About Grace (3 page)

“You could,” he said.

“I could.”

Every night now—it was January and dark by 4 
P.M
.
—he pulled on his big parka and drew the hood tight and drove past her house. He'd start at the end of the block, then troll back up, the hedges coming up on his left, the curb-parked cars with their hoods ajar to allow extension cords into the frost plugs, the Newport slowing until he'd come to a stop alongside their driveway.

By nine-thirty each night, her lights began to go off: first in the windows at the far right, then the room next to it, then the lamp behind the curtains to the left, at ten o'clock sharp. He'd imagine her passage through the dark rooms, following her with his eyes, down the hall, past the bathroom, into what must have been the bedroom, where she'd climb into bed with
him.
At last only the tall backyard light would glow, white tinged with blue, all the parked cars drawing energy from the houses around them, the plugs clicking on and off, and above the neighborhood the air would grow so cold it seemed to glitter and flex—as if it were solidifying—and he'd get the feeling that someone could reach down and shatter the whole scene.

Only with great effort could he get his foot to move to the accelerator. He'd drive to the end of the block, turn up the heater, roll alone through the frozen darkness across town.

“It's not that he's awful or anything,” Sandy whispered once, in the middle of
Logan's Run.
“I mean, he's nice. He's good. He loves me. I can do pretty much whatever I want. It's just sometimes I look into the kitchen cupboards, or at his suits in the closet, and think: This is it?”

Winkler blinked. It was the most she'd said during a movie.

“I feel like I've been turned inside out is all. Like I've got huge manacles on my arms. Look”—she grabbed her forearm and raised it—”I can hardly lift them they're so heavy. But other times I get to feeling so light it's as if I'll float to the ceiling and get trapped up there like a balloon.”

The darkness of the movie theater was all around them. On-screen a robot showed off some people frozen in ice. In the ceiling the little bulbs that were supposed to be stars burned in their little niches.

Sandy whispered: “I get happy sometimes for the younger gals at work, when they find love, after all that stumbling around, when they've found their guy and get to talking about weddings during break, then babies, and I can see them outside smoking and staring out at the traffic, and I know they're probably not a hundred percent happy. Not all-the-way happy. Maybe seventy percent happy. But they're living it. They're not giving up.

“I've just been feeling everything too much. I don't know. Can you feel things too much, David?”

“Yes.”

“I shouldn't tell you any of this. I shouldn't tell you anything.”

The film had entered a chase sequence and the varying colors of a burning city strobed across Sandy's eyeglasses. She closed her eyes.

“Thing is,” she whispered, “Herman doesn't have any sperm. We got him tested a few years ago. He has none. Or basically none; no good ones. When they called, they gave the results to me. I never told him. I told him they said he was fine. I tore up their letter and brought the little scraps to work and hid them at the bottom of a trash can in the ladies' bathroom.”

On-screen Logan careened down a crowded street. Suits in the closet, Winkler thought. The guy with the birthmark?

In his memory he could traverse months in a second. He imagined Herman crouched like a crab on the ice, guarding the net, slapping his glove against his big leg pads, his teammates swirling around the rink. He imagined Sandy leaning over him, the tips of her hair dragging over his face. He stood outside their house on Marilyn Street and above the city, streamers of auroras—reds and purples and greens—glided like souls into the firmament.

Now a soft hail—lump graupels—flew from the clouds. He opened all his windows, turned off the furnace, and let it blow in, angling through the frames, the tiny balls rolling and eddying on the carpet.

Near the middle of March she lay beside him in the darkness with a single candle burning on his sill. Out beyond the window a trash collector tossed the frozen contents of a trash can into the maw of his truck and Winkler and Sandy listened to it clatter and compress and the fading rumble as the truck receded down the street. It was around five and all through the city, people were ending their workdays, mail carriers delivering their last envelopes, accountants paying one more invoice, bankers sealing their vaults. Tumblers finding their grooves.

“You ever just want to go?” she whispered. “Go, go, go?”

Winkler nodded. Without her glasses, that close to his face, her eyes looked trapped, closer to how they had looked in the supermarket, standing at a revolving rack of magazines but trembling inside; her whole body, its trillions of cells, quivering invisibly, threatening to shake apart. He had dreamed her. Hadn't she dreamed him, too?

“I should tell you something,” he said. “About that day we met in the market.”

She rolled onto her back. In five minutes, maybe six, she would leave, and he told himself he would pay attention to every passing second, the pulse in her forearm, the pressure of her knee against his thigh. The thousand pores in the side of her nose. In the frail light he could see her boots on the frayed rug, her clothes folded neatly beside.

He would tell her. Now he would tell her. I dreamed you, he'd say. Sometimes I have these dreams.

“I'm pregnant,” she said.

The flame of the candle on the sill twisted and righted.

“David? Did you hear me?”

She was looking at him now.

“Pregnant,” he said, but at first it was only a word.

He parked the Newport in a drive-up lane and tugged a deposit slip from the slot.

Can you get away?

No.

Only for an hour?

He could just make her out through the drive-up window, wearing a big-collared sweater, her head down, her hand writing. The pneumatic tube clattered and howled.

This is not the time, David. Please. Wednesday.

Between them was fifteen or so feet of frozen space, bounded by his window and hers, but it was as if the windows had liquefied, or else the air had, and his vision skewed and rippled and it was all he could do to put the Newport into gear and ease forward to let the next car in.

He couldn't work, couldn't sleep, couldn't leave her alone. He went by the house every night, patrolling Marilyn Street, up and back, up and back, until one midnight a neighbor came out with a snow shovel and flagged him down and asked if he was missing something.

In Sandy's backyard the one blue street lamp shivered. The Chrysler started away slowly, with reluctance, as if it, too, couldn't bear to leave her.

Each time the office phone rang, adrenaline streamed into his blood. “Winkler,” the supervisor said, waving a sheaf of teletype forecasts.
“These are atrocious. There are probably fifty typos in today's series alone.” He looked him up and down. “Are you sick or something?”

Yes! he wanted to cry. Yes! So sick! He walked to First Federal at lunch but she wasn't at her station. The teller in the station to the right studied him with her head cocked as if assessing the validity of his concern and finally said Sandy was home with the flu and could she help him instead?

The banker with the birthmark was on the phone. The gray-haired one was talking with a man and a woman, leaning forward in his chair. “No,” Winkler said. On the way out he scanned the nameplates on the desks but even with his glasses on couldn't make out a name, a title, any of it.

She came to the door wearing flannel pajamas printed all over with polar bears on toboggans. Something about her standing in her doorway barefoot started a buzzing all through his chest.

“What are you doing here?”

‘They said you were sick.”

“How did you know where I live?”

He looked across the street to where the other houses were shuttered against the cold. Heat escaping from the hall blurred the air.

“Sandy—”

“You walked?”

“Are you okay?”

She stayed in the doorway, squinting out. He realized she was not going to invite him in. “I threw up,” she said. “But I feel fine.”

“You look pale.”

“Yes. Well. So do you. Breathe, David. Take a breath.”

Her feet were turning white in the cold. He wanted to fall to his knees and take them in his hands. “How is this going to work, Sandy? What are we going to do?”

“I don't know. What are we supposed to do?”

“We could go somewhere. Anywhere. We could go to California, like you said. We could go to Mexico. You could become whatever you wanted.”

Her eyes followed an Oldsmobile as it passed slowly down the
street, snow squeaking beneath its tires. “Not now, David.” She shook her head. “Not in front of my house.”

March ended. Community hockey ended. She consented to meet him for coffee. In the cafe her head periodically swiveled on her shoulders, checking back through the window as if she had ducked a pursuer. He brushed snow off her coat: stellar dendrites. Storybook snow.

“You haven't been at the bank.”

She shrugged. A line of meltwater sped down one lens of her glasses. The waitress brought coffee and they sat over the mugs and Sandy didn't speak.

He said: “I grew up over there, across the street. From the roof, when it was very clear, you could see half the peaks of the Alaska Range. You could pick out individual glaciers on McKinley. Sometimes I'd go up there just to look at it, all that untouched snow. All that light.”

She glanced again toward the window and he could not tell if she was listening. It struck him as strange that she could look pretty much how she always looked, her waist could still slip neatly into her jeans, the blood vessels in her cheeks could still dilate and fill with color, yet inside her something they'd made had implanted into the wall of her uterus, maybe the size of a grape by now, or a thumb, dividing its cells like mad, siphoning from her whatever it needed.

“What I really love is snow,” he said. “To look at it. I used to go up there with my mother and collect snow and we'd study it with magnifying glasses.” Still she did not look up. Snow pressed at the shop window. “I've never been with anyone, you know. I don't even have any friends, not really.”

“I know, David.”

“I've hardly even left Anchorage.”

She nodded and braced both hands around her cup.

“I applied for jobs last week,” he said. “All over the country.”

She spoke to her coffee. “What if I hadn't been in that grocery store? What if I had decided to go two hours earlier? Or two minutes?”

“We can leave, Sandy.”

“David.” Her boots squeaked beneath the table. “I'm thirty-four years old. I've been married for fifteen and a half years.”

Bells slung over the door handle jangled and two men came in and stamped snow from their shoes. Winkler's eyeballs were starting to throb. Fifteen and a half years was incontestable, a continent he'd never visit, a staircase he'd never climb. “The supermarket,” he was saying. “We met in the supermarket.”

She stopped showing up at the bank. She did not pick up the phone at her house. He'd dial her number all day and in the evenings Herman Sheeler would answer with an enthused, half-shouted “Hello?” and Winkler, across town, cringing in his apartment, would gently hang up.

He trolled Marilyn Street. Wind rolled in from the inlet, cold and salty.

Rain, and more rain. All day the ground snow melted and all night it froze. Winter broke, and solidified, and broke again. Out in the hills, moose were stirring, and foxes, and bears. Fiddleheads were nudging up. Birds coursed in from their southern fields. Winkler lay in his little bed after midnight and burned.

At a welding supply store he compiled a starter kit: a Clarke arc welder; a wire brush; tin snips; a chipping hammer; welder's gloves, apron, and helmet; spools of steel, aluminum, and copper wire; brazing alloys in little tubes; electrodes; soldering lugs. The clerk piled it all into a leftover television box and at noon on a Tuesday, Winkler drove to Sandy's house, parked in the driveway, took the box in his arms, went up the front walk, and banged the knocker.

He knocked three times, four times. He waited. Maybe Herman had put her on a plane for Phoenix or Vancouver with instructions never to come back again. Maybe she was across town right then getting
an abortion. Winkler trembled. He knelt on the porch and pushed open the mail slot. “Sandy!” he called, and waited. “I love you, Sandy! I love you!”

He got in the Newport, drove south, circled the city lakes: Connors and DeLong, Sand, Jewel, and Campbell. Forty minutes later he pulled down Marilyn past her house and the box was gone from the front porch.

Baltimore, Honolulu, and Salt Lake said no, but Cleveland said yes, handed down an offer: staff meteorologist for a television network, a salary, benefits, a stipend to pay for moving.

He drove to Sandy's and pulled into the driveway and sat a minute trying to calm his heart. It was Saturday. Herman answered the door. He was the gray-haired one: the one with the key ring permanently clipped to his belt loop. Gray-haired at thirty-five. “Hello,” Herman said, as if he were answering the phone. Over his shoulder Winkler could just see into the hall, maple paneling, a gold-framed watercolor of a trout at the end. “Can I help you?”

Winkler adjusted his glasses. It was clear in a half second: Herman had no clue. Winkler said, “I'm looking for Sandy Sheeler? The metal artist?”

Herman blinked and frowned and said, “My wife?” He turned and called, “Sandy!” back into the house.

She came into the hall wiping her hands on a towel. Her face blanched.

“He's looking for a metal artist?” Herman asked. “With your name?”

Winkler spoke only to Sandy. “I was hoping to get my car worked on. Whatever you like. Make it”—he gestured to his Chrysler and they all looked at it—“more exciting.”

Herman clasped his hands behind his head. There were acne scars on his jaw. “I'm not sure you've got the right house.”

Winkler retreated a step. His hands were shaking badly so he stowed them behind his back. He did not know if he would be able to say any more and was overwhelmed with relief when Sandy stepped forward.

“Okay,” she said, nodding. She snapped the towel and folded it and draped it over her shoulder. “Pull it into the garage. I can do whatever I want?”

“As long as it drives.”

Herman peered over Sandy's head then back at her. “What are you talking about? What's going on here?”

Winkler's hands quivered behind his back. “The keys are inside. I can come back in, say, a week?”

“Sure,” she said, still looking at the Newport. “One week.”

One week. He went to Marilyn Street only once: creeping on foot through the slushy yard and peering through the garage window toward midnight. Through cobwebs he could just make out the silhouette of his car, hunkered there amid boxes in the shadows. None of it looked any different.

What had he hoped to see? Elaborate sculptures welded to the roof? Wings and propellers? A shower of sparks flaring in the rectangular lens of her welding mask? He dreamed Sandy asleep in her bed, the little embryo awake inside her, turning and twisting, a hundred tiny messages falling around it like snow, like confetti. He dreamed a welding arc flickering in the midnight, a bright orange seam of solder, tin and lead transformed to light and heat. He woke; he said her name to the ceiling. It was as if he could feel her across town, her tidal gravity, the blood in him tilting toward her.

In his road atlas Ohio was shaped like a shovel blade, a leaf, a ragged valentine. The black dot of Cleveland in the northeast corner like a cigarette burn. Hadn't he dreamed her in the supermarket? Hadn't he foreseen all of this?

Six days after he'd visited their house, she telephoned him, whispering down the wire, “Come late. Go to the garage.”

“Sandy,” he said, but she was already gone.

He closed his savings account—four thousand dollars and change—and
stuffed whatever else he could carry—books, clothes, his barometer—into a railroad duffel he'd inherited from his grandfather. A taxi dropped him at the end of the block.

He cased the panels of the garage door up their tracks. She was already in the passenger's seat. A suitcase, decorated with red plaid on both sides, waited in the backseat. Beside it was the television box stuffed with welding supplies: the torch still in its packaging, the boxes of studs unopened. He set his duffel in the trunk.

“He's asleep,” she said when Winkler opened the driver's door. He dropped the transmission into neutral and rolled the car to the end of the driveway and halfway down Marilyn Street before climbing in and starting it. The sound of the engine was huge and loud.

They left the garage door open. “The heater,” was all she said. In ten minutes they were past the airport and on the Seward Highway, already beyond the city lights. Sandy slumped against her door. Out the windshield the stars were so many and so white they looked like chips of ice, hammered through the fabric of the sky.