but we never used any of that. Grace left it all unplugged. She made a bed for Sonny on the movie player out of an old, glittery dress, and he took to lying there nearly all the time. We drank beer and played board games. We built an intricate model of a French church that I had bought in town. At night we lit fires in the massive stone fireplaces—fires nearly as big as me, fires that sounded like war and lit the whole house with smoky orange light. There was a pool in Grace’s basement—or rather, her basement was a pool. You walked down the basement steps right into a long, tiled alleyway of water. The pool was rich in minerals and smelled like clay, and when Grace lit the porthole lights along the walls, the water glowed a luminescent, milky green, like the color of a potion from a children’s book.
As the summer wore on, Grace’s manners relaxed. She started teasing and joking with me, ribbing me about how out of touch with things I was, but in a way that let me know how much she liked this about me. I set up a hammock on the balcony and we often lay in it reading or talking or napping together. We cooked meals out of a glossy cookbook. Sometimes we went to my place and watched the children down at the fat farm. We picked one out and followed her progress through my binoculars. She was pretty in an exotic sort of way, with olive skin and soft black down on her arms. We named her Patty. She kept her hair in two braided loops that hung from either side of her head like giant earrings. Patty’s favorite activity was tennis, and Grace and I would sit up in my stand and watch her clomping back and forth along the baseline. It felt so calming, observing Patty from high in the trees, so fulfilling. It was like we were her parents and she was our daughter, and I felt proud of her for working so hard to achieve her goals.
On days that were cool or overcast, Grace and I went scavenging. She held the metal detector and I walked out in front, scouting, wearing those sunglasses of hers, my head angled so that the horizon always stayed balanced along that narrow band of clarity between the darkening planes of gold and blue.
As we walked, Grace told me things about herself. She rarely talked about California or her life out there. Now and then, though, a certain worried look would appear on her face and I understood that she was thinking about having to go back. Petyr knew not to put calls through to Grace, but I often spied little sticky notes that he left for her clinging to things around the house like insects. They always had names on them, with messages written beneath, like
Sometimes, as we walked, I wondered about Grace’s life before the accident; I wondered what it was that she did out in California—was she a singer? An athlete? A businesswoman? What had made her so famous? More than that, though, I wondered about the little things that made up her life out there, the details. I wanted to see the view from her front door. I wanted to know what the inside of her car looked like. To see the magnets she kept stuck to her refrigerator.
We never talked about her accident. Over time, though, I came to understand that whatever had happened to her had involved glass. Because every now and then—no more than once every couple of days—a piece of glass would emerge from her head. These weren’t big shards that came out of her; they were tiny specks of glass, just particles. Apparently, when she had her accident, some glass had gotten lodged between the two layers of muscle tissue around her head, and now they were slowly working their way out of her. Mostly the glass came out through her hair follicles. But on a couple of occasions, pieces of glass exited right through her face. Once I saw one come out of the corner of her eye, a tiny shard, no bigger than a snowflake. I watched as she calmly plucked it from beneath her lid as though it were a stray eyelash.
Even though Grace didn’t talk about her current life during our walks, or about her accident, she still managed to tell me all kinds of intimate things about herself. She told me about her parents, her childhood. She told me about how, as a little girl, she’d wanted to be a policewoman, then an acrobat, then a deep-sea fisherman. She told me about her mother, about how she’d made Grace beg for change when they first moved out west, beg everywhere from the boardwalk to the bus station, where a man had once thrown a penny right into Grace’s mouth.
No one had ever talked to me in such a way before, never so openly. It was weirdly arousing. It felt like watching someone undress right in front of me; it felt like standing next to them and being handed layer after layer of clothing. And the more she talked, the harder it became for me to ignore the need for her I felt building in me. I tried, though, because I understood that she was here with me only for the summer, just until her face healed. And it was healing all the time.
By the second week I knew her, a kind of settling process had already begun. Her features, the ones that were swollen and bulged out of place, had rapidly started taking shape, gathering ominously toward the center of her face. But part of me refused to see these changes. Part of me already believed that something would happen to stop her from leaving. Something miraculous, or even terrible.
Here’s what Grace told me on one of our walks: one morning, while she and her mother were wandering on the beach, they found a dollhouse washed up on the sand.
“It was so creepy,” she said. “I’d been asking for a dollhouse—it was like the one thing I wanted for my birthday that year, my eighth birthday—and suddenly here one was. Just sitting there on the sand in perfect condition. Even the tiny windowpanes were intact.”
We were walking along the edge of a brook that had long ago dried to chalk. It was three weeks to the day since I’d met her. The wind blew strongly. The shadows of clouds kept skating over us before we saw them coming.
“My mom and I had this game,” said Grace. “Whenever we found something washed up on the beach, we would try to guess whether it was flotsam or jetsam. Flotsam is what gets washed overboard in storms—it’s things swept away by the sea. Jetsam is what’s thrown overboard if a ship is in distress. What people get rid of to make the ship lighter so it won’t sink. There’s really no way to tell which is which after the fact. I mean, if the ship wrecks, everything gets mixed up together, the stuff people wanted to keep and the stuff they got rid of. It all becomes the same thing.”
The metal detector gave a few clicks around a patch of scrub. I rooted around for a moment but couldn’t feel anything substantial, so we went on.
“So my mom wanted me to guess which the dollhouse was,” said Grace, “flotsam or jetsam, but I didn’t want to. The idea of some girl my own age on a ship about to sink was really scary to me, you know? And then, right as I was looking at it, the whole house just fell in on itself. It collapsed in a heap on the sand.”
Grace’s calves moved up and down in gentle swallowing motions as we walked. “Keep talking to me,” I said. “I love listening to you.”
She smiled at me over her shoulder. The light that afternoon was kind, and her cheek looked like a smooth, snow-covered field broken only by the wiry black fencing of her stitches. “It’s easy to talk to you,” she said. “I like who I am with you. I love her, actually.”
“Can I try kissing you again?” I said. We’d kissed a few times before, but it had always hurt her face too much.
“Stay still and let me kiss you,” she said, and then she leaned over and brushed her lips against mine, first the top one, then the bottom. Next I felt her tongue tracing my lips, gently sliding between them. Before I knew it she was kissing me harder, really pressing her mouth against mine. I kissed her back. Our teeth kept clicking together. I felt the bag beneath her chin bulge as it was squeezed between our necks—the liquid inside felt warm and viscous—and I worried that it might pop, but she kept at it, pushing harder now, hardly kissing so much as driving her mouth into mine, wedging and ramming. When she finally stopped and pulled away I saw blood inside her mouth.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
“No,” I said.
“I just don’t want to go back yet,” she said. She tugged on the collar of my shirt. “And I like you.”
“Kiss me again,” I said. And she did.
To this day, I remember everything she told me. I even remember exactly what we found scavenging each day. The afternoon Grace told me about the dollhouse, we discovered a bottle cap, a green stone she thought was pretty, and the horn from a phonograph, smashed so badly you wouldn’t believe music had ever passed through.
By July we’d started making love, but rarely, only once every few days. Grace wanted to more often: she asked me to, but I had to be careful; it would have been too much. Already I couldn’t sleep without her. When she
