Chapter Seventeen. Grace
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
GRACE
Early Saturday evening, I’m sitting on the rickety back porch steps, idly tracing the metallic beadwork on the bracelet. Did it belong to my birth mother?
Could she be the ghost who’s been haunting me? Maybe she hasn’t been trying to make me doubt my sanity; maybe she’s been trying to communicate with me in the only way she can. Let me know that she was here. That she’s angry Cooper and I were taken from her.
I’m so lost in thought that I don’t hear Dad crunching down the pea-gravel path. Before I know it, he’s coming up the porch steps.
His pale eyes fall on me. On the bracelet encircling my wrist.
I snatch my hand off my knee, try to hide it in the pocket of my red skirt, but it’s too late, he’s already seen it, and now I look like I’m trying to hide it from him. Why did I risk taking the bracelet out in the first place? I’ve only had it for an hour! Rose trusted me with it!
“Where did you get that?” Dad points with a shaking finger, his voice strange and hoarse.
His gaze never leaves the bracelet. His face has gone white as milk.
He recognizes it!
He grabs my wrist with bruising fingers. “Don’t make me repeat myself, Grace. Where did you find that?”
“You’re hurting me! What do you care about some old bracelet, anyhow?” I whine.
“Answer me!” He squeezes the thin bones of my wrist till it feels like they’re grinding together.
I whimper and hate myself for it. I hate him. “Rose gave it to me.”
He swears. “How did she get hold of it?”
“She found it.”
“Where?”
I wince. “Up at the hotel. I don’t know where!”
I hate the calculus he forces me to do: What answer will have enough truth to it that he won’t hurt me? Will that answer get Rose in trouble? Will he remember seeing us this morning in the Blue Room, and put two and two together?
Dad yanks the bracelet off my wrist. He’s rough, and one of the hinges breaks.
It falls on the porch steps below me in pieces.
I want to cry out, scramble to pick it up, but I swallow my words and keep still.
If he sees that it means something to me, he’ll take it away.
This is my fault; I was stupid to put it on.
Now it’s broken. It might be the only thing I’ll ever have of my mother’s, and it’s broken!
“What else did she squirrel away?” I’ve never seen him like this. The trembling hand, the muttering, the way his pale eyes dart from side to side …
He seems almost afraid.
Did he hurt the woman who owned this bracelet?
Is he afraid that, somewhere, there’s proof of that?
Something sparks in me. Could I find proof? Could I make him pay for what he did to her?
“What else, Grace?” Dad wrenches my shoulder. Makes me look at him instead of down at the warped porch steps. His breath smells like black coffee. I wonder what he sees on my face. Hate? Fear?
Did my birth mother look at him like that?
“There’s nothing else. I don’t know what you’re talking about!” I blurt.
Cooper comes running up the path, breathing hard, his burgundy Greeley High Lions shirt soaked with sweat. He comes to an abrupt halt when he sees me and Dad.
“Everything all right?” His voice is too mild to be accidental.
“Fine,” Dad snaps, stepping away and straightening his suit jacket.
“I thought you were heading up to the hotel,” Cooper says.
“I did. Summoned for a meeting with Her Majesty,” Dad says. Mrs. Langford, he means. “There was some trouble with the Thorpe girl.”
“Rose?” My brother’s face is a clear pane of glass. It’s a good thing Dad isn’t looking at him.
“The other one,” Dad says. “She’s been prancing around the place in clothes so short they’re indecent.
One of the workmen made a pass and Her Majesty sacked him for it!
That girl makes herself cheap and then cries wolf when a man responds the way any red-blooded man would.
There are names for girls like that, aren’t there, son?
Unless you haven’t noticed.” Dad eyes Cooper with disgust. “What kind of man doesn’t notice legs like that?
” I work hard to keep my face blank, even though the idea of Dad leering at Ella’s legs is nauseating.
“Unless it’s not girls you’re looking at. ”
“I look at girls.” Cooper runs a hand through his damp hair. “But Ella’s just a kid.”
“She’s old enough to suffer the consequences of her actions,” Dad snaps.
Dad thinks a girl like that (a girl like Ella, like me) who can turn the heads of grown men (men old enough to know better) ought to face the consequences of inspiring their lust.
The consequences of being fourteen (or sixteen or twenty-two) and wanting to be looked at.
Is that really such a sin?
I rub my shoulder where Dad grabbed me. I’ll have a bruise tomorrow. I’ll have to make sure my collarbones are covered for church. And make an excuse for my bruised wrist.
Ella’s just a kid, Cooper said.
That’s why Rose swooped in to save her. Why Mrs. Langford fired Hank McIntosh. Ella will never have to see him and feel humiliated.
A tiny part of me (a low, mean part) resents the way Ella’s been protected.
Nobody was there to protect me.
I was thirteen when Stan took me up to the lookout for the first time.
It was May, a week before he left for army training camp.
In April, he’d asked me to be his girl and given me his class ring.
I was the envy of every girl in school. I felt special.
Honored. Stan had been pretty respectful up till then.
We necked a lot, and I’d let him fondle my barely there breasts and sit me on his lap, but I’d been able to redirect his wandering hands when they ventured south.
But that night, he had been drinking with his buddies.
He picked me up for a drive (to look for shooting stars, he said, which was a load of bunk).
We went straight to the lookout, where he mashed his lips against mine, wormed his tongue into my mouth, and squeezed my breasts.
He ignored me when I said ow. He reached up my skirt, between my legs.
When I tried to push his hand away, he said, Hush.
I’ve been patient long enough. He said, Doesn’t that feel good?
His jabbing at me didn’t feel good, and I tried to squirm away.
But then he unbuckled his belt, and I thought he was going to hit me with it and I froze.
I guess he took that as permission. He unzipped his jeans and rubbed himself against my thigh till he cried out and collapsed on top of me.
See, that wasn’t so bad, was it? You’re so beautiful, Gracie, I can’t help myself.
I didn’t feel beautiful. I felt sticky and dirty and ashamed.
The fact is, I haven’t got Ella’s money, or her station. And ever since I turned thirteen, no one’s treated me like I’m a kid anymore.
“Those Thorpe girls are trouble,” Dad says now. “Both of them. You stay away from them, you hear me?”
He brushes past me and goes inside, the screen door banging shut behind him. The moment he’s gone, I snatch up the broken bracelet and shove it into my skirt pocket. Cooper gives a low whistle, staring into the house after Dad.
“What was that about?” he asks. “You sure you’re all right?”
I nod. “Fine. You know how he gets about Mrs. Langford.”
Cooper is looking at me with his concerned face. He knows I’m not fine. But I’m going to burst into tears if he doesn’t knock it off, and I don’t want to cry in front of him.
I flee to my bedroom. Collapse on the bench at my vanity. I take the bracelet out of my pocket and finger the little metal beads. Rosie said they’re called millegrain, and the green gems are peridots. Of course she would know things like that.
I wonder if the bracelet was a present from my real father. I wonder if he and my mother were in love. I wonder what happened between them, why my mother ended up at the Harrow Home, with no choice but to give me (us) up.
Dad recognized this bracelet.
Something about it made him afraid.
It feels like he’s hated me ever since I turned thirteen and started shooting up, tall and slender, legs for days.
Even before I developed breasts or hips.
I thought it was because I was becoming a girl instead of a child, and he hates girls.
Hates how they make him want, so he has to boss and bully and subdue.
But maybe it’s more than that. Maybe I remind him of my mother.
Who was she?
I stare into the mirror over my vanity. My stupid freckles, my straight blond hair, my square jaw—who do I get them from?
Not from Ma or from Dad. But the ghost doesn’t look like me, either. Her complexion is pale, her hair dark, her face round. Do I take after my father?
“Who are you?” My voice is full of desperation, two steps from tears. “Please tell me who you are. Help me find you. What’s your name?”
I don’t see her, but I feel her. I go hot and prickly, and my face flushes till it looks like I’ve been running the country roads alongside Cooper. Rage rises in me like the tide, and I match it.
How dare he break that bracelet.
He knew it was precious to me.
He’ll never let us be happy.
Then the bedroom door bangs open.
Magnolia gasps. “What are you doing?”
I start. On the mirror, over my reflection, there’s a wobbly red D.
I’m holding my red lipstick in my right hand, uncapped. The rich brick red that Dad says makes me look like a harlot. Like I want to be kissed.
(What’s so wrong with wanting to be kissed?)
I don’t remember picking it up. I don’t remember uncapping it or writing anything.
All that anger rushes out of me and leaves me empty and trembling. I drop the lipstick.
What am I doing? Why did I write that? What does it mean?
Did I write that? Or did she? How long was it between when I felt her and when Magnolia burst into the room? Two minutes? Ten?
“Grace?” Magnolia is staring at me like I’m loony.
“I had a fight with my dad,” I manage.
She nods, her white-blond curls bobbing. “He’s a nasty piece of work.” She looks like she wants to say more, but she doesn’t.
“Yeah.” I grab a tissue and rub out the letter. The lipstick leaves a waxy smudge. I scrub harder, till all trace of it’s gone. I don’t like this. I wanted the ghost to tell me who she was, to help me—but not like this.
The ghost is getting stronger. Strong enough to wear me like a puppet.
And I think her name starts with the letter D.