About Grace (18 page)

In the evenings he sat with the butcher and unburdened himself. Furtive meetings with Sandy, leaving Alaska, the birth of Grace. Describing Anchorage or Cleveland brought those places back: the look of the Chagrin River rumbling brown and heavy beneath a bridge; the awful lurch of an Anchorage city bus on ice. All during the days, at unexpected moments, images—Sandy folding a sweater, or his father wheeling a dolly of milk crates—would seep in front of his eyes, as if by cracking the door on recollection, he was unable to shut it again, and now memories that had been staved off for years were shoving their way out.

And indeed in the fringes of sleep he was often back in his old life—a school bus turning into the middle school parking lot; yellow leaves hung up in a chain-link fence; Sandy's face beneath the high, blue light of the Fourth Avenue Theater. For long, tentative moments, just after waking, it would be as though he'd never left, and he often wondered if, in some divergent world, he hadn't—if he lived in Ohio still, staking tomato plants in the backyard, the Newport rusting in the driveway, the river slipping innocently past the end of the street.

He filled a third notebook with sketches and disjointed findings cribbed from books.

Our entire bodies, flooded with water, are governed by electricity. Bring any two molecules close enough together and they will repel each other. We cannot ever touch each other, not really. We repel at a
distance. Actual touch
—
real contact
—
is not possible. A fistfight, one person lifting another, even sexual intercourse
—
what you feel is only electrical repulsion, maybe a few thousand molecules sloughing off your skin. Even our own bodies are not cohesive. Photons pass through our eyeballs, through the webbing of our fingers.

He began to dream of snow: ice glazing a parking meter; slush in the treads of Sandy's boots. There was the feeling of turning up blinds and seeing the whiteness of everything—snow on fence posts, snow limning branches—a banquet of light. He thought of his mother, and the way the mountains looked from the rooftop of his childhood: shimmering, insubstantial as ghosts.

He sat in the alley with only the light of the butcher's cigarette and the pale, reflected glow from the street lamps on the far wall. “You know why I left the States? You really want to know?” The butcher grunted. His hands smelled of bleach.

“I dreamed I was going to inadvertently kill my own daughter trying to save her from a flood.”

The butcher nodded. “And did you?”

“No. But I may have left her to die. I may have left her to drown in our house.”

“But you were not there when she drowned. You did not see her drowned.”

“No. I fled. I came here.”

Something rustled in the pile of boxes beside their chairs, then fell silent. The butcher carefully stretched his back. “You still don't see it?”

“See what?”

He shook his head. “This woman. Across the street. What did you dream when you dreamed her in the water?”

“I dreamed she would drown.”

“But did she?”

“No.”

The butcher inhaled and the tip of his cigarette flared and in the
sudden light his features were antic and strange. “Maybe this is because you changed it. You altered it. Maybe you changed the dream with your daughter, as you did with the girl across the street. Now do you see?” He flicked away his cigarette and it fizzled in a puddle.

“But my wife sent a letter.”

“And said your daughter is dead?”

“No. Well. No, she did not say that.”

Suddenly Winkler was standing, backing against the wall.

“So you see it then,” the butcher said. He passed a hand over his thin scrub of hair. “You see.”

But Winkler was already clanging up the stairs, in the hot, frog-loud night.

Hope was a sunrise, a friend in an alley, a whisper in an empty corridor. All night he stayed awake, pacing, making notes, going to the window. It felt as if a last lock had ruptured: the hinges were giving way; light was rushing in.

In his fingers he could feel Grace's forearm, bonelessly soft. He smelled her: the smell of a crushed maple leaf; he remembered that Sandy could vacuum beneath the crib and still Grace would not wake. And the crib itself—enameled metal, the feeling of the screws in his fingers as he'd assembled it…If she had lived, if she had lived. The phrase vibrated dangerously in his brain. If she had lived, she could right now stroll down Market Street and he would not know it. That very day he had passed a half dozen possibilities: a newlywed strolling the beach, another paddling a rented kayak slowly across the harbor. A blonde with plump, sunburned calves examining lemons at the market; a freckled redhead turning magazine pages on a hotel balcony. Was one of them Grace? Was it so impossible? A woman now, a wife, a tourist who swam the breaststroke in a resort pool, or held hands with an overloud car salesman, or ordered carrot sticks from Felix's kitchen?

The rich, sudden smell of Sandy's hair—the smell of metal in it, tin or lead—used to stay on his fingers all day. The way she rubbed her
feet together even as she slept; the way she would pull hairs from her hairbrush and drop them onto the floor of the bathroom instead of into the trash—it was as if all these memories had been hibernating in him, not dead but merely dormant, weathering it out, and now they stumbled out of their thousand dens.

The butcher had said: “Now do you see?” He scrambled for a notebook.

I have not seen snow since 1977. But now, in my mind, I see it perfectly: Flurries swirling through the beam of a street lamp. Like tiny dried flowers. Like a million insects. Like angels descending.

David
—

You were right about this city. It is gray and bleak, but also beautiful in many ways. I especially love the lakes. The other day I brought my lunch to Lake Hood and watched the float planes land and take off-
—
over a hundred in a single afternoon.

I'm studying insects now. Their similarities to shrimps are astounding. The work is not as hard as I expected, and I'm doing better (I think) than most of the others. Next winter there is an opportunity to study cold weather insects in the north. I hope to go, but Professor Houseman says it will he difficult and very cold, too cold for someone from such a warm place. What does he know? I trust you are well. Hi to everyone.

He went to sea one last time in a rowboat. He lay across the thwarts and felt the water raise the boat and set it back down, and stared at the sky a long time.

The day he left for college his father had waited on the landing, a string of smoke rising from a cigarette in his fingers. What had they said to each other? Maybe a good-bye, maybe nothing. Winkler had set down his cardboard box of books and grasped his father's hand. After his mother had died, he and his father lived together like timid roommates, almost strangers, never touching, speaking softly over meals about nothing important. Each evening his father sat in his chair and smoked and read the
Anchorage Daily News
cover to cover.
This was how he had finished out his days: brokenhearted; smoke suspended around him like grief; settling into the rituals of newspaper stories—lost hunters, plane crashes, basketball scores—wheeling dollies of milk into the backs of stores.

He turned the boat and rowed back. The sun was over Soufrière and the sea was drenched with light. He paused a minute and feathered the oars and let them drip.

The passport had taken two months. After that it went quickly. He booked a ticket, returned his library books, told the butcher he'd be moving out. He visited Nanton, and they stood on the porch sipping tea, saying nothing much, and when his mug was empty Nanton nodded and went back inside to tend to a guest.

Fifty-nine years old and what had he accumulated? Two dozen pieces of staghorn coral, each smaller than the next. His nerite shells from the windowsill of the shed. A pair of avocado seedlings in ceramic pots. A couple towels, a couple sets of clothes. In Kingstown he went to a tailor and ordered a two-button suit, gray with high-notched lapels. He bought two white shirts and a nylon duffel bag. At the bank he withdrew his savings and exchanged the currency, $6,047 U.S., his life's savings.

The night before he was to leave, a uniformed driver knocked on his door and said a car was waiting. In the street the butcher stood smiling. “On me,” he said. The driver took Winkler to the ferry, which brought him the six miles across the channel. At the inn Nanton led him across the rope bridge to the restaurant. “Your friend,” he said. “He wanted to do this.”

A table was set with linen and a single votive. Felix brought out chicken and slips of eggplant fried crisp. “One of Soma's birds,” he said. He stood beside Winkler, sipping a short glass of rum. Afterward they led him to a room where he lay down for the night on a king-sized poster bed with mosquito netting and a ceiling fan.

In the morning he shaved in the porcelain sink mounted on the bathroom wall—a sink he himself had installed twenty-three years
before. He dressed in his new suit, distributed his money into his shoes and each of his pockets. Then he made the bed, collected his duffel, and went through the lobby, across the glass floor. From the porch he peered out at the lagoon and grounds one more time. Tacit good-byes: the reef, the shed, the breadfruit tree.

He walked to Soma and Felix's, climbing through the sheep paddock and stepping carefully over the fence so as not to catch his pants on the wire. At the top he paused and peered back down into the cove where the lobby of the inn stood on its stanchions in the early light. It looked like an architectural model down there, idealized and small, nestled into the cove, something close to how Nanton had probably always wanted it to look. Then he descended the grassy field to the blue house with its crack running through the center and the tiny boats crowding the sills. Soma was in the doorway. She folded her arms around him.

“You can come back.”

He nodded. They separated; she fished a handkerchief from a back pocket and blew into it.

Behind her shoulder Felix smiled. “Ready?”

“Before you go,” Soma said, “I have something.” She set a wristwatch into his hand—his watch.

He turned it over in his hands. “You saved this?”

“You still owe me for a phone call.”

Winkler smiled. “We can take you across,” Felix said. Soma stood beside him with her arms crossed over her chest.

“I'd rather take the ferry.”

“We'll take you.”

“No,” Winkler said. “Thank you.”

They stood a moment longer, in the kitchen, Soma with her big crucifix lying atop her blouse and Felix with his hands folded over his belly, the smells of that kitchen and the eggs stacked on the counters and the old picnic table and the hens outside and the tradewinds muscling through the window screens all suddenly and plainly obvious to Winkler—all this family's thousand kindnesses, their own expulsion still not finished, their haunting, perhaps, more permanent than his own.

Before he left, Felix gave him a pair of meat pies, wrapped in newspaper. His last image was of the pair of them standing at the gate, a dozen or so hens like shadows scratching in the dust around their feet.

The ferry ride across the channel was like a film running in reverse. From the stern he watched the jetty recede, and the small pastel shapes of the fishermen's pirogues, and the ferry churned and shifted slightly and thirty or so scuba tanks stacked along the stern rang against one another as the diesel pushed through the gap in the reef, past the big combers to the east, past the two lonesome channel markers, their bottom halves crusted white.

Flight attendants collected cups and newspapers; passengers levered their seats forward. From the window he watched the city of Miami assemble itself: antennas and rooftops gliding into view, two trucks like toys curling through a freeway exit, a green band of smog hovering over the shoreline. A crowded marina scrolled past, each boat's windshield in turn reflecting the sun.

From the wing came the whine of flaps threading down. The runway whisked beneath them; the wheels touched, a slight jolting, and their bodies tilted forward as the airplane decelerated.

Beside him the woman clapped her novel shut and tucked it into the leather bag between her feet. Without turning to him, she said, “When you got on, you saw the bin wasn't latched. That's all.”

The jet taxied into its gate. Passengers stood, yawned, hauled bags out from overhead compartments. “I—” he began.

“You could have at least relatched it. Now Dirk's martini glasses are all ruined.”

He pretended to busy himself with magazines in the seat pocket in front of him. The woman and Dirk pushed into the aisle. The frost on the window, Winkler saw, had softened to water. He had meant to watch it change.

In the terminal he waited for his connection and scanned commuters as they rushed past, families, businessmen. There was a certain transparency to them, tides of human beings washing back and forth, and to what end? An enormous woman settled into the seat next to
him, pulled a cinnamon roll from a wax paper bag, and put half of it in her mouth.

Our bodies are water, too,
he wrote in his pad.
Our skin and eyeballs. Even the parts we think will last: fingernails, bones, hair. All of us. It's no wonder doctors keep it in intravenous bags, at the ready. We are dust only after all our water evaporates.

On the flight to Cleveland he sat by the window and grappled with a slow and unyielding nausea. States slipped beneath: Georgia, North Carolina, West Virginia, low hills broken by the geometric quilting of fields. The sky darkened toward violet. Platoons of cumuli ascended past the window, each shot through with light.

An airport hotel in Cleveland. A hot shower, condensation on the mirror. He lay on the coverlet watching steam roll out of the bathroom and dissipate into the room.

Every few minutes a jet landed or took off, quaking the window glass. Soon a thin, almost granular light seeped through the curtain. If he had slept at all he was not aware of it. He dressed in his suit and went to the lobby and paged through a newspaper (the president denying rumors of war; Asian smog clouds threatening millions; home sales up, prices down), heading for the classifieds.

Only one of the lobby payphones accepted coins. A local call cost 30 cents. He dialed a number and an hour later a boy and his father were in the parking lot walking Winkler around their Datsun. “Most of the miles are highway,” the father said. “Got a nice Sporty clutch. Good brakes. Just rust-proofed it.”

Winkler tried to remember what was expected of him. He nudged a tire with the toe of his shoe; he checked the odometer—110,000 miles.

“Fine,” he said, and ran a finger over the hood. “I'll take it.” Eight hundred dollars. He pulled the bills from his pocket and folded them into the boy's palm and the father signed over the title and all three of them shook hands and the car was Winkler's.

He checked out of the hotel, took his packet of nerite shells from
his duffel, and aligned them in front of the speedometer largest to smallest. A memory of his old Newport rose: the smell of vinyl, the feel of the starter grinding against the cold. That expanse of hood stretched out in front of him, reflecting sky.

It was August 2002. He didn't have a driver's license, didn't have insurance. With a magnifying glass he studied a road map left in the glovebox. A convulsion of freeways. He eased the key into the ignition, cranked it, and the car gasped to life.