The Disappearance of Grace

by Vincent Zandri

  “When I was sleepwalking,” I say, “I was asleep. But I could see.”

  “How can that be?” Grace asks. “What difference does sleeping make?”

  We approach the bed and I sit myself on the edge, then lie back, feel the small cuts and scrapes from the shards of the broken rooftop tiles.

  “Because there’s nothing wrong with me,” I say, my chest filling with a strange sense of optimism.

  “How can there be nothing wrong?” Grace asks. “You spend most of your life in the dark.”

  “There’s nothing physically wrong. There’s only my memory. I fell asleep last night to some bad remembrances.”

  She lies beside me, curls into me.

  “What remembrances, Nick?”

  I see the little boy . I see the bodies that surround his . I hear my voice ordering the bombing. I hear the jet and see the rockets shooting out from below its straight wings. I feel the concussion of the explosions.

  “Never mind,” I say, as I close my eyes. “I just can’t talk about it yet.”

  Grace exhales but doesn’t respond, as if to make another sound will somehow send me back up onto that roof. With the sun coming up and bathing our top floor studio in radiant warmth, I once more feel exhaustion invade the blood that swims through my veins, and I surrender to a deep sleep.

  Chapter 10

  WHEN I WAKE UP again, I smell coffee.

  The good news: I’m still in bed.

  The bad news: Grace is gone.

  I reach out for her, but she’s not there.

  I have no idea how long I’ve been out. A few minutes or half the morning. I feel exhausted, but somehow energized that I’m alive and not being dragged from the bottom of the feeder canal. As expected, the sight has left my eyes again. But it is not replaced with complete blackness this time, as if a war is being waged inside my brain between the power of the light and the power of darkness.

  As I crawl naked out of bed, feeling the scrapes and cuts from my rooftop sleepwalk, I decide to let the opposing powers go ahead and duke it out. I have no control of the outcome. I have only the memory of that little boy killed in the bombing. Maybe if I can learn to forget him, or at the very least figure out a way of storing his memory away inside a brain-vault, I can one day lose the blindness forever.

  But forgetting the death of a little boy…forgetting the thin coat of dust that covered his face, his wide-open blue eyes, the star-shaped hole in his chest, or the way his feet were so distorted…forgetting something like that would be like living without breathing.

  * * *

  The smell of oil paint, turpentine and freshly brewed espresso fills the air of the studio when I make the six steps to its center. The smells tell me Grace is painting. If I look in the directions of the open French doors, I can make out the dark silhouette of Grace sitting at her easel. She is surrounded by light. I can almost feel the fire burning off of her as she creates an image I can only hope to see one day.

  “Good morning, sleepy head,” she says, the tone of her voice having entirely lost the stress and panic that filled it just a little while ago.

  “What time is it, Grace? How long have I been asleep?”

  “It’s eight-thirty. You slept for another two hours after I saved your life.” She laughs.

  “You saved my life?”

  “That’s my story.”

  I hear her get up from off her stool.

  “Coffee,” she says.

  “Keep painting, Gracie,” I say. “I can manage—”

  “—to burn up the building. That’s a gas stove, my lovely husband-to-be. And must I remind you that at present we live above a bookshop. Real paper books.”

  “That place downstairs has been practically emptied out last I looked,” I say.

  “Last time you looked?” Grace says.

  “Very funny.”

  “You’ve got to look on the bright side, love.” She giggles at what she just said and how she said it. “Oops, there I go again.”

  She makes the coffee for me, and I take it out onto the terrace with me. If I stare directly into the sun, my head fills with a light so profound it warms my entire body. Heaven must be like this. Light and warmth and happiness.

  I drink my coffee with milk and soon I feel a hand on my shoulder.

  “Come,” Grace says. “I want to show you something.”

  Taking me by the hand she leads me the three or four steps back inside the apartment through the open French doors, past her easel.

  “I think I’m done,” she says, as she releases my hand. “I worked like a fiend while you slept.”

  “You’re kidding right, Grace? I’m blind as a bat right now.”

  It’s true there have been a few times I’ve been able to see with near 20/20 vision over the course of the past week. But during those times, Grace has always made sure to cover her work-in-progress with a paint-stained drop cloth. Even though it was very likely I would not be able to see her new painting at all, she nonetheless would not take a chance on my seeing it during my temporary bouts of eyesight. Now she wants me to see when I am blind.

  “Here, Nick,” she says, once more taking hold of my hands. “What do you see?”

  Gently, she lifts my hands and brings them so close to the painting it’s as if I can feel the heat radiating off the canvass. She proceeds to move my hands in the exact shape of the object she has spent the past week sketching and painting.

  “Take your time,” she says. “I want you to try and see it.”

  I feel my hands making a kind of circular motion. Then she drops them just a bit, and my hands make a more elliptical motion. Next she moves my hands to the right, then to the left. She lowers them another few inches and moves them up and down, not once, but twice, as if to translate two parallel sticks or piers or even legs. I’m still confused and blind. But, at the same time, something strange is happening inside me. I feel like laughing, but I also feel like crying. I feel Grace’s hands wrapped around my own and feel her feathery hair brushing up against my face and I smell its rose petal scent.

  Grace is not my wife yet. But she can see and I can’t. Somehow, I know what she is painting and I know that it has everything to do with us, and what we will make together one day.

  “Now what is it you see?” she begs me.

  I release a deep exhale. I feel as if a spirit or ghost has just passed through my worn body.

  “I know this is crazy,” I whisper. “But I see our child. Our baby.”

  Grace lets go of my hands and she holds me so tightly I feel our beating hearts pressing up against one another. The salt in her tears stings the cuts and scrapes on my face. They remind me of how much I cannot live without her.

  My future wife. My life. My heart. My Grace.

  Chapter 11

  THE STUDIO APARTMENT ABOVE the old bookshop is a peaceful oasis surrounded by the memories of war. It is a safe haven for a blind man who is neck deep in love and war. But it is also small and cramped. Which is why, blindness or no blindness, we decide to get dressed and take the boat taxi to Piazza San Marco where we can blow a week’s pay on lunch and a bottle of Valpolicella at the outdoor café across from the cathedral.

  Grace is happy with the idea.

  Giddy happy.

  I don’t have to see her to be able to feel her happiness. Her infectious happiness. It is better than the absolute panic she experienced when I nearly fell to my death from up on the roof. Better than the anxiety-ridden woman she was yesterday afternoon at the café when I gave her a hard time and a strange man with black eyes kept staring at her. She keeps placing her open hand on her flat belly. I don’t require perfect eyesight to know she’s doing it. She is always holding my hand and she must release it in order to do this. I know she is touching her belly, because just moments ago, when I wrapped my arms around her from behind, she once more took hold of my hand and pressed it there for a time that seemed very long. Her hand was warm and so was her bare belly. I know she was trying to
tell me something. Sometimes the best conversations I have with Grace are the ones we carry on silently.

  When we are dressed and have our black leather coats on, Grace opens the door. I’m about to step out behind her when the phone rings again.

  “Let me get it this time,” I say.

  I step back inside the apartment, shuffle the couple of steps to my right, where the wall-mounted phone is located beside the door. I feel for the receiver, pick it up.

  “Pronto.”

  My ear fills with white noise. Not loud white noise. More like the static that comes from a bad connection, or a cell phone with bad reception. I listen for a voice, but thus far, I hear nothing but the static.

  “Who is it?” Grace asks from outside the open door on the stone landing, her soft voice echoing in the open stairwell.

  I find myself turning in order to glance at her. But of course, this is just instinct kicking in.

  The sound of her booted feet shuffling against the stone landing tells me she is taking a step closer to the open door.

  “It’s him again, isn’t it?”

  I hold up my hand as if to say, Please don’t talk.

  Grace gets the message and goes silent. It’s possible she’s holding her breath.

  “Who’sthere?” I say into the phone. Tone even keeled, not at all threatening.

  There is only the white noise. Until it’s broken by a faint voice.

  “I.See.” says the voice. It sounds like a man. Perhaps an old man who is talking to me over the phone from a great distance away. But this is the age of satellites. He can be located on the other side of the world and it’s possible for him to sound like he’s standing in the room next door.

  “What do you see?” I pose.

  More white noise.

  “I. See.” he repeats.

  “Who is this? What is your name? Please tell me your name.” I’m lobbing the queries but they don’t seem to be registering in the least.

  Once more the receiver fills with white noise, and once more come the words softly spoken: “I. See.”

  And then the line goes dead.

  * * *

  “Hello,” I bark into the phone. “Hello. Hello. Hello…”

  But it’s no use. The man on the phone is gone. Disconnected.

  Grace comes back in.

  “May I?” she begs.

  It startles me when she pulls the cordless phone from out of my hand and punches a couple of numbers into the handset. In my head I see her face. Her cheeks will be tight as a tick, her lips pressed together, her green eyes bright and wide. It’s the face she wears when she’s angry or upset.

  “What’s happening?” I say, standing inches from her in the corner of the room by the apartment’s open door.

  “Star sixty-nine.”

  “You sure that works in Europe? In Italy?”

  “We’ll soon find out.”

  I wait along with Grace. Even though the phone is not pressed against my ear I am still able to make out the faint, tinny sound of the computer-generated operator speaking in rapid-fire Italian. I can’t make out a word she’s saying, but I sense that Grace is trying her best to make sense of it all.

  “Well?” I pose.

  “Greek to me,” she jokes. But I know it’s not funny. Then she adds, “Something about the number I just dialed is not correct or can’t be connected.”

  “More than likely the man is calling from a cell phone, his number blocked.”

  Graces reaches beyond me with the phone, her arm brushing up against my shoulder, hangs it up in its cradle.

  The room fills with a hard, icy silence. After a beat, Grace breaks it.

  “Does anyone know we’re here, Nick?” she asks.

  I shake my head.

  “Far as I know,” I answer, “only Uncle Sam.”

  “Do they often rent this apartment out to other wounded soldiers?”

  Wounded soldier. I’ve never thought of myself as a wounded soldier. A casualty of war. But I guess that’s precisely what I am. A casualty.

  “I have no way of knowing.” I go for the phone. “But I can make a call or two—”

  Grace grabs hold of my arm just before I’m able to grab hold of the phone.

  “Let’s just go,” she insists. “I’m sure there’s a logical explanation for whoever’s called and lets us know that he can see something…whatever that’s supposed to mean.”

  “I still say it’s some kind of bad joke,” I add, lowering my right hand.

  “Or bad timing,” Grace says. She heads for the open door. “You coming, Nick?”

  “Yes,” I say, trying to picture in my head an old man standing somewhere in the world speaking the words, “I. See.” into a cell phone. I picture a bald, craggy-faced old man. Perhaps the man who used to own the rare bookshop.

  “Close the door behind you,” Grace insists as she begins to descend the steps down to the first floor.

  I do it. I close the door behind me, reach out for the railing, and begin to make my way down the staircase.

  “Be careful,” Grace reminds me after a beat.

  “I will,” I say, carefully feeling my way down each step with the bottom of my feet. “I survived Afghanistan. I’m not about to die in Venice.”

  Chapter 12

  I CAME TO VENICE to live again.

  I came to Venice to heal.

  I came to Venice to regain my eyesight.

  I came to Venice to learn to love Grace all over again and to forget about the mistakes of the past.

  I came to Venice to forget about a village I bombed.

  I’m not sure I’ve succeeded at anything yet. I’m not sure I will succeed. I’m not sure of anything other than the next footstep I will take and the one after that and the one after that. Other than an old man who keeps calling and telling me that he sees something at a time when I most definitely do not see a thing.

  Or do I?

  Walking arm in arm with Grace through the narrow alleys and cobbled corridors, I once more see the moment when we first met. It was still long before my second war and I was working on building my writing career. I’d published a couple of novels, one of which became a bestseller. That one book resulted in a few invitations to speak at some writing and book conferences all across the states. When you spend as much time as I once did all alone inside an eight-by-ten room writing for a living, you learn to take advantage of these conference invitations, no matter how humble the event.

  At one such conference in New York City, I find myself giving a lecture on “the writing life” to a group of young, would-be authors. It’s my job to tell them what it’s really like to write books for a living. The large room is filled mostly with young people learning how to write. Young people buried in jobs they can’t stand, student loans they can’t pay off, and a quickly developed conviction that the nine-to-five life of sleep/video games/bed is the sure path to suicide. They’re also convinced the one unfinished opus they have going on their laptop is the next great American novel. I know the feeling. I was there once myself. Two books ago. Two wars ago. One ex-wife, two grown sons, and many, many failures ago.

  The room is about two-thirds empty and that’s okay. I’m not an entirely anonymous author, but then I’m no Stephen King either. I’m just me, Nick Angel from upstate New York, son of a construction business tycoon, former full-time soldier turned National Guardsman, turned newspaper reporter, turned writer. Obsessive writer. The mirror image of a salt-and-peppered, forty-something man who wears his loneliness and losses on a thin chain wrapped around his neck along with his dog-tags, gym pass, and the old rusted key to his bicycle lock.

  I talk about the writer’s life to these hungry, open-mouthed birds.

  My. Writer’s. Life.

  A couple of rows in sits one of these young writers. A woman. Long, lush, dark hair that drapes her shoulders, green eyes, and heart-shaped lips that make her dimpled cheeks glow like electric bulbs when she smiles. Her eyes dig into me as I speak and s
oon, I find myself focusing in on her as if I travelled by train the one hundred forty miles from Troy to Manhattan to speak with her and her alone. And maybe I have.

  When the lecture is over, a half dozen people line up to pick my brain, as if I haven’t told them enough lies. I find myself searching for her almost frantically. She’s there, waiting behind everyone. Waiting patiently. Waiting to be the last person who gets my attention. I sense that she knows what she’s doing, and I couldn’t be happier for it.

  When finally we’re alone, she offers me a smile that does something to my heart. Makes it beat and heat up and swell all at the same time, like a tire tube that’s been overfilled with air. Her nearly pale complexion goes flush, as if something is happening inside her too. And something else. I know I’ve never met this woman before, but somehow I feel like I’ve known her my whole life.

  She begins to ask me something about writing. Something that completely goes in one ear and immediately out the other and I am only seeing her beautiful mouth move with her words, and already I imagine myself kissing the mouth and swimming in those green pools.

  I’m expected to head up a panel in a few minutes, but I take a shot and ask her if she’d like to grab a coffee at one of the coffee shops situated outside this tuna can of a chain hotel conference center. She nods thoughtfully, her face filling with more blood. Pushing the strap of her bag up onto her shoulder, I can’t help but capture a quick hint of her black lace bra through her low cut shirt. I lower my gaze and watch her nervously cross one booted foot over the other. When I raise my head back up, her eyes are locked onto mine. Her infectious smile tells me she would love to join me for coffee.

  I want to ask her to marry me then and there. But I figure it’s probably better that I wait a while on that. Together, we escape the conference, like our lives depend upon it.

  * * *

  Her name is Grace.

  And here is Grace’s life according to her own invention: She is not only a painter, but a poet, and shaman of sorts who believes far more in the power of astrology than in a mysterious white-bearded, white-robed, omnipotent God. She doesn’t drink coffee but loves tea, and unlike me, isn’t much of a drinker when it comes to the hard stuff. But she does like to smoke herb on occasion and together we make a joke about how pot will make me so paranoid I would have to insist that she stop looking at me, especially with those giant green eyes.