NOG installment 5

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2

Maybe if a dreamer, upon wakening, could summon her dreams in their entirety to the forefront of her consciousness, the transitions between dreams would make better sense. Perhaps imperfect memory is what makes the leap from one dream to the next seem incongruous or nonsensical. What if there is a perfectly logical segue from one dream to the next and the dreamer just can’t pull it back through the undertow of waking? Whatever the case, Grace and her companion had moved in the nonsensical shuffle of dreams to a different location.

Nocation,

spoke itself into Grace’s brain as she suddenly knew she was nowhere. She had accidentally found that fictitious place No Man’s Land: grey, numb, blind, deaf, deprived of all sensation, she felt a moment’s horrific panic.

“Where are we?” she heard her panic muffled by the heavy emptiness of a sinus cold. Her companion didn’t answer and panic lifted itself to clawing terror. “Where are you? Are you gone?” the distant rising shriek of her own voice would have made her shiver if her numbness would have allowed.

“That’s some grip.” His voice saved her from free fall as she, by the suggestion of her hand, was able to feel her limbs again. In a moment’s exquisitely unbearable crushing grey pressure, they were pressed through a pinhole of light with the force of a spitball, expanding and ballooning onto the surface of the next scene.

Grace sucked in the air in one huge gulp.

“Where are we?” came again as if these were the only words she could remember. Her eyes caught the familiar as they zoomed past a Bursar’s Office on the right and an atrium café, The Meeting Place, on the left. Grace recognized people and places in flashes of clarity, each flash disappearing in the wake of their speed. They moved down a hallway and left, down a flight of stairs.

“The Student Union?” Grace queried, not understanding how the aisles of a nonexistent Bohack could possibly relate to the school she fled in failure, tail tucked between her legs. Maybe failure was the theme. Not a pleasant prospect.

“I’ve never been down here,” came even though she was looking at her own back in an unfamiliar doorway, abruptly contradicting these words. “And there I am. How is that possible?” She couldn’t look at him, even for the reassurance she craved.

“On a linear timeline, this is you in a future tense. You can’t remember it because you haven’t been here yet.”

“Was that an explanation?” Too much to try to make sense of, Grace fell, instead, into the acceptance of dreamers.

She looked around trying to take in clues. Her eyes landed on the sign next to the room into which her other body was leaning. Ceramics Studio.

“Hm, I didn’t know we had a Ceramics Studio. Then again, the list of things I don’t know seems to be growing by the minute.” She delved into the deeper layers of that thought only to be interrupted by the sound of her own voice.

“Hey, do you have time for lunch?” Grace strained to hear the muffled reply. The anonymous murmuring response incited a visceral surge of interest.

“Can I see who she’s talking to in there?”

Abracadabra, a face peered through the door, causing her a quick rush of adrenaline followed quickly by buzzing lightheadedness. In the disconcerting anonymity that often characterized the denizens of her dreams, she already couldn’t remember the features on the face she was staring directly into. If quizzed, Grace would not be able to tell if this person had dark hair or light, the color of his eyes or even his height. Despite this complete failure to recognize his person, or perhaps because of it, like a blind person with heightened intuition, she thought she knew him. Inexplicably and totally she knew him, she trusted him, she felt something toward this unknown entity that she hadn’t felt before. Grace wished she could trade places with herself as this stranger gently pushed against her with his palms against her shoulders, the softly worn denim of his thigh against her thigh. She became shamelessly jealous of herself as he moved strong arms around her shoulders and grasped his clay-splotched hands together at the middle of her back. She sighed in vicarious bliss, as his chin burrowed into her hair and he breathed her in.

“You always smell delicious.” His words poured out on Grace like warm honey, giving her the chills.

This is right,

sprang from nowhere causing the fine hairs to stand up on the back of her neck.

“I wasn’t expecting to see you ‘til later but sooner is always better than later.”

“I have something I want to talk to you about. Can you take a quick break?” Grace felt like she was eavesdropping on something so private that was both none of her business and crucially important to her and was immediately alert to a small twinge she heard in her own voice.

“For you? I can do anything.” The generosity of his smile complemented his words as he spun her around and tried, with one clean elbow, to rub a schmear of clay his embrace had deposited on her back.

“How sweet is that? Almost too sweet. Under different circumstances it might even make me nauseated.” Grace was confused and excited. “Not that I’m complaining but I don’t really understand what we’re doing here. I haven’t felt like this in–” she lost her train of thought, sucked into the drain where sadness and a nasty ball of hair lay in the dankness side by side. Here, she couldn’t remember the last time she had been happy and didn’t want to wake up from the illusory promise of happiness. “I don’t really want to leave here.” she whispered.

“Grace, be patient. You have so much to learn and so little time. If you will trust me I can help you.”

She whispered again,

“I hope you aren’t just dangling this in front of me to rip it out from underneath me. This is something. I know it.” She needed more information. “When did I meet him?”

“Oh, you’ll see.” She could hear him smile an enigma. She might have been irritated had the challenge of a mystery not always been so powerfully seductive.

“I feel like we’re –they’re pretty serious.”

“You or they, whichever makes you more comfortable, are engaged to be married.”

At the age of twenty, in the throes of ruination-by-drug, all avenues of her life aborted, the word marriage sounded like jibberish to Grace.

“What?” plopped stupidly out of her mouth. And even as it came out she recognized that the couple in front of her were, indeed, linked in a way that seemed like jibberish. She tried to sound it out. “I, or she, or we have a fiancé? He makes pottery? I can’t imagine liking someone who does pottery–” she veered off that nonsensical rumination, picking up a more substantive thread as if her fingers had skimmed it accidentally, “I don’t even know him, I don’t even know about a Ceramics Studio, I don’t even go to school anymore.” The impossibilities were overwhelming.

“And yet, there you are.”

“I know, right?” she glommed onto his statement of the simultaneously obvious and obscured.

Grace watched herself and that incomprehensible fiancé of hers walk across a narrow hallway into an intimate cafeteria. An old song by Don Henley, flying solo without the rest of his Eagles, was playing from a portable radio on the counter as they ordered sandwiches from its glassed display. Grace was content to just watch the couple be together while they waited for an egg salad on pumpernickel and a chicken salad on sourdough. The mundane details of the music and specific sandwich orders gave substance to a hope for an irrational future she didn’t quite believe would ever exist.

Hope for what?

Hope that this scene will someday exist on my real linear timeline.

Oh right, mumbo jumbo, bibbity bobbity boo.

Grace almost skipped over to the small table in the corner the couple had chosen as a lover’s nook. She wanted to be with them, her knees kissing their touching knees.

“My dad wants us to stick to a budget of five thousand dollars for the entire wedding. I don’t know how he expects us to do that. I wish he would just give us the money and let us have a ‘family only’ ceremony. I just want to get married and get out of the house.”

Grace found herself easily nodding along with the wisdom of her self making bizarre plans for an inconceivable wedding. She couldn’t even really see this man she was looking at and still she couldn’t wait to start a new life with him. The prospect of escaping her old life to a new one was irresistible.

“Grace, let’s just cooperate. Do whatever it is that makes him happy and then we’ll be together. I’m sure it’s hard for him to let go of you. I wouldn’t want to let go of you either.” Both Grace and Grace rolled four eyes at his dreamily idealistic interpretation of her father’s motivation for making the whole process difficult. He didn’t know that her father operated on a constant need to make life as difficult as possible for everyone around him, as if it were a daily contest he had with himself to see whose life he could make just a little less comfortable. Grace shook the uncharitable thoughts out of her head and the other Grace seemed to agree as she didn’t argue the point.

Why ruin a perfectly good moment with my own nastiness? If he wants to think generous thoughts, then I can go along with that.

Grace was so giddy she felt she could float to the nearest field of daisies to pluck up a blossom:

He loves me, he loves me, he loves me.

Somewhere in the midst of her flowered idyll, her stomach began to curdle with a rumbling undercurrent of undeniable tension.

Something's not right.

While she had taken a mental time out, the happy faces had grown agitated along with their tone of conversation. She knew it had been too good to be true. She asked her companion,

“What’s his name? I don’t even know his name. He doesn’t look happy.”

“Shhhh, listen.”

“Grace I am trying to be reasonable. I wish you wouldn’t go out with him tonight. I don’t ask much from you. Please don’t go. ”

Grace pushed one side of hair behind an ear and curled her lip.

“That’s an ugly face.” Grace whispered.

“You’re being a big baby. What ever happened to: for you I can do anything? Is it that you don’t trust me or that you are just so insecure that I’m never going to be allowed near any other guy again.” She snarled.

“Ooh that was uglier.” Grace, the commentator, was getting nervous.

“Grace this isn’t any other guy. You dated him seriously for a year. You were irrationally attached to him and so devastated when he broke up with you that you started doing drugs. Your whole life was almost ruined after he dumped you.” His eyes pleaded with her, his vulnerability tangible.

“Irrationally attached? I was dumped? Like garbage? This just keeps getting better.” As her voice impossibly rose an octave with each question, he opened his mouth with a conciliatory look on his face but she held her hand up in front of his face, determined to pick this fight “Let me get this straight; I’m so weak I’m going to fall back into the arms of a guy who dumped me like yesterday’s trash? Or I don’t love you enough to be faithful? Or maybe you don’t think you will measure up to him.” She pounced on this idea and began mauling it like a tiger. “Are you man enough to handle this or aren’t you?”

“Grace, I feel extremely uncomfortable with this situation. The only thing I’ve ever asked of you is that you wouldn’t cheat on me. You kind of have a track record of unfaithful behavior in your relationships, especially with this guy. I just can’t tolerate cheating”

“Uh oh.” Grace's eyes went wide anticipating the impending onslaught of her own rage. She was justly rewarded with a near shriek.

“Are you serious? You can’t tolerate?”

He tried to stop the unavoidable barrage of fury,

“Grace, you know that’s not what I meant. Why are you so desperate to misunderstand me?” He looked at her anxiously, questioning the true intentions of the storm she seemed to be deliberately brewing.

“Of course this is my fault. I love the way you have worked it out so I am the one who is misunderstanding your perfect motivations. Please save your perfection for someone else. And just for the record: nobody dictates to me which of my behaviors they will or will not tolerate.”

She could see that he was bewildered but also saw a growing annoyance climb into his demeanor as she refused to capitulate. He struggled for control.

“Why don’t we calm down for a second.”

His reasoning tone obviously infuriated her. She wanted him to enter the fray as a participant, not as a referee,

“You calm down! Don’t you tell me what to do. I have had a lifetime of someone else’s rules shoved down the back of my throat. I don’t need a new life with a new set of dictator’s rules. And another thing, you don’t need to throw my ‘track record’ in my face.” Grace shook her head in misery as she watched her own exaggerated and angry air quotes clawing the air. “You know all my crap because I trusted you with it. I didn’t share with you so could use it against me whenever you’re not getting your way. I guess the sensitive, understanding guy routine works when it suits you. ”

He put his hands over hers thinking he could still defuse the situation. It was clear that this wasn’t the first time he and Grace had clashed. It was obvious that he knew the routine and he was hoping his protons would have a balancing effect on her wildly zipping electrons.

“Grace please stop. Don’t say anything else. You’re just starting to say stuff and you’re going to say things you can’t take back.” Above the fray, she found it interesting that he didn’t retaliate at her insults.

What must life be like inside his head?

On the other hand, she knew his placid tone alone was enough to push all of Grace’s buttons. What he thought was soothing, shredded through her nerves like acid burning through flesh. It was a lost cause by the time he made his last desperate suggestion,

“Why don’t we all go out together? I know a good place.”

She ripped her hands from where they were being smothered by his,

“Why on earth would you pick the place? You’re not even from around here. Are you seriously trying to tell me what to do? Why do I always have to shut up and be a good little girl? What earthly purpose could you possibly serve in going out with us? Are you planning on feeding me my food? Maybe you can put a bib on me. Maybe you could talk for me while I just sit there and look pretty. Look at my mouth while I tell you this slowly so you can understand my words: I am not asking your permission. I am going and I’m going without you. If you don’t like it you can take back your stupid measly ring and we’ll call this off.” Grace’s words gathered momentum, rightness assured by volume and viciousness. She didn’t wait for a response. Suddenly standing, the back of her knees knocked her chair over. In an impetuous rush she turned around and left the room, leaving her sandwich alone and forlorn.

The Grace that did stay peered inquiringly at the face of her five minute fiancé while the words of the song floated across the room.

And I think it’s about, forgiveness, forgiveness, even if, even if, you don’t love me anymore.

“I feel bad for him. Maybe she’ll come back when her rage wears off. It’s been known to happen” An old pro at these altercations, Grace felt compassion for him, so obviously unprepared and unequipped for this kind of warfare. Impervious to her psychic sympathetic vibe messages, he set his jaw hard, calmly stood up and walked out of the room betraying not a tic of emotion.

“Wait! Don’t go, she might come back.” Grace was powerless to do anything but watch. She turned to the only person who could hear her, “What does this mean? Where does this leave us? Why did you even bring me here?” Grace grabbed her companion’s arm and shook it in distress

“Be patient Grace.”

With the deep regret of a dreamer, Grace reluctantly left the stranger she wanted to know. As if she had a choice.

night of grace story-part 4

1

In the next few moments Grace was convinced she was on the wrong end of some kind of hallucinogenic trip. Maybe the right end of it.

Moments? Is that what they’re called? Is that a measurement of time? Is there any such thing? Or is this just an artificial constraint that our minds use to define the unknown by pouring it into a Pyrex cup and measuring it with graduated lines of varying length?

Yup, definitely tripping.

The walls of her room disintegrated, crumbling like wet sand that’s been flash-dried by a blast of heat, instantly divested of all adhesive properties. For three heartbeats, the trees stood their ground outside the dissipated room and on the fourth beat they vanished: oaks simply swirled upward as if flushed into the sky. Breathe in and out, on the next inhalation the sky joined the choreography of metamorphasis. The night dropped each of its stars in a magnificent shower of light, leaving behind obsidian emptiness. Grace giggled like a child in church.

“Have you ever seen those slide shows people spam your inbox with?” Nervously trying to explain her sudden

Inappropriate?

laughter, she forgot to wonder if he knew anything about the world of slide shows, spam or inboxes.

“I know about everything,” again his voice was so calm, so warm. The stunning magnitude of his simple statement sucked the breath out of her lungs with a truth she couldn’t fathom but could feel in places she hadn’t felt since childhood. She struggled to organize amoeba thoughts floating toward entropy inside her mind. Gathering courage, she blurted a tiny amorphous entity randomly corralled as it drifted through her brain.

“That reminded me of one of those slide show that celebrates the beauty of nature with beautiful pictures. Only this was like standing in the middle of each picture. And those transitions–” She stopped herself mid-sentence, afraid to trivialize what had happened with her fumbling analogies. He squeezed her hand,

“Go on Grace, I like the sound of your voice.”

A wave of hot ache swelled in her throat, and she felt the strain of warm salt at the back corners of her eyes. She gulped down the bittersweet richness of his unexpected interest.

He likes the sound of my voice?

And she knew it was true, so she continued.

“It reminded me of the fireworks I used to watch on the Fourth of July down by the bay. Especially the finale. One beautiful floral kaleidoscope of color after another, coming in faster and faster succession, each display more spectacular than the last.” She fizzled out, her words embarrassed by their own inadequacy to do justice to the marvel she had just witnessed.

“Yes, I remember.” Soothing mom sounds, reassuring and inviting to express some more.

“Would you call this the supernatural?”

He didn’t answer but she thought he might be nodding.

Does he think he can lure me into looking at him?

“This is way different than any supernatural I ever imagined. I thought it would be terrifying and horrible and too huge to contend with. Maybe it’s because you’re here with me.”

Again no answer, at which she began to second-guess her instincts.

Why should I find his presence reassuring? I don’t even know him.

“You know me Grace.”

She stiffened her neck and clenched her jaw.

Did he just talk to my thoughts? I definitely don't find that reassuring..

She hurriedly spoke out loud to drown out any thoughts that might provoke any more creepy inner dialogue.

“Is what I just saw the kind of thing people talk about after an acid trip? Is this what they see? Is this what they’ve been searching for?” Carefully, Grace tip-toed into this sudden secret.

Is he going to be offended? Is that a disgusting comparison?

She heard or remembered his words inside her head,

I know about everything.

This piece of truth struck its chord again, resonating through her synaptic gaps, jumping from one place to the next. The first note, the melody, sang out clearly and simply, assuring her that he knew and understood what she was saying. The next note in the chord sang a close harmony about his knowledge of things throughout the world, in the universe and beyond. A lower note, rich and mysterious, gave deep witness to his knowledge of things from time before time, unknowable and unfathomable. Giving a shard of evidence of his knowledge, he began to explain the thought that Grace could barely begin to articulate.

“People are constantly seeking to connect with spirituality on some level. Humans try to fill the voids in their lives by any means possible. There is so much that you know nothing about. Still, you miss those very things of which you know nothing. You long for them, you yearn for them and you didn’t even know you needed them.”

Grace wasn’t really sure what those things were. She was sure that her hand felt warm inside of his; complete, as if her one hand had never realized its true purpose until this moment. She wished her whole body could enjoy that sensation. More, she wished her mind and spirit could enjoy that sensation. She thought this might be one of the things she had been longing for and yearning for without ever knowing she was missing it.

“It is called rest.” His voice responded to her unformed words. She closed her eyes and concentrated on her hand at rest. Bliss.

In a moment,

Moment?

her eyes opened and she was standing in a supermarket. ‘Standing in’ had just become another one of those terms like ‘moment’. It had been robbed of all relevance. Grace’s feet were not literally touching the floor of the supermarket. She was not able to interact with the people in the store. An unconfirmed suspicion told her that if she reached out to touch the navel orange immediately on the right she would not feel the bright leather of its skin. She had the notion that her hand might pass right through it. Even then, rather than feel the juicy pulp of the fruit, she would, instead, experience through the soles of her feet and the follicles of her hair, the very essence of citrusy tang: sweet, sour, full of zest and nutrients. Grace as part of the orange for a moment.

Ugh I can’t even use the word moment. How am I going to get through this? And what about the other bizarre thoughts zinging through my head?

Surely, I am not here to contemplate my oneness with the produce.

“No, you aren’t. And stop calling me Shirley.”

Grace still couldn’t look at his face. She couldn’t name her fear, or which one of many that prevented the eye contact. His ridiculously stupid joke broke through her defenses. Disarming. She took, instead, a coward’s look at his forearm.

Sinewy, strong. Is he human?

“Why are we here then?” She spoke to disengage, withdraw from the threatened intimacy of desire begging her to touch the rope of muscles on his arm.

“Don’t you remember?”

She looked at the grid of one-inch hexagonal floor tiles. Dingy grey and brown laid out in a pattern that formed a geometric floral design in the honeycomb of the floor. The produce stands were made of wood; real wood, sturdy and rustic, with scalloped green and white striped awnings overhead. Here was an old-school grocery store, not one of those cookie-cutter supermarkets that fill the shopping centers now.

“Oh! We’re in Bohack. Didn’t they tear this place down? I think they replaced it with a Walmart or something. Yeah, I remember now, this store was the best. There’s a section over there,” she pointed past the produce, “filled to overflowing, row after row, with the most beautiful candy. There is one kind, my favorite to tell you the truth, so pretty it even has pictures of the fruit of its flavor incorporated in the–” her voice petered out.

“You do remember.”

“Seriously? That whole spectacular supernatural intro and this is where you were headed?” sarcasm oozed out of her pores racing the fear to the surface of her skin.

“Yes. I want you to see this as an observer.” He gently led her to the left along a store-length alley between the line of registers and the aisles of groceries. Grace tried to make herself leaden but he easily arrived at their destination. Strange how a seemingly trivial event in a child’s life, barely worthy of notation, can cause an immediately roiling cauldron of emotional soup: anger, fear and shame expertly diced into tiny cubed pieces and tossed into the frothing broth of guilt. Silly, but not. She became engrossed by the tableau.

“Can they see us?” she whispered.

“No and they can’t hear us either,” his gentle susurrations matched hers, soothing and teasing all at once.

She looked sadly at four year old Grace. A red and white gingham shirt with white piping outlining a cowboy yoke paired with ancient hand-me-down Billy the Kid jeans. She held on to her mom’s hand. More accurately stated, her mom had little Grace’s sweaty fist in a death grip. The veins on her mom’s tough hands were bulging with telltale force. Grace was looking down at her feet, with her free hand reluctantly held out to a man. The man wore a green grocer’s apron. with matching green bands on his sleeve,

What are they called? You know those things worn only by singers in a Barber Shoppe Quartet or one of the seventy-six trombonists from the Music Man?

I don’t know, they look like garters for your sleeves.

Whatever you call them, I hope it’s part of his required uniform or this dude is seriously out of touch with reality. Freak.

He was a manager, a fact Grace had brilliantly deduced by reading his name tag: ‘Bill-Supermarket Manager’. He grimaced uncomfortably, rolling his eyes slightly, obviously wishing the event over.

“What’s his problem?” she hissed to her new partner in crime, fully annoyed by Bill’s discomfiture.

“Do you think he honestly wanted any part of this little drama?”

“I never thought of how he felt about it,” she was struck for the first time that this extra in her life’s play might have had any feelings. She turned again to the strangely familiar show.

This small child, stocky and strong, stood trembling with fear, unable to look up through the hair hanging over her eyes. Grace remembered vividly fixing her child’s eyes on a crusty scrape on her own knee and concentrating on that with grim determination. Dirty tear tracks trailed through a Milky Way of rusty brown freckles.

Her mom’s voice rang tight and angry, “Speak up Grace.”

“Look how pretty she is, even when she’s angry. My dad always says her eyes sparkle brighter blue when she’s mad. Must be true because they are on fire right now. Makes her look beautifully fierce huh?” Grace admired her Mom, sixteen years and three children younger. Her hair was golden streaked sand and sable, fluffy like the lady on the old green Herbal Essence shampoo bottle.

Not that revoltingly orgasmic redo. The original. That beautiful hippie, naked and organic, clothed only in her hair, flowers and birds.

There stood her mom in all her natural glory, thankfully not an exactly naked replica of the Herbal Essence lady but clothed in the tennis outfit she had been wearing when she discovered Grace, literally red-handed, sticky strawberry flavoring smudged all over her guilty little palms. Below the sassy pleats of her white skirt, Grace admired strong, perfectly shaped and tanned legs not yet marred by the ravages of those horrible varicose veins that now lived like a colony of purple slugs just below the surface of her mom’s older skin. Grace laughed out loud when she noticed that her mom hadn’t even bothered to put shoes on. Mom was famous for playing barefoot at the courts while still winning the club championship tournament each year. Accustomed to dominating without the benefit of shoes, she certainly didn’t need to subject her feet to the prison of footwear just to teach her daughter a lesson. Maybe the store’s ‘no shoes, no shirt, no service’ policy didn’t apply in a situation like this. Grace was willing to bet that Bill-Store Manager wasn’t going to make the challenge.

“Yes, she is a beautiful woman.”

Grace was startled out of her trance by the voice next to her, unexpectedly filled with a surprising ache of longing. She wanted desperately to see if the longing was stamped onto his features, confirming what she was hearing. She caught herself from turning, stopping in time to witness the rise and fall of his chest. Actually just the rise as his chest seemed to catch and hold his breath.

“I am sorry I stole this piece of candy from your store.”

Grace’s attention quickly shifted to the child whose voice was shaking with fear, shame and one other thing.

What is it?

Her peripheral vision caught sight of legs spinning through the air.

Oh right! Anger.

Grace wanted to laugh as she saw little Grace half-turn toward the distracting legs windmilling across the supermarket. Her young eyes squinched up in fury and tried to shoot daggers at the offending legs while multitasking a demonstration of contrition to Bill-Store Manager.

“I almost forgot about Brooke for a minute. To this day I’d like to slap her. She cartwheeled around while my mother forced me to apologize to the manager for stealing. She is the one who told me to take it! She was eating it with me when my mom caught us behind that bush in front of the house. Why is she cartwheeling?” Grace continued, not really waiting for a response, “You’d think she might have felt a little guilty that I was standing there crying, humiliated, taking one hundred percent of the blame for our crime. You'd think she could have stopped cartwheeling just for a second. She wasn’t even that good at cartwheels. Look at those bent legs.” She fumed at the memory she was being subjected to.

In a tandem flash of emotion she felt a sudden sinking of a stomach in an elevator ride, remembering that moment of being discovered. The two girls had been safely ensconced in the shady fort created between the thick privet bush and the cool brick façade at the northeast corner of her house, away from the midday sun. Sitting in the dirt, trading licks, they transferred tacky red guilt between them, leaving a trail of evidence. The sensation of her mom’s arrival had been horrifying, her angry disappointment suddenly blocking the little sun that had filtered through the bush. Grace had slowly looked up to her mother’s head, a fringe of hair haloed in golden light and when her features finally came into adjustment, Grace had been sick to her stomach with fear. She felt the forbidden cloying sweetness curdle in her otherwise empty belly and a thin stream of candied bile coated the pathway between her stomach and mouth, rising from the bottom to the top. She recalled, as if it were in slow motion, how she had turned to look at Brooke. She had been utterly amazed as her friend, seemingly unfazed, continued to get her last licks in before the candy was confiscated. A voice interrupted her remembered misery,

“Grace, do you know that is exactly what you were focused on at the time?”

“What?” Grace felt the stupidity of numbness, like walking out of the dentist office.

“Brooke.”

“Oh right.” She slowly swam up to the surface of her memory, still discombobulated.

“Even when you remembered this incident, you invariably turned your attention to Brooke’s part in this. Is it important that she got her last licks in? Who cares about her bent legs?” Gentle prodding was obviously meant to lead Grace to a point.

Grace resisted,

“Well, I just have to say one thing. She has always been a big fat pain in my butt.” Her one thing unfolded its arms and legs revealing itself to be a much larger thing than apprehended at first glance, “You know what she did to me two years after this little episode?” She rushed on, afraid he wouldn’t let her finish this one extended thing, “When we were in first grade she brought Good and Plentys to school every day. I don’t know why she liked them so much, they made her teeth black and all the boys laughed at her calling her ‘Black Tooth Brooke.’ Anyway, every day she offered me some at lunch and I would say no because, to be honest, I didn’t even like them. But one day, I just gave in and took some. I don’t know why, like I said, I didn’t even like them. Long story short, my big sister Annie was over her house to play with her big sister Gretchen. For some insane reason, Brooke felt compelled to tell Annie that I had eaten her candy that day. And, of course, perfect hall monitor that she was, Annie marched home and ratted me out to my mom. They interrogated me for what seemed like hours ‘til I finally cracked and admitted it. Then I got punished for the double dose of eating candy and lying. What the heck?” She wanted to look at him to see if he understood the ridiculous part that everybody had played in the farce. Apparently he didn’t,

“You do realize that if you hadn’t taken the Good and Plentys in the first place, none of this would have happened don’t you?”

“So that’s how it’s gonna be huh? We’re not even going to discuss what was wrong with Brooke that she felt the need to constantly be tempting, then tattling on me? We’re not going to address the fact that Annie could have just minded her own beeswax.” Grace had reverted to the cadence of childhood speech, “This is just going to be about me?”

“Exactly. I am not here to fix Brooke, she is not the one whose life is hanging in the balance between the hell of addiction and death. This is between you and me.”

She looked down and to the right at his foot,

Is he seriously wearing flip flops?

His footwear reminded her of the beach where she had laid tonight, weighing her bleak options. She suddenly remembered that he was here to help her, so she capitulated a bit.

“Okay, so what are you trying to tell me?”

“You never really felt sorry for stealing. You felt humiliated at being caught. You felt resentful for being forced to apologize and return the half-eaten candy. You felt indignant at Brooke’s cartwheels.”

“Give me a break, I was four years old.” She listened in disgust to that small child’s whininess as it hobbled out of her mouth.

“You were old enough to feel humiliation, resentment and indignation. You were able to recognize Brooke’s culpability. I think you were old enough to feel remorse.”

Grace felt backed into a corner. She didn’t perform best from that location. “So you dragged me here to show me that stealing a two-cent piece of candy when I was four led me to an addiction to crack?” Now she was off the ropes and swinging wildly, blurting the first outrageous thing that came to mind. Those cartwheeling legs made her feel perverse even this many years later.

“That was a big leap. Funny thing is, you are trying to distract with what you think is a wild exaggeration but you’re closer to the truth than you know. We have limited time, so I’m going to see your wild exaggeration and raise you a chip of absolute truth.” She could feel his gaze pinning her down and was supremely relieved not to be looking at those eyes. “You do frequently like to ignore the things you have done wrong or mitigate your errors by deferring blame. It is a recurring theme for you. If you don’t admit what you’ve done, accept culpability, then you can never address it and fix it.”

“Oh silly me. I wish I had known life was so simple. See it, admit it, fix it. You’re a regular Tony Robbins.” Her nasty tone was a practiced defensive weapon. She knew she would not have the audacity of blunt rudeness if she dared to look at his face; another reason to hold him at bay and speak freely at the general space around her.

Completely unruffled, he handled Grace deftly,

“Tony wishes. But yes, it is a simple equation and it is effective.”

“So let me get this straight, when you offered me your hand, you were really offering me some sort of mea culpa mind trip where I get to seek and destroy all the stuff you think I should feel guilty for? Had I known that’s what you were offering, I might have considered going it alone.” She knew she was bluffing, going back to alone was a terrifying thought.

“Grace, you may relinquish my hand whenever you choose.”

Relinquish his hand?

The mercy of his tone was enough to make Grace want to do the exact opposite. She redoubled her grip on his, worried that he might soon grow tired of her mercurial mood swings and remove the choice from her hands. She thought she felt him smile in response to her thoughts.

I don’t know what that means.

And then he squeezed her hand three times. She didn’t know what to do with this information. She and her mom used to play this game when she was little: her mom would squeeze her hand three times, signifying ‘I love you’, to which Grace would respond with two squeezes, ‘me too’, Mommy would reply two squeezes, ‘how much?’ and they would squeeze together as hard as they could to indicate how strong was their love for one another. Mommy, with her Spock grip, always won. She said that was because she loved Grace more than she could ever imagine.

Does he know about our game?

Maybe it’s just something everybody knows about.

So, is he telling me he loves me?

Love you? I hardly even know you.

Grace’s mind had always worked in such a way that, while mulling over any number of thoughts, she would be pierced by an unanticipated and mostly unrelated insight. So, as Grace played the hand-squeezing puzzle in her head, she was broadsided by a fragment of the other truth her companion had been trying to show her. She felt the profound weight of it in one flash. For one breath, she knew that her inability to address her own weaknesses without diverting blame was a common thread running through her twenty years of life. In the next breath, she could see the physical path that led from the supermarket and ended with her face down on a beach, body full of toxins, begging for an escape. Her mind raced up that path with an impossible combination of clarity and speed. Having pulled at that single thread, the whole fabric of her life seemed to unravel.

My life just flashed before my eyes. Not a pretty sight.

“ Not exactly your whole life Grace, just the one strand.”

They stood and watched for another moment.

I don’t think that word will ever be the same for me.

Little Grace reached out her hand offering a slimy sucker on a napkin. It had been beautiful, a disc the size of a quarter, the thickness of her pinky. Red around the rim touching a thinner line of lime, contrasting beautifully, the rest of the field was pure white. Nestled in the middle of the snowy pureness was the tiniest, most perfect picture of a strawberry, complete with stem and tiny seeds, not stamped on to the face but an integral part of the candy. A few years later, before TV watching was fully banned from the home, Grace had seen a Sesame Street mini-documentary which had demonstrated in detail this particular candy-making process. Colored sugar was rolled and stretched into long thin straws, bundled together into a log and cut on the cross-section revealing wily and seductive beauty. Not that she was obsessed but there was a lot to be learned about these lovely drops of heaven.

Earlier on that fateful day, while her Mom was occupied in pursuing her own idea of a delicious indulgence,a ring of dried figs and coconut covered dates, one particular piece of candied craftsmanship had called out to Grace in a tiny, perfectly-formed, sweet voice. The youngest of the mermaid sisters had regained her powers, singing,

“Pick me.”

Brooke had chorused furtively in a guttural hiss,

“Take it.”

Grace knew it was wrong. She wasn’t even allowed to have candy: not to have, not to hold, not to eat. Candy had been forbidden fruit since her mom had decided to bring the delights of a strict health food lifestyle to their home. To add a criminal element to her disobedience, she knew she was stealing. Just as quickly as knowing, she gave one furtive peek around the store and popped that beautiful piece of candy into the front pocket of her Billy the Kids.

Returning to its home at the supermarket, the candy was no longer so perfectly formed, not so sweet, and certainly not so beautiful in her tortured, dirty, pudgy, outstretched hand. The sweat from her palm had wet the napkin on which sat that gob of ruined delight. Focusing on the tiny pieces of black fuzz that had gathered on the ride over, Grace offered it for Bill-Store Manager to take. He shied away with a look of minor disgust. He opened his mouth, obviously ready to say, ‘I don’t want it, you keep it.’ Instead of those words, a strangled noise came from his throat as her mother caught his attention over Grace’s head. Cold steel locked his gaze. She narrowed her eyes and clenched her jaw with the patented but rarely used look that meant: ‘I will knock your teeth into the back of the oven.’ She mouthed the words with strenuous articulation,

Take It.

Clenching her jaw until the muscles were finely twitching golfballs, she thrust her chin forward and widened her eyes, allowing the blue lasers to penetrate the hapless grocery worker’s soul. She dared him to defy her.

Looking at her skips, little Grace never saw this exchange. Big Grace considered for the first time how frustrating this must have been for her mom. Humiliating that your child is a thief. Everybody in town now knows the daughter of Mrs. Health-Food Nut steals candy. Awesome. Her mom had determined to see this uncomfortable task through in an effort to build Grace’s character, make her understand the consequences of her actions. Small town public opinion be damned. Grace wanted to run and say sorry or give her mom an encouraging slap on the back for scaring the great googly-moogly out of Bill-Store Manager. She stepped toward the scene but was constrained by something like a plexiglas wall of invisible force.

“Sorry, it doesn’t work like that. In terms you would understand, we aren’t even in the same dimension as they are. You can’t interact with them.” He gently pulled her back from the precipice.

They watched quietly as Bill took the offending lump of goo. Grace thought she saw his hand tremble just the slightest bit. That tickled her. Grace briefly contemplated this latent hostility toward Bill and realized she must still be angry with him for witnessing her shame. Poor Bill. Mission dispatched, her mother turned quickly to go, whiplashing Grace into her wake. Once she had thanked Mr. Store Manager for his time, her Mom had spun so quickly that Grace’s shoulder caught the tail end of a leg reaching for the floor to complete one last cartwheel. The minor collision sent Brooke careening off into a small display of cereal boxes. That amateur acrobat landed splayed on her stomach with a pile of LIFE on her back.

“I don’t remember that at all.”

How did I miss so much?

Grace glimpsed the briefest smirk fly across her mother’s face as she oopsy-daisied Brooke upright. The manager scurried over, rubbing his sweaty hands against the thighs of his apron,

“I’ll take care of that ma’am. You have a nice day.” He bobbed his head up and down and practically bowed in nervousness, reaching to right the display. He clearly couldn’t wait for them to exit the store.

“Too late,” murmured Grace from across her dimensional plane as her mother marched out of the store with a girl in each hand.