About Grace

by Anthony Doerr

  From the wing came the whine of flaps threading down. The runway whisked beneath them; the wheels touched, a slight jolting, and their bodies tilted forward as the airplane decelerated.

  Beside him the woman clapped her novel shut and tucked it into the leather bag between her feet. Without turning to him, she said, “When you got on, you saw the bin wasn’t latched. That’s all.”

  The jet taxied into its gate. Passengers stood, yawned, hauled bags out from overhead compartments. “I—” he began.

  “You could have at least relatched it. Now Dirk’s martini glasses are all ruined.”

  He pretended to busy himself with magazines in the seat pocket in front of him. The woman and Dirk pushed into the aisle. The frost on the window, Winkler saw, had softened to water. He had meant to watch it change.

  In the terminal he waited for his connection and scanned commuters as they rushed past, families, businessmen. There was a certain transparency to them, tides of human beings washing back and forth, and to what end? An enormous woman settled into the seat next to him, pulled a cinnamon roll from a wax paper bag, and put half of it in her mouth.

  Our bodies are water, too, he wrote in his pad. Our skin and eyeballs. Even the parts we think will last: fingernails, bones, hair. All of us. It’s no wonder doctors keep it in intravenous bags, at the ready. We are dust only after all our water evaporates.

  On the flight to Cleveland he sat by the window and grappled with a slow and unyielding nausea. States slipped beneath: Georgia, North Carolina, West Virginia, low hills broken by the geometric quilting of fields. The sky darkened toward violet. Platoons of cumuli ascended past the window, each shot through with light.

  An airport hotel in Cleveland. A hot shower, condensation on the mirror. He lay on the coverlet watching steam roll out of the bathroom and dissipate into the room.

  Every few minutes a jet landed or took off, quaking the window glass. Soon a thin, almost granular light seeped through the curtain. If he had slept at all he was not aware of it. He dressed in his suit and went to the lobby and paged through a newspaper (the president denying rumors of war; Asian smog clouds threatening millions; home sales up, prices down), heading for the classifieds.

  Only one of the lobby payphones accepted coins. A local call cost 30 cents. He dialed a number and an hour later a boy and his father were in the parking lot walking Winkler around their Datsun. “Most of the miles are highway,” the father said. “Got a nice Sporty clutch. Good brakes. Just rust-proofed it.”

  Winkler tried to remember what was expected of him. He nudged a tire with the toe of his shoe; he checked the odometer—110,000 miles.

  “Fine,” he said, and ran a finger over the hood. “I’ll take it.” Eight hundred dollars. He pulled the bills from his pocket and folded them into the boy’s palm and the father signed over the title and all three of them shook hands and the car was Winkler’s.

  He checked out of the hotel, took his packet of nerite shells from his duffel, and aligned them in front of the speedometer largest to smallest. A memory of his old Newport rose: the smell of vinyl, the feel of the starter grinding against the cold. That expanse of hood stretched out in front of him, reflecting sky.

  It was August 2002. He didn’t have a driver’s license, didn’t have insurance. With a magnifying glass he studied a road map left in the glovebox. A convulsion of freeways. He eased the key into the ignition, cranked it, and the car gasped to life.

  2

  The boy had outfitted the dashboard with a low-end Hifonics digital receiver with push-button volume controls that Winkler could not figure out how to turn down. Electric guitar screamed out of speakers in the door panels. He stabbed buttons randomly as he drove but managed only to stop the tuner halfway between stations. Static deluged the car, punctuated by bursts of distant-sounding jazz. He rolled down the windows.

  The roadsides had changed—a strip mall at an intersection; new developments labeled Meadowlark Ridge or Woodchuck Hollow—but the roads themselves were the same: the same iron bridge over Silver Creek, the same low and comfortable hill on Fortier Avenue, even the same weeds along the shoulder: Queen Anne’s lace and thistle bucking in the wake of a passing car.

  At a convenience store he bought three wilted roses wrapped in cellophane and drove with them in his lap. Despite the howl of static, his heart was oddly steady; the Datsun griped through its gears.

  East Washington, Bell Road, Music Street. The middle school—still a middle school!—marquee read: CONGRATULATIONS BOMBERETTE DANCE TEAM! In front of the entrance a giant poplar he didn’t remember stood sentinel. The parking lot was empty, save a trio of school buses parked at the back. He turned in and switched off the car and the speakers mercifully stopped their hissing.

  He had spent one August in Ohio, a month of thunder: distant clouds in the far corner of the sky muttering most mornings; by afternoon whole colonies of storms illuminated in the radar’s sweeping radius, like spots of blood saturating a disc of gauze. By evenings, he remembered, the air would get so heavy with moisture he imagined he could feel each bloated molecule as it toppled into his lungs.

  Memories heaved up: a ball of hail melting in his palm; sheets of rain overwhelming the windshield; a calendar darkening and turning in the whirlpool of the basement stairwell. The goose-shaped knocker. A smell of acetylene rising through kitchen floorboards. This place was the Ohio he had left, but it wasn’t, too: the hurtling traffic, a buzzing electrical tower where he was certain a tract of forest had been twenty-five years before.

  He got out of the Datsun and exhaled. This was just a day. Just a late-summer morning, a few stratus clouds skimming over fields. To a passing car he would be nothing more than a man out for a walk. Who knew—maybe he had a family here; maybe—in some fundamental way—he belonged. He took the roses, locked the Datsun, and started up Shadow Hill Lane. A warm wind eased past.

  Here was the subdivision, all the houses still standing: the Stevensons’, the Harts’, the Corddrys’. On the Corddrys’ mailbox stood a new, hand-lettered sign: THE TWEEDYS. In the driveway that had been the Sachses’, a bald man in painter’s coveralls took a bucket from the back of a van and carried it inside. There was no sign of the fallen sugar maple, just a young crabapple besieged by tent caterpillars.

  He peeked inside the Harts’ mailbox, where a yellow strip of tape read Mr. Bill Calhoun. The same was true of the Stevensons: moved away, replaced by another name, updated lives.

  New houses had been built at the end of the cul-de-sac—smarter-looking houses, with skylights and outdoor central-air units and art deco numerals. An image of the road awash in floodwater flashed in front of his eyes, flotsam and detritus, swirling brown water, his legs locked around a mailbox post.

  Still, he could not suppress tendrils of hope: Sandy coming to the door, photos of Grace hanging in the hall, an eventual reconciliation. Had he wanted so much from life? An interesting job, a view of sky. A car to wash in the driveway. Sandy plucking weeds from a flower bed; his daughter pedaling a bike cautiously to the curb. A straightforward, anonymous existence. The odds were astronomical, he knew, but his brain floated the idea forth—they could be here—and he was reluctant to dispel it.

  He scanned the houses but could not discern a trace of flood damage. Warps in the frames? Stains on the foundations? He saw nothing. It was as if the entire place had been rebuilt, the old houses hauled away, memories erased. Grass, trees, birds—even the smell of barbecue somewhere—every sound and sight bore a quiet, summertime complacency: no mysteries here, no secrets.

  But everywhere corpses were rising from graves, shambling toward him: the odor of wet, mown grass, of weeds, of the river—each was a key to a memory: the card table in the kitchen, leaves in the backyard, a slap across the face.

  Four houses, three houses, two. The cellophane around the roses crackled in his fist. “She won’t be here,” he said. “Neither of them will be here.” Still, spiders of sweat crawled his ribs.

  Nine
-five-one-five Shadow Hill Lane. The saplings flanking the front walk were now rangy, gangling adults. The walk and driveway were the same, the hedges unruly and full. The same eaves. The same front steps. A new garage huddled at the end of the driveway, clumsily built. In one of the downstairs windows a chain of paper dolls, taped to the glass, held hands.

  He could see Sandy taking Grace inside, lowering her into the bath. Clumps of snow dashed against the kitchen window. In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.

  The brass knocker had been replaced by a doorbell. An orange bulb behind the button flickered. It was strange to think that something added to this house after he had last been there had already become old in the interim.

  A piece of slate suspended above the bell was engraved THE LEES. He wiped his palms on his pants and rang the bell. The door was maroon now, and the paint was flaking off. I’ll repaint it for them, he thought. I could do that today. Think of the things he could do: edge the beds, weed the lawn, pry moss from the sidewalk cracks—he’d cook them dinner; he’d defrost their freezer. Whomever Mr. Lee was, a guardian, Sandy’s husband, he wouldn’t mind; he’d shake Winkler’s hand, invite him into the backyard—by the end of the night they’d embrace like brothers.

  There was a shuffling inside and a Korean woman came to the door holding a puppy. She squinted through the screen. “Yes?”

  “Oh,” Winkler said. Over her shoulder, in the hall, the closet door had the same plastic knobs on it. “You live here? This is your home?”

  “Of course.” She raised her eyebrows. “Are you all right, sir?”

  “And no one named Sandy lives here?”

  “No. Is this—?”

  He thrust the flowers at her. “These are for you.”

  She pushed the screen open a foot and took them and let the door close again. The dog sniffed the cellophane. She turned the bouquet to see if there might be a card.

  “It’s a nice house,” Winkler said.

  She looked up expectantly. “Are these from you?”

  He shrugged, tried a half wave as he backed off the stoop. The heel of his shoe caught, and he staggered backward onto the walk.

  “Sir?” she called.

  “I’m okay,” he said. She closed the door, and he heard it latch. Blinds in the front windows louvered shut, one after another.

  He gathered himself, trembling lightly, and continued to the end of the street, past the end of the cul-de-sac, through a backyard, to the edge of the river. The water was sluggish and low. The caps of a few stones showed above the surface, pale with dried mud. On the far bank, the trees had been thinned and he could see the decks and backyard swing sets of another neighborhood. He listened: a low murmur, a thousand tiny splashes. Somewhere above that, the sound of traffic. That was it. A meek, brown river purling along.

  3

  Buildings looked smaller, sidewalks more crowded, traffic more hurried, parking meters more expensive. He was unused to seeing shoulder belts in cars, locks on doors, screens on windows, blankets on beds. The smell of the falls, the grapevine of the gazebo, the revolutions of the barber pole—they all seemed smaller, less compelling than he remembered. Other changes were more obvious: the Chagrin Department Store was now The Gap. Goodtown Printers was Starbucks. All the cliches held fast. You can’t go home again. It seems like only yesterday.

  By noon he was in the Chagrin Falls Library, scrolling unsuccessfully through microfiche of 1977 Plain Dealers. A volunteer pointed him toward a desk where a ponytailed man sat rapt before a computer monitor. “He can help you,” she said. “Gene knows the archives as well as anybody.”

  Gene sat in a wheelchair, a chubby torso balanced over disconcertingly still legs. He held up a finger, typed something on his keyboard, then looked up and clasped his hands over his gut.

  “I’m trying to find somebody,” Winkler said. “Two people. My daughter. Her name is Grace. Grace Winkler. And my wife, Sandy. They lived here a long time ago. They might be in Alaska now.”

  Gene pulled down the corners of his bottom lip and inhaled. “I can do addresses in national White Pages and ReferenceUSA. Real estate records, maybe. That’s about it. You want more, you’ll need a private investigator. It can get spendy. Are they hiding?”

  “Hiding? I don’t know.”

  “You have social security numbers?”

  “Not by heart.” A black spot was slowly opening across his field of vision. He leaned on Gene’s desk. “I have money,” he said. He set a hundred-dollar bill on the keyboard. Then another. Gene looked at the bills a moment, then slipped them inside a fold in his wheelchair. “Okay,” he said. “Sandy with a Y?”

  Winkler dragged a chair from a nearby table and sat down. He had seen desktop computers only in the back of the island church and inside the Shell station, but this machine was larger and sleeker and its hum more quiet and powerful. Gene piloted it with unnerving speed, unleashing a stroboscope of websites; leads, dead ends, more leads. Winkler couldn’t make out much, a logo for Switchboard.com, another for something called U.S. Search. Gene breathed slowly through his nose; occasionally his fingers burst into an avalanche of keystrokes.

  “Nothing here,” he said, “not in Cleveland…I can try by age…She married?”

  “Married?”

  “The girl. Grace. Is she married?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Gene turned from the screen a moment to look at Winkler, then looked back. “It’s okay, Pops. Go get some water. It’ll be all right.”

  Winkler sat beside him for over three hours. Gene tried everything he said was “in the book” and some things that weren’t—marriage certificate databases, real estate transactions, quasi-legal pay-search systems, IRS audit lists. “If they’re married, man, or changed their names,” Gene said, “we’re pretty much screwed.” But he tried—his fingers rattled keys; he elicited two more hundred-dollar bills from Winkler. He searched Ohio, Alaska, credit reports, criminal records, a directory for nationals currently living out of the country, an FBI search engine not meant for librarians.

  At first there were too many, several hundred at least, daunting numbers, a world populated with Grace and Sandy Winklers. But they were able to rule out some because of age, some because of nationality, a few because of race.

  “Anchorage?” asked Winkler. “None in Anchorage?”

  “None in Alaska. No Grace Winklers. There’s an Eric and Amy Winkler.”

  “What about Sheelers?”

  A burst of keystrokes. The computer searched. “None in Anchorage. There’s a Carmen Sheeler in Point Barrow. I don’t see a single Grace Sheeler under sixty years old in the whole country.”

  Winkler pinched his temples and tried to hang on.

  “The cops could do better,” Gene said. “They’ve got access to fingerprints, of course, and to CCSC, which I can’t touch.”

  Screens succeeded one another across the monitor. It was well into the afternoon before Gene paused. He did not look at Winkler. “Should I do obituaries?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You know they’re not,” Gene asked, and cleared his throat, “or you hope they’re not?”

  Heat, and a rising acidity. He studied one of the wheels on Gene’s chair, the treads worn shiny, a wad of chewing gum anchoring a loose spoke. “Hope,” he said. In his mind’s eye he could see Nanton leaning on his elbow at the desk of his hotel, waiting for guests. A few gray chubs circling in the water beneath the glass floor. He could see the butcher seated on his crate in his bloody apron, smoking a cigarette. Gene shifted in his wheelchair and a smell rose from the seat: musty, overused. “I’ll just take a look,” he said.

  Winkler tried to remember the feeling of Grace in his arms, the weight and warmth of her, but all he could think of was his mother’s plants, how in the spring after she had died, he had gone up to the roof and tried to restart her garden but overwatered the seedlings. How m
onths later he had to drag her pots and planters, heavy with soil, down to the street and upend them into a Dumpster.

  After a few minutes Gene fumbled for his mouse and blanked the screen. He pivoted his chair back from the desk and turned to Winkler. “Tell you what, come back in an hour.”

  “I could search on another machine.”

  “It’s okay. I’ll get it done. And look, Pops. Make sure you remember one thing. The world is a big, big place. Huge. It may be crisscrossed with fiber optics and spy satellites, but there are still plenty of pockets to hide in. Plenty. I can get you a list of maybe half your Sandys and Graces. I can find the taxpaying ones.”

  “Half?”

  “Maybe more. Maybe all of them. Maybe I’ll find every damn one of them.”

  Winkler nodded.

  “All right,” said Gene. “You sweet on these girls, then?”

  “Something like that.”

  “They really your family?”

  “Yes.”

  “You going to write them? All the ones I find?”

  “I’ll go see them. I wouldn’t know what to put in a letter.”

  “Well.” Gene turned back to the screen. “See you in an hour.”

  He walked to Dink’s and chewed fish sticks at a veneered table and scanned customers for familiar faces but found none. Traffic slid past and a police officer drove an electric cart up and down the street ticketing cars. Out the window clouds gradually sealed off the sky. Near the edge of his view, beyond the wall of the candy store, hung a rippling parcel of air, heavy with mist. Just below it, out of sight, the river slipped under Main and over the falls.

  When he returned to the library Gene was gone. He had left a manila envelope, which Winkler brought to a carrel. Inside were five folded sheets of paper and the four hundred-dollar bills, all returned. No note.

  The first two pages consisted of a list of five Sandy Winklers and eight Sandy Sheelers. He scanned the addresses: Texas, Illinois, two in Massachusetts. No Alaska. The second two pages listed Grace Winklers, nine Graces sprinkled throughout the states. A Grace Winkler in Nebraska, another in Jersey, another in Boise, Idaho.