Grace

by T. Greenwood

  She thought about her mother driving home. Her back straight, her hands at ten and two. She imagined Willa waiting at the door for her. Her father inside now, maybe catching up on some listings, trying to forget what had happened in the hospital. She thought of her sister, Angie, doing homework or drawing. Or maybe already asleep, as if this had all been a dream. As if Crystal weren’t lying in the hospital feeling like her body had been split open like a ripe peach. That dark pit in the center of her, that pocked dark place now exposed.

  She reached for her phone on the nightstand. Nothing. Ty hadn’t answered any of her texts. Hadn’t had the decency to even answer the goddamned phone. She stung. She leaked. She could feel her body emptying. Everything that remained trying to escape.

  Through the wall behind her she could hear a woman moaning, like an animal. On the other side of the curtain that divided her own room in two, a baby cried, its cries like tinkling bells. Only Crystal keened silently. Her body weeping, seeping, but her eyes were absolutely dry.

  Later as she closed her eyes, she allowed her mind to wander to that place she’d promised she wouldn’t ever go again. To that impossible place. To imagine what would have happened if she had simply refused. If instead of handing the baby over to Mrs. Stone with her pale hair and pale yellow sweater set, she’d just held on.

  As Elsbeth stood, rolling Mrs. Van Buren’s whispery hair into hot rollers, she dreamed her life backwards. She couldn’t help it. It was magnetic, this need to circle back again and again. To unwind the life that had been woven from that moment on, to imagine how things would be different if she hadn’t met Kurt. Mrs. Van Buren’s soft voice was hypnotic, and as she talked, Elsbeth drifted.

  When she’d met Kurt, she was sixteen years old. Elsbeth at sixteen was doe-eyed but scrappy. She was on the girls’ basketball team at school, all legs and speed. She met Kurt when she and a couple of girls from the team had gone out for pizza at Luigi’s after the game. They’d won, she’d scored twenty points, and she was feeling invincible. Kurt was sitting at the booth behind them, and she’d noticed him right away when she walked back to the table, carrying the giant pizza on the hot silver tray. He had slow eyes, the kind her mother would have called “bedroom eyes.” Light blue with heavy lids, thick blond lashes. Totally sexy. He looked at her, and she felt everything inside her go soft and melty.

  For almost an hour, she sat giggling with her girlfriends, stealing glances at him across the back of the booth’s seat, trying to make that pizza and her fountain drink last forever. He was sitting with two other guys, and every now and then he’d catch her looking at him and grin. By the time the girls’ pizza was finally gone and the soda was diluted with melted ice, she felt like she was going crazy. And so when the guys started to empty the plastic pitchers of beer and stack up their cups, gathering their coats and making to go, she thought about her coach’s mantra, You can’t score if you don’t take the shot. So she edged out of the seat, and then she was standing at the guys’ table, every nerve ending a live wire. “Hi,” she said. “My name’s El.” She looked straight at Kurt as she said this, trying to say a thousand other things without saying a word.

  “Cool,” one of the other guys said. “You girls like to party?”

  And then they were all piling into Kurt’s car, four in the back and two up front. Led Zeppelin blasting on the stereo, winter air coming in through the open windows. They drove out to the river, tumbling out of the car and into the woods, and somebody had a bottle of tequila and somebody had weed. And Elsbeth had a mission.

  It didn’t take long. Soon, the others had clumsily paired off and wandered away, finding soft places to lie down and make out. She and Kurt held hands and walked along the river’s edge. She remembered that she was cold and he’d offered her his sweatshirt. Later, her tongue and lips swollen from all the kissing, she crawled into her bed, still wearing it. His phone number was scrawled on her forearm in ballpoint. His sweatshirt smelled like sawdust and pine. She was drunk and slept curled up inside the sweatshirt, dreaming the night, the kisses over and over again.

  But she was sixteen. And she knew now that back then she would have fallen in love with anyone with sexy eyes who gave her a second glance at a pizza joint. With anyone who touched her like Kurt had. With anyone who kissed her like that. It was all just a matter of circumstance that it happened to be Kurt.

  As she slipped the curlers out of Mrs. Van Buren’s hair, the silvery curls like tiny clouds, she wandered back through that night, at all the opportunities to change her future. If she’d missed the game-winning shot and gone home to sulk over a cardboard quart of ice cream. If she hadn’t been so sure of herself, so certain that she could have anything she wanted. If she’d fallen asleep on her stomach instead of her back, the ink of his number smudging into her sheets like the mascara she didn’t bother to wash off.

  She imagined the other lives she might have lived. The other men she might have loved. The other houses in other towns, the other jobs, even the other children. But the barb that snagged and ripped on all of this was Gracy. Without Kurt, without Trevor even, there would never have been Gracy. And the thought of that, of Gracy’s absence from her life, was like imagining the world without the sun.

  She used to love Kurt so much it stung. But that love had dulled like one of the knives in the set they got from her mother for their wedding. She still cared about him, of course, but she couldn’t help but feel let down.

  She and Kurt used to dream about leaving Vermont, about going somewhere, anywhere but here. Kurt said he’d always wanted to go to Alaska. That he’d love to work on a fishing boat. That they could get a little log cabin in the snow. Elsbeth dreamed of sunshine. California, Arizona, Florida, Hawaii. Kurt told her he heard that at certain times of the year in Alaska, the sun never set. But he also said he’d go anywhere Elsbeth wanted. These were the things they shared in the calm blue midnights of their first year together. She could still remember that tingling feeling of a possibility sometimes. That soft happiness of a shared dream. But as soon as Elsbeth found out she was pregnant, they’d put off their plans. She’d enrolled in cosmetology school so that she’d have some practical skills. A way to make a living, wherever she and Kurt wound up. She figured girls in Alaska needed their hair done just as much as girls in Two Rivers. Trevor would just be a minor delay.

  She was haunted by the promises whispered under covers, by the trill her skin used to feel at his touch when she was still just a girl in tube socks and a basketball uniform. This wasn’t the life she’d dreamed of then. Maybe this was someone else’s dream, but it certainly wasn’t hers.

  But then again, here she was. She wasn’t a dreamy sixteen-year-old girl anymore. She was a wife. A mother. She knew she just needed to do something, sharpen those dulled edges. Feel alive again.

  “You have lovely hands,” Mrs. Van Buren said.

  “Excuse me?” Elsbeth said, untying the plastic cape with its snowfall of silver curls.

  “Your hands are lovely,” she said. “Do you play piano?”

  She studied her hands, her long, thin fingers. It was as though she were seeing them for the first time. “No.” She laughed. “I used to play basketball, though.”

  And despite herself, again she rewound, in slow motion, her long legs running backward down the court, away from the basket, dribbling and dodging in reverse. The pass from the sideline, returning to the hands of the other girl. A girl whose name she could no longer recollect.

  By noon, her feet were tired, but it had been a busy day with two new clients she hoped might become regulars.

  “See you later,” she said to the receptionist, Carly, on her way out.

  “Say hi to Gracy for me,” Carly said, the electronic bells of the doorway chiming.

  She drove to the elementary school to pick Gracy up from kindergarten, and when they opened the metal gate, Gracy ran across the blacktop into Elsbeth’s arms, nearly knocking her over. “Mumma!” she said, and Elsbeth smiled. Gracy’
s unabashed affection nearly killed her sometimes. She couldn’t remember the last time Trevor had hugged her.

  Gracy’s teacher came over and rubbed the top of Gracy’s head. “You have quite a little artist here,” she said to Elsbeth. “Gracy, why don’t you show your mama what you made today?”

  “What did you make?’ Elsbeth asked, squatting down to help Gracy open her Hello Kitty backpack.

  “I drew you a picture,” Gracy said, reaching into her school folder and carefully pulling out a sheet of paper. She handed it to Elsbeth.

  The picture was of a face, with big round eyes and exaggerated eyelashes. Black hair and pink lips. The neck was long and thin with a heart-shaped locket at the throat.

  “Is this me?” Elsbeth asked, reaching for the locket she wore every day. The one Kurt had given her when Gracy was born, the one with a picture of Gracy on one side and herself on the other. The one she didn’t take off even in the shower.

  Gracy nodded.

  “She was so proud of it,” Mrs. Nelson said. Then she whispered conspiratorially, “It really was the best one in the class.”

  Mrs. Nelson had told Elsbeth more than once how special Gracy was. She had a couple of really difficult children in the class this year, including one kid who repeatedly spat on her, and Elsbeth knew that she was grateful for Gracy. Sometimes Elsbeth felt like two different people, like two different mothers. She was Trevor’s mother, always sitting on the opposite side of the principal’s desk, head hung in shame, and she was Gracy’s mother, beaming with pride. It made her feel like shit.

  “It’s not as pretty as you are, Mumma. I couldn’t do the nose right.”

  “It’s perfect, sweet pea,” she said, hugging Gracy tightly, feeling the little bones of her shoulders like wings at her back. But she also felt a crush of guilt, as though that other mother, Trevor’s mother, were standing there next to her, watching this display in disgust.

  “Listen, how about we go get a treat? Just you and me,” and then, “We can pick something out for Trevor too.”

  Gracy nodded and pressed her forehead against Elsbeth’s.

  Elsbeth pulled into the parking space in front of the Walgreens and glanced in the rearview mirror. Gracy had already fallen asleep, and she thought for a moment about just driving home, letting her sleep. But she’d promised her a treat, and if she woke up at home, that would be the first thing she’d remember. As she lifted her out of her booster seat, she noticed a whole bunch of crumbs stuck to something hot pink on the seat’s upholstery. She plucked a withered French fry from the floor and shoved it in her pocket. She thought of Twig’s Mustang with its soft leather seats and freshly vacuumed floor mats and sighed.

  Gracy grumbled a little as Elsbeth hoisted her up onto her shoulder, still dreaming. She was five now, almost six, and almost too big to be carried, but Elsbeth didn’t mind. She’d carried her on her hip for the entire first year of her life; she could cut and even color hair with Gracy still clinging to her. She lugged Gracy inside and then lowered her into the front basket of one of the shopping carts. “Mumma, can I get a Butterfinger?” she asked groggily.

  “Sure, baby,” Elsbeth said. “Anything you want.”

  “Trevor likes those peanut butter cups.”

  Elsbeth could spend a whole day at Walgreens. She loved to wander the makeup aisle, trying the samplers of blush and eye shadow on the backs of her hands, while the glossy models on the displays smiled coyly at her, like they shared some sort of special secret. She loved walking down every aisle, letting her fingers graze the sticks of deodorant, the flip-flops, and the tacky wind chimes. She paused at the Tupperware, the hand soap, the bags of gumdrops and little jars of Vaseline. There was a comfort in all this stuff. It quieted her nerves in a way nothing else could. She let Gracy out of the cart in the toy aisle, let her pull the puzzles and dolls and squirt guns from their shelves and metal hooks. They flipped through coloring books and crossword books together. She read entire magazines at Walgreens.

  Everyone steals.

  This was what Elsbeth told herself every time she couldn’t resist the impulse to pocket an item. Of course, she never took anything expensive: not the cameras or GPSs, not the cordless phones or expensive earbuds. But little things: a box of diet pills, a bag of M&M’s, a tiny garden gnome whose little red hat poked into the palm of her hand as she pocketed it. She took something almost every single time she shopped there, though the total probably didn’t add up to even a hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise. The box on the top shelf of her closet was overflowing with the stolen trinkets: Matchbox cars, magazines, batteries, and gum. Once she even managed to pilfer a box of twenty lubricated condoms, despite the fact that she’d been on the Pill since Gracy was born. At home, she’d opened the box and slipped the condoms into her hand like colorful party favors. They lay scattered now next to some stolen dryer sheets and a ball of rubber bands in the box.

  The box made her feel awful. She knew stealing was wrong, but the urge was so strong. It felt like the time she and Kurt had driven to Maine and she’d stood at the shore as the waves sucked at the sand beneath her feet. She was powerless to its pull. And, of course, she would never steal from a local business, but Walgreens was just one of a million chains making somebody somewhere richer and richer. Everyone steals. This is what she told herself.

  Today, as Gracy snagged a giant stuffed Easter bunny from the clearance bin, Elsbeth felt that tidal pull toward a rotating display of sunglasses. She knew where the security cameras were. She also knew that there was only one employee on the floor right now and she was busy texting behind the counter.

  “Come on, Gracy Bear,” she said and Gracy ran to her, dragging the bunny across the scuffed and speckled linoleum. She scooped her back up into the cart and, without hesitation, slipped a pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses into the front pocket of her jeans. Her heart was beating hard but steadily in her chest as she pushed Gracy and the rabbit straight to the counter where she smiled at the pregnant girl behind the counter. This girl had been working there for a while, mostly on weekends, though. She’d seen her a few times before, watched as the suspicious belly bump grew into an obvious one. She couldn’t be more than sixteen, and Elsbeth felt a sudden snag in her heart. She had wished she could tell her something, warn her or something, but it would be like yelling “Fire!” after a house has already burned to the ground.

  “Did you find everything okay?” the girl asked, quickly shoving her phone back behind the counter.

  “Yes, thanks,” Elsbeth said, trying not to think about the sunglasses. She knew it was dangerous, stupid. She could so easily get caught, though she never stole unless Gracy was with her. Nobody ever suspects a mother of shoplifting, especially not a mother buying her cute little girl a giant stuffed rabbit and a Butterfinger. “Gracy, honey, put your bunny and the candy up there so the nice lady can ring us up.”

  The girl smiled at Gracy, and Elsbeth’s chest ached with pride.

  Elsbeth glanced at the girl’s round belly again, making sure before she spoke. “Are you having a girl or a boy?”

  The color drained from the girl’s face, and she looked down.

  “I’m sorry, that’s none of my business,” Elsbeth said, and suddenly she was aware of the sharp arms of the glasses poking into her hip.

  “That’ll be five dollars and forty cents, please,” the girl said. Her eyes were watery, blinking hard.

  Elsbeth handed her six dollars and Gracy grabbed the bunny from the counter, squeezing it.

  “It was a girl,” she said. “I already had her.”

  “Oh,” Elsbeth said, feeling her face grow hot. She figured she’d be smart to just shut up before she made things any worse.

  As she got Gracy back into her booster seat, she thought about the days right after Trevor was born, when her body looked and felt so different. She remembered staring in the full-length mirror on the back of her bedroom door, stunned to see a woman’s body instead of a girl’s. She remembered how
cheated she felt. How devastated. She also remembered wondering if she’d made the wrong decision. Thinking, as Trevor wailed and flailed in his crib and she could do nothing but sit helplessly on her bed and cry, that maybe she should have given Trevor up to someone who would make a better mother. It was in those days, so long ago now they were hazy, dreamlike, in her mind, that she began second-guessing her entire life.

  In the car, she pulled the sunglasses out of her pocket, peeling the UV sticker off the lens. She peered into the rearview mirror at Gracy, who was cooing softly to the rabbit, a swipe of chocolate and peanut butter across one cheek. Elsbeth looked at her own reflection and put the sunglasses on, and as she tilted her head to the left and then the right, she thought about the bathing suit in the catalogue, about sunshine and the ocean, and she realized exactly what she needed to do.

  They needed a vacation.

  And so instead of driving home, she pulled out of the lot and drove to the grocery store. Even though she’d already blown their grocery budget for the week, she got two thick pork chops from the butcher and a frozen Sara Lee cheesecake. The kids could have fish sticks, but she would need to make something special for Kurt. On the way to the register, she grabbed a seven-dollar bottle of Chardonnay.

  Elsbeth knew that if she was going to convince Kurt to take a vacation, she would need to start planting the seeds early on. Like the tulip bulbs she planted last winter. She couldn’t just come out and ask him; that would never work with Kurt. He’d come up with a zillion reasons not to before she even finished asking. She would need to be patient. She needed to be smart about it, subtle. She had to do in a way that made it seem like it was his idea.

  On Fridays after work, Kurt usually went to the store to pick up his dad’s groceries for him: a carton of eggs and a jar of instant coffee, two loaves of white bread, and three cans of deviled ham. Then he’d go to the liquor store for a carton of Kools and a handle of Seagram’s Seven. If Kurt bought anything else (fruit or vegetables or milk), they would only go bad in his fridge. He stopped by to check in on Pop every Friday night on his way home from work, and once every month he took him into town to the barber and then out to Rosco’s for lunch. The home health nurse came by twice a week to make sure he was taking his meds. Maury Vorhies, one of Pop’s neighbors, came on Monday nights to play cribbage. Kurt had asked him to keep an eye out on Pop as well.