About Grace (10 page)

In the predawn, hens scuttled on the roof of the house and he heard the screen door open and clap shut. When he woke next it was fully light and Felix was singing over the stove. Winkler rose and tucked the sheet back over the little mattress. Had he dreamed? He couldn't remember.

He put on his glasses. Out the window, in the lower quarter of sky, a group of clouds huddled above a hill. “Rain,” he said.

The girl, Naaliyah, watched him from the doorway. She came to the window and peered out. “The sun.”

He nodded. She said: “No rain.”

“It's sunny now,” he said, “but see those clouds on the hill? How they are pushed up? Like hats? It means there's a convective—warm air—rising along the hillside. The air up there is unstable. It means there's a chance of rain.”

She stood on her tiptoes and hooked her fingers around the sill. “Really?”

He stepped into the kitchen. Felix was wearing a wool watch cap and a teal T-shirt with
Miami Dolphins
silk-screened onto it. He sliced a mango and handed a half to Winkler with a spoon.

Winkler watched him move through the kitchen on his skinny legs. His hair stuck through little moth holes in his cap. He took a drink from his bottle.

“You are not from here,” Winkler said.

Felix turned. “No. I was born in Punta Arenas. Soma in Santiago.”

“Chile.”

“Yes. Chile.” He rolled the word in his mouth, as if tasting it. He looked at the girl. “But this is home now, isn't it, Liyah?” She shrugged.

Felix went on: “Soma says everyone on this island is a refugee. Africa, or South America, or Asia. Even the Caribs, this was not their island.” He turned back to the eggs.

“And your sons? They are from Santiago?”

“They are not our sons. Not by blood. Yes, from Santiago. Their parents lived there.”

Winkler frowned. He dug into the mango. “How much,” he asked, “would it cost for a flight to the United States?”

“Maybe four or five thousand? Expensive.”

“How do I get back to St. Vincent?”

“The boys could take you. When they return. They are at school now. They take their mother to the post office. But you are welcome to stay more. Soma has told you.”

“I'd like to repay you for your kindness.”

“You owe nothing.”

He mulled this over. He owed something. But what position was he in to repay anyone? He did not even know the name of the island he was on.

Felix drank from his bottle. After a while he said, “We are building an inn. I am going to be the chef—perhaps you will work there?”

Felix and Naaliyah led Winkler through the chickens and along another path past more houses, each with an air of happenstance as though it had been placed there by the recession of a massive flood. They climbed a hill and traversed a cleared paddock and then descended into dark thickets toward the western edge of the island. Through breaks in the canopy Winkler glimpsed glittering expanses of sea and the ragged white borders of the reef. Every few minutes Naaliyah glanced over her shoulder at the clouds shifting and piling over the hills.

The inn—or what Winkler assumed would become an inn—was hardly anything: a pile of lumber, a pallet of bricks. One tin shed
tucked under a welter of bush. Maybe a quarter mile out frothy breakers collapsed over the reef. Wind-stooped palms fringed the place; the clearing was brown and sandy; a single breadfruit tree at the corner of the property was wreathed by a ring of its own fallen fruit. The beach was crowded with drift logs and mats of morning glory and empty cable spools like huge upended coffee tables.

A half dozen men sent a slow volley of greetings at Felix and then they all waited, a few men smoking as they squatted, the lit ends of their cigarettes glowing and drifting in the dimness. Naaliyah chased ground lizards through the shadows.

Eventually a jeep arrived, pressing its way over a tangled access road. A man in a yellow suit got out and opened the hatch and the men filed forward and took shovels and picks from the back. When Felix reached the rear bumper, the man in the yellow suit stooped and they exchanged a few words. Felix turned and waved Winkler over.

“This is Nanton. It is his inn.”

Nanton looked Winkler up and down, then turned and closed the back of the jeep. “What can you do?”

Winkler glanced over at the sullen company dragging tools toward the stacks of lumber and said, “Whatever they can.”

Nanton seemed to consider this. “You work on the foundation today. Work two weeks. If you still here after two weeks, maybe I keep you.” His teeth were a dull green and his breath was salty, as though he had been drinking seawater. “You work today,” he said and his lips eased into a smile. “Maybe you don't come back tomorrow.”

Nanton had two men haul what looked like a lifeguard's chair out from the shed into the shallows. He climbed to the top, opened an umbrella, and sat above the crew, watching them and chewing coca leaves.

Winkler took a shovel and followed Felix to the pile of lumber but Nanton called him back. “No.” He waved Winkler toward the lagoon. “You work out here.” Winkler went to the edge and waited until Nanton beckoned him forward again. “Out. At the flags.” Small orange markers had been driven into shallow places in the lagoon. They waved silently with the passage of water. “You dig beneath each one.”

“Beneath the flags.”

“Correct. Now please. While the tide is still low.”

Winkler squinted, then adjusted his glasses and waded out to the first flag. The water reached halfway up his thighs. The flag's thin shaft was anchored by a bag filled with sand. He began hacking at the rock and coral heads below. The shovel skewed out beneath him in the water and it was nearly impossible to get any leverage.

The sun came fully over the island then, brassy and merciless. The other men worked in the shade, on a stretch of rock at the end of the beach. Their shovels chipped and sparked.

Nanton produced a newspaper and slowly turned its pages. There was a sense of laziness and melancholy beneath the trees and most of the men slunk away at noon to nap or drink rum or stare out at the sea. The blade of Winkler's shovel bent; the tide climbed his thighs. It was impossible to keep memories at bay: water seeping into the basement; Sandy glowering in the driveway.

These perhaps were his weakest moments. He had fled, yes, but with reason. Grace's life had been in danger, but surely the danger had passed by now? Yet here he was, surrounded by strangers, hacking away at rocks with a half-ruined shovel. Weren't there other ways home? He could have been begging or sneaking, selling his labor directly for passage, stealing his way to an airplane ticket. He could pilfer a raft and paddle it home. He could swim. Wasn't each passing minute a betrayal?

Was it fear? Was it that if he returned, and she was still alive, he might still inadvertently kill her—her fate waiting all this time for him to fulfill it? Was he simply afraid to face what he had left behind? Had he been hoping, all along, to leave, each moment stretched thin with it, exhausted by the pinioning of obligation against desire: the staying, and the longing to flee? He heard Sandy's voice, echoing down the telephone line:
You left. You just got up and left.
No. He loved her. And he loved Grace, so much that little fissures scarred in his heart each time he thought of her.

He stared a moment through the water at the base of the flag and wiped his forehead and realized he had made no perceptible progress.

In the early afternoon sheets of diffuse clouds, dragging scuds, eased off the sea, and it began to rain. Most of the workers retreated beneath the palms, but the girl, Naaliyah, stood in the little clearing, watching Winkler, holding her palms out. Drops spattered the lenses of his glasses; he worked on.

Nanton descended from his perch in the evening and collected the shovels and picks and stowed them again in the back of his jeep. Winkler stood dripping at the fringes of the small excavation and watched Felix speak to Nanton in low tones and finally the jeep drove away.

The rain slowed and the clouds relented. He returned to Felix and Soma's house. The boys washed dinner plates in the yard. Felix dragged a battered tacklebox out of the back room and opened it on the picnic table. Inside were the tiny makings of model boats, little saws and screwdrivers, dowels, tiny brushes, tubes of glue, jars of model paint. He withdrew a small piece of wood and began sanding it carefully. Soma quizzed him about Winkler's day.

Naaliyah tugged Winkler's sleeve. “What else,” she asked, “do you know about clouds?”

Every day Nanton sent him out into the lagoon to hack at submerged rock. “We need half-meter excavations,” he said, but did not elaborate. Winkler was the only white man working for Nanton, and Nanton appeared to take a perverse pleasure in the historical irony of it, occasionally descending from his perch and asking Winkler to hold up a shovelful of rock so he could inspect it and smile broadly and spit his coca juice into the water beside them. The skin between Winkler's fingers sloughed off; sores bloomed on his palms.

He let the rhythm of work overwhelm him, chopping with a shovel and pick until the tide was nearly at his chest. Then he would wade dripping ashore and work alongside the other men. He walked back each evening with Felix and Naaliyah, climbing through the forest and the paddock, then dropping down again. He began sleeping on the floor of the kitchen, so the boys could have their bunks back, and when he woke, with the boys and their mother, he would go into the
yard and watch the light accrue and listen to the frogs go quiet and roosters crow on the hills. Gazing up at the patchwork of fields, cane plots like clear-cut timber, a sea wind pushing at his neck, it was almost possible to pretend he was eight years old, in a park somewhere with his mother, on a cool, blue Anchorage morning.

A day passed, then another, and another. As long as he did not think of Grace, it was almost easy. Had it been twenty-five days or twenty-seven? A month? The sun came up, the sun went down. Sandy did not appear at the door of Felix and Soma's little blue house fuming with rage. No one appeared. He thought of his year with Sandy in the house on Shadow Hill, how her eyes went to the windows, the silent desperation of everything they never said—gaps and absences in every conversation, the past circumscribing the present, the future hemming in the past. He tried to imagine life as it must have been for Herman, how he must have let each day fall away, going to the bank, tuning out the inevitable gossip, each hour that much more distance between himself and his wife. Maybe he had found a new job. Maybe he had never given up hope.

Winkler's first weeks at the inn passed like that: sun and wind scorched his shoulders; his skin went pink, eventually assumed an even brown. On his palms blisters rose and opened and rose again. Felix told him that Nanton had made his money building tenements in Venezuela and that he planned this inn to fund his retirement.

“Nanton is honorable. He will pay you. He is only testing you now.”

“But what are we doing hacking away at rocks? Why does he have me out in the water?”

“Ah.” Felix smiled. “It is Nanton's secret.”

“A secret.”

“Yes. A very special idea.” He made a sweeping gesture that took in the whole lagoon. “It will bring guests from all the world.”

Out in the inn's lagoon brightly painted fishing boats shuttled back and forth, and onshore strange, long-billed birds cried at the workers from the canopy. Clouds sat down over the distant silhouette of the volcano on St. Vincent to the north. At night the lights of Kingstown
glittered across the channel. Felix brought rice or curry or papaya wrapped in leaves for their lunches, and Winkler would sit with him and watch Naaliyah scurry through the sand or beneath the palms, chasing insects, capturing hermit crabs in the cups of her palms. “Papa,” she'd whisper, holding up a pair of mating dragonflies. “Look how they're attached.”

In the course of those evenings he assembled what he could of Felix and Soma's story. Both had worked in the Moneda, which Felix said was like the White House in Washington, only “more Chilean.” When the current president was deposed in a coup (he had been shot or perhaps shot himself in a subterranean corridor), his entire staff had fled, including the cooks. There were disappearances. Several of their friends, including Felix's supervisor, were picked up and never heard from again. Soma would not speak about these parts and closed her eyes and played with the chain of her crucifix.

This was, Felix said, international news and he wondered aloud if it was possible that Winkler was the only person alive who had not heard about it.

Felix's eyes were on his hands, where he was using what looked like rusty nail clippers to trim the tiny rigging on a model. His fingers kept missing and the rigging would sag through the little eyelets and he'd have to start again.

Immediately after the coup, Felix and Soma had traveled to Patagonia to hide among his family. When the three boys showed up, sons of the former commerce minister, a friend to them both, Felix and Soma took them in. The mechanics of their departure from Paragonia he would not discuss, nor would he say how they had accomplished this with four children, nor what specifically had catalyzed their flight. They met Nanton in Caracas, who hired Felix and paid for their voyage on a third-rate liner to St. Vincent.

“Will you go back? If it ends? If this current leader gets ousted?”

Soma stopped at the door and turned. “This is our home now. We live here.” She swung open the screen and went out into the yard.

Felix did not look up from his boat. Winkler shifted in the heat. Far off they could hear the shouts of the boys where they played stickball in the road.

“And you?” Felix asked. “You are fleeing something also?”

In Winkler's mind came an image of Sandy fluttering her fingers, a habit she had, a gesture, as if she were trying to brush aside all the things that were wrong with their lives. “Yes,” he said. Out the window Soma scattered seed corn for her chickens, staring off into the tamarinds.