Unbecoming (4 page)

Then the twins were born, identical colicky boys who absorbed her parents in family life completely. Her mother and father adored Aiden and Dryden—their names, aspirational and slant rhymed, embarrassed her before she knew why—with such obvious passion, imagining their thoughts and desires and fears before the boys could speak them. Her parents loved their baby boys in a way that even they had not expected. Grace had been practice for them, she concluded. She hadn’t realized she was lonely until she began to understand that other people were not. Then she met Riley, and he brought her home to the Grahams.

The Grahams lived in a pale-blue-painted brick house on Heathcliff with a giant hemlock tree in the front yard. The tree was at least three stories tall, though it looked like ten when Grace and Riley were children. They climbed up the sap-sticky branches as if these were spiral stairs in an empty tower, until they got so high up the slender trunk that they could see the single green flipper at the bottom of the Monahans’ leaf-addled swimming pool, they could peer into the skylight in the Wagners’ bathroom, and they could feel the trunk swaying beneath them. Grace would wrap her body tightly around it, a death grip of spindly arms, looking out and looking over, never down. And then Riley would climb a little higher.

They kissed in the tree and on the rooftops, shortcut around the neighborhood by hopping from eave to eave. They lay out on the asphalt shingles in the summer, their fingers crooked in each other’s waistbands, making out and burning in the sun. They skinny-dipped in the Monahans’ swimming pool when the Monahans went on vacation and paid Riley five dollars a day to take care of their cats. Grace slept at home but otherwise lived at the Grahams’ as best she could. Often their neighbors would forget that she didn’t live there. She babysat their children and patronized their lemonade stands, and everywhere Riley was, she was too.

Even now, Grace could go back into these memories so completely that she was shocked when a noise, a voice, a heel on the pavement shook her out of the dream.

Garland had one high school and one art teacher. Mr. Milburn thought himself a backwoods talent scout, shaping young genius for what he called “the big leagues.” “Don’t forget us when you’re famous!” he crowed to Riley, clutching his forearm. Riley was a splendid draftsman who could draw from life in the way that seems like magic to those who can’t: still lifes of softening bananas with frayed stems and collapsing brown bruises, used tissues, messy garages, sleeping grandparents. She tried not to envy him. Grace had no talents of her own, but her attachment to Riley was its own kind of talent, wasn’t it? She had a gift for pleasing him, and so his talent seemed to extend to her, like warmth.

Since the arrest, Grace had remade her life alone, administering now to objects: teapots too delicate for the stove, chairs too fragile to sit in. At night she went home to the far reaches of Bagnolet. She got off the metro at Gallieni, the end of the line, and picked up a bus to the end of its line. From there it was a kilometer up and around the hill to her flat. She rented a row house’s upstairs floor, a small bedroom and bath, from an Austrian nurse in her sixties. Mme Freindametz claimed to feel more at home in the hospital where she worked. She had a little bunk, she’d explained to Grace, in the wing for night nurses.

Mme Freindametz kept no family photos in the house and almost no personal effects, except for an embroidered pillow that looked too loved to be anything but a family heirloom, and one wooden spoon so warped and burnt that it surely would have been tossed out long ago if it didn’t have sentimental value. Grace was careful not to touch these things in front of Mme Freindametz. But Grace had few effects from her old life anymore, and so sometimes she would run her fingers down the length of the spoon’s handle, ease her thumbnail into the split in the wood, and almost feel like it meant something to her.

 • • • 

At four o’clock, the turpentine in the chafing dish had turned the color of olive brine. The liquid lightened from bowl to bowl as the solution became less polluted, and the two rightmost bowls were clear of even the slightest film. She laid the first four batches of beads out on linen towels to dry. It was ten o’clock in the morning in Garland. Their day had only begun.

Grace had not spoken to anyone in her family since her mother’s single phone call to Prague more than three years ago. She sent them e-mails every couple of months so her parents would have enough to say should anyone ask after Grace in the grocery store. Grace could never tell her mother where she really was. The chain back to Riley was always too short. In Grace’s e-mails, she lived in Melbourne, Australia, and worked as a marketing assistant for a nylon luggage company. Travel to Garland was much too expensive, a handy excuse for them and for anyone who asked when they would next see their daughter, but Australia was also white and so, to them,
safe
, preventing inquiries about sex slavery, civil war, or drinking water.

Believing her was their choice. She had given them a gift in tidily constructing a busy, happy life on the other side of the world. Her parents could have pressed her about phone cards and webcams, but they didn’t.

For a while after the boys’ arrests, Grace’s mother had sent regular updates on Riley’s case. Grace was confused by this interest, which seemed out of nowhere. Her parents had never paid any special attention to Riley before, or even to her. But when Riley was sentenced and still Grace did not come home, did not write or call the Grahams, and ignored any mention of Riley in her responses to her mother’s e-mails, their exchanges made the necessary transition into small talk. Grace knew they thought she was heartless.

Privately, she had scoured the web for information about the case. She checked in every day without fail, like taking a pill. Just once, and quickly, to get it over with. The compulsion didn’t make any sense, she knew; there was nothing in her life to threaten anymore. She had no relationships to protect, no real career or reputation. And if some malevolent ghost from her past did discover her here in Paris, it wouldn’t be Riley or Alls—it would be police about the painting; or Wyss, the collector or whatever he was, also about the painting; or the thug Wyss had sent to beat her up the first time. But Grace was never as afraid of the police or Wyss as she was of Riley and Alls, which was to say she was never as afraid of getting hurt as she was of having to look into the eyes of those she’d already hurt so much.

For obsession to be managed, Grace had learned, the object must be shrunk to a manageable size and enclosed within a manageable shape. Vast, hovering clouds must be packed into a small, hard mass or they would smother you. Now she didn’t think about Mrs. Graham anymore, her bridal portrait with magnolias at the waist. She didn’t think about Wyss’s man and his bolt cutters, and she didn’t think about where the painting was, and she didn’t think about what her life should have been—pregnant in America with a Volvo and health insurance—instead of this one, and she didn’t think of Alls at all. She had packed it all into one tiny box, and that box was checking the
Albemarle Record
every day, once a day, just quickly, to make sure there was no news from her old life that might show up in her new one.

The boys hadn’t ever spoken to the press, not even to the
Record
. They could, though, and at any time. She could never stop checking up on them.She’d had to accept that the
Record
would report, dutifully but mildly, on the Wynne robbery for the rest of their lives. Obituaries now included achievements like “longtime donor to the Josephus Wynne Historic Estate, which was robbed in 2009.” These mentions, though frequent, were benign. When there was no mention at all, she was rewarded with an irrational, temporary feeling of safety.

And then, one day in June, there it was: Riley Graham and Allston Hughes, the convicted robbers of the Josephus Wynne Historic Estate, would be released on parole, barring incident or compelling objection, on August 10. She thought she had touched bottom in her fear, and now it opened up beneath her.

A few days after the boys’ parole was announced, Grace received an e-mail from her mother that broke their unspoken agreement.

Riley is going to get paroled soon. I didn’t know when/if to tell you but his mom told me at mass last week. She said he wants to go back to school but not at GC. He has been drawing but is being very private about it. They are probably relieved about that. That poor family doesn’t need any more attention.

Poor family
left a messy sting. She still felt she was one of the Grahams, though of course she had forsaken that privilege, and she resented her mother’s simple pity for them. But perhaps this was her mother’s nasty secret smirk: The Grahams were the poor family now.

The only objection to the parole came from the groundskeeper’s family. Wallace Cummins had died in 2010 after a second stroke, at the age of seventy-three. His obituary lauded him for his decades of service to the Josephus Wynne Historic Estate, but made no mention, for once, of the attempted robbery of the estate the year before. But shortly before the parole hearing, Wallace’s daughter told WTQT that her father was murdered. “That first stroke led directly to the second,” she said. “My dad was killed by criminals as surely as if they’d pulled a trigger.” She did not want the boys released on parole. She did not want them “loose.”

They were out by now; Grace knew it.

At five o’clock, she left the beads and walked the nine circuitous blocks to the nearest Internet café, one of the last remaining now that everyone else had smartphones, and bought ten minutes.

She’d braced herself for a mention on parole day. She held her breath as she waited for the page to load, but the
Record
’s top story was only the ongoing debate over the condemnation of the public pool. She began to type their names into the search field, and as she was typing, the page reloaded itself. The front page changed.

A photograph.

The boys were coming out of Lacombe together. She could see Riley’s mother close behind and, she thought, Alls’s father, but the face was blurry. Alls hated his father.

What if she didn’t recognize them, if they had changed that much? She would see a man in a shop or in the park and wonder. The last picture she had seen was from the first day of their prison terms. A local photographer had been waiting at the gates to watch them go in.

Now she was shocked at the sight of them. Riley was a man now. His hair was long again, faded to rust, and most of the curl had fallen out so that it fell in lank waves over his ears. It was dirty, maybe. His cheekbones were higher, his jaw sharper, his snub nose not so snubbed. He had two creases between his eyes, just like the lines his mother had called her “elevens.” His eyes were down; she couldn’t see them at all. She looked for his birthmark, a thumbprint under his jaw, but she couldn’t find it in the shadows. He looked so much older, more than three years older.

Alls was behind, biting his lip as if to hold his tongue. She remembered his teeth knocking against hers and swallowed.

Alls was still Alls. Riley was Riley, but not.

In the reflection of the computer screen, Grace saw a boy coming over to her, throwing his dish towel over his shoulder the way she’d seen Alls do a hundred times in the kitchen on Orange Street, and she felt the wheels on her rolling stool skate out from under her. She grabbed the edge of the desk to keep from going down.

“Ça va?” the boy asked her.

She turned around. His eyes were blank, his mouth empty and concerned, and he didn’t look like Alls at all.

“Ça va,” she said.

She stared at the photograph, hovering over every detail. Riley had filled out in his arms and chest, but his face was thinner. His freckles hadn’t faded—if anything, they seemed darker on his pale skin. She didn’t know the shirt he was wearing. It was too tight, stretching across his chest and pulling at the buttons. His hands looked so familiar to her that her own hands shook. She couldn’t help feeling that the gaze he was avoiding was hers.

Alls looked calm, smooth across his dark brow. He looked up at the camera, right at her from amber eyes. Maybe his release had brought him relief. It should, shouldn’t it? But Grace better understood the lines between Riley’s eyes, the incredible fatigue of the unknown.

 • • • 

Paris had been a mistake, she knew now. She should have gone to Tokyo or Mumbai. Someday,
someone
would see her. She’d had a scare once, at a wine bar almost two years before. She was on a date. Now the idea of a date was ridiculous to her—watching some poor boy imagine that
she
could make him happy!—but at the time she had been in Paris only a few months, and she believed she could fully become her new self.

Grace had been in Europe for almost a year then. She had stayed in Prague after the summer program. She was terrified to travel, as though she were invisible only as long as she was still. After they were sentenced in August she left for Berlin.

She worked any job she could scare up, from washing dishes and cleaning hotel rooms to modeling for expat artists. She was surprised at how resourceful she was, how quickly desperation eradicated her timidity, her fear. An antiques dealer whose small shop Grace cleaned at night had begun to train her in making minor repairs when her assistant disappeared. But Berlin, though big and anonymous, was lousy with New Yorkers, especially the kind of artsy twentysomethings who’d been her classmates during her brief time in New York. She already feared running into someone she’d known. She didn’t want to be Grace anymore, even for five minutes.

She changed her name and bleached her hair, hoping this would also change her on the inside. She left for Paris.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster.
She kept a copy of the Bishop poem tucked into her passport, mocking the drama of her own loss. If she couldn’t find Grace, no one else could either.

But she wanted a life, however small it would have to be. A bartender from Melun asked her to dinner one afternoon while she was reading in the Jardin du Luxembourg. He was deferential and friendly, and though Grace’s French was still a bit tangled, he seemed uninterested in her American past. They had dinner and a glass of wine, and when they parted ways at the metro, Grace was euphoric to have done it—a date! Even lying to a perfect stranger could provide a sense of intimacy, if it presented the very limit of contact. She met him again four days later for dinner at Racines, and it was there that she saw Len Schrader, the father of her college roommate in New York, Kendall Schrader. She’d met the Schrader parents just twice, but she was almost certain.