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Authors: Elizabeth Bass

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BOOK: Wherever Grace Is Needed
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15
U
NFORGETTABLE
O
n the first day of school, Grace cradled a mug of coffee in her hands as she sat by the front window, watching the melancholy exodus. Crawford left first, followed by Lily, carrying a brown clarinet case, her small frame weighed down by a backpack large enough to take to tackle Kilimanjaro. After her, Dominic burst out of his house, appearing slightly frantic and already hot in a maroon jacket, black pants, and black shoes that made him look like he was attending a school for doormen. The uniform was a little tight, and Grace kicked herself for forgetting to say something to Ray.
But honestly, shouldn’t Ray have been able to tell when his son’s clothes didn’t fit?
Jordan, the straggler, came out five minutes later. For her back-to-school outfit she had chosen a black tank top, a lime-green miniskirt over brown-and-white striped leggings, and platform boots worthy of a seventies stadium rock star. Instead of a backpack, she was lugging an old carpetbag that made it hard to tell if she was headed for school or running away from home.
Despite the fact that none of them looked thrilled to be embarking on a new school year, Grace felt a ridiculous stab of nostalgia. For a crazy moment, she wanted a do-over—a blank slate. Not that she missed school, or God forbid, being a teenager. She just wanted the world back the way it had been when she was sixteen.
Or maybe she just wanted the world back the way it was when her father was well.
Around noon, she went to check the mail and nearly walked right into Ray, who was standing on the front porch. She drew back, startled. She hadn’t spoken to him since the tree episode, weeks ago.
He looked worried. “You wouldn’t happen to have seen one or two of my kids around here, would you?”
Unbelievable!
The man didn’t know that this was the first day of school? Where had he been?
“You won’t find Jordan here ever, and you won’t find Dominic or Lily here today,” she said, annoyed for the kids’ sakes. “They’re in school, Ray. It’s the first day of school.”
He absorbed this information and then blew out a breath. “That’s right. Of course.”
“Please tell me you knew that.” Otherwise she would have to think those kids really were alone over there.
“I knew that,” he confirmed. “I forgot.”
“Pardon me for asking, but how could you forget? This was a big day for the kids, Ray. Well—I don’t know about Jordan, but I know it was important for Lily and Dominic. They could use a little attention from you, Ray.”
“You think I’m not interested in my own kids?”
She backpedaled. “It’s not what you feel, it’s what you show. Even the basics—like seeing that Dominic needs new uniforms.”
She’d expected him to take offense. Instead, he nodded. “You’re right. I only noticed his uniform this morning.”
“I probably should have said something,” she admitted. “He mentioned it earlier . . .”
As she spoke, Ray zoned out before her eyes. He sat down on one of the two Adirondack chairs on the porch, his face pinched in a strange, distracted expression. “I know that music,” he said.
Grace listened. “Probably.” She assumed everybody knew it. “It’s ‘Moonlight Sonata.’ ”
“Is that what it is?” he asked. “Jen used to play it—my wife, Jennifer.”
Jennifer.
Dominic and Lily’s mother. The woman who’d died in the crash with Nina, the other twin. Grace had never known what their mother’s name was. Dominic and Lily never talked about her in detail.
He shook his head. “I know you’re right about the kids, Grace. And I did talk to them this morning, but then . . . I don’t know, I just spaced out or something. Odd, isn’t it? I forgot it was the first day of school
because
it was the first day of school.”
She didn’t say anything—because she really didn’t have anything to say that wasn’t along the lines of
wow, you’re crazy.
“I started out this morning thinking about the first day of school,” he explained. “I came downstairs as Dominic was leaving, and I saw him in his uniform. Seeing him flung me back in time. All morning I couldn’t concentrate at work. Finally, I told my boss I was going to work from home today.”
“You went to the same school Dominic goes to?”
“Yeah.” He shook his head. “Stupid, isn’t it? And then I was actually surprised to find the house empty, because the thing that was preoccupying me had been triggered by seeing my son in his school uniform. I started thinking about the first day I saw her, at St. Xavier’s.”
Grace stood still for a moment, as if any sudden movement might scare Ray away before he could tell her more about this woman. “You met her at school?”
“Actually, we’d met before, but I didn’t remember.” He smiled. “I didn’t go to St. Xavier’s till I was in seventh grade. The first day I got there I felt a little lost. I had to wear a uniform, and everything seemed so regimented. When I arrived at that first homeroom, the teacher sent me to the back of the room because my name started with W. As I was walking past her, Jen—her name was Webber—said, ‘Hey Ray!’ Which was really startling, because I had no idea who she was.
“It happened again in Chapel. Then in another class. I’d see Jen and she’d beam a smile at me and say, ‘Hey Ray!’ like we were best friends. Finally, at lunch, I was sitting by myself at the end of a long table and she came and plopped her plastic tray across from mine and said, ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’
“ ‘Not really,’ I admitted. Although a more truthful answer would have been
not at all.
”
“How did she know you?” Grace asked.
“Turns out, we’d been in peewee soccer together. I mean, it had been years and years before—back when I was five or six. I’d forgotten all about it—all about her. Probably I blanked it out because I was the worst kid on the team. I
hated
soccer.”
“But she remembered you,” Grace said wistfully. “That’s so cool—so sweet.” So Cathy and Heathcliff . . . if Heathcliff had been a math geek.
“That’s what I thought. I spent the rest of the day on a sort of high because this cute girl remembered me. Walking down the halls during the following weeks I felt like I was a couple of inches taller. I looked forward to the classes with her, and all those tedious lineups they made us go through, just so I could see her smile and hear her voice saying ‘Hey, Ray.’ ” He shook his head. “ ‘Hey Ray.’ ”
Grace could almost hear it herself.
“Did you two go together in school?” she asked.
“God, no.” He laughed and explained, “That high I was talking about? It didn’t take me long to figure out that Jen smiled that way at the whole world. Whenever I tried to really talk to her between classes, I could hardly get a sentence out because she greeted
everybody. ‘Hey, Jake!’ ‘Hey, Carla!’ ‘Hey, Sara!’
It was so irritating.” He shot a sharp look at Grace. “Do you know that when I looked at Jen’s Facebook page after she died, she had over 1,300 friends? I have forty-two. And most of those are from work.”
Grace smiled. “So when did you and Jennifer start going out?”
“Well, the first time we got together—sort of—was right before high school ended. We’d been friends for years, but only from being in classes together, and clubs. But Jen was really popular. She wasn’t a cheerleader type, just a girl everybody liked. In school she dated the captain of the junior varsity basketball team, then the debate club president, then Kevin Early, then a guy named Eddie Carter, who was her date to the senior prom.”
“Who did you go with?”
“Sonia Krohn, my chemistry lab partner.”
“What happened with her?”
“She gave me a concussion. Then I think she went to MIT.”
Grace sputtered. “Wait—back up. A
concussion?”
“In Sonia’s defense, I behaved badly. After we arrived at the prom, I went to get her a sparking apple juice, and then on the way I walked by Jen. I almost didn’t recognize her because she was standing all alone. I mean, I hadn’t even seen her standing by herself
in six years,
and then suddenly, there we were at the prom, not another person around. Turns out, her date, Eddie, had had a Sea-Doo accident on Lake Austin that day and was in the hospital, so Jen had come to the dance with a couple of friends. And then Sinead O’Connor started singing that ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ song, and I asked her to dance, and she said yes, and before I knew what was what, two dances had gone by, and Sonia was glaring at me next to a Styrofoam rock.”
Absorbed in the story, Grace eased herself into the other chair. “Styrofoam rock?”
“The Seniors’ theme was ‘Blaze of Glory,’ because of the Bon Jovi song, so they’d decorated the hall like the Grand Canyon, like in the video. Anyway, long story short, Sonia shoved me into the Styrofoam, which made the Grand Canyon wall start to wobble, and then it was just me holding it up, and several people gasped and ran over for fear that the whole thing was about to come down. A football player named Bryan Bennett pushed me out of the way, and somehow I lost my balance and ended up clunking my head against the corner of the refreshment table. So, technically, I guess Sonia didn’t give me the concussion. She just gave me the shove that started it all.”
It was amazing to hear all this. Grace got the impression that Ray had barely communicated with anyone for months, but here he was, opening up to her. It was like the moment when a wild animal inched up toward you to take a piece of food.
“Jen and I left the dance together and ended up driving out to Mount Bonnell and sneaking up the stone steps after curfew to look at the view. It took a quarter hour of city gazing and passionate hand holding for me to work up the nerve to kiss her. When I finally bent down and touched my lips to hers, it was nearly overwhelming—really. At first I thought I was just seeing stars because of how great the kiss was. Then I realized that I was about to black out from a headache.
“Jen drove me to the hospital and visited Eddie while I waited in the ER. I felt like an idiot. My parents came and my dad drove Jen home before he took me back to our house. He kept calling Jen Sonia—I’m not sure I ever made him understand what had happened.”
“So you and Jennifer didn’t actually go out in high school?”
“No, we didn’t really get together until college, and that was sort of by accident, too.”
“Where—”
“Hello, you two!” someone yodeled at them from the street. It was Muriel Blainey. She turned up the walkway and stopped just at the porch steps. She wore a lime-green shirt and lemon-yellow pedal pushers. “You two sure look comfy cozy, porch-sitting together.”
Ray shot to his feet. “Hello, Muriel.”
“Don’t get up on my account. Y’all looked like you were deep in conversation about something or other.”
Then why did you butt in?
Grace wondered, annoyed.
Ray was already edging away, taking the stairs backward so that he looked as if his feet could easily miss a step. Grace worried she would never be able to look at him without imagining the Grand Canyon about to crash down on his head.
“I need to get back to work,” he said.
He fled back to his house, and then Muriel rounded on Grace. “You sure are playing your cards right. Maybe befriending the children
is
the way to a widower’s heart.”
Grace was so surprised she almost laughed. “We were just talking.”
Muriel sent her a knowing smile. “And how many people in the neighborhood do you think Ray’s actually talked to since the accident? I’ll give you a hint—goose egg.”
“Maybe it’s easier to talk to me because I’m an outsider. I never knew Jennifer or Nina.”
“That’s probably to your advantage,” Muriel said.
Advantage? “I’m not trying to—” Grace choked on the words. It was stupid even to be having this conversation. In fact, she was beginning to feel angry.
“How’s that boyfriend of yours?” Muriel asked. “The one you talk about but we never see.”
“He’s good. How’s your husband?” Grace asked. Two could play at this game.
“Fine,” Muriel said, adding, “in California, at the moment.”
“It must be hard, having him away so much.”
Muriel’s lips twisted at the corners. “Yes, it is.”
After Muriel left, Grace went inside but glanced once or twice out at the two empty chairs on the porch, almost as if she could imagine herself and Ray sitting in them. A sharp desire to know what happened when he and Jennifer met again plagued her the rest of the afternoon. It was as if she’d been left with a series cliffhanger and now had to wait till the new television season. But what were the chances Ray would ever open up to her again?
16
G
OOD
M
ORNING
F
or the first painting class, Jordan started out early. The studio was located in one of the farther-flung ACC campuses and she had to catch two buses to get there.
It would have been so much simpler if she could drive. Well, she
could
drive—that is, she knew how—but she didn’t have a license. The thought of driving made her ill now. Nina had always been wild to get behind the wheel, which is probably why she’d volunteered to drive their mom last spring, the day of the accident.
The whole thing had played out in Jordan’s head so many times. It was like a short film she’d pieced together from scraps of her own memory, what Lily had told her, and a police report. Some details she’d filled in herself, from her imagination, just from knowing her mom and Nina.
On a Friday afternoon in March, while all the family except their dad were on a spring break vacation in the country, Jordan had been forced to call home just before dinner. Their mom had been making a pizza, aided by Lily, who had answered the phone first.
“What’s going on?” Lily had asked, sensing something odd in Jordan’s voice.
“Just put Mom on,” Jordan had told her in a clipped voice.
Lily had done as asked, and then had come the confession, spoken by Jordan in a wobbly but defensively pissed-off voice. “Mom, I’m at the police station.”
She’d given a brief, humiliating explanation right there in the middle of a bunch of cops and other people standing around, who were all staring at her as the dumb story came out. Knowing that she had an audience, Jordan had responded with growing exasperation to her mom’s sputtered questions.
“Look, I’m sorry, okay? Can you just come get me? Please?” she’d asked her mom in her most irritable voice.
The last words she’d ever spoken to her mother.
After hanging up, her mom had instructed Lily to carry on with the pizza preparation but to hold off actually putting it in the oven for another thirty minutes or so. Lily had probably been delighted to be left in charge. Her mom had then taken the keys off the hook by the door and was just about to step out when Nina came racing in, volunteering to drive her mom wherever she was going. Lily had reported that their mom hadn’t given anyone any details about Jordan’s call, but after a moment’s thought she’d looked glad to have Nina along.
After that, Jordan could only imagine. Nina would have gone around to the driver’s side of the Jeep and driven very carefully on the rural roads. On the way to town, she would have asked their mom what was going on, which their mom would have told her because Nina was mature and responsible—the only one their parents ever really confided in. Maybe she would have asked Nina for advice on how to get Jordan under control. And Nina would have been sympathetic to their mom’s frustration yet taken Jordan’s side, too, and tried to smooth things over. Nina had always been the peacemaker.
They would have been deep in conversation when they rounded the curve and found the truck coming straight at them. The truck had been passing another vehicle illegally.
DO NOT CROSS DOUBLE YELLOW LINES IN YOUR LANE TO PASS
, the signs read, and the truck was in the wrong lane. According to the police, both vehicles had been going approximately sixty miles per hour.
And now came the part Jordan replayed most often in her mind, over and over, a constant loop of torment: The instant of surprise and fear in Nina’s eyes as a truck barreled toward her, then a sickening impact of crushing metal and shattering glass, then intense pain, then semiconsciousness during the eternal wait for an ambulance, their mom already dead in the seat next to her, the paramedics arriving just as Nina’s world turned to dark.
When Jordan told people she didn’t want to drive now, most who knew her would nod in sympathy. They remembered the collision, and probably thought she was afraid to get behind a wheel. Afraid.
It wasn’t fear that made her not want to drive. It was shame.
Nina
should be the one who was alive—Nina, the best of all the Wests. And their mother should still be with them, too, taking care of Dominic and Lily and playing piano and feeding birds and being the only woman their dad had ever loved.
If she lived to be a hundred, she would have to endure this pain of having lost everything—her mom, her sister and best friend, the love of what family she had left. Everything. And it was all her fault.
 
She’d left the house way too early. But that was okay. She’d be able to talk to Jed while he was setting up. She imagined he’d have the music cranked and he would be slurping some coffee from a battered mug. Jed was a natural-born teacher. He might put on a cranky curmudgeon act, but he was always full of energy in class, as if being around students gave him some kind of performance buzz.
She was so early that she had time to swing by a coffee shop and buy a to-go cup and a couple of stale doughnuts. Jed would like that. He was one of those bearish-looking guys who didn’t mind that he had a gut.
She walked into the community college building, loving all the smells of paints and glues and turpentine that made art seem a little like alchemy. She got to her classroom, dropped all her stuff at a place close to the door, and was a little surprised by the quiet. She peered around the forest of empty easels until she spotted a lone seated figure with blond cornrowed hair slumped over a table at the front of the class. It was a woman, and she was zonked.
What should she do? Wake the person up? Call security and inform them that a strange lady had crashed in Jed’s classroom?
Where was Jed?
The woman snorted, shaking herself out of sleep, and then raised her head and examined Jordan through red puffy eyelids. She wasn’t wearing any make-up, and her blotchy skin still bore the traces of sheet line. Her pale eyebrows blended in with her skin, and together with her blue eyes gave her a forlorn look.
“Is it time for class?” she asked Jordan.
“It’s . . .” Jordan didn’t know what to say. “Where’s Jed? He’s teaching the painting class, isn’t he?”
“What gave you that idea?”
“Because his name was on the schedule? Levenger?”
The woman sat back in her chair with a sigh and combed a finger through her cascade of snaky braids.
“I’m
Levenger,” she said. “Heather Levenger . . . much as I wish I weren’t.”
“Oh.” Jordan’s disappointment was so sharp she couldn’t have hid it if she’d wanted to. She’d been looking forward to being in Jed’s class. That was the whole point.
The woman smirked. “Don’t tell me . . . one of Jed’s groupies?”
Jordan shook her head. “No—I had him in a class once. I just liked him.”
“Yeah, so did I. Once.” Heather narrowed her puffy eyes on the cup Jordan held. “Where did you get that coffee?”
“I bought it down the street.”
“Oh.” The woman sagged. “I thought maybe it was free.”
Maybe because she worried that she would have to spend the next three hours with a near-comatose instructor if she didn’t, Jordan offered the cup to Heather.
She raised a barely-visible brow. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah. I’ve had a cup already.”
Heather reached out her hands to take the cup, looking almost moved to tears by the gesture. “Thank you so much.”
Jordan looked in her bag. “I got a couple of doughnuts, too. One cakey one with chocolate, and a cruller.”
A childlike gleam appeared in her teacher’s eyes. “Oh . . . cakey chocolate?”
Jordan handed it over and Heather took a bite and washed it down. She started to look less like the undead. Watching her, Jordan had an odd feeling in her chest—the same feeling she’d had when she and Nina had dropped off gifts for a giving tree for the underprivileged at Christmas. That little glow of maybe having made someone’s day slightly better.
She offered her the other doughnut, too, but Heather shook her head. “No—thank you. My ass is already as big as a barn.”
Jordan doubted this was true. Although the crinkly skirt she was wearing probably didn’t help matters.
Heather tilted her head and eased her hand toward the bag. “I might just take the other one for later. Would that be all right?”
Jordan didn’t want to say no. She was still trying to think when she’d ever heard an adult talking about her ass in front of her, and actually using that word. Maybe never.
She took it as a sign of respect. At least Heather didn’t see her as just a high school dweeb.
“So Jed never mentioned me?” she asked. “Jordan West?”
Heather sent her a blank stare. “You were at that camp thing he did?”
“Yeah.”
The woman shrugged. “No, but to tell you the truth, last summer is when we were hitting rock bottom, relationship-wise. We separated in September. Almost a year ago, exactly . . .”
“Oh, well . . . it’s no big deal or anything. I was just hoping . . .”
“I know—you were hoping for Jed.” Heather sighed. “Well, you got me. I’m guessing that sucks. Which reminds me, I’d better get going here. Got a class to teach. Would you mind sweeping up a little? It looks like they had a shop class in here or something. All this dust is a disaster with oils.”
Usually having someone boss her around like that was a huge turnoff. But something about this woman—exhausted, abandoned, with crazy hair—made Jordan reach for the broom. Heather was an artist living a real life. A kindred spirit.
Heather was all alone too. Maybe the oddballs of the world, like herself and Heather, just would never fit in, not even with their own families. Maybe they had to find families of their own, through friendship.
Jordan started sweeping.
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