“Right.”
“And look at you,” she says, “you seem fine, don’t you? I mean, considering?”
A shimmer of lightning in the window.
“Considering,” I say quietly. Again, I brace myself. Brace myself for the pain to spread back through me with a vengeance, like a wildfire. For the chair to return to my foot. For the fat man to return to the chair. For concrete to replace flesh once more. For the fists to return to my back, clenched tighter than ever before. For my heart to break. For my throat to catch. For a surge of tears to blind me, to fall and never get done falling. Nothing. A throb beneath the bandage on my shin. A new weight in my body, my limbs, my chest. A swell of something in my heart—sadness or is it happiness?—that rises then falls, rises then falls, like an ocean wave. Rises and falls at the sight of Grace, alive and across the table from me. She clinks her glass against mine. Smiles at me.
“Miranda,” she says, “you’re staring at me again.”
I tell Grace I’m sorry to stare. I don’t mean to make her uncomfortable. I’m just so glad that she’s…
“What?” Grace says. “That I’m okay? Of course I’m okay, Miranda. Pilgrim stock, remember?”
I look at her face, not at all angry, but perhaps she’s still just in shock. I wait for her to call the police. Wait for her to punch me.
Grace laughs in the red light. “Miranda, I’m fine. All’s well,” she says to me.
She puts her hand on mine. “Thank you for all the cacti and dragon fruit, by the way,” she says. “You kind of went a bit overboard with the Instacart deliveries. But I do appreciate the thought.”
“I was worried about you. I meant to visit. I just—”
“But you did visit me, didn’t you? Didn’t you sit by my bedside?”
I remember sitting beside her in the dark, staring into the voids of her eyes. Surely she can’t mean that first night. But maybe she hallucinated me in her fever.
“I could have visited you more,” I say.
“You just had to go on with the show, Miranda,” says Grace. “I know how it goes. Anyway, I wasn’t very good company. I haven’t been ill in years. But it was bound to catch up with me at some point, wasn’t it? All that good health.”
I watch her light a cigarette with the candle, the cherry spark from the thin orange flame.
“Grace,” I say, “that night here, in the basement, in the—”
“Forget it. I’m embarrassed that I was so… I don’t even know what I was. Suspicious, I guess? Of you.”
I tell Grace she was right to be suspicious. “I’ve done some terrible things, Grace. I wish I could say I didn’t mean to do them. But I don’t know. Maybe I did. I’m sorry. I know that.”
Grace shakes her head. She says she is the one who is sorry actually. She says that lying around all day sick, it gave her some time to think. And actually, Grace thought a lot. About me, in fact. About what I must have gone through. With my hip. And my back.
“What?”
“With your hip and your back. Both, right? Miranda, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Go on.”
“I realize I wasn’t always the most—I don’t know. I could have been kinder. More patient.” She’s looking down at her glass.
I recall my coldness, my impatience with Ellie the night before opening night, her weeping about Briana. How heartlessly I watched Briana drag her leg of stone into the theater. How quickly I assumed she was faking.
“It’s really okay, Grace,” I say.
“No, it’s not. I’m sorry, Miranda. I am.”
She’s actually sorry. I know this. I know this because Grace can’t bring herself to look at me.
“Anyway, I’m just so glad you’re better now.”
A rumble of thunder overhead. A hiss of rain. The skin at the back of my neck prickles. I look at Grace’s hand on mine, and I want to tell her everything. The truth about the three men, who might appear any second, demanding their refund. The truth about where my pain went all those weeks. Into which bodies. Into her body. That in the black box, I almost didn’t save her. That the feel of the baby in my arms, of Paul’s hands on my face, of my own body light as air, free of concrete, webs, fists, was almost too much to turn away from. Was excruciating to turn away from. That I’m waiting for it to all come screaming back. For what was reversed to be righted again. After the initial shock wears off. To be expected.