About Grace

by Anthony Doerr

  “Do you want to come in?” she asked. “Is that what you’re doing? Every night out here? Like some stalker?”

  “No. Yes. I just…I thought…”

  “Then come in. I give up.”

  He followed her up the walk. At the threshold he beat snow from his jacket and pants. Her bike leaned against the hallway wall, wiped down, a damp towel draped on the handlebars. He swallowed; he stepped inside.

  She was still in her cycling shoes and they clicked against the kitchen floor. The cake was on the table, all the candles extinguished. There were no signs of any flowers. Did she throw them all away? Winkler paused beside the little kitchen table. The place smelled like carrots, he thought, boiled carrots. Christopher entered from the other end, where there must have been a common room, and hesitated there.

  “Mom? Can we go see the chrysalides? After the party? David said—”

  “Not now, Chris.” She stood in her kitchen, a butter knife in her hand, eyes on Winkler as if he were a gunslinger about to draw. Her lips—so like Sandy’s—parted slightly.

  Winkler inhaled slowly. From his pocket he pulled the wrapped stack of snow crystals and held it out. She did not step forward. He set it on the table. “It was supposed to be a surprise. The party, I mean. The cake.”

  Grace plucked candles, one by one, from the frosting. “This is your grandfather, did you know that, Chris?” She looked at Winkler as she spoke. “This is my dad.”

  The boy looked at Winkler. Winkler’s entire frame shook.

  “Go play in your room, Christopher,” she said. Her eyes were still on her father. The boy looked up at her and then at David and took his backpack and retreated down the hall. They could hear his footsteps and then his door close.

  Her voice was so low at first he could hardly tell she was speaking. “You think cake is going to do it? Some goddamn chocolate cake? You think that’s going to exonerate you? Chocolate fucking cake and flowers?” Her hands were shaking as she dropped the last candle on the table. Winkler moved toward her but thought better of it and instead crossed the kitchen to the window where a failing cactus stood on the counter, half leaning out of its plastic pot.

  “No,” he said.

  “You never came back. You never even thought to come back. And now you do. After all these years. Parading around town with my son. Practically kidnapping him.”

  He drove his trembling hands into the pockets of his coat. Out the window the dark shapes of hedges moved against a light and the snow blew diagonally a moment and fell straight once more. “I never really believed it,” he said. “All those years. That you could still be alive.”

  Her shoes clicked. Cords in her neck rose and seemed about to break the skin. Her voice edged toward hysterics: “Do you believe it now? Because here I am. Here I am eating your goddamn chocolate cake.” She clawed up a handful of it and threw it past him, into the sink. Then she screamed, a quick, wordless scream, her eyes closed, the sound boiling out of her.

  Winkler kept his hands in his pockets, his eyes out the window.

  She used the butter knife to scrape cake and frosting off her fingers. She was crying now, quietly, inhaling so vehemently it was as if she were trying to suck the tears back into her eyes. “Was it hard? At least tell me it was hard.”

  “Of course it was. Each day the sun goes down and you think: I’m a day closer to death. Your mother didn’t want to see me. She thought I left you.”

  “You did leave us.”

  “I did. I know I did.”

  Grace stood staring down at the cake. Her crying slowed. “Yeah. Well. There’s no pardon. A birthday cake is not going to do it.”

  “I’m not looking for a pardon. I want to help. I want to be here now.”

  She turned to him and waved the butter knife. “You were gone for my entire life. All of it. Every single day of it. And now you stand here thinking we can pretend there’s something between us?”

  “No—”

  “Damn right. You’re not my father, not in any of the important ways. Leaving flowers doesn’t make you a father.”

  In the pauses they could hear the far-off slish of snowy traffic. Winkler gazed down at the toes of his shoes. “I’m sorry.”

  She pulled a chair from the table and sat down with the cake at her elbow and braced her head in her hands. He waited. The apartment was very quiet. The trembling of his body had subsided. A minute passed. She was no longer crying but she did not move her head from her hands. He considered going to her but instead stepped to his left, down the hall and into the bathroom, and pressed a towel over his mouth.

  At the other end of the bathroom a door was open, and through the gap Winkler could see the tip of a pennant on the wall and the corner of a tube-framed bunk bed. Christopher’s room. He would have given a year of his life to walk in there and examine everything: the boy’s T-shirts, his Legos, his Snoopy pillowcase. What kind of window shade did he have? What pattern on the curtains?

  Grace had a room here, too. A laundry basket full of her thin, scrappy clothes. A photo of Christopher probably, a photo of her mother maybe. No pictures of the husband. There was a stack of parenting magazines on the toilet tank. A smell like moisturizing lotion, and cotton balls, and a hint of bleach. What sadness to know your daughter has a bedroom somewhere that you are not allowed to see.

  Winkler sat on the toilet and tried to gather his breath. He was failing at everything important. A room away his daughter was sitting with her face in her hands and he could not go to her. When she talked, even when she was angry, she moved her hands in the most familiar way, turning her thumbs down; it was a gesture, Winkler realized, he himself made.

  She said: You were gone for my entire life. All of it. Every single day of it.

  Breathe, he thought. Breathe. Everything was faltering. Where was Herman? Herman should have been there.

  On the bathroom sink two toothbrushes shared a filmy Fred Flintstone glass. Christopher’s was shorter than Grace’s but not patterned with any kid’s logos, no dinosaurs or wizards, just a purple, semi-translucent plastic. An adult’s toothbrush. Winkler stood, picked it up, pressed it to his teeth a moment, and returned it to the glass.

  Then he felt his eyes go liquid and he leaned against the toilet and flushed it. When he came out of the bathroom Grace was standing in the center of the kitchen. Her face was bloodless. She asked: “Where’s Christopher?”

  12

  A single pattern—two hydrogen atoms, one oxygen—multiplied a billion times, suspended in the air. Rise into it, into the clouds, where those molecules are precipitating around tiny, invisible granules of clay, growing branches, gathering weight—rise through them all, into the great castellated dark above Anchorage, the starlit mesosphere, the deep well of sky, and now head south, soar over the Coast Range, over the great Pacific cloudscapes, to where the weather pulls back and clears, the cities of California below like great shining networks of glitter; leap the dark ranges of Central America, traverse the Caribbean—in a breath—and drop down the chain of the Grenadines toward Venezuela: you are a sinking raindrop, plummeting now, gathering speed, the ocean growing larger by the millisecond; you are dashing on the roof of a cracked, blue house, sliding down the eave, over the soffit, reaching the window. Inside: Felix in bed, in a circle of lantern light, his eyes closed, a sheen of sweat. Soma prays; the laminated Virgin in the kitchen stares benignly, casually, through the wall. Felix’s liver, stiff and taut, its architecture ruined, is bypassed by blood; toxic metabolites stream toward his brain. Chunks of kidney drift through his intestines. The sound of his own name passes unheard through the canals of his ears. On Soma’s neck the emaciated iron Jesus swings back and forth.

  The raindrop glides down the window, falls into the yard.

  Felix had already been dead three hours when the phone call went rifling through the miles of undersea fiber, a burst of electrons smashing toward the great vibrating switchboards of the United States, rerouted, rearranged, relaunched acro
ss the continent, riding through states, one after another, up the coast and into Anchorage and down the swinging copper wires sizzling with voices, into the apartment at Camelot where Naaliyah sat—had indeed sat all evening—curiously apathetic since David and Christopher had left, the snow settling deeper along her sills, the smell of chocolate cake lingering in the kitchen. She had frosting on a spoon and the can of it in her lap. The phone in her ear: her mother, on the other end.

  “Your father…” Soma began, but Naaliyah was already gone.

  Across town Herman was sitting in his office, finishing the paperwork on one last refinance, the rest of the office dark, the janitors held up by snow, exit lights glowing red above the empty cubicles, when he felt it: a dozen or so cracks in his chest, little fissures that had been quiet all day, shifted. He caught his breath. He banged his palm against the desk to locate the feeling in it.

  But the cracks were splitting, finding power, thickening into chasms. Soon his rib cage was splitting asunder. He grabbed the side of his desk and fell, the chair upended, the bottom rotating once, the casters spinning. The mouse of his computer followed him down, swinging back and forth off the lip of the desk like a pendulum. He clawed the carpet, saw—his consciousness narrowing, like the shutter blades in the aperture of a camera—two paper clips against the molding, hidden in the complicated structures of dust.

  Grace yelled Christopher’s name into the yard. She pushed her bicycle over the curb and mounted it in one smooth motion and was off, gliding into the snow—all this in maybe twenty seconds. Winkler was still in the doorway to the bathroom. The toilet tank hadn’t even refilled. He stood a moment. She had left the door open and snow drifted onto the mat.

  It was seven-fifteen. He had not even taken off his coat. He went out and shut the door behind him and started toward Cordova Street. Grace’s bicycle tires had cut a thin furrow through the fallen snow. She had stayed on Sixteenth, heading for A Street, down the little hill there, and he worried for her, worried for her tires in the slush. Already she was far enough away that he could not hear her calling for Christopher.

  He turned up Cordova, moving in the opposite direction. The streetlights cast cones of light down through the snow. Clumps of flakes melted on his glasses and in the hair above his ears. He walked quickly, nearly jogging. It was seventeen blocks to the mall and he was not sure what route the boy would take or if he would know the way. But there was the dream: Christopher running between lampposts, darkness to light to darkness.

  The doors would not lock until nine and Winkler pushed inside at eight-thirty. The entrance mat was soaked and gray with slush. He stamped his feet. The security guard nodded at him. There was the familiar yeasty smell from The Pretzel Factory.

  The bottom floor was almost entirely empty. LensCrafters was dark. His boot soles squeaked as he jogged to the elevators.

  Cables whirred; the elevator car began its slow rise; the mall fell away beneath the glass walls. Against the huge atrium skylights, snow dashed and slid and the light inside the food court was a muted blue. He stepped out. Christopher was kneeling on a chair by the persimmon tree. He was concentrating hard, nor conscious of Winkler’s approach, as if he, too, was feeling the electricity of that night, the convergences of it. He had covered just under a mile, by himself, in a blizzard.

  Winkler slowed, picked him up, hugged him to his chest. “There’s three of them,” the boy said, his eyes going back to the tree. “I heard them. I could hear them in there.”

  “Come on,” Winkler said gently. “We’ll go find your mom. We can come back tomorrow.”

  They walked the snowy blocks. A snowplow went past, its amber beacon revolving, snow peeling off the blade and soaring in a steady arc over the sidewalk. Out the back spun cinders. Winkler held the hand of the boy and they walked in silence.

  They were all the way to Thirteenth when the dream—like a huge, blue mouth—came over him. A man in a green snowsuit scraped his sidewalk with a snow shovel. Big, conglomerate flakes landed in a black puddle. The boy’s hand, inside its mitten, tightened against Winkler’s fingers.

  When they pushed into 208 East Sixteenth, Apartment C, it was empty, as he knew it would be. He was out on the arm of a snowflake, networks of crystal solidifying all around him. The boy poked his head into every room, “Mom? Mom?”

  “She’s not here,” Winkler said. He was still in the doorway. He blinked. “She’s looking for you. She’s okay.”

  Christopher stopped and looked at his grandfather. He began to cry. His sobs sounded small and quiet in the kitchen. Winkler pressed a fist to his temple. All the events of his life were compressing to singularity: one night, one hour. Jed with his future machine, its dozen clips and dials. The Datsun at the end of a dusty road. Water pushing through foundation blocks.

  In the infinite permutations of an ice crystal, everything repeats itself, but, really, from another point of view, nothing repeats itself. The arms go out, forming dendrites, sectored plates, the same angle every time, but the final product—because of wind, because of molecular vibration, because of rate of growth and temperature—is never the same. To a certain extent, time was malleable, what he did did matter. Grace was proof of that. Naaliyah was alive.

  What was the dream? Christopher, running. Herman, under the desk, the casters of his chair spinning. His computer’s mouse swinging back and forth on its cord.

  The boy had tracked in boot prints of snow and they were melting on the linoleum. Grace’s car keys were right there on the kitchen table, beside his stack of snow crystal prints. “Get a piece of paper,” he told Christopher. “And a pencil.”

  The boy stared. “Go,” Winkler said. He went. Ten seconds later he had a crayon and a sheet of notebook paper. Winkler scrawled a note. He left it on the table. He took the keys, went out to the street, and got into the car. He switched on the headlights. The boy clambered in beside him.

  “Can you drive? Are you going to drive?”

  “Yes,” Winkler said. He started it. He put it into gear.

  “I thought your eyes weren’t good enough to drive.”

  “They aren’t.”

  The snow was heavy and Winkler reached out and caught a wiper on its uptick and banged the ice off it.

  “But you’re going to drive?”

  Winkler pressed the accelerator. The little Cavalier started forward. They skidded past the stop sign at A Street well into the intersection but no cars were coming. Winkler turned and the right front tire rode up on the curb and came back off and he straightened the wheel and they were in their lane.

  “Oh,” the boy said.

  Winkler found the headlights and switched them on. They fishtailed down the hill, over Chester Creek, stopped at the light on Fireweed. The defogger roared.

  “Your note said hospital,” said Christopher. Winkler said nothing. He listened to the boy struggle to rein in his breath. The snow was all over everything.

  Herman lay beneath the desk with the cracks running through his chest and his heart tight in the fist of someone invisible and huge: God? Answers seemed to float through the space around him. It was about love. It was about getting handed at conception a gift that sets you apart from everyone and you spend your whole life drifting through the margins of time, not understanding hours like everyone else seems to: glancing at wristwatches, checking timetables—you hardly know what it is people are trying to accomplish when they go through their days: morning, noon, evening, night. Wake up and sleep and wake up. This was about family, how blood supersedes death; it was about trying your hardest, it was about snow.

  His fingernails pulled through the fibers of the carpet. It was, he knew—he had always known—about Christopher.

  The pads of Grace’s brakes squealed against the slush. She pedaled up the Lathams’ driveway and unclipped her shoes and dropped the bicycle in the snowy bushes and pounded the front door.

  Mrs. Latham was a long time in coming. Grace tried the knob, pounded again. Mrs. Latham pulled i
t back. “Grace?”

  “Chris,” she huffed.

  “Christopher? He’s not here. What about your party?” She put a hand over her mouth.

  Grace looked back down the driveway. Mrs. Latham blinked. Snow fell onto the toes of her slippers. “Are you riding your bicycle, Grace?”

  “We’re going to see Herman,” Winkler said. “I need you to help me find his office. Can you remember where it is?”

  Christopher looked out the car window, into the snow. The wipers thumped back and forth.

  “I mean in the building. Can you find Bumpa Herman’s office in the building?”

  “Maybe.” The boy bit his lower lip. Snow speckled the windshield and drained toward the edges and the wipers swept the drops away. “Put your seat belt on,” Winkler said. The light changed. Winkler spun the front wheels, spurted forward, almost put the Cavalier through the side of a minivan.

  Grace’s rear tire slipped out at the bottom of the Lathams’ driveway and she went down and tore her tights, but was back up in a second, leaning into the pedals, heading past Delaney Park, the way she had come. Across town Naaliyah leaned forward in the backseat of a cab, urging the driver forward. Winkler and Christopher passed Benson, passed Thirty-second. If Herman, in his last moments of consciousness, had been able to rise through the roof of his building, and ascend toward the clouds, he might have traced the outlines of their paths, their triangular pursuits, bright lines along the contours of streets, the veins of a leaf, the answer to a riddle, the pattern of family.

  Winkler got the Cavalier into the parking lot but was going too fast and when he turned to park, he took the entire vehicle over the curb and into the trunk of an adolescent cherry tree. The sapling groaned and splintered; the car stalled. The headlights shone on, twin beams into the snow. Christopher slowly brought his hands down from where he had braced them over his crown. Herman’s Explorer was alone in the parking lot, maybe thirty spaces down, five-inch caps of snow on the hood, bumpers, and roof. Winkler was already at the door by the time Christopher had undone his seat belt.