Grace (47 page)

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Authors: T. Greenwood

BOOK: Grace
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Her mother can't stand the smell of Angie's skin, the wreckage that is Angie's body. But Crystal doesn't find it disgusting at all. She is single-minded in her care for her. She feels, for the first time, like she truly has a purpose. She thinks that maybe one day she'd like to be a nurse.
She wrote to Lucia, to let her know what happened to Angie. Lucia wrote back right away, and Ty e-mailed a few days later. They write to each other now, e-mails filed with so many careful words. The friendship they used to have is gone now, abandoned or lost, she's not sure which, but they have forged something new, a quiet forgiveness maybe. A bit of peace. Lucia sends her things in the mail. Books of poetry, homemade cookies, hand-knit hats that look silly on her head. Crystal gives them to Angie, who wears them to cover the few places where her hair still hasn't grown back in.
“You look pretty,” she says today as Angie affixes one of Lucia's hats over her hair. They look at each other in the reflection of the mirror and Angie grimaces as she smiles. “No, really, look at the way the light is hitting your eyes,” she says. Because despite all the damage, her eyes were, thankfully, unharmed.
She reads to Angie in the afternoons, biographies mostly. They are just finishing the one about Frida Kahlo. Angie is obsessed with Frida Kahlo. They are similar: both victims of tragic accidents, their damaged bodies like prisons. Nothing but art to save them.
After she is able to sit upright, she asks Crystal if she can get her an easel for her bed, some paintbrushes and paint. The pictures she paints bring tears to Crystal's eyes. They, like most important things in life, are both terrifying and beautiful.
“R
eady?” his dad asks.
Trevor is taking pictures of what remains of Pop's house. The long shadows it makes across the burnt grass of the lawn. The cracked windows. For a moment, he imagines Pop's face peering out.
“I guess.” He shrugs and climbs into the back of the truck.
As they drive away, he aims his camera at the house and watches it become smaller and smaller in his viewfinder, until it is nothing but a speck. Nothing but a memory.
Pop's house is empty now, every last piece of trash, every broken thing removed. For the second time. For the last time. They'd filled his father's truck ten times more with debris they hauled off to the dump, most of it stinking of the fire. Without Pop there to refill it, it slowly emptied out until finally, it was just the hollow shell of a place he once lived. As if Pop had never been there. Erased. Gone. It was like those photos from the first roll Trevor took. All those images that were washed away by the light, like dreams rubbed out. Just that afternoon Mrs. McDonald in her bright red skirt came and pounded a sign into the ground by the driveway. F
OR SALE.
His dad says that whoever buys it would do well to just knock the whole thing down and start over.
He and his dad go visit Pop every weekend, take him cigarettes and the chocolate-covered pretzels he likes. At first he wouldn't speak to them, he was so angry. But his resolve is weakening. He has to know he is safer here, that he is taken care of. He likes the food they serve. The nurses are kind, and he gets better reception on his TV here than at his old house.
Trevor talked Pop into letting him keep his model airplanes. At the house, Trevor had stood on a stool and used his fingernails to pry the thumbtacks and fishing lines from the ceiling. They were all covered with dust, and when he tried to blow them off, he realized that the dust was probably trapped in the paint. Pop had probably hung them up when they were still wet, and the dust and grime had become a part of them. He wondered about that, about filth attaching itself to you. About being stained, tainted. He told his therapist that he worries about this, that this might be what he's most afraid of. She told him that you can't be ruined by things that others do to you but only by what you do to others. He liked that idea, and he made a quiet promise to himself to remember this whenever he began to feel undone.
He also has his mom. Surprisingly, after that night in the field, she wanted nothing more than to listen as Trevor told her everything that was going on inside his head. Maybe working with the chatty ladies at the salon for all those years had made her a good listener. At first, he was reluctant. It seemed strange to spill those secrets. To let them out. But every night after Gracy fell asleep, first in the motel and then in the room they all shared at Twig's, he was able to tell her almost everything that had happened. And she listened. She really listened. She held him and stroked his hair like she used to, to calm him down when he was little, and she told him that whenever he was ready, she would make sure something was done so that Mike and Ethan never ever bothered him or anyone else again. Uncle Billy would help them. He only needed to say the word.
He hasn't talked to his father about what happened that day behind the Walgreens. He doesn't have the words yet to explain. They also haven't really spoken about what happened out in the field. But he knows that his dad is sorry; all of the anger in his face has turned to regret. Everything he does is an apology.
The night after they all moved back into the house, he heard noise outside his window and watched as his father went to the shed. The porch light shone eerily, casting a strange orange glow over the entire backyard. It was beautiful. The swing set looked skeletal, like the rusted bones of some large creature. And his father's silhouette was like a shadow, a strange choreography. In and out he moved, purposeful, and certain. By morning, there was a new roof and the windows were filled in to block out the light.
“A proper darkroom,” he said, showing Trevor everything he had done, offering it to him like a gift.
They managed to save the enlarger and some other equipment from the river's edge, and what they couldn't save his father had somehow replaced. His dad had even gotten the shed wired with electricity, plumbed so that he'd have running water. His father called Mrs. D., and she promised she'd come to the house that summer, to show him how to develop the film, how to enlarge the pictures and make prints.
His mother gave him the hundreds and hundreds of photos she'd had developed for him, and he felt terrible for thinking she'd stolen them from him.
“You're a really good photographer,” she'd said, looking through each of the photos with him at the kitchen table. “You know that, right?”
He'd nodded then, embarrassed but proud.
“Can I keep this one?” she'd asked, holding up the one of Gracy standing in the river.
She took the negative to Walgreens and had it enlarged, then she framed it and hung it in the living room, right where everybody could see it.
Now he lies down in the back of the truck and peers through the viewfinder of his camera up at the sky. He can feel the road under his back. It makes his heart and lungs feel like they are being pummeled. It hurts, but the view is worth the pain. Storm clouds crowd out the sun, stealing the little bit of warmth remaining. It is still spring, still cold, but summer will be here soon. Every single thing tells him this is true: the tops of the trees turning green. The crisp chill to the air, the smell of fertilizer and sunshine. Even the breeze tastes different, sweet.
The school is shut down for the rest of the year. He won't ever have to go back there. As long as he passes the tests they send in the mail, he'll be able to go to the high school in the fall. Start over.
Ethan was hurt in the explosion. Badly. Trevor heard that both of his hands were burned when he was trying to get out of the cafeteria. He heard that they were worried for a while that they might not be able to save them. He thought about Ethan without hands, how powerless he was now. How impotent. Mike wasn't hurt. He'd been at a doctor's appointment or something that morning. But after the explosion his parents decided to move away; Angie told him that her parents were selling their house.
He visits Angie sometimes. He takes her art supplies. Her sister, who stays home to take care of her, always leaves them alone, brings them snacks and stuff to drink.
He asked Angie the last time he was there if he could take a photo of her.
There is something amazing about a body that's been harmed the way hers has, something incredible about its stubborn insistence upon healing itself: all that damaged skin sloughing off, replaced by the new, fresh pink flesh. The hopefulness of it is what gets to him.
“It's beautiful,” he said as he peered through his viewfinder at her. At all that shiny hope emerging.
“Shut up,” she said, but she smiled too. As he clicked and clicked and clicked.
Next week they're going to Florida. He's excited to fly, both afraid and thrilled. He thinks about looking at the clouds from the inside. In the back of his dad's truck, he tries to concentrate on the clouds, to think only of flying. For now, he has nothing to worry about except sunshine. Nothing to worry about except how he might capture the light.
Acknowledgments
This book was, in many ways, a collaborative project. It was not written alone, and it is with humility and gratitude that I offer my thanks to everyone who contributed and conspired:
 
To my family, whose support sustains me always. To Patrick and the girls, who give purpose to my work (and all the necessary diversions from it as well). Thanks especially to Kicky for Dizzy and Squirrel; I promise the rest of their story will come soon.
To Jim Ruland and Rich Farrell, the other two-thirds of the Dub Club triumvirate, who stood by as this little bird incubated, giving me both nest to keep it safe and, later, the worms to feed it. And who watched as the ugly little thing finally grew into something worthy of both flight and song. (A special thanks to Jim for your eleventh-hour suggestions. Phew.)
To Mireya Schmidt, Tim Hussion, and Angie Vorhies for your generosity and to Georgia Bilski for the swirliest hair.
To Peter Senftleben for always seeing what I cannot. To everyone at Kensington for helping make beautiful books and finding people to read them. To Henry Dunow for looking after me, and to all my best teachers: the ones who taught me the importance of perspective, and the power of light.
Discussion Questions
1.
When Crystal first goes to the Kennedys' house, she observes: “What you see on the outside rarely reflects what's really on the inside. She, of all people, understood that appearances can be deceiving.” Discuss the idea of perception in this novel. Compare Crystal's assumptions of the Kennedy family through the photos and her interactions with Elsbeth and Gracy with each of the characters' own narratives. Do you think her view of them is accurate at all? Talk about Elsbeth's and Kurt's opposite reactions to Trevor's pictures of Gracy. Further, consider how your life might look to an outsider and how accurate that perception is or how it differs from the truth.
2.
Discuss the various father-son relationships: Kurt and Trevor, Jude and Kurt, Jude and Billy. Are there patterns to be found? Any broken? How is Kurt like his father? How is he different? What parallels are there between the opening scene and the one in which Jude catches Billy with a man in the junkyard?
3.
Trevor is a victim of Ethan and Mike's bullying, but is he also victimized by those people who fail to protect him? Who do you believe is at fault for the way he is treated? How do you think he handled the bullying? Should he have fought more, reported it, ignored it? What could have been done to protect him and other students?
4.
What purpose does Elsbeth's shoplifting serve for her? What is missing in her life? Do you think she will stop now? Discuss her need for things and Jude's hoarding. Are the two more similar than different?
5.
Talk about the theme of stealing in
Grace.
Elsbeth shoplifts, Trevor steals equipment and chemicals from school, and Crystal steals Gracy. What else is stolen, figuratively and literally, over the course of the novel?
6.
Photography allows Trevor to see the world as an artist. Does this make his world more endurable to him? What impact does art—in the form of photography, drawing, tattoos, etc.—have on each of the characters in
Grace
?
7.
Put yourself in Kurt's position as a son or daughter to an aging father with an obvious illness. How would you have handled the situation? Do you think Kurt did the right thing by setting him up in the trailer in the backyard, or should he have left Jude in his own home like he wanted? Do you think it was abuse like Maury suggested?
8.
Why is Crystal so consumed by Elsbeth and Grace? How does her relationship with the Kennedys change her? Did this event actually, in the end, help her get over the loss of her own Grace or make her more regretful?
9.
Do you think that Kurt and Trevor will ever be able to get past that awful night in the pasture? Is there any amount of healing or love that can mend such a rift?
10.
Discuss Elsbeth's feelings regarding Trevor and Gracy. Do you believe it's possible for a mother to love one child more than another for no reason? Are she and Kurt bad parents? Why or why not?
11.
Discuss the concept of grace in this novel. Think about all of the definitions and uses of the word.

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