About Grace

by Anthony Doerr

  Nanton told him, in his cryptic way, that the broadcasts were codes for spies to pick up when they were in hostile territory. Each sequence corresponded to some message from back home: Your mother has gout. Your son had his first communion.

  Winkler would take the radio to the end of the beach and lie in the blue shadows beneath the palms and rove the frequencies. It was not difficult to hope that somewhere there was a channel on which his own daughter was transmitting numbers—a code he might eventually break. 56. 71. 490. I have an aquarium. Daddy I’m trying out for the swim team. I like pizza but not pepperoni.

  Past midnight: a tapping on the shutter. Naaliyah. She was breathing hard; the front of her T-shirt rose and fell. She seemed darker somehow, a brooder, a dreamer. Her hair slashed into a ragged bob. Wind shouldered through the doorway. She squirmed as if anxious to leave.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m running away.”

  The knobs of her collarbone stood out above the collar of her shirt. He thought of his Sunday walks with her, years ago, her hands in his hair, the way her pelvis felt against the back of his neck.

  He made tea. They stood side by side in the open door, cradling their mugs and watching stars through the shifting crowns of the palms. She chewed a fingernail. Shadows milled around them. “Where will you go?”

  “What’s it like in America?”

  “Well. I don’t know. It’s huge. There are a thousand different places.”

  “What’s your home like? Where you were born?”

  “Alaska? Not as cold as everybody thinks. It’s dark a lot in December and January. But it’s not really dark: it’s more purple, like twilight all the time. And there are mountains, real mountains, with glaciers. When the wind is from the east, or the north, you can smell them. A smell of trees and stones and snow.”

  “Maybe I will go there.”

  “Maybe you should wait until tomorrow.”

  She didn’t laugh. The breeze picked up again and out in the lagoon the yachts swung around and an anchor line moaned. Naaliyah’s voice came out of the dark beside him. “What’s snow like?”

  Something inside him stirred and he waited for it to settle. “It’s full of air. And light, too: each crystal can act as a prism, so when the sun is shining, and the albedo is right, snow glitters, like fires are burning in it.”

  She nodded, studying him. “You miss it.”

  He sipped his tea.

  “You do. I can tell.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I can’t even remember where I’m from, and I miss it. My parents left their friends and their histories and everything. To come here.” She gestured at the walls of the shed, the island beyond them. From a recess in his memory he heard Sandy’s voice: I look at his suits in the closet and think: This is it?

  “My father misses it,” she said. “They left because of my mother.”

  “They left because people were dying.”

  Naaliyah shrugged. “That was a long time ago.”

  “There are worse places to be than here.”

  Later, watching her pad across the lawn, past the dark, slumbering inn, he wondered if such things were born into people. If perhaps we cannot alter who we are—if the place we come from dictates the place we will end up.

  He shut the door, braced it with the two-by-four, and sat on his bed. She was sixteen years old.

  Soon afterward Naaliyah moved permanently to St. Vincent. He saw her on the island only once more, as he paused to knot a shoelace on the road toward town, her face flashing past in the crowded flatbed of a truck. She raised an arm at him; she might have smiled. Then she was gone. The foliage seethed in her wake, and stilled, and the pursuing dust hung awhile in the air, collecting on his shirt as it sifted down.

  Felix only shook his head and Winkler did not have the heart to ask Soma about it. Naaliyah had failed out of school, he heard, stopped going to classes. One night Felix showed him her knapsack of abandoned school books. In the margins of her notebook were drawings of shells or a husk of a nymph fastened to the underside of a leaf. But nothing else—she didn’t seem to take any notes. Crushed at the bottom of the bag was a geometry exam: she’d written only her name, then made idle sketches beneath each problem. An anemone standing beneath a question about scalene triangles; a cricket crouched beneath the Pythagorean theorem.

  Whole months passed. The only contact he had with her parents was if he worked near the kitchen and could hear Felix barking orders to his dishwashers. Soma began sleeping in an apartment above the St. Vincent post office during weeknights. Sunday nights she’d eat leftovers on the inn’s back steps with a plate balanced on her thighs, chewing thoughtfully and staring off into the dark spaces between the trees. She joked less; her attention strayed when he spoke to her. Hen feathers clung to the hems of her skirts.

  Felix, too, wore a certain distance in his eyes. Winkler would see him gazing into the space above the grill, or at the tiny planking of one of his models, as if something invisible floated there, and Winkler knew he was back in Chile, weighing the things he had now against the things he had been forced to give up.

  Each Christmas he walked with the two of them to St. Paul’s, a round, thatch-roofed church built on stilts halfway up a hill. He’d sit behind them in a back-row pew and watch the half dozen or so countrywomen in the choir—each a different shade of brown—croon and flash gold teeth. Fat yellow flowers in baskets would line the altar and moths would crowd the candle flames and a smell of sweat would rise as the priest delivered his homilies in a cautious voice—perhaps afraid that if he preached too loudly, the church might tear off its stilts and go cartwheeling down the hillside—and the whole building would sway while the Congregation nodded as if the father had located truths they’d fumbled for all their lives.

  Afterward, leaving the church, with the lights of St. Vincent trembling across the sea in front of them, Soma would reach for Felix’s hand, and they would walk together, the frogs howling, big night clouds passing across the stars, Winkler trailing his friends, down the steep, crumbling road, to the small blue house, to eat. Sometimes the boys would come, wearing shark’s-tooth necklaces and drinking beer after dinner, speaking in their mixed accents of investment schemes or trade laws or the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in Santiago, how it was progressing, how families might be paid reparations. But Naaliyah never came.

  And each time, leaving in the darkness, walking the dewy footpath over the paddocks and down to the inn, Winkler would have the sensation that he moved neither forward nor backward in time, but merely endured variations of the same day over and over. Maybe he was the one trapped underwater, under a Plexiglas floor, while the world moved on, men and women checking in and out of rooms, lugging overstuffed suitcases, the soles of their shoes passing lightly above him.

  2

  Thirteen. Seventy-two. Forty-nine. The voice of the girl on the radio aged, deepened, but her articulation—even through a roar of static—was as careful as ever. Maybe it was Naaliyah, leaning into a microphone half a world away. I am in Irkutsk, now, crossing into Siberia. I am in Lima; I am in Toronto. Tell everyone I love them.

  There were rumors, of course: Naaliyah had fled with a French charter captain and was somewhere in the Arctic Ocean; Naaliyah had a string of boyfriends all the way to Cuba; Naaliyah was living in Barbados, working as a waitress. He imagined her in Chile, in Puerto Montt, wrapped in a dark coat, crossing some weathered square and staring up at the stark spires of a church.

  The seasons traded places. Guests glided in on rented catamarans and ate at the restaurant and raved about the stars or the soup or the clarity of the sea. Felix went from table to table with his hands clasped behind his back and explained the night’s menu and Nanton stood behind the front desk turning pages of his newspaper and Winkler went from lantern to lantern at the end of the night extinguishing little flames.

  Once a week a cruise ship steamed past, maybe a mile out, stuffed to the portholes with creamy
light, and in the lulls between waves Winkler could hear music drift across the lagoon. The entire island was changing. Vacation houses sprouted on hillsides; local boys deemed themselves sailfish hunters and swaggered along the quays hawking charters. The cane mill closed; forests were cleared to make room for a copra plantation, an airstrip, even a golf course. Bed-and-breakfast bungalows popped up, boasting wicker chairs and elaborate latticework and complimentary American newspapers.

  The inn itself began to slump, as though it had simmered too long in a covered pot. Sea stars climbed walls and crept into gaps in the mortar like disembodied hands trying to undo the place. Toilet flappers failed; showerheads rusted; potato bugs built empires of tunnels beneath the linoleum. The Plexiglas flooring had buckled slightly, so that the armchairs did not sit flush anymore and tipped from side to side whenever a guest sat.

  Worse, Nanton’s little rectangle of reef was dying. Shaded from sunlight, pressured by discharge, the coral slowly died, elkhorns collapsing into rubble, and algae moved in, coating the abandoned fingers and struts with a waving black fuzz. Fish still roved beneath the lobby but they were mostly chubs now, greedy, trained to wait below the railing for the shadows of crumb-dispersing tourists

  In storms cocktail glasses fell from lobby tables; kitchen pots swung and clanked. Occasionally a groundswell rose high enough to slip beneath the porch doors and push a sheet of water through. Nanton would scream and curse and climb on his stool clutching his guest book, and Winkler would slide the armchairs aside and push the water back with a rubber squeegee.

  Some days, pulling on his rubber boots and wading into the lagoon, prying anemones or urchins off the glass bottom with a paint scraper, he felt like a damkeeper, attempting to keep an overwhelming quantity of water at bay, managing a truce that was doomed to eventually fail.

  Mice chewed tunnels through the thinning thatch of the inn’s roof and seedlings sprouted in the eaves and the tide swirled against the lucent floor of the lobby and the world—somewhere, out there—fought its wars and constructed its cease-fires while Winkler managed what remained of his life as microscopically as possible, head down, unwilling—or afraid, perhaps—to look up. The same Spanish girl read her same numbers into her same microphone, and an antenna somewhere flung them into the ionosphere in huge electromagnetic waves, across the ocean, through the walls of the shed, penetrating his shirt and skin and bones and cells and nuclei and smaller still—radio signals in his dreams, in his soul.

  He endured Nanton’s indignities: wearing the same flower-print shirt every day, renting teeth-ravaged snorkels and leaky masks to guests, pushing the perpetually full bin of dirty towels from beach to laundry, and pushing the clean towels back again. Perhaps, he’d think, staring at the sky above his shed—a brightening green bowl of light—this is a dream. Any moment I’ll wake and be thirty-three years old, in Ohio, in bed, in the middle of the night. The warm shape of Sandy will breathe beside me; I’ll hear Grace mumbling in the nursery. I’ll pull back the blanket; I’ll go to her.

  Or he could wake in his childhood bed inside the coat closet and smell the ghosts of all the animals who gave up their coats there, the foxes and minks and caribou; he’d pull open the door and hear trains shunting through the snowy rail yard, his mother stepping through the apartment, pouring a glass of water, chewing a piece of toast at the window before work.

  There was that chance. But each time he woke, there was the dusty, cramped interior of the shed. The springs of his cot creaked beneath him; a pain throbbed two-thirds of the way up his spine. A smell like rust, like failure; the cool emptiness of his bed; the sound of the sea sighing into the reef and a fly writhing in a corner-spun web: he was forty-eight, he was fifty; he was alone.

  Once—1993, or ’94—he was walking the road to the pier, north of the inn, when he stopped outside Felix and Soma’s house. It was a Tuesday, and Soma was on St. Vincent, working at the post office, and Felix, Winkler knew, was at the inn, working through lunch orders.

  The gate was closed with its loop of wire, and before he could think too much about what he was doing, he unfastened it and entered the yard. The hens came running, heads bobbing, scratching up dust with their dinosaur legs. He waded through them to the screen door.

  “Hello?” he called. But no one was home. He knew no one was home. He ran his hand over the crack in the wall, its edges a rawer white against the blue paint.

  Inside it was dark and cool. Most things were as he remembered them, as they had seemingly always been: the ungainly boats sitting on everything, painted in their Popsicle colors; Soma’s books in the corners; the light blue picnic table with its laminate hanging from the underside in long, deciduous strips. On the counter sat a flat of two dozen eggs waiting to be wiped clean.

  But there were changes, too, or maybe it was being in the house like this, uninvited, the kitchen devoid of noise and activity. It felt emptier, less hopeful. Not so much haunted as abandoned, as if even its ghosts were away, at work on more pressing concerns.

  Felix had since installed a sink and several chipped plates sat in the bottom, one with a mostly eaten tortilla on it, a soggy quarter-moon. Outside, in one of the neighboring yards, a dog began to bark.

  The stove smelled like caramelized onions. The charcoal box was tidy and full. In the corner room that had been the boys’ and then Naaliyah’s still hung the poster of Chile’s Torres del Paine, faded so the sky had gone white and all the granite pink. A menagerie of stuffed cartoon rabbits sat mute on the shelf; a fistful of dried herbs stuck out of a pebble-filled wine bottle. On the underside of the top bunk the constellations of glow-in-the-dark stars still clung, pale and stiff, the adhesive failing.

  Once, he remembered, for a whole summer, Naaliyah had wanted to learn to walk on her hands. She wore a purple one-piece bathing suit every day, frayed at the straps and hems, and she’d bend and spring onto her hands and ask Winkler to hold her calves in his fists and she’d walk on her palms through the sand, her suit slipping off her buttocks, legs straight. They’d shuffle a few dozen yards until her arms gave out. “How many did I make that time?” she’d ask, breathless, shaking out her arms.

  “Fifteen, I think.”

  “Fifteen,” she’d say, savoring it. “Okay. Let’s try for twenty.”

  Outside someone passed along the path carrying a radio and Winkler froze beneath the archway of the bedroom. Soma’s clothesline creaked in the breeze. The music was a long time in fading.

  They still slept behind a curtain. Their bed was unmade, its sheet kicked to the foot. A row of dresses hung from a dowel in the closet; rumpled cook’s tunics were piled in one corner. And a little TV, with a complicated aerial rigged on cop, and a battery-powered clock radio, and a glass of stale-looking water, bubbles arrayed along the bottom.

  He lifted one of Soma’s blouses from the floor to his nose and inhaled and held it there for a minute or so. Then he set it down carefully and retreated, walking quickly, past the picnic table and the wary eyes of the laminated Virgin, easing the screen door shut behind him so it would not clap, and hurried out through the yard.

  3

  Before dawn, December 1999. Some first guests were moving about—he could hear doors groaning and water traveling through pipes. He stood at the entrance to his shed and listened to the clamor of the birds. Venus shone a distant white above the shoulder of the hills to the south. The black of the sky blanched into a pale green, and three tiny clouds appeared—cumulus humilis—carrying a wilting pink in their undersides, drifting west.

  He picked his way down the coral stone path to the beach. Bats, on their final hunts, swung overhead like black motes. Soon there was a horizon, ironed flat as if by the load of the sky, and a sailboat toiling across it. He let himself into the kitchen, crossed the inn, over the glass floor, and climbed to the porch. There he drew open each of the louvered doors, and swept sand from the boards, and watched it sift and disappear into the water below.

  The sun was fully up when he retur
ned to his shed and found a blue folder leaning against the door. Inside was what appeared to be a lab report, or a draft of one. On the cover was a photograph of a shrimp, one of its claws lumpy and oversized. The handwritten title read “Social Structures of Sponge-Dwelling Snapping Shrimps.” And beneath that, a name: Naaliyah Orellana. Across the title page someone—Naaliyah herself?—-had scribbled: What do you think?

  He brought the report into his shed and set it on the table and read it cover to cover.

  It was Naaliyah’s work, he could tell right away. There were exclamation points after nearly every sentence: The shrimps feed on their host sponges almost exclusively, but never so much that they endanger the sponge—think of that! Symbiosis is everywhere! Did evolution select the shrimps with the most gastronomic restraint?

  Apparently she had harvested exposed sponges from a variety of reefs and peered into their tunnels in search of tiny shrimp, no bigger than a grain of rice. She’d maintained a controlled environment somewhere—for two years, evidently—and according to her research, certain species of these crustaceans lived in eusocial groupings, like termites or bees, in service of a single reproducing queen.

  It was an ambitious and marvelous and amateur effort all at once. She blamed discharge from cruise ships for population declines but never demonstrated that such pollution was in the water. And the report had no structure: no abstract, no introduction, no citations.

  By candlelight he flipped through it again. There were astonishing observations: After feeding the dominant brooding female, a juvenile male will sometimes invert and lie on his back, flexing his telson. Like a submissive dog! I have seen the female climb on top of him and repeatedly tap his thorax delicately with her major cheliped. Is she asserting her dominance? Maybe she is teasing him!