State of Grace Read online

  Often I would go with him, playing in the greasy garage, prowling through the dusty storage area that smelled of oil, grime, and age. I explored the dirty recesses of the buildings, avoiding only the exposed drain in the corner where all the men peed when they thought I wasn’t looking. Although I realize now that the men affectionately tolerated my presence, at the time, I honestly believed they considered me an equal. I drank Coca-Cola out of thick glass bottles scuffed and cloudy from use, dangled candy cigarettes from my mouth, and at the end of the day, used the same thick, petroleum-based hand cleaner and filthy nail brush the men used to remove the worst of the grime from my hands.

  We drove home that evening with the truck windows down, the hot air blowing my already tangled hair around my face. “Hey Jude” came on the radio and we both sang along. Dad sang the words and I enthusiastically joined in on the chorus. It had been the perfect day.

  We were just through the front door, into the foyer, and were halfway to the living room when my mother came around the corner. The smell of frying chicken hung in the air and my stomach rumbled. “Birdie, bath,” she said in way of greeting as she pointed down the hall toward the bathroom. She wrinkled her nose as my father continued past her to the kitchen. “You could use one, too.” My father shrugged but didn’t answer. Our house was one of those cookie-cutter ranch-style homes that were so popular in the 1970s. With all the rooms on one level, sound carried and it was easy to stand in one room and hear what was going on in other parts of the house. From where my mother and I stood, I heard the refrigerator door open and the clink of glass as Dad pulled out a beer.

  “Dinner smells good,” he said as he came back through the doorway and headed toward the living room, an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth and a bottle of beer in his hand. He set the sweaty bottle on the end table and walked over to the television to turn it on. He bent down to pull at the worn plastic knob and then backed toward his chair as the picture slowly appeared. Satisfied with the channel, he lowered himself into his recliner to watch the tail end of the local news.

  My mother glanced back down at me. “Bath,” she repeated and then returned to the kitchen. In the living room, my father, his eyes fastened on the screen, flicked open his scratched silver-plated Zippo and touched the flame to the tip of his cigarette. He took a deep drag, pulled the cigarette from his mouth, and reached for his beer. I wandered into the room, hoping he would offer me a sip. Though I hated the taste of beer, I loved the feeling of inclusion in his end-of-the-day ritual. It made me feel important and grown up. I sidled closer and he grinned. “You’d better get in the bath or your mom will have your hide.”

  As if she could hear us, my mother’s voice came from the kitchen. “Birdie? I don’t hear any water running.”

  I was in the process of pretending not to have heard when she came into the living room, tongs in hand, and glared.

  “Birdie,” she began and then stopped, her attention drawn to the television.

  “Authorities in Hollywood, Florida, tonight are continuing to search for six-year-old Adam Walsh, who was abducted outside a Sears Department store on July 27th,” the newscaster was saying. A picture of a freckle-faced boy in a white and blue shirt and a red baseball cap, and holding a bat flashed on the screen.

  “Hollywood police say that Walsh may have been in the company of a suspect described as a Caucasian male in his mid-to late-30s, about six feet tall, 170 pounds with dark hair. Anyone with any information about this case is asked to contact the Hollywood, Florida Police Department.”

  Below the picture and physical description of Adam flashed a red bar with a telephone number. My mother stared intently at the screen, her lips pinched together, her eyes slightly narrowed.

  “Birdie. Bath. Now.”

  With exaggerated deliberation, I sauntered toward the bathroom. It was a petty show of defiance, and my mother’s eyes narrowed as I passed. She waited until she thought I was out of earshot before she spoke.

  “John,” she said as I started to close the door. “How closely are you watching Birdie when she’s down at the station? She’s down there with all those men . . . do you keep an eye on her?”

  “Nancy, she’s a kid,” I heard him say. “She plays in the back, she runs around, she has fun. That’s what kids do. This is Edenbridge, not Wichita or Oklahoma City.”

  I listened to this exchange from the bathroom, the door cracked about an inch, my back against the sink.

  “It may not be Wichita, but that doesn’t mean that something couldn’t happen to her.”

  I heard the wet sound of my father taking a swig of beer and could tell he was buying time, choosing his words. “Nance,” he said finally. “I think you’re making too much out of this. Nobody here would do something like that.”

  My mother sighed and I heard her muttering as she went back into the kitchen. I quietly eased the door shut and flushed the toilet before turning on the spigots and adjusting the temperature of the water. In the kitchen, I could hear my mother banging things around and muttering to herself.

  “Birdie,” she hollered, “Dinner’s almost ready. You have five minutes and I want those fingernails clean. Do you hear me?”

  I made a noise of assent and then climbed into the bathtub and began to scrub.

  I realize now how much my mother must have hated those days—hated the grime I never was fully able to scrape from under my fingernails, the mannish gestures I picked up from the farmers, and the fact that I was allowed to roam unsupervised in the presence of so many adult men. She was never wild about the idea of me spending my Saturdays at the station, even before what happened to Grace, but the year I turned eleven, her disapproval changed into something stronger—something I now recognize as fear.

  I think I first noticed it one spring evening in April, three months before Adam Walsh disappeared. The evenings were staying lighter longer and I had been out playing with my friends until my mother called me inside and forced me into the bath. As I waited for her to finish brushing Tara’s hair, I sat crouched in front of the screen of the open front bank of windows. I closed my eyes and smiled as the nighttime breeze cooled my bath-reddened skin and wet hair. I didn’t realize how the light from the living room silhouetted my body until a carload of boys drove slowly past and began to whistle and whoop.

  “Birdie,” my mother said sharply as I ducked down below the windowsill. “Get away from the window.”

  The boys in the street laughed loudly before gunning the engine and racing away.

  Embarrassed, I remained crouched against the wall as my mother hurried over and pulled the curtains closed. My heart thudded loudly in my chest and head as I looked fearfully up at her.

  “Sweetie, you can’t sit like that anymore.”

  Her tone was gentler.

  “You couldn’t see it, but with the light the way it was, to those boys you looked like you were naked.”

  I blushed and wondered who had been in the car. I looked at Tara, who watched us with a curious expression. My mother crouched down next to me and looked intently into my eyes.

  “Birdie, you’re going to be a very pretty girl. Your body is going to start changing and boys are going to start paying attention. That’s why when I say you can’t run around in the backyard without a shirt on or that you need to be more careful, you need to listen to me. Do you understand?”

  I nodded. Even though I wasn’t quite sure what she was telling me, the thought that I might one day be pretty made me very happy. I was in what my mother referred to as my “awkward stage.” I was tall for my age and gangly. My body was changing, preparing for adolescence, and my coordination couldn’t quite keep up. My bony knees and elbows were a perpetual patchwork of scratches and scrapes from unanticipated falls. Today, when I look at pictures of myself from back then, I’m struck by my angularity. In one photo, which was taken shortly before Grace’s death, I’m sitting on the ground under the shade of a tree. We were at a picnic and my mother must have surprised me
when she took the shot because my head is turned toward the camera, my mouth slightly open. I’m dressed in red shorts and a tank top that is startlingly white against my tanned skin. I’m sitting with my arms around my knees, which are pulled up to my chest. I look somewhat like a brown prairie grasshopper—all lines and angles. The upper part of my face is obscured, in part by my unruly mop of mousy brown curls, but also by an enormous pair of my mother’s plastic sunglasses.

  The maturation of my body wasn’t the only change I noticed that summer. There were changes in my parents’ relationship with each other. It was as if they had forgotten how to talk to each other. And, when they did talk, it was with words that were almost too polite—interactions that were well on their way to unresolved arguments that evolved into resentment that evolved into apathy. But that would come later. On that Saturday, my parents still loved each other—at least I think they did.

  Chapter 2

  My mother’s concerns were the furthest thing from my mind two days later as I pedaled my bike down the dirt path to the tree house that Grace, Natalie, and I had built the summer before in one of the towering oak trees in the woods near Brush Creek. Despite its haphazard construction, the tree house was sturdy, made from boards salvaged from a nearby barn that was falling in on itself. We called it the Nest.

  Although I liked to be the first to get there, I was rarely able to beat Grace. Her lack of parental supervision gave her a freedom that neither Natalie nor I had. More often than not, I would arrive to find her pink banana-seat bike already propped against a nearby tree, and she would be curled up in one of the corners reading. Because her mother wasn’t awake to cook a morning meal, Grace’s breakfasts, if she bothered to eat, usually consisted of cold Pop-Tarts or crackers from a waxy sleeve of saltines she carried in her bag.

  Although we didn’t really talk about it, I think both Natalie and I recognized how Grace was neglected—the way her clothes were never quite clean or how haggard she always seemed to look. Of course, I say this now as a thirty-year-old, but looking back, it was more than just her appearance. Grace compartmentalized her life—separated the time she spent with us from the time she spent at home. She talked about her father only to say she had spent the weekend with him, and she never talked about her mother except to say that she “wasn’t feeling well” or that she “had a new boyfriend.”

  Grace endured her life stoically, though to this day, I can’t help but think if we had been older or better equipped emotionally to understand just what exactly was going on, we could have helped her. Maybe we even could have prevented what happened. Or maybe we couldn’t have. I don’t know. What I do know is, that Monday morning, three weeks into summer vacation, my thoughts were no more pressing than figuring out our plans for the summer. I grinned as I climbed the board slats nailed to the side of the tree to serve as a ladder and pulled myself up onto the platform. Grace was sitting in her corner on one of the torn lawn chair cushions we salvaged from the community dump, reading a library book and eating a strawberry Pop-Tart.

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but Grace was a pretty girl. Like me, she was gangly, though when she moved, there were different results. Where I was clumsy and awkward, Grace was graceful—her movements smooth and seamless. And there was something about the way she looked at people with her green, thickly lashed eyes. There was a depth about her that belied her years—a calmness that made all of us think she could handle anything.

  “Hey,” I said somewhat breathless from the climb.

  She looked up, startled by my greeting. She had been so deeply engrossed in her book that she hadn’t heard me come up.

  “Hey yourself,” she said as she stretched out her legs.

  “Whatcha reading?” I asked.

  “The Outsiders.” Grace flipped it over so I could see the cover. “Not bad.”

  She broke off a piece of Pop-Tart and popped it into her mouth. She pushed several strands of blond hair from in front of her eyes and studied me as she chewed. The hollows beneath her eyes were smudged with shadows of fatigue. I was about to ask what time she had gotten to the Nest when a whoop of greeting came from the clearing. I peered down through the entrance as Natalie carelessly dropped her bike to the ground, jogged to the tree, and began to climb.

  “What’s up, chickens?” she said, rather than asked, as she heaved herself onto the platform. She was breathing heavily, her forehead and upper lip glistening with sweat.

  Natalie Stewart was the leader and the smartest member of our group—not that Grace and I weren’t smart; we were. But not like Natalie. She was not only smart, she was also fearless. If there was trouble to get into, rules to break, or feathers to ruffle, Natalie was typically the ringleader.

  “Nothing,” I said as I grabbed a cushion from the pile and tossed it at her. “How about you?”

  “Hot.” She settled herself on the cushion and pushed her sweaty bangs back from her forehead. “I’m probably already sunburned.”

  Her hair would eventually deepen to an enviable shade of auburn and her features would lengthen into smooth adult lines. But when we were young, Natalie was cursed with the bright orange hair, round freckled face, and pale complexion of her Irish ancestors. Whereas Grace and I would turn brown in the sun, Natalie’s skin would redden, blister, and peel away, only to be the same shade of white as when she started. She hated her skin—but only slightly more than she hated the color of her coarse, unruly hair. For Natalie, her appearance was a source of constant frustration and because of that, she tried to pretend that looks weren’t important. She covered it by being smart and fearless. But it still bothered her that she wasn’t pretty. I enjoyed the fact that I knew that about her.

  “So, did you guys hear about what happened to Mr. Holmes?”

  Natalie’s question shook me.

  I shook my head, knowing that if anyone would know details of the latest gossip, it would be Natalie. In addition to being gifted at sneaking around and eavesdropping on other peoples’ conversation, she also benefitted from the fact that her father was a detective with the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Department. He generally knew everything that was going on in the county.

  “Somebody painted nasty words on his pickup and then slashed one of the tires.” I could tell from her tone that she was pleased to be able to deliver this information.

  “Why would somebody do that?” I asked.

  Grace raised her eyebrows, curious as well about the answer.

  “Because he’s black, duh,” Natalie said as if it were obvious.

  I frowned and then nodded slowly.

  Edenbridge wasn’t unwelcoming to strangers. That wouldn’t be Christian. Rather, they were polite—painfully polite. It was the Midwestern equivalent of the Southern expression bless your heart.

  Enter the Holmes family. Not only were they newcomers to the town and the only black family, but in the minds of many people, they didn’t belong because of how they got their land. It all started during the Vietnam War when Walter Hanson, the great-grandson of one of the town’s founders, Emmet Hanson, gave his family’s land to Anthony Holmes. Walter was the sole surviving member of the family line. A “confirmed bachelor”—I realize now what that meant—Walter farmed the family property until he was drafted to fight in Vietnam. He was a much better farmer than a soldier and no one was really surprised when he was killed in battle. What did come as a surprise was that just before he died, Walter deeded the land his family had held for generations to Anthony Holmes, the man who, despite leg and shoulder injuries of his own, had carried him to safety and medical attention.

  At first, Mr. Holmes’ claim was disputed. People in town talked about going in together and hiring a lawyer, but, without the Hanson family to object and because Mr. Holmes had documentation, there wasn’t really anything anyone could do. The land belonged to Anthony Holmes—though had he known what was in store for his family, he might have sold the land immediately. But he was, at heart, an optimist and believed that this land was
the first step for a better life. He was both right and wrong.

  Like Walter Hanson, Anthony Holmes grew up working the land. He had a love of farming and also knew how to raise cattle, pigs, and chickens. So, when he was released from the army, it made perfect sense that he would take his wife and two children, go to Edenbridge, and farm the land that had been given to him. He was unprepared, however, for the sight that awaited him in his new home—flat land bursting with corn, wheat, milo, and soybeans. One planting season showed him that these weren’t crops he was good at cultivating. Better, he decided, to raise pigs and chickens.

  At first people in Edenbridge were amused. They took pleasure in making jokes at his expense. They stopped laughing, though, when the hot summer winds from the south funneled the heated stench of Mr. Holmes’ animals into town. Their animosity increased when the farm crisis hit, crop prices hit rock bottom, and everyone began to lose money—everyone, that was, except Mr. Holmes. Because he focused on animals rather than crops, he was faring better than most. Rumor had it that he was even making a profit. Resentment ran high and the townspeople’s treatment of the Holmeses ran from grudging to hostile. My grandfather was one of the worst in this regard.

  A sour man with a hawkish nose and small black eyes, my grandfather stood barely above five feet in height. And, like many men of short stature, he tried to project the bravado of a much larger man by swaggering and bullying anyone around him, swearing like a sailor and gesticulating with a smoldering cigarette to emphasize his point. Regardless of the weather, he wore the same outfit: a short-sleeved white button-down with a pocket at the chest to hold his cigarettes, droopy gray or black polyester pants cinched below his large belly with a turquoise-inlaid, tooled leather belt, and cowboy boots.