About Grace (6 page)

After midnight he hovered over Grace in the orange glow of her nightlight and watched her blanket rise and fall. Lately she slept a subterranean, vacant sleep, as if some invisible huntsman came to put her consciousness in a sack and hold it until morning.

Five months old now, she could hold her head at midline and focus her eyes on him. And she smiled—a raw, toothless smile, a hockey player's grin—any time he raised her to the ceiling or swung her through his legs.

Three days had passed since he first dreamed her death and each subsequent night the exact same dream had returned. He stood at her window and gazed down at the Newport in the driveway. He could take her. It wouldn't matter where. They could find a hotel, wait it out. Up and down Shadow Hill Lane the faces of the neighbors' houses were dark and blank.

After a few minutes he went instead to the backyard, where the remnants of summer's tomato plants lay gray and withered in the mud. The evening rain had let up and the sky above the ravine had split apart and in the gaps burned stars. Scraps of dirty, twice-frozen snow hid in the corners of the yard. A wind came through the trees and sent droplets flying through the air. One landed in the hairs on the back of his wrist and he studied it: a magnificent, tiny dome, a rhombus of sky reflected on its cap. Suddenly he forgot how to stand—his knees gave way and there was a slow, helpless sinking. He knelt awkwardly in the yard. The house loomed in front of him, dark and angular.
Beneath the thin layer of mud he could feel massed shafts of ice, slender as needles. He remembered the way his mother's plants had absorbed the water she'd poured into them, the liquid slowly disappearing, a kind of flight. He thought: So this is how it will be. Not a sudden collapse of all function but instead a gradual betrayal.

How much easier it would have been if he and Sandy could have fought: a skirmish in the night, some harsh words, some measure of the truth actually spoken aloud. Maybe even—was it too much to hope?—a final belief: “I believe you,” she would say. “It's impossible, but I believe you. We have to leave.”

But he would be given nothing so dramatic. Everything invisible stayed invisible; everything unsaid remained unsaid. The following week progressed like any other: Sandy tended Grace, made dinners, soldered more and more objects onto her Paradise Tree. He had not even told her about the dream.

He tried every kind of sleep evasion: caffeine pills, push-ups, cold showers. He'd sit at the kitchen table over a mug of coffee and wish Sandy good night and watch the backyard darken and stars crawl over the lip of the ravine, the Milky Way rotating out there on its concentric wheels. He'd play solitaire. He'd eat tablet after tablet of Excedrin. He'd climb Shadow Hill and stand beneath the naked trees listening to dogs bark and houses settle in the night.

But he could not keep it up. Eventually he'd sleep—in bed next to Sandy, or sometimes in the Newport against the steering wheel, or at the kitchen table, chin propped on a palm—and he'd dream, and what he saw was always minute variations of the same original nightmare: Grace cold and drowned against his chest, hands prying her out of his arms. Let go, let go. The future waited for him to keep his appointment. The creek crawled through its ditch beside the lane and emptied into the river.

Yesterday he had brought home real estate flyers for houses across town; he begged Sandy to take a trip to Florida, of North Carolina, two weeks, three weeks, whatever she wanted. “We can't afford that,” she'd say, or, “Why are you acting so strangely?” Here was the worst curse: he managed to force the dream from his conscious mind often
enough that when it returned to him (opening the pantry door, say, recalling the sweep of flood water), the experience of it became fresh and bleeding once more. At moments he found himself wondering how he'd gotten himself into this life: a wife? a child?

Did time move forward, through people, or did people move through it, like clouds across the sky?

For months after George DelPrete had been killed by the bus, Winkler couldn't sleep for more than a couple hours at a time. He'd wander the apartment in the dark, try to locate that smell of caribou he used to love, try to imagine big reindeer sniffing at the kitchen wastebasket, standing quietly in the shadows of his parents' bedroom. As often as not he'd find his mother at a window, watching the night, and she never seemed surprised or upset to find him out of bed at such a late hour—she'd extend an arm and bring him to her side, the pair of them at the glass, the city sleeping below. She'd pull him closer, as if to say, “I believe you, David; you're not alone,” though she rarely said anything at all, just kept an arm around him, both of them watching the slow blinking of lights on far-off antennas, the all-night trains shunting into the railyard.

Now, kneeling in the frozen mud behind his house, he saw it again: a hatbox flying through the air, coming down dented on one corner. He hauled himself up from the garden and went on creaking legs back inside and checked the barometer. Falling. He studied the roiling, silvered sky through the window but felt no presence there, no sympathetic gaze.

At unpredictable moments he began mistaking people for Herman Sheeler. Herman was urinating in the Channel 3 restroom; he was salting the walk in front of a pizza restaurant; he was pulling open Winkler's mailbox and shoving a phone book inside. Each time Winkler had to calm his heart, wait for Herman's face to fade, a stranger's to reestablish itself.

What must it have been like for Herman to walk out into that garage for the first time, to open a closet and see all the clothes and shoes
Sandy had left behind? Sandy's underwear in the dryer. Their wedding silver. Their West High yearbooks. Their fifteen and a half anniversaries.

At work Winkler spilled coffee through the cooling vent of a six-hundred-dollar television monitor. He stubbed his toe; he zipped his shirttail in his fly and didn't notice until the head meteorologist pointed it out to half the office.

Sandy bounced Grace on her thigh and watched him eat dinner. “You've started sleepwalking again,” she said. “You went into the baby's room. Last night I was feeding her and you came in and started going through her drawers. You took out her clothes and unfolded them and piled them on top of the dresser.”

“I did not.”

“You did. I said your name but you didn't wake.”

“Then what happened?”

“I don't know. You went downstairs.”

A sudden front. Warm air pressing over the lake. Storms riding down from Canada. He handed his forecast to the morning anchor: rain.

From the Channel 3 parking lot he watched black-hulled cumulonimbus blow in like windborne battleships. Across the freeway, lake ice banged and splintered. Dread rose in his larynx. On the way home he parked in a neighborhood in University Heights with the windows down and waited.

Any minute now. The wind lifting leaves from the gutters, a first dozen drops sinking through the branches. The sky curdled. Trees bucked and reared. Rain exploded on the Chrysler's roof.

“You're all wet,” Sandy said. She folded a diaper between the baby's legs and pinned it neatly. Rain coursed down the windows and wavered the light.

He rolled up his left sleeve and wrung it in the sink. The water clung, pooled, slid toward the drain. “Sandy. I keep having this
dream.”

“I can't hear you, David. You're mumbling.”

“I said, I keep having this dream.”

“A dream?”

From the shadows he could feel Grace's gaze turn on him, dark and strange, not her eyes at all. He shuddered, backed away from the sink.

“What kind of dream?”

“That something will happen. That Grace will be hurt.”

Sandy looked up. “Grace? And you think this dream'll come true?”

He nodded.

She looked at him a long time. “It's just a dream, David. A nightmare. You're dripping all over everything.”

He went down the hall and stood before the bathroom mirror in his damp suit a long time. Rain hummed on the eaves. “Just a dream,” he said. After a while he could hear her pick up the baby, her footsteps fade down the basement stairs.

Midnight or later. He woke up in the driveway. Mud gleamed on the tires of the Chrysler. One red leaf was stuck to the bottom of his shoe. Rainwater murmured in the gutters. Sandy was quaking in front of him. “What are you doing out here? Have you lost your mind? Were you driving the
car
?”

She was reaching for him—he was holding Grace, he realized, and she was crying. Sandy took her (collecting her neatly, expertly, always so much better at holding the child than he was) and hurried back inside. Through the open door he could see her undressing the baby, wrapping her in a blanket. The cries were screams now, long wails that even out in the driveway seemed improbably loud. He stood a moment longer, feeling sleep melt from him. His shirt was warm where he'd been holding the child. The car ticked behind him in the driveway and the driver's door stood open.
Had
he been driving? How long had she been crying like that? It seemed like it had been awhile: when he concentrated, he could remember her bawling, as if the residue of it still
hung in the air.

Before he went in he watched the rain sift past the floodlight mounted beneath the eave: sheets of drops like a procession of wraiths, shifting, tumbling.

Sandy was running water in the bath. Her chest heaved, still out of breath. Grace lay on the carpet beside her, sucking her fingers. “It's going to flood,” he said.

“What were you doing, David? My God, what were you doing?”

“The ground is frozen. It can't absorb this water. We can go wherever you like. Florida, Thailand—wherever. Just until this weather is gone. Or longer if you want. Forever if you want.”

Water surged and bubbled in the tub. “At first it was kind of charming, you know,” she said. “Sleepwalking. And you did it so rarely. But now, David. I mean, come on. You're doing it every
night
! You had Grace out there!”

She unwrapped the baby and set her in the bath. “There,” she said. “It's okay.” She swirled the water with an index finger.

“Sandy.” He reached for her but she pulled away.

“You've barely slept in, what, five days, David? Get some rest. I'll sleep in the baby's room. And Monday you're going to Dr. O'Brien's.”

The rain kept up all night. Sandy whispered into the phone downstairs. He did not sleep. The sound of the water on the shingles sounded to him like insects chewing away at the roof. Twice before dawn he wrapped himself in his poncho and went out to the Chrysler and held his keys at the ignition but could not bring himself to start the car. Water ran down the lenses of his glasses. Inside the Chrysler it was damp and cold.

The next day was Sunday and still the rain had not let up. Over an otherwise silent breakfast he begged her twice more to leave. Her eyes glassed over; her lips went thin. There was no water in the streets, nothing on TV about flooding, not even on his own network. None of the neighbors were going anywhere.

“Our house is lowest,” he said. “Closest to the river.”

Sandy only shook her head. “I made an appointment for you. At Dr. O'Brien's. Tomorrow. One
P.M
.” To appease him she carried food up from the pantry and arranged it on top of the dresser: three boxes of Apple Jacks, a tub of oatmeal, bread and jam. Grace began to cry around noon and would not let up. He couldn't bear it and had to go stand in the bathroom, pretending to relieve himself.

Sandy called from the top of the basement stairs, her welding mask braced on her head. “You better go see the doctor, mister! You better go tomorrow! You tell him about sleepwalking. Tell him you think you can see the future.”

He took Grace's yellow hat and hid it. Not ten minutes later Sandy was calling him: “Have you seen her yellow woolie?”

“No.”

“But you just had it. I saw you with it.”

He withdrew it from the toolbox in the closet and handed it back.

One o'clock the next day he did not go to Dr. O'Brien's. The dream floated just beneath his consciousness, huge and eager. He had not slept in fifty hours except for two catnaps in the file room at the network office and in all that time the rain had not ceased. By 3
P.M
. the river had surpassed its embankments in several valleys and sent thin sheets of water speeding through neighborhoods. At intersections, firemen waved away traffic or ferried sandbags through the mud. Telephone poles along the road shoulders stood rootless, their bases submerged. The river climbed over a bridge on Miles Road and carried it off.

Winkler clambered out of the car on the way home from work and watched the water lick at the banks. A camera crew from a rival network pulled up and splashed out of their van. “Are you getting this?” the producer shouted at the camera operator. “Are you getting it?”

A policeman waved them back. The concrete at the edges where the bridge had been was left clean and dark as if cauterized. A child's red plastic snow sled came floating down.

At home, water was coming through the foundation. Sandy had removed many of her things from the basement already, her soldering
kit, a crate of salvaged metal, sheets of paper with the ink running off in long purple tendrils. But her tree—huge now, as broad at the base as the hood of the Newport—would never fit up the stairs. Winkler doubted three men could lift it. Sandy splashed beside him, pulling her fingers through her hair.

He waded beside the washer and dryer with a five-gallon bucket and brought it up to the porch and upended it over the lawn. Then he descended again. Grace wailed. After a half hour of bailing, he could see how futile it was—water was seeping into the basement in a thousand places. The water he carried out probably rifled through the topsoil, met ice, and flowed right back through the foundation. His feet had gone numb in their boots. The drizzle would turn to sleet later in the night.