He let the rhythm of work overwhelm him, chopping with a shovel and pick until the tide was nearly at his chest. Then he would wade dripping ashore and work alongside the other men. He walked back each evening with Felix and Naaliyah, climbing through the forest and the paddock, then dropping down again. He began sleeping on the floor of the kitchen, so the boys could have their bunks back, and when he woke, with the boys and their mother, he would go into the yard and watch the light accrue and listen to the frogs go quiet and roosters crow on the hills. Gazing up at the patchwork of fields, cane plots like clear-cut timber, a sea wind pushing at his neck, it was almost possible to pretend he was eight years old, in a park somewhere with his mother, on a cool, blue Anchorage morning.
A day passed, then another, and another. As long as he did not think of Grace, it was almost easy. Had it been twenty-five days or twenty-seven? A month? The sun came up, the sun went down. Sandy did not appear at the door of Felix and Soma’s little blue house fuming with rage. No one appeared. He thought of his year with Sandy in the house on Shadow Hill, how her eyes went to the windows, the silent desperation of everything they never said—gaps and absences in every conversation, the past circumscribing the present, the future hemming in the past. He tried to imagine life as it must have been for Herman, how he must have let each day fall away, going to the bank, tuning out the inevitable gossip, each hour that much more distance between himself and his wife. Maybe he had found a new job. Maybe he had never given up hope.
Winkler’s first weeks at the inn passed like that: sun and wind scorched his shoulders; his skin went pink, eventually assumed an even brown. On his palms blisters rose and opened and rose again. Felix told him that Nanton had made his money building tenements in Venezuela and that he planned this inn to fund his retirement.
“Nanton is honorable. He will pay you. He is only testing you now.”
“But what are we doing hacking away at rocks? Why does he have me out in the water?”
“Ah.” Felix smiled. “It is Nanton’s secret.”
“A secret.”
“Yes. A very special idea.” He made a sweeping gesture that took in the whole lagoon. “It will bring guests from all the world.”
Out in the inn’s lagoon brightly painted fishing boats shuttled back and forth, and onshore strange, long-billed birds cried at the workers from the canopy. Clouds sat down over the distant silhouette of the volcano on St. Vincent to the north. At night the lights of Kingstown glittered across the channel. Felix brought rice or curry or papaya wrapped in leaves for their lunches, and Winkler would sit with him and watch Naaliyah scurry through the sand or beneath the palms, chasing insects, capturing hermit crabs in the cups of her palms. “Papa,” she’d whisper, holding up a pair of mating dragonflies. “Look how they’re attached.”
In the course of those evenings he assembled what he could of Felix and Soma’s story. Both had worked in the Moneda, which Felix said was like the White House in Washington, only “more Chilean.” When the current president was deposed in a coup (he had been shot or perhaps shot himself in a subterranean corridor), his entire staff had fled, including the cooks. There were disappearances. Several of their friends, including Felix’s supervisor, were picked up and never heard from again. Soma would not speak about these parts and closed her eyes and played with the chain of her crucifix.
This was, Felix said, international news and he wondered aloud if it was possible that Winkler was the only person alive who had not heard about it.
Felix’s eyes were on his hands, where he was using what looked like rusty nail clippers to trim the tiny rigging on a model. His fingers kept missing and the rigging would sag through the little eyelets and he’d have to start again.
Immediately after the coup, Felix and Soma had traveled to Patagonia to hide among his family. When the three boys showed up, sons of the former commerce minister, a friend to them both, Felix and Soma took them in. The mechanics of their departure from Paragonia he would not discuss, nor would he say how they had accomplished this with four children, nor what specifically had catalyzed their flight. They met Nanton in Caracas, who hired Felix and paid for their voyage on a third-rate liner to St. Vincent.
“Will you go back? If it ends? If this current leader gets ousted?”
Soma stopped at the door and turned. “This is our home now. We live here.” She swung open the screen and went out into the yard.
Felix did not look up from his boat. Winkler shifted in the heat. Far off they could hear the shouts of the boys where they played stickball in the road.
“And you?” Felix asked. “You are fleeing something also?”
In Winkler’s mind came an image of Sandy fluttering her fingers, a habit she had, a gesture, as if she were trying to brush aside all the things that were wrong with their lives. “Yes,” he said. Out the window Soma scattered seed corn for her chickens, staring off into the tamarinds.
Late into Winkler’s second week, Nanton climbed down from his lifeguard chair, splashed ashore, and called him to the jeep. From the backseat he dug out a roll of blueprints. “You are wondering why I have you in the lagoon, under the sun,” he said. His teeth were bright green. “You are thinking I am crazy. You hack apart rocks around a little flag and think I am wasting your time.”
Winkler shrugged. “But don’t you want to see, really, what you are doing?” Nanton unrolled the plans over the tailgate cautiously, as though they were secret, or illegal, and watched Winkler carefully as he examined them. A lattice of girders, dim blobs of color, blue rectangles representing windows. Winkler shrugged. “I don’t get it.”
Nanton’s face eased into a smile. “A see-through floor. So the guests can look down at all the creatures of the sea.”
Winkler turned the page and studied the elevations. Nanton beamed. The reasons for his enthusiasm became plain: a huge glass floor in the lobby where fish might come browsing beneath the shoes of the guests. A big stainless steel kitchen behind that, a dozen guestrooms onshore, a lantern-studded deck for the dining room. There would be footbridges over creeks and low, tasteful light fixtures lining the paths, and underwater spotlights so guests could watch the reef at night.
But for now it was just a dry lot with stacks of cinder blocks and bamboo and roofing piled under tarps.
“If you work like this all the time,” Nanton said, gesturing at the shovel in Winkler’s hands, “maybe I use you after it is done. Maybe you clean pipes for me.” He laughed and showed his green teeth. “My American doctor toilet-scrubber!”
“I won’t be here that long,” Winkler said.
And anyway the foundation wasn’t even halfway finished. He chipped and shoveled out rock; sand slid in to cover his work. Schools of tiny fish wheeled past his legs; the tide crept up and down again. The men studied him but barely spoke to him. When they did, he could hardly understand what they said. At dusk, before heading back to Felix’s, he watched their fire at the end of the beach, their shadows reaching across the sand, elongated and warped, their low voices like the voices of the trees.
These were the beginnings of a new existence; Winkler could feel it gestating. One day passed like every other—time would not be a sequence as much as a repeated rhythm: the sunrise, the roosters, the jeep and shovels and rock. No interruptions, no studies, no forecasts. His body was becoming an instrument, a tool—he would wade into the water and lose himself in the cadence of work, and days would be one like every other: clear in the morning, rain in the afternoon, stars burning above branches at night.
Still, of course, memories found gaps: the soft, almost impossibly pink hue of Grace’s cheeks; the burned smell of Sandy’s hair dryer lingering in the bathroom. The curve of her rib cage against his palms.
Naaliyah watched Winkler from the shadows. The holes beneath the little orange flags deepened. At times, swinging the blade of his pick, he felt he was chiseling his own underwater grave.
6
Fourteen days after he’d begun worki
ng for Nanton—over a month now since leaving Ohio—he waited in line at the back of the jeep with the others and was paid: $60 E.C. In the yacht supply at Port Elizabeth he bought pants, a secondhand pair of boots, and a packet of airmail envelopes.
Dear Sandy—
I can remember so many things. I remember skipping rocks across the river, your hand wiping down the kitchen counter, freckles on your cheek. I remember how you hated it if my nose touched your glasses because it smudged the lens, and how you stopped talking and stared whenever we passed a baby.
All I ask is that you tell me if Grace is alive. Just tell me what happened.
I will write you every day. I will work until I have enough money to return and then I will come back. If you’ll have me, we could start again. We could always start again.
All day he’d slash away at underwater rocks and at night he’d write letters, leaning over Felix’s picnic table in the light of the sputtering oil lamp, scribbling, rehashing, restarting.
Subsequent letters were even less adequate than the first: disjointed pleas, nearly impossible to compose. He said he was sorry; he hoped someday she would understand. Then he crossed it out. Then rewrote the same words. At times, just penciling her name onto the front of the envelope was nearly intolerable. But the alternative, which was never to try, to have left for good, was worse. Then he truly would be gone, and he had the sense that a cord like that, once cut, would not grow back. He thought of the feeling he’d had leaving the post office in St. Vincent: a sensation as if his body might dissolve into light—a cracking at the back of his skull, a damp sigh, a thread pulling apart.
Naaliyah peered over his shoulder at the pencil crossing and re-crossing the page. “Are you writing your family?” she would ask. “Are you writing your home?”
Dear Grace—
Sometimes I hope your mother tells you lies. Maybe she tells you I am stationed overseas: a submarine captain, or a diplomatic spy. Maybe she tells you the man you live with, if you live with him, is your father.
Sometimes I see things and then they happen. It has always been this way—I don’t know why. In my more lonely moments I imagine that you, too, might dream things that come to be. If you do, I hope you see better places, and a better life. If you think I’m crazy, that’s probably all right. It may help you understand. I love you. I always will.
He addressed the envelopes to Marilyn Street or occasionally—optimistically—the house on Shadow Hill Lane and handed them to Soma in states of near panic. “Mail it,” he’d ask, “even if I tell you not to later.” One, two, sometimes three a day. Maybe the idea was that he could write so many letters, deliver so many envelopes back to Sandy, eventually he’d have sent all of himself, and could exist more there than he did here.
He imagined Herman shredding each letter and depositing the pieces in his trash can with the pedal-operated lid. In you go, down the lid slams. The Anchorage summer outside the window, failing already.
But Winkler kept on, writing at least once a day, using the Kingstown post office as a return address. Sometimes he’d write more than an apologia; he’d describe Felix’s elaborate dinners, or his family, little Naaliyah chasing butterflies down the road, cornering a lizard against a rock. She reminds me of Grace, he’d write. Her eyes are always open.
A steel crew arrived, silent indigo-skinned men who drove trucks onto the beach and unloaded pallets of three-inch-thick Plexiglas. Within an hour they had erected a rudimentary crane and were sinking an auger into one of the holes Winkler had begun. They rolled enormous barrels off a barge, anchored ties in them with concrete, stones, and coral, and sunk them in the lagoon to serve as piles. Within a week an entire framework of steel was poised above a section of the lagoon where the little orange flags had been. A half dozen carpenters boated in and set up camp on the beach and in seven more days framed the entire building. Nanton watched all this unfold from his perch, computing rows of numbers on a legal pad, frowning, erasing, refiguring.
Now Winkler guided a raft loaded with breeze blocks back and forth across the lagoon. He folded his earnings inside a plastic box; he helped the boys with the dishes; he wrote his letters.
On Sundays he walked the island. Naaliyah would trail him at a distance and eventually he’d call her forward and hoist her onto his shoulders. He’d try to name the few planes he recognized for her: bamboo, Caribbean pine, tree ferns, cecropia. “Clouds like those,” he’d show her, “are called cumulus congestus. Each one is riding along on a big column of slowly cooling air. Like a big invisible ice-cream cone. That small cloud there probably weighs five hundred thousand pounds.”
“Nooo,” she’d say. “It’s floating—it weighs nothing.” Still, she would not look away.
Dripping groves, high fields. Century plants and organ-pipe cacti. The island, viewed from a ridge, was a lumpy, six-mile hill ringed with palms and coral gardens, the sea teething at its reefs. And the skies: in one day the sky could travel from green at dawn to a noontime blue so severe it was almost black to hot silver in the afternoon to roiling burgundy at sunset. Just before night it flowered in yawning, imperial violets. Wedges of mauve, cauldrons of peach—skies more like drugs than colors.
“See that dark line at the horizon? That’s called the wind line. It means it’s storming out there.”
Naaliyah leaned into him and followed the sight line of his arm. “Will it come here? The storm?”
“It might.”
They passed a sugar works gone to ruin: an abandoned water-wheel, a rusted treadmill, relics of slavery. He thought: Our shadows are our histories. We drag them everywhere. Naaliyah stood outside looking up, waiting for rain. He thought of the small weight of her in his arms, her thin and bristling hips, and a blade of guilt turned inside him.
At poorly lit tavern tables with a bottle shining in front of him, Nanton penciled elaborate landscape drawings onto sheets of butcher paper. “Here,” he’d jab with a coca-stained finger, “flowers. And here royal palms. I want a row of them by the creek.”
He had good ideas, Winkler could see, a feeling for how things could look.
“Is good?” Nanton asked, frowning. “There will be enough water?”
“Yes. It will be nice.”
Dear Sandy—
It feels good to work with my hands. At the end of a day I’m truly tired. I understand now my father’s pleasure in his work. He used to park his truck at the end of the block and slog upstairs and sigh when he got through the door. He looked forward to dozing in his chair, his pipe beside him at the end of a day.
Felix, the friend I’ve told you about, makes little model boats, still using his hands at the end of a long day. He is not very good at it—his masts are always lopsided, his rigging is always falling off—but he seems happy, working on small things in the lantern light with a bottle beside him.
I’m sleeping better here, having dreams I cannot remember. Are you okay? Do you think of me?
Naaliyah would wade out and hang from the girders that would soon brace the glass floor, or she’d climb through the shell of the dumbwaiter where pupating caterpillars had already wrapped themselves to the walls and pale wasps shuttled between shafts of light, her small hands grasping after them. She and Felix and Winkler would walk home from the work site at dusk, the girl on her father’s shoulders and the husks of palms blowing and skeltering over the path and the ocean crashing out behind them against the reef.
“What do moths do in the rain, Mr. Winkler? Do their wings get wet?”
“I’m not sure, Naaliyah.”
“I bet they crawl up under big leaves,” she’d say. “I bet they sit under there and peek out at the rain. Happy as rabbits.”
She’d come to him, her pockets full of lichens and seeds and shells. “Look,” she’d exclaim, and spread her hoard over the ground and take it up one item at a time. “I found this on the side of the cistern, and this in the muck below the standpipe…” Once she brought Winkler a piece of blue sea glass and he began t
o ask her if it might be a sapphire or some rare gem but she shook her head. “No, Mr. Winkler, it’s glass from a bottle that got smooched by the sea.”
The facts and truths of the world around them. Tiny snails appeared in her hands. She’d tug his sleeve: “Mr. Winkler, do ants sleep?” Once he woke and saw her at the kitchen window, holding his glasses over her eyes with both hands and blinking out at the night.
I have questions, Sandy, of course I do. Whole days pass and all I feel sure of are questions. What if I’d been able to save that man—Mr. DelPrete—in front of the bus? What if I’d been able to carry Grace safely up the street? What if knowing had been enough? If I’d been able to hold her a bit more cautiously?
The funny thing is, people don’t want to hear about the future. They go to palm readers and fortune-tellers but in the end they only want to hear that they’re doing well, that everything is going to be fine. They want to hear that their kids will take over their world. No one wants to hear that the future is already determined. Death’s success rate has been 100% so far, yet we still choose to call it a mystery.
He was reminded of how he’d felt at his mother’s funeral: neighbors glancing around the pews to see who else had come, a girl he’d never seen before smiling in the vestibule, whispering something to a friend about how she was going to take her coat back to Koslosky’s because it was too small. The dead are gone and so their power over the living is only temporary. You lose sleep, you lose your appetite, but eventually you fall asleep and eventually you eat—-you may hate yourself for it, but the body’s demands are incontrovertible. He had always felt guilty about that, that he went on living, eating tomato sandwiches, going to Iditarod Days with his father, making snowballs, when his mother could not.
About Grace Page 11