About Grace

by Anthony Doerr

  Winkler swallowed. The boy whispered again. “Jed says you will have a long journey. He says the future machine tells only what it sees and not everything.”

  Winkler breathed a bit and smiled but Grace did not smile back. “Does it say where my daughter is?”

  The boy rubbed his hands over the machine and the room seemed to collectively inhale and Winkler raised his empty bottle to his lips. Grace leaned over to listen and finally said: “The future machine says there are many Grace Winklers and all of them are the real Grace Winkler, so in that way your journey will never be done. He says you will see fire and you will die. The future machine says that to enter a world of shadows is to leave this world for another.”

  Winkler blinked. The boy came forward and began removing his alligator clips. “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  5

  Someone left the kitchen faucet on and he woke to the sound of running water. On the carpet around the entrance to the basement stood a bevy of empty bottles. Winkler peeled himself from the plastic sofa and stumbled to the sink and shut it off. The house was empty and silent now save the lone dark child still in his underpants who crouched at the door eating animal crackers from a giant plastic tub. Winkler found his glasses on the sofa back and wiped them and put them on. The sky out the windows was gray and overcast. A pale fog slinked along the lawn.

  “Hey,” Winkler said. “Jed. What time is it?”

  The boy did not turn or even flinch. There was an aching at the far back of Winkler’s head and a general soreness in his limbs and he gathered his coat and in his rumpled suit unlatched the screen door and went down the steps to his car, which sat as he had left it, unmolested. Before he pulled away, he brought the Datsun beside the mailbox, pulled down the door, and set a hundred-dollar bill inside.

  A motel north of D.C. He draped his coat on the table beside a broken television and took a sheet of stationery from the bedside drawer.

  Dear Soma—

  Supposedly there are over 13,000 McDonald’s restaurants in the United States. I drove here on an eight-lane freeway and passed five of them. I miss you and Felix. I miss the whole island. I even miss Nanton. There are comforts in knowing the boundaries of the place you live. Everyone here seems to behave like things are endless.

  Once, before she was my wife, Sandy bought a sleeve of chocolate chip cookies and we ate them on a bench overlooking the ocean. I remember she was talking about something, but I couldn’t listen. I was watching her lips move as she spoke, the curve of her jawbone. I wanted to grab her and hold her and feed her cookies. I didn’t, though. I only watched her, the light on her face, a few stray hairs that had fallen over her ear.

  You ever read your horoscope, go see a fortune-teller? Do you think there’s anything to people’s desire to know what’s coming? I always thought they just wanted to hear something nice, that their week will be a happy one, that they might meet somebody who will love them.

  The Grace Winkler in Petersburg, Virginia, lived in a russet-colored condominium with a pair of overexcited Saint Bernards. She spoke to him through her screen door with one hand covering the mouthpiece of a cordless telephone. The Saint Bernards slavered at the screen and dripped big ropes of drool onto her bare feet. She listened to Winkler, then shook her head. “I grew up in Raleigh. I work for my dad’s software company.”

  She called, “Good luck,” after him, and pushed her huge dogs back from the door with her knees.

  From a cavernous superstore outside Winston-Salem he mailed her two twenty-pound bags of premium dog food that cost more to ship than they did to buy. Families clambered in and out of cars in the parking lot. A close, damp sky hovered over them. Mothers, daughters, fathers—stocking their wagons like postmillennial pioneers: bricks of Miller Lite, foil pillows of Goldfish crackers, crates of Campbell’s Beef & Noodle. Something caught in his throat and he began to cry.

  One squirrel harrying another across the parking lot, an itch halfway up his arm—even in the midst of grief the mind grapples with a hundred impressions: a pain below the heart; an odor on the breeze. He thought of Sandy measuring milk for her cereal; he thought of her smile behind the bank counter, and the dark mouths of her boots standing on his bedroom floor. He thought of cancer devouring her ovaries; of bacteria, and beetles, and the grubs that had by now chewed their tunnels through her body, carrying her off, piece by piece.

  The third Grace Winkler lived in Dyersburg, Tennessee, with a soft-spoken grandfather who asked Winkler to sit in a porch hammock while they waited for Grace to return from the night shift at a doughnut bakery. Lightning bugs rose through the spaces between branches. Winkler wondered: Would my daughter live here? He lay motionless in the netting, listening to the old man’s dictums: Grace’s father had been a master with drywall, her mother (the grandfather’s daughter), the best nine-pin bowler in four counties. There were trophies to prove it. This Grace, when she returned, was at least two hundred pounds and looked precisely like a younger and more female version of her grandfather. She fed Winkler and the grandfather fried chicken thighs at three in the morning, a pair of candles burning on the table, tribes of bullfrogs rising to successive crescendos outside the windows. Afterward Grace and the grandfather fell asleep in her California king and left Winkler sweating in the grandfather’s twin beneath a pile of afghans. He waited until he could hear the old man snoring, set a hundred-dollar bill on the nightstand, and slipped down the porch, through the humid starlight.

  It took a day and a half of driving to cross Missouri and a corner of Kansas into Nebraska. The open ends of cornfield rows ticked past like turnstiles. Six Graces left and he could feel his hope wilting. The country was huge and trafficked and hot. Everything moved more quickly than he imagined it would: music, travel, images projected on screens. Only his search seemed slower, longer, already interminable.

  By Lincoln the Datsun was spitting black smoke and listing badly to the right. Parked, it left pools of oil on the pavement and he had to begin carting a two-gallon jug of Valvoline in the hatchback and draining it into the black and smoking filler neck whenever he stopped for gasoline.

  A hollowness settled into him. A feeling like the corridors of his body were cobwebbed and vacant. He lay on a hotel mattress with the air conditioner on high and the TV forecasting temperatures in Hanoi, Istanbul, Jakarta.

  There was the Grace Winkler of Walton, Nebraska, now Grace Lanfear, a subdued woman who said probably five words to Winkler and served him the greatest macaroni and cheese he’d ever eaten. She lived in a two-bedroom ranch house with train tracks running through the backyard and a kitchen that reeked of bird droppings. He met Geoff Lanfear, a gangling and excitable husband who spouted all evening about education technologies: “What do you think the classroom is going to look like in 2020, Dr. Winkler? Take a guess!” He showed Winkler his birds: a cockatoo, an African gray parrot, twenty cockatiels in a cage the size of Geoff’s minivan. During dessert a freight train stampeded through the backyard, rattling the pictures on the walls and the plates on the table. The family chewed on as if their eardrums had been plucked from their heads. The birds sent up a death racket from the garage.

  What Winkler took from there was the macaroni and cheese, in a Tupperware bowl, tasting of Parmesan and bay leaves, a triad of flavors, first the bread crumbs, then the bay, finally the cheese and butter. He ate it for breakfast the next morning on the side of the road, using his fingers for a spoon.

  In Austin, Texas, he tripped on the front stairs of Grace Winkler’s townhouse and put his teeth partway through his tongue. She was a large Englishwoman who shoved kitchen towels at him and told him to spit the blood in her sink. “My God!” she kept saying. “Holy crap!” She taught at the University of Texas and drove a Datsun identical to Winkler’s. No kids. A father back in Manchester. She had antique-looking photos of menorahs on her walls and a giant brass clock, twice as tall as him, shaped like a sun. Who knew?

  Dear Soma—

&n
bsp; Today a stranger at a truck stop sold me two dozen cans of soup and an “emergency kit.” He had maybe a thousand American flag buttons pinned to his jacket. “You’ve got to keep this stuff in your trunk,” he said. “You never know what will happen.” And I was so persuaded, so convinced that he was on to something original, what he said about the not knowing. I practically stuffed money into his pockets.

  At nights I page through my notebooks and wonder what to do with all these drawings, all this stuff I’ve gathered about water. Most of it makes very little sense. I have written here that two hundred years ago Urbano d’Aviso theorized that steam consisted of bubbles of water filled with fire, ascending through the air. What do I do with that?

  More than once, I admit, I’ve imagined a ridiculous triumphant publication with lots of people and newspaper articles. My daughter smiling in the front row, flashbulbs, all that. Ridiculous. I haven’t even taken any notes in a week. The whole thing feels like a pool of water that I’m trying to hold in my hands.

  Did you know students in U.S. schools now take notes not on paper but on computers? Half the drivers that pass me are talking on cellular phones.

  When I sleep now I pray I’ll dream of Grace but my dreams are crazy: the bathroom is stuffed with ice; angels wearing sneakers chase me through the halls of my college dormitory. All I really remember when I wake is that they were bad dreams, and kept me from sleeping.

  I’ve visited five Graces now. Maybe it is stupid to continue; maybe I ought to go to Anchorage and find Naaliyah, see if anyone there can tell me what happened. Perhaps Herman, my wife’s first husband. But it seems easier—and better—to do it this way, to try to find her on my own. My best to Felix.

  A hundred anonymous dollars in a stamped envelope for Grace in Walton; another hundred for Grace in Austin.

  Motel rooms blended in his memory, a mash of polyester bedspreads, air conditioners, soap wrapped in paper. Mirrors were the worst, always big and garishly lit, always revealing an image of himself he cringed to see: a gaunt, white-haired stranger in rumpled underwear, twin ladders of ribs up his sides, a face pinched by glare, permanent hollows beneath his eyes. He learned to draw curtains, use bathrooms in the dark.

  In Socorro, New Mexico, a bank sign read 109 degrees Fahrenheit. The gravel between the Datsun and the front door was so hot he could hear it sizzle. This Grace was a twenty-year-old beauty in a floor-length nightgown who hovered behind the screen giving him laconic answers (“’Course I know my daddy”) until her father appeared in the hallway. “Out,” he said, and clapped his hands as if Winkler were a dog that needed frightening. He was a mousy man striped with tattoos and his arms looked capable of nasty, redundant violence.

  Winkler veered back the way he came, his shells rattling and sliding across the dash. The car shuddered and limped; the father’s words rolled in the passages of his ears like pebbles: Your. Daughter. Ain’t. Here.

  West of there he turned onto I-10 and tried to lose himself in a current of westbound trucks. The whole of the country was off to his right, shining up into the sky. Electric wires slung past in shallow parabolas from tower to tower. Mirages loomed in the distance like lagoons into which the Datsun could plunge. Sandy, immured in her yellowing photograph, watched it all pass.

  As he came out of a truck stop bathroom east of Tucson, he paused in front of a payphone. Rust-colored foothills burgeoned the horizon and heat blurs rose in the distances. The bug-spattered Datsun looked horrific, like some primitive beast driven through the apocalypse and deposited next to the gas pumps to die. The thought of climbing back into the driver’s seat made him want to retch.

  He pulled Gene’s list from his pocket. Three Graces left. Numbers seven and eight lived in Southern California: Los Angeles and La Jolla, still a day away.

  The girl at the register traded his ten-dollar bill for a handful of quarters. He pushed into the only phone booth and sat holding the receiver a moment, dial tone failing in his ear. It was 9 P.M. in California. He thought of Sandy holding Grace on her hip, reaching with her left arm to retrieve something from a cupboard. What did the future machine say? There are many Grace Winklers, all of them the real Grace Winkler, so in that way your journey will never be done.

  He rifled quarters into the slot. At the first number a man answered. “Not here. At her mom’s for dinner. Yeah, her mom. What’s this about?” Winkler hung up.

  The other decided he was trying to sell her a new windshield. “I told you to take me off your list,” she said. “My windshield isn’t even cracked.”

  “No,” Winkler said. He gave his explanation, asked if she had family in Alaska, if she was born in Ohio or knew the name of her father. When he finished, there was a pause.

  “Luke?” she said. “It’s you, isn’t it? Goddamn you, Luke. Nice try. My dad died of cancer five months ago. Real freaking smooth.” She swore, and hung up.

  6

  He sent deer jerky to the Graces in California, a hemp doll in a tiny poncho to the one in New Mexico. All daughters, none of them his. He felt as if he were trapped in some variation of the original dream: a house filling with water, a search through empty rooms.

  From a motel in Glendale, Arizona, on the first of September, he dialed the number for the last Grace Winkler, the one in Boise, Idaho, and pressed the handset to his ear. It rang unanswered. It was noon before he could summon the will to stand, fold his clothes into his duffel bag, and slog out to the Datsun once more.

  Dear Soma—

  In over two weeks I have spoken to eight Grace Winklers and have nothing from any of them, no clues, no answers, just a sore on the underside of my tongue and pain in my lower back. It was stupid to think she’d even use my surname. What could it mean to her? She could be Grace Sheeler; she could be Grace Anything. I should probably go straight to Anchorage, finish this. But I’m afraid there will be nothing—no one—there. Not even Herman. It is strange and awful to feel so alone, to feel like your whole tribe is dead, even your enemies.

  My little car is starting to fail me. I have spent more than two thousand dollars already.

  All day the Datsun coughed and spat oil. He talked it forward. The highway fringed the faint arc of an ancient lakeshore where fossilized shells lay like small bones in the sand, and by evening he was descending onto a plain thronged with legions of cacti. They went first pink and then purple and finally crimson in the dusk, their shadows lengthening, the sun dragging its light over the edge of the firmament. Little desert bats appeared over the road, swooping through the headlight beams, their ancient and jawboned faces flashing once in the glare and then gone. Winkler pushed on, racing the fuel gauge to empty, stopping only to refill the oil reservoir or scrape husks of bugs from the windshield. Soon the cacti were behind him, or invisible in the dark, and all that remained were gray and corrugated mountains at the horizons and the immense darkening cistern of sky, trimmed at the edges with orange.

  The Datsun limped into Utah around midnight, only intermittent highway lights left now casting dim pools that the car and its pilot passed beneath, gliding from one to the next, towed, seemingly, by their own pale wedge of light. Beneath the highway a canyon opened, and a river appeared, sleek and implacable, before vanishing again.

  He spent the last hours of darkness in a rest stop between two purring car carriers. All night he half woke to the sounds of truckers swinging open the door of the outhouse and relieving themselves. An echoing trickle; a noise like small, individual lives passing away. In a dream he watched a winged ghost disappear through columns of falling snow. Each time he drew close, the ghost faded deeper down the trail. Finally it dissolved for good, just the faint blush of its wings receding, and Winkler stopped running to gaze up at ranks of descending snow, snow all the way to the limits of the earth. He woke sweating.

  The next day he passed through the sun-afflicted towns of southern Utah and the flanks of the Datsun went red with dust and great red walls of that same dust hung over the road incandescent as if lit fr
om within. The little car wound over canyons and followed the course of a river far below lined with the greens of river oaks and cottonwoods.

  It was late into his sixteenth day when he reached Idaho along the wind-tortured flats near Holbrook. The sky was purple a long time and finally black. Along the shoulders dim shapes of sagebrush were bundled low against the ground, and at both horizons low walls of mountains stood black and featureless. He felt as if he were entering a trap and would soon be hemmed in. Around midnight he could make out the lights of Boise reflected off a space in the sky and soon after saw the lights themselves, twinkling and burning on the range like a small blue galaxy.

  “Almost there,” he told Sandy. She merely looked out the window. He braced his hands on the wheel. Already the truth was becoming plain: this place would be no happy ending, no slate wiped clean, no port in the storm. He was arriving at the end of the line, no markers above him, no prospects, no tenth Grace on his list. Sandy was dead and his daughter had likely drowned twenty-five years before, and here he was in Boise, Idaho, after nearly sixty years of living and what did he have to show for it?

  7

  One-one-two-two Alturas Street was a small slate-colored bungalow with three or four heat-stroked rhododendrons withering in the front bed. He kept his attention on the porch. No one went in or out.

  It was the third of September, plenty of broth left in summer’s cauldron, and by 10 A.M. the temperature shoved past ninety. Winkler opened his collar and rocked in his seat. Every hour or so a pedestrian ambled by, one of them a sweating mailman who limped to Grace’s door and pushed a pile of magazines through the slot.