Unmaking Grace by Barbara Boswell

Author:Barbara Boswell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catalyst Press
Published: 2019-01-16T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Was this another vision? She’d been seeing Mary a lot since Sindi’s birth. Was Johnny up to the same ghostly tricks as her mother? Was this a conspiracy of ghosts to pull her to the brink of sanity? No, no. This Johnny was flesh, breathing before her and staring at Grace in that quiet, intent way she remembered well. He was not the Johnny she had summoned a thousand times to her mind; time had clearly left her hand on him. The eyes were deeper set, with fine lines feathering the skin around them; his skin darker, but still freckled in that boyish way. They sat there, frozen, staring at each other without any movement between. The train shuddered to a halt, and Grace rose, gathering her bags, without taking her eyes off him.

“Grace.”

She saw him mouthing the word without a sound escaping his lips.

“Grace!”

This time he spoke her name into the air filled with the warmth of strangers’ bodies. The train stopped, the doors slid open, and the crowd rearranged itself as more passengers entered. Grace started toward the door, then turned to give him one more look. He was getting to his feet. She moved on and stepped out of the train, onto the platform, where it was already getting dark. She turned again, and there he was behind her. She faced him as tears gathered in her eyes. They stood motionless, each probing the other’s eyes, until the train pulled off and disappeared around a bend. Johnny was here, in front of her. Real. Grace’s head spun as she grasped fruitlessly for words.

“Is it you?”

An unnecessary question, but one she felt compelled to ask. “Is it you?” she implored again.

“Grace! Oh my God! Yes, it’s me,” he laughed.

The sound of her name in his mouth dislodged decades of holding it all in, keeping it all together. Grief and relief flooded her body, rushed to the surface of her skin and poured out in an incoherent jumble of words and tears. Reserve snapped. Words clattered across the concrete of the station platform.

“What happened…where were you? Why? Why didn’t you find me?”

Johnny. Johnny. Johnny.

Tears were streaming down her cheeks. Johnny was laughing and crying too. “You are alive!”

As she uttered these word, an awareness grew that at that very moment, she, too, felt alive, maybe more than she’d ever felt before. His name was that first breath you take after holding your head under water for a long time; the first shard of daylight after a dark, horrible nightmare.

After ages, he replied simply: “Yes, it’s me. I’m alive, Grace.”

Words bubbled from her: how she thought he was dead, that they’d killed him. How she couldn’t bear it after her mother.

His hands moved onto her shoulders, steadying her shivering body.

“No, I didn’t die, as you can see. They kept me for a while—I came out of detention after three months.”

“What did they do to you, Johnny?”

He shook his head slowly while smiling his sweet, gentle smile.

“It doesn’t matter now, Grace.

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