Echoes of Grace

by Guadalupe García McCall

Genres: YA Mysteries & Thrillers; YA Paranormal; General Fiction

Synopsis

In Eagle Pass, Texas, Grace struggles to understand the "echoes" she inherited from her mother—visions which often distort her reality. One morning as her sister, Mercy, rushes off to work, a disturbing echo takes hold of Grace, and within moments, tragedy strikes.
Attending community college for the first time, talking to the boy next door, and working toward her goals all help Grace recover, but her estrangement from Mercy takes a deep toll. And as Grace's echoes bring ghosts and premonitions, they also bring memories of when Grace fled to Mexico
to the house of her maternal grandmother—a woman who Grace had been told died long ago. Will piecing together the truth heal Grace and her sister, or will the echoes destroy everything that she holds dear?

Release date: June 21, 2022

Publisher: Tu Books

Print pages: 400

Sample

Chapter One

Eagle Pass, Texas

June 2011

There is a fuzzy black caterpillar sitting on the wooden railing of the porch. It’s quite unusual to find them in the light of day, especially here in the scorching-­hot South Texas sun, because the caterpillar of Hypercompe scribonia, the giant leopard moth, is a nocturnal creature. It prefers to stay out of sight and only comes out to feed at night.

I know that because we have thousands of them in our yard. Most of them live off the old mulberry tree in the front yard. Some of them hide behind large patches of perforated leaves or under heavy rocks, in between the planks of the creaking floorboards, or under the rickety porch steps. Others cling to the underside of the dating bench, the only piece of furniture in the yard, handmade by my father at my grandmother’s request. My father’s mother, Guelita Rosa, is very old-fashioned and demanded a space out here where she could keep an eye on us from the kitchen window when we got old enough to have boys over.

“Hurry up!” I yell as I pound on our front door again.

There are a million things I’d rather be doing than standing around waiting for my older sister, Mercedes — or Mercy as she prefers to be called these days — to come out of the house.

She’s late again, which means that I can’t get my day started, not until she’s left the driveway and I am alone with my daily ritual: wake up Guelita Rosa, feed her and Alexander, wash the dishes, and sort and put away the laundry. Once that is done, I can sit down and sketch and think and create.

There’s a giant moth I have been itching to work on. I don’t quite have the shading yet. Somehow, I can’t get the 3D effect right on that curled-up belly. Maybe it’s the angle of the thorax. Although it might be in the abdomen. I’m not quite sure yet, but Mercy’s lateness is keeping me from it, and I bang on the door again.

“Come on!” I yell, hanging my head in resignation.

Mercy pulls the curtain aside on the living room window. “Stop it! You’re scaring Alexander,” she says, which is code for I’m taking my sweet time putting my fake eyelashes on and you can just wait until I’m done.

I look across the yard, where the sun filters through the dark green leaves of the mulberry. A ray of light pierces the moldy branches, and I think about that bench. Nothing my grandmother did would have kept Mercy from doing what came naturally with boys. Nothing would have stopped her from getting pregnant at seventeen and ruining our plans.

I wince at the thought of what Mercy did, how she made it impossible for us to go off to college the way we’d always intended. You could leave her behind, the ­tortured little voice inside me whispers, but I could never leave Mercy behind. We promised to take care of each other. We made a pact when we were six and seven years old. The day our mother died, we swore we’d never leave each other’s side, no matter what.

Tears threaten to form in my eyes and I look away, back to the black caterpillar in front of me. The pretty scribonia with its thick coat of black bristles is sitting completely still on the wooden rail, and I wonder if it is alive.

A bus drives down the street, chugging along the road with all the grace and agility of a yellow long-horned beetle. The sun shifts in the sky, shedding light on the rotting wooden slats at the corner of our porch, and still Mercy doesn’t come out.

Frustrated, I walk over to the window and slam my open palm against the glass several times. “Mercedes Aurora Torres!” I yell loud enough for the neighbors to hear. “Get your scrawny butt going! Now!”

Mercy walks out of the house then. She is hoisting my two-year-old nephew, Alexander, on her hip. He’s clinging to her neck with both arms. “Don’t nag,” she says as she hands him over to me. “Alexander couldn’t find his teddy bear, so he wouldn’t let me get dressed until we found it. Can you please take him?”

“Don’t I always?” I ask.

Mercy doesn’t answer me. She grimaces, pulls her beloved Gucci sunglasses out of her handbag, and shoves them on her face. Her light mauve lipstick ­glistens in the sun. She looks like a grown, professional woman with her long black hair flowing silkily off her temples and down her back. She always takes her time getting ready, because she wants to give the illusion of having a good head on her shoulders.

Only I know different. She is a nineteen-year-old high school dropout. But she sells the sophisticated look very well, which means older guys really like her. She likes them too. Their wallets are always full of cash, and she loves pulling those wallets out of their hands and taking what she needs from them. I don’t approve, but she won’t listen to me about it.

“Looks like it’s going to be a hot one again today,” I say, when Mercy steps off the porch and flips her beautiful hair back.

“Do me a favor,” she says, pushing her new Coach bag high up on her left shoulder. “Try to keep Alexander inside until I get home, okay? I don’t want him running around outside in the heat of the day and getting a sunburn.”

“Okay,” I say.

“I mean it, Grace,” she warns. “Don’t zone out the way you always do or get all caught up scribbling and just ignore him. Be present. Watch him carefully. Are you listening to me, Graciela Inés Torres? You know how he likes to get into things.”

“Yes.” I roll my eyes.

Mercy doesn’t respect anything I do. To her, my drawings and the poetry I create when I look at nature are just scribbling. She doesn’t know the difference between a metaphor and a simile, but she knows how to get a guy to fill her tank at the gas station with one little smile. “What’s it good for, all that scratching on paper?” she asks. “It won’t get you anywhere, Grace.”

It isn’t just our differences of opinion about devotion to school and intimacy with boys that’s created a gap between me and Mercy. The last four years, we’ve grown into complete opposites of each other. I love nature and art and books. She loves eyeliners, lipstick, and discount racks. I stay as far away from guys as I can. She can’t stay out of their cars. I don’t believe in love at first sight; she capitalizes on it.

But it wasn’t always that way.

When we were young, especially after our mother’s untimely death, Mercy and I were inseparable. We used to really take care of each other. We were like those tiny brown caracoles you find sitting side by side, clinging to each other on the underside of a wet leaf after a great rainstorm. Nothing could tear us apart back then. But then puberty struck, and she became a whole other person. When she turned sixteen, she went completely off the rails and straight into Jose Valdez’s arms.

On the porch, Alexander stands on his tippy-toes and picks up the bristly black caterpillar from its place on the railing. It rolls itself into a semicircle in the palm of his tiny hand and remains there. Each segment is open, separating the black spine and exposing the tender crimson skin between, one bright layer after another.

I try to stay present, like Mercy warned, but something has changed, and I know it’s happening again, that weird thing Guelita Rosa calls echoes — the don, a kind of woman’s intuition with sights and sounds and smells shared by most of the women in my family, starts to manifest something before me. I stand very still, trying not to be overwhelmed, waiting for the premonition to pass through me as it does most times.

The morning light pulses and wavers, making each bristle of dark hair on the caterpillar glint and bounce back light. Suddenly, I am somewhere else. The echo is clear as raindrops shimmering on freshly polished black patent-leather shoes, and I am suspended in another time, another space. A light breeze filters through the dead leaves of the mulberry tree, and the caterpillar’s fuzzy hairs tremble. Its soft red belly starts to quiver and palpitate, as if something inside it is trying to push itself out.

Spotted wings, like white oleander blossoms, burst through the caterpillar’s back and almost as quickly desiccate and drop off. Delicate yellow sprouts begin to break through the tender segments of red flesh. They spiral upward and outward, spiky horns that grow and grow. But then the flesh darkens and dulls, and one after another, the black bristles fall off and lie glistening on Alexander’s hand like dark poisoned pine needles, and hundreds of tiny white starving maggots, thin and ­spindly as grass roots, crawl out. They devour the moist innards so fast, so swiftly, it frightens me, and I slap the dead thing out of Alexander’s hand.

The caterpillar goes flying and lands on the corner of the rotting porch. Alexander shrieks and shrinks away from me.

“Grace!” Mercy shouts, reaching for Alexander. “What the hell!”

I look at the caterpillar, but it isn’t decomposing anymore. It writhes and squirms on the far corner of the porch, lifting its head and lolling it side to side. Mercy pushes me aside. She isn’t trying to be mean to me. She just doesn’t understand. She doesn’t have the don, like me and my mother.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I thought it was dead.”

“See? This is what I’m talking about, Grace.” Mercy picks Alexander up and holds him against her shoulder. “You can’t do this. You can’t zone out and then lose it because he gets into something. You’ve got to pay attention!”

Alexander wails and squirms, and Mercy glares at me.

Then you take care of him! I want to scream at her. You make sure he wipes his bottom before he pulls up his pants. You take crickets out of his mouth and chase after him when he’s running after lizards in the yard.

I want to yell, to fight, to make Mercy responsible for the care of her own son. I want to be responsible only for myself — but that would be selfish. It wouldn’t be right. And it definitely wouldn’t be sisterly. We have come so far in mending that broken fence — I just can’t jump to the other side again, so I don’t say anything.

Mercy snaps her fingers in front of my face. “See?” she asks when I look into her big brown eyes. “This is what I’m talking about, Grace. Where did you go? Just now? Where were you?”

Where did you go?

Where?

Where were you?

Where?

The questions roll around in my head, like roiling clouds in my mind. Over and over again. In a strange man’s voice. In my father’s voice. In Abuelita Rosa’s voice. In Mercy’s voice. Again and again and again.

Where did you go?

Where were you?

Where?

Where?

In the darkness. With a merciless light glaring in my eyes. In Mercy’s car. In a police station. In our living room. In my room. Over and over and over again.

Where?

Where?

“I don’t know!” I yell, pressing my palms against my ears to stop the thunderous echo rolling around in my head. Somewhere, far away, a baby cries. Realizing it is Alexander, I open my eyes.

On the sunlit porch before me, Alexander is screaming in Mercy’s arms. Mercy is trying to hush him even as she glowers at me.

“Stop it, Grace!” Mercy hisses. “You’re such a child!”

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, quietly, because even the sound of my own voice hurts my ears when I’ve just had an echo.

But then I see the tiny tears glistening in Alexander’s eyelashes and guilt slices through me, a hot-cold knife that cuts me to the core. I love taking care of Alexander. He is the love of my life. We do everything together. When Mercy isn’t around, we hide under furniture, sing songs, climb trees, and catch chicharras. The fat little tears rolling down my nephew’s cheeks make me ­miserable, and I am undone.

No matter how much Guelita Rosa claims they are a gift, and even when I am able to help others, like the time I told my father Guelita Rosa needed us because she’d fallen in the vegetable garden behind her house, I still hate these stupid echoes. Especially when they come like this morning, one right after the other, without warning. They’re even worse when they are distorted or disconnected and I can’t make sense of them, like these two were, repeating words or phrases that I can’t decipher — questions I can’t answer.

Because, believe me, nobody wants to know where I was three years ago, the summer before Alexander was born, more than I do. But having those stupid questions roll around in my head doesn’t help. I can’t remember where I was, and that troubles me more than it troubles anyone else.

It’s my mind that’s locked — my memories that are lost. This doesn’t have anything to do with my echoes. I’m almost sure of it. It’s an entirely different thing. I want to remember. I do. I just can’t for some reason. Sometimes I wonder, Is this how Cassandra felt when no one would believe her premonitions?

When the police first found me, sitting quietly on a pew in front of our Virgencita inside the Santuario de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, looking filthy and lost as a vagrant, the doctor in the tiny clinic in Piedras Negras had pressed down on my tongue with a huge stick that almost gagged me. He’d pulled and peeked into my ears, listened to my passive heart, checked my pulse, pressed and prodded at my abdomen. But when nothing seemed to bother me, he told my father I was fine and sent me home with a clean bill of health.

“Esta chiflada,” my father told my grandmother that first evening after I arrived, when he couldn’t get anything out of me. “Says she doesn’t remember where she was. A whole week, and she doesn’t remember? I don’t know what to do with her.”

“¿Bueno, y un psiquiatra?” my grandmother had proposed.

“¡Ay, n’ombre!” my father had exclaimed. “I don’t have that kind of money. No. She’s just going to have to live with whatever she was doing out there. God knows, I can barely keep the bills paid these days!”

Somewhere in the midst of that foggy memory, I hear my sister yelling again.

“Guelita!” Mercy hollers, leaning over to look into the house. “Guelita? Can you hear me? I need you to help Grace with Alexander today!”

“I don’t need her help!” I say, shaking myself back to the present. “Stop acting like I’m a moron or something.”

“That’s the problem,” Mercy says, looking at me like I am evidence of everything broken in her world. “You’re smart, but you refuse to step up to the plate. You’d rather live in that little notebook of yours. Writing and drawing all day. When the real work is out here, waiting for you. Guelita!” she yells over me again. “Are you up? I need you. I can’t take the day off again.”

“Please don’t fuss at her,” I say, patting my nephew’s chubby arm. “She’s an old woman. We should be taking care of her. Not the other way around.”

Mercy’s perfectly arched eyebrows furrow over her eyes and she presses her lips, sighs, and then whispers, “Finally. Some common sense.”

“Let me have him,” I say, reaching for Alexander, hovering over him like a bumble bee over the tiny honey­comb cell in her charge. “Please. It’s not like I’ve never done this before. I’ve taken care of him most of his life.”

Mercy hesitates. “Sure?” she asks, fawning over Alexander’s hair and clothes, dusting dirt off the kneepads of his tiny pants.

“Yes. Yes.” I nod and force myself to smile brightly. Because I don’t want her to think that I am anything but ready to take responsibility.

Mercy shakes her head. “Grace. Grace. You’ve got to pay attention,” she says. But then her eyes soften, and she isn’t so angry anymore. “I’m not mad at you. I’m not. You understand that, don’t you? I just need you to watch every move he makes. Okay?”

“I will,” I assure her. Relieved. “You don’t have to worry about it. I love him. I wouldn’t let anything —”

“Here,” Mercy interrupts, releasing her hold on Alexander and handing him over quickly. “I don’t have time to wait for Guelita to wake up. I’m already late. Carmen’s going to kill me!”

“Come on, baby,” I coo at Alexander, who comes willingly into my arms.

Mercy caresses his curly, dark hair and places a kiss on his forehead. “Play with him,” she pleads. “And for God’s sake, stay inside. It’s already hot as hell out here.”

“You hear that, Alexander?” I say, hoisting my nephew onto my hip. “No ’side-’side today. Okay? We’re staying indoors, like Mami says.”

Alexander turns and twists his little body in my arms, squirming and pointing at something on the ground. I turn away from Mercy and see that he’s watching intently as the caterpillar inches itself across the porch, away from the railing.

“Okay, I’m off. Give Mami a kiss,” Mercy says, pushing her red Coach purse high up on her shoulder again so she can lean over and kiss Alexander. “Thanks for watching him this summer. You’re a good sister,” she says. “I trust you — you know that — but if anything happens to him, I’ll gut you like one of those frogs in science lab.”

“Thanks,” I say. “Thank you for that lovely image. Now go. You don’t want to get fired, remember?”

I watch Mercy step off the porch and sprint across the lawn toward her car in her red high-heeled shoes, the ones she bought at seventy percent off. Who runs in high heels? I ask myself, shaking my head. A fashion victim, that’s who. Because that is the best way I can describe my sister. She is a victim of our social climate, dancing on the edge of a precipice while I try coaxing her to safer ground.

Although I can’t understand her, I love my sister. It took us a long time, almost two years, to get back to this place of understanding, this place where differences of opinion are not worth fighting over. Things are still not perfect, no sisterhood ever is, but our contentious relationship has reached an eddy, a gentle push and pull of emotions that we are both willing to wade in from time to time.

Our words are kinder when we criticize each other. We are more aware of the things we say. It is hard to live with her in this house, where broken dreams share space with reality, and grief and suffering linger in the darkness and come out at night to lose themselves in decay, like leopard moths mating in the summer heat.

My mother’s unsolved murder caused us all a great deal of pain. It baffled the police and wounded everyone in my family when it happened, but my mother’s senseless killing more than hurts me.

It haunts me.

Mercy looks worriedly up at the sky, then turns back to me. She points to a group of white clouds drifting inconspicuously to the east of us and I shake my head and roll my eyes. There is no chance of rain. She is worry­ing about nothing, like always.

I hold Alexander tightly in my arms, but he kicks and fusses until I relent. He likes standing on his own two feet.

“Here, hold my hand,” I say, putting him down. Alexander stands still beside me and watches Mercy getting into the Beast, a baby-blue 1991 Oldsmobile Cutlass Calais with a gray interior that smells of Mercy’s expensive perfume and flavored-coffee stains. The rusted monster is left over from Mercy’s abusive relationship with Jose Valdez, the ex-husband from Hades who used to get drunk and beat her often, para sosiégarla, to remind her that he was the boss in the house — our house!

Thank God my father finally put an end to that!

“Wave — Mami?” Alexander asks when he sees Mercy buckling her seat belt inside the car. I nod, watching him lift his chubby little arm for the big goodbye that has become part of his morning ritual this summer.

Things are going to be different in the fall. Once Mercy and I start community college, we’ll have to take turns watching him while the other one attends class. Then, once Alexander is older, we’ll go off to a university. Mercy can study textiles and apparel, and I’ll finally get to work on a degree in graphic design from the University of Texas.

So far, we are all set. Mercy finally helped me fill out her application for financial aid at the annex at Southwest Texas Junior College, ...