by Rae Meadows
In the year following Callie’s death, Grace’s parents retreated. Her mother had her bedroom and her three-hour walks and the sympathetic kitchen tables of her friends. Her father had bourbon. Grace dabbled in obsessive habits that gave her purpose and kept her company. Most of these behaviors were internal and no one knew about them. They were games more than anything. Counting syllables when people spoke, touching walls, flipping light switches a certain number of times, not eating anything red or yellow. But then she started to pull out her hair. She would single out a strand at her crown at the end of her part, weave it around her first two fingers, and yank it, savoring the little pop of the root giving way. One at a time. A release she allowed herself when she was alone. The smooth patch of scalp was her secret and the whorl grew from dime- to quarter- to half-dollar size. It was her talisman. Her security blanket. It could be counted on to be there, to be in her control.
Most of the time she hid the patch with a ponytail so her parents never saw it, locked away as they were within their grief. By the time Miss Harris, her fifth grade teacher, noticed, her patch was the size of a silver dollar. Its presence so confused and sickened her that she sent Grace immediately to the school psychologist.
Mr. DiFranco was a short, broad man who wore his curly hair in an afro style, but because his hair was thinning on top, it went out to the sides in two bushy poofs. He was the kind of man Grace’s father would have called a yahoo, so even though he was warm and she liked him, she knew her dad would have scoffed at him. So in a way, she did, too. She had met Mr. DiFranco once before, the day she returned to school after Callie died. He had told her then that it was good to cry, that she could come talk to him whenever she wanted. She never did, and had avoided walking by his office ever since.
The day Miss Harris sent her to see him, he wore a plaid polyester suit with an open-collared shirt and sat with his legs crossed to the side of his desk.
“Grace. How are you?” he asked, leaning forward.
“Fine,” she said.
“How’s it going at home?”
“Okay.”
“I’m sure it’s been hard on you, with Callie gone.”
She shrugged and ran her thumbnail along the wale of her tan corduroys.
“Do you want to talk about anything?”
“No.”
“Do you want to tell me why you’re pulling out your hair?”
She shook her head.
“I see. Do you do it when you feel a certain way? When you feel angry? Or maybe when you feel sad?”
Right outside the window the custodian was mowing the lawn. The smells of gasoline and cut grass mixed with that of the old coffee on Mr. DiFranco’s desk.
You don’t get it, she said in her head. You can never understand.
“You know that it’s natural to feel guilty when something bad happens to someone we love and not to us. Do you think you’re pulling out your hair because you feel responsible in some way?”
“No,” she said without meeting his eyes. She had shut down long before this well-intentioned outreach.
“But you know the accident was not your fault, right Grace?” he asked.
She stared at him and traced the outline of his large hair with her eyes. There was a tiny part of her that wanted to open up to this man, so unlike her tight-lipped family, to tell him all that she kept hidden. But the urge was eclipsed by the safety of silence.
“It’s natural, Grace, to feel this. To feel like you could have done something.”
She hasn’t thought about this in twenty years and she is amazed that now with the right trigger, the door to the memory has swung wide open, exposing all its contents intact. She gets up from the step and wipes the grit from her hands. She fumbles with her keys in the door, at once anxious to get inside to her bottle of wine.
What Grace didn’t tell Mr. DiFranco, what she has never told anyone, was that she could have done something that day, but she didn’t.
———
“He was a weird dude. Of course, hindsight is twenty-twenty and all that. He gave me Knicks tickets once.”
“We were at the Saloon in this big group the first week of school. Out of nowhere he started crying and ran out. I thought he was just really wasted.”
“I hope he fries.”
“He was really sweet. He came in here about five times a week, always by himself. He ordered coffee, two glazed, one chocolate with sprinkles. He was so polite and always left a tip. He used to ask how I was, and that’s rare these days, especially with the younger ones. I’m so sorry about it all.”
———
CHAPTER 6
A week has passed since Grace’s visit to Long Island. She went back one night and posted a flier around campus asking for any information about Charles, which elicited a trickling of emails and phone messages, some epithets, one conspiracy theory about “commie academia,” and a call from campus security saying such postings were against school policy. No one claims to have really known him, and even the gossipers, who wish they had something juicy to share, don’t have much. What has emerged is a sad portrait filled in only with broad strokes from his eight lonely months at Emeryville College.
The fraternity has distanced itself from him, saying they knew him only casually. As Amy said, he was not an official member. He lived off campus at the end, rarely attending classes, by then rarely seen.
Grace sets about searching for someone who knew Charles before he left Ohio. Posing as a former student, she gets an alumni mailing list from his high school graduating class. One by one, she sends each person an email, asking who knew him and what he or she remembers.
“Hey, Grace.”
As Brian comes around to the entry of her cube she quickly closes her email. His shirt has skulls printed on the front and a frayed collar, like he is some kind of rebel. It makes her smile. If she were a different type of person she might muss his hair. If she were a different type of person she might ask him out to dinner.
“Hey, Brian,” she says.
“Is everything all right?”
“Um, yeah. Sure.”
She hasn’t done much work in the last few days and she hopes it hasn’t become noticeable. She has an article due and there is more work she has ignored.
“Okay,” he says. “Just checking. You know, since you were sick and all last week. And I haven’t seen you much lately.” He gives a nervous laugh. “So. We need to talk about the summer special issue? I keep forgetting.” He twists to crack his back.
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll come by later?” She tries to sound upbeat.
“You should get out more,” he says, wagging his finger. “You’re always locked away back here.”
The phone in a neighboring cubicle rings, as if to remind Brian that he has stayed too long. He half-waves before retreating to his office.
She tries calling Charles’s lawyer, but as expected, he won’t talk to her.
“No, Mr. Dubno will not allow access to his client,” his secretary clips. “Thanks for calling.”
Grace does a quick search for updates on the case. The D.A. has announced that Charles will be arraigned tomorrow on eight charges. Two counts of murder in the first, four counts of murder in the second, one first-degree kidnapping, one first-degree attempted sexual abuse.
Their story is taking shape. She just doesn’t believe it.
###
“Jimmy,” she says, “the usual.”
“Gracie, for you, the best,” he says, filling her glass.
The wine on her tongue is calming. She takes off her jacket and drapes it over the stool next to hers, just in case anyone gets an idea about striking up a conversation.
Jimmy leans over with his forearms on the bar, his eyes deep pools of dark gold, the color of scotch with melted ice. Like the contents of glasses she and Callie used to clear the morning after her parents’ cocktail parties.
“Talk to Jimmy,” he says.
“Just remembering something.”
“From your face I would say it’s not a good something.”
Grace lifts her shoulders to her ears and lets them fall.
“My dad used to say, ‘Memories can devour you if you don’t look at them and let them go.’ But he would say that,” Jimmy laughs. “The old sonofabitch couldn’t remember a thing.”
“Nothing like bartender wisdom,” she says. Her tone sounded harsher than she meant but Jimmy pretends it didn’t.
“Can you believe I don’t charge for it?”
He lightly pinches her arm and moves down to tend to other customers.
For Grace’s parents in their Cleveland suburb, the seventies were the era of big-backed station wagons and light blue carpeting. Tennis groups and duck hunting. Valium and elaborate home bars. A consistent group of couples, some from the neighborhood, some from the club, used the weekends to overdo it with alcohol and each other. To Grace, the ritual of her parents going out was mesmerizing and exciting but edged in anxiety—she never knew the state in which they might return.
She holds an image of her mother in motion, sweeping into the kitchen in heels and gold bangles, her long, dark hair in soft waves from having been set in large curlers. She bends down to kiss Grace, enveloping her in her glamour and the womanly scent of her Joy perfume, leaving faint pink lips on her daughter’s cheeks. As a girl, Grace was in awe of her mother’s beauty.
One fall night, the air sharp with the snap of Northern Ohio woods, the party landed at their house. Grace and Callie helped their mom make her signature hors d’oeuvre: white bread cookie-cuttered into circles, slathered with mayonnaise and sprinkled with scallions, and then toasted. The girls set out ashtrays and filled bowls with dry roasted peanuts. They crumpled newspaper for the fireplace and stocked the ice bucket. Their dad organized his bar tools and glasses and bottles like a chemist preparing an experiment. He was merry in the way they liked. He was elegant in his suit, not yet smelling of alcohol.
By the time the candles were lit and the lights dimmed, the doorbell began to ring and the girls were sent upstairs to bed.
But Grace and Callie didn’t want to sleep. They watched the party from the top of the stairs. Their mother swung through the kitchen door with a tray of crudités and flowed through the party in her wide silk pants and large hoop earrings, while their father smoked a cigar as he talked to Janice Livorno with the low V-neck and large, tanned breasts. Laughter got louder, bodies got closer. Grace was used to how her dad was drunk—she knew what to expect and when to avoid him—but other drunk adults were scary, slightly menacing. Callie didn’t understand and she never wanted to be kept from a party.
“Come on,” Callie said. “Let’s go down.”
“No,” Grace said. “We’re not allowed.”
“They’re not going to care.”
Nina Simone, her dad’s post-third-drink favorite, was on the record player, and the Wilsons from the club were dancing cheek to cheek, their eyes on other people.
“I’m going,” Callie said. “I don’t care if you come or not.”
“Callie,” Grace whispered, but her sister was already halfway down the stairs in her flannel nightgown.
Mr. Chenowith, who lived two houses down, swooped Callie up and spun her around, spilling his drink.
“Come here, baby,” her dad said, pulling her onto his lap. “You remember Mrs. Walker.”
“Lizzie’s mom,” Callie said.
“Right, sweetheart,” Mrs. Walker said, with kohl-lined, half-closed eyes. She wore the shortest skirt in the room.
“Now this, Callie,” her dad said, nodding at Mrs. Walker, “is a beautiful woman.”
“Oh Jack, you’re too much,” she drawled, putting a new cigarette in her mouth.
Grace inched down a few steps. In the shadow of the front hall, there was her mother, wineglass in hand, staring out the window. And then Mr. Chenowith came up behind her, planting a slow, lingering kiss on her neck. Her mother didn’t pull away. They moved off together into the dark.
Callie giggled and flitted from one group to another, dancing around, unaware that her father’s hand was now massaging Mrs. Walker’s ass, while her mother was being fondled by their neighbor with the large yellow lab named Louise.
Grace wanted to pull Callie out of it all, out of this scene that had gone terribly wrong. She felt strange, tarnished. But she couldn’t turn away. A glass broke. An argument erupted between the Mitchums. Grace was nine but she had the same sense then that she still gets now, that feeling of there it goes: no matter how good everything can seem for a moment, it will sour before long.
The next morning, Grace and Callie were awake before their parents and they cleared the mess from the party into the kitchen—wine goblets and highballs and short bar glasses with remnants of limes or lemons or lipstick on the rims. They sipped from the milky remains of banana daiquiris. They ate leftover peanuts and drank cans of warm ginger ale for breakfast as they watched cartoons. Grace found her dad a while later, asleep in the car, passed out in his suit, an empty glass in his lap.
Jimmy holds up the wine bottle. Grace nods.
“You don’t think I drink too much, do you?” she asks.
“Think about who you’re asking,” he says.
He pulls out the cork and hesitates.
“I’m stopping at two,” she says, tapping her glass.
“I’ll try to remember that,” he says.
He pours. The glass frosts and sweats from the cold wine. She takes a tiny sip, wanting to make it last.
“You know the college murder out on Long Island?” she asks.
“Sure.”
“It’s not like it seems,” she says. “I mean how it’s been reported.”
Jimmy folds his arms across his chest and squints at her.
“You know something the police don’t?”
She balls up her napkin and throws it at him.
“Maybe. In a way. There’s more to it than evidence. There’s something about the kid they arrested.”
“Yeah, he kidnapped and killed a girl. He’s a shady character.”
“It’s not that simple, why people do things.”
“I won’t argue with you there,” Jimmy says.
He wipes up a puddle of spilled beer from the bar.
“If he did it at all,” she says. “I don’t know. I don’t know enough yet to figure it out.”
“What? You think he didn’t do it?”
“I don’t think he’s a sinister mastermind who planned it all out. People want retribution and they want a bad guy. It makes them feel better about themselves.”
“You think he’s redeemable?” he asks.
“I want to know more about this kid. I need to put together a few more pieces.”
“Humans are a giant mystery, Gracie. If you get all the clues and fill in all the little boxes, we still might not make sense.”
Grace rests her chin on her palm.
“Just don’t put yourself in danger,” he says. “What about the knitting? That seems like a better pastime.”
He’s summoned by a group of women in suits at the other end of the bar.
“I’ll be okay,” she says.
“Yeah,” he says and smiles. “That’s what you always say.”
She doesn’t tell Jimmy that she is ready to follow this thing wherever it goes.
###
A few months after Callie died, Grace watched from the family room window as her mother picked the first daffodils of the season in the backyard, her hand up under the throats of the bunched yellow blooms as she trimmed the stems to perfectly even stalks. In her mind, Grace pictured herself and Callie standing a few yards apart, her mother between them. She imagined that her mom looked at her, and then turned away, dropped her bouquet, and held out her arms to Callie. Grace became fixated on this image, on the feeling of being the unchosen. Even though she knew she’d made it up, the scene was cracklingly real to her, as if it kept recurring on some parallel stage. The thought
so seared her consciousness that she would try to see how long she could go without thinking about it, forcing her mind blank, pushing away this vision she had created. It was too damning, and she had a sense that if she couldn’t get rid of it, it was proof of its truth.
Of course Grace knows now that her mother loved her as best she could, that her obsession was born from her own unease, but it’s never really gone away, that vague sense that she is a disappointment for having lived.
Grace couldn’t bring herself to answer when her mother called at work earlier, but after her stop-off at the bar, she dials freely.
“Mom?”
“Grace. Hi. What time is it?”
“Did I wake you?”
“I must have dozed off. I was watching an old Cary Grant movie.” Her mother yawns. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. I wanted to see how Dad was doing.”
“He’s asleep. Today he watched eight trays of slides from when you girls were small. Such pretty children you were. I decided that he’s just going through some sort of phase, your father. Feeling his age.”
Her mother knows it’s more than that but she’s always in control, her emotions in check. Theirs was a household of silence, of close-mouthed smiles across quiet dinner tables. Tears borne in private corners. One night Grace’s father arrived home hours late, but her mother pretended all was normal. She put on her lipstick and met him at the door with his drink and a kiss on the cheek. Growing up Grace sensed that it was more important to be slim than smart, feminine than ambitious. When the Taylors got divorced, her mother shrugged and said, “Well, she’d really let herself go.” Grace preferred to stay out of view in the cool, obfuscating shadows. It was easier that way.