About Grace

by Anthony Doerr

  The main and side doors were locked. Winkler tried the glass stairwell door but it, too, would not budge. The boy joined him and stood looking at Winkler with his bottom lip trembling. “David?”

  “It’s okay,” Winkler said. “Everything is going to be okay.” There was a small blue decal in the shape of a police badge at the right edge of the door, but what did that matter? He bent, brushed snow from the landscaping beside the door, and found a rock the size of a softball. This he shot-putted through the glass. It broke with a bang, followed by a little exhalation, a thousand cracks webbing beneath what remained of the protective laminate, and the rock rolled to a stop on the mat inside. He pulled the cuff of his coat over his hand, reached inside, and let them in.

  “Which floor, Christopher?” The boy’s eyes were huge. “Down here? Or up these steps?” Christopher blinked back tears, pointed to his left.

  The elevators were painfully slow. They stood beside each other, grandson and grandfather, each breathing heavy, snow melting on their coats. Ding went floor number two. Ding went floor number three.

  Naaliyah pushed into the terminal, cut to the front of a first-class queue, bartered for an emergency fare. Anchorage to Chicago to Miami to San Juan to Kingstown, St. Vincent. Fifteen hundred dollars. She put it all on her credit card. The Chicago leg departed in thirty-five minutes. “Bags, Miss?” No bags.

  Grace pedaled more gingerly now, her side wet and slushy from her fall, snow and grit piled up against the calipers of her brakes. A shape moved beneath the tree of a front yard, and she called, “Christopher?” after it, into the night, into the snow, as her father had once dreamed he would do with her, shouting her name into the stillness of a flooded house.

  The boy located Herman’s office on the first try. He gazed up at Winkler through wet eyes with a look of minor triumph. Third floor, right next to the elevator. The door was unlocked. Herman’s legs stuck out beneath his desk. His computer mouse had stopped swinging. Winkler dialed 911, handed the telephone to Christopher. He crawled under the desk and held his cheek over Herman’s mouth. “C’mon,” he said. “Oh, come on.” He pulled aside Herman’s shirt, lowered his ear over the scar on his sternum.

  The boy had begun to cry in earnest now, but he held the receiver in both hands and did not shake. “It’s ringing,” he said. “Someone’s picking up.”

  13

  In front of Providence Medical the turnaround was plowed and salted and the driver eased his ambulance beside a set of sliding doors. Already a police officer was running toward them, and an orderly with a gurney behind her.

  Christopher was kneeling on the bench inside the ambulance watching them lift Herman out and hook his IV bag onto the gurney’s hanger. Winkler’s arms were around his shoulders. “They’re going to take him in?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re taking him in now?”

  “Yes.”

  Then a waiting room off the main hall, two couches and a handful of chairs and magazines splayed in a rack and a corner television rehashing a bombing in the West Bank. The boy sat very close to Winkler with the points of his soggy crown bent against Winkler’s coat and they waited and in Winkler’s mind time fell apart.

  Diastole. Systole. Somewhere down the hall Herman’s skin was pulled back, his ribs gave way. Tubes were installed; light breached his chest a second time. Winkler could hear the thudding of his own heart as clearly as if he had cotton in his ears, a sound like the shoes of a heavy man climbing an interminable staircase. Two miles away Grace was calling her son’s name into the night, pedaling down Sixteenth, turning into her apartment. She’d see her car was gone. She’d see the note. She’d get warmer clothes. She’d come.

  “David?” Christopher whispered. “Is Bumpa Herman good?”

  He pulled the boy closer. The air pulsed—he could feel it. In. Out. “Yes,” he said. “Herman is very good.”

  The television played on. The boy went quiet again at his side. Perhaps he fell asleep. Winkler felt his vision drift, heard the engine of his heart grow louder. Into the seats in the waiting room came the butcher on St. Vincent and Nanton the innkeeper and the captain of the Agnita and the nine Grace Winklers and Brent Royster the truck driver, each of them invisible and silent except for the sounds of their hearts, banging on and on, in and out of rhythm with Winkler’s own, and with Herman’s down the hall, a sound like the sucking of the sea at Nanton’s glass floor, or the clapping of a dozen moths’ wings. “Do you hear that, Christopher?” he whispered. “Can you hear that?”

  Out in the snow Grace was bearing toward them now, furious and terrified, her heart high in her throat, her rear tire catapulting a stripe of slush up the line of her spine. Crouching low as she glided through intersections. Winkler could hear her heart, too, an echo, a plodding horse tethered to a pole, a sequence of identical numbers whispered into a microphone: Two. Two. Turn. Two…

  Inside one of the houses she passed was the widow Dr. Sue Evans, who was carrying a plate past the bedroom and the neatly made queen-size where she’d slept fifteen years with her husband and five more alone. She sat at the coffee table and gazed down into the steam of her lasagna, knife and fork in hand, snow sifting past the windows of her little Midtown bungalow, the head of her husband’s elk still above the fireplace. She took up her television remote, paused a moment before pressing the power button, thinking she heard something, a song maybe, a familiar rhythm. She went to the window and opened it, but there was only the sound of the snow touching and touching down everywhere, the silence of it.

  And Gary felt it, and Mrs. Latham, and the woman at the flower shop who always ribbed Winkler about how lucky his sweetheart must be. Maybe even Christopher, in his sleep, felt it.

  The surgeons converted Herman’s heartbeat into light and sound, a blip pinging across a monitor. In the Camelot Apartments, the receiver of Naaliyah’s phone, still lying on the kitchen floor, ran once more through its hang-me-up tones. Winkler’s invisible chorus in the waiting room leaned forward.

  The sensation of a plane lifting—flight, return. The acceleration in Naaliyah’s chest. The front tires first, then the rear ones, Anchorage falling away. Her hands on the armrests, her mother’s words—your father—in her ear like a pair of wasps. The tiny island of St. Vincent a throbbing green disc in the map of her mind.

  What was Dr. Evans always telling him? “What we do is important, David. What we do is help people see.”

  His mother’s book of Bentley’s snow crystals, each of them laid out on their black pages like the image of an individual life, birth to death, each one different but, in the end, each one the same.

  Sandy walked out into that motel parking lot and saw Winkler like a zombie with his keys at the Newport door, clutching the baby in the rain. The neon sign flickering in the background. That faraway look in his eyes, that you’re-not-here look, that I’m-seeing-horrible-things look. Grace. Sandy would have walked along the bottom of a lake for her daughter, would have found a way to get her safely out of that house. Wouldn’t Winkler have done the same? Hadn’t he already?

  A half hour later Christopher woke. Grace still was not there. The boy pulled his big Velcro wallet out of his pocket, no bills in the billfold but the internal pouch for coins bulging, and from it took the photo of his father. He studied it a minute before holding it up to Winkler.

  It was taken at a party in what looked like someone’s kitchen. A man—Mike Ennis—had just dunked his head into a kiddie pool full of ice and water and cans of beer and he was rising quickly, his wet hair brought up into a mohawk by the motion, his mouth in a shocked grin, probably from the cold of the water. Primetime was scrawled in drunken marker print across his chest.

  He was shovel-faced, Winkler thought. His eyesockets set back in his head as though he had two black eyes, peering out beneath a ledge of skull. But handsome in an aggressive sort of way. And who was he to judge deadbeat fathers?

  “David?” Christopher’s voice was sleepy. Winkler bent. />
  “Those chrysalides have pupas. I saw them.”

  Winkler nodded, kept nodding. “That’s good,” he said. The TV in the corner burbled out a commercial; the boy’s mouth trembled with feeling.

  Winkler handed back the photograph; Christopher restored it to his wallet.

  Later the nurse, Nancy, brought them both meals on plastic trays and held a finger to her lips as if the trays were some great illicit secret, giving healthy people sick people’s food, and she winked and Christopher nodded gravely. There were green beans and a sludgy chicken-and-orzo soup and grapes in a dish and an oatmeal cookie in a plastic wrapper. Winkler and Christopher balanced their trays on their laps in the waiting room and Winkler had removed the lid from his soup and was tearing the spoon out of its wrapper when he saw Christopher close his eyes and clamp his hands over his food.

  Winkler set down the spoon. He closed his hands and eyes as well.

  Christopher said, “Thank you, Jesus, for your goodness and for the bounty of this food. And please look after Bumpa Herman in his bed with all the tubes. And my mom. Amen.”

  They ate. The thumping continued, slugging in Winkler’s ears.

  The halls of the hospital were wet and Grace skidded on the heels of her bike shoes, soaked and slushy, blood raging through her. She came into the waiting room, soaking wet, mud and slush up the front of her sweatshirt, skittering in her biking shoes, and picked up her son and held him a long time, crying, sobbing for several minutes, and the boy holding his cookie and looking at it over her shoulder, scared and not sure whether he could go on eating, and she set him down and said, “Thank you,” to her father, and then, “Where is he?”

  Dawn: the Atlantic showing itself to the sun, the great, ceaseless meridian of shadow pulling back across the hemisphere, touching the eastern edges of the Grenadines, dragging up hillsides, cresting the summit of Mr. Pleasant, Nanton’s inn and its outbuildings still crouched in shadow. At the Port Elizabeth pier they loaded Felix’s body onto a fishing boat, pushing his box under the thwarts to keep him in the shade. In the island clinic Soma and two of the boys slept in chairs; one of them walked out in the yard, staring at the sky; and Naaliyah leaned forward in the darkness, somewhere over North Dakota, racing against the limitations of atmosphere.

  A day later, on St. Vincent, they would load him into the incinerator, and across the channel, stepping into her parents’ little blue cracked house for the first time in almost four years, stacked nearly to the ceiling with tiny boats, each of them seeming to tremble and slur in the sunlight, their sails filling with air, Naaliyah would feel it. And waiting in the funeral home, each of the three boys would feel it, a sight like a white horse at dusk, near-glowing, a little flicker, and only a half mile from Naaliyah, in St. Paul’s, at that very same moment, the pews starting to fill with friends and the priest lighting candles, the floor braced on its stilts, the whole structure hanging on, Soma would feel it, too: some small part of her flare up, incandesce, give itself up to heat and light. Maybe throughout Chile, too, between the scattered rib bones and in the sockets of broken skulls, in the gaps between the ones who had gone missing, small webs of light fired, tiny serrated bolts running through the soil, a stirring in the forgotten pastures, the bones of friends who had been taken, anticipating the arrival of a long-awaited friend.

  Well past midnight in Anchorage and Christopher sat quietly in the waiting room, eyes closed, hands clasped in front of his face. His feet did not reach the floor and he kicked his legs back and forth.

  His mother knelt in front of him. “What are you doing, baby?”

  His voice was a whisper: “Praying for Bumpa.”

  In the operating room, one floor up, nurses pulled off gloves, stuffed smocks into hampers. Monitors pulsed, and Herman’s eyes were sealed: stabilized, they called it.

  Stabilized to them, perhaps, but Winkler guessed Herman was moving fast, the room like a train car hauling him through his dreams, through ten thousand dead-tired hours at the bank, all the possible futures in which he and Sandy had children and raised them and ushered them into the world, the morning he realized she really was gone; his faith, his friends, his hockey, his golf, then out through his new life, the life that still could be: San Diego, California, the Pacific-blue California sky, the endlessly clean sea-washed light, that woman down there he liked—Misty!—the two of them driving in a big air-conditioned car to a putt-putt course like you’ve never seen, David, a classy one, not with plaster dinosaurs and cartoon bears, but with intricate miniature windmills, an entire Swiss village, little window boxes and dwarf trees and lights in the windows and elaborate model trains moving through sidings, through hand-masoned stone tunnels, past saloons with doors that really did swing both ways on tiny springloaded hinges, his simple white golf ball struck well and cleanly, banking off the wall at the perfect angle, finding the right slot, pouring through some unseen piping, dropping out onto the green, green synthetic turf, rolling at an ideal trajectory, making right for the hole…

  It was three or four in the morning by now. The emergency ward was dead quiet, no beeping, no footfalls. The television played Family Feud reruns without sound. The boy fell asleep again in the waiting room lounger with a Newsweek wrinkled beneath his knees and Winkler’s coat for a pillow. Grace looked at her father a long time.

  She said, “Mom wanted me to write you. Toward the end. She asked me to. She had an old address.” She shifted and adjusted the bike helmet in her lap. “She said it was worth a try. Even if you never got it. She said I should tell you she took me to the house, on the day of the flood, and she tried to get the neighbors to help her get her big sculpture out of the basement. But they wouldn’t, there were hardly any neighbors who hadn’t evacuated, and she said it was all underwater anyway.”

  She dragged the soles of her bike shoes back and forth across the floor. “Thing was, I couldn’t. I couldn’t write the letter. I’d look at the blank paper for a minute and get angry and I never sent anything.”

  Winkler closed his eyes.

  “The snowflakes,” she said. “Mom told me about that. That that was what you did. They’re nice. I’ve never seen anything like them.”

  Now she closed her eyes, and outside the snow had stopped. Already it was melting and everywhere the hospital dripped and the respirators in their various rooms wheezed and clicked. She took the time, he thought. She took the time to open them, to see what I’d given her.

  He waited until her eyelids fell, and her breathing slowed; then he stood and trod softly down the hall, past the nurses’ station and the wastebaskets overflowing with gauze and alcohol wipes and the stacks of blankets on carts and the empty, curtained beds, and past the closed doors behind which people waited in the grips of their various fates, to Herman’s room, where the fluorescent bulb in the headboard shone and the heart monitor beeped regularly.

  Herman lay very peacefully, six diodes taped across his chest. Three-quarters of his body was wrapped in blankets. His face looked composed, and sentient, and for a moment Winkler thought he might wake, might turn to him and say. Hey, David. You mind switching the channel? But his eyes remained shut; his breath was steady.

  Winkler stood by the bed a bit longer, then lowered his head, and knelt. He reached up to get his folded hands through the rail and onto the bedside. His thoughts tried to assemble as utterances: Please. Not again.

  The curtains were still; everywhere in the hospital patients dreamed their dreams and their cells fought on, climbing repair strands, revamping, regenerating, running the seams of their bodies.

  He had knelt there maybe ten minutes when Grace tiptoed in behind him and stood to his right. Neither of them said anything. The beeping that was Herman’s heart sounded steadily. She shifted and her bicycle shoes clicked against the floor as she knelt beside him. Together, the unlikeliest of penitents, silently, grafting words to air, they sent their prayers into the room.

  14

  He missed seven days of work but Dr. Evans
took one look at him standing in the entrance to the store in his wrinkled suit with his eyeglasses on and took him back.

  Felix’s body was brought to Kingstown and incinerated and the ashes poured into a white plastic container with a screw top. This Naaliyah held on her lap through the flights from Kingstown to Bridgetown, to Santiago, to Puerto Montt, and finally into Punta Arenas, in Patagonia, at the end of the continent.

  Her letter took two weeks to arrive in Anchorage. When it did, Winkler let Christopher open the envelope. They sat on the orange sofa and Winkler read it aloud.

  Dear David—

  The guidebooks say the reason they paint their houses such bright colors is to contrast the colorless landscape. But to call it colorless is ridiculous. I see color everywhere: lenga leaves touched with red, the gold of the pampas, a few crimson flowers still on these bushes that I think are called fire bushes. The blue of the sky, too: not indigo like the Caribbean but a sort of pale blue, washed through with white. Even the sea, the Magellan Strait, is a color: like old silver that has been touched with polish in a few places.

  It is late spring here and the insects are mating everywhere. Last night during dinner a big brown moth landed on the window and was joined by another and still another. All males—their hair pencils were so heavy with alkaloids and pheromones that after they left I could still see the ghosts of them powdered on the screen.