About Grace

by Anthony Doerr

  Some nights he woke to the sounds of Naaliyah and the ranger having sex in her bedroom. He’d pry open the window, prop it with a textbook, lay a hand over his booming heart, and stare into the midnight, the strip mall empty and silent and nearly finished now, Naaliyah’s gentle cries issuing from beneath the door, the sky a pit of violet, edged with black.

  10

  Every second a million petitions wing past the ear of God. Let it be door number two. Get Janet through this. Make Mom fall in love again, make the pain go away, make this key fit. If I fish this cove, plant this field, step into this darkness, give me the strength to see it through. Help my marriage, my sister, me. What will this fund be worth in thirteen days? In thirteen years? Will I be around in thirteen years? And the most unanswerable of unanswerables: Don’t let me die. And: What will happen afterward? Chandeliers and choirs? Flocks of souls like starlings harrying across the sky? Eternity; life again as bacteria, or as sunflowers, or as a leatherback turtle; suffocating blackness; cessation of all cellular function?

  We crack open cookies and climb fortune-tellers’ stairs and peer into the rivers in our palms. We scour the surface of Mars for signs of liquid water. Who hasn’t wanted to flip to her last page? Who hasn’t asked: Let me know, just this once, how it will turn out.

  What did it mean that Winkler had dreamed he would meet Sandy in a grocery store as she browsed a rack of magazines? Did it mean their entire interaction and every consequence was prearranged? That armies of his sperm were only months away from her egg, climbing up one another’s backs, laying siege to her cytoplasm? Was the seed of Christopher, even then, like DNA torqued and folded and folded again inside the chromatin of a nucleus, planted in that moment?

  Maybe it meant nothing. Maybe it meant Sandy was merely one possibility among an infinity of possibilities. Winkler had gone to her in the store and again at the bank; Sandy had phoned him, had carried herself to the movies, then to his bed, Wednesday after Wednesday. Could these things, too, be prefigured? Hadn’t the actors acted of their own volition?

  Does it matter? In memory, in story, in the end, we can remake our lives any way we need. To be surprised, truly and utterly surprised by what came into your life—this, Winkler was learning, was the true gift.

  For the fourth time in his life, he began sleepwalking. He woke wearing his suit, the pants on backward. He woke with a half-eaten mustard-and-bread sandwich on the pillow beside him. He woke standing over Naaliyah and the ranger where they slept on her Salvation Army mattress, the ranger squinting in the sudden light, rising, drawing a sheet around his waist, his expression sliding from shock to anger.

  He fed her insects. He worked extra shifts. He did fifty sit-ups every morning with his feet tucked beneath the orange couch.

  Every two weeks he was paid $411.60. He’d leave two hundred dollars on the counter for Naaliyah, spend a hundred more on groceries, and most of the rest at Flowers for the Moment on Northern Lights. The groceries went into Naaliyah’s cupboards, the flowers onto Grace’s porch. Dr. Evans stayed on him about finding an apartment, and he and Herman spent a couple evenings a week watching baseball playoffs or college hockey on television. This was his life.

  He wanted more, of course. He wanted to see Grace. He wanted to buy her a fancy dinner, have a waiter pack it in a basket, get a cab to drive the three of them—father, daughter, grandson—up to some cleared lot on Hillside; he wanted to gaze out at the inlet with her and eat halibut and seasoned potatoes and listen to the clink of silverware against plates. His voice would be clean, unwavering. He’d ask important questions. “Did she keep up her sculpture?”

  “Not that I saw.”

  “Did she speak of me?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Do you remember any of Ohio?”

  “I know there was a flood. But Mom wouldn’t say more. She’d say things like, ‘All that is in the past now.’”

  Grace would offer something: “I thought Herman was my father until I was eight. Mom told me. After ballet. She stopped the car a block before the house. I remember I was looking at a button on the cuff of her jacket. I always wanted a jacket like that. With brass buttons on the cuffs. She said Herman wasn’t my father, that my father had run off. She said you were somewhere in the south.”

  “In the south.”

  “That’s what she said.”

  Christopher would sit quietly, eating french fries, or fish sticks. Grace would wipe his mouth with a big, starched napkin. She’d say, “Mom told me to have him. I was only twenty, but she insisted. She said I should have a child no matter what, no matter how bad the timing. She said being able to give life was not something anyone should take for granted.”

  He would reach across the tablecloth; she might even let him take her hand. They’d talk about the malleability of time, about relativity, about premonition. He’d tell her that he believed events could be foreseen, that a thousand choices were implicit in a single moment, that he had always loved her, even when he couldn’t bear to, and that this, too, was prefigured and inevitable, burned into him, the way the six sides of a snow crystal were honeycombed into its very atoms. His story—his trials and confessions, his dreams, his failings—would well up, would press against the backs of his teeth.

  She’d sip her Chardonnay. She’d say: “Tell me about your dreams.”

  Of course none of this happened, not yet, not ever. Grace was still angry, determined not to need him. She pressed her bicycle up the hills, pouring out toward Girdwood, returning through the drizzle along the New Seward Highway, her hair soaked beneath her helmet, and Winkler would have to wait for her to come around, or for events to bring her around, and maybe he’d be waiting forever, waiting for her to show him whatever part of her heart she could manage to unlock. Maybe it had been too long and she would always be a stranger to him; maybe he’d go into his final hours, his heart laced with regret.

  The playground swing groaned beneath his weight. Grace washed and ironed her Gottschalks outfits. She folded Christopher’s shorts, rolled his little white socks. Across town, in the break room, Herman folded an entire Danish into his mouth and chased it down with twelve ounces of Pepsi.

  “Sometimes,” Naaliyah told Winkler, “you look at me and it’s like you’re looking right through my body. Like you’re looking through me and watching something out on the horizon.”

  In dreams he saw Herman crawl under his desk, his chair upended, the casters spinning. He saw Christopher run through snow, passing beneath streetlights, hurrying from one pool of light to the next, rushing with an earnest, worried gait, in and out of darkness.

  11

  The party was Herman’s idea. “Three months is long enough,” he said. “It’s time. I’ll be there. I’ll be your buffer. You’ll see. It’ll be all right.”

  Herman would tell Josh Latham’s mom that he’d pick Christopher up from school. Grace wouldn’t have to know. It was a surprise party, after all. Mrs. Latham would cover for them. Winkler would bring the boy to Naaliyah’s from school. Herman would pick them up at five forty-five. Grace would return from her bike ride at six-fifteen. When she came in the door, there they would be, Christopher and Herman and her father, a chorus of “Surprise!”

  The fourth of November was a Tuesday. At Fred Meyer, Winkler bought cake mix, canola oil, eggs, frosting, and a packet of silver birthday candles.

  All morning the radio predicted snow. A heavy layer of nimbostratus sagged over the inlet, dragging across the islands. At two it began. Winkler watched it from the window, silent and white, the cars below passing like shadows.

  At three he stood outside Chugach Elementary School. Snow gathered on the sleeves and shoulders of his coat and atop the school buses and the waiting cars of parents and along the naked branches of trees. Christopher came out with the others, wearing his crown, his Thomas the Tank Engine backpack loaded to the zippers. He looked at the sky and held out his palms. “Snow,” he said.

  Winkler bent at the waist. “How
are you, Christopher?”

  “Fine.”

  “I’ve missed you.”

  The boy nodded. His crown was made of construction paper and decorated with cardboard and foil jewels. “I’m not going to Josh’s?”

  “Not today.”

  He nodded again, as if this was something he’d suspected all along. Winkler explained: Grace’s birthday, the surprise. They started through the first half inch of snow. When they rounded the block, out of sight of the school, the boy reached up with his mitten and took Winkler’s hand.

  Back in Camelot they kicked snow from their boots. Winkler cleared insectaries from a corner of countertop, and they worked in the dampness of the kitchen, Christopher standing on a chair to see better. They measured out oil, beat eggs and water into the cake powder. Snow piled up along the sills. The insects were quiet. At four they put a pan of batter in the oven.

  Naaliyah came home at four-thirty. She bent and hugged Christopher, swung him in a circle, set him back on the chair once more.

  “You’re early,” said Winkler.

  “What are you doing?”

  Christopher held up the box. “Making cake.”

  “You’re making a mess.”

  The boy shrugged. He had batter smeared across his forehead and on his crown. “David says my moth hatched, Naaliyah.”

  “I heard about that.”

  “Where did she go?”

  Naaliyah looked at Winkler. “Well, she might have gone into the woods and found a birch tree. They like birch trees. Then she probably started looking for a male to fertilize her eggs.”

  “Do you think she found one?”

  “Maybe.”

  “But probably not,” Christopher said. “Because luna moths don’t live in Alaska.”

  Naaliyah reached down and straightened his cardboard crown. “That one did,” she said.

  Winkler opened the oven and the warm smell of cake washed out. Christopher was sitting on the counter, thinking hard.

  “You know,” Naaliyah said, “have you ever gone back to the plant where you found her?”

  He looked up, shook his head.

  “It might be worth a look. There could be other chrysalides, you know. It’s perfectly warm in there, and if there are enough leaves on that persimmon tree, maybe the caterpillars will be seasonally independent. Maybe they’ll pupate year-round.”

  The boy stared at her. His face seemed to widen. “What you can do,” she said, crouching and tapping one of his kneecaps, “if there are any, is shine a light through them. Usually you can see the outline of what’s inside pretty clearly. You can sometimes even see the antennae and figure out what sex it is.”

  Winkler went into the other room and untaped his prints of snow crystals one by one and stacked them and wrapped them gently in newspaper and knotted a ribbon around the bundle. The daylight had disappeared swiftly, almost immediately, as if the snow had rinsed the light out of the air. They took out the cake and set the pan on a trivet to cool. Winkler and the boy took the lid off the frosting and slathered the cake with it and covered the pan with foil.

  Christopher’s teeth were brown from licking the spatula. “Can we go to the mall, David?”

  “Not now, Christopher. Maybe after the party.”

  He pulled the boy into his coat and pushed mittens over his hands and then they sat on the orange sofa and waited. The boy held the cake in his lap. Condensation clung to the windows. The radio said, More snow coming. Winkler thought: All my life, and it’s down to this.

  Five-forty. Five forty-five. “Is Bumpa Herman coming?” Christopher asked.

  “He’ll be here.”

  They sweated on the couch inside their coats. At five-fifty Herman called. “I can’t get free.” His voice was wrenched, tense.

  Winkler groaned. “Can you still come?”

  “I’ll be there. Hopefully by seven. I just can’t get away right now. Soon.”

  “But Grace—”

  “I know, David. I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

  Naaliyah stared at Winkler from across the room. Her mouth said, “You have to go.”

  He had twenty minutes to get the boy to Grace’s. If Grace returned from her ride and her son was not there, she would drive to Mrs. Latham’s to pick him up. At which point everything would be ruined.

  Both telephone numbers for both taxi companies were busy. He and Christopher set forth down the snowy sidewalk, Christopher with the cake cradled in his arms, Winkler with the bright yellow straps of the Thomas the Tank Engine backpack straining around the shoulders of his coat. Snow blew against the lenses of his glasses and down his collar. Headlights careered past. The boy, bundled thickly into his parka, bore the cake out in front of him like an offering.

  The bus was behind schedule. Its grille was pasted with slush. Up Lake Otis, up A Street. “We’re going to be late,” Winkler said. Christopher drew moths on the steamed-over windows. “Will your mother really have gone riding in this weather?”

  “She goes riding in everything. Can we go see the chrysalides right after the party?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You said we could.”

  “I know, Christopher. But first, we’ll have to ask your mother. And remember, there might not even be chrysalides.”

  “There will be.”

  At each stop passengers got on and mumbled at the driver and snow battered the windshield and the red glow of taillights smeared back and forth beneath the wipers. Slush lay gray and melting in the aisle.

  At Fifteenth, Winkler pulled the stop cord. He stood and made his way through the aisle with the backpack and the boy followed him bearing the cake. They stepped off the bus at six twenty-five. “We’re too late,” Winkler said.

  They walked gingerly, their boots sliding in the snow. Twice Christopher refused Winkler’s offers to carry the cake.

  Five blocks, northeast. Each block seemed longer than the last. The snow seemed to come harder still, an endless procession of flakes, big as quarters, and the mailboxes and fence posts already wore little caps two inches deep. Down Medfra Street a Toyota fishtailed and nearly slid into the ditch before righting itself and keeping on.

  When they reached Sixteenth her Cavalier was out front, free of snow, the hood still warm, the jaw of her bike rack unclipped and standing open. Through the window Winkler could see the kitchen light. Maybe she hadn’t gone over to Mrs. Latham’s yet. Maybe she would still be surprised. He slowed. They slogged up the walk. “She’s still here,’’ Christopher said.

  At the door they stopped. The boy stood cradling the cake. Winkler leaned the backpack against the siding. “Go on and ring the bell.”

  Christopher looked up at him.

  “Go on then.”

  “What about the candles?”

  Winkler breathed. Snow fell into Christopher’s hair and onto the sagging points of his crown. “Okay,” Winkler said.

  They knelt at the end of the sidewalk with the hedges as a windbreak. Christopher drew back the foil. Winkler pulled the package from his pocket and stood twenty-seven candles in the frosting. The boy bent to one knee and braced the cake on his little thigh. Flakes of snow landed on its surface and cartwheeled across it or melted in the waves of frosting. Winkler bent with a book of matches and made a cup with his hands but still the wind reached the first two match heads and snuffed the flames.

  “They won’t light.”

  “Try again,” said Christopher. He steadied the cake’s wobbling. The third match flared and held, and Winkler touched the flame to each candle and thankfully the wind was still and the flames wavered and then held.

  The boy started toward the door. “It’s a lot of candles.”

  “Careful now.”

  Snow sunk into the flames. The candles lit the boy’s throat and face. He carried the cake up the walk as solemnly as if he were bringing offertory to an altar. The flames dragged behind their wicks, bent horizontal. Thomas the Tank Engine beamed from the turquoise pocket
on Christopher’s backpack. He stopped at the door. Winkler himself rang the bell. He heard it chime inside, a sound like a single church-bell. He retreated down the snowy stoop to the sidewalk.

  His heart was a catapult in his chest. Herman was supposed to be here, with apple juice and wine, and a sleeve of plastic cups, a body for Winkler to hide behind, another “Surprise!” to drown out the weak sound of his own voice. A buffer. Now he wondered: Did Herman set him up for this?

  When the door swung open the candle flames ducked toward it, held, and righted themselves. Grace crouched in the gap between door and frame looking over the boy’s head. She wore her biking shoes and pants and a hooded sweatshirt and her face was orange in the candlelight.

  “Mom,” Christopher was saying. “Mom! Happy birthday!”

  She peered over his head, out at Winkler.

  “Do you see what we made?”

  She raised one hand, and held it over her eyes, as though shading out the sun, then placed the other in Christopher’s back and took the backpack from the stoop and shepherded the boy and the cake inside. The door fell shut. Winkler stood on the sidewalk a while longer, watching the light in the kitchen above the sash, the snow falling silently, muting everything.

  He retreated to the swings. He fingered the package of snow crystals in his pocket. Was she blowing out the candles at least, making a wish? The traffic kept on along Fifteenth, whispering through the snow, and the door stayed closed. He remembered standing outside Sandy’s and Herman’s house, on Marilyn Street, how he’d watch the lights in the windows go out one by one: living room, kitchen, hallway, bedroom; that ache in him, ice crystals cycling above the street, a gulf of frozen air.

  Snow settled on his thighs and shoulders, and on the top of the playground sign. His toes slowly went numb. Finally she came out and stood before him on the other side of the street and he pulled himself out of the swing.

  The wind stilled and the flakes fell silently; through the lenses of his glasses each appeared to leave a thin blue thread, as if they sliced through space and revealed, for half a second, a brilliance on the other side.