Free No One Tells Everything by Rae Meadows Page A

was hilarious.”
    ———

CHAPTER 8
    I t’s three a.m. and Grace drinks champagne, a bunch of mini bottles, all she could get at the one open store down near the Gowanus Canal, amidst the hookers, addicts, and lurkers. It’s a place she wouldn’t even walk to during the day but she felt fearless, protected by her manic mood. One of the empty bottles rolls under her bed. She is on the verge of discovery and it makes her feel alive.
    She hasn’t felt this way since she was a girl. It makes her think of the summers of her youth before everything started to slide. When her dad could make her mom laugh, when she and Callie ran around and got grass-stained, when they watched the Fourth-of-July fireworks from their old army blanket on the golf course at the country club, the four of them, some fried chicken, carrot sticks, and cupcakes speared with little American flags. Grace knows that she was the same then as she is now, too aware of longing to be carefree, too sure of disappointment to forget herself in the moment. But if she closes her eyes she can conjure her mom’s luminous laugh, the rich, deep sound that changed irrevocably when Callie died, that grew shallow, then fizzled. If she closes her eyes she can believe that it wasn’t her fault.
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    It’s Saturday. Grace wakes up on the floor, her head under the bed. As she tries to extricate herself, she bangs her head on the bed frame, the metal bar hitting above her eye. She recoils into the deep, focused pain of it, closing her eyes against the stinging light of day. An overturned champagne bottle has soaked her sheets. This is it for me, she thinks. I am going to stop drinking altogether. The rug has left a red, rash-like patch on half her face and her ripeness disgusts her. Her stomach howls—she hasn’t eaten anything since the bagel she ate yesterday on the way to the courthouse—but it quivers with nausea at the smell of her neighbor’s frying bacon. Deep breaths through her nose. Six steps to a scalding shower. She stands with her face in the streaming water for ten minutes. She focuses on the words on the back of her shampoo bottle and copyedits them in her head.
    Coffee helps a little and she spreads out her Charles notes on the floor. She imagines him in high school, believing against reason that the popular pretty girl liked him. She wonders if there is a way to track the moments in a person’s life to reveal exactly when a course is set in irrevocable motion. She reaches back to the whorl of her hair where her bald spot used to be; the hair that grows there is softer than the rest.
    The super and his wife are sitting on the stoop enjoying the sunny afternoon outside her apartment. Grace is hungry but she can’t face their questions, their neighborly chitchat, their optimism. She is trapped inside, behind her pulled curtains, with no means of escape. She has never cooked a real meal for herself and her empty refrigerator gapes back at her. She cuts the mold off a nub of old cheddar and scrounges for some stale saltines in the cupboard.
    She calls the jail and the clerk gives her Charles’s inmate number and cellblock. She turns on her laptop. Dear Charles. But she can’t type anything further. She doesn’t even know what she is asking for. Dear Charles, I would like to meet you, to hear your side. No, that’s not right. I don’t believe you were some type of predator. No. She tries again.
    Dear Charles,
    I have been following your case and I am very interested in learning about you. I live in Brooklyn but I grew up in Cuyahoga, Ohio, which kind of makes us from the same place. I imagine that because of the unsettled legal status of your situation there are events that you will be advised not to speak about. I understand this. However, it is the rest of your life that I am interested in. Maybe we can get to know each other.
    I hope you will write me back. I am enclosing a self-addressed, stamped envelope.
    Print. Fold. Seal. She double-checks