Authors: T. Greenwood
Grace (11 page)
The whole kitchen smelled like supper still: it was rank with the smell of tuna casserole and green beans. He felt his stomach lurching, his whole world lurching as he tried to get a grip on what to do next. It was seven o'clock at night. The banks were closed. He thought about going to talk to Elsbeth, but he also knew that was the last thing he should do, could do. She would blame him. Not with her words, of course, she'd never ever come out and say that he was responsible,
irresponsible,
but that's what she'd feel. That's what her body would say when it turned away from him. That's what she would think every time she looked at his face.
irresponsible,
but that's what she'd feel. That's what her body would say when it turned away from him. That's what she would think every time she looked at his face.
He ran his hand through his hair, surprised by how thin it was becoming. He wondered if this awful habit alone was responsible for making his hair thin. If he had simply worried it away with his fingers over the last couple of years.
He had to think. He just needed to clear his head and think this through. It was another thousand dollars a month. A lot, yes. But if he picked up another job, he could probably swing it. He was home most nights by six o'clock; a couple of night shifts would be difficult but doable. Maybe he could work the weekends. And it wouldn't have to be forever either. Just until he could get the house refinanced again. Move the loan over to a different bank. Start fresh.
“Daddy?” Gracy said. She had wandered into the kitchen without him hearing her. She was wearing a threadbare Ariel nightie she'd had since she was three and the rainbow toe socks she got from Santa last Christmas. Her hair was wet from her bath, and her cheeks pink.
“Yeah, baby?” he asked.
She came to him and climbed up into his lap. It shocked him how far her legs dangled now. When did this happen? When did she stretch out like this? She'd be too big for this soon. Grown. She looped her finger through a loose piece of lace at the hem of her nightgown and wrapped it tight.
“Daddy, I love you more than pie.”
“And I love you more than birthday cake.”
He breathed the sweet smell of Gracy's shampoo and wrapped his arms around her tightly. He could feel the rapid flutter of her heart beneath his fingers like a ticking clock.
“It's my birthday in how many days?” she asked.
Kurt glanced up at the calendar hanging on the wall. “Just over a month, sweetie.”
It would be okay. He just needed to be logical, methodical. Call the bank. Fill out the paperwork. If need be, he could get a second job. He was able-bodied. Strong. Willing to work. Elsbeth didn't even need to know.
Elsbeth came into the kitchen and smiled at them. She kissed Gracy's forehead and then leaned down to kiss Kurt.
“I was thinking,” she said as she went to the fridge, peering into it. She pulled out the bottle of wine and poured a little bit into a tumbler. “Maybe we could take Gracy to S-T-O-R-Y-L-A-N-D for her birthday?”
Gracy puzzled over the letters, probably trying to assemble them in her mind.
“Yeah,” he said. “Sure. That would be nice.”
But after they went to bed the panic slowly set in. While Elsbeth slept, oblivious, his legs thrummed. When he couldn't take it anymore, he gave in to them. He walked and walked and walked. He walked the hallway, he walked circles around the living room, and then he walked to the kitchen and called the number on the back of his credit card, making sure there was enough room left to buy their tickets.
C
rystal could count the things she loved about Ty on two hands and one finger. Eleven itemizable things. She thought of these qualities when she was checking at Walgreens. As if they were things you could ring up and bag.
rystal could count the things she loved about Ty on two hands and one finger. Eleven itemizable things. She thought of these qualities when she was checking at Walgreens. As if they were things you could ring up and bag.
She loved his hands. His fingers, long with square fingertips and thick knuckles. He chewed on his right index finger's second knuckle when he was thinking, and it was callused and thick. When he held her hand for the first time (seven years old, running through the fenceless backyards in their neighborhood), she knew she would go wherever that hand led her. She also loved his feet. In the summer, they were tan and bare, his arches strong and his tendons long. When they lay in the hammock under the big oak tree in his backyard, head to foot, she would study the soft bottoms, count his toes.
She loved the chipped tooth that only showed when he smiled, and she loved that she was there when it happened. (They'd been riding their bikes together when his tire got caught in the railroad tracks. He'd spilled over the edge of the bike, headfirst onto the unforgiving ties. She'd come back the next day and, miraculously, found the other half of his bottom incisor, sitting in the gravel as though it had been waiting for her. She carried the tooth, this little boney sliver of him in a locket she wouldn't let him open.)
She loved that he was funny, but that he never needed to be the center of attention. Lena was funny too, but she was always making sure you knew how funny she was. Ty had a quiet sense of humor, and they had a million private jokes that she collected like shells or pretty stones.
She loved his family. His mother, Lucia, and her paisley scarves and silver rings, the way she looked like she was searching for the future Crystal in her face. “Let me look into my Crystal Ball,” she would say when Crystal was only ten or eleven, holding Crystal's jaw in her hands and peering lovingly into her eyes. “I see happiness,” she'd say. “I see love and laughter and so much happiness, and what's this? Lemonade? And brownies?” And then she would pour her a tall glass of freshly squeezed lemonade and cut her the best brownie from the center of the pan. She loved his father, who wrote children's books and played the bongos and used to put on puppet shows with puppets he'd made for them in their dusky basement. He was tall and skinny and reminded her of the Scarecrow in
The Wizard of Oz
. He'd play checkers or Monopoly or gin rummy with you without ever getting bored. And she loved his little sisters, Dizzy and Squirrel, who they pushed around in doll-sized strollers.
The Wizard of Oz
. He'd play checkers or Monopoly or gin rummy with you without ever getting bored. And she loved his little sisters, Dizzy and Squirrel, who they pushed around in doll-sized strollers.
She loved his house: the funky Victorian with its slanty floors and drafty windows. With its kaleidoscope of wild climbing roses and rusty claw-foot tubs. It was so different from her family's prim Colonial with its perfect hedges and wall-to-wall carpeting. She loved the way Ty's house always smelled like cloves and cinnamon. Like pumpkin pie. She loved it at Halloween when Ty's father hung trash-bag ghosts from the trees and made creepy silhouettes out of black construction paper in all the windows. She loved it at Christmas, when his dad strung the entire house in twinkling lights, a frenetic sparkling peace sign in the center of the cupola. She loved it in the spring when tulips popped up in random places all over the yard.
She loved Ty's eyes, which were both blue and hazel at the same time, like God couldn't make up his mind. Like little greenish brown stones, ringed in blue. She loved the way he kissed her, first her top lip then her bottom, the feeling of his teeth on her flesh. She loved the way he smelled like the French lavender water his mother put in the laundry, even though he said he couldn't smell it at all. She loved his voice, which was deep and fluid, the way it washed over her like rain.
And she loved that he read books. Most boys didn't, or if they did, didn't admit it. Sometimes, they would hang out together in his room, the one in the attic with its porthole window and exposed beams, just reading for hours, and she imagined that this was what it would be like when they were grown-ups. This happy quiet, each of them alone and immersed in their own world, but still somehow together.
And for a couple of months last summer, it seemed like Ty's mother had been right. There was nothing but happiness and love and lemonade. After twelve years, Ty finally realized what had been sitting under his nose waiting patiently for him to come around.
She hadn't expected it, the first time he kissed her. They'd been swimming at the river all day and were hanging out on his front porch while Dizzy made a painting on a giant roll of butcher paper held down on the grass with two heavy stones, and Squirrel was bouncing up and down in her ExerSaucer. Crystal's skin was tight from the sun, and her hair smelled like the river. It was dusk, and one of his dad's jazz CDs was playing inside the house, the soft breeze of it escaping out into the night. She knew she should head back to her own house, to her mother's frozen lasagna and her dad's bad knock-knock jokes, but she didn't want to leave.
Ty came over and sat down next to her on the ratty wicker love seat with its faded red floral cushions.
“I love it here,” she said suddenly, surprising herself.“I love all of this.” And she was suddenly and absolutely overwhelmed by every single thing that she loved.
When he leaned over to kiss her, she was so startled she caught her breath. If she'd known it was coming she would have prepared, she would have known to hold on. And later, if she'd had any idea about how quickly and suddenly all of this could fall apart, she would have braced herself.
But it wasn't until two months later when she was sitting on the floor of her bathroom, clutching the pregnancy test in her sweaty hand, that she knew all of this was about to disappear: a decade of friendship, everything in the entire world that she loved.
She knew she could have dealt with it quietly. She could have (like Lena had sophomore year) driven to a Planned Parenthood in a town where no one knew who she was, and had this taken care of. But the very thought of it made her body rock with something between sickness and sadness. Every time she considered her options, she thought about her mother's hands, folded in her lap quietly at church. She wasn't sure why this was the image that came to mind, but it was. Her mother's straight spine in the harsh wooden pew at St. Elizabeth's. Her clean, polished nails and her carefully ironed skirts. Her Realtor blazers and the scarves she wore around her neck, the orange line of her foundation at her jaw. She didn't think of God or Jesus or Mary or the Bible or the dark confessional. She thought only of her mother.
She knew she would need to tell her mother, and that once she did, then all of the possible options would also disappear, leaving her with only one. She was going to college in one year. She had her list narrowed down to Georgetown, Amherst, and the University of Vermont. Ty wanted to go to Middlebury, which was close to UVM. Close enough that they could see each other all the time. But if there was a baby, there would be no college. Not for her anyway.
Her mother was surprisingly calm. Perhaps it was because she knew exactly what Crystal should do. When there is only one solution, then you simply do what you must. By the time they had finished their Diet Cokes at Rosco's where she'd met her during her lunch break, her mother had found an adoption agency on her BlackBerry, scheduled an appointment with her own OB / GYN, and written down the names of the prenatal vitamins she should pick up.
It wasn't until that night, lying alone in her bed, listening to Angie sleep, oblivious to everything that had transpired, that Crystal allowed herself to consider the other option, the one that she knew was ridiculous, but also the only one that seemed to make any sense.
What if she kept the baby? What if she simply went through the pregnancy, took the prenatal vitamins, went for her monthly visits to the OB/GYN, and then at the end, in the spring when the baby came, she just brought it home? Ty could still go to college, and she would just go with him. She could take night classes. Work part-time. They could rent a little house. She imagined a backyard with a hammock. She dreamed the lemonade. Why did that idea have to be crazy? As she lay in her childhood bed, it didn't seem crazy at all. It seemed real. She practiced what she would say, rehearsed the words until it was like a prayer, and she fell asleep to stained-glass dreams, whispering this strange rosary.
She waited until they were walking home after school to tell him. They'd only been back at school for a week, and it was still very much summer outside, despite the fact that vacation was over. “Carry me,” she said, getting behind him and jumping on, piggyback. She buried her nose in his neck and tightened her legs around him. He took off running and when they got to his house, he spilled her onto the grass, lying down with her. They stared up at the blue sky and he reached for her hand. “I hate calculus,” he said. “I totally failed that last test.”
“I'm going to have a baby,” she said. When she closed her eyes, she saw stars instead of the sun. She could feel every single blade of grass beneath her. His hand went loose for a moment before it tightened around hers again. She should have known what this meant, but she didn't want to.
“Okay,” he said.
She opened her eyes and rolled over on her side to look at him. “Okay?” she asked, her throat swollen.
“Sure,” he said, but there was a shadow that passed across those wild eyes.
“Okay,” she'd said, as if it were this simple. An agreement. An understanding.
And that was that. She told her parents that night over dinner that she'd decided to keep the baby. That there was nothing they could do to change her mind. In six months she would be an adult, and she and Ty would do this together.
“He won't stay,” her mother had said softly, but the words were sharp. They felt like splinters.
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