"All sorts of things. Lockets, watches, bullet casings. Last month I found a toy train, a little windup engine. There"s an antique store in town that takes almost all of it."
"You don"t get lonely living out here all by yourself?" she said. "Alone in the woods? No people to talk to?"
"I talk to people at work," I said, helping Grace over a log. "And I talk to the old man who runs the antique store when I bring things in. Mr. Gourd."
"Mr. Gourd?" Grace said, and chuckled. "What are you, Wade, twenty-eight? Twenty-nine? Don"t you have a girlfriend? Some friends our age?"
People were always asking me things like this.
"I like my own company," I said. "I"m not lonely."
And it was true: I wasn"t lonely. I had never been lonely. I had no real friends, no family, but I didn"t long for any of that. Alison, the last woman I"d dated, had left me because she felt that I acted like I didn"t need her, like I didn"t need anyone at all.
"You don"t relate to people, Wade," she"d said the day she left. It had been scorchingly hot. We were sitting naked on the kitchen floor with the refrigerator open behind us, its vapor cooling our backs. Behind Allison"s head were bags and jars of uneaten food. "It"s like you don"t know how and you don"t care to learn. What happened to you? Who f.u.c.ked you up?"
But nothing had happened. No one had done this to me. I had never been any other way. If anything, it was living here, in this place, that made it hard to become attached to other people. No one stayed around very long. It seemed that, eventually, everyone moved away. In their old age, residents left for warmer weather, as my parents had done. And most young people took off for big cities to start careers and families as soon as they finished high school. Over time I"d come to think of this area, my home, as a kind of port that people stopped at for a little while, a port in which to do a bit of maintenance before piloting off.
I understood why no one stayed, too. The land here is unattractive. It"s frozen and bare nearly ten months out of the year. The frenzied parade of summer comes and goes before anyone can really enjoy it. Flowers huddle in frightened little bunches. The trunks of too many trees are knotty with tumorous black burls. Even Alison herself wanted to leave. The whole time we were dating she kept talking about getting out, going somewhere exciting.
But there are things to like around here. It"s quiet and peaceful. In the winter the ice is so thick it glows blue. You can hear it slowly rolling forward at night, splitting and pushing on, making noises like grinding teeth.
The metal detector gave off a burst of sharp clicks. "Yay!" Grace said, and laughed. She laid the detector on the ground and took a garden shovel out of the pack around her waist. Petyr came over and offered to dig for her, but she said she wanted to do it herself.
I sat beside Grace as she dug. Whenever she hit a rock, I scooped it out and tossed it to the side. As she worked, she pa.s.sed in and out of a patch of sun that caused her hair to change color. In the light it shined up to a brilliant red, in the shade it became a dull brown. Seeing it shift back and forth like that, I felt as though she were sharing something special with me, letting me get a glimpse of some secret part of herself. It was noon by now, and after a few minutes of digging, she took a break and we sat back on the gra.s.s. The sun felt wonderful on my face and chest. High above us, the pine trees creaked back and forth in the breeze like the masts of ancient ships.
"What was it you lost at the beach?" I said. "When you were a kid. The thing the metal detector couldn"t find."
"What? Oh, it was nothing," Grace said. "Just a piece of metal."
I waited for her to go on.
She laughed, but it was a sad hiccup of a laugh. "It"s dumb. It was the latch to the mailbox of my mom and dad"s house. This little tin ladybug you flipped down to keep the mailbox door from falling open. I took it with me when we first left for California. I know. It"s stupid."
"I don"t think it"s stupid," I said.
Grace pulled her knees to her chest and smiled at me. "Thanks, Wade," she said. "I was pretty hysterical about losing it at the time." She took off her sungla.s.ses and wiped them on her shorts and there were those eyes of hers again. The st.i.tches beneath them looked like extra sets of curling eyelashes. I felt myself staring, so I glanced at Petyr, who was lying beneath a tree with his eyes closed. A bright green leaf had landed on his giant chest and rose and fell with his breath.
"Look at him," Grace said. "I should probably just let him go, now that I scare everyone away myself." She pointed to her face and laughed, but then she looked away, at the pit she"d dug in the ground.
"I find you very beautiful," I said, which I knew then to be true.
She blushed. "You know, I didn"t do this to look younger or anything like that. I was in an accident. I don"t want to talk about it," she said, touching the bag under her chin, which now had some liquid in it. "I"ll tell you a secret, though, since I was so nosy before." She leaned closer and I could feel the warmth coming off her body. "I poke at it sometimes, at my face. I know I"m not supposed to, that I"ll scar it, but I do it anyway."
"Why?" I said.
"I don"t know," she said. "Maybe I"m just not ready to go back home yet."
"Everyone around here leaves sooner or later," I said.
"Well, who knows? Maybe I"ll be a "later,"" she said.
Grace and I started spending time together regularly after that. Sometimes she"d meet me at the store and Haymont would let me go-would, in fact, nearly push me out the door after her. Other days I"d drive out to her house after work. I"d pull up with Sonny and find her waiting for me on her porch swing, or on her stomach reading in the tall gra.s.s, the sunlight fanning over the backs of her long legs. Petyr hardly ever joined us. Grace told me that his sister was having problems with her husband, who coincidentally was also a bodyguard. Petyr had a high, soft voice, a soothing voice, and he spent long hours walking around the lawn with his tiny silver phone, talking patiently to one of them, then the other. At night he retired to the guesthouse, a cabin at the edge of the yard with vines strangling it.
Grace and I spent most of our time loafing around that cavernous house of hers. She had movie players that could hold up to two hundred movies at once, and a huge flat-panel TV that hung on the wall like an antique mirror, but we never used any of that. Grace left it all unplugged. She made a bed for Sonny on the movie player out of an old, glittery dress, and he took to lying there nearly all the time. We drank beer and played board games. We built an intricate model of a French church that I had bought in town. At night we lit fires in the ma.s.sive stone fireplaces-fires nearly as big as me, fires that sounded like war and lit the whole house with smoky orange light. There was a pool in Grace"s bas.e.m.e.nt-or rather, her bas.e.m.e.nt was a pool. You walked down the bas.e.m.e.nt steps right into a long, tiled alleyway of water. The pool was rich in minerals and smelled like clay, and when Grace lit the porthole lights along the walls, the water glowed a luminescent, milky green, like the color of a potion from a children"s book.
As the summer wore on, Grace"s manners relaxed. She started teasing and joking with me, ribbing me about how out of touch with things I was, but in a way that let me know how much she liked this about me. I set up a hammock on the balcony and we often lay in it reading or talking or napping together. We cooked meals out of a glossy cookbook. Sometimes we went to my place and watched the children down at the fat farm. We picked one out and followed her progress through my binoculars. She was pretty in an exotic sort of way, with olive skin and soft black down on her arms. We named her Patty. She kept her hair in two braided loops that hung from either side of her head like giant earrings. Patty"s favorite activity was tennis, and Grace and I would sit up in my stand and watch her clomping back and forth along the baseline. It felt so calming, observing Patty from high in the trees, so fulfilling. It was like we were her parents and she was our daughter, and I felt proud of her for working so hard to achieve her goals.
On days that were cool or overcast, Grace and I went scavenging. She held the metal detector and I walked out in front, scouting, wearing those sungla.s.ses of hers, my head angled so that the horizon always stayed balanced along that narrow band of clarity between the darkening planes of gold and blue.
As we walked, Grace told me things about herself. She rarely talked about California or her life out there. Now and then, though, a certain worried look would appear on her face and I understood that she was thinking about having to go back. Petyr knew not to put calls through to Grace, but I often spied little sticky notes that he left for her clinging to things around the house like insects. They always had names on them, with messages written beneath, like Again or Twice today.
Sometimes, as we walked, I wondered about Grace"s life before the accident; I wondered what it was that she did out in California-was she a singer? An athlete? A businesswoman? What had made her so famous? More than that, though, I wondered about the little things that made up her life out there, the details. I wanted to see the view from her front door. I wanted to know what the inside of her car looked like. To see the magnets she kept stuck to her refrigerator.
We never talked about her accident. Over time, though, I came to understand that whatever had happened to her had involved gla.s.s. Because every now and then-no more than once every couple of days-a piece of gla.s.s would emerge from her head. These weren"t big shards that came out of her; they were tiny specks of gla.s.s, just particles. Apparently, when she had her accident, some gla.s.s had gotten lodged between the two layers of muscle tissue around her head, and now they were slowly working their way out of her. Mostly the gla.s.s came out through her hair follicles. But on a couple of occasions, pieces of gla.s.s exited right through her face. Once I saw one come out of the corner of her eye, a tiny shard, no bigger than a snowflake. I watched as she calmly plucked it from beneath her lid as though it were a stray eyelash.
Even though Grace didn"t talk about her current life during our walks, or about her accident, she still managed to tell me all kinds of intimate things about herself. She told me about her parents, her childhood. She told me about how, as a little girl, she"d wanted to be a policewoman, then an acrobat, then a deep-sea fisherman. She told me about her mother, about how she"d made Grace beg for change when they first moved out west, beg everywhere from the boardwalk to the bus station, where a man had once thrown a penny right into Grace"s mouth.
No one had ever talked to me in such a way before, never so openly. It was weirdly arousing. It felt like watching someone undress right in front of me; it felt like standing next to them and being handed layer after layer of clothing. And the more she talked, the harder it became for me to ignore the need for her I felt building in me. I tried, though, because I understood that she was here with me only for the summer, just until her face healed. And it was healing all the time.
By the second week I knew her, a kind of settling process had already begun. Her features, the ones that were swollen and bulged out of place, had rapidly started taking shape, gathering ominously toward the center of her face. But part of me refused to see these changes. Part of me already believed that something would happen to stop her from leaving. Something miraculous, or even terrible.
Here"s what Grace told me on one of our walks: one morning, while she and her mother were wandering on the beach, they found a dollhouse washed up on the sand.
"It was so creepy," she said. "I"d been asking for a dollhouse-it was like the one thing I wanted for my birthday that year, my eighth birthday-and suddenly here one was. Just sitting there on the sand in perfect condition. Even the tiny windowpanes were intact."
We were walking along the edge of a brook that had long ago dried to chalk. It was three weeks to the day since I"d met her. The wind blew strongly. The shadows of clouds kept skating over us before we saw them coming.
"My mom and I had this game," said Grace. "Whenever we found something washed up on the beach, we would try to guess whether it was flotsam or jetsam. Flotsam is what gets washed overboard in storms-it"s things swept away by the sea. Jetsam is what"s thrown overboard if a ship is in distress. What people get rid of to make the ship lighter so it won"t sink. There"s really no way to tell which is which after the fact. I mean, if the ship wrecks, everything gets mixed up together, the stuff people wanted to keep and the stuff they got rid of. It all becomes the same thing."
The metal detector gave a few clicks around a patch of scrub. I rooted around for a moment but couldn"t feel anything substantial, so we went on.
"So my mom wanted me to guess which the dollhouse was," said Grace, "flotsam or jetsam, but I didn"t want to. The idea of some girl my own age on a ship about to sink was really scary to me, you know? And then, right as I was looking at it, the whole house just fell in on itself. It collapsed in a heap on the sand."
Grace"s calves moved up and down in gentle swallowing motions as we walked. "Keep talking to me," I said. "I love listening to you."
She smiled at me over her shoulder. The light that afternoon was kind, and her cheek looked like a smooth, snow-covered field broken only by the wiry black fencing of her st.i.tches. "It"s easy to talk to you," she said. "I like who I am with you. I love her, actually."
"Can I try kissing you again?" I said. We"d kissed a few times before, but it had always hurt her face too much.
"Stay still and let me kiss you," she said, and then she leaned over and brushed her lips against mine, first the top one, then the bottom. Next I felt her tongue tracing my lips, gently sliding between them. Before I knew it she was kissing me harder, really pressing her mouth against mine. I kissed her back. Our teeth kept clicking together. I felt the bag beneath her chin bulge as it was squeezed between our necks-the liquid inside felt warm and viscous-and I worried that it might pop, but she kept at it, pushing harder now, hardly kissing so much as driving her mouth into mine, wedging and ramming. When she finally stopped and pulled away I saw blood inside her mouth.
"I"m sorry," she said, and wiped her lips with the back of her hand. "I didn"t hurt you, did I?"
"No," I said.
"I just don"t want to go back yet," she said. She tugged on the collar of my shirt. "And I like you."
"Kiss me again," I said. And she did.
To this day, I remember everything she told me. I even remember exactly what we found scavenging each day. The afternoon Grace told me about the dollhouse, we discovered a bottle cap, a green stone she thought was pretty, and the horn from a phonograph, smashed so badly you wouldn"t believe music had ever pa.s.sed through.
By July we"d started making love, but rarely, only once every few days. Grace wanted to more often: she asked me to, but I had to be careful; it would have been too much. Already I couldn"t sleep without her. When she wasn"t with me, my house seemed to buzz with silence. I tried to keep some distance between us, but she began talking about driving with me back to California. We didn"t have to stay out there, she said. We wouldn"t. We"d just hang around long enough for her to settle some things, some business matters, and then we could go anywhere we wanted-we could even come back here. She said she loved me. I couldn"t stop myself from being hopeful, from expecting things. I bought a book on driving across the country and drew little stars next to all the places I wanted to take her.
But her face was taking shape. The drainage bag had vanished, along with the st.i.tches beneath her eyes, inside her mouth. All that was left of the face I"d known was a ghostly blueprint of white scars, and even that was quickly melting into the fresh pink skin underneath. At certain moments she looked like someone else entirely, someone strangely familiar whom I"d seen or met many times over, but somehow managed to forget. At first she acted as frightened about all this as I was. Not just frightened of what was happening, but also of what I"d think about her. The day the last of the st.i.tches came out, I had to convince her to come out of her bedroom.
"It doesn"t matter what you look like," I said into the keyhole.
"You"ll see why I don"t want to go back," she said, crying. "You"ll know what I used to be like."
"I know what you"re like now," I said. "That"s all that matters."
When she finally opened the door and I saw those flawless crescents of flesh beneath her eyes, I felt my blood drain. She"d become beautiful to a degree that felt difficult for me to understand. Her face didn"t look like a face anymore. It was like a sail she"d raised between me and her real face, a tall white sail that could carry her anywhere she wanted to go. And as much as I didn"t want it to matter what she looked like, as much as I told her so, it did matter, and I wanted the healing to stop, to slow down at least.
But of course it didn"t slow down: her skin tightened, her cheekbones surfaced. Streaks of copper appeared in her hair. I tried to ignore it, but sometimes looking at her made me so sad that I could barely speak. Grace began to make arrangements. She started taking calls from Petyr. At first she spoke in a brief, clipped manner, but soon she began to really talk into the phone. She joked and laughed and wound the cord around her finger. Occasionally she used a miniature phone hooked up to her ear by a cord, a phone that left her hands free and made it look like she was talking to an invisible stranger in the room with us.
I began to think of California as a weak but constant force pulling on Grace, a growing undertow. I was certain that if I didn"t go with her, I would lose her altogether, that she would just vanish behind its long curtains of sunshine. Sometimes, at night, watching her sleep, I wished for her face to go back to how it had looked when I met her. I actually fantasized about changing it back myself.
All of this happened in a matter of weeks, not months. It felt like it happened as fast as I"m telling it to you.
Near the end of July, just a couple of days before we were supposed to leave, I took her to the yearly picnic to celebrate the end of the tourist season. I warned her that a lot of the town would be there, that people would probably come up to her, but she insisted. We could bring Petyr, she said. It would be like our first real date. Food. Dancing. Romance.
I went out and bought a new pair of shoes and a tie with tiny downhill skiers on it. I asked a woman in town to make me a little ladybug out of tin, which she did, cherry red and covered with shiny black dots.
On the day of the picnic, Grace, Petyr, and I drove down the hill and into town in my truck. Before we even got within five blocks of the picnic, though, it became evident that everyone in town was attending. Parked cars lined the avenue, some up on the sidewalk and others left right in the middle of the street with the keys on the driver"s seat.
The picnic took place on the lawn behind the mayor"s house. He"d set up tables on the gra.s.s, which were already filled by the time we arrived. There must have been five hundred people crowded on the lawn, not counting the many children threading their way between the knots of adults, giggling and swatting at one another.
I felt Grace tense up at the sight of all those people-the joints in her arm locked-and I grew nervous too.
"We don"t have to do this," I said.
She gave me a kiss on the cheek. "I want to show you off," she said.
A band from Canada played country songs in French beneath a tent at the edge of the lawn; couples had already begun to dance in a loose ring. As we crossed the lawn to the food, I felt Grace beginning to relax, but my own anxiousness only grew worse. People were staring. Most of them tried not to be obvious about it, but I could feel them looking at us, at Grace.
"Wade, are you all right?" said Grace.
I told her that I was.
"Hey, they"re all staring at me, not you, okay?" She took my hand. "They"re wondering how I landed the hottest stud in town."
"Grace..."
"Come on, let"s dance," she said. Before I could refuse, she kissed my hand and led me toward the tent.
We stopped at the edge of the moving ring of couples. I put my hands on Grace"s waist and pulled her close as we entered the flow of people and began to dance across the gra.s.s. Her skin was a deep brown and smooth as the underside of a sh.e.l.l. I felt my heart relaxing. I caught sight of Petyr standing by the edge of the tent, and I watched over Grace"s shoulder as he tapped one foot in time to the music. Every few moments he"d let himself be swept along with the couples; he"d post his arm as though he"d found a partner and take a few graceful steps in the direction of the dance before hurrying off the floor and returning to the spot where he"d begun.
"I want to fly away with you in a blimp," I said to Grace. Everywhere, hoppers leapt out of the yellow gra.s.s. The feeling was like dancing across the surface of a fizzing gla.s.s of champagne.
She laughed. "A blimp? Like a zeppelin?"
"A blimp. I want to fly across the country with you in a blimp. Just coast, the two of us weightless up there."
She put her head on my shoulder and we kept dancing like that, swaying back and forth, while the other couples moved around us in unison, spinning, rising and falling like the working parts of a carousel. I kissed her neck and closed my eyes.
"Wade!" said Haymont, dancing next to us with his little daughter standing on his toes. "I didn"t think you"d come today. You two about make the cutest couple here."
"I don"t know how that"s possible when you"ve got the prettiest girl around," said Grace. She winked at Haymont"s daughter, who pressed her face into his belly.
Haymont laughed. "She"s a shy one tonight. She"s actually a big fan of yours."
Grace thanked him, though I could tell that, as always, he was making her uncomfortable.
"So, a little birdie told me you"re taking Wade away from us. I get such a kick out of picturing him out in California," he said, and gave a big coughing laugh that nearly shook his daughter off him. "Wade driving down Hollywood Boulevard with the palm trees whizzing by. Waving to the stars." He laughed again, staring too hard at Grace.
"Let"s go, Daddy," whined Haymont"s daughter.
"Bailey, don"t be rude, now," Haymont said to her. "Daddy"s having a conversation here." But when he turned back to us, Grace had already put her head on my shoulder.
Haymont waited a moment. "You two have a good night, now," he said, finally.
We thanked him and he waddled off, maneuvering his daughter like a marionette.
"Not all of California"s like that," Grace said into my neck. "That"s just a small part. Besides, we"re not going to stay."
"I know," I said, but as we made our way around the ring, Haymont"s words stayed with me. I could feel him watching us, feel other people watching too. Making no bones about it now, just staring from their tables. And I knew so few of them. I could hardly pick out a familiar face. I saw a young girl whisper something to her mother and point at us. I saw her mother laugh into her napkin. I realized that this was what California was going to be like. People I didn"t know gawking at us, laughing. Laughing because it was funny to see someone like me with someone like Grace. I caught sight of Petyr again, dancing alone by the edge of the tent, and a series of images flashed through my mind, images of myself alone in California, alone at all the places I"d read about in my guidebook. On the beach. On the pier beneath a swarm of seagulls. At the aeros.p.a.ce fict.i.tious museum, standing before an enormous, dangling model of the moon. I held Grace tighter against me, but even as I did I grew angry. It seemed like too long ago that I"d been happy alone, that I"d preferred it that way, and now I was suddenly following someone to the other side of the country. Someone I"d only known a matter of months. Someone who was just vacationing in my life. Someone who would leave me; who, in her own mind, had probably already left.
"Grace," I said, "I need to talk to you about California."
"I know. G.o.d, we"re leaving so soon and we haven"t ever really discussed my life out there, have we?"
"No," I said.
"It"ll be difficult. But I"ll only need a couple of weeks. I promise."
"I think you should go without me," I said.
Grace pulled back. "What are you talking about?"
"I think you should go to California without me. You could fly out and get done what you need to get done and I could stay here until you get back. I"d just be in your way out there."
"In my way? The whole fun was going to be driving out together. I thought you wanted to go with me."
"I did. I do. It"s just that hunting season is about to start and Haymont needs me at the store. He"d never say so, but I know he does. I can tell."
The song ended and everyone bowed and curtsied. When the music began again, we continued around the ring.
"I don"t want to go without you, Wade," Grace said, and laid her head on my shoulder again. As soon as her face touched my shirt, the sudden, overwhelming feeling shot through me that I was making a tremendous mistake. I had a stinging urge to tell her that I loved her, that I needed her, but I couldn"t do it. In my mind, I begged her to ask me to come with her. I pleaded with her to ask me just once.