The Gift Read online

  The Gift

  By Kate Anslinger

  For my mother, the lover of twists and turns

  Grace

  I always knew I was different. My mother said that while other babies enter the world screaming, I was presented to her with a smile on my face and a look of calm in my dark, ocean-blue eyes. That was before they turned green and before I knew that I had a gift. Mom said that when she first held me, I looked up at the ceiling as if I was staring at something that made me unbelievably happy. Within minutes of being born, my tiny hands reached toward the light in the delivery room as a look of contentment swept across my face. The peace in my eyes was like nothing that she had ever seen before and because of that, she asked the nurses if I was healthy.

  “Why isn’t she crying?” she shouted at the nurses in a panic as she looked down at me with her own frightened green eyes. The nurses confirmed that I was fine and that all my physical tests and response times were average, if not above. They told her that some babies just don’t cry at first.

  They assured my mother that, one day, I would find my voice.

  Chapter One

  Grace McKenna was only three years old when the first vision catapulted her into what her mother assumed was a really bad tantrum. They had been walking down Main Street in Wentworth, a small Massachusetts town that boasted the best holiday shopping. It was almost Christmas, and Grace had been mesmerized by the colossal Christmas tree on display at the center of the bustling ice skating rink.

  “Wait right there, Grace. Don’t move,” her mother said, as she turned toward the clerk at one of the stands selling homemade Christmas ornaments. Her mother kept one eye on her and one eye on the clerk as her hand navigated through her tattered faux leather fringe purse to retrieve her last five-dollar bill to purchase the glittery ornament. Money was low as it always had been, but Ellen McKenna did her best with what she had and was determined to make Christmas special for her daughter. The small, artificial Charlie Brown tree that they had at home had been swiped from a dumpster after the holidays last year, and Ellen used what few ornaments had been handed down to her. She couldn’t leave the rest of the tree bare, so she hung silver measuring spoons from the scrawny branches, showing her daughter that they didn’t need to spend a fortune to add some shine and sparkle to their lives.

  “Mama! Look!” Grace yelled, pointing to a little girl who was twirling effortlessly in the center of the skating rink in a short pale-blue skirt, shimmery tights and a sparkly turtleneck sweater.

  “I’ll be right there, sweetie,” Ellen said as she watched the clerk wrap the ice skater figurine ornament, complete with tissue paper and a sparkly red bow. Grace fell in love with watching the skaters glide across the ice, their ribbons trailing from their heads like the dolls she thought they were. Her eyes followed the skater in the blue skirt as she used a toned leg to push off the icy surface and accelerate across the rink and into the arms of a boy who skated with as much finesse as she did. She positioned herself in front of him, their arms linking as they soared across the ice arm in arm, creating a dance to the background music of Sinatra’s voice bellowing “I’ll be home for Christmas.”

  “Do you want to be an ice skater someday?” A man’s voice pulled Grace from the trance. Startled, she dug her hands deeper into the pockets of her red hand-me-down peacoat. One of the big black buttons on the pocket dangled by a thread, partly from her habit of twirling them when she was nervous and partly from the wear and tear of a winter coat worn by several children before her.

  As a little girl, Grace was painfully shy. Had her mom been within a few feet, she would’ve darted to her and maneuvered her way between her legs, using them as a security blanket in which she could wrap herself to get away from the stranger. Instead, she slowly looked up at the man, the owner of the deep scruffy voice that interrupted her concentration on the dancing skaters. She parted her lips to speak; the few sentences that she could put together at her young age mashed together and clogged her thoughts. Her wide-set green eyes, innocent until that moment, widened and latched onto his as if being pulled into a tunnel. Their eyes locked like two forces of opposite energies, hers pure and green, and his bloodshot, brown, and filled with corruption.

  Maybe her first vision was the worst simply because it was the first, and it transformed the clarity of her innocence into a murky mess, having wiped her clean of any natural thoughts she had yet to form. Or maybe it really was the worst. It started with the body of a fair-skinned woman being dragged across muddied earth, the kind that is usually the result of a rainy spring day. Bursts of the woman’s placid face flashed in and out like a blinking light. Grace was only three years old, but she was old enough to have the innate ability to know wrong from right; something about these images left a sick feeling in her stomach. A flash of red hair splayed across the woman’s emaciated face, chunks of crusty mud cemented into the corners of her mouth and deep into the hollows of her eyes. Dried blood left a line of color down the woman’s ashen body, starting at the neck and dipping between her breasts, ending at a jutting hipbone. A flash of the woman’s face, displaying a pair of terrified eyes just seconds before a knife ran the length of her neck, leaving a neat slice for a pool of blood to spill out and onto her sharp collar bone. The images didn’t come in order, but rather in short bursts of disarray.

  The vision made Grace emit a high-pitched scream.

  “Grace!” Ellen looked up from her interaction with the clerk and ran over. The freshly wrapped ornament fell to the ground, landing on a bed of fake cotton snow that enveloped the outside of the skating rink. Completely unaware of the man, she ran right past him, nearly jabbing his burly body with an elbow. By the time Ellen reached Grace, the little girl was lying on the ground flailing her limbs in protest, as if someone was holding her down against her will.

  “Grace! Grace, honey, what’s the matter?” Ellen’s voice escalated.

  As a crowd started to gather around the scene, the man meandered away, hidden by the puffy winter coats and hats of the audience.

  The visions kept coming, flashes of crime that infiltrated Grace’s mind. The red-haired woman’s naked body being pulled and dropped into a pool of murky water. Her red hair fanning out above the smooth black pool, making her look like a mystical mermaid. Her eyes were closed, a look of peace masking a face that had just witnessed her own murder. And then a flash of her sinking.

  “Grace! Please, honey, what happened? Did something happen?” Ellen looked up at the audience, seeking witnesses who saw the start of her daughter’s breakdown. “I just looked away for a second!” she shouted, feeling the need to defend herself. “Grace! Baby, what happened?” She cradled Grace’s little body in her arms, pulling the peacoat closed where it had been torn open from the jerking movements of her daughter’s arms and legs.

  “The man.” Grace pointed a delicate finger toward the crowd, as heads swiveled in search of a mystery man. When no one came forward as a witness, the crowd opened up and dispersed, going back to their Christmas shopping.

  “Maybe you should pay more attention to your child,” a heavyset woman said as she waddled by. Her eyes were so small, they looked like two raisins pushed into her head.

  “Dude, that was weird,” said a teenage boy to his friend. “Maybe she’s like that chick in Poltergeist. She looked possessed.”

  “That man is bad, mommy,” Grace said between bouts of shaky sniffles.

  “What man, honey? Which man is bad?” Ellen asked, shaking off the comment of another passerby who accused Grace of seeing ghosts.

  “He’s gone. I don’t see him anymore.” Grace craned her neck, looking beyond the elegant skaters who hadn’t missed a step in their routine. They soared across the ice like figurines in the center of a snow globe, far fro
m the world Grace had just witnessed.

  “Baby, are you sure you saw a man? What did he look like?” Ellen asked, trying her hardest to push out any doubt that had surfaced. Grace had a tendency to be a creative little girl, often having tea parties with invisible friends, but she’d never gone to extremes like this, especially in such a public place. She was painfully shy and did anything she could to divert attention from herself. “Honey, was the man one of your invisible friends?”

  “No, mommy. The man is bad. He hurt the girl.” Grace’s voice was still slightly heightened by her adrenaline.

  “Honey, let’s go home.” Ellen had reached her limit. Now there was a girl, too. Surely Grace was making this one up. She turned, remembering the ornament she had dropped, but there was no trace of the shiny red package.

  After the incident at the ice skating rink, Ellen put every earned penny toward psychologists, behavioral specialists and psychics on a mission to find out what her daughter was seeing and if her behavior was normal. Nearly every shrink said that Grace was lonely and using her imagination to build worlds inside her head. The behavior specialists claimed that Grace’s “visions” were normal and it just meant that she was searching for more attention. “This behavior is quite common in single-parent homes,” one specialist told her. The psychics went to the opposite extreme, saying that Grace had powers from the other side and for ten more dollars they could tell her what her daughter should do next to protect herself from the visions and evil that were headed her way. Ellen became fed up that no one was taking her seriously; she was determined to keep at it, believing the girl and standing by her when everyone else thought she was a freak.

  While not a religious person, Ellen had a childhood friend who went on to become a priest at a church in Boston. As a last resort, Ellen brought five-year-old Grace to Father Burke, begging him to see her and give her an explanation. His response had been the most simple and straightforward: “Grace has been chosen as the recipient of a special gift. She was created by God to see visions of sinners. There are people of all backgrounds who have used meditation and hypnotic tools to receive the gift that Grace has naturally been given.” Father Burke said the words calmly, as if he were talking to a friend about the weather. He was the first person to treat them with respect.

  He told Ellen that Grace’s visions were called “pictures,” and that based on his experience, these pictures would contain one scene and usually appear in a flash without prior notice. “It happens very quickly,” he said, “and the images will remain just long enough for Grace to notice them before they vanish.” Ellen nodded. “When God gives you a gift, you are to use it and share it with the world—to help others. So, my advice to you is to take these visions and piece them together to bring down the sinners. I know it’s not the easiest thing to do, but I’m sure Grace will find a way.”

  Father Burke passed away from a heart attack only two years after their initial meeting. With Grace too young to understand, Ellen saved his words of advice and gently nudged Grace throughout her life, pushing her daughter to get involved in the world of law enforcement where she could use her gift to help people.

  Chapter Two

  Grace traveled the winding roads to work, familiar bumps and dips paving her way through the colorful fall Massachusetts’ countryside. The tree limbs reached for the road, creating a tunnel of red, yellow and orange, a clear sign that it was fall, with winter just around the corner. She never got bored on her route to work. The trees always greeted her like old friends, cheering her on at the sidelines of a race. She wrapped her hand around the stick shift like a bird-claw grasping its prey, the smoothness of the leather calming the inevitable nerves she experienced before starting every shift at the police station.

  When Grace was in college, a psychology teacher taught the class about a neurological phenomenon called Synesthesia. The teacher stood in front of the class and passionately described the phenomenon as being a stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway that leads to involuntary experiences of another sensory or cognitive pathway. It wasn’t until this class that Grace realized she possessed the phenomenon.

  For as long as she could remember, the feel of leather always made her revert to a place of calm. She first discovered the sensation when she sat on her mother’s black leather couch in one of the many apartments they lived in outside of Boston. It was the nineties, when frumpy leather couches were considered modern and hip. She had only been about fifteen years old when her mother told her who her biological father was. As Ellen told the story about how she was the product of a violent rape, Grace pressed her sweaty palms into the couch, and gripped the black leather so tightly that she was afraid her hot-pink nails would tear the material. She had sensed a simultaneous calm, which she would later discover as the result of contact with the leather. She had sat quietly, trying to breathe, her rigid teenage body perched on the edge of the couch, leaning forward and staring at the mauve carpet. Tears slowly appeared at the corner of her eyes, though she tried her best to refrain from crying.

  Her mother had always been her role model, providing a mold that she had so badly wanted to contort her own world to fit into. Ellen McKenna had been a bit of a free spirit, straying from a straight line, while Grace lived her life more rigid, thriving in the presence of rules and direction, but that didn’t stop the two women from forming a rare bond of opposites. Straight-laced Grace McKenna was the product of a violent and tragic crime, but her mother had assured her that she was still the best thing that ever happened to her. While she had hid the truth for the first fifteen years of her daughter’s life, Ellen felt that Grace, who was always far more mature than her age, was old enough to know.

  For years, Grace had asked why there was never a man around to take out the trash, guide her in a daddy-daughter dance or be a master griller in the summer months. Ellen would always come back at her with a well-thought-out response. She had claimed that she only knew him that one night for about thirty minutes before they engaged in a heated romance that lasted only until the next morning at dawn. Knowing the carefree persona of her mother, Grace didn’t find the story anything but believable. Every time her mother told this story, she would have a faraway look in her eyes, the white around her pale green irises transforming to a shade of red, tears coming to life in the corners. Grace had assumed it was her mother’s heightened emotion, Ellen having always been a firm believer in showing authenticity with one’s feelings.

  When Grace was greeted by the usual surge of emotions in her pre-teen years, Ellen had been sure to educate her on the importance of owning one’s feelings.

  “Gracie, are you sad today?” Ellen had asked through the partly cracked door to her daughter’s room one Saturday afternoon. Grace had been paralyzed by a broken heart, refusing to do anything but lie in bed listening to Sinead O’Connor on repeat as she sulked about being dumped by a seventh-grade bad boy.

  “Leave me alone, mom,” Grace said, maintaining a sullen stare on the pale blue wall in front of her bed.

  “Grace Hope McKenna, what I’m about to say to you is going to help you get through the rest of your life, so listen up.” Ellen eased her way into the room, and folded her tall form into a sitting position at the end of the bed. “Emotions can be uncomfortable—debilitating, even. And there is nothing wrong with any particular emotion. But one thing that you need to do is accept them. You are not flawed because Bobby whatshisname dumped you. It’s not your problem, it’s his. Stop blaming yourself for other people’s cruelty.” Ellen regurgitated the words like a trained psychologist as she gripped Grace’s foot, a lump in the pastel quilt her daughter was swaddled in.

  As if a firecracker was set off in her head, Grace’s eyes darted to her mother’s, making a connection that she would take with her for the rest of her life. From that moment, Grace learned how to accept and understand her emotions before separating herself from them. Not long after that, Ellen told her about her father and how for years, while she was traumati
zed by the event, she had learned that she was not responsible for other people’s actions, and when possible, to make the best out of every situation.

  Learning that her father was a rapist was like being told that she was infected with a contagious disease. She felt dirty. And, for the first time, Grace looked at her mother as broken, instead of the fun-loving, quirky woman who had always danced while cleaning and dropped Grace off at school within seconds of the bell ringing. While she never had an activity calendar posted with highlighted events, and almost always sent Grace to parties and school with store-bought treats instead of homemade, Ellen knew how to love her daughter and she did so with every fiber of her being. Ellen hadn’t missed a single one of Grace’s sporting events, recitals or school plays. While she may look disheveled and typically trickled in at the last minute when there was standing room only, Grace could always count on her mother to be standing in the back of the auditorium or gym in her post office uniform. Her shirt would be un-tucked, her arms wrapped around a small gift that would inevitably be wrapped in leftover postal packaging.

  According to her mother, Grace’s father never got caught, at least publicly, and Ellen never saw the man again. Like a ghost, he was without a face and name; almost as quickly as he tore apart Ellen’s life, he was gone. For years, Ellen had checked with the police officer on duty who had taken her report the night of the rape. Fresh on the force at the time, Adam Mullen was a rookie who was dead set on finding the rapist. He was determined to make his career notable. After a year, he moved on to other cases, but he still kept in touch with Ellen, usually to relay the same information—the description that she gave to the police never showed up in the police blotter of Clayton, Massachusetts. Clayton was the town where she had been the night of the rape. She was attending an evening theater arts class at the local community college down the street from her parents’ house. Not more than five minutes before the attack, she had said good night to her acting partner and current flame. She walked to her car alone in the dark, toward the lot that was designated for part-time students. Her attacker didn’t even try to sneak up on her. He had just walked up to her and grabbed her like he was staking his claim.