Vicious Grace

“I’m good,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”

I saw him hesitate, but I left before he could talk about it anymore. When the elevator doors closed on me, I almost started crying again. But only almost.

The Starbucks was indeed right by the El. The hazy white sky didn’t cast clear shadows, so the darkness under the orange-brown supports and dark webworked steel didn’t have a clear border. It just seeped in. The gray stone of the building looked like a cross between a storage facility and a mausoleum. The building just down the street was taller redbrick with ornamented windows at the front and a billboard on the side, and it made the coffee shop’s two stories look squat. I pushed my way in, stepping out of the real world and into customer service land. The smell of fresh coffee filled the air, and Pink Martini’s “Tempo Perdido” was playing softly from hidden speakers. I felt vaguely betrayed that my favorite band had been here without me.

Sunday afternoon left the place sparsely populated. David was sitting on a soft couch, a large cup of coffee looking small in his hand. With clean clothes and a better night’s sleep than I’d had, he looked more like a retired NFL player. The round burn of the shotgun on his neck looked better too. When he caught sight of me, he smiled and rose. I walked over. His smile faltered.

“Hey,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“Peachy,” I said.

“Do you want anything?”

I sat down in the chair across from his couch, then waited, looking up at him until he took his seat too.

“All right,” I said. “I’m here. Tell me what you’ve got.”

“Well, I don’t have anything solid,” he said. “It’s more a feeling. I was thinking about all the—”

He stopped, looked around uneasily, and hunched in close before he went on.

“All the dreams. They’re horrible. All of them, but it’s not like they did me any damage.”

I shrugged, unconvinced. Maybe he didn’t remember what he’d looked like on Friday. Undamaged wasn’t the first word that came to mind.

“When I was dreaming that I was Grandpa Del, maybe it was because he was trying to reach out to me. And he can only do it through dreams,” he said. He was getting excited now. I could see the enthusiasm in the smile that flirted with his lips, the way his broad, thick hands patted at the air. I wondered if this had been what it was like for Eric, watching Aubrey and Kim discover the secret world of riders and magic. The idea depressed me.

“And so he’s sending you a year’s worth of soul-destroying nightmares? Wouldn’t a couple ‘Hey, Dave, could you get me out of this box’ dreams be a little more likely to keep you from killing yourself before you could help out?”

“That bothered me too. But there was this movie I saw when I was a kid. I don’t know the name, but it was all about this guy who was in a coma. Trapped between life and death. And he kept pulling other people into his dreams. What if it’s like that? What if Grandpa Del is trying to reach out, only he’s dreaming too?”

“So you’re thinking that maybe he’s been kicking the crap out of you because . . . ?”

The door swung open and two surprisingly lovely women came in. One was blond, the other a redhead with a complexion that said the color hadn’t come from a bottle. They had the kind of looks that made men lose their car keys. David glanced at them, dismissed them, and turned back to me.

“You swim much?” he asked. “You know not to go in after someone who’s drowning. Throw them something or get them a stick, and you’re fine. But if they get ahold of you, they’ll try to climb up you, and you both drown. I think Grandpa Del is flailing like that.”

I could feel my mind wrapping around the idea even as my head shook its own decisive no. There was something about it I liked. That I wanted to be true. That maybe the thing under Grace was scared, alone, and thrashing in its sleep. Maybe it was one of the good guys, and so maybe Eric was too. I had to put it aside now and focus on David.

“Listen to yourself,” I said. “You don’t go after someone who’s drowning. Because you might get hurt or worse, and you sure can’t help that way. Right?”

“Right.”

“And what’s your plan? Go to Grace Memorial?”

David opened his mouth. At the counter, one of the beautiful women broke out in a peal of laughter. She wasn’t paying attention to us, but it still had the feel of the universe mocking us. David blushed and shook his head. His face could have been put in a dictionary beside chagrin.

“I’m going in after the drowning guy,” he said. “Because I’m an idiot.”

“You’re being called,” I said. “You’re trying to answer. That’s not dumb. But it is dangerous.”

“You want me to go home,” he said. His voice was sour.

“I do. I want you to wait until we know what we’re looking at. And I swear as soon as I know something, I will tell you.”

He sighed, staring into the black surface of the coffee. The espresso machine hissed and spat. Pink Martini gave way to some modern big-band swing. I took his hand. It was warmer than I expected, and when his fingers squeezed mine, I made myself smile.

“Trust me,” I said.

In my imagination, a vampire I’d known once took a drag on his cigarette, smiled with ruined lips, and said Being new to the game makes you an easy mark, kid. Happens to everyone. It would have been simple to use David now. It was almost harder not to. He wanted me to ask him for something. I could tell him to write me a check for his whole savings, and he would. I could tell him to go to Grace Memorial just to see if the hospital attacked him.

Or I could keep him safe. Give him a real life and the chance to live it. Push him away and tell him to run like the devil was after him. It probably was. And that was the one thing I could say that he wouldn’t listen to.

“I trust you,” he said. “Just don’t leave me out.”

“Promise,” I lied.

SIXTEEN

I sat at the table for a while after David left, then went up and bought myself a latte I didn’t want so that I could keep sitting. The music moved on, landing on eighties nostalgia, some guy telling me it was always mesh and lace and offering to stop the world and melt with me. But the coffee wasn’t bad if I put enough sugar in it, and the emotional equivalent of a loose scab was forming in my heart. I knew the grief and anger and fear were there, but if I didn’t jar myself or scratch at it, I could ignore them. I wasn’t, for instance, in tears. That was a start. I could almost think Aubrey might leave me without breaking down.

The Sunday afternoon crowd stayed light. Behind the counter, a nice-looking blond guy and a hatchet-faced woman who seemed too old to be steaming milk for a living talked about television while they cleaned the wood- grained laminate and straightened stacks of prepackaged biscotti. The beautiful girls were joined by two equally beautiful guys. They laughed and flirted and raised arch eyebrows. The trains of the El came by now and then, the clatter of their passage competing with the music. I remembered Kim sitting at the Bump & Grind Café with a latte and heartache of her own. I even remembered feeling sorry for her.

The scab shifted a little, threatening to slip off and expose the wound. I looked out the window, forcing myself back to the here and now. Either it was later than I’d expected or the clouds were thickening. The darkness had spread from under the El and was loitering in the street. I considered calling Ex or Chogyi Jake. Or a cab. I wanted to talk to Aubrey. I wanted to talk to Uncle Eric.

This was the moment when I needed a best friend. Sad and sobering, but I didn’t seem to have one who wasn’t already hip-deep in the problems I wanted to get away from. I pulled my cell phone out of my backpack and stared at it. There were almost two hundred contacts in the phone book, most of them put there by Eric. A few that were particularly mine. None of them felt right. All those numbers and no one to talk to.

Except.

My heart sped up just a little as the whole plan popped into my head. It wasn’t like thinking of it so much as remembering something I’d already planned. I picked up my cell phone and went back to the counter, digging through my backpack as I walked. The blond guy trotted up with a professional, practiced smile.