A few days after the boys’ parole was announced, Grace received an e-mail from her mother that broke their unspoken agreement.
Riley is going to get paroled soon. I didn’t know when/if to tell you but his mom told me at mass last week. She said he wants to go back to school but not at GC. He has been drawing but is being very private about it. They are probably relieved about that. That poor family doesn’t need any more attention.
Poor family left a messy sting. She still felt she was one of the Grahams, though of course she had forsaken that privilege, and she resented her mother’s simple pity for them. But perhaps this was her mother’s nasty secret smirk: The Grahams were the poor family now.
The only objection to the parole came from the groundskeeper’s family. Wallace Cummins had died in 2010 after a second stroke, at the age of seventy-three. His obituary lauded him for his decades of service to the Josephus Wynne Historic Estate, but made no mention, for once, of the attempted robbery of the estate the year before. But shortly before the parole hearing, Wallace’s daughter told WTQT that her father was murdered. “That first stroke led directly to the second,” she said. “My dad was killed by criminals as surely as if they’d pulled a trigger.” She did not want the boys released on parole. She did not want them “loose.”
They were out by now; Grace knew it.
At five o’clock, she left the beads and walked the nine circuitous blocks to the nearest Internet café, one of the last remaining now that everyone else had smartphones, and bought ten minutes.
She’d braced herself for a mention on parole day. She held her breath as she waited for the page to load, but the Record’s top story was only the ongoing debate over the condemnation of the public pool. She began to type their names into the search field, and as she was typing, the page reloaded itself. The front page changed.
A photograph.
The boys were coming out of Lacombe together. She could see Riley’s mother close behind and, she thought, Alls’s father, but the face was blurry. Alls hated his father.
What if she didn’t recognize them, if they had changed that much? She would see a man in a shop or in the park and wonder. The last picture she had seen was from the first day of their prison terms. A local photographer had been waiting at the gates to watch them go in.
Now she was shocked at the sight of them. Riley was a man now. His hair was long again, faded to rust, and most of the curl had fallen out so that it fell in lank waves over his ears. It was dirty, maybe. His cheekbones were higher, his jaw sharper, his snub nose not so snubbed. He had two creases between his eyes, just like the lines his mother had called her “elevens.” His eyes were down; she couldn’t see them at all. She looked for his birthmark, a thumbprint under his jaw, but she couldn’t find it in the shadows. He looked so much older, more than three years older.
Alls was behind, biting his lip as if to hold his tongue. She remembered his teeth knocking against hers and swallowed.
Alls was still Alls. Riley was Riley, but not.
In the reflection of the computer screen, Grace saw a boy coming over to her, throwing his dish towel over his shoulder the way she’d seen Alls do a hundred times in the kitchen on Orange Street, and she felt the wheels on her rolling stool skate out from under her. She grabbed the edge of the desk to keep from going down.
“?a va?” the boy asked her.
She turned around. His eyes were blank, his mouth empty and concerned, and he didn’t look like Alls at all.
“?a va,” she said.
She stared at the photograph, hovering over every detail. Riley had filled out in his arms and chest, but his face was thinner. His freckles hadn’t faded—if anything, they seemed darker on his pale skin. She didn’t know the shirt he was wearing. It was too tight, stretching across his chest and pulling at the buttons. His hands looked so familiar to her that her own hands shook. She couldn’t help feeling that the gaze he was avoiding was hers.
Alls looked calm, smooth across his dark brow. He looked up at the camera, right at her from amber eyes. Maybe his release had brought him relief. It should, shouldn’t it? But Grace better understood the lines between Riley’s eyes, the incredible fatigue of the unknown.
? ? ?
Paris had been a mistake, she knew now. She should have gone to Tokyo or Mumbai. Someday, someone would see her. She’d had a scare once, at a wine bar almost two years before. She was on a date. Now the idea of a date was ridiculous to her—watching some poor boy imagine that she could make him happy!—but at the time she had been in Paris only a few months, and she believed she could fully become her new self.
Grace had been in Europe for almost a year then. She had stayed in Prague after the summer program. She was terrified to travel, as though she were invisible only as long as she was still. After they were sentenced in August she left for Berlin.
She worked any job she could scare up, from washing dishes and cleaning hotel rooms to modeling for expat artists. She was surprised at how resourceful she was, how quickly desperation eradicated her timidity, her fear. An antiques dealer whose small shop Grace cleaned at night had begun to train her in making minor repairs when her assistant disappeared. But Berlin, though big and anonymous, was lousy with New Yorkers, especially the kind of artsy twentysomethings who’d been her classmates during her brief time in New York. She already feared running into someone she’d known. She didn’t want to be Grace anymore, even for five minutes.
She changed her name and bleached her hair, hoping this would also change her on the inside. She left for Paris. Then practice losing farther, losing faster. She kept a copy of the Bishop poem tucked into her passport, mocking the drama of her own loss. If she couldn’t find Grace, no one else could either.
But she wanted a life, however small it would have to be. A bartender from Melun asked her to dinner one afternoon while she was reading in the Jardin du Luxembourg. He was deferential and friendly, and though Grace’s French was still a bit tangled, he seemed uninterested in her American past. They had dinner and a glass of wine, and when they parted ways at the metro, Grace was euphoric to have done it—a date! Even lying to a perfect stranger could provide a sense of intimacy, if it presented the very limit of contact. She met him again four days later for dinner at Racines, and it was there that she saw Len Schrader, the father of her college roommate in New York, Kendall Schrader. She’d met the Schrader parents just twice, but she was almost certain.
She felt as if she’d seen a character from her nightmares. But why? Len Schrader was so far removed from Garland, and Grace looked so different—paler, thinner, another blonde dressed all in black. He would not recognize the college freshman from Tennessee. But if he did, he might come over to her table. He might say, “Kendi’s friend? I thought that was you!” He might ask her questions about what she was doing there, and even if she answered them in the same vague way that she had for her date, Len Schrader would tell her what his daughters were up to these days, even if she didn’t ask. He might remember that Grace had left NYU, and his daughter’s life, quite abruptly.
Her date would ask why he had called her Grace. And hadn’t she said she was from California? And Len Schrader might tell his daughter he’d seen Grace in France, and Kendall might wonder, again, what had become of Grace, and that boyfriend of hers. . . .