He pulled his arm away.
“Dammit, Grace. Stop trying to save me,” he slurred. “This is my choice.”
We’re adults now, she had told Aunt Clove that morning.These are no longer your choices to make.
She heard Aunt Clove’s voice echoing in her head.Love would not hesitate to take down any obstacle that stands in her children’s way. Especially when they don’t see the harm it will cause them.
“You’re destroying yourself,” she said, a heavy lump rising in her throat. “And you’re destroying me, too. I want a choice in that.”
She knew she wasn’t physically strong enough to force him to do anything. She felt so helpless. She wanted to scream.
Lillie and Earnest stepped away to give her some semblance of privacy, even though this meltdown was happening amid the most crowded fair in the history of the country.
Is this rock bottom?she wondered desperately.Will he even remember we had this conversation?
She changed tack and turned her voice to soothing. She gently touched his arm. “Walt,” she said. “Did you find anything for Oliver?”
“I was supposed to find something for Oliver?” he asked. His eyes were dull.
Her heart sank. She felt something crumble within her.
“I can help you,” she said fiercely. “Please. Let me help you.”
She cried then, the tears bursting forth from somewhere long-buried. They were streaming down her face, mixing with snot. People were staring. St. Louisans in long skirts and oversized hats. Bagobos wearing beads and knee pants and carrying bolos. Visayans in puffed white blouses with sleeves. Bontocs in cloth sashes and bead necklaces. She was making a scene in front of them all. She didn’t care.
Walt looked at her with a cruel disdain brought out by the drugs, the brother she once knew now so far away she couldn’t reach him anymore. He shoved her aside, staggering to his feet, and bent to snarl in her ear, “No.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THAT NIGHT, Grace dreamed she was going to die.
She was next to Harriet in the fair’s roller coaster, but their harness was broken. It crumpled away like tinfoil and as the coaster fell, there was nothing to hold her in. She felt her stomach drop as her body jolted up into the air like a limp rag doll. She tried to reach out for Harriet, but she couldn’t.
Harriet was screaming, then laughing.
And then Harriet turned into her sister Penelope.
“I met with her in the Tunnels,” Penelope said.
“Why?” Grace asked. Penelope was opening her mouth to answer, but it was too late.
Grace braced herself to hit the ground.
Instead she gasped and sat up in the small bed, sweating.
She reached out to the nightstand for her glass of water. Gulped it down to the dregs.
Her eyes focused and she forced herself to reorient to the small room. The desk and typewriter in the corner. Her clothes, where she had left them on the chair last night. The fireplace, and the smell of paints that always greeted her when she first opened the door.
She could feel how swollen her eyes were from crying herself to sleep.
She swallowed, listening to the sound of her heartbeat as it steadily began to slow.
Harriet was dead.
Oliver was imprisoned.
The Walt she knew was gone.
