About Grace

by Anthony Doerr

  In the past years he had kept up with science less and less, almost solely now out of coincidence—fog shoaled over the sea in the morning, the condensation of water vapor on plumbing pipes, the high mark of a spring tide on the lobby’s eastern wall. If a yachtie left an issue of Nature in the lobby, or if he overheard charter captains discussing fish stocks, he could not seem to muster the energy to be interested beyond a vague and stifled curiosity. As if he had a faraway brother who cared for such things. But now here was Naaliyah, writing like an adult, like a scientist, a piece of her delivered to his doorstep. Did Felix know? Did Soma?

  He sat over her pages well into the evening, making notes in the margins with a pencil.

  February came and went and he did not see her. He gathered what he could from Soma as she cleaned a henhouse, hacking apart waste caked onto the plywood floor: Naaliyah had completed secondary school on Barbados; she had found work with the Caribbean Institute of Oceanography, scrubbing aquariums, maintaining research boats. She’d crept into classes, read instructors’ texts. One of them had eventually allowed her to use a launch, in the mornings, to record her own observations. Now, after four years of this, she had moved to their satellite school on St. Vincent, where she was completing a degree.

  Soma had seen her only once, glimpsing her from the post office package dock, as Naaliyah hurried up Back Street with a garden hose coiled over one shoulder. She looked older. Soma said. Different. But when pressed she could not explain what, exactly, had changed.

  Vestiges of the dream he’d had, twenty-three years earlier, tugged at Winkler’s consciousness: Naaliyah’s ankle, a loop of chain.

  “All this time so close,” Soma said.

  The acrid, nitrous smell of waste saturated the air. Winkler blinked a few times.

  In the hot shade Soma looked smaller than ever. “An angry daughter,” she said, dragging the blade of her shovel across the plywood, “is like an angry hen. The more you chase, the harder it is to catch her. You wait, and be patient, and hope that eventually she comes to you.”

  He rubbed his eyes. Shadows of that old dream—an empty skiff, a taut anchor line—dragged through the bottom of his stomach. He watched the dust hanging inside the henhouse, three divergent sunbeams slanting through it, tiny coronets rotating in the light.

  Was she in danger? If she was, wouldn’t the dream come back? He dreamed and woke and remembered hardly anything: the green paint on his high school locker, a wire and chrome hubcap he’d caught rain in as a child.

  That dry season was very dry. No rain for thirty days, then forty. The wind carried dust devils out to sea, where they whirled and elongated like miniature red tornadoes and finally spun themselves out. His flowers wilted in their beds. “Damn,” Nanton would mutter, peering into the cement reservoir set behind the inn, stretching on his tiptoes, his curse echoing back. But the tourists still came, raving about the lack of cloud cover, and took their showers, and swam in the molasses-vat-turned-pool, and ran their faucets, and Winkler cringed to hear it: more water disappearing through pipes, flushing into the sea.

  The shrimps live in twisting networks of canals within their host sponges—hundreds of crooked, scrambled tunnels, yet they always seem to know where they’re going. Duffy et al. argue that it is the sponge itself who pumps water through those tunnels, providing the shrimps with their steady supply of oxygen. As payback they defend the sponge from other colonizers. And they give their lives! They are little soldiers! They are lions!

  In March he saw her. She was rounding the cape in a small motorized launch with navy blue markings, her hand flat above her eyes to block the sun. He was on the beach raking spent sparklers and plastic cups from a volleyball party the night before and leaned on his rake and raised a hand. She did not see him or else pretended not to. Stacked in the bow in front of her were what looked like traps made of rusted chicken wire. She sat in the stern with one hand on the tiller. A yellow T-shirt ruffled against her chest. Although she was far away and his eyesight was poor, he could see that her mother was right—she was older: something in the way she held her frame, in the confidence with which she piloted the boat. He remembered the feeling of her small weight on his shoulders, shifting as she ducked to avoid an overhanging branch.

  How many times had she passed without his noticing? He lowered his hand and watched the boat as it passed the lagoon along the last line of coral and finally disappeared, just her wake coming in toward shore, and the whine of the motor fading into silence.

  4

  Twenty-four years before, he and Sandy had been driving from Anchorage to Cleveland in the Chrysler. They were in Manitoba, maybe, or northern Minnesota. It was early morning and the Newport climbed a low rise, pushing east toward a darkness broken only by a thread of white. On a grassy slope beside the freeway, eight small deer, like little impalas, stood chewing. All of them faced westward, staring into the receding gloom. Their shadows—long and hazy in front of them—shrunk slowly back along the hillside.

  “Sandy,” he said, and nudged her where she was slumped against the door. “Sandy, look.” But she had not even bothered to raise her head, asleep or feigning sleep, and soon the deer were behind a hill and out of sight. I should stop the car, Winkler remembered thinking. I should double back and force her out and we should climb that hill and watch those deer. But he hardly slowed. The box of welding supplies rattled softly in the backseat; the hood of the Newport cut the wind. He had the strange thought that what he had seen were not deer but the ghosts of them, that if Sandy had looked she would have seen only a hillside, an empty swath of grass.

  Were they already seeing things so differently, only two days away from Anchorage? It was hard not to think, back then, of Herman Sheeler calling detectives, hiring private investigators.

  Later that day Winkler saw more deer, all of them dead, their bodies broken open on highway shoulders and the dark miscellaneous stains they left on the asphalt. Sandy held her bladder in silence beside him.

  Easter Monday. Dusk. He stood on the beach watching the sun recede in a soundless panoply of color, the rays separating and refracting a thousand times in the fields of dust blowing over the sea.

  Before he saw her, he could hear the hum of the outboard. Then the launch came into view, crossing the lagoon from the south this time, the same rusty traps stacked in the bow, a wake rolling from the stern. As she passed she turned the boat and killed the motor and coasted onto the beach. She climbed out and dropped a cinder block anchor onto the sand and came up barefoot and stood beside Winkler watching the smear of color on the horizon. She wore a one-piece bathing suit printed with magnolia flowers and a pair of jeans sawed off just below the pockets. Her fingers were cut and scarred in places; her face was broad and smooth and brown and older. But still so young, still the face of the little girl who had taken his eyeglasses and held them over her eyes.

  “What?” she said, smiling.

  He could not look away. She laughed and hugged him. He felt her breasts press into his chest, and the lean strength of her arms around his back. He wondered how long it had been since he was last embraced.

  He blushed. She tilted her head toward the kitchen. “Is he…?”

  “Serving dinner.”

  “Did you get it? My thesis?”

  He nodded.

  “It’s only a draft. I’ve collected more data since that one.”

  From the deck of the restaurant they could hear silverware clinking. A waiter navigated between tables with a tray on his shoulder. Winkler didn’t know what to say, how to begin. She was a grown woman. The sun burgeoned as it neared the horizon. “Take a walk with me,” she said. They crossed the grounds and went out onto the road in the failing light. A hundred yards farther down, a trail switchbacked to the summit of Mount Pleasant, a path they had taken many times when Naaliyah was a girl.

  It was a short, steep hike. They didn’t speak. By the end of it Winkler was struggling to catch his breath. From the tight, stumpy clearing at
the summit they could see lights in the towns along the necklace of islands to the south, illuminated like small piles of glitter on a black platter. The wind had finally come up and it was blowing hot down from the north and pushing dust through the sky, and the last light of the now vanished sun made a blue stripe at the horizon. Above it the troposphere hung rose-colored in all that haze as if a great fire burned just beyond it. Lights strung along the market and condominiums on the hillsides and along the riggings of boats in the harbor farther off stirred and quaked in the wind and the microwave tower erected beside them on the summit moaned. Small flowers of fireworks bloomed over the neighborhoods to the west.

  Yesterday the priest at St. Paul’s had told his congregation in his quiet voice that the risen Lord was wandering among the people now, showing them the wounds in his palms. Afterward, during the Nicene Creed, the choir rose to such a pitch that Winkler worried that this Easter, finally, the church was going to tear off its stilts and go careening down the hillside.

  Naaliyah smelled faintly of shellfish. She worked her hands in her pockets. “I need a favor,” she said. From her shorts she produced a half dozen envelopes, folded in half, addressed and stamped. “I need letters.”

  “Letters?”

  “I’m applying to school. To get a doctorate.”

  He took the envelopes and held them close to his eyeglasses. They were addressed to schools in the United States: Texas A&M, UMass Boston, Portland State University. Even the University of Alaska at Anchorage. “Graduate school,” she said. “Like you. Like you did. I’ll need funding, of course, but my advisor thinks I have a shot.”

  “Naaliyah…” The light was failing. A single rocket arced above the harbor and guttered and faded. What did he know about getting her into a graduate program? What clout would he have now? He’d never had any to begin with.

  “Will you do it? I don’t need it until the end of the month.”

  The crowns of the trees below them billowed and shone. A chain of firecrackers erupted somewhere. Naaliyah was saying something about how hard she had worked, how she wanted her thesis to break ground.

  “What about the instructors at the institute?”

  “I’ve asked them, too. But I thought one from you…” Winkler leaned against the cement base of the microwave tower. “I’ll try,” he said.

  “Thank you.” They stood a bit longer watching the small, ephemeral flourishes of fireworks below them, and the ganglions of smoke they left behind. He thought he should say something about her parents, how her father stood sometimes on the beach and gazed over the six miles of sea at St. Vincent. How every Monday morning her mother walked the footpath to the interisland ferry alone, the big tangled trees looming above her.

  “Your thesis,” he said. “I’m not sure I’m qualified, but I made some notes and—”

  Naaliyah reached over and held his hand. “They’ll take me, won’t they, David? Some school will let me in?” Out in the harbor the fireworks pitched toward the finale, dozens of green and carmine blossoms that left ribbons of fading gold sparks as they drifted back. “Yes,” he said. “Of course.” He felt as if she might float off into the sky and burn, as if he were what kept her from it.

  That night he had the dream again. Even as it began, he felt himself entering a scene at once familiar and intolerable. He was hurrying down a path, crashing through thorns. Off to his left, out at sea, Naaliyah was lowering a cinder block from the stern of a small boat. Every detail was concentrated and intensified: mica shining in the sand, a thousand reflections of sky on the water, each oscillation of her launch. A chain, rifling into the water, caught her ankle and jerked her off her feet. She clung to the transom. The boat tipped. She went under. He was maybe a hundred yards away. He sprinted into the lagoon and swam for all he was worth, but she was too far. The chain hung taut from the stern; the launch turned slowly against it. She did not surface. He stroked forward but the boat seemed to recede. He woke with water in his lungs.

  5

  A trend recurred over and over: Winkler was on an airplane, returning home after twenty-five years; Winkler was on an island, dreaming of the future. George DelPrete stepped in front of a bus; his hatbox flew through the air. Grace suffocated in his arms. Now—again—Naatiyah drowned before his eyes. All these deaths, ordained perhaps by chance, or choice, or the complexities of some unfathomably large pattern—was there a difference? Would he be forced to relive the same events over and over? Would he always be compelled along variations of the same trajectories?

  Studying ice crystals as a graduate student, he eventually found the basic design (equilateral, equiangled hexagons) so icily repeated, so unerringly conforming, that he couldn’t help but shudder: Beneath the splendor—the filigreed blossoms, the microscopic stars—was a ghastly inevitability; crystals could not escape their embedded blueprints any more than humans could. Everything hewed to a rigidity of pattern, the certainty of death.

  He was supposed to fix a failing toilet in room 6; instead he ran the mile and a half to town in the still-dark and paid a fisherman $60 E.C. to ferry him to Kingstown. His heart thrummed in his ears. Scraps of the dream resurfaced: an empty launch, a chain hanging motionless. The hull of the boat smacked the waves.

  At the post office he cut to the front of the line. Soma frowned. “Did you run here?”

  “Where does Naaliyah live?”

  “Somewhere near the market. Get your breath, David.”

  “Please. Do you know the address?”

  “No.”

  “Can’t you look it up? You’ve never looked it up?”

  It was a concrete building, eight apartments, a flat roof, a strip of front lawn gone to clay. Across the street a butcher cut steaks behind a grease-smeared window. Winkler sprinted the stairs, rapped the knocker. “Naaliyah!” he called. “Naaliyah!”

  After a minute a shirtless man with dreadlocks swung back the door. Behind him music played softly in a dark room, sheets tacked over the windows, a weathered-looking couch littered with Heineken bottles, a glass coffee table with a wedge chipped off the corner. “What’s this?”

  “Where is Naaliyah?”

  “Work.” He gestured toward the stairwell, the street beyond. “You having a heart attack?”

  “Where is that? Where is work?”

  “At the institute. By the quay. Here now, man,” he scratched his hip with the back of his thumb, “what you up to? You the old guy she talks about?”

  But Winkler was already down the stairs. He was halfway across the street when the sheet over the apartment window pulled back and the shirtless man leaned out. “Hey,” he called. “Liyah is fine! You got to relax!”

  The institute was a series of boats along a jetty and a low trailer lined with sinks. Two men outside the trailer carefully lowered large pieces of coral into a roiling aquarium. Winkler huffed her name. They pointed to the sea. “Collecting. Won’t be back for a while.”

  “Does she have a radio?”

  The men rolled their eyes and laughed. “You here to make a donation? We’ll take some radios.”

  He jogged to the end of the pier. Barnacles. The white shapes of rocks twenty feet down. A few needlefish flitted past, dim and silver. The sea swung slowly up and back down, leaden and inscrutable. What cove was she in now? Would she be lowering anchor? His heart shook. Wisps of an older nightmare resurfaced: water at windowsills, his legs wrapped around a mailbox post.

  His hamstrings ached and it felt like bones had collapsed in his feet. All this running—and for what? His memory summoned an image of her, maybe twelve years old, tapping at his shutters before dawn. She was breathing hard; the front of her T-shirt rose and fell. Grass clippings clung to her bare feet and she stood before him with a kind of electricity in her body: her fingers quivered; her teeth gleamed. He had struck a match and set it to a candle and swung open the door.

  She slipped over the transom; links of chain tightened around her ankle. Bubbles rose like flexing jewels to the surfac
e.

  She did not return until nearly dark, easing the launch against the tire casings hung beside the pier, and hauled herself up the ladder. She stopped when she saw him. “You look terrible.”

  He took her hand. He practically knelt on the planks. Maybe she was a ghost. “You have to stop collecting, Naaliyah. You can’t go out anymore.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Isn’t your research completed?”

  “Is it ever completed? I didn’t do that work just for my thesis, you know. Just to get into a school.”

  “Can’t you research in the lab from now on? Don’t you have enough specimens?”

  “What is this? Did my father put you up to this?”

  “No. No.” He dragged a palm over his forehead. “Please. Don’t go on the water anymore. We need to get you to dry land.” He followed her to the door of the institute and paused outside, unsure, his fingers on her elbow.

  “David,” she said, “you’re the one we should be worried about. You should go home.” In her hand a net bag full of coral pieces dripped. “Please.”

  He waited in front of her apartment, leaning against the butcher’s front window. She went up and came down an hour or so later with the dreadlocked man. He tailed them to a cafe, watching from a distance. He saw her smile over a plate of rice; the boyfriend leaned over and kissed her neck. Heat built around Winkler. His eyes stung. An emaciated hound emerged from a lot beside the restaurant and barked him into the shadows.

  He walked to the post office, which was closed and still bore the rotting gate where he had spent his first night in that town more than two decades before. Nanton would be furious by now, hammering at the door of Winkler’s shed. The beach chairs would need to be folded and stacked; umbrellas taken down; lanterns around the dining deck extinguished. Towels folded. Lawns watered. Walkways swept.