by Rae Meadows
“Our daughter is a good girl,” the mother says. “She didn’t deserve this.”
Grace clucks at this naiveté, as if goodness is any kind of deterrent.
Callie’s death was the first domino and the rest of the family fell with unresisting ease. Sometimes Grace tries to remember the time before loss was a possibility, when they were four and not three, when she and Callie wrestled with every muscle in their girl bodies, each believing in her own justice, her own entitlement to more space in the backseat, more attention, more credit for her more perfect front-walkover. Before she knew that having no sister was to be her sentence.
She daydreams a scenario where it turns out that Callie disappeared, ran away, was abducted—anything that allows a chance of her showing up one day, her blond hair now darker, shorter, smartly tied back from her face, her body long and slim. Callie loops her arm around Grace’s waist and they slip back into being girls again. “Gracie-Lacie, let’s play kickball and I’m up first.” For a moment the dream dissolves into memories of the old days, of how it was before it wasn’t.
Her phone rings.
“This is Grace.”
“Hi, honey.”
Her mother’s tone is always a little reserved, polite. Grace’s shoulders droop.
“Hi, Mom.”
“How’s work?” her mother asks, not looking for a real answer.
“Fine,” Grace says automatically. “How’re you?”
Her mother sighs.
“I’m okay,” she says.
“Yeah?”
“Well.”
“What is it?”
“I’m a little worried about your father.”
Lately a sense of frailty has crept into Grace’s conception of her parents. They have been replaced by smaller, quieter, less able versions of themselves. Her father has arthritis and high blood pressure. Her mother broke her hip when she slipped on the driveway last winter. They are shrinking. Grace tries to ignore that they are, by most definitions, old.
“He’s forgetting things,” her mother says.
“What do you mean?”
“Getting disoriented running errands, losing track of what he’s doing. He looked at me the other day and I could tell he didn’t know who I was at first.”
Grace feels the itching, burrowing roots of dread.
“How long has this been happening?”
“A couple months. I was hoping it would go away.”
Her mother is quiet, looking out the kitchen window above the sink at the season’s first lily of the valley, her favorite, coming up through the ivy. Her patrician silhouette and coiffed bob. A pastel yellow cashmere, perhaps. Pearls.
“You know him. He thinks he’s fine. He blames it on retirement, his medications, the weather,” she says. “I was thinking maybe you could talk to him.”
Grace and her father have never discussed personal matters. They trade surface generalities and small talk like new acquaintances who have run into each other at the grocery store, volleying pleasantries.
“I don’t think so.”
“Maybe you could come home for a while? It might be good for him.” It is unlike her mother to ask for help, so now Grace thinks the situation is worse than she’s letting on. “It would be nice to spend some time as a family.”
“I’m pretty busy at work these days.”
Grace organizes a stack of old layouts, fearing her mother can sense her lie.
“It’s been three years,” her mother says, her controlled voice belying her blame. “I just think it would be nice to all be together.”
The guilt nettles even as it makes Grace want to stay away from them for another good stretch.
“Grace, he keeps talking about Callie.”
And now Grace knows that something is very wrong.
Her parents still live in the white and stone colonial house she grew up in. Their upper-middle-class suburb, southeast of Cleveland, is idyllic from the outside, rolling and green with wide lawns, towering oaks, old homes, and a feeling of insular solidity. Kids she grew up with joined their dads’ firms, got married, and moved into houses in the neighborhood. At the country club there are still men wearing pants with whales on them. Her parents never considered leaving, even though Callie died in the street right at the edge of their front lawn.
Her father worked for the same financial management company for almost forty years, from which he retired as a partner. He eats two scrambled eggs, wheat toast, and tomato juice every morning and he plays golf every Saturday, teeing off at 7:30 a.m. Her mother used to say she could set her watch by when she heard the garage door rise on Saturday morning.
A few months after Callie died, he decided that none of them would talk about her anymore, that it was time—and best for all of them—to soldier on. Pretend it was fine and it would be, he seemed to believe. Grace and her mother went along with it for years, even when it was just the two of them. Her father slapped Grace once when she was twelve for saying that Callie had ruined her chance of ever having a pet by letting her goldfish starve to death.
The news that her father has been talking openly about Callie is unsettling. Portentous even. Grace tries to ignore the icy, creeping sensation emanating from the base of her spine. But it won’t go away.
###
After lunch, Brian calls Grace into his office. On his desk is a framed photograph of the department, arms around each other, in front of a race car at an off-site activity. She is on the end, half of her body cut off by the frame. The night she and Brian kissed, she remembers saying that people play at being different versions of themselves at the office. She wonders if the real Brian is even more earnest than he lets on. She doodles a checkered flag on her notepad as he talks, but then he notices, and she hastily flips the page.
He gets up and shuts his office door before sitting back down.
“So,” he says. His eyes are green, speckled with yellow, and crinkled in the corners. He smiles but looks away.
“So,” she says.
“I wanted to talk to you about something,” he says, playing with a paper clip on his desk. He bends the end of the wire back and forth until it breaks off. “It’s not about work stuff. I mean I know you report to me and if it makes you uncomfortable to talk about this, please tell me.”
Heat needles her cheeks.
“I want to make sure we’re okay,” Brian says, flashing his hands out, palms down. “Since the cruise, I sense a little hostility from you or something. And I didn’t want you to feel, in any way, that I took advantage of the situation.”
Grace turns her widened eyes to her lap.
“You’d had a few…”
So had you, she thinks defensively, even though she can’t recall enough of the evening to know for sure.
“And being your superior, I didn’t want anything to be misconstrued…”
She’s annoyed at his presumption of authority, even if he is her boss.
“I’d pretty much forgotten about it,” she says with feigned cheerfulness.
“Oh. Okay. Cool,” he says. “So we’re cool then?”
She actually gives him a thumbs up.
###
Grace is always eager to leave the office but once outside the door, back into the hurrying masses fighting for sidewalk space, disappointment usually sets in. She rushes home to be alone. Tonight, as on most Tuesdays, she picks up sushi at the place near her subway stop and a bottle of Chardonnay on the corner. In the evenings, the super and his wife usually sit on the top step of her building, waiting to ensnare in conversation whomever happens home. Tonight they are in their basement apartment, engaged in a Spanish screaming match, and she ducks into the building unnoticed.
When she opens her mailbox, a sense of crushing failure sets in before she even gets the thin business envelope open. She already knows. No interest, no interview, no job. All the best.
Grace unlocks her door and right inside her apartment plunks to the floor in defeat. She slams the door shut, h
iding in the darkness. Her face burns for trying and she looks to the wine to wash it away, a cleansing current through her veins, carrying away the rejection. She is thankful for the corkscrew on her keychain. She takes a swig from the bottle and then another, welcoming the promise of the slightly tart and tepid wine that’s now spilled on the front of her shirt. She opens the little plastic lid of the sushi tray and pours a dash of wine on each little bundle, as if feeding a nest-full of baby birds. For you and for you and for you. And then more for me, she thinks. A fire truck screams by and she drinks to that. A bottle breaks against the sidewalk and she drinks to that, too.
The telltale red light blinks on her answering machine.
“Grace, it’s me. I know you’re probably still upset. I wanted to tell you I’m sorry. For things. It’s just best this way, I think. Well, okay. Good luck with everything.”
How perfect. His message—purposefully left during the day when she wouldn’t be here—is a fitting punctuation to their relationship. She tells herself she didn’t like him that much anyway.
She is a rest stop, an intermission, a pause. At thirty-five, she has never been in love and she often wonders if there is something that has rendered her unable. A crossed chain of synapses in her brain, a genetic flaw. Callie was the sunny, outgoing one. She was light and Grace was dark. Hair color, temperament, outlook. Callie made people smile just by being. Even as a child it was already clear that she had it, that spark that people gravitate toward.
Grace was ten and Callie was eight when old Mr. Jablonski’s wood-sided Dodge Aspen veered around the curve of Woodland Road. On that hot, hot August day when the brood cicadas had come up from the ground en masse and drowned out the other sounds of summer, when the sun-warmed tar was as soft as taffy, her sister’s body bounced up onto the car’s hood like a rag doll, coming to rest in the cradle of a crushed windshield.
When she thinks of Callie, Grace remembers the long flaxen braids, the impish cackle, the fierce longing she felt to know her sister’s blitheness, to grab hold of it and swallow it whole.
###
Grace hoists herself up onto the couch and finds the remote control flush against the edge of the coffee table, this dependability one of the benefits of living alone. Even though drunk—a bottle is such a lovely amount—she doesn’t want to miss the local news in case there are any Sarah Shafer updates. It seems, at the moment, vitally important to follow the story to its conclusion. She clicks on the television.
Before she can decipher the words, she sees Sarah’s mother, her face collapsed in her palms, being led into the police station by her husband. Grace knows that look, turned in on itself, imploding. Despite her tears, the woman does not yet comprehend the enormity of the moment, still thinking that her child might come back. Grace’s mother said that for years after Callie died she would occasionally wake up and for a few seconds not remember. Cruel bliss she called it, like it was the name of a perfume.
Grace turns up the volume. An anonymous tip led police to the remains of a body believed to be that of Sarah Shafer, buried behind a beachfront apartment complex five miles from campus.
Remains. It shouldn’t be a surprise that she’s dead, but its resounding finality settles heavily in Grace’s chest. She had hoped against reason that the girl had gotten away, that she was doing something no one had expected.
There is a lightness about Sarah, a look of openness to the world that has always been foreign to Grace. She wonders if someone wanted to snuff that out.
The news has moved on to the weather, a week of warmth and sunshine ahead. Grace’s head spins when she closes her eyes.
CHAPTER 3
In the morning, Grace finds a story on her desk waiting for her to copyedit. A large picture of Sarah Shafer takes up half the page. She is laughing, her mouth open wide, a wad of pink bubble gum formed to her molars. How Callie might have looked in high school. Tan and freckled. At ease and happy. The photo is a close up, the strings of a bikini top around her neck, a strand of blond hair caught on her lip. The toast of spring break in Cabo San Lucas. Pretty, popular, all-American. Nutley High School’s Sweetheart Dance Queen. The magazine couldn’t ask for a better victim.
A smaller inset photo shows the parents, huddled against their grief, heads bowed, faces shadowed. Sarah’s mother’s eyes are closed, her face crumpled, her head curled into her husband’s chest as if he might protect her from her flayed heart. Grace knows they will spend hours, days, weeks, imagining what they could have done differently, how one little thing, a phone call even, might have been enough to change the course of events. Their other kids will always be part of a larger story about their sister, and they will be angry with her for all of it.
The article calls it “a senseless murder,” a phrase that lets people luxuriate in their outrage, puts them on the right side of good. Grace checks the byline—a writer whose prose tends to be overwrought and sappy. She circles “senseless” and writes “overused?” just to be irritating since it’s not her job to suggest word choice edits. She knows what’s next: “killed in cold blood.” Another gem. She circles it and scribbles “find another phrase?”
But in the next paragraph, she’s jolted out of her smugness by the report of Sarah Shafer’s autopsy results. One deep stab wound to the chest that severed the aorta and another flesh wound near the left lung, both made with what appeared to be a short-blade knife. Grace puts her palm over her heart but its beating is muted by her sweater. She reaches under her shirt and bra and feels her skin, up under her breast, the rapid pumps of blood churning within a protective cage of bone. The knife would have had to hit just right to slip between the ribs.
“Hey, Grace,” Brian says, standing in the opening of her cube.
“Hi,” she says startled, quickly pulling her hand out.
“What’re you working on?”
“Finishing up the piece on the college murder.”
“God, that’s so sad. She wasn’t that different from us, you know?”
“Yeah,” she says, her neutral smile barely more than a line.
“Kind of freaky. So anyway. I was just checking on the front-of-book section.”
“It’s finished,” she says. “It was pretty clean.”
“Oh, great, great,” he says, nervously picking imaginary lint from his ripped-on-purpose jeans.
She looks at him in hopes of making him leave. She wiggles her toes inside her shoes.
“Grace?”
“Yeah?”
“I was wondering if you wanted to get a drink after work,” he asks, catching her unprepared.
She blinks.
“Just a drink.” He reddens.
She’s jumpy, antsy to finish the article, which accounts for what she says next.
“Okay.”
“Really? Cool. I’ll swing by later,” he says.
Grace watches his head bob away down the hall before turning back to Sarah.
###
The bar is a dark and modern midtown after-work place, loud with pre-commute revelry. Brian yells their drink order to the bartender, a skinny wannabe actress with fake breasts bunched together in painful-looking cleavage.
“How long have you lived in New York?” he asks.
“Almost thirteen years,” Grace says, realizing he was about that age when she moved here.
“Wow. That’s a long time.”
“Yeah,” she says, raising her eyebrows. “You’ve been here what, a year, year and a half?”
He nods.
“I arrived right after 9/11,” he says. “That must have been an insane experience for you.”
Not this conversation, she thinks.
“I hate how it’s all so fetishized,” she says. “It’s a cottage industry. The justification for everything these days. A collective excuse.”
“I kind of feel like I’m not really part of the city because I didn’t live here then,” Brian says.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” she says. “It doesn’t make me
feel more a part of it anymore.”
He eyes her, not believing.
“It must have changed you.”
Brian is looking for a way in, but he’s chosen a dead end.
“You know how it changed me? I know that if I had been in the second tower,” she says, “I would have stayed where I was. I would have respected that vague authority on the loudspeaker and followed instructions. And now I know that I wouldn’t.”
She takes the last of her wine in too big of a gulp and whacks her glass down on the bar. Brian flinches but then he does the same thing with his drink and smiles.
On that sunny September morning, Grace left her desk with coffee in hand and walked down Seventh Avenue, straight toward the smoke and licks of orange. At Canal Street she watched in a trance as the towers burned and then fell, unaware that there were people inside. She walked across town and up to the East Village, sunburn blooming across her cheeks and nose, her feet wrecked in high-heeled sandals, numb amidst the people moving about, yanked out of routine. There was almost a giddiness, a mania to the chaos: this is huge and scary and exciting and we’re alive! People stopped at restaurants for lunch and chattered with each other. Fire trucks flew down Second Avenue. Grace walked south again, through the choking air and the murmur of voices that tried to put meaning to the events, to the Manhattan Bridge, and she kept walking through Brooklyn until she saw Jimmy in the cafe across the street from Chances.
It was one of the only times she has seen him outside the bar. He looked smaller, more timid. It was strange to see his feet, and to see them in running shoes. He wiped the powdery ash from her shoulders. A woman at the table behind them looked out the window, crying. Outside, a group of men in paint-splattered pants huddled around a radio.