Miracle Beach (34 page)

Beads of sweat stood like Braille on Glory’s forehead. It made Jack uncomfortable, knowing how muggy he himself felt. He cracked the farthest window from Glory’s bed, then decided that the long-sleeved shirt the girl had on was probably a worse culprit. He rummaged through the two laundry baskets of secondhand clothes they had scrounged up at the foot of Glory’s bed, which was really a roll-away cot, to find something with short sleeves. Jack knew Glory was exhausted—she had fallen asleep in his arms in the station wagon—and knew he didn’t need to worry about waking her.

He was right about that. Jack changed Glory’s shirt without so much as a night whimper escaping from her. But as he eased her back down onto the bed, he saw something that almost stopped his heart.

The biggest part of Glory’s arms was her elbows, which joined the bones above and below them at severe, odd angles. Those bones were covered with the softest, most translucent skin, marred by gashes in various stages of healing—from old scars to flame red ridges that looked like they might break back open at any minute.

Jack gasped. He felt the room start to teeter and spin. She was just a little girl. An itty-bitty little girl. Who could do something like that to her? Torture her like that? What kind of monster? Her mother? Could a mother really do something like that to her own child? Or was her mother’s boyfriend to blame? Was that the real reason Glory had braved so much to get to them? Had some guy abused her in other ways, too? Was this simply the physical manifestation of all Glory’s mental or emotional scars that she seemed to have hidden so well? Was he prepared to deal with all of this?

Jack wasn’t sure. But he sure as hell could use a little help figuring it out.

He lowered himself to the foot of Glory’s bed, staring at the girl’s mutilated arms. Black specks danced in front of his eyes. His breath skipped like pebbles.

He didn’t know what to do, or what to think. Sophie would. She was sensible like that. But she was also far up-island, guiding, out of reach of cell phone service.

Could he ask Macy? Would she come?

She picked up on the fifth ring, her voice groggy. Perhaps the notes of panic in Jack’s voice that he didn’t try to hide had roused her, because she said she’d be over in five, and hung up.

 

Jack led Macy to the sunporch, to the edge of Glory’s bed, rolled Glory onto her back, and held out the girl’s left arm.

“Do you see?” he asked her.

Macy covered her mouth with an open hand. “Oh, God,” she said. “Good God.”

“Do you see it?” he asked her again.

Instead of answering, Macy knelt beside Glory’s bed. “Can I touch her?” she asked.

Jack nodded. “She’s out cold.” Macy took Glory’s arm in one hand, and lightly brushed the other over Glory’s ravaged skin.

“I don’t know what to make of it, Macy,” said Jack. “I mean, what the hell?”

Macy swabbed at her face with the back of her hand. “I used to do this,” she said.

“Do what?” Jack didn’t have to ask, really. He knew, in his head, that no one else had carved up Glory’s arms. But it was just all so god-awful that he couldn’t make himself actually believe it. She was
eight
. Only eight years old. Jack pressed his fingertips to his eyelids, feeling the subtle pulse behind each one.

Macy continued brushing her hand back and forth over Glory’s arm as if trying to erase the marks.

She stood up and made her way to the steps leading to the house. She motioned for Jack to sit down next to her. Macy told him then, in a whisper, what she had never told anyone—the full story of how it had all started. And she started at the beginning, on that Christmas Eve, just before her dad found them—she and her mother in the bathroom—when Macy’s mum had opened her eyes, looked straight at Macy like she wanted so badly to say something, and then closed them. For good.

After that, Macy told him how she took to practicing so she wouldn’t be her mother and let Death in on the first knock. She’d make him wait on the stoop until she was good and goddamned ready to open that door. He’d come in on her terms, not by accident.

She had started with her stomach, she recounted calmly. It seemed the easiest—soft and fleshy—and the safest. Nothing vital near the surface that she could accidentally nick.

She described how the little beads of blood that rose to the surface of the cut soothed her. That there was a well of crimson within her, and that she could control its flow fascinated her. That she loved how she could control how and where and how much blood she let see the light of day, or the thin skin of night. She told Jack about how she would place her index finger across the cut, hold for a few seconds, and then raise her finger to her lips. No nightmares, no worrying about being chunky or unpopular or latent-crazy. No thoughts to torment her when she was alone. Just her and a tiny bit of steel. It was almost too simple.

Even better, she said, was the way her wounds bristled against the waistband of her jeans, the buttons of her shirts. The way she endured the stings straight-faced through biology and geometry and English. It made her feel real, alive. She told him that at first it wasn’t a frequent thing, but when one cut would start to heal, when it just itched instead of hurt, she’d reopen it, or sometimes make a new one altogether.

He raised his hand to stop her. He had heard enough. But she didn’t take the cue. She went on, to the time when, years later, she started sneaking into an abandoned orphanage to entertain boys after school, and right about then she had to switch to her arms and the flesh of her inner thighs; and a year or so after that, when she started to sneak into local bars to pick up unhappily married men, she switched to the undersides of her arms. “Boys and men notice a woman’s torso under their hands, but the undersides of their arms they can do without,” Macy said.

The men would run their hands down her arms, pinning her wrists to whatever she happened to be lying on—bed, floor, pool table in the back bar—and if they bothered to ask what had happened she’d say, “Barbed wire.”

“By that time, it didn’t seem like such a lie,” Macy said.

Jack’s head felt like it had been whipped with electric beaters. Why would anyone do such a thing—on purpose? To themselves?

“Do you . . . still . . . you know?” he asked, his voice shaking.

“Cut?” Macy asked. “No. I stopped. Nash caught me once. The look on his face—I couldn’t after that.”

“But why?” Jack asked, shaking his head. “I just—I don’t get it.” Though it dawned on him then that he hadn’t seen Glory in short sleeves since she arrived.

Glory stirred in her sleep and Macy moved toward her. She lowered her voice to a weak whisper. “Believe it or not,” she said, “it makes the hurt go away.”

Jack covered his mouth with the back of his hand. He bit a knuckle. He hauled himself up the half step leading to the living room, turned, and sat down.

“Every time I look at her,” Macy said, “all I see is Nash fucking someone else. Like I never even knew him.”

Jack shook his head. “You did. You knew him like I did.”

“And how was that?” Macy asked. She lowered herself to her knees, leaning against Glory’s cot.

“The best we could,” he said. “We all did the best we could.”

They sat in silence, watching the rise and fall of Glory’s rib cage.

“Do you really believe that?” Macy asked after a while.

“I do,” Jack said. And he did.

Glory stirred. Her eyes lolled open. “Wha’s going on?” she asked, still mostly asleep.

“Your grandpa and I are just talking and waiting for Sophie,” Macy whispered to her. “Go back to sleep.”

Glory nodded and closed her eyes, but then they popped back open. She seemed to realize, too late, that her arms lay on top of the bedding, exposed. She pulled them back under the sheet, her eyes darting from Jack to Macy and back. Glory bit her lip, as if she were bracing herself for the lecture that would surely follow.

But Macy didn’t say a word. Instead, she reached out to stroke the girl’s forehead with her left hand, and with the right, she reached under the sheet and freed Glory’s scarred arm, setting it back on top. She traced a finger over the mangled flesh, then bent down and kissed the gouges carved raw and bloody into Glory’s skin. She let her lips linger there.

“What are you doing?” Glory asked. She didn’t pull her arm away, but looked wholly confused.

“Didn’t your mom ever do this for you?”

Glory shook her head.

Macy brought her lips once more to the girl’s scarred arm. “I’m making it all better,” she said.

MAGDA MADE CERTAIN HER WINDOWS WERE ROLLED DOWN BEFORE putting the car in drive. She had heard about a tragedy years ago when a car ferry in Vancouver—or was it Seattle?—pulled away from the dock as it was unloading and cars trying to make their way to dry land instead found themselves plummeting into the icy North Pacific. The news coverage following the disaster had said that a lot of people would’ve been saved if they had just been able to roll their windows down. So now, every time she was over water, Magda dutifully made sure to do just that.

But this was Vancouver Island in late August, and the acrid mix of dead fish and seawater and something else equally offensive—barnacles, maybe?—mixed into an aroma that stung her nose. She hated the way this place smelled, and as soon as she felt the tires of her rented Chevy Malibu touch asphalt, the windows went up and she switched the air-conditioning on.

She inched along in the line of cars making its way out of the ferry lot and pushed buttons on the radio, trying to find a station. Magda stopped fiddling with it as she eased her car onto the Old Island Highway, the sight of which made her suck her breath in hard. There was the gourmet kitchen store where Nash had bought her a sushi-making kit, plates, and fancy chopsticks for her birthday during their last visit. Sushi was the thing to eat out here, the thing to do. Everyone seemed to make their own. And Magda didn’t mind sushi itself. But she couldn’t deal with preparing the raw fish. She had tried once, but the slimy, smelly salmon had made her gag. And gagging was not exactly an appetizing response to the dinner one might be trying to make. So she had tucked the mat and fancy chopsticks and plates into the cluttered cabinet above her refrigerator—the place where once-good-idea kitchen gadgets and gaudy nonregiftable platters went to die in their house. And she lied to Nash each time he asked how she was enjoying her sushi set and whether she had made any for Ginny and Frank yet.

And there was the little bakery where Nash had first introduced her and Jack to Nanaimo bars. Macy had been away at a horse show for the weekend, and it was just her little family together. They had gone shopping for a tent for Nash at Canadian Tire, and then to the Ironwood Mall for eggs, bacon, bread, and feta cheese for that evening’s meal. On the way out, Nash had suggested they get some Chinese food from the deli (it was his favorite, although Magda couldn’t quite understand why—Chinese food from a grocery store!), and they parked at the marina, staked out a spot on the docks, and had an impromptu picnic. Afterward, on the way back home, Nash had convinced them that they absolutely
had
to try a Nanaimo bar. “Even you, Ma,” he had said. “And you’re getting your own.” Magda tended not to order dinner—less guilt and, ideally, calories. She’d make do with a side salad and satisfy herself with bites from Nash’s and Jack’s plates. She hadn’t realized, until that point, that anyone had noticed her little trick.

“What the heck!” she remembered saying, as she took in the trays of bars striped mocha and white. The simple smell of the bars’ vanilla custard, coconut, and chocolate had been sweet enough to pang her teeth. “After all that MSG, why not?”

Nash had thrown an arm around her then, and kissed her on the cheek.

Even though the drive home was a good twenty minutes or so, by the time they had reached Nash and Macy’s house, none of them had managed to put away a whole Nanaimo bar. Magda herself had conceded defeat not even halfway through. She was sure she had never tasted anything quite so sweet. Each bite literally hurt her teeth to the point where she thought they might melt from the sugar.

Now she was passing the condo that Nash and Macy had bought as an investment property. Nash had taken out the worn gray carpeting, put in new bamboo floors, painted the bedroom a blue reminiscent of the ocean it overlooked on sunny days. He’d tiled the modest bathroom and put a colorful mosaic back-splash in the kitchen. He sanded and repainted the porch railings a brilliant white, and replaced the vertical railing supports with Plexiglas, common in homes and condos with ocean views in Campbell River. Every week, he would send Magda and Jack pictures of his progress, always so proud of his handiwork.

Once, Macy had called the condo a money pit. Magda had told her that she thought the pictures looked lovely and that she and Jack were throwing around the idea of buying it from them, retiring in Campbell River. That had shut her up about the condo. Magda had only been half kidding.