The Mystery of Grace, page 1
The Mystery of Grace
By Charles de Lint from Tom Doherty Associates
ANGEL OF DARKNESS
DREAMS UNDERFOOT
THE FAIR IN EMAIN MACHA
FORESTS OF THE HEART
FROM A WHISPER TO A SCREAM
GREENMANTLE
I’LL BE WATCHING YOU
INTO THE GREEN
THE IVORY AND THE HORN
JACK OF KINROWAN
THE LITTLE COUNTRY
MEMORY AND DREAM
MOONHEART
MOONLIGHT AND VINES
MULENGRO
THE MYSTERY OF GRACE
THE ONION GIRL
SOMEPLACE TO BE FLYING
SPIRITS IN THE WIRES
SPIRITWALK
SVAHA
TAPPING THE DREAM TREE
TRADER
WIDDERSHINS
THE WILD WOOD
YARROW
The Mystery of Grace
Charles de Lint
A Tom Doherty Associates Book
New York
This is a work of fiction. All the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this
novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE MYSTERY OF GRACE
Copyright © 2009 by Charles de Lint
All rights reserved.
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
De Lint, Charles, 1951–
The mystery of grace / Charles de Lint.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-1756-8
ISBN-10: 0-7653-1756-7
1. Magic—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9199.3.D357M97 2009
813'.54—dc22
2008046436
First Edition: March 2009
Printed in the United States of America
0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
for
Paddy & Jim
(still hot-rodders at heart)
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank Stu Jenks and Wilf Clarke for making my reference work go so much easier, and also Stu’s friend Patricia for helping me name the city properly. Stu provided me with lots of wonderful reference photos and support (check out his exquisite art at www.stujenks.com), while Wilf (who works for H. B. Fenn, my Canadian distributor) sent me a stack of hot rod and custom books that were not only indispensable, but also vastly entertaining.
And speaking of hot rods, I’d also like to thank the editors and contributors of Kustoms Illustrated, American Rodder, Traditional Rod & Kulture Illustrated, Ol’ Skool Rodz, and Car Kulture DeLuxe. These magazines not only helped inform me about the nitty-gritty of rebuilding old cars, but also kept me in the right mood while writing.
That mood was also helped by the stream of rockabilly and surf guitar I had playing while I worked. I’ve always loved this stuff, but didn’t know nearly as much about it as I do now (and I’m still no expert), and that’s only thanks to blogs by people with improbable user names such as rideyourpony, Boppelsag, EekTheCat, Yesterdays Gold, Fat City Guitar Lounge, Rock Is Dead/R.I.P., RedondoRoundUp, Uncle Gil’s Rockin’ Archives, Rocker Stomp, and Frisian’s Other Favorites. They’re chock-full of miniessays illustrated with classic album art.
I could fill pages of this book listing the artists I listened to while writing this novel. So let me just say that for contemporary music in this style, a few of the artists I enjoyed included The Reverb Syndicate, The Mermen, The Torquays, Los Straitjackets, HorrorPops, the Creepshow, The Langhorns, and Southern Culture on the Skids. For the classics, where do you start? Try Duane Eddy, Link Wray, Dick Dale, Davie Allen, The Deuce Coupes, The Super Shocks, Eddie Cochran, and The Ventures, and go on from there.
The blogs mentioned above are a good source for more information on all the above and more. As is Blue Suede News: The House Organ of the Church of Rock ’n’ Roll, which sadly only comes out a few times a year.
Thanks are also due to you, the readers—I’d still write these stories if I wasn’t being published, but because of you I get to make my living doing so; to Rodger Turner, friend and first reader, and also Web master for my website (www.charlesdelint.com) and the indispensable www.sfsite.com; to my agent, Russ Galen, who made sure that I would have the time to write this properly; to my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who, besides being a great guitarist, is also a most patient man; to my publisher, Tom Doherty, for his ongoing support of my career; to Irene Gallo, the art director at Tor, who book after book has designed some of the best covers in the field—I’m so lucky that some of those books are mine; and to the folks in the publicity department at Tor who never fail in their enthusiasm to get my books out to my readers.
Last, but not least, there aren’t enough thanks for MaryAnn, who not only helps make all of this possible (the least of which is her reading and editing the manuscripts before anyone else sees them), but also completes my life.
OTTAWA
Winter 2008
I do not understand the mystery of grace—
only that it meets us where we are, but does
not leave us where it found us.
—ANNE LAMOTT, from Traveling Mercies
We stand always on the edge of wonder . . . and
need only to be pointed in the right direction
to see it.
— ROBERT J. HOWE, from his
introduction to Coney Island Wonder Stories
When we die . . . it will different for each of us.
— TORI AMOS, from an interview
in Mojo, October 2006
The way to love anything is to realize that it
might be lost.
— G. K. CHESTERTON
The Mystery of Grace
She woke up when he got out of bed. As she lay there, listening to him pee, it occurred to her that she’d actually been sleeping. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a real sleep. She stretched languorously, appreciating the pull on her muscles and how the sheets slid across her skin. When the toilet flushed, she sat up to watch him return to bed, but he didn’t climb back in. Instead, he sat at the end, pulling up his feet to sit cross-legged on the comforter.
“I killed my brother,” he said.
“You what?”
He lifted a hand. “Oh, I don’t mean literally. I killed him by neglect.”
She leaned back against the headboard, pulling the sheets up over her breasts. A moment ago, she’d been comfortable with her nudity. Now she felt uneasy and goose bumps marched up her arms. She realized that for all their earlier intimacy, this was still a stranger’s room. He was still a stranger, and she wasn’t sure she liked the turn the evening had suddenly taken. No, scratch “evening.” Make that late, late night. Almost morning.
If she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a real sleep, she really couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone home from a club with a stranger. But he’d seemed so nice. He still seemed nice. Except right at this moment she didn’t trust that he actually was what he seemed.
“Why are you telling me this?” she asked.
“I don’t know. It’s the anniversary of his death—he’s always on my mind at Halloween. And I find that any time I’m really, really happy, I think of him and how it’s one more thing he’ll never get to experience.”
“That’s messed up.”
“No kidding.”
“You’re still not saying why you’re telling me this.”
He shrugged. Those dark brown eyes of his settled their gaze on hers and she found it hard not to melt into their warmth.
“I know we’ve just met,” he said, “but I felt this real connection with you, right from the first moment.”
She smiled, and relaxed a little.
“You don’t need a pickup line anymore,” she said. “I’m already in your bed.”
He smiled back. “I know. I guess I just wanted to share an . . . I don’t know . . . intimacy with you.”
She let the sheets fall and scooted over the bed until she was sitting right in front of him, cross-legged as well, their knees bumping. She took his hands.
“Tell me what happened,” she said.
It wasn’t a long story, but it was long enough. His bedroom windows faced west, so neither of them saw the dawn pinking the city’s skyline. She wanted to tell him what happened wasn’t really his fault, but she knew that wasn’t the way this kind of guilt worked. Intellectually, he already knew that. It was his emotions that were tripping him up. The tangle of love and memory and what might have been.
She wanted to make love to him again, but a pressure in her bladder told her that first she needed to use the toilet herself. She leaned forward and they shared a lingering kiss.
“Hold that thought,” she said as his hand rose to her breast. “I just need to pee.”
He stayed on the bed when she got up, listening to her use the toilet as she’d listened to him use it earlier. He waited, but there was no sound of flushing. There was no sound at all. After another few moments, he turned around.
“Are you okay in there?” he asked.
There was no response.
“Grace?”
He got up and walked barefoot across the hardwood floor. The sun was up now. When he reached the bathroom door, he could see that the small room was empty. He stepped over to the bathtub and pushed the shower curtain aside. She wasn’t there either.
He’d had his back to the bathroom, but surely he would have heard her leave the bedroom. So where did she go? She hadn’t come through the bedroom. The only other way out was through the bathroom window, but it was too small to crawl out of and he would have heard the squeak of it opening because it always got stuck halfway up.
He backed out of the bathroom and looked around his bedroom. That was when he noticed the scatter of his clothes on the floor by the bed. His clothes. Hers weren’t there.
Had he fallen asleep and she’d slipped out without him noticing?
He knew he hadn’t, so she couldn’t have.
Had she even been here in the first place?
That was an odd thought, except suddenly he wasn’t sure of the answer. Real people didn’t vanish into thin air.
He could remember her every detail. All the tattoos. The smell of her hair. The silky touch of her skin contrasting against the rougher texture of her hands—a mechanic’s hands, she’d told him. He could remember her enthusiastic participation in their lovemaking, and his penis still had a touch of postcoital thickness.
He’d definitely had sex with someone—unless he’d just been jerking off in his sleep.
He sat on the bed and stared out the window for a long moment before he went through the apartment, turning on lights.
There was no one here.
It didn’t look like there’d ever been anyone else here.
Great. He’d just fallen in love with a dream. Or a hallucination.
And surprising as that was, falling in love was exactly what had happened. He’d fallen for a woman he’d only just met, and fallen hard. Except it appeared that she was imaginary.
He rubbed his face with his hands. Halloween was always bad. It had been ever since the night Tim died. He’d always been able to bear the pain of the anniversary with a certain stoicism, hiding it from the world at large, staying busy, making sure he was around people so that he didn’t have time to brood. But no matter how much he tried to distract himself, eventually he had to come back to the apartment, where the memories lay in wait.
Tonight had been different. He’d met Grace. She’d come home with him. They’d talked for hours, made love, fallen asleep in each other’s arms.
Except he’d only imagined her. He’d imagined all of it. The sex. Feeling this incredible, immediate bond with her. Even sharing the story of Tim’s death, which he never did with strangers . . .
Then his gaze rested on the two wineglasses standing on the coffee table. He remembered opening the bottle when they got back from the club. They’d each had a glass. There was still residue at the bottom of the glasses and the wine bottle on the table beside them was half full. More to the point, there was lipstick on the rim of one glass.
He looked back into the bedroom.
So she had been here.
But if that was true, if he hadn’t just imagined her, then how the hell had she disappeared?
He waited until the hour was vaguely reasonable—staring at the clock until the digital numbers finally changed to seven—before he picked up the phone and called Danny. It rang a half dozen times before Danny finally picked up.
“Man,” he said, his voice thick with sleep, “if you’re selling something, it better be good.”
“What could anyone sell you? You’ve already got everything you need.”
“My point exactly.” Danny paused for a moment, then added, “Jesus, John. It’s seven o’clock in the morning.”
“Yeah, I know. Sorry about that. I just need you to answer a question for me.”
“The answer is: yeah, you’re a dipstick. Now can I go back to sleep?”
“At the club last night,” John said. “Was I with a woman?”
“Are you kidding me?”
John’s heart sank. He knew it had been too good to be true. Except then Danny went on.
“She was awesome, man. I mean, not cover girl pretty, but a genuine looker. And seriously hot. Kat Von D hot, what with the tats and all.”
“Who?”
“Come on. Didn’t you ever watch L.A. Ink?”
“I don’t have a TV.”
“And that’s something we need to have a serious conversation about. Who doesn’t have a TV? What happened to you, man? You used to be just as much of a media geek as the rest of us.”
“I’ve got a computer.”
Danny laughed. “That’s like saying you’ve got a cell phone. These days, everybody’s got both. Hell, my grandfather’s got a BlackBerry and I can remember having to set the time on his VCR whenever I went over to visit because he couldn’t figure even that out. Forget taping a show. But now? He’s like this tech pro, downloading game scores and weather forecasts, sending text messages to my mom and dad. You totally need to get back into the game.”
John didn’t bother to argue the point. He was too high on the swell of possibilities filling his head and his heart to even really pay much attention.
She was real.
He still had no idea how she’d left his apartment without him seeing her go, but that was completely overshadowed by Danny’s confirmation.
“So why were you asking about that woman you left with last night?” Danny asked.
He laughed when John finished explaining.
“What?” Danny said. “You think you’re such a loser that you made her up? Get real, Burns. Everywhere we go, women are always giving you the eye. It’s like I was saying last night. You’re this total chick magnet.”
“Oh, come on.”
“And I guess what’s so appealing to them is that you’re oblivious to it.”
“I think you’re—”
“She went home with you, didn’t she? Do you think she’d just go home with anybody?”
“I hope not.”
“Anyway, I wouldn’t worry about it. If you guys got on as well as you say you did, she’ll probably be calling you soon. Or you can always ask Nina to find out who she is. I think she knew everybody at the Solona Music Hall last night.”
“She didn’t know her.”
“Well, someone must.”
“I guess. That was a quite a crowd there last night.”
“Tell me about it. And some of those Wicca girls are totally hot. Who knew? I thought they’d be all, you know, not so much.”
John didn’t bother to ask why. Danny was a sweet guy, but sometimes he just got too focused on women and their hotness factor.
“And Helen,” Danny went on. “That girl you saw me talking to? I didn’t get lucky like you, but she totally wants to get together again.” He paused a moment, then added, “Unless she gave me a bogus number. Aw, man, what if she gave me a bogus number?”
“I’m sure she didn’t.”
“Says the guy who calls to confirm that he even met someone last night.”
John laughed. “I should go. Sorry about getting you up so early.”
“That’s okay. You owe me a favor now, right?”
“I suppose . . .”
“And we totally need some new concept drawings for the Addison DVD. They want something edgier for when we come out of that intro clip into the main menu.”
John sighed. “And when do you need them by?”
“Yesterday?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
But when he went to his drawing board after he hung up the phone and picked up a piece of charcoal, he found himself sketching Grace’s features on the paper tacked to the board instead.
The need to see her again was like an ache in his chest.
Altagracia “Grace” Quintero
Abuelo—my grandfather on my father’s side—always liked to say, if you’re going to do something, do it the best you can. Do it like it’s the last thing you’ll ever get to do, the one thing by which you’ll be remembered when you’re gone. It doesn’t matter if it’s pulling somebody out of the river or replacing a set of spark plugs. What’s important is that you make it count.
