Gradually Grace (Detroit ABCs #7)

Chapter 1

“Oh. Oh, my. Sugar! No. No, that won’t work.” I tried not to yell, but it hurt and she had to stop. “No,” I said firmly. And loudly.

“How? How could you…” The woman trailed off but she did stop pulling so hard on my arm. She looked exasperated, which I recognized because I’d seen that expression plenty of times before. “What happened here? I can’t even begin to understand!”

I re-examined the situation and considered how to explain. It was probably best to start at the beginning. “I guess that at one point, someone decided to purchase an aquarium for this waiting room, and then someone else might have added the little blue pebbles at the bottom—”

“I’m not debating the origins of our office décor. I’m asking how you got your arm stuck in the fish tank filter!” she interrupted. I saw that she hadn’t been exasperated before, because this, now, was real exasperation. “How did an adult woman do something like this?”

That was harder to pin down. “Things seem to happen to me. Even when I was a baby,” I started, but she shook her head. I thought she stomped her foot a little, too.

“I don’t want to listen to your life story. I’m going to get the doctor,” she informed me. I heard her call him after she went through the door that led to the exam rooms. “Dr. Winter! You’re not going to believe this…”

I tried to move my arm but it really was stuck in there.

I imagined what my siblings would say when they heard about this latest accident, because they would definitely find out.

I had brought my brother-in-law to this appointment today and he would tell his wife, my big sister Juliet, and she would spread it around to my four other big sisters and to my big brother as well.

They might even tell our parents, but that was iffy.

Those two had a lot going on right now and anyway, they had never been overly interested in—

“Sorry,” a small voice whispered, and I looked down at the little girl who had previously been sitting next to me in the waiting room chairs. She had a hard time saying the R sound so it sounded more like “sowwy,” and I felt even more of a kinship with her.

“That’s ok,” I answered, and then I nodded a hello to the rest of the people still seated. One of them was this girl’s mother, who hissed at her and beckoned with her hand. Her daughter left me at the tank and quickly returned to her chair.

“The fish?” I heard a male voice say next.

He wasn’t loud, but I heard the disbelief in his voice.

In another moment, the nurse who had first tried to pull me out returned, and she had a man with her.

He didn’t have on a white coat or scrubs like I’d seen on other doctors, but he did wear a tie for fanciness.

He stopped when he saw me. “Wow.”

“She won’t say why she did it,” the nurse told him, which wasn’t true. She hadn’t asked me that! I could have given her the answer very easily.

But now they were both studying my predicament. “Can’t we remove the lid to free her?” the man asked, but he seemed to be saying it more to himself than to me or the angry nurse. “Oh, I see. It’s broken on the side and...” He gingerly tried to wiggle it. “It’s stuck.”

She looked at me suspiciously, but it had been broken when I’d found it. “I couldn’t get the lid off, and that was why I was trying to put my hand through the little opening near the filter,” I said.

“Why did you put your hand in there at all?” she demanded, but the doctor was also talking as he rolled up his sleeve.

“Let’s just deal with the situation. Miss, I’m going to stand next to you,” he said, and I nodded as he moved to my side. “Now I’m going to reach in and try to extricate you. Tell me if you feel any pain.”

I guessed that was his way with patients, quietly explaining and not making any promises about success. It made sense in his line of work.

“I should call the fire department about this. And then the police,” the nurse muttered, and she glared at me. “You have several patients still waiting, Dr. Winter.”

“I’ll see you as soon as possible,” he announced to the other people in the room.

I could tell that they were also angry, but also not at him.

He put his arm into the lukewarm water and the fish, which had gotten used to my presence, scattered to the far side of the tank again.

“Here we go,” he said quietly, and he started to work on both the aquarium and my arm. It did hurt at times, but then—

The lid flung off, the filter apparatus detached, and with a big splash, I was free. We were also both drenched.

“Thank you,” I told him, but the nurse had spoken over me.

“She ruined your tie!” She shook her head angrily. “I’ll get you a scrub top,” she said.

“Could you also please get one for…” He turned to me. “What is your name?” he asked.

“I’m Grace. Grace Curran.”

“Please also get a top for Grace,” he requested, and the nurse looked as if she’d rather have poured the rest of the water from the tank over my head but she only nodded.

“Is your arm all right?” the doctor asked me. He picked it up and looked at my skin, which was red in places but unbroken.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Here you go,” the nurse announced as she returned. She handed him a blue top that was similar to what my sister Nicola wore to work, and she tossed one in my direction, too.

“Thank you,” I said to her as well.

“You’re welcome,” the doctor told me, and she managed a nod.

They strode into the back rooms and I went to the bathroom to wash up and change.

Before I did, I walked by the chair where the little girl sat, opened my hand to let a small object fall, and then kept going.

When I came out, she and her mom were gone, and someone had put the tank back together.

The office seemed to have returned to normal.

I sat down and the man next to me got up and moved.

My brother-in-law Beckett came out into the waiting room a little while later and stared at me. “Why are you wearing that top?” he asked. “Why are your other clothes in a bag?” The nurse had also given me a Ziploc and my wet sweatshirt and bra were inside it.

“There was a thing about the aquarium,” I said, pointing toward the fish, and Beckett shook his head. He didn’t look mad, though, and he actually smiled.

“Grace, you have a talent for trouble.” But now he laughed quietly and I felt very excited.

“Do you have good news?” I asked.

We walked out of the office as he answered. “I have no news. The scans are still clear,” he told me, and I felt so relieved.

“Call my sister,” I said, but I didn’t need to remind him. He was already on the phone with his wife. She hadn’t been able to come today because he had purposely scheduled this appointment to coincide with when she had an appointment of her own.

“You need a break from this,” Beckett had explained, but Juliet had been upset.

Very. She’d decided that someone else had to be with him just in case…

well, she wasn’t able to say it, but she’d been afraid and just in case, she hadn’t wanted him to be alone.

She had explained all of this in our sibling group chat.

“When do you need me?” Nicola had written back immediately, but she had almost zero time due to her job and her family.

Actually, everyone was busy like that. I had waited as my older siblings argued amongst themselves over who could shift what around and the things they could get coverage for, and then I’d answered.

“I’ll go with him,” I’d written. I didn’t have a family and currently, my job was flexible. I also needed to be flexible in order to perform there, so it was lucky that I’d been doing so much yoga.

Juliet hadn’t been sure about depending on me.

She’d texted me separately several times to make sure that I understood my duties for the day: show up on time, drive safely, be attentive.

“Don’t do anything weird,” she’d ordered this morning when she had called to confirm again.

I wondered if she would think that getting stuck in the aquarium was weird, and decided that yes, she would.

I heard her on the phone now, though, and she was crying again. My sister had always been very tough, but since she’d met Beckett and fallen in love, she’d softened up like a marshmallow in the sun. As a reminder, you needed to be very careful of those and not put them anywhere close to your hair.

Beckett had gone through something terrible: he’d had cancer and he’d been very sick.

Since the cycles of treatment had ended, he’d gotten two clean scans that were a huge relief.

But Juliet wasn’t able to relax and as they talked, I watched him get worried, too.

“Now she has to go back to work, and she was sobbing,” he said to me after they hung up.

“It’s control.”

“What?”

I beeped the car, trying to remember where we had left it in this garage, and he pointed because he had remembered without the beep. “I mean, JuJu likes to be in control,” I explained. “There was the stopwatch.”

“Grace, say what you mean.” He was a lawyer and very precise about language.

“For a while when she was a kid, she carried a stopwatch to time things. She kept track of how long it took us to get out of the door in the morning and how many minutes we each cooked our eggs. Then she felt like she had control over it all.”

“Your house was very chaotic. It makes sense that she would have looked for some kind of ownership.”

I thought back to when I’d been little, before my siblings had gradually moved out. “Maybe so,” I agreed. “Now JuJu is worried that she can’t control your illness and that it will win. She likes to win.”

“That’s very perceptive.”

“But the biggest reason she keeps crying is that she loves you a lot,” I told him, and now he smiled.