About Grace

by Anthony Doerr

  Winkler felt his way to the stern to watch. The cable tightened; a deep boil rose. A dark cloud, flecked with silver, bloomed in the surface water. Tiny white crabs clung to the line, hauled up from the depths, blind, hanging on. As the crabs reached the surface, each slipped off in turn and floated back down in slow spirals. Haze drifted over the water. The launch rose and fell. The sound of the winch groaned out into the fog, on and on.

  Eventually a trap came into view, abruptly visible from the deep green, rising past the descending flurry of crabs, and it broke the surface and Naaliyah switched off the winch, swung the trap over the stern, and emptied it onto the deck. A few fish and a dozen eels writhed around her boots. She rebaited the trap with sardines, clipped it to a new buoy, and swung it overboard.

  Winkler retreated into the bow and listened to the eels, like sleeves of muscle, slap the boards. The fog washed down, thick and otherworldly, a trillion minute beads. The great unbroken swaths of trees on the flanks of the volcano seemed impossibly still. Birds—jaegers, maybe—wheeled in slow, primitive circles.

  Naaliyah stood with her hands on the stern, looking east. The sun was flaring suddenly in a rift of cloud. Around her boots the eels flopped and writhed. “How many times does a person get to see this?” she asked. “Maybe twenty? Ten?” She leaned over the bulwark and filled a bucket with seawater and set it at her feet and looked out at the swells. “And yet it all seems infinite.”

  Winkler shook his head. “Not to me.”

  She flipped the fish overboard, then gathered the slick eels with both hands and stowed them in the bucket, where they popped and seethed. He watched her arms as she worked, thin and brown; he could see the lean strength in them. When she had emptied three traps, she peered into the plastic bucket and said, as if addressing the eels, “I got a letter. Yesterday. From the University of Alaska in Anchorage.”

  A swell passed under them and he clutched a cleat in the gunwale.

  She looked at him. “Don’t you want to know what it said?”

  “If you want to tell me.”

  “They accepted me. With a tuition waiver.”

  He shook his head. Another swell came in beneath them. “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you.” She leaned over and braced her hands on the rim of the bucket. “Thank you for everything.”

  10

  Nanton let them use the inn. Felix was in rare form, sprinting through the kitchen with a ladle in one hand and a pair of tongs in the other, grilling snapper, stewing plantains, producing plates of ginger cookies, bowls of chutneys and pigeon peas, banana bread, steamed whelks.

  Maybe forty people came. Naaliyah’s boyfriend, Chici, plucked an electric bass in the corner and sang island songs with a girlish voice. The three boys were there, drinking coladas and smiling behind their sunglasses, two of them with dark, handsome girlfriends. Tourists gathered at corner tables, tapping their feet. Even Nanton came out for a while, sitting nervously and sipping ginger ale through a straw, nodding at whoever nodded at him, periodically brushing something invisible from his suit.

  Naaliyah smiled and touched the arms of guests, the priest from St. Paul’s, girlhood friends and their husbands. Winkler sat for dinner beside Dr. Meyer, who proved to be a cordial and soft-spoken man.

  “Naaliyah tells me you are a hydrologist.”

  “I was,” Winkler said. “Years ago.”

  “You don’t work anymore?”

  “I’ve been doing some reading. But I have not worked seriously in along time.”

  Meyer nodded. He took a bite carefully with his plastic fork and wiped his mouth.

  Winkler ventured further. “I was thinking about writing. Maybe a book, something for a wider audience.”

  “It’s never so late you can’t start again.”

  “I suppose not,” Winkler said.

  Later, after dessert and toasts, he walked the beach and watched the reflections of table lights play across the lagoon. Chici was still singing softly and his voice carried over the water. Someone was dancing on the deck—Soma, perhaps, her thin arms swaying back and forth like ropes.

  Three days later he stood in the street in front of the butcher’s to say good-bye to Naaliyah. The boys were there, and Felix in his cook’s whites, and Soma. Chici had borrowed a truck and stood leaning against its fender, smoking a cigarette and periodically tapping its ashes against the edge of his sandal. The sky was huge and blue. Naaliyah wore a pair of canvas shorts, a tank top. Her hands worked over a trio of suitcases a hundred times.

  Felix beamed as he produced a giant box sheathed in newspaper and ribbon. “What is this?” Soma asked. Felix winked.

  Naaliyah removed the frangipani tucked under the bow and folded back the newspaper and opened the box. “Oh!” she said. She hauled out the contents: a puffy blue parka. The brothers laughed.

  She pulled the coat over her bare arms and spun in it a few times. Chici pitched her bags into the flatbed. “Thank you, Papa,” she said. Her mother looked away.

  Winkler offered his present: a glass bottle, filled with seawater and stoppered. “So you don’t forget what it’s like at home,” he said. She thanked him, tucked the bottle into a bag. Finally she made her way down the line, hugging her brothers, her mother. She finished with Winkler. “Come see me,” she said.

  He held on, the smell of her hair in his nose.

  “I’ll write. I’ll miss you,” she called. “I’ll miss you all!” Then she was stepping into the cab, still wearing her oversized blue parka, and Chici was easing the truck out, up the black road, and they watched it get smaller and turn onto Bay Street, and she was gone.

  11

  In the evenings he sat with the butcher and unburdened himself. Furtive meetings with Sandy, leaving Alaska, the birth of Grace. Describing Anchorage or Cleveland brought those places back: the look of the Chagrin River rumbling brown and heavy beneath a bridge; the awful lurch of an Anchorage city bus on ice. All during the days, at unexpected moments, images—Sandy folding a sweater, or his father wheeling a dolly of milk crates—would seep in front of his eyes, as if by cracking the door on recollection, he was unable to shut it again, and now memories that had been staved off for years were shoving their way out.

  And indeed in the fringes of sleep he was often back in his old life—a school bus turning into the middle school parking lot; yellow leaves hung up in a chain-link fence; Sandy’s face beneath the high, blue light of the Fourth Avenue Theater. For long, tentative moments, just after waking, it would be as though he’d never left, and he often wondered if, in some divergent world, he hadn’t—if he lived in Ohio still, staking tomato plants in the backyard, the Newport rusting in the driveway, the river slipping innocently past the end of the street.

  He filled a third notebook with sketches and disjointed findings cribbed from books.

  Our entire bodies, flooded with water, are governed by electricity. Bring any two molecules close enough together and they will repel each other. We cannot ever touch each other, not really. We repel at a distance. Actual touch—real contact—is not possible. A fistfight, one person lifting another, even sexual intercourse—what you feel is only electrical repulsion, maybe a few thousand molecules sloughing off your skin. Even our own bodies are not cohesive. Photons pass through our eyeballs, through the webbing of our fingers.

  He began to dream of snow: ice glazing a parking meter; slush in the treads of Sandy’s boots. There was the feeling of turning up blinds and seeing the whiteness of everything—snow on fence posts, snow limning branches—a banquet of light. He thought of his mother, and the way the mountains looked from the rooftop of his childhood: shimmering, insubstantial as ghosts.

  He sat in the alley with only the light of the butcher’s cigarette and the pale, reflected glow from the street lamps on the far wall. “You know why I left the States? You really want to know?” The butcher grunted. His hands smelled of bleach.

  “I dreamed I was going to inadvertently kill my own daughter tryi
ng to save her from a flood.”

  The butcher nodded. “And did you?”

  “No. But I may have left her to die. I may have left her to drown in our house.”

  “But you were not there when she drowned. You did not see her drowned.”

  “No. I fled. I came here.”

  Something rustled in the pile of boxes beside their chairs, then fell silent. The butcher carefully stretched his back. “You still don’t see it?”

  “See what?”

  He shook his head. “This woman. Across the street. What did you dream when you dreamed her in the water?”

  “I dreamed she would drown.”

  “But did she?”

  “No.”

  The butcher inhaled and the tip of his cigarette flared and in the sudden light his features were antic and strange. “Maybe this is because you changed it. You altered it. Maybe you changed the dream with your daughter, as you did with the girl across the street. Now do you see?” He flicked away his cigarette and it fizzled in a puddle.

  “But my wife sent a letter.”

  “And said your daughter is dead?”

  “No. Well. No, she did not say that.”

  Suddenly Winkler was standing, backing against the wall.

  “So you see it then,” the butcher said. He passed a hand over his thin scrub of hair. “You see.”

  But Winkler was already clanging up the stairs, in the hot, frog-loud night.

  Hope was a sunrise, a friend in an alley, a whisper in an empty corridor. All night he stayed awake, pacing, making notes, going to the window. It felt as if a last lock had ruptured: the hinges were giving way; light was rushing in.

  In his fingers he could feel Grace’s forearm, bonelessly soft. He smelled her: the smell of a crushed maple leaf; he remembered that Sandy could vacuum beneath the crib and still Grace would not wake. And the crib itself—enameled metal, the feeling of the screws in his fingers as he’d assembled it…If she had lived, if she had lived. The phrase vibrated dangerously in his brain. If she had lived, she could right now stroll down Market Street and he would not know it. That very day he had passed a half dozen possibilities: a newlywed strolling the beach, another paddling a rented kayak slowly across the harbor. A blonde with plump, sunburned calves examining lemons at the market; a freckled redhead turning magazine pages on a hotel balcony. Was one of them Grace? Was it so impossible? A woman now, a wife, a tourist who swam the breaststroke in a resort pool, or held hands with an overloud car salesman, or ordered carrot sticks from Felix’s kitchen?

  The rich, sudden smell of Sandy’s hair—the smell of metal in it, tin or lead—used to stay on his fingers all day. The way she rubbed her feet together even as she slept; the way she would pull hairs from her hairbrush and drop them onto the floor of the bathroom instead of into the trash—it was as if all these memories had been hibernating in him, not dead but merely dormant, weathering it out, and now they stumbled out of their thousand dens.

  The butcher had said: “Now do you see?” He scrambled for a notebook.

  I have not seen snow since 1977. But now, in my mind, I see it perfectly: Flurries swirling through the beam of a street lamp. Like tiny dried flowers. Like a million insects. Like angels descending.

  12

  David—

  You were right about this city. It is gray and bleak, but also beautiful in many ways. I especially love the lakes. The other day I brought my lunch to Lake Hood and watched the float planes land and take off-—over a hundred in a single afternoon.

  I’m studying insects now. Their similarities to shrimps are astounding. The work is not as hard as I expected, and I’m doing better (I think) than most of the others. Next winter there is an opportunity to study cold weather insects in the north. I hope to go, but Professor Houseman says it will he difficult and very cold, too cold for someone from such a warm place. What does he know? I trust you are well. Hi to everyone.

  He went to sea one last time in a rowboat. He lay across the thwarts and felt the water raise the boat and set it back down, and stared at the sky a long time.

  The day he left for college his father had waited on the landing, a string of smoke rising from a cigarette in his fingers. What had they said to each other? Maybe a good-bye, maybe nothing. Winkler had set down his cardboard box of books and grasped his father’s hand. After his mother had died, he and his father lived together like timid roommates, almost strangers, never touching, speaking softly over meals about nothing important. Each evening his father sat in his chair and smoked and read the Anchorage Daily News cover to cover. This was how he had finished out his days: brokenhearted; smoke suspended around him like grief; settling into the rituals of newspaper stories—lost hunters, plane crashes, basketball scores—wheeling dollies of milk into the backs of stores.

  He turned the boat and rowed back. The sun was over Soufrière and the sea was drenched with light. He paused a minute and feathered the oars and let them drip.

  The passport had taken two months. After that it went quickly. He booked a ticket, returned his library books, told the butcher he’d be moving out. He visited Nanton, and they stood on the porch sipping tea, saying nothing much, and when his mug was empty Nanton nodded and went back inside to tend to a guest.

  Fifty-nine years old and what had he accumulated? Two dozen pieces of staghorn coral, each smaller than the next. His nerite shells from the windowsill of the shed. A pair of avocado seedlings in ceramic pots. A couple towels, a couple sets of clothes. In Kingstown he went to a tailor and ordered a two-button suit, gray with high-notched lapels. He bought two white shirts and a nylon duffel bag. At the bank he withdrew his savings and exchanged the currency, $6,047 U.S., his life’s savings.

  The night before he was to leave, a uniformed driver knocked on his door and said a car was waiting. In the street the butcher stood smiling. “On me,” he said. The driver took Winkler to the ferry, which brought him the six miles across the channel. At the inn Nanton led him across the rope bridge to the restaurant. “Your friend,” he said. “He wanted to do this.”

  A table was set with linen and a single votive. Felix brought out chicken and slips of eggplant fried crisp. “One of Soma’s birds,” he said. He stood beside Winkler, sipping a short glass of rum. Afterward they led him to a room where he lay down for the night on a king-sized poster bed with mosquito netting and a ceiling fan.

  In the morning he shaved in the porcelain sink mounted on the bathroom wall—a sink he himself had installed twenty-three years before. He dressed in his new suit, distributed his money into his shoes and each of his pockets. Then he made the bed, collected his duffel, and went through the lobby, across the glass floor. From the porch he peered out at the lagoon and grounds one more time. Tacit good-byes: the reef, the shed, the breadfruit tree.

  He walked to Soma and Felix’s, climbing through the sheep paddock and stepping carefully over the fence so as not to catch his pants on the wire. At the top he paused and peered back down into the cove where the lobby of the inn stood on its stanchions in the early light. It looked like an architectural model down there, idealized and small, nestled into the cove, something close to how Nanton had probably always wanted it to look. Then he descended the grassy field to the blue house with its crack running through the center and the tiny boats crowding the sills. Soma was in the doorway. She folded her arms around him.

  “You can come back.”

  He nodded. They separated; she fished a handkerchief from a back pocket and blew into it.

  Behind her shoulder Felix smiled. “Ready?”

  “Before you go,” Soma said, “I have something.” She set a wristwatch into his hand—his watch.

  He turned it over in his hands. “You saved this?”

  “You still owe me for a phone call.”

  Winkler smiled. “We can take you across,” Felix said. Soma stood beside him with her arms crossed over her chest.

  “I’d rather take the ferry.”

  “We’ll t
ake you.”

  “No,” Winkler said. “Thank you.”

  They stood a moment longer, in the kitchen, Soma with her big crucifix lying atop her blouse and Felix with his hands folded over his belly, the smells of that kitchen and the eggs stacked on the counters and the old picnic table and the hens outside and the tradewinds muscling through the window screens all suddenly and plainly obvious to Winkler—all this family’s thousand kindnesses, their own expulsion still not finished, their haunting, perhaps, more permanent than his own.

  Before he left, Felix gave him a pair of meat pies, wrapped in newspaper. His last image was of the pair of them standing at the gate, a dozen or so hens like shadows scratching in the dust around their feet.

  The ferry ride across the channel was like a film running in reverse. From the stern he watched the jetty recede, and the small pastel shapes of the fishermen’s pirogues, and the ferry churned and shifted slightly and thirty or so scuba tanks stacked along the stern rang against one another as the diesel pushed through the gap in the reef, past the big combers to the east, past the two lonesome channel markers, their bottom halves crusted white.

  Book Four

  1

  Flight attendants collected cups and newspapers; passengers levered their seats forward. From the window he watched the city of Miami assemble itself: antennas and rooftops gliding into view, two trucks like toys curling through a freeway exit, a green band of smog hovering over the shoreline. A crowded marina scrolled past, each boat’s windshield in turn reflecting the sun.