Gracefully grayson, p.8
Gracefully Grayson, page 8
MY EYES ARE the first part of my body to start working again. I look at the outlines of things: a glass of water on my bedside table, but not the water inside; window frames, but not the windows; picture frames, but not the pictures.
Then sounds come. The phone rings far away. Voices, loud and hushed, all at the same time. “Mr. Finnegan, hello!” Aunt Sally’s muffled voice rising and falling, then rising and rising. It pounds on my eardrums.
Long, gentle silence.
“Sally, we need to just talk to him about it.” Uncle Evan. Did Dad have a similar voice? Doors closing. TV. Footsteps on wood. I’m back-floating in still, warm water.
It’s like those first nights after I moved here, and I remember them now—the strange smell of the pillowcase, the sliver of light that fell through the opened doorway at night and how it bent over the corner of the bed and onto the rug and faded into darkness near the dresser, like a road to nowhere.
My body is burning. I’m asleep and awake all at once, and images come in snippets. The bedside lamp is suddenly on. I can see the light like an explosion through my eyelids. Paper rustles. Silence.
“Oh my God, Evan, read this.”
Whispering. Paper unfolding, folding.
Someone sitting down, pressure on the bed, wire on foam.
“Look at this picture.”
More rustling and the sounds of quiet and breathing.
Whispers again. “Oh my God, Evan. What do you think she meant?”
Nothing. “Evan!”
“It’s perfectly clear what she meant, Sally. Perfectly.”
Silence.
I barely know if the voices are real. My blanket scratches at my neck. My feet can move now, and they kick the covers off. I open my eyes. Uncle Evan’s face is close to mine. His gaze shifts from my eyes to my chin. His eyes are soft, and they study my face.
I see the tiles around the toilet now, gleaming—bright, clean white. I’m sick, and Uncle Evan’s hand is on my burning back. The toilet is flushing. I look away and hold on to the sink. A cold washcloth is on my neck. It’s like I’m sleepwalking, and I’m back in my bed, asleep in the darkening room.
But, eventually, I can tell that morning is coming. Someone has put the covers back over me, and the room is brightening. When I finally open my eyes, the first thing I look at is the phoenix flying in the painting over my bed. Nothing that happened feels real, but when I turn away from it, I see the three sturdy blue envelopes propped neatly against my lamp.
I SIT UP SLOWLY. My mouth is dry, and my body is weak. I stare at the blue envelopes, and I can’t believe what happened. It feels like a dream, but the envelopes are there, right in front of me. I pick up the last one, the one Mom wrote just before the accident, and I pull out the pink paper again.
Grayson is who he is, she said. Who am I? I want to hear her tell me. I look at the picture of me in the tutu. All I want is for him to be true to himself. My mind races, but I keep coming back to what I know is true: they knew. They knew, and it was okay.
I swing my legs carefully over the side of my bed and stand up. My blood rushes to my feet and I’m dizzy. I haven’t had anything to eat or drink since yesterday morning. As I walk to my closet for a pair of pants, I see myself in the mirror in my white T-shirt and underwear, and I suddenly remember Amelia’s dark eyes in the store mirror. Darkness starts to seep in again, and I turn back to my bed. The springs squeak as I sit down, and Uncle Evan’s head pokes through the cracked doorway.
“Grayson? You’re up! How are you feeling? Sally!” he calls. “He’s up.”
I hear quick footsteps, and Aunt Sally appears beside him. She takes a cautious step into my room. “Grayson!” she says. “Are you okay?”
“I think so,” I tell her. But when I think about yesterday, feelings of sickness and dread come to me like words trying to make a sentence. I sit on my bed and watch Aunt Sally and Uncle Evan standing in the doorway.
“Grayson,” Aunt Sally starts awkwardly. “Those letters. Uncle Evan and I read them last night. When we gave them to you, we didn’t know. We didn’t know what they’d be about.” She looks down at her feet. “We should have read them first,” she says, still not looking at me. “That must have been very difficult for you.” Her voice fades away. “We’re sorry.” Uncle Evan is watching her. I wait for her to go on, to tell me what exactly she’s sorry about, but she doesn’t say anything else.
“Son, why don’t you get dressed and come to the living room so we can talk?” Uncle Evan says. “Tessa came about an hour ago to take the boys to the lake house for the day.” He glances at Aunt Sally uncomfortably. “And, well, there’s one other thing that we need to talk about, too,” he says, still watching her.
I can’t feel a thing. Half of their words bounce off of me like light on a mirror. I pull on my pants and brush my hair. My face is pale, and I’m dying of thirst. I walk to the living room, numb, the feeling of cotton behind my eyes. I feel like I’m four again.
I sit on the couch across from them. On the end table next to me are a glass of water and a mug of tea that Aunt Sally must have made. I drink the water carefully and pull a red pillow onto my lap. I hold it there like a shield.
Uncle Evan runs his fingers through his hair, studies his hands for a minute, and begins to talk. “Grayson,” he says, “I guess there are a couple of things we need to discuss with you.” I don’t move.
“The first thing is that, like your aunt Sally said, we know it must have been very difficult for you to read those letters from your mom. We didn’t know what they’d be about. And what your mom said, well, we’re not quite sure what to make of it.” He looks at me carefully. “Or what you make of it.”
Nobody says anything. “You know,” he finally goes on, “how she talked about wanting you to be who you are, and how she included that picture of you in the, uh, the pink dress,” he says.
“Tutu,” I correct, automatically.
“I’m sorry?” Uncle Evan asks.
“It’s called a tutu.”
“Right. Well. That was obviously a very long time ago.”
I’m starting to feel sick again.
“And we don’t have to talk about anything right now if you don’t want to, but we do want you to know—Aunt Sally and I both want you to know that you can always come to us. With anything.”
“Of course he knows that,” Aunt Sally stammers quickly. I look at her flushed face and nod automatically. Uncle Evan watches me expectantly, but I’m frozen. The room is quiet except for the ticking clock.
After a minute, Uncle Evan clears his throat and continues. “Well, then. I know this is a lot—a lot to think about, and you probably feel very overwhelmed, but the other thing that we need to talk to you about, Grayson, is that yesterday when you were in your room, when you were, ah, reading the letters, Mr. Finnegan called.”
A tiny wisp of memory of Aunt Sally’s voice weaves its way back into my mind, and my heart starts to race.
“He called to ask us—”
“He didn’t call to ask us anything,” Aunt Sally interrupts. “He called to tell us.”
“Okay, well, he called to say that he was thinking of—”
“Not thinking of, Evan. He had made the decision.” I realize that Aunt Sally is fuming. Her face is hard, and her eyes are cold. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her like this before.
I can’t contain myself. “Why did he call?” I yell.
Uncle Evan looks shocked. “Well, apparently you tried out for the lead female role in the play, Grayson?”
My heartbeat is wild. I nod.
“Grayson,” Aunt Sally pleads, her forehead wrinkled in concern, “why?”
“Take it easy, Sal,” Uncle Evan says to her softly.
“I’m sorry,” she continues. “It’s just that, well, Grayson, I’m worried about you. Why would you want to set yourself up to be teased like that? Kids can be very cruel, especially in middle school. I’m just trying, Grayson, I’m just trying to protect—”
“But what exactly did he say?” I interrupt.
“Now, hang on a minute,” Uncle Evan says. “We’ll get there. But what Aunt Sally said—it is something to think about. If you want to do this, to play a girl’s role, well, you should do it. That’s how I feel.” He looks at Aunt Sally. “But, Grayson, what your aunt is saying is true. Kids are not going to be kind about it.”
“So, did he say—?”
“You know,” Uncle Evan says, “we, ah, we didn’t know until we read your mom’s letters that you’d also been like that before you came to us.”
“Also?” I ask.
“When you first moved here, you used to dress up as a girl all the time,” Aunt Sally says. “I suppose that’s what your mom was referring to in her letter.”
I tighten my grip on the red pillow. “I did?” I ask.
Uncle Evan nods. “We didn’t know what it meant.” He pauses. “Your dad and I had grown apart quite a bit by the time you moved to Cleveland. It’s one of my biggest regrets—that we didn’t talk to each other more.” He takes off his glasses and rubs his forehead.
“Oh,” I whisper.
“But it was just for a little while that you dressed up,” Aunt Sally adds quickly. “Like your mom said, you actually insisted for the first couple of months that you lived with us that you were a girl. But your teacher, Mrs. Stern, assured us that it was all a normal phase, or possibly a reaction to the trauma, and that it would pass. And it did.”
Uncle Evan looks at her. “It did, Sally, but only after we explained to him that Jack would stop tormenting him if he just acted like a boy.” He turns back to me. “You used to wear my undershirts like dresses. They were way too long on you. You used to trip over them. I don’t know. I suppose…Maybe we should have gotten you—”
“Evan!” Aunt Sally interrupts. “All it took for him to stop the behaviors was a simple explanation that this is not something that boys are supposed to do.”
My hands are sweating. I swallow hard. “And then I stopped?” I ask.
“Of course you stopped,” Aunt Sally says quickly. “You had no problem stopping.”
“Well, Jack wasn’t exactly easy on him,” Uncle Evan says to her, as if I’m not sitting right across from them. “Maybe that’s why he stopped. Maybe he didn’t want to deal with Jack teasing him about it anymore.” He pauses. “And you and I, well, it’s not like we exactly supported Grayson the way it seems Lindy and Paul did.” His voice catches when he says his brother’s name.
Aunt Sally takes a deep breath. “It was a hard time for everyone.” She turns and looks at me again. “Jack felt very displaced when you arrived. He was only five and a half. He didn’t know right from wrong, and Brett was just a tiny baby. We had so much—”
Uncle Evan cuts her off. “Anyway, you and Jack eventually became great friends,” he says. He glances at Aunt Sally, and it looks like he’s trying to force himself to smile. “It just took a few years.”
I stare at them. I feel like I’ve just read the prequel to my life story, like I’m understanding things for the first time. “Why didn’t anyone tell me about this before?”
“Oh,” Aunt Sally says, “I guess I thought you remembered.”
I stare at her blankly.
“But, Grayson, the point is that we need to make a decision together here,” she continues. “About whether or not it’s a good idea for you to do this. To play the role of this, ah, Persephone character. Mr. Finnegan said he already cast you, but before making it official, he wants to confirm that you’re still up for it. So we have a very easy opportunity to just tell him—”
“So I got the role?” I ask them, standing up. The red pillow falls on the floor.
“Yes, Grayson, that’s the whole point,” Aunt Sally says. She looks at Uncle Evan and back at me.
All of a sudden, I can’t help smiling. I don’t mean to, because Aunt Sally looks like she’s about to cry, but I can’t stop. I say it again, just to hear how the words sound one more time: “I got the role.”
“This is completely ridiculous,” Aunt Sally says, looking up at me, her voice rising. “Mr. Finnegan has absolutely no business putting you in a position like this!” Now she doesn’t look like she’s going to cry anymore—she looks furious again. Beside her, Uncle Evan seems small and defeated. He rubs his hands on his knees as he looks up at me. And even though all I can remember about Mom’s and Dad’s faces is how they look in pictures, it’s like they’re standing next to me now. Their hands are on my back, and I can’t turn my thoughts away from a vision of myself on stage, in the spotlight, in a beautiful, flowing gown.
“Grayson, are you okay?” Uncle Evan asks, watching me strangely.
“Yeah,” I tell him, still grinning. “I’m perfect.”
TESSA AND HANK drop Jack and Brett off after dinner.
“I hope you’re not contagious,” Jack says, passing me on the way to his bedroom. He slams his door. I think back to when we were younger and he would open his bedroom door for me when I did our secret knock—tap, tap, bang, bang, bang. I remember the time we went sailing with Tessa and Hank while Brett sat on the pier with Aunt Sally and Uncle Evan in the whipping wind and blinding sun. The sailboat capsized in the reeds on the far side of the little lake. Jack and I were laughing in the water, bobbing up and down in musty-smelling lifejackets. He reached for my hand and helped me crawl up onto the slippery, white bottom of the boat.
Brett looks down the empty hallway and then sits on the couch next to me. “Are you still sick?” he asks.
“Nope, I’m good,” I tell him. I wonder what Aunt Sally and Uncle Evan told Tessa and Hank. They wave to me from the doorway. Do they know about the play? The thought horrifies me.
We sit on the couch together for the rest of the night. Even after it gets late, Aunt Sally and Uncle Evan don’t make us go to bed. I pretend to be watching Star Wars with Brett, but really I’m lost in my thoughts. Whenever I used to imagine Mom and Dad, I’d think of their faces in the framed picture on my nightstand. But now it’s different. Having those letters—now it’s like I can actually feel them next to me.
Winter break drags on. I can tell that Aunt Sally and Uncle Evan are trying to give me space, but I catch them staring at me strangely all the time. Aunt Sally gets us a week’s pass to the museums, but there’s no way I’m going. Every day, she, Jack, and Brett head out after breakfast. I lie on my bed a lot and look at Mom’s painting. I especially look at the phoenix. I read the letters over and over again. I study my pictures. Mom and Dad knew. They knew, and it was okay.
One night after dinner, Aunt Sally and Uncle Evan come in. “Grayson,” Aunt Sally starts, “we just want to check in with you—to see how you’re doing. And to see where you’re at with this, ah, play thing. Mr. Finnegan left another message on my voice mail today. I think he really wants us to call him back.”
I sit up in bed. “You haven’t called him back yet?” I ask.
“Well, your uncle and I wanted to give things a little time. You know, to settle.” She looks at Uncle Evan.
“So,” he asks me, “are you still thinking that you’d like to take on the role?”
“Yes!” I say. “Definitely.”
“Why?” Aunt Sally sounds desperate. “Why do you want to set yourself up to be teased? Other kids could make your life miserable if you do this, Grayson. You could get bullied. You could get hurt.”
I don’t feel like myself anymore; it’s like I’m acting in a performance already. “I don’t know,” I say. “I guess it’s just that I feel…” I take a deep breath and look at them. “I mean, I’ve been thinking about what you said, about how I could talk to you, and about how I was when I first moved here….” They both stare at me frantically, their eyes wide. “I guess I still feel—”
“You feel what, Grayson?” Aunt Sally interrupts anxiously.
I look from her unblinking eyes to Uncle Evan’s. “Nothing,” I say, lying back down. “I just wanna do it. That’s all. If I get teased, I can handle it.” I have no idea if this is true.
“Well,” Aunt Sally says flatly, “I think we should tell Jack and Brett. Just so they’re prepared.” She looks hurt and my stomach tightens. Prepared for what?
“Fine,” I say. They stand there for another minute before closing my door.
The next morning I stay in bed as long as possible. After a while, though, I know I need to get up. I’m starving, and I have to go to the bathroom. Besides, I can’t hide out forever. I think of what Aunt Sally and Uncle Evan said about how Jack treated me when I first moved in. When I walk to the dining room, I feel myself bracing for an attack.
Aunt Sally, Jack, and Brett are at the table eating breakfast. “Hey! Look at the pretty lady!” Jack calls out. Brett watches him, his spoonful of cereal frozen halfway to his mouth.
“Jack, this is exactly what I’m talking about. You need to leave him alone,” Aunt Sally warns, looking up from the paper. “How’d you sleep, Grayson?” she asks automatically.
“Fine,” I tell her, watching Jack out of the corner of my eye. I sit down next to Brett and pour myself some cereal.
Brett turns to me, his mouth full now. “Dad told me the story about Persephone and why there are seasons,” he says, chewing. “So, you’re gonna be Persephone?”
“Yeah,” I tell him, forcing a smile.
“Is it a true story?” he asks.
“Nah,” I say. “It’s made up.”
He nods.
“Well, Grace, I think you’ll make a perfect girl,” Jack says. “But what am I supposed to tell all my friends when they ask me why my cousin is totally gay?” His face turns pink when I meet his eyes, and he looks down and plays with his cereal.
“Jack,” Aunt Sally says sternly, but she sounds exhausted.
