About Grace

by Anthony Doerr

  “Good-bye, Christopher.”

  “Good-bye, David.”

  Winkler slinked out the rear door, made for the trail at the end of the cul-de-sac. Thirty seconds later Grace’s Cavalier pulled onto Lilac, her bike clamped to the roof.

  They sat in the Fifth Avenue Mall food court at Winkler’s usual table. Christopher was kneeling on his chair, his back to Winkler, rooting through the leaves of a big potted persimmon Winkler had not seen before. Teenagers milled and bickered and clanked their watch chains in the big sun-heated atrium and the odors of fast food drifted from the various stalls and rose to the skylights. Winkler stared out to his left, where the ocean lay glittering, the boy’s father out there somewhere, netting salmon, and thought of the great repository of the sea, how the water in us longs to return to it, and how once in the sea, it longs to rise into the clouds, and in the clouds to come to earth once more.

  “David,” the boy said, into the plant. “Look. A chrisaletter.”

  “What?”

  “What Naaliyah says. Where butterflies come out of?”

  “Chrysalides?” He stood, walked to the other side of the tree. “Well, I…” There was a little brown and green parcel, the size of the long segment of Winkler’s thumb, glommed to the underside of a leaf. The boy poked it: it was flimsy, made of a gray parchment that looked like homemade paper.

  Christopher stared at it, unblinking. “Inside there’s a caterpillar?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “And butterflies will come out?”

  “That’s how it usually works. One butterfly. Or maybe a moth. We’ll have to ask Naaliyah.”

  “Can I take it home?”

  Winkler glanced over his shoulder. “I don’t know, Christopher.”

  The boy’s fingers caressed the cocoon, over and over. Maybe they were brought in with the persimmon. Or mated female lepidoptera flapped through the mall during the night?

  Winkler leaned back into the leaves. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s take it.” They broke the leaf off at its stem and the boy carried it all the way back to Herman’s in the upturned cup of his palms.

  They telephoned Naaliyah, set the chrysalis in an empty water glass with a few twigs, and used a rubber band to strap a square of screen over the mouth. This Christopher gingerly carried out to the deck and set on top of Herman’s patio table in the shade.

  Dear Soma—

  I always figured that as people aged, their dispositions would strengthen. They see more, they get used to more, they grow tougher, more capable of bearing the heavy things. But not me. I’m falling apart. The sight of sunlight on the simplest object—on Naaliyah’s keys, say, or on her raincoat on the floor, or on a thousand pairs of eyeglasses in their little niches—can start tears in my eyes. Sunlight, eight and a half minutes old, racing across space, reaching through windows—up here, even in the city, the Alaskan light is so unadulterated it manages to reveal the essence of things, throw them into relief. Everything becomes sublime. Animated movies make me cry. A really good-tasting banana can get me choked up. I have to sit on Naaliyah’s sofa in the dark and gather myself.

  Even Christopher seems to feel it. We sit outside and look at things under the microscope Naaliyah gave me. We look at whatever he wants-—a blade of grass, a sliver of his fingernail. Afterward, he’ll get tired, and lean back, and shut his eyes. As if he’s drinking in the light. As if already he understands how rare such moments can be.

  A field trip: Naaliyah drove Winkler and Christopher into the vast doomed groves of the Kenai to hear the spruce beetles. They passed first through the dead forests, yellow and orange to their crowns, needles carpeting the road, then into still older groves, recently infested, still fighting. “Thirty million trees a year,” Naaliyah said and Winkler watched the boy try to absorb this.

  They hiked a quarter mile off the road, Naaliyah occasionally stopping to take samples with a handsaw. When they entered the oldest trees, she stopped them at a sizable spruce and pressed listening cones to its trunk. They braced their ears over the narrow ends of the cones. Winkler tried to block out the wind in the branches and the creek below them trickling along and strained only to hear the tree, its hundred minute creaks and shifts.

  “I hear it,” Christopher said. “I hear it.”

  Eventually Winkler got it, too: a slow chewing, not unlike a pulse, a sort of sanding-down like the surface of a rough tongue dragged across bone. “They’re chewing the tree out from the inside,” Naaliyah whispered, and he listened to the beetle larvae locked deep inside the trunk, unseen, spitting up their acids on fibers of phloem, then taking them in their mouths and mincing them, digging their unlit avenues up toward the branches, the whole tree hanging on as the family made its way through it. Soon, they seemed to be saying to one another as they chewed. Soon.

  Herman fended off Grace with three-quarter lies. Yes, he and his friend had taken Christopher to the park Tuesday; yes, they’d driven him down to the Kenai. Yes, he’d noticed that Christopher now refused to step on bugs, didn’t even want to see houseflies killed.

  “She knows,” he’d say afterward, wiping sweat from his palms. “She must. She’s just not letting on.”

  “She must. She has to know my name is David, after all.”

  “And it’s not so bad, is it? To get the boy out? To let me get back to a little work? It’s free daycare, isn’t it?”

  “It’s not so bad,” Winkler agreed.

  Her Cavalier hunkered on Sixteenth Avenue, outside her apartment. At dusk he sat on the swing, and pushed back with his feet, rocking back and forth. He could just see the doorbell, a single point of light, its faint yellow glow, its incessant flicker.

  Naaliyah explained: what they had found was the cocoon of a luna moth, a species her books said did not live in Alaska. She showed them a photo: an adult moth, like a lime-green hang glider, fringed in black, with four spots on its wings and short fuzzy antennae like little feathers. Perhaps, she speculated, the caterpillar was trucked in with the persimmon tree, and pupated there, in the warmth of the mall’s atrium.

  Inside the empty water glass, Naaliyah said, inside the walls of the chrysalis—if she wasn’t parasitized, and dead already—the pupa was lengthening her legs, putting scales on her wings, dusting herself with color. At the base of her brain, no larger than a poppy seed, a tiny vat of hormones was starting to fill. Muscles were thickening along her back. She was reabsorbing her larval eyes, making new and better ones, restructuring half the cells in her head. Her eggs were maturing. She was tasting the air. She was peering through the paper of her cocoon at the sky above Herman’s deck.

  Winkler took a Thursday off and walked the boy out to the pond to listen to the bullfrogs. He carried his little sleeping body to the couch. He drank sixteen-ouncers of 7-Up with him and watched four consecutive episodes of a television show called Clifford, where an enormous red dog and his gang of round-faced kids struggled and eventually overcame various conflicts.

  But he and Herman pushed it too far, counted on luck for too long. At 2:30 P.M. on the fifth of August, Winkler and Christopher came in Herman’s front door to find Herman standing in his suit and tie in the kitchen. Christopher stopped halfway down the hall, watching them.

  The story was breathless and mostly predictable: a client had suggested lunch at O’Brady’s. O’Brady’s was in the Dimond Center. Herman had thought it wouldn’t be a problem. What were the chances? The Dimond Center had sixty-one stores, nineteen restaurants. He had eaten two spoonfuls of soup when he looked up and there was Grace.

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought she rode her bike during lunch hour.”

  “Not today.”

  Christopher studied them with his lower lip between his teeth, puzzling through it. Winkler set down the boy’s backpack, went to the sink, turned it on.

  “I told her how you were with him. I told her you were great.”

  Water drummed in the sink. Winkler shut his eyes.r />
  “It was like there was nothing in her face. No expression, nothing. She’s putting him in daycare at the mall. He’ll be in school in a month anyhow. It was a stupid thing to try. We should have told her. C’mon, Christopher,” he said and held out his hand. The boy walked over. “Let’s go see your mom.”

  Winkler leaned over the sink. “I thought she knew. I hoped she knew.”

  “She didn’t know.”

  Herman shepherded the boy into the garage. The garage door churned up. “I was supposed to bring him to her by one,” Herman called. “You can stay as long as you want. I’ll take the blame, David. I’ll try to take the blame.”

  Then his Explorer was pulling out, and the garage door was descending in its tracks, eclipsing the light, and Winkler was alone, leaning over the sink, water gushing from the faucet and disappearing down the drain.

  9

  August: days of humidity, dragonflies roving above the ponds. He did not have the stomach to return to Herman’s for two weeks. When he did, he went straight to the patio and found the water glass empty, a hole chewed through the retaining mesh, the birch leaves dry, the little deflated bag of the chrysalis empty on the bottom. A tiny slug was coiled inside, sucking it clean. Another desertion.

  Was Christopher fighting for him? Was he asking about Winkler at dinner?

  No. Christopher was gentle and trusting; he would endure this abandonment quietly, as he had endured other, greater ones: his grandmother, his father.

  He started leaving flowers. He’d set them on her doormat—hypericum berries, white daisies, gas station carnations wrapped in green cellophane—and back quickly away as if leaving bombs with unpredictable fuses. Some nights he’d sit in the swing till after dark, her hedges heaving in a wind, the cars on A Street whispering like faraway saws.

  Mostly he waited. Customer after customer ambled into LensCrafters and studied their reflections through various frames: Ellen Tracy, Tommy Hilfiger. He typed their orders into his computer, printed them out, handed them to Dr. Evans. So many human beings, none of them seeing clearly.

  Rain spattered Naaliyah’s windows, and stopped, and started again. The ceiling thumped; water traveled the walls. He sat in the darkened kitchen and listened to her caterpillars consume their various repasts. In the other room his nineteen snow crystals hung over the sofa, half-aglow in the watery light.

  In late August, after work, he walked up Spenard to the building where he had grown up, waited for someone to exit, and caught the door before it swung shut. The foyer was completely new, brass mailboxes, a checkerboard floor. The stairwell had been redone, too, and smelled less of memory than of varnish. His footfalls echoed loudly. He limped up four flights—the stairs closer together, the walls more cramped than he remembered. The door to the old apartment was painted white. The roof door was unlocked.

  A parking garage blocked a third of the view. A bank sign flashed the temperature, then the time, one after another: 61; 9:15. Each time the bulbs lit, the air filled with the hum of vibrating filaments. Beyond that thousands of city lights shimmered and the color in the sky pooled and the heat of the day drew off toward the inlet.

  A bush plane buzzed past, flying low, wing lights blinking. The mountains were huge and pale. The corners of the roof were bare. There were no answers here.

  The year swung past the fulcrum of another equinox. Shadows lurked in corners by four o’clock. Everybody but Winkler, it seemed, was doing fine. Business at Nanton’s inn was picking up. Felix was improving, back at work. Through Naaliyah’s bedroom door he could hear her talking into the phone about Patagonia, lakes and mountains, guanacos standing in roads. “You should just ask her to come with you, Papa,” Naaliyah would say. “She’d say yes. I know she would.”

  Naaliyah, too, was doing as well as ever. She finished the second chapter of her dissertation, taught an undergraduate class. Her students sent e-mails telling her how much they enjoyed it.

  Christopher started the first grade. Herman said he carried a Thomas the Tank Engine backpack stuffed full of books. Josh Latham’s mother picked him up at three, drove Christopher and Josh to her house, and kept Christopher until five. He loved school, Herman said. Reading, music, maps, kickball, friends—he loved it all.

  Herman, for his part, was putting in long hours, his strength reemerging, surprising him. The doctors weaned him off blood thinners. His church was sponsoring a hockey team in the winter city league and had asked Herman to serve as head coach. He spoke of investing in a putt-putt golf course in Del Mar, something Misty clued him into, an “upscale situation,” he told Winkler, “and challenging, too, not for the faint of heart. Something that would keep people coming back.”

  Sometimes Winkler would walk into Herman’s living room and see little indentations in the carpet, thin lines, maybe twelve inches long, Herman walking the room in his ice skates.

  The back side of Naaliyah’s apartment door. The thousand tiny cracks in the paint. All it took was a breath, a blink of the eyes: Grace could be on the other side, raising her knuckles to knock. He’d pull open the door; she’d lean slightly forward. She’d say it, say, Dad, carefully and quietly, as if the word were an egg, a house of cards. Her bicycle helmet dangling from her fist.

  How deep did her anger run? Could she keep him out of her life forever? Don’t come back. Don’t write. Don’t even think of it. You are dead.

  Gerbera daisies. Lilies. Whole spectrums of roses. He laid them on her doormat, stuffed them in her mailbox. Then the swing in Raney Playground, his hands against the chains, his heels grooving the scalloped dust.

  In October, two months since Grace had caught Herman having lunch at O’Brady’s, Winkler saw her. It was after 8 P.M., and he was riding the bus home from work. She was pedaling hard, and the bus was slow to overtake her, so that for a few moments she was directly beside and beneath his seat, dressed in her sleek gear, pouring herself, like a luger down a track, along Minnesota Drive.

  She was one lane over. She was close enough to the streetlight for him to see her face. His breath caught. Her tires clung to the edge stripe as if riding a groove in the pavement. The road climbed as it passed the Westchester Lagoon and Grace stood off the saddle, her bike swinging rhythmically back and forth between her legs. Her shins and ankles were shaved shiny, and beneath the skin the muscles in her calves were like animals in sacks.

  The bus overtook her. Winkler pressed his face against the window. The frames of his glasses knocked the glass. At the stoplight on Northern Lights she caught up and was positioned directly beside him. Could she see through the bus window? He slunk lower, peering over the sill. Her bike was like a silver featherweight between her thighs, every line of its sleek architecture promising speed. She unclipped one of her shoes and stood her leg straight in the intersection. She wore black spandex shorts, a reflective shirt, a helmet streaked with orange decals, and clear wraparound sunglasses. A thin line of sweat down her back. His daughter.

  She had been in the garage that night, too, on Marilyn Street, twenty-seven years before, curled inside Sandy, the two of them waiting for him in the dark.

  Grace pulled a bottle from its carriage on the crossbar and squirted water into her mouth and swished and spat onto the asphalt. The bus rumbled.

  That blue-green face from his dreams; hands reaching over the gunwale of a rowboat. The question: Is she breathing?

  He knocked on the window. He stood up. “Grace,” he called. “Grace!” The other passengers swiveled their heads. He fumbled at the window but the only latch was two seats away, and only for emergencies. He smacked his palms against the glass. “Grace!”

  But the light turned, bathing her in green, and the driver dropped the bus into gear, and Grace stowed her water bottle and was up, pedaling hard, turning right toward the shadows of Earthquake Park, her legs two lean muscles pistoning the gears, her spokes blurring to haze.

  Naaliyah’s burgundy towel, still wet, hanging on the bathroom doorknob; five of her hair elastics ar
rayed on top of the dresser. Felix’s ramshackle sloop on the sill. A glass bottle Winkler had not noticed before—his gift to her when she left the Grenadines. Inside, still, were a few milliliters of the eastern Caribbean. He unstoppered it. The water smelled like nothing, no diatomite, no crust of salt.

  In her closet hung the puffy blue parka her father had given her, an ember burn on the right sleeve, maybe the size of a dime, the hole circular and black around the edges, the white sworls of stuffing visible beneath. Winkler put it on, the cuffs ending halfway up his forearms, and walked through the apartment.

  Had he ever desired Naaliyah? Yes. Had he ever wished he were Felix, surrounded by family, a quick and loyal wife—if a refugee, then a refugee who had made a new home? Yes. Did he sometimes wish he were Herman, in all his literalness, a man he had dismissed so many years ago as little more than obstacle? Yes.

  In school Christopher’s class made crowns out of construction paper and Christopher had taken to wearing his everywhere. “Like a little prince,” Herman said. “Grace fixes it to his hair with hairpins. He wears it to bed. He wears it to church.”

  At work Gary called across the sales floor: “Dave, your momma’s glasses are so thick, she can see into the future!” Dr. Evans scowled.

  He dreamed of houses with a thousand windows, flowers tall as people. He dreamed himself older, wrinkles deepening, skeleton collapsing, the water leaving his cells; he was his father, wasting his final hours; he was his mother, dying in her chair, reaching for a windowpane.