About Grace

by Anthony Doerr

  A ladybug scaled the D in her name. Her life represented in a two-inch etched hyphen. A breeze came up and passed over the stones and spirit houses and ascended the hillside into the spruce, and pushed higher still, to the patches of tundra, and the still-melting fields of snow, stirring the tiny new blooms of avens and saxifrage, tucked into the highest rocks, starting their summer yellows and purples.

  He propped the daffodils against the stone and wiped his palms on his pants. “Sandy…,” he began but did not finish.

  It wasn’t until he was in the taxi, heading back to the city, that a memory rose. After a matinee, back in his apartment, he and Sandy had impaled marshmallows on forks and roasted them over a burner. She wore his brown corduroy jacket, nothing else. Winkler had been trying to brown his marshmallow evenly, the whole surface area of the cylinder going tan, while Sandy would let hers catch fire and watch it burn, the skin bubbling and charring, beginning to slide off. Then she’d blow it out, chew off the blackened skin, and ignite the white, inner core once more. She had eaten three or four like this already, burning off successively smaller epidermises of marshmallow, peeling them down to their cores, and had gobs of marshmallow on her cheeks and in her hair. She was laughing hysterically, her blood swarming with sugar, and she began bumping Winkler’s elbow, pretending it was an accident, sabotaging his careful roasting.

  In the back of the cab Winkler burst into a smile and the cabbie’s eyes rose to the mirror and met his for a moment before returning to the road ahead. Winkler thought: I loved you, Sandy. I love you still.

  3

  Lilac was a Turnagain subdivision of thirty-six houses, backed against a pond. Each with tightly mown lawns and shrubs edging the front walks and little keypads mounted on the frames of the garage doors. He stood outside Herman’s address and studied the windows, the stucco archway, the little gray satellite dish screwed to an eave. How many times had he felt this: Herman inside, himself outside?

  Subarus and Volvos and Nissans gleamed in driveways. Two women in gardening gloves chatted over fences and twisted to wave to Winkler and he tried to make his return wave look natural, as if his business were no more pressing than theirs, his life no less composed: an extension of the arm, a snap of the elbow.

  He slunk up Herman’s walk. He swallowed, he fluttered. A minute passed before he was able to ring the bell.

  Within a few seconds Herman opened the door. He was big-faced with small eyes and a complexion that was pocked beneath the cheekbones. His hair was still all gray, buzzed into something like a flattop. An apron hung around his neck, with a sheriff’s star and vest silkscreened onto it, and a spatula holstered through a loop sewn on the hip.

  Winkler held a shrink-wrapped Craftsman ratchet set he had bought a few hours before. “Herman? Herman Sheeler?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m David Winkler.” He lifted the ratchet set as if to fend off a blow.

  Herman’s face wrinkled, then opened. He glanced over Winkler’s shoulder out into the driveway. Winkler thought: I could have passed you in the street a thousand times.

  “Well. My goodness. How did you get here?”

  “The bus.”

  “The People Mover?”

  “Number sixty stops at the business park. On Huffman.”

  “That has to be two miles from here.”

  Winkler shrugged. He lowered the ratchet set. Behind him a Suburban pulled into a driveway and honked and Herman raised a hand as the truck disappeared behind a descending garage door

  “Well, come in,” Herman said, “come in. David Winkler. My goodness.”

  The entryway emptied into a living room with beige carpet and a high ceiling where a fan turned slowly. French doors opened into a dim room on the left. Stairs rose to the right. Out the back was a screen door through which blew the odor of charcoal and lighter fluid.

  Herman stood in the entryway in his apron still inspecting Winkler, and Winkler did his best to hold ground. “After all these years.”

  Winkler nodded.

  “What’s that you’ve got there?”

  “Wrenches. They’re for you.”

  Herman took the package and read the label and shook the case. “Sixty-nine pieces. Well. Thank you, David.” He carried it into the kitchen, tore off the plastic wrap, and unclasped the box on the breakfast bar beside a foot-high soapstone polar bear. He examined its contents a long time. As if the shiny cylinders might be more than drive sockets and slotted bits. As if in that case might be answers to questions he had chewed over for decades.

  In the corner of the family room hockey highlights played on an enormous television. There were watercolors of fish on the walls, salmon and trout, maybe even one of them the same print Winkler had seen in Herman’s hallway twenty-five years before.

  Herman looked up. “I’m making dinner. There’s plenty of food.”

  Winkler adjusted his glasses. “Oh, I wouldn’t…I don’t need to…”

  Herman held out his palms. “Stay.” He left Winkler clutching a tumbler of skim milk and went out to the patio, where he stood over a smoking grill and flipped what looked like burger patties with his spatula. The kitchen was neat and clean. On the windowsill stood an army of orange pill bottles. A half dozen child’s marker drawings were stuck to the refrigerator with poker-chips-turned-magnets and it was to them that Winkler’s attention kept slipping, as if the images possessed a gravity independent of the room’s.

  They were uniformly of tall, multiwindowed buildings with genderless figures standing to the sides among high-stalked flowers. Among them hung a wallet photograph of a five- or six-year-old boy. He had freckles and a bowl haircut and the photographer had posed him against a velvet backdrop with a foot braced on a soccer ball.

  Winkler wiped his mouth. “Is this…?” he began but Herman was still at the grill and would not have been able to hear him. When he did come back in he was asking Winkler if he had been following the Stanley Cup playoffs and if he had any favorites. Winkler shook his head and sipped his milk. In the margins of his vision the photograph of the boy loomed, like a black hole.

  They sat to veggie burgers on toasted buns and a bowl of grilled asparagus. “I know,” Herman said, untying his sheriff’s apron, “we ought to be having real burgers. But these are doctor’s orders. Antioxidants, soy, all that. And I’ll tell you, David, I’m on it, I’m on the program. I emptied the freezer, dumped all my meat. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

  “Doctor?”

  Herman knuckled his sternum to the left of the sheriff’s badge. “Heart,” he said. Then he closed his eyes and joined his palms over his plate and said, “Lord Jesus, thank you for your goodness and bounty, and for watching over me and David here all these years,” and raised his milk and drank half of it.

  They ate. Winkler chewed and swallowed. As if the intervening years had been nothing; as if his crimes against Herman were negligible. Was this how one person forgave another? Herman talked about San Diego, and a timeshare complex there called Casa de la Jolla, where he spent three weeks each December. Before he ate his asparagus he grimaced at it for a moment, like a child, then closed his eyes and chased it down with a gulp of milk.

  When they were finished they sat a moment over their plates. A crow landed in the backyard and began scratching around beneath the grill.

  Herman stifled a belch. “Don’t say much, do you, David?”

  Winkler shrugged. His organs swarmed. Here was Herman, living his life, carrying around his pockmarked face, his mending heart; his hockey skates beneath the coffee table, his health food in the freezer. He had a job, a house—what did Winkler have? Yet they spoke now across a glass-topped dining table as if words were just words, as if their histories were equivalent. The ratchet set open on the counter, the ghost of Sandy traveling the walls. During dinner the child’s drawings on the refrigerator had grown to the size of billboards.

  Herman unbuttoned his shirt and showed Winkler a thin scar grafted onto his breastbone like a v
ery straight earthworm. “Stenosis. My aortic valve was almost completely blocked. They found it during a physical. Had to cut me open and scrape it out. I lost two months at the bank. I’ve been trying to work from here, but it’s not the same.”

  With a fork Winkler smeared a puddle of mustard on his plate back and forth. “I’m sorry.”

  “At least I don’t have a pig valve in me,” Herman said, and peered over his shoulder and watched the TV for a while. Skaters glided up and down. A truck dealer came on and jabbed a finger at the camera. Who has the best deals in Alaska? Who?

  They ate frozen yogurt for dessert. Herman piled four scoops into his bowl. Winkler excused himself to the bathroom and shut the door and leaned on the sink. On the tile counter stood a photograph in a varnished wooden frame. It was Sandy. She gazed off to her left. Her hair was short, dyed almost red; her throat was thin and pale, her expression bemused. It was a color print of the photo that had been used in her obituary.

  He flushed the toilet and it refilled and silence followed. Outside, in the kitchen, Herman’s spoon clinked against his bowl. Winkler’s own face was long and thin and as unacceptable as ever in the mirror and he switched off the light and Sandy withdrew into black and he backed out.

  Herman was staring into his frozen yogurt. Without looking up he said, “That’s Sandy. The picture.”

  “Yes.”

  “About four years ago, I guess. At a birthday party. Just before she was diagnosed.”

  Winkler nodded. The air between them seemed to accumulate energy. “About Sandy…”

  Herman looked up and the two men studied each other a moment in the kitchen and the objects around them—the pill bottles and the carved polar bear and the boy’s drawings and the range and the clusters of wooden spoons in their ceramic container and Herman’s sheriff apron hanging from the pantry knob—seemed suddenly to glow, throbbing with their various charges, each dish towel about to incandesce, and then the refrigerator clicked on and the glow subsided and the kitchen returned to normal.

  Herman spooned up another mouthful. “Hey,” he said. “That was a long time ago.”

  They would not get closer to the truth that night. They watched a period of hockey in silence. Winkler insisted on doing the dishes. Herman insisted on driving him to the bus stop.

  The truck reeked of stale coffee. Winkler was climbing out of the passenger’s seat when Herman said, “You spent the whole winter up there? Off the grid?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it cold?”

  “Maybe not as bad as you’d think.”

  Herman smiled. “I’ll bet it was freezing. Thirty below is what the paper said.”

  Winkler looked out over the hood. Insects were rising from the lawns and floating toward the lights of the industrial park. Herman watched him.

  “She’s at my place every weekday at five, you know. To pick up Christopher. I’ve been watching him while I’m off work. You could come by. To tell you the truth, I could use the help.”

  Winkler tried to nod. “Christopher,” he said. The whole scene seemed ready to twist and rear back and spit him out into the night. The electronic door-ajar chime sounded over and over. Moths hung in the nimbus of streetlight.

  Herman said, “You’re sure the bus comes down this far?”

  Winkler nodded. He shut the door. Herman dropped the transmission into drive. Winkler leaned through the window. “Herman,” he said. For a moment in the glow of the dashboard Herman’s face was naked and smooth. “I’m sorry.”

  He reached inside. Herman looked at Winkler’s hand maybe a second before taking it. “Heck,” he said.

  They held the handshake a moment. Then Winkler stood back and wiped his eyes and Herman pulled away into the blue May dusk, his taillights shuttling gently from sight.

  4

  He returned to Herman’s a second time, and a third. They’d eat tofu dogs, or soy pizza, a bowl of microwaved broccoli, Herman shuddering as he swallowed his vegetables, and afterward they’d sit in front of the huge television, Herman in his leather lounger, Winkler on the davenport, and watch the Seattle Mariners. “Get legs!” Herman would shout once in a while, or “Drop!” and Winkler would look over, surprised, realizing a moment too late that on-screen a ball had rolled up against the outfield fence, or the third baseman had made a diving stop.

  Every time he showed up, it seemed, a new drawing hung on the refrigerator. Each was a variant of the original: giant flowers—all red one time, a dozen colors the next—below a tall facade cut by hundreds of polygonal windows. There was other evidence, too: a Tonka backhoe on its side on the deck. A two-handled Bob the Builder cup standing in the sink.

  In the bathroom Sandy smiled on and on.

  Only in the waning minutes, riding to the bus stop, nearing the New Seward Highway overpass, would he and Herman veer toward anything like the truth.

  “She didn’t stay with me, you know,” Herman said once. “I mean, for years she only lived a quarter mile away, but she raised that girl on her own. I helped get her on her feet, found her a job at one of the banks. But she did it on her own. Took Grace to ballet and sent her to camp and washed her clothes and all of it. You know she was still married to you? Far as I know, anyway. Maybe she had boyfriends but I never saw them.”

  Winkler looked out the window, the trees clocking past. On the next trip, he started it: “I’d like to help pay for the gravesite. ”

  “It’s all paid for.”

  “I’d like to help.”

  “I didn’t do a thing. It was folks at the bank. They loved her there. Absolutely crazy about her. They paid for hospice, the plot at that nature cemetery, just about everything. God bless ’em.”

  Afterward, each time, they’d lapse into silence, taking a moment to accustom themselves to the minute shifts in their individual burdens, as if with each truth spoken aloud into that truck cab, their bodies became a tiny proportion lighter. Winkler would wave his good-bye; Herman’s taillights would glide away.

  On the fourth evening they arrived at the business park without speaking. Winkler paused with his hand on the door handle. “The drawings are the boy’s, aren’t they? Christopher’s?”

  Herman stared straight ahead and the light of the dashboard was pale on his throat. He nodded.

  “And the photo? That’s him, too?”

  “Right.”

  From the south, down Old Seward, the last bus was trundling toward them, its marquee glowing palely in the still-light of 11 P.M.

  Herman’s stare did not leave the dash. “Grace works at Gottschalks,” he said. “On Dimond. She manages the shoe department. Nine to five.”

  5

  Early morning. June. Naaliyah picked up the phone. She nodded. She leaned on the sink. Winkler watched from the orange sofa. Felix had collapsed over his saute pan and burned his chest. The island doctor worried Felix might have bleeding in his spleen and they ferried him to the hospital on St. Vincent, where he was hooked up on dialysis. He was stable now, under control. Soma was with him. The boys were with him. When Naaliyah hung up she stood in the kitchen and her mouth was a wound and her eyes were huge and swimming.

  A roofer with a nail gun shot nails into shingles atop the strip mall across the street. On the windowsill sat one of Felix’s boats, a red-hulled sloop with a triangular green jib clipped awkwardly to the mast. Winkler said her name and went to her and held her in the kitchen a long time, the little analog arms on the stove clock grinding forward.

  After a while she went into her room and shut the door. An hour passed and another and then, like a glass of water overfilled—the meniscus inverting, going convex, gravity pulling at the edges, the overflow finally giving way—he could no longer suffer his own cowardice.

  The outbound Lake Otis bus stopped directly across from Gottschalks and he crossed the parking lot and pushed through the glass doors at 11.45 A.M. It was a Thursday and the store was mostly empty, salesclerks trolling sleepily between the racks, children stomping up th
e escalator steps, a Japanese couple picking through souvenirs in a sales bin.

  A girl behind the cosmetics counter drew color over her lips with a pencil. She pointed toward women’s shoes without taking her eyes from the mirror.

  Winkler made his way through the warrens of jackets and sweaters. Footwear occupied an entire corner of the store, and glass tables were arrayed here and there with the mouths of expensive-looking loafers angled toward passersby, a display of sandals and another of tall leather boots, one of them bent at the ankle. A woman strolled head-down among the collections, stooped to pick up a stiletto, and turned it over, and set it down. Another sat on a bench in her stockings with a half dozen boxes arrayed in front of her. Sinatra burbled out of ceiling loudspeakers.

  A memory, long dormant: infant Grace, basketed in Sandy’s arms, the three of them at the family room window staring into a snowfall. Tiny droplets raced down the pane. The baby’s eyes were wide and dark. The snow settled onto Shadow Hill Lane and into the tracks of cars that had passed before and along the tops of the hedges. The word had risen that night: family.

  But what was family? Surely more than genes, eye color, flesh. Family was story: truth and struggle and retribution. Family was time. At the other end of the continent Felix was lying in a hospital bed, asleep, surrounded by kin—Soma and the boys, the ghosts of the Chileans he had known, the disappeared, the still-here. Winkler had a single memory of an infant girl at a window. Faces in a dream, phantoms in the periphery. If he had learned anything it was that family was not so much what you were given as what you were able to maintain.

  A portly salesclerk in a dark suit stood behind the shoe counter picking through receipts. Was she Grace? Sinatra kept on. Winkler thought: I will not even know her when I see her.

  Then she came out of a back room. She was carrying three gray shoe boxes. Her hair was black. She was thin, very thin, her hips so fatless he could easily imagine her pelvis riding there on top of her femurs, the knobs of her spine rising up her back and plugging into her skull. Her eyebrows were sudden and dark. It had been twenty-six years but there was no doubt: She was Grace—she was Sandy, but she was Winkler, too, tall and aquiline and slightly gangly and with a look like her flesh was stretched too thin. Just twenty feet now from her father, strung up in his cheap wool suit, and in the nucleus of her every cell twenty-three chromosomes of his DNA.