Unmaking Grace Read online

  From every direction, children poured into the quad. Like sheep rounded up by an unseen herd dog, bodies ran, walked, churned against each other, not knowing whether to go or stay, not knowing how to leave. Mindful of a stampede, the leaders tried to induce some order. The teachers were nowhere.

  Then: shots. One, two, three. A shooting star hung briefly suspended above them before landing in their midst, unleashing its poison. A small dust cloud bloomed into full evil, and Grace knew in that instant that she was going to die. The gas ripped into her, into the delicate tissues of nose, eyes, and mouth. The top layer of her skin was being eaten away. She couldn’t breathe. Tried to cough. Gasped for air but swallowed fire. Throat melting, eyes burning out of her head, she could not see a thing. She was aware of only the burning, burning.

  She started moving again, without volition, amidst the sea of bodies being swept out by a current to God knew where. In the press of bodies the students rounded a corner out of the quad and then Grace was breathing again, her lungs greedily sucking the air. She felt a hand at her back: Johnny’s, pushing her away from the main school building.

  “Run, run! Go to the hole in the fence. Run home!”

  Lungs still burning, Grace ran with a crowd of students across the soccer field toward the makeshift exit in the school fence, but the soldiers, guessing their escape plan, rolled in their Casspirs toward it, rifles ready. Fear became the fire in her throat, the burning of her insides, the liquid running down between her legs.

  All running together, but each alone, the students’ race against the soldiers seemed futile to Grace even as she ran with the herd. There was nowhere to hide, just the soccer field with no chalked lines and browning patches. Throats on fire, they ran the length of the field, not daring to look up or back or around. Johnny had disappeared. With skin and eyes burning, tears and snot streaming down her face, Grace shot forward with the crowd.

  Another dull pop echoed across the field. Another teargas canister launched at them, thudding on the earth. Faster they ran, trying to outrun the convoy rolling toward the stream of kids congealing at the hole in the fence. Turn around or continue forward? Everyone else kept moving forward, so Grace stayed within the safety of numbers.

  At the hole, the group bottlenecked. Dancing to the invisible flames of teargas, some fell, while others trampled over prostrate bodies in their haste to get through the gap that allowed passage to only one person at a time. Grace felt herself being pushed up against the fence. She managed to break free. As the stream of children halted, she took a gap and decided to leap through the fence. She was about to step through the hole when her knees collapsed and her body hit the ground. The noise of the approaching armored trucks deafened her. She felt harsh rubber soles treading into her back. Then unseen hands lifted her quickly, securely, and shoved her through the fence. She turned back for a second, expecting to see him, but there was no recognizable face, just an endless blur of children crowded at the gap.

  “Move!” they chided, and Grace started running again. Students scattered in all directions as a volley of shots rang out. Grace saw a house ahead of her and she ran for it. She clambered over the low front wall and lay down behind it, hoping she was hidden. More shots rent the air. These were sharper than those that had released the teargas. She crawled around the garden keeping to the wall, then scaled an intersecting fence, dropping into the neighboring yard. Through a window, a woman her mother’s age screamed, “Get out! Don’t come running through my yard! Do you see me looking for trouble?”

  Grace slipped through a side gate, and for the first time since the protest began, her limbs relaxed a little. A full block away from the soldiers, separated by a double row of houses, she slowed to catch her breath. Unless they jumped out of the vehicles to start chasing on foot, she was safe. She slowed down, turned, and saw a plume of smoke rising from the school grounds. The last part of her journey home was a blur. Her legs were the consistency of rubber by the time she reached the yellow house on Saturn Street and unlocked the front door and the metal security gate. Inside, as she sank to the floor, a terrible thought screeched into consciousness. What if they’d followed her, could see her through the lace curtains? She crawled against the faded white couch and stayed there, for how long she didn’t know. Waiting. Waiting. Examining the cracks in the unpolished wooden floor. Holding them with her eyes as though her life depended on it. Guarding the tiny specks of white sand, blown underneath the door by the terrible howling wind. How neatly the grains lined up against the edge of the threadbare, fraying carpet. Taking in the dirty-orange rug speckled with brown; watching where the grains of sand had settled and nested, like tiny eggs, into its fibers. Watching one ant, then another, making its way across the living room. Feeling nothing.

  This was the kind of magic Grace had learned in this house. How fixing your eyes on one thing, just one little thing—say a crack in the wall—could make everything else disappear: your parents, their shouting, the wind, the snap of fist upon flesh. The sound of Casspirs circling, the fevered cries outside, her limbs, her own body—none of these existed after Grace tuned them out. She became a mind, a pure mind, floating on the thing she’d chosen to fix on. She could project her entire being on that crack in the wall, that speck of white sand. It held her. It got her through whatever was raging on the outside.

  Mary was late from work that evening. By the time her key turned in the lock Grace had gotten off the floor, but she was sitting hunched up on the couch in the darkening living room.

  “Grace! Oh, thank God!”

  Mary’s eyes were wild as she rushed over to her daughter and pulled her to her.

  “Why haven’t you switched on the lights? All I saw as I was coming up the road was darkness!”

  She let go of Grace and rushed around the room again, flicking on every switch as if to ward off evil, then sat back down next to her daughter, embracing her.

  “What happened today?”

  “Nothing, Mama.”

  “Why won’t you tell me?”

  Mary reached into her bag, not waiting for an answer, and produced from it a box of cigarettes. She lit up and inhaled. Sitting up straight, it looked as if she was bracing herself for something.

  “Grace,” she said, blowing smoke at the ceiling, not looking at her, “Johnny is gone.”

  Her voice was soft and low. It was the same benevolent voice she used to deny Grace something she could not have.

  Grace retreated deeper into silence, although her eyes searched for her mother’s.

  “They think the cops shot him at the school,” said Mary. “They think he was helping the others to get out. No one has seen him since this afternoon. The police came out and ran into the school grounds. Did you see him? Do you know anything, Grace?”

  “No.”

  Words were spilling out of Mary—incomprehensible, senseless words that Grace wanted to stop.

  “I just came past their house. Rowena is in a state…!”

  Grace fought the urge to hit her mother in the mouth in order to stop the stream of words.

  “…Tim has driven everywhere, all the hospitals and police stations…”

  After a waterfall of words, Mary fell quiet, staring into the distance and dragging on her cigarette, lost in her own world again. Grace wanted to scream, but the fog of cigarette smoke and silence choked her, strangling any sound. Instead, she looked at her fingernails, inspecting the arch of the white tips against the pink nail beds and the frayed bits of cuticle sticking out of her left ring finger.

  Her mother sighed, smoothed down her hair, and got up to go to the kitchen. Grace heard the lid of the kettle, a sharp stream of water, and a click of a switch. She went back to examining her nails.

  Mary emerged with two cups of tea. “Drink!” she ordered.

  Ever the obedient daughter, Grace did as she was told until she’d drained every drop of the strong, sweet tea.

  Chapter 5

  Patrick stepped off the bus and onto a burnin
g street. Barricades of blazing tires choked Main Road as he made his way to his former home, sending plumes of black smoke into the dying day. The smell of petrol clung to the air. Flames danced from all sides of the road, making it difficult to know where to tread. He had been heading to his new place—a small bedsit tacked onto someone’s house, about five minutes from the home he used to share with Mary. The bus ride home had started uneventfully, but with each new passenger the chatter grew. The children had staged a demonstration at the local high school. They were peaceful, but the police had opened fire anyway. One child, maybe two, had been shot; others were missing. Patrick listened, not daring to ask questions. Grace was fine, of that he was sure. She wouldn’t be caught up in a demonstration of that sort. His daughter was far too timid a creature. She preferred to stay in the background and not be noticed.

  Yet she also had a willful streak in her. Mostly she did what she was told, obeyed orders without talking back. But then, out of the blue, there’d be a day when she’d just dig her heels in, refuse. She was like Mary in that way, although not as insolent. When it happened, the child’s defiance was all the more infuriating because it surprised him, coming out of nowhere as it seemed to. Like that one time she’d disappeared for half a day into the bushes near the airport. He had looked all over for her, combing the streets trying to find her—she had never ventured away from home before. Then just as the sun was setting she had reappeared, with a smirk on her face as if nothing had happened. He had not been able to control his rage. Yes, she could be defiant in the most surprising ways. But he didn’t think someone with her innate fearfulness would go near such trouble as had happened at the school today.

  Yet, as the bus drew nearer to the township, uncertainty gnawed at him. If something had happened to Grace, he would surely have heard by now. Mary or the principal would have called him at work, he reasoned. But he had just started this new job as a mechanic at JB’s Autos, and now he couldn’t remember whether he had given Mary his new phone number, what with the trouble between them.

  Patrick tried to stay calm, picturing the girl safe in bed or watching television in the living room. That’s probably what she was doing right now. Still a layer of sweat beaded his body. Waves of fear rose from his belly to his chest. What if the unthinkable had happened? He had already lost one child. He wouldn’t be able to stand the loss of another.

  He shot a little prayer heavenward. Please, God, let her be okay. Then he laughed at himself, for hadn’t he long ago forsaken God? Or God forsaken him? But habits die hard. Give me a child for the first seven years of their life, and I’ll give you a Catholic for the rest of their life, the brothers at school used to say, only half joking. Most of Patrick’s young life had been testimony to that sentiment. By the age of ten he had been adept at leading three younger siblings to Mass each Sunday. Then there were novenas on Tuesdays, praying of the rosary Thursdays, and catechism on Sundays. He’d served as an altar boy, helped his mother when she volunteered to wash and iron the priests’ robes at the local parish. He’d dutifully taken himself to confession every two weeks, making sure, in advance, to examine his heart and conscience for the tiniest speck of wrongdoing. Because sin left unchecked, even the seed of sin, destroyed lives; and he, Patrick de Leeuw, had determined from the age of reason that he would live a life worthy of redemption.

  Not that he deserved redemption. He knew himself, even as a young boy, to be tarnished with the stain of sin. He was a lowly sinner like all the rest of them, but he had been taught that redemption could be found through striving for goodness and humble supplication before God. It had been drummed into him: always know that you are a sinner; never forget that. Work hard to atone for that sin. He always did. He would go to confession, determined to start anew and not sin again, as the priest exhorted.

  But then the problem of sinning would creep in, again and again. Always, even moments after atonement, the very second after the priest’s absolution, he would find himself doing wrong again, or find the shadow of a bad thought flitting through his mind. He would be stained and dirty again. He would feel guilt and remorse, and the priest’s confessional would not be close enough to absolve him as quickly as he needed. The maintenance of a state of sinlessness became increasingly difficult. And then the thing at school happened, and he’d been so sullied that he could never again think of himself as clean, sinless, again. Certain sins could not be forgiven, especially if one had willingly participated in them. At the age of fifteen, God left him, and Patrick gave up trying to find him again.

  For a year afterwards, his torment knew no bounds. Although he was keeping up the dizzying cycle of pretense—daily Mass, Sunday Mass, novenas, confession—he knew in his heart that he was not good enough for God, would never be good enough. It didn’t matter that he tried. Wracked with anguish, Patrick tried to imagine the life, and afterlife, that lay before him. Damnation, eternal damnation awaited him. Contemplating his fate, the fear of God became permeated with a slow-rising anger. Why would God have created him this way—stained and flawed—knowing full well that the attainment of purity would never be his? And why had God let these things happen to him? Was his life a cruel joke, and did God watch on in amusement as he strove and failed in an endless, agonizing cycle? Was that God? If it was, then he wanted no part of God. Fuck that. This decision relieved him.

  And so he came to take pleasure in his sinfulness, enjoying his willful defiance. He wallowed in his soul’s squalor and found a deep satisfaction in examining the many facets of his wrongdoing, flaunting them in the world’s face. Fuck you, church, and fuck you, God! He took up drinking, grew to enjoy it. Yet even in his most drunken excess, a kernel of fear remained. It was there, worrying him, like a tiny grain of sand in his shoe, a dull undercurrent to his life and pleasures. God was watching, waiting. Although he had turned his back on God many times, the knowledge of a supreme being watching his every move had never really left him. Recently he had tried going to the big evangelical tents. They were so different, much happier. He had even gotten baptized, but deep inside, couldn’t shake the feeling that he was faking it. God was really hollow; you could make him anything you wanted him to be. Patrick had never felt his presence.

  But at times like these—where was the girl?—he still went to God, like an addict reaching for a fix, and prayed like a child with blind belief. Did God ever answer him? He couldn’t say. For years he’d had Mary. Some would have called her a prayer answered. But the impulse to do things he knew was wrong, the vertiginous pull of pleasure, was often stronger than his love for her.

  He was twenty-one when they’d married, determined that his life would be different from the one he’d known growing up in the cramped street where everyone knew each other’s business. He would treat her like gold, unlike the way he had seen his father treat his mother, sentencing her to an early grave. The blows he’d witnessed inflicted upon his mother had broken more than the bones in her tiny body: he had seen, along with the bruises, the destruction of her spirit, her light being snuffed out bit by bit, until there was nothing left but a shell of a woman who, at forty-five, succumbed to a stroke. The eldest child, Patrick had despised his father for what he’d done to his mother. He despised himself even more for his inability to protect her.

  Things would be different with Mary. There was a sadness in her which evoked in him the urge to protect, to try again where he had failed with his mother. But Mary’s sullen, hard side, her refusal to be dominated, vied with her childlike softness that so enchanted him. She could be hard to her core, capricious in her whims, fluctuating often in manner between guileless, beautiful child and bitch. She could play on his sympathies one moment, elicit cosseting and affection, and then reject him with her very next breath. Patrick wasn’t always sure which Mary he’d encounter. During their short courtship, he had watched these moody fluctuations with wry amusement, indulging her as one would a spoiled child. Once they were married, he would put his foot down. It would be time for her to grow up
. They’d be a family, and he’d be the head. He would be in for a bit of a time breaking her in, but no doubt he would be able to do so within a few months. Once she conformed and settled into the role of wife, he would be a good husband to her. He was not his father’s son. He would be the proud head of his family, a protector and provider to Mary and the children they would have together.

  Their wedding had been a small affair. Between the two families there was not much money. Mary wore a simple gown, white of course, stitched by his aunt Patricia. He was dapper in the first and only suit he would own. Standing next to her on their wedding day, his pitch black suit offset her lovely black eyes, which were darker than ever but glinting with a love he could feel when he looked into them. Till death do us part, they both said.

  Had he still believed in God then? Thinking back now, he could not remember. But he had meant it when he had promised before God to love, cherish, and protect his wife. That promise meant something, if not to God, then to himself, even as Patrick remembered, in that very moment of vow-making, his proclivity toward pleasure. This he would overcome, and in loving his wife, would create for himself the life he had always craved.

  Patrick had not reckoned on Mary’s shameful confession in their marital bed on their wedding night. In their new closeness, and faced with a similar need to exorcise the past as she stepped into their shared life as husband and wife, Mary had unburdened herself of a deep and heavy secret.

  For a few weeks after their marriage, Patrick considered a divorce. But he was a Catholic, and that would be difficult. He wished to heap no more shame on himself by exposing her past. Annulment was an option, but he had dithered too long. It was easier to remain married, but the life he had dreamed of with Mary had been destroyed.