About Grace (31 page)

Her father would have left for a very important reason; her father was significant and dashing; if a villain, as her mother claimed, then a misunderstood one. He would return for her in the darkest hours, as she lay awake in her bed, eight years old, nine years old. She'd hear the rich purr of his car in the driveway. She'd hear the soles of his polished, expensive shoes come lightly down the hall.

He'd slip into her room in his dark suit, set his hat on the dresser, sit on the edge of her bed. No lights. Better if we don't wake your mother. On the porch he'd have left an enormous package, wrapped in silver paper, too big to fit through the doorway. Inside something so good, so perfect, she hadn't even known it was the one thing she'd always wanted.

He'd offer a stick of gum from a shiny silver case. He'd smell like a barbershop, or very, very good whiskey, or the flax of his linen suit; he'd smell like the limestone of some ancient and important city.
Tell me what I've missed, Gracie,
he'd say, and push the hair back from her face.
Tell me everything.

The straining of dreams against the fabric of reality. Growing up meant burying possibilities, one after another. In the LensCrafters display window, stringing up gigantic pairs of cardboard eyeglasses, Gary whispered his riddles: “Hey Dave, what's the difference between a blonde and a pair of sunglasses?”

“I don't know, Gary.”

“The sunglasses sit higher on your face.”

The 2 bus heaved through its stops, up Lake Otis Parkway, past Tudor. This was June 12, in Anchorage, Alaska. Winkler was sixty
years old. He wore oversized glasses; he had liver spots on the backs of his hands. He had been a gardener at a two-star inn for twenty-five years and now he worked at a LensCrafters in the Fifth Avenue Mall, making $7.65 an hour.

The hours crawled, each its own prison. When Naaliyah's apartment started feeling too small he stumped down to the basement and sat across from the big coin-operated dryers and watched the clothes of other residents spin. The strip mall was halfway finished. Naaliyah spent an hour each night talking to her father on the telephone: he had fibroids in his liver; he was to stop drinking alcohol altogether, probably for the rest of his life. But: He was going home in a few days; he was beating Nanton at gin rummy every night in the hospital. He was planning his trip back to Chile.

Halfway through the morning of June 19, Winkler rode the bus to Herman's and walked the two miles up Huffman to Lilac and knocked on the door unannounced.

Herman considered him a moment, then smiled. “David,” he said. He wore a chamois shirt buttoned all the way to the collar. He kept his body between the door and frame.

“Herman. What do you think of me watching Christopher? You might be able to get some things done. You could catch up on work.”

Herman glanced over his shoulder, into the house. “What does Grace think?”

Winkler tried to give him a look that would explain it, that would make everything clear. Somewhere behind Herman was the boy.

“But you saw her. You went to see her?”

Winkler said nothing. “Oh,” Herman said. He rested against the half-open door and whistled. “That Grace is one tough cookie, isn't she?”

“We could tell him I'm a friend. Or a neighbor. A person, someone named David, an associate who helps you out.”

“And not tell the truth?”

Winkler shrugged.

“I don't know,” Herman said.

Winkler wiped his eyes. “Please. I'd be good with him.”

“You probably would be. But…” Again he looked back into the house and shook his head. “I just don't know.”

Two days later the phone rang at Naaliyah's apartment and it was Herman. “Hey, David. Are you working today?”

“No.”

“Do you still want to help with Christopher?”

The bus. The long climb up Huffman. The knock on the door. Herman waved him inside. The boy knelt on the rug and Herman called him over. He approached with his head down. He was five and a half years old. His blond hair was clipped short and his ears stood out as if propped there by small dowels and he looked to Winkler more like Herman than either Sandy or Grace or even himself.

Herman introduced Winkler as David. Christopher executed a solemn handshake, then pivoted on his toe and returned to a cardboard box brimming with segments of orange plastic racetrack. The two men stood in the main room. Herman offered coffee. Winkler tried to hold the cup but had to set it on the hall table.

The boy pieced together sections of track and fixed them in place with little purple tabs. He paused to puzzle through a ramp, tugging a cushion off the couch to serve as a hill. On the table beside him were the remnants of lunch: peanut butter toast, half a glass of orange Kool-Aid.

“He's real good about playing alone. It's only later that he gets tougher. Around naptime.”

Winkler attempted a nod.

“She'll be back at five. To pick him up.” It was not quite noon.

Winkler was not sure how much longer he'd be able to stand.
Christopher's toes were folded beneath him as he knelt by the track and he had not yet turned once to see if he was being watched by the stranger. “Okay,” Herman said. “I'll be upstairs. Yesterday I got called in on this re-fi project and I'll be up all night if I don't get to it. You need anything, give a shout.” He glanced at Winkler, then went upstairs. The boy did not look up.

Soon enough Christopher's track was built. He had an armada of toy cars in a battered zip-locked bag and took them out one by one and placed them on the coffee table and arrayed them in rows.

Winkler cleared his throat, stepped forward. “Those are all your cars?”

The boy shrugged, as if to say: Whose cars do you think they are? He picked up each one and tried its axles on the coffee table and replaced it in its specific location. Eventually he settled on a green coupe, and opened and closed both its doors and set it on the track and pushed it around shyly. The little wheels hummed against the plastic. When the car reached the makeshift hill, Christopher released it and it rolled down the track and came to a rest a few feet farther on.

He glanced toward the stairs, collected the car, and started it on another lap.

Winkler breathed. He took a few more steps into the room and sat cross-legged with his back against the base of the television. Christopher guided the coupe around the track a few more times. With each pass he released the car at the top of the little hill and let it coast down where it came to a rest just before the turn.

Finally the boy set the car back in its row on the coffee table and sat back on his ankles. The family room was quiet except for the whirring of the ceiling fan overhead and Herman's muted voice speaking into the telephone upstairs.

“What's he doing?” Christopher asked.

“Working. We'll have to let him work for a bit. He'll be back down.” The boy picked at his shoes. Winkler's gaze settled on the Kool-Aid on the table. “You want to see something?”

The boy raised his eyes to meet Winkler's and tilted his head. It was a gesture almost exactly like something Sandy would have done, diffident
and beautiful, blood undercutting the decades, and Winkler had to fight the urge to take the boy up by his ribs and hug him to his chest.

Instead he went into the kitchen and fumbled through the cupboards for a plastic bowl. This he filled with crushed ice from the refrigerator dispenser, and mixed the ice with several palmfuls of salt. The boy had followed him in and watched with a guarded curiosity.

In another cupboard Winkler found a little Pyrex dish. He brought it and the bowl of ice to the coffee table.

“May I borrow some of your Kool-Aid?”

Christopher nodded. Winkler covered the bottom of the little dish with Kool-Aid and nestled it into the bowl of ice and aligned both bowl and dish so they were in the light. “Now we wait.”

“Okay.”

They waited. Upstairs they could hear Herman printing something off his computer, the printer churning out pages. The ice in the bowl settled and cracked against the salt. After a minute or so Winkler asked Christopher to poke the Kool-Aid in the dish a few times with the end of a pen and the boy did.

“Now we watch,” Winkler said. Christopher set the pen on the table and crowded in to peer into the dish. Before Winkler knew it their heads were touching. The boy didn't move away and Winkler closed his eyes and felt the pressure of the boy's scalp against his. He smelled like peanut butter. Christopher's eyelashes closed, opened.

“What are we looking for?” he whispered.

The Kool-Aid was thickening now, its molecules slowing down, coming almost to a halt. “Poke it one more time,” Winkler said. Christopher did. As soon as he withdrew the pen, the film of orange liquid went cloudy, then quickly began to freeze, crystalline shapes running out from its center, ferns and dendrites and prismatic slashes. In half a minute it was a pale orange disc of ice. Winkler retrieved a flashlight from a kitchen drawer and held it under the dish.

The boy's finger poked at the shapes in the ice. Pinwheels and whorled feathers and alluvial plains.

“Do you know why that happened?”

Christopher looked up. He nodded.

“How do you think?”

“Magic.”

Winkler looked at him. “Not really.”

Christopher said: “Do it again.”

Around two Herman came down and served them cubes of Colby cheese on Triscuits. Before they ate the boy pressed his palms together and Herman did the same and with his eyes closed said, “Lord Jesus, please bless this food and the good men around this table.”

“Thank you, Jesus,” said Christopher. They ate. The boy chewed with an eye on Winkler. Along the backyard fence a squirrel galloped and checked up and a neighbor's dog let off a chain of barks.

“I think they want me to retire,” Herman said.

Christopher took another cracker from the plate.

“I miss two and a half months and now they decide they don't need me.”

“Why do you think that?”

“I have to practically wrestle my job back. And the thing is, if I don't get back into the office, I don't know what the heck I'll do.”

There were only crumbs left. The boy nodded his head as he chewed, his cheeks bulged out. Someone in a neighboring yard started up a lawnmower. Herman went on: “Grace won't let me leave him at the church daycare. Says it's all about brainwashing.”

“You can go back up,” Winkler said. Why were his hands trembling? “I'm happy to stay with him.”

“Good,” said Herman. “Okay.” He pinched Christopher on the ears. “You guys having fun, champ?” The boy nodded. Herman kissed him on the forehead.

They cleared the table. Herman returned upstairs. Christopher pulled open the coat closet and dragged out a child-sized easel that was stowed there and flipped the big pad to a clean sheet and began to draw. He drew a blue circle, five sideways nines he said were fish, then big flowers, then a soaring, multiwindowed house. At four he fell into
a trance in front of the television. Cartoon robots assailed enemy trucks. Winkler paced the carpet. The back of the front door loomed at the end of the hall.

He went upstairs at four-thirty. Herman turned from his keyboard and looked at Winkler over the tops of his reading glasses. Winkler said, “Thanks,” and, “I should get going.”

‘I'll tell her you're an old friend. Someone I trust. Someone who helped me out. I'll tell her I was with you the whole time.”

Winkler's fingers tapped the door frame. “Okay.”

Herman shook his head at papers on his desk. “I have so much work.”

On the walk down Huffman, Winkler kept in the ditch, below the shoulder, little blue moths rising from the tall grass in front of him, tumbling in the wake of cars.

Dear Soma
—

I have a grandson. It is unbelievable-—outrageous
—
to watch him learn the world. He draws pictures. His other grandfather, Herman, who he calls Bumpa, has bought him an easel with giant sheets of paper on it and Christopher makes posters with thirty-four different colors of markers. Houses are very tall, with many small windows. Flowers are tall, too, larger than people, but with tiny petals. All the parks are blooming here and he draws orange tulips in the air around the houses, and small black M's he tells me are bumblebees. He draws Herman standing in the yard, and his mother, of course. I haven't yet made it into a picture but am hoping.

I hope Felix is doing better, able to enjoy being home. Give my best to him. Tell him I think his cooking is terrible.

Summer. Municipal gardeners on stepladders hung baskets of lobelias from every lamppost on Fourth and Fifth avenues. On the solstice the sun stalked the horizon for nineteen hours and twenty-one minutes and at midnight, marathoners passed silently beneath Naaliyah's windows, dragging their long shadows behind them.

Almost immediately he and Herman started pressing their luck. Winkler saw Christopher again, and again. By the second week in July he was going to Herman's every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Herman fell gratefully into the schedule, disappearing into his upstairs study, working on his phone sometimes all the way through lunch.
Grace dropped off the boy at eight-thirty and did not return until five and Winkler was careful, every time, to leave by four-thirty. He found a path through the western woods and subdivisions that kept him away from Huffman and the chance a Chevy Cavalier with a bike rack might go hurtling past. Herman told Grace he was getting more help from his friend and not to worry.

Did she know? At least harbor suspicion? Maybe—miraculously—not. But more likely she did, knew from the first day Christopher piled into the backseat and buckled his seat belt and told her a man named David had spent the afternoon with him. How could she not?

This was what Winkler secretly hoped, that she knew and that it didn't bother her—that indeed it was what she wanted—and she would tolerate it as long as it wasn't brought out in front of her. Maintain ceremony; maintain pretense. Time would adjust her to his presence in her life gradually. And why not start with this?

In the meantime he learned. He learned that Christopher hated mayonnaise, would eat only pizza with the cheese scraped off. He learned that the boy's eyesight was at least three times as good as his own: Christopher could spot a hawk soaring above Herman's deck where Winkler saw only air. He liked the following cartoons, in order of importance:
Arthur, The Justice League of America, The Jetsons,
and
SpongeBob.
He prayed before eating snacks. He spoke more in the afternoon if he napped from 1 to 2 
P.M
.
 His favorite toy cars were Matchboxes, not Hot Wheels, and his favorite action figure was Spider-Man, rubber skin sheathed over a pliant wire frame.

He learned that Grace wore cotton slacks and white blouses to work, and did not go to church with Herman and Christopher on Sundays. She was a fanatic bicyclist; she rode every day at noon, peeling out of her work clothes and into her road-biking gear, eating lunch over the handlebars, pushing toward the hills. She rode a Trek 5900 made of carbon, black and silver. On weekends she strapped Christopher into a little yellow trailer and pulled him through the streets, Christopher sitting with his hands in his lap, the streets rushing past his plastic windows. Seven years before, she had married a salmon boat captain out of Juneau named Mike Ennis who drove a black van with the bumper sticker “I
am
the man from Nantucket.” It had lasted six months. He spent most of the year on his boat, even the off-season. He did not send child support.

Nobody wanted the marriage. Sandy hated Mike. Herman would say only that Mike was “not all that bright.” Christopher had met him

He learned that Herman had a girlfriend, an actuary named Misty who lived in San Antonio and telephoned Herman every Monday night. She also owned a timeshare in San Diego at Casa de la Jolla, and spent nine weeks each winter there. Herman had met her inside the swimming pool gates at a vending machine that would not accept her wrinkled dollar but would accept his. Whenever she phoned, Herman would disappear into his upstairs office and emerge an hour later with an insuppressible smile, his ear bright red from the receiver.

He learned that in the back of Herman's pantry were Oreos, three wholesale-sized bags of them.

Naaliyah kept on with her research, although now much of her advisor's attention was on the state's spruce beetle problem, and she had to spend hours in meetings. When she came home, she'd occasionally lie spread-eagled in a trapezoid of sunlight, her eyes closed, her body stretched like a cat's. Her wind-blasted forest ranger from Eagle visited every now and then, slipping past Winkler on the sofa in the shaded purple of midnight and disappearing into Naaliyah's bedroom and slipping out again in the mornings.

Gary told his ophthalmology jokes. “Hey, Dave, why did the gynecologist go to the eye doctor?”

“I don't know, Gary.”

“Because things were looking a little fuzzy.”

Winkler groaned. Dr. Evans scowled. She, he learned, was a widow, who kept Gary on as a sort of charity project, a surrogate son, funding his GED with franchise profit. Her hair was curly and her eyes were sweet and she called Winkler David and asked him to call her Sue. But she took her job seriously, grinding lenses nine to five, and as often as not reprimanded Winkler for something: entering prescription information incorrectly, feeding letterhead into the printer backward. Some
evenings, closing up, he thought she might ask him to dinner but she never did, just smiled a tight, fluttery smile and made for her station wagon.

The remains of George DelPrete, the salmon merchant from Juneau, resided in the crematorium at Angelus Memorial Park. Winkler brought him lilies. His parents, in the Anchorage Cemetery, got peonies.

He learned that Felix was better. The old cook moved back off St. Vincent; he swallowed vitamin K tablets twice a day. The color was returning to his skin; he walked the perimeter of the yard, wading among the chickens. On the telephone he rasped on and on about the nurses he had flirted with and then Soma would come on and tell him the truth: that Felix had been unnervingly quiet the whole time, that he had cried when they pulled out the catheter.

But it was Christopher that filled Winkler's thoughts. The boy was smart and shy; he was beautiful. He said please when he asked for something; he always put the toilet seat down after he flushed. When he thought hard he pinched his temples like a little philosopher.

To be with him became less and less hazard and more and more imperative. Winkler would have quit his job; he would have leapt in front of a bus.

On the tenth of July, Herman started spending the first three mornings of the week at his office, at the First National Bank of Alaska Home Loan Center on Thirty-sixth. He did not tell Grace. Winkler and Christopher sat on the davenport at Herman's. It was a dazzlingly clear day and light swung up the windows.

“Let's go somewhere,” Winkler said.

They rode the bus to Resolution Park and studied the panorama: Susitna, Denali, the big shining reaches of the inlet. A tourist passing with binoculars told them to be on the lookout for belugas, that she had spotted one out in the arm that very morning, and Winkler and the boy peered hard through mounted pay telescopes for fifteen or so minutes, Christopher with almost shocking earnestness, every buoy
and whitecap the round white head of a whale rolling, and the outstretched bronze finger of Captain Cook behind them pointing as if he'd spotted one, but before Winkler knew it he was out of quarters, and it was two-thirty, and they had to go.

The boy fell asleep on the bus and his head leaned into Winkler's ribs. Winkler carried him most of the two miles home.

From then on, every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, he and Christopher hardly stayed at Herman's. Together they'd walk into the immature woods behind the Lilac pond, or explore Huffman Park a few hundred yards farther west, or hike the long miles to the business park and ride the bus to the city rose garden or Russian Jack Springs and Winkler would watch the boy as he worked playground obstacles, crawling through tunnels, inching down a slide, surveying other children on the trapeze bar with a hand on his chin before finally deciding it was too risky.

Christopher's favorite place turned out to be Naaliyah's apartment in Camelot. He could sit and watch her insects for hours. Winkler would help the boy prepare pastes and together they would lower them into the insectaries and watch the little animals eat. He liked the microscope, too, and was happy to examine whatever Winkler put on the stage: a desiccated wasp, moth wings, the corner of a cornflake. Some days Naaliyah would walk in and, reluctantly, frowning at Winkler behind Christopher's back, would show them things: which were carnivores and which were herbivores; her orchid bees, metallic green and gold and blue, pinned to felt in little plastic boxes; three painted lady caterpillars in different instars, one molting before their eyes, slowly and elaborately shrugging out of its skin.

“Butterflies taste with their feet,” she'd tell them, and pinch a swallowtail's wings shut and brush the pads of its forelegs with sugar water. Its head would rise; its tongue would extend reflexively. Christopher, peering through a magnifying glass, almost fell off his stool.

He always returned the boy to Herman's by four. Winkler would get back to Camelot, his feet aching, and Naaliyah would accost him at the door: “This is ridiculous. What does the boy tell her?”

“He tells her he's with Herman's friend.”

“He tells her he's with you two the whole time. And the boy doesn't even know you're his grandfather!”

“Maybe not.”

“He's five, David. You're making a five-year-old tell lies.”

“He's almost six. And they're not lies.”

“They're not truths.”

Winkler groaned. It was wrong and impossible and illicit and yet each minute with the boy was a gift, a scene from a story he could not leave.

He brought Christopher to the Fifth Avenue Mall food court one afternoon and bought him ice cream and Christopher thanked Jesus for the snack and then they sat at the table where Winkler usually ate his lunch, eating spoonfuls of mint chocolate chip among the big ornamental trees and staring out across the rooftops at the distant glittering pan of the Knik Arm.

After a while Christopher said he saw a ship. Winkler squinted.

“There's a big white ship. Right there.”

“Like a cruise ship?”

The boy nodded. He looked a while longer and did not touch his ice cream and then began digging in the rear pocket of his pants.

Winkler with his poor eyes could see only the haze of rooftops, the broad plain of ocean beyond. “I hear your grandmother liked cruise ships.”

The boy shrugged. He produced an adult-sized wallet from the pocket and unfastened it and withdrew a photo and stared at it a minute, then set it on the table and continued eating.

“Your father,” said Winkler, and Christopher, looking out the window, nodded.