Authors: Karin Salvalaggio
Bone Dust White
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For my children,
Daniela and Matteo
A final comfort that is small, but not cold:
The heart is the only broken instrument that works.
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T
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E
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K
ALEM
Contents
1
“He’s hurt her, she’s bleeding.”
With the phone to her ear, Grace slips away from the soft spill of light coming through the kitchen windows and leans heavily on a refrigerator crowded with family photos. The upturned corners snap back against her spine.
“Grace Adams,” she says into the crackling void, twisting the phone cord in her fingers, “153 Summit Road.”
Grace waits, her fingertips darkening in the twist, a pulse forming inside the small purple blooms. Slim and fragile, she drowns amongst silk waves of carp swimming across a kimono three sizes too big for her. Her round face is as pale as a serving plate and a single strip of white cuts through her straight black hair. Between shallow breaths, she steals glances out the windows, turning this way and that, tangling her feet in the kimono’s hem. She bites hard into her fingernails, shredding one with her small white teeth. A thin line of blood follows a trail of dried cuticle. She presses her thumb to it, trying to stop the flow.
“Yes, on the trails behind my house.” It’s as if she’s being smothered. With every word she gulps for air. “I saw him,” she says, “I saw him do it.”
“Just try to stay calm,” says the voice on the phone. “You’re safe as long as you stay inside your house.”
Grace retreats to the shadows thrown down by a wall separating the kitchen from the hall and gazes into the darkened entryway toward the front door. The security chain isn’t attached.
Grace speaks in a whisper. “I don’t feel safe.”
“It’s important that you remain calm. Help is on the way.”
Straining against the phone cord, Grace upsets a glass shelf of porcelain figurines, and her skittish hands fail to catch them as they fall into a clattering heap. She tries to set them upright but knocks several more over and one drops to the floor. She picks up the small ballerina and stares at it. Its pearly white shoulders are coated in dust.
The voice on the phone asks her a question and Grace peers out the kitchen windows as directed. “I don’t know. I think so. I can’t see him anymore.”
Grace had been up in her bedroom when she saw something move through the trees. She squeezed between her cluttered desk and the window to get a closer look. A woman walked slowly along the trails snaking through the woods behind the house. Grace watched her progress. Even from a distance it was clear she was unwell. She’d almost reached the gate at the end of the garden when the man appeared. Not more than ten feet apart, she greeted him like an old friend. Her unfamiliar face changed though. Words were spoken. Her mouth gaped wide in silent surprise, her eyes pleading. As she backed away, she called out Grace’s name. Unsure what to do, Grace ducked down low so she couldn’t be seen. Her hurried breaths misted over the glass. It wasn’t until she wiped away the fog with the long sleeve of her kimono that she saw the man’s knife. He lunged at the woman and she staggered away, clutching her side. Farther up the slope, they disappeared in the deep bracken and seconds later he stood alone. Never altering his stride, he vanished over the ridgeline, his receding silhouette outlined by pale light. Fingertips pressed to glass, Grace waited but he did not return.
A swell rises up in Grace’s throat and the phone slips through her fingers. It hits the floor and as the cord retracts it skips on the carpet like a flat stone across water, eventually coming to rest under the breakfast bar. Grace hurries to the bathroom, her kimono falling from her white shoulders, revealing the red nightgown underneath. Unable to keep her balance, she grips the toilet with both hands. The pressure in her chest could rip her in two perfect halves. Bile comes up until her throat is scraped raw and her stomach is a hollowed-out bowl. The mirror isn’t kind. Her eyes are nests of broken blood vessels shadowed by a sickly blue. She runs the water until it’s warm and presses a cloth to her face. Sobbing, she sinks to the bathroom floor but from the kitchen the phone calls out her name. Faint at first, it grows in volume as Grace focuses in on the sound.
“Hello? Grace,” it says. “Are you okay?”
Stretching her arms and pulling her body along, she climbs a horizontal wall of carpeting. Her hands shake and the phone jumps from her fingertips. “Please hurry,” she says, hanging tight to the back of the sofa and drawing herself upward to her feet. She sways, emptied out and half crazed. For a few seconds she can’t remember why she called.
“Yes, I’ll stay in the house.” Her white-knuckle grip on the handset is unyielding.
The hilltop community, where she lives with her aunt Elizabeth, is all but abandoned. Long before most of the homes were finished the developers went bust. Concrete foundations are disappearing under creeping vines and wooden frames stand like exposed rib cages. Every winter more roofs cave in under heavy snow and arsonists burn the rest. Sometimes groups of homeless move in but they never stay long. It’s too far from Collier, the nearest town. So out here in her faux Tudor castle, there are no neighbors to call on.
Leaning against a counter crowded with clipped coupons and medical insurance forms, Grace glances out the kitchen windows again. Beyond the locked wrought-iron gate and high garden wall the wooded hillside looks flat under a thickening sky and colorless trees stand like sentinels, leafless and silent on the still winter morning.
On the other side of the garden wall the forest stretches for miles before hitting the boundary between her country and the next. Grace went there once with her uncle Arnold when he was still alive. While walking an isolated trail, he’d stopped quite suddenly, telling Grace to stay where she was. “Go ahead,” he said after turning toward her. “Step over the line.” Fearing it was some sort of trick, she hesitated. But he insisted and she was young and did as she was told, even lifting a leg high when he indicated the exact spot. He grinned and welcomed her to Canada. She wonders what her uncle would do now that she has a new heart and could run all the way to that invisible border if she chose to. It is only a month since the transplant operation and she already feels stronger, but after years of uncertainty she doesn’t trust it will last.
Grace walks to the back doors and presses her forehead against the glass.
The woman in the woods knew her name.
All the while the phone is calling her back to the kitchen and the early winter morning. “Grace, are you still there?”
She says a quiet yes and listens.
“There’s going to be a delay. A truck’s jackknifed on Route 93. They’ll get to you as soon as they can.”
Grace runs her hand across her kimono and pauses when she feels a ring of keys through the thin fabric lining the pocket. Very gently she rests the phone on the kitchen counter. A rush of cold air comes into the house as she opens the French doors. The paving stones on the back porch are like ice against her bare feet. Her eyes go wide from the shock.
Imagining unseen things pinching at her toes, she steps out onto the untended lawn, the long hem of the kimono trailing behind her like a slug. Halfway across she steps on a stone and winces. Bending over to pick it up, she folds her fingers around it. It’s as flat as the palm of her hand.
Grace peers through the gate and takes her time to scan the wooded hillside. Other than her breathing, there is no sound. No wind, no birds. Nothing.
Hand to chest, her fingers tremble, tiny movements that mimic the frantic pounding of her heart. As her fingers increase their pace, she arches her white neck back, revealing a latticework of tendons stretched to the breaking point. Grace recalls the woman’s screams and shrinks back toward the house. As she’s turning to leave she hears something soft and primal coming from the woodland.
Moaning.
Her eyes follow the sound. Upward toward the ridge, the woman is lying somewhere amongst the undergrowth. Grace wants to forget, but in her head she can still hear the muffled echo of the woman’s voice. She has to know why this woman knows her name. She takes the key from her pocket and slides it into the lock in the gate, wincing when the ungreased cylinders roll and grind against one another plaintively. Her heart is already pounding hard when she takes off in a run, but her legs are awkward and buckle beneath her. She has to stop a few feet up the slope and rest her palm against a tree.
Grace listens. She wants to be sure he hasn’t returned.
She starts moving again and the cold air burns her throat. She barely has time to fill her lungs before coming up for air again. Her heart pumps hard. She keeps putting her hand to her chest, a look of surprise on her face. She’s not used to this. The hill rises steeply, but she follows the scent, low branches snapping at her like wolves.
Grace finds the woman in a small clearing. She is twisted on the ground, one of her legs bent behind her unnaturally and the other stretched out and barefoot. Grace focuses on the cast-off shoe and the pine needles that sit thick on the forest floor, looking everywhere the woman is not. But the woman’s hands reach out slippery and dark like eels, grasping at her before sliding away.
“Grace,” the woman says. “Help me.”
Dizziness blurs Grace’s vision. She’s faint from running. She can’t think along straight lines. Looking hard into the woman’s eyes she is trying to find someone she’s seen before. The woman’s hat has fallen away and her gray hair is lying in a tangled web, catching late autumn leaves and pine needles in its strands. She is far too thin. Her skin wraps underlying bones like melted candle wax and her pale lips are framed by deep grooves. Wisps of white hair sprout from her pointed chin. The eyes dance though. They dart around Grace’s face like a hummingbird collecting nectar.
“Please, Grace,” the woman says.
Grace hesitates. She’s not thought to bring anything. She thinks of her kimono and looks up at the sky, knowing it will snow. It’s so cold. Her feet are bare and her small hands are trembling. Her eyes follow the ridgeline searching for the man with the knife. She thinks of dragging the woman back to the house but knows it’s too far. They’d never make it. Grace unknots the kimono’s belt, and a sea of cherry-colored carp slips away. She presses the silk to the woman’s chest and feels the blood seep through the thin fabric. The dark tide swallows the carp in seconds.
The woman’s words are so soft they’re weightless, floating through the air like gray-winged moths. Grace collects them all. The woman shapes her story into something Grace can almost forgive. She tells Grace she’s sorry for having stayed away so long. She drifts off and Grace shakes her awake.
