About Grace (17 page)

Thunder, a sound like furniture being dragged across the sky. He hauled himself up from his sheet on the floor, put on his glasses, and went to the window. Lightning ran on in the twilight, flaring mostly in the clouds, but a few fingers dropped now and then to touch the hillsides above town. The power to the street lamps had been knocked out and in the blue, vaporous light he could just see the tossing crowns of palms and the rearing black arcs of utility wires. Lightning strobed close by and Naaliyah's building stood small and bright for a moment, its windows and decaying facade, before it was sucked back into shadow.

Wind threw sand and leaves and plastic bags down the street. He unlatched the window and let the first raindrops blow over the sill. In his imagination he could hear trees on the hills stretching to catch the water, roots perking, trunks leaning, leaves reaching out. Up the street a shutter pushed open and someone cranked in her clothesline. A few people—little more than shadows—stepped from doorways and held up their palms, gaping at the sky. After a minute or two the tile around his feet was wet, and he drew the shutters.

In the hospital the whole family had showed up, Felix and Soma and the three boys, and the doctor said Naaliyah was fine, no lung or chest complications, just sore ribs, just shock. She was discharged that night. Nobody asked him how he had been there. Felix shook his hand. Soma hugged him a long time. His clothes left wet marks on her dress.

Now the wind stilled and the rain came harder and he retreated inside and listened to it thrum on the roof and let sleep come over him.

The following afternoon Soma walked with him down Back Street and together they stood at the quay beside a vast produce warehouse watching the rumbling queue of farmers' trucks and the athletic pivots of loaders as they passed crates of bananas down a human chain. Behind them, in the market, a nutmeg merchant collapsed his umbrella and shook its water into the runnels.

“What now?” Soma said.

He glanced at her face, the wide, planarian-shaped nose, the light brown cheeks, the skin freckled lightly over her cheekbones. Nanton had cleaned out the shed at the inn and was now storing the riding mower there. The new groundskeeper, Felix said, was a teenager from Kingstown who brought friends in there to smoke marijuana.

“I've been thinking about work,” Winkler said. Out in the harbor a few unrigged sailboats bobbed at their moorings, and halyards chimed against their metal masts, a sound like church bells. “Not for Nanton, but here on St. Vincent.”

Soma turned to him and let her arm rest on his shoulder. He pivoted slightly, and was embraced, the warm column of her body, the thin cotton of her dress, the sweet, living smell of her neck.

For a desk he unhinged the bathroom door and laid it across two waxy boxes used for shipping beef. The first days it was a notebook and pencil, but soon it was out in the streets, on the switchbacked paths above the town, even as far north as the slopes of Soufrière. He started with descriprions of water, or sketches; he'd crouch over a rivulet running from the forest into the sea: the braided channels, driving miniature landslides of sand before them—the way the surface of the water flashed and stretched in the wind, the way it poured on, seemingly endless.

In the afternoons he walked to Kingstown's only library, an antique
two-story gingerbread with books stacked on every available piece of furniture and trade winds stirring everything on the second floor so that, after particularly strong gusts, the place fluttered wildly with papers.

There were so many things he had not known: researchers with remote-controlled submersibles had found sea life two miles deep, beside volcanic vents called black smokers—and not just microbes, either, but meter-long worms, clams as big as hubcaps. There were new phenomena, thousands of them: global climate change, reservoir pollution, rising sea levels. Physicists theorized that a trillion subatomic particles called neutrinos passed through a person's body every second—through a body, its bones, the nuclei of its cells, and out again, into the ground, into the core of the earth, out the other side, and back on into space. There were older notions, too: FitzRoy, captain of Darwin's
Beagle,
pored through fossil beds of mollusks determined to find evidence for Noah's global flood. An Englishman named Conway argued that sparrows left farm ponds in autumn not for warmer climates, but for the moon.

Were they so wrong? Who was to say their guesses were any less applicable than the theories of scientists who strapped radio collars onto geese? They were all aspirations toward the same unknowable truths.

Gates were creaking open inside him—paths, long sealed off, revealed themselves once more. He would write a book. He would write a treatise on water, a natural history of it: it would be new and popular and fascinating; it would be the
Double Helix
of water. He would start small, with the attraction between hydrogen and oxygen atoms. This would in turn illuminate everything else, glaciers and ocean and clouds—what had he been doing for so long at Nanton's inn?

He filled one notebook, started another. Every day he could feet whole segments of himself waking. The sight of the sea just after dawn was enough to make him stand and watch for an hour. Boobies chased one another across the reef line; light touched the tops of the swells; shadows shrunk in the troughs. He lay on his back in a buzzing, abandoned cane field and watched cumulus bloom, growing across seventy miles of sky, a movement so slow you could hardly observe it, a gargantuan
puffing, a heart-pulling tumescence. He ate dinner at Soma and Felix's; he shared a cigarette with Naaliyah's dreadlocked boyfriend. He saw Naaliyah herself only occasionally, running up the stairs to her apartment, or running down, toting a sheaf of papers, a bag of groceries, but to see her brought a quickening to his pulse, and he found he could not keep himself from smiling.

In the evenings he'd sit in the alley with the butcher, a small, very black-skinned man with shiny forearms and improbably delicate hands. He smoked and rebladed his saws and told Winkler stories about the 1902 eruption of Soufrière that killed 1,600 islanders, or how his grandfather would kill pigs with a ball-peen hammer. “One whack,” he said. “Back of the neck. Over and over. All day, every Friday.” He pronounced “Friday” like “Frey-dee.”

Winkler would wake at midnight with his mind active, revving high, and scribble sentences into his notebook:
Do starfish grow old?
Or:
Water, impossibly, is in the sun
—
a wreath of steam, unfathomably hot, floats around the corona.

In June, Naaliyah appeared on the iron stairwell outside his door. She was wearing a rubber raincoat and her legs were like tan sticks between the hem and the tops of her boots. Mist rolled on the landing behind her. She smiled. “Got an hour?”

She led him to the institute and they stood a moment on the pier looking down at the launches bobbing and clattering lightly in the dark. She chose a larger boat, stacked as usual with wire traps in the bow. A winch stood on scaffolding over the stern. The anchor, he noticed, was brand-new, an aluminum trefoil with symmetrical flukes, set into the bow.

Wordlessly, she lowered the motor and steered them clear of the last pilings. He could not help the fear from starting: something would capsize them and she would be trapped again in the chain and drowned. But he had dreamed nothing and the day felt new and unportentous. All around them the sea glided past black and glassy. Moisture in the air condensed on his forehead and hands.

She found a gap in the coral benches that headed the harbor and maneuvered north. They passed beaches Winkler knew, the island sliding past dark and silent beneath the noise of the motor, to a place he had never seen, where the shoreline was rocky and beachless, crenellated cliffs beneath an unbroken forest. The water here was pocked with buoys. She eased the throttle and let them drift.

“Eels,” she said, as she clambered to the stern and reached for a green buoy with a long gaff. “For one of the professors.” She caught the buoy line in the gaff hook, pulled the launch closer, and snapped an eyelet at the end of the tine through a carabiner on the winch. The unclipped buoy she tossed into the bow. Then she threw a switch, the drum turned, and the line began to coil. “He's studying some photochemical in them. He thinks it might help in human neurology. Something like that.”

Winkler felt his way to the stern to watch. The cable tightened; a deep boil rose. A dark cloud, flecked with silver, bloomed in the surface water. Tiny white crabs clung to the line, hauled up from the depths, blind, hanging on. As the crabs reached the surface, each slipped off in turn and floated back down in slow spirals. Haze drifted over the water. The launch rose and fell. The sound of the winch groaned out into the fog, on and on.

Eventually a trap came into view, abruptly visible from the deep green, rising past the descending flurry of crabs, and it broke the surface and Naaliyah switched off the winch, swung the trap over the stern, and emptied it onto the deck. A few fish and a dozen eels writhed around her boots. She rebaited the trap with sardines, clipped it to a new buoy, and swung it overboard.

Winkler retreated into the bow and listened to the eels, like sleeves of muscle, slap the boards. The fog washed down, thick and otherworldly, a trillion minute beads. The great unbroken swaths of trees on the flanks of the volcano seemed impossibly still. Birds—jaegers, maybe—wheeled in slow, primitive circles.

Naaliyah stood with her hands on the stern, looking east. The sun was flaring suddenly in a rift of cloud. Around her boots the eels flopped and writhed. “How many times does a person get to see this?” she asked. “Maybe twenty? Ten?” She leaned over the bulwark and filled a bucket with seawater and set it at her feet and looked out at the swells. “And yet it all seems infinite.”

Winkler shook his head. “Not to me.”

She flipped the fish overboard, then gathered the slick eels with both hands and stowed them in the bucket, where they popped and seethed. He watched her arms as she worked, thin and brown; he could see the lean strength in them. When she had emptied three traps, she peered into the plastic bucket and said, as if addressing the eels, “I got a letter. Yesterday. From the University of Alaska in Anchorage.”

A swell passed under them and he clutched a cleat in the gunwale.

She looked at him. “Don't you want to know what it said?”

“If you want to tell me.”

“They accepted me. With a tuition waiver.”

He shook his head. Another swell came in beneath them. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you.” She leaned over and braced her hands on the rim of the bucket. “Thank you for everything.”

Nanton let them use the inn. Felix was in rare form, sprinting through the kitchen with a ladle in one hand and a pair of tongs in the other, grilling snapper, stewing plantains, producing plates of ginger cookies, bowls of chutneys and pigeon peas, banana bread, steamed whelks.

Maybe forty people came. Naaliyah's boyfriend, Chici, plucked an electric bass in the corner and sang island songs with a girlish voice. The three boys were there, drinking coladas and smiling behind their sunglasses, two of them with dark, handsome girlfriends. Tourists gathered at corner tables, tapping their feet. Even Nanton came out for a while, sitting nervously and sipping ginger ale through a straw, nodding at whoever nodded at him, periodically brushing something invisible from his suit.

Naaliyah smiled and touched the arms of guests, the priest from St. Paul's, girlhood friends and their husbands. Winkler sat for dinner beside Dr. Meyer, who proved to be a cordial and soft-spoken man.

“Naaliyah tells me you are a hydrologist.”

“I was,” Winkler said. “Years ago.”

“You don't work anymore?”

“I've been doing some reading. But I have not worked seriously in along time.”

Meyer nodded. He took a bite carefully with his plastic fork and wiped his mouth.

Winkler ventured further. “I was thinking about writing. Maybe a book, something for a wider audience.”

“It's never so late you can't start again.”

“I suppose not,” Winkler said.

Later, after dessert and toasts, he walked the beach and watched the reflections of table lights play across the lagoon. Chici was still singing softly and his voice carried over the water. Someone was dancing on the deck—Soma, perhaps, her thin arms swaying back and forth like ropes.

Three days later he stood in the street in front of the butcher's to say good-bye to Naaliyah. The boys were there, and Felix in his cook's whites, and Soma. Chici had borrowed a truck and stood leaning against its fender, smoking a cigarette and periodically tapping its ashes against the edge of his sandal. The sky was huge and blue. Naaliyah wore a pair of canvas shorts, a tank top. Her hands worked over a trio of suitcases a hundred times.

Felix beamed as he produced a giant box sheathed in newspaper and ribbon. “What is this?” Soma asked. Felix winked.

Naaliyah removed the frangipani tucked under the bow and folded back the newspaper and opened the box. “Oh!” she said. She hauled out the contents: a puffy blue parka. The brothers laughed.

She pulled the coat over her bare arms and spun in it a few times. Chici pitched her bags into the flatbed. “Thank you, Papa,” she said. Her mother looked away.

Winkler offered his present: a glass bottle, filled with seawater and stoppered. “So you don't forget what it's like at home,” he said. She thanked him, tucked the bottle into a bag. Finally she made her way down the line, hugging her brothers, her mother. She finished with Winkler. “Come see me,” she said.

He held on, the smell of her hair in his nose.

“I'll write. I'll miss you,” she called. “I'll miss you all!” Then she was stepping into the cab, still wearing her oversized blue parka, and Chici was easing the truck out, up the black road, and they watched it get smaller and turn onto Bay Street, and she was gone.