About Grace (11 page)

Late into Winkler's second week, Nanton climbed down from his lifeguard chair, splashed ashore, and called him to the jeep. From the backseat he dug out a roll of blueprints. “You are wondering why I have you in the lagoon, under the sun,” he said. His teeth were bright green. “You are thinking I am crazy. You hack apart rocks around a little flag and think I am wasting your time.”

Winkler shrugged. “But don't you want to see, really, what you are doing?” Nanton unrolled the plans over the tailgate cautiously, as though they were secret, or illegal, and watched Winkler carefully as he examined them. A lattice of girders, dim blobs of color, blue rectangles representing windows. Winkler shrugged. “I don't get it.”

Nanton's face eased into a smile. “A see-through floor. So the guests can look down at all the creatures of the sea.”

Winkler turned the page and studied the elevations. Nanton beamed. The reasons for his enthusiasm became plain: a huge glass floor in the lobby where fish might come browsing beneath the shoes of the guests. A big stainless steel kitchen behind that, a dozen guestrooms onshore, a lantern-studded deck for the dining room. There would be footbridges over creeks and low, tasteful light fixtures lining the paths, and underwater spotlights so guests could watch the reef at night.

But for now it was just a dry lot with stacks of cinder blocks and bamboo and roofing piled under tarps.

“If you work like this all the time,” Nanton said, gesturing at the
shovel in Winkler's hands, “maybe I use you after it is done. Maybe you clean pipes for me.” He laughed and showed his green teeth. “My American doctor toilet-scrubber!”

“I won't be here that long,” Winkler said.

And anyway the foundation wasn't even halfway finished. He chipped and shoveled out rock; sand slid in to cover his work. Schools of tiny fish wheeled past his legs; the tide crept up and down again. The men studied him but barely spoke to him. When they did, he could hardly understand what they said. At dusk, before heading back to Felix's, he watched their fire at the end of the beach, their shadows reaching across the sand, elongated and warped, their low voices like the voices of the trees.

These were the beginnings of a new existence; Winkler could feel it gestating. One day passed like every other—time would not be a sequence as much as a repeated rhythm: the sunrise, the roosters, the jeep and shovels and rock. No interruptions, no studies, no forecasts. His body was becoming an instrument, a tool—he would wade into the water and lose himself in the cadence of work, and days would be one like every other: clear in the morning, rain in the afternoon, stars burning above branches at night.

Still, of course, memories found gaps: the soft, almost impossibly pink hue of Grace's cheeks; the burned smell of Sandy's hair dryer lingering in the bathroom. The curve of her rib cage against his palms.

Naaliyah watched Winkler from the shadows. The holes beneath the little orange flags deepened. At times, swinging the blade of his pick, he felt he was chiseling his own underwater grave.

Fourteen days after he'd begun working for Nanton—over a month now since leaving Ohio—he waited in line at the back of the jeep with the others and was paid: $60 E.C. In the yacht supply at Port Elizabeth he bought pants, a secondhand pair of boots, and a packet of airmail envelopes.

Dear Sandy—

I can remember so many things. I remember skipping rocks across the river, your hand wiping down the kitchen counter, freckles on your cheek. I remember how you hated it if my nose touched your glasses because it smudged the lens, and how you stopped talking and stared whenever we passed a baby.

All I ask is that you tell me if Grace is alive. Just tell me what happened.

I will write you every day. I will work until I have enough money to return and then I will come back. If you'll have me, we could start again. We could always start again.

All day he'd slash away at underwater rocks and at night he'd write letters, leaning over Felix's picnic table in the light of the sputtering oil lamp, scribbling, rehashing, restarting.

Subsequent letters were even less adequate than the first: disjointed pleas, nearly impossible to compose. He said he was sorry; he hoped someday she would understand. Then he crossed it out. Then rewrote
the same words. At times, just penciling her name onto the front of the envelope was nearly intolerable. But the alternative, which was never to try, to have left for good, was worse. Then he truly would be gone, and he had the sense that a cord like that, once cut, would not grow back. He thought of the feeling he'd had leaving the post office in St. Vincent: a sensation as if his body might dissolve into light—a cracking at the back of his skull, a damp sigh, a thread pulling apart.

Naaliyah peered over his shoulder at the pencil crossing and re-crossing the page. “Are you writing your family?” she would ask. “Are you writing your home?”

Dear Grace
—

Sometimes I hope your mother tells you lies. Maybe she tells you I am stationed overseas: a submarine captain, or a diplomatic spy. Maybe she tells you the man you live with, if you live with him, is your father.

Sometimes I see things and then they happen. It has always been this way
—
I don't know why. In my more lonely moments I imagine that you, too, might dream things that come to be. If you do, I hope you see better places, and a better life. If you think I'm crazy, that's probably all right. It may help you understand. I love you. I always will.

He addressed the envelopes to Marilyn Street or occasionally—optimistically—the house on Shadow Hill Lane and handed them to Soma in states of near panic. “Mail it,” he'd ask, “even if I tell you not to later.” One, two, sometimes three a day. Maybe the idea was that he could write so many letters, deliver so many envelopes back to Sandy, eventually he'd have sent all of himself, and could exist more there than he did here.

He imagined Herman shredding each letter and depositing the pieces in his trash can with the pedal-operated lid. In you go, down the lid slams. The Anchorage summer outside the window, failing already.

But Winkler kept on, writing at least once a day, using the Kingstown post office as a return address. Sometimes he'd write more
than an apologia; he'd describe Felix's elaborate dinners, or his family, little Naaliyah chasing butterflies down the road, cornering a lizard against a rock.
She reminds me of Grace,
he'd write.
Her eyes are always open.

A steel crew arrived, silent indigo-skinned men who drove trucks onto the beach and unloaded pallets of three-inch-thick Plexiglas. Within an hour they had erected a rudimentary crane and were sinking an auger into one of the holes Winkler had begun. They rolled enormous barrels off a barge, anchored ties in them with concrete, stones, and coral, and sunk them in the lagoon to serve as piles. Within a week an entire framework of steel was poised above a section of the lagoon where the little orange flags had been. A half dozen carpenters boated in and set up camp on the beach and in seven more days framed the entire building. Nanton watched all this unfold from his perch, computing rows of numbers on a legal pad, frowning, erasing, refiguring.

Now Winkler guided a raft loaded with breeze blocks back and forth across the lagoon. He folded his earnings inside a plastic box; he helped the boys with the dishes; he wrote his letters.

On Sundays he walked the island. Naaliyah would trail him at a distance and eventually he'd call her forward and hoist her onto his shoulders. He'd try to name the few planes he recognized for her: bamboo, Caribbean pine, tree ferns, cecropia. “Clouds like those,” he'd show her, “are called
cumulus congestus.
Each one is riding along on a big column of slowly cooling air. Like a big invisible ice-cream cone. That small cloud there probably weighs five hundred thousand pounds.”

“Nooo,” she'd say. “It's floating—it weighs nothing.” Still, she would not look away.

Dripping groves, high fields. Century plants and organ-pipe cacti. The island, viewed from a ridge, was a lumpy, six-mile hill ringed with palms and coral gardens, the sea teething at its reefs. And the skies: in one day the sky could travel from green at dawn to a noontime blue so severe it was almost black to hot silver in the afternoon to roiling burgundy at sunset. Just before night it flowered in yawning,
imperial violets. Wedges of mauve, cauldrons of peach—skies more like drugs than colors.

“See that dark line at the horizon? That's called the wind line. It means it's storming out there.”

Naaliyah leaned into him and followed the sight line of his arm. “Will it come here? The storm?”

“It might.”

They passed a sugar works gone to ruin: an abandoned water-wheel, a rusted treadmill, relics of slavery. He thought: Our shadows are our histories. We drag them everywhere. Naaliyah stood outside looking up, waiting for rain. He thought of the small weight of her in his arms, her thin and bristling hips, and a blade of guilt turned inside him.

At poorly lit tavern tables with a bottle shining in front of him, Nanton penciled elaborate landscape drawings onto sheets of butcher paper. “Here,” he'd jab with a coca-stained finger, “flowers. And here royal palms. I want a row of them by the creek.”

He had good ideas, Winkler could see, a feeling for how things could look.

“Is good?” Nanton asked, frowning. “There will be enough water?”

“Yes. It will be nice.”

Dear Sandy
—

It feels good to work with my hands. At the end of a day I'm truly tired. I understand now my father's pleasure in his work. He used to park his truck at the end of the block and slog upstairs and sigh when he got through the door. He looked forward to dozing in his chair, his pipe beside him at the end of a day.

Felix, the friend I've told you about, makes little model boats, still using his hands at the end of a long day. He is not very good at it
—
his masts are always lopsided, his rigging is always falling off
—
but he seems happy, working on small things in the lantern light with a bottle beside him.

I'm sleeping better here, having dreams I cannot remember. Are you okay? Do you think of me?

Naaliyah would wade out and hang from the girders that would soon brace the glass floor, or she'd climb through the shell of the dumbwaiter where pupating caterpillars had already wrapped themselves to the walls and pale wasps shuttled between shafts of light, her small hands grasping after them. She and Felix and Winkler would walk home from the work site at dusk, the girl on her father's shoulders and the husks of palms blowing and skeltering over the path and the ocean crashing out behind them against the reef.

“What do moths do in the rain, Mr. Winkler? Do their wings get wet?”

“I'm not sure, Naaliyah.”

“I bet they crawl up under big leaves,” she'd say. “I bet they sit under there and peek out at the rain. Happy as rabbits.”

She'd come to him, her pockets full of lichens and seeds and shells. “Look,” she'd exclaim, and spread her hoard over the ground and take it up one item at a time. “I found this on the side of the cistern, and this in the muck below the standpipe…” Once she brought Winkler a piece of blue sea glass and he began to ask her if it might be a sapphire or some rare gem but she shook her head. “No, Mr. Winkler, it's glass from a bottle that got smooched by the sea.”

The facts and truths of the world around them. Tiny snails appeared in her hands. She'd tug his sleeve: “Mr. Winkler, do ants sleep?” Once he woke and saw her at the kitchen window, holding his glasses over her eyes with both hands and blinking out at the night.

I have questions, Sandy, of course I do. Whole days pass and all I feel sure of are questions. What if I'd been able to save that man
—
Mr. DelPrete
—
in front of the bus? What if I'd been able to carry Grace safely up the street? What if knowing had been enough? If I'd been able to hold her a bit more cautiously?

The funny thing is, people don't want to hear about the future. They go to palm readers and fortune-tellers but in the end they only
want to hear that they're doing well, that everything is going to be fine. They want to hear that their kids will take over their world. No one wants to hear that the future is already determined. Death's success rate has been 100% so far, yet we still choose to call it a mystery.

He was reminded of how he'd felt at his mother's funeral: neighbors glancing around the pews to see who else had come, a girl he'd never seen before smiling in the vestibule, whispering something to a friend about how she was going to take her coat back to Koslosky's because it was too small. The dead are gone and so their power over the living is only temporary. You lose sleep, you lose your appetite, but eventually you fall asleep and eventually you eat—-you may hate yourself for it, but the body's demands are incontrovertible. He had always felt guilty about that, that he went on living, eating tomato sandwiches, going to Iditarod Days with his father, making snowballs, when his mother could not.

All he had to do was close his eyes. He could see the two saplings flanking the front door, the roof of the house as it looked that last hour, viewed from atop Shadow Hill, a thousand wet shingles beneath which Grace may or may not have been. He could watch, over and over, the Sachses' big maple lose its hold and come groaning out of their lawn, roots tearing, the trunk splashing down, a hundred branches bouncing and clattering and finally going still.

Any of the freighters plying the horizon—any of the airplanes descending into St. Vincent—could hold a letter in its compartments, bound for him. When Soma returned from St. Vincent, still making the crossing each day, so the boys could go to a better school, she'd lift her shoulders slightly, hold her palms up: nothing. He'd be left shut out, her hands an empty mailbox, the rest of the afternoon paler somehow. But each morning the thought would resurface: some letter sorter in Kingstown might be tunneling an envelope in his direction, laying it neat and flat in a cubbyhole for Soma, for
him.
The sun clambered over
the horizon, the well of hope refilled. Somewhere Sandy might be sealing an envelope with his name on it, touching her tongue to the back of a stamp.

The bank in Cleveland reported that all his accounts had been closed. The American consulate in Kingstown would work on reissuing his passport. He phoned a shipping agent in Grenada, a freight company in Port Elizabeth, the American Airlines office in Kingstown. The best he could find was $1,100 to Los Angeles. Twenty-nine hundred E.C. He would keep working.