Forged in Grace (13 page)

“
Help Adam,” Marly repeats, voice hard, and sets down her bowl. “Grace, I guess, wow—” Now she heaves into a chair, and though I can’t see her eyes clearly, within a minute I hear her crying.

“
No, don’t cry, please. Of course I love being with you, too.”

“
It’s just,” Marly says, sniffles punctuating her words, “I’m having this baby, Grace. And I’m scared. I don’t want to do it alone.”

I come over to her, put my hands on her shoulders; within three weeks all this hand-to-person contact now helps me control the visions. So I
’m not expecting this one:
a strong muscular back, flexing, an intimate heat that is both pleasurable and suffocating.

I don
’t want to pull away quickly, but it feels too personal so I gently remove my fingers, aware that my heart is beating faster, heat crowding my thighs. I sit down across from her.

“
What about Drew?” I ask, sensing my opportunity.

Up close, I can see the surprise in her eyes.
“What
about
Drew?” She pushes her cereal bowl away from her.

“
There’s something between you, right? You’re seeing each other, aren’t you?”

She sits up straighter, lips pressed tight together.
“It’s complicated.”

“
That’s what you said about Loser back in Drake’s Bay.”

She slurps milk out of her cereal bowl, then answers,
“Together, they are one big complication.”

“
Well, seems to me that the one who takes you to day spas is a better deal than the one who beat you up in a parking lot.”

Marly smiles with only half of her mouth.
“See how much I need you? I can barely sort this stuff out by myself.”

I sigh and walk to the window, my sock soaking up the spilled milk, squishing on soggy Cheerios. Strange to think that healing is my purpose, in this land of alternative universes and fake prettiness. Stranger still to think it
’s the friend who saw me burn thirteen years ago who would lead me to it.

Like some screwed up version of toastmasters, I talk to my indistinct reflection in the bedroom window, over and over again the next morning.
“Hi Adam, it’s Grace!” No, too cheerful—he’ll think I don’t miss him at all. “Hi Adam, Grace here, I need to talk to you…” That sounds too morose. The more I practice the words, “I don’t know when I’m coming back to work, to town,” the more they sound final in my head, the more impossible to speak, the more heartbreaking. Of course, I don’t even know if he misses me.

And I
’ve never been good at speaking my mind. Even in my burn survivors group, which I attended for two of the worst years of my recovery, with feelings swelling like a sac of poison just behind my throat, I could not tell anyone how it felt. I was in awe of a man I called “Kuwait Guy”—one of my defense mechanisms, not to learn anyone’s name. He was an optimist. A “Beauty is Internal” believer, even though his face literally melted away after a bomb blew his platoon to shreds. He always started the same way for the newbies: “You’ve heard them call you lots of things, but take it from me… you’re a burn
survivor
, not a victim.”

When Kuwait Guy was done with his speech, and the new ones were dabbing their eyes with tissues, the group facilitator would venture around the room asking if anyone else wanted to tell their story. Like me, one half of her face was spared the flames, but her reconstructive surgery pulled her skin down into strange puckers so that her right eye threatened to droop into the heavy cowl of sweaters hiding the territory of her neck. At least they
’re honest when they call it “reconstruction” I remember thinking. No matter how good the surgeon, we’d all been counseled on the unlikelihood of getting back our old faces.

Every time she came to me, Sally or Selena, whatever it was, tilting her good side toward me in a way I would come to mirror, asked the same, pointless question:
“How about today, Grace?”

I had never been able to explain that I came to group only because Ma had fits if I didn
’t, as though I’d turn into some kind of deranged fire-starter without counseling. But the truth was, I didn’t feel seen or purged or less alone, the same way the special ed kids at our school probably didn’t feel “integrated” stuck away in portables at the back of the school. As a sixteen and seventeen-year-old who just wanted a normal life, coming to those meetings was just a reminder of how much I didn’t want to be among these “survivors.”

What I wanted was to be able to navigate the world of regular, unscarred people with hardly a second glance, to live a life promised to me in the literature of my English classes and the feminism of my mother
’s generation.

The kind of life I can have now, here in Vegas.

And trying to put that into words to the people who’ve helped me
survive
the years in between seems unfair, and impossible.

Chapter Thirteen

April

This patio is lush with flowering green ferns, their spiny tendrils like fingers all craning toward me, wanting. I
’m holding the hand of a woman named Hawa. She couldn’t bear to be inside the small apartment she shares with her young husband. Her bright blue head scarf is so threadbare, well-loved, one of a few possessions that made it out of Darfur with her to America when she fled. Her face bears wrinkles and hollows of fear and trauma, aging her—she could be anywhere between sixteen and forty. Her eyes are hollow, hidden. Her left hand shakes as if with a palsy.

The woman, Aina, who speaks for her is tall, with skin several shades lighter than Hawa
’s deep umber, says she is Hawa’s aunt. “Hawa was raped.” The woman gets straight to the point in thickly-accented but clear English. She delivers the words as though we are talking about getting one’s hair done. “All night. Lost the baby she carried, and the husband—he was killed. She want have another baby, with the new husband, but she have trouble with the…” She looks over Hawa’s head, squinting, searching for the words. “With the love. There is pain, down there.” She points to Hawa’s lap.

Marly is sitting on the far end of the patio, my overseer. When I glance at her during the story of Hawa
’s injuries—men using their bodies as weapons in a war she was a casualty of—Marly’s face is almost green, her shoulders hunched over, like she will be sick. She shakes her head repeatedly. I look at my hands with concern; are they up to the task, am I up to the task of walking with this woman’s body and its abuse?

But I look into Hawa
’s eyes, and she looks back, and does not cringe. Her expression says:
Ah, so you know suffering, too
. And my serpent makes an appearance, slow, gentle, inviting her out from the darkest place to which she has had to retreat, into the light.

When I open my eyes, black spots float across my line of sight against a light so dim, I can barely make out my own hands. A cool cloth is instantly pressed to my forehead.

“Here, take these—” Marly’s voice. She puts two pills in my hand and I swallow them down with a glass of ice water without bothering to ask what they were. All the cooling helps. She gently massages the source of the headache. I scoot backwards and up to a sitting position. It feels late to me, as though I’ve slept many hours this time. On a bedside tray she’s amassed a mountain of French toast that oozes syrup, scrambled eggs, and fruit. A pitcher of orange juice accompanies it. Before I can speak she offers me forkfuls, and I am so starved, I eat.

I
’m not sure if I’m eating so fast because I’m famished or because Marly is shoveling it in rapidly, but when I’m stuffed I begin to feel restored. “What time is it?”

“
Nine-thirty at night,” she says. She bites her lip and bounces one leg in the chair. “You slept all day,” she says. “I was worried.” She fidgets with the fork from my plate.

“
That’s a record.”

Even after two months of this work, it still amazes me each time a person allows me access and opens the
“gate” that lets the serpent do its work. Without that permission, nothing can happen.

I am vaguely aware that it
’s a beautiful April day outside, and I should take advantage of the tiny window of “mild” Vegas weather before the bulldozer heat bores down on us, as Marly has warned me it will. I reach over to a list I have on my nightstand. Marly peeks over my shoulder, reading aloud: “Cancer (colon), Cancer (breast), Kidney stone, Stomach Pain (Chrone’s Disease), Cancer (ovarian), Cancer (breast), Diabetes (trouble balancing blood sugar)…keeping score?”

“
That’s last week alone, and I know that’s not everyone. I’m…sick of sickness,” I say. I look at her belly, which is a miraculously round protrusion. The effortlessness of Marly’s pregnancy gets me thinking of Ma and her lament that she never had more children, which brings a sudden, unbidden memory of my parents.

My father saying in a slightly slurred shout,
“Why keep up the sham any longer, Roseanne? We don’t love the same things, we don’t believe the same things…Just because we’ve been together since we were sixteen doesn’t meant we have to keep doing it. Grace will understand.”

“
I don’t care what she understands, Harlan Jensen. You took a vow to me, and I to you.”

I raced down the stairs afraid to let this conversation run its course.

When I entered the living room, Ma was red-faced and sweating with anger. The Christmas tree looked as though it had been attacked by a gang of small animals. The twinkly lights hung at the base of it like a woman’s skirt roughly stripped; the antique glass bulbs had been tossed on the wicker couch beside the tree, though two were in shards on the carpet, as though crushed in rage. Pine needles littered the floor.

“
What did you do?” I whispered. Ma shook her head. “I am trying to make the season happy. Buy presents to make it a beautiful holiday…”

“
Roseanne, it’s more than a few presents. You’ve got a problem,” he shouted. “We can’t live like this. We can’t afford it, and we can’t…you’re crowding us out!”

“
Can’t we just have a nice Christmas?” I asked, my voice shrill, childlike. “I don’t even care about presents. Let’s just act like a happy family.”

“
You call this a family?” She pointed at my father. “I was going to have so many babies! My body failed…”

My father’s face softened a little.
“Roseanne, you can’t be blamed for that—”

Ma actually stamped her foot.
“That is not for Grace’s ears. You know what? Take it all back. All the presents, the tree, all of it!” Ma kicked the tree. “I’m going to my room.”

“
Hey, where’d you go?” Marly’s voice draws me back into the present. Before I can answer, she says, “Do you think there’s anyone you can’t help, Grace?”

For a moment I wonder if she
’s saying I’m a fraud, or asking if I have an expiration date. “I don’t know,” I say. “I mean, there always seems to be
something
I can do.”

Marly chews a cuticle, holding her Deep in Thought pose.
“I wonder if you can heal emotional wounds,” she says lightly, almost as if she’s not ready to share the thought aloud.

I
’ve gotten used to Marly’s style of deciding what we’re going to do, so I am not surprised to hear her tapping at my bedroom door before 7:00 a.m. “Come on, Grace. Up and at ’em!”

I
’m still groggy from the last healing, despite my inordinate amount of sleep. I don’t understand how she can always be so full of energy, her body busy making new life, working full time, and fostering me in my strange new venture.

“
What is it?” I demand, sleep still web-like around me, dream fragments resisting the pull of morning light.

“
Something very important,” she says, her hands flying around her like birds as she pushes her way into my room, pulling the curtains wide. The sunlight grinds in on me and I squint away. “Woah,” I say. “Too much!”

Marly doesn
’t seem to hear me. She paces my room, finger tapping her top lip. “Dress nicely, maybe that white dress you wore to the first healing.”

“
Are you going to tell me what we’re doing today?” A headache beats out a steady pulse in between my brows.

Marly flings my closet doors open.
“Where is it?”

Though it
’s actually her closet, and I have barely a handful of items tucked away in there, I’m suddenly filled with naked dread that she’s about to see into some dark corner she shouldn’t—half afraid that a tumble of Ma’s junk is going to come crashing out onto Marly’s pristine floors. “I’ll get it. Go make yourself something to eat,” I say. “Please?”

When I
’m dressed and steady, coffee in a travel mug and ibuprofen on board, I follow her down to her car.

“
I just want you to know that I’m onto you,” I say, trying to sound somewhat teasing.

She whips her head around to look at me as though I
’ve accused her of a crime. “What?”

“
I just mean that when you want me to do something you don’t think I’ll agree to, you don’t tell me the plan—you just swoop me up and away, toss me into the mouth of the beast, so to speak.”

Her eyes look downcast, and her smile tumbles into a frown.

Now I feel guilty for taking the steam out of her idea. “It’s ok. I like it. Let’s go on with this big surprise.”

Marly considers me from beneath her cleanly brushed hair—which is pulled back in a headband, not her usual look.

“Ok,” she says, but the steam that was there a moment ago seems gone, and I feel like a jerk. I sip my coffee to stop myself from saying anything else.

When we pull up in front of
Las Vegas Hospital I’m baffled. It’s a tall, clean building, with no landscaping other than tanbark and a few non-spiny cacti.

Marly is so quiet as we traverse the hallways of the hospital that waves of anxiety start to ripple through me. Either we
’re here to see someone very sick, or she’s arranged for me to meet with some kind of plastic surgeon, a false promise of change that I have no faith in; insurance companies are all too happy to consider reconstruction an “elective” surgery. I exhale, looking around at the once-familiar, sterile supply stations and beckoning rooms.

It
’s only as the scenery changes to include wallpaper with colorful balloons on it, and posters of Sesame Street characters that it hits me what she’s done.

“
No, Marly—I can’t go in there.” I stop at the doors where the sign announces Pediatric Unit.

Through the doors, at the end of a long corridor, are
two forty-something people slumped in chairs. They rise when they see Marly. They’re walking toward us before I can think to run or hide. The woman has long, thin hair piled in a messy bun atop her head. There is a large and alarming streak of white in her otherwise dark hair. The man’s face is imprinted with tiny little squares, a pattern from the knit shirt, which he must have been pressing into his face, sleeping on his arm.

“
They’re expecting us, Grace. Just talk to them.” Marly quickly waves to the parents, who smile in the tight but polite way of people whose pain has erased the familiar muscle memory of happiness. “Max, Celia—this is Grace.”