Forged in Grace by Jordan E. Rosenfeld Read Free Book Online

Nicholas Cage drinks himself to death—dance through my mind. I step onto dingy brown carpet, once beige, but see swatches of red velvet casino carpet under sequin-studded heels; as I pass the nearly-dead fern that reeks of cat pee in the dining room, tall, hearty palm trees wave exotic fronds in my mind. I navigate my house mostly by memory, our lights dim, picturing a lit path around a too-blue swimming pool with happy tourists playing in it. In the gloom of the microwave, sallow light leaks out from the kitchen, and Ma’s person-high piles of J. Jill catalogs—which she has long since ordered from—resemble library stacks. Not that I’ll ever be allowed to go searching for a lost copy of National Geographic, as it threatens to ruin the order that makes sense only to my mother.
    From my room there comes a rustling, like one of the cats searching for a leftover bite of food in a cupboard. My door is cracked open, my desk light on.
    With an unusually swift and powerful urgency I shove hard on the door. “Ma, what the hell?”
    She ’s half-squatted, half hunched on the floor at my closet, leaned forward into it as though balancing for a last taste of honey in a hive. The way she throws her head over her shoulder at me, then tries to get up without success, hunkering, makes her seem like a cornered beast.
    “ I’ve told you not to put anything of yours in my closet.” The words trip out of my throat with choked rage. My hand trembles on the doorknob.
    Shoes I never wear tumble out onto the floor, a few shirts have fallen off their hangers, making my clothing seem foreign, as though maybe it really isn ’t my closet after all. She continues to shove and fix a pile of…something. “Stop it! I’m going to throw out whatever you put in there, don’t you get it?”
    “ You wouldn’t!” she cries, as though I’ve threatened to harm one of her cats. She struggles to stand up, and though one half of me is already twitching forward to help her up, I resist, pull myself back. How dare she! At last she heaves herself onto my bed, sweating. Something reddish, knit, cranes out of my closet like a strangled creature. It’s probably more clothes that neither of us will wear, too small for Ma, too attention getting for me.
    “ This is the only space I have, Ma, that’s mine, that I can…that isn’t…” To tell the truth is to risk hurting her.
    “ Well I have nowhere else to put them,” she says softly, almost childlike. I think of all the closets that I can’t open for fear of being crushed beneath their contents, child safety-locks holding back the avalanches. All the cupboards that should hold dishes but are crammed full of odds and ends that should be thrown away—the empty roll inside paper towels, bottle caps, chip bags still dusted with crumbs. Even the dishwasher itself is a home to wayward pop-tart boxes and other recyclables.
    Ma fidgets with something small in her hands. “I knew where you were as soon as you didn’t come home after work tonight,” she says, surprising me. “She was over here a few days ago looking for you and I could see it in her eyes—she will bring you nothing but heartache, I promise you. I don’t want you to bring her to this house.”
    I toss my bag onto the bed near her, barely resisting the urge to throw it at her. “You kept Marly away from me after the fire—it makes no sense to me. Why did you lie to both of us?”
    Ma cringes up at me. “I had good reasons—”
    “ Don’t you think that while they were scrubbing the burned, dead skin from my body, I needed a friend? How about when they cut chunks out of my legs and stitched those onto my face and neck? Think maybe I could have used a friend then?”
    Ma shakes her head slowly, as though she can ward off both the past and the future. Then she stands up, signaling she ’s done talking, but I can’t let her go. Though I know I will suffer for it, I grab her wrist and bite back a cry at the scalding sensation