper down just enough for her father to make eye contact with her. “Who told you that?” he asked gruffly.
“A little bird at the diner,” Grace replied. “Is it true?”
The newspaper returned to battlement position without answer. Grace’s mother touched Grace on the shoulder with a soapy hand. “You know your father doesn’t discuss business at the family table.”
“I’m going regardless,” Grace said. “It would have been nice to hear it from him though.”
“If you’re going regardless, I don’t see how it matters.” Grace’s mother forced a tightlipped smile and returned to the kitchen, singing a few lovely lines from Closer to Thee O’ Lord. “New Haven will have so many opportunities that you simply can’t get around here.”
The statement was unusually pragmatic for Grace’s mother; she was normally such a flighty romantic when it came to planning the future. “That’s true,” Grace said. “I was thinking maybe I could get a job as…”
“There will be college boys and business men galore for you to choose from.” She swooped in, scooped up Grace’s plate, and kissed her on the head again. “I’m so proud of you, leaving so much on your plate.”
Grace knew objecting wouldn’t do her any good. She would have to be hungry until lunch and hope to make up the difference then. “I guess I’ll go get dressed,” she said.
As soon as she was out of the kitchen and around the corner, she heard the newspaper rustle as it was set aside and heard her father’s fork hitting the plate with harsh gusto. She couldn’t even say for sure if she liked her father. The truth was, she hardly knew the man. Her older brother Warren had said almost those exact words to her when he left to join the army three years ago. Warren said if he died in combat, someone would have to deliver a letter to their father informing him that he had children and that one of them was dead. Grace hadn’t much cared for the joke—a little too true and morbid for her taste.
Grace only made it partway through getting dressed into a pair of ratty Capri pants and a denim work short when her attention landed elsewhere. Her old pompoms were out along with her cheer sweater, sitting on the wooden chair beside her vanity. She lifted the items one at a time to closely inspect each. The paper of the pompoms rustled with a familiar sound and the sweater felt as soft and inviting as it always had. She even found a few blades of grass around the bottom hem, likely left over from when their pyramid at the final home game toppled into a giggling mess of girls on the edge of the field. Grace plucked the blade of grass from the sweater and smelled it.
Debbie, the top of the pyramid always, had landed on top of her. The crowd thought the whole thing was a hoot and so did the cheerleaders. Grace remembered feeling very comfortable with Debbie lying across her stomach. She could feel the vibrations of her friend’s laughter against her ribcage. The single memory of that chilly October night a year prior excited her more than all the make out sessions she’d ever had with boys. Grace couldn’t even muster the usual self-loathing and recriminations she normally used to squash the feelings of lust she had for girls in general and Debbie quite specifically. When she tried to tamp down her desires with spite for what she was feeling, she only ended up feeling guilty for what she’d said and done to Debbie.
If Debbie had just waited until they were in New York, Grace might have reacted differently—she knew she might have. It wasn’t that Debbie wasn’t welcome; it was that Grace wasn’t ready. If she had only waited…
But Grace knew that was a lie and a lousy rat excuse for what she did. She didn’t want to be like she was and she really didn’t want Debbie to be that way. It was okay when she thought it was just her. She thought she could control the feelings as long as she was the only one having them. But Debbie, perfect Debbie, beautiful, talented, popular, and wonderful Debbie wasn’t supposed to be sinful and wicked like her—Debbie was supposed to be better than that! Grace hated her for not being perfection as she’d imagined it. She tossed the sweater back onto the chair and turned to make for the door.
Her hand stopped before it could reach the handle. Debbie was perfect and beautiful and kind and all the other good things too numerous to count, and she’d trusted her imperfect friend Grace with her darkly secret desires. No, it was more than that. Debbie had wanted to share them with Grace. Maybe she sensed Grace had those feelings too, but that didn’t seem likely since Grace couldn’t sense that Debbie had them. Debbie was brave and had thought Grace was special, and Grace was a cad who wasn’t strong enough to tell Debbie she felt honored to be the object of her affections. Grace sat hard on the floor, tears rolling freely down her cheeks. She had to tell her. Even if it was too late and Debbie really was dead, she had to tell her.
She heard her mother’s shoes outside her room and saw the little shadows they left beneath the door. Her mother, who had hearing to rival most sonar listening posts, always seemed to know when Grace was crying. Rather than rush in like Grace knew most mothers did, invading her space, bombarding her with questions, and generally making it all a lot worse, Grace’s mother always left her daughter to work through her emotional process alone and only ask later on what it might have been about. Grace appreciated that about her mother, although she would have to think of something else to tell her when she eventually asked what Grace had been crying about. Admitting she really wished she’d gone ahead and necked with Debbie when the opportunity arose that summer probably wasn’t the sort of thing that would be kept in confidence, even in mother-daughter emotional talks.
Debbie collected herself, dried her eyes, and pulled a scarf over her short hair to keep the dust and grime off. She thought again about what might have been if she’d taken Debbie up on the make out session, rather than slapping her and calling her names. How lovely it all might have been. Without the hatred and chiding she usually gave herself, the thought nestled warmly inside her, finding a place somewhere between love and lust, making Grace feel a little naughty, but more than that, relieved like she’d finally come clean after defending a very big lie for a very long time. If she got the chance, she resolved to tell Debbie’s ghost as well.
She threw open her bedroom door to approach the day with a new truth shining over her.
4.
Sleep was once again elusive despite working herself to near exhaustion that day doing laundry, cleaning floors, and polishing brass fixtures around the house. Grace didn’t mind the hard work or the fact that her mother became increasingly lazy as Grace picked up the pace. She didn’t even mind that her hands still smelled like furniture polish or that she had a lump on the back of her head from when she stood up into a drawer her mother left open above her while she was on her hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor beneath the lip of the counters. But she really wished she could at least sleep.
As with the night before, something kept calling her to the window. She rushed to the front window of her room, threw open the curtains, and stared across the empty expanse of their yard, down the hill to the farmland below, and on to the
woods and town beyond. A low cloud cover hung over the scene, unlike the night before, holding in far more ambient light which reflected off the bottoms of the clouds and the snow on the ground to create something of a lingering glow. Rather than shut the curtains in a huff as she had the previous night, she sat at the window a moment, simply enjoying the serenity of her dark room and the peacefulness of a calm winter night.
A chill crept through the thin glass and around the edges of the window with the curtain left open. Grace glanced back to the chair next to her vanity where she’d replaced her cheerleading sweater that she assumed her mother had dragged out for possible boxing to be placed in the attic. The faint light coming in through the window illuminated the edge of the chair enough for Grace to find it in the dark. She padded over in bare feet and scooped up the sweater to wrap around her hands. She turned back to the window and her heart nearly leapt up her throat and into her mouth. Debbie was standing on the edge of the tiny expanse of icy roof outside the window, hands gripping the sill, staring into Grace’s room with a blank, lifeless expression on her face.
There was none of the energetic, survivalist fear from the night before. Grace simply froze, caught in the grips of a solid fright.
“Can you see me, Grace?” Debbie asked. Her voice sounded faint, barely above a whisper, or perhaps like she was actually very far away. Regardless of what created the thready quality to her speaking, it was entirely unsettling.
Grace bobbled her head in something of a noncommittal simultaneous shake and nod.
“Let me in, Grace,” Debbie said.
But she couldn’t have even if she wanted to. Her feet refused to move. Her fingers refused to unclench from their death grip on the cheer sweater. Indeed, she found she was even struggling to blink. The uncertainty of the night before all came rushing back to her. This was her friend, but at the same time, it wasn’t. The thing outside her window was Debbie, but it was also something else entirely, something that frightened Grace on a primal level harkening back to a time when mankind still feared that the sun might never rise when night fell.
“You have to invite me in,” Debbie said. The quality of her voice changed from distant and spooky to sultry and soothing. Grace looked into her friend’s beautiful blue eyes and listened to her sweet-as-pie voice as it took on an alluring quality Grace had never heard before. “You want me to come in, don’t you?”
Grace did, she really did. Suddenly, she couldn’t remember why she’d ever been frightened in the first place. She had things to tell Debbie, things she was concerned not five hours ago that she might never get the chance to tell her. And yet, there was Debbie, asking to be invited in, and Grace was being a clod about it. Grace wrapped her sweater around her shoulders and snuck to the window, unlocking the two latches at the top of the pane and then pushing it up slowly to avoid any creaks.
“You can come in, but we have to be quiet,” Grace said. “My parents still think you’re dead.”
“Thank you. I’ll be quiet.” Debbie crawled in through the window with remarkable agility and completely good to her word about the silence as she didn’t make a single sound on her way through the tiny window. She was dressed in the same nightgown, but now had a heavy woolen coat over the top of it. Her feet were still bare and looked a little muddy around the soles.
“You must be freezing.” Grace rushed to close the window and returned to Debbie who appeared to be a little nervous about suddenly being inside. Grace gathered up Debbie’s hands and rubbed them between hers, which only served to make Grace’s hands cold as well without seeming to do anything for Debbie’s.
Debbie cocked her head to the side in a puzzled way Grace had seen her brother’s border collie do when it was trying to figure something out. She slid her hands from Grace’s and reached up to touch the cheerleader sweater around Grace’s shoulders.
“I remember this,” Debbie said dreamily. “I had one just like it.”
“Yep,” Grace said with a grin. “Except yours had a ‘C’ stitched to the shoulder for captain.”
“It was fun,” Debbie said, a bittersweet smile spreading over her lips.
“It reminded me of the last home game,” Grace said. “Remember when our pyramid fell, and you landed on top of me? You were lying across my stomach, laughing, and…it felt right.”
“But you called me a freak when I…” Debbie pulled back, but Grace followed, regaining her clasped grip on Debbie’s cold hands.
“I was wrong,” Grace said. “You’re not a freak. You’re Beautiful. You’re my friend. I should have been honored that you would share that with me. I didn’t…couldn’t let myself feel lucky that you chose me until today and even now I think it’s crazy hearing myself say it. I told myself, and this is the living end, that if you’d waited until New York, I would have…I don’t know, but that doesn’t make up for it. I know it doesn’t. I just wanted you to know.”
Debbie looked entirely caught off guard. The confident and sultry quality her voice had contained in asking to be let in was gone and she looked as absolutely uncertain as Grace felt. “I went with you to those James Dean movies because I liked the way you would hold my hand when you were excited,” Debbie said with such earnest candor that Grace was overwhelmed by the equal exchange of honesty.
“I…I didn’t go to the James Dean movies because I had a crush on him,” Grace said hesitantly. An embarrassed smile and furious blush painted her face before she could even continue. “I went because I wanted, still kind of want, to be like James Dean.”
Debbie smiled, took a step back, covered one half of her face with her palm, and shook her head. When she tried to speak a stifled giggle came out instead. “You would be a gorgeous James Dean,” Debbie said when she finally regained her composure.
“As long as we’re sharing secrets, I’ve got one more for you,” Grace said. “After Christmas, I’m going to New Haven to live with my aunt.”
Debbie went from embarrassed and delighted to hurt beyond words. She immediately made a rush for the window, but Grace, expecting such a reaction, intercepted her, grasping her by the puffy arms of her overcoat. “No, no, no, listen to me,” Grace pleaded when Debbie was clearly going to get away. “I want you to come with me. I don’t care that you’re a ghost and that we’re both freams and that we’re going to have to think up a Moby Dick sized whopper of a story to tell my aunt to explain who you are—I want you to come with me.”
“New Haven?” Debbie stopped struggling. Grace thought she looked as though she’d been shoved out on stage in the middle of Hamlet after having memorized all the lines for Brigadoon; cues were still being given, but what Debbie thought she was supposed to say didn’t fit the context.
“I know it’s not New York, isn’t Barnard College, but it’s a start, a new start for us both,” Grace said repeating the script she’d rehearsed in her head the whole day while cleaning the house. Debbie might not know the lines, but Grace had it all planned out. “My aunt has this big townhouse. We’ll have to get jobs, but we can get jobs together. It’ll be a hoot, I promise!”
And that was it. That was all Grace had prepared to say. She thought Debbie would be ecstatic and say yes immediately, or she might decline in roughly the same way Grace had declined so long ago, but she definitely thought it would be one or the other. The stunned and muted response of utter confusion simply wasn’t something she’d prepared for. Grace opened her mouth to say more, but she didn’t know what else to say. She bit the edge of her lower lip, a rising panic welling up in her as she felt the opportunity to convince Debbie slipping away. She found herself mechanically wetting her lips with her tongue and then pulled Debbie in by the front of her coat and planted one on her. Debbie’s lips were frigid and initially unresponsive, but Grace was determined and reckless enough to overwhelm her. The crush kiss she’d seen in so many movies, the same one that worked for James Dean and Humphrey Bogart had to work for real when it came to convincing some girl that she was loved. If it didn’t really
work, Grace had wasted a lot of time in movie theaters. Finally, Debbie relented, the kiss shifted, and they began to share a lip-lock only appropriate in the backseat on lover’s lane, something no movie house would be allowed to show. Grace wanted to prove to Debbie she wasn’t tentative about what they were doing and Debbie appeared to want to prove it right back. This is letting go, jumping in, accepting what I am, Grace thought, and in the moment, she thought it was the best feeling in the world.
The Vampires of Vigil's Sorrow Page 5