About Grace (13 page)

The sand was searing hot against his cheek. The pain in his knee was enough to make him faint. A deep, elegant blue rose up along the fringes of his vision.

Two dive operators motored his body the mile north to the inn. Nanton helped carry him up from the beach. A doctor dining at the restaurant stitched his knee; a hotel guest donated a plastic vial of painkillers. Soma fetched pillows, gauze, and water; Felix brought beef tea. Even the boys helped, fulfilling Winkler's obligations around the inn.

But it was Naaliyah's vigil. She slept on the floor beside him; she waved mosquitoes away from his face; she poured water into his mouth at regular intervals. His eyelids quivered; sweat shone on his forehead; he slept on.

During four days and nights he woke only twice. A thousand splinters of narrative passed in front of his eyes: surface formations in the sand of a shoal; snow blowing through trees; the viscera of an animal steaming in his hands. Were these memories or dreams? He watched a boy sprint down a row of planted saplings; he saw air bubbles cycle through a fish tank. A mantis perched on his thumb, methodically cleaning her face with her forearms.

Eventually he woke. A smell like phosphorus and sulfur, as if a match had been struck, hung in the air. Droplets from the trees plunked onto the shed's roof. Naaliyah was asleep on the floor, rolled in a sheet. Beside her, beneath the window, waited the box of his returned letters.

He stood and lifted her onto the bed. Then he went out. A half-moon hung over the horizon, its reflection a tapering trail across the water. The lawn was wet beneath his feet and water murmured in unseen streamlets toward the beach.

No lamps in the inn, no sailboats in the lagoon; the lights of St. Vincent six miles away veiled by rain; drops trilling in the understory and the popping and bubbling of saturated ground—for a moment he wondered if a tidal wave had broken over the Grenadines and hauled everyone away.
Don't come back,
she had written.
You are dead.
Maybe he was. Maybe he was dead and this island was a purgatory from which he could only watch the souls of the more deserving go shuttling past to their various Edens. What is death, after all, but a cessation of involvement with the world, a departure from those you love, and those who love you?

Grace had died in the flood. Standing beside the inn that evening he was certain of it. His flight had been in vain. There would be no going back.

He returned to the shed, collected the box of letters and a match-book from the sill, and brought them out to the beach. In a hollow near the tide line, he tore up every sheet of paper and set the shreds afire.

The sea churned under the moonlight. Smoke rose into the palms. A breeze caught a burning scrap of paper and sent it flying over the lagoon, glowing at its fringes, then going black and disappearing as it touched the water.

He marveled at the indifference of the world, the way it kept on, despite everything.

Winkler would not leave the Grenadine Islands for twenty-five years. A quarter of a century, a third of a lifetime. The years passed as clouds do, ephemeral and vaporous, condensing, sliding along awhile, then dispersing like ghosts. He mended leaks and planted trees and scrubbed coral deposits from the underside of the lobby's glass floor with a system of magnets. He mowed the lawns, planted young trees, culled dead ones. He washed beach towels. He fixed toilets.

His knee healed beneath a net of scars. An optometrist on St. Vincent ground him a new pair of eyeglasses. He spent $1,100 of the $2,100 E.C. in his plastic box to replace Nanton's lost dinghy. No one, not Nanton, or Felix, or any of the islanders who knew him, asked what he had been doing that night, why he had tried to take a ten-foot rowboat over the reef. Perhaps the reasons were obvious enough.

He bought a shortwave radio, balanced a series of nerite shells on the windowsill, fashioned a hot plate from a propane tank and an old burner element. Every day he wore a pair of canvas trousers and a T-shirt; his skin browned further; his hair gradually went white. Insomnia slowly carved hollows around his eyes, so that the sockets looked permanently bruised, and the eyes themselves were gradually failing—objects at a distance quivered among halos; small flecks of color began traveling the periphery of his vision. Without glasses he could no longer read a sign thirty feet away.

But these were physical things, remote from him: no more real than
if they were the actions and hours of another person. His thoughts skirted Sandy and especially Grace as if they were fatal chasms into which he might tumble. Out of habit his eyes noticed clouds, signs of cycling weather, rainbows flowing into the Atlantic, and wreaths of moisture around the moon, but the information did not interest him as it once did. It was as if banishment from his nascent family included a banishment from his curiosity as well. Somewhere icebergs were calving off glaciers. Somewhere it was snowing.

St. Vincent won its independence in 1979 and islanders shot Roman candles from rooftops but to Winkler it was just the end of October, Nanton nailing pinwheels to palm trees, Felix drinking an extra fifth of rum. The war in the Falklands was a rumor, a breath, an English couple on vacation sharing coffee.

Gnats whined at his eat. Clouds scaled the mountainsides. Twice in those years Soufrière belched steam and tephra a mile into the sky, and the Caribs on St. Vincent's northern slopes scurried across the channel to wait it out and some never went back.

Maybe six months after he had nearly drowned, Soma stood in his doorway with a basket of eggs. “For you,” she said.

“Thank you.”

She went to the window and stood fingering the shells aligned on his sill. “It was that box? From the post office?”

He nodded.

“I'm sorry I brought it. I wish I had burned it.”

“I needed to know.”

“You are okay now?”

He shrugged.

“You can come by the house, you know,” she said. “You are welcome with us.”

He nodded and rubbed his chin. Her fingers worked the shells, flipping them, rotating them.

“You would like to meet girls?” Felix asked. This was December, or January. Nineteen eighty-one. Or '82. The kitchen closed for the
night, and he appeared in Winkler's doorway wiping his hands on an apron. “Go to a…what is the word? Rendezvous?”

“Date?”

“Yes, dates. Dates are very fun. I know girls on St. Vincent. And others from church. Even one of the maids, maybe? They might like to go to dates.” He winked.

Winkler sat on his bed. “
On
dates.”

“Yes. Go
on
dates.”

“I don't much feel like it.”

“You'd be okay. They'd like you.”

“It's all right, Felix.”

“Huh,” said Felix, and took off his watch cap and turned it inside out and pulled it on again. “It is because of your family?”

“I don't know. I suppose. Something like that.”

“You were asleep. When you held Naaliyah's ankle? In our house?”

Winkler said nothing.

“It is okay,” Felix said. A shutter at the inn banged in the wind. Someone at the restaurant bar burst into laughter.

“Well,” Felix finally said. “In Patagonia we say: God needs His priests and His
ermitaños
all the same.”

“His what?”

“His
ermitaños.
His hermits. Like hermit crabs? Carrying around those shells?”

Later Winkler would wonder: A hermit? Is that what I have become? He thought of Felix, marooned in his own way: the cracked blue house filling with model boats; the way he worked as if he were building little arks that might deliver him across the sea, back to Chile.

When he dreamed it was the now familiar blacknesses, or standard human phobias: he was signed up for a geology course he never attended; he had inexplicably turned in blank pages for his dissertation. He did not dream of Ohio, or Alaska, or Sandy, or Grace. It was as if he had trapped them underwater, beneath a Plexiglas floor, and
though he may have stood over them all this time, just a few feet away, he could not look down to see. Eventually they would stop struggling. Eventually they would go away.

Life still contained pleasures: leftovers from Felix's kitchen, which a waiter would periodically leave steaming on Winkler's doorstep—pumpkin soup, whelks steamed with garlic, scungilli or snapper, lobster roasted with nutmeg and lime, prawns, ratatouille, roasted christophene, a warm slice of banana bread slathered with butter. There was the reassuring hum of rain on the roof, and the wind in the plants he tended—hibiscus and anthuriums, arrow ginger, oleander, the big symmetrical fans of a traveler's palm—and there were the thousand colors of sky and ocean, and the clouds that trundled over the island in ceaseless ranks: infinite variations of cumulus, sprawling sheets of stratus, a smear of cirrus troweled against a ceiling of air. In that place the sky was a vast magician's bowl where miracles brewed up hourly.

And there was Naaliyah. Weeks would pass without his seeing her, but then there she'd be, tapping at his window on a Sunday morning. Each time, seeing her, his heart lifted. She brought him leaves silvered with rain; she broke open urchins on rocks, hunted eels in the shallows, dragged him into the lagoon to rescue a wounded octopus. He helped her build a butterfly net from old T-shirts and wire; he explained to her what he knew about waves, how they revealed the topography of an ocean's floor, how they told the stories of offshore storms. And he watched her grow up. Her body elongated; she started wearing lipstick, and complaining about the restrictions of her mother. Soon she was laughing on the steps of the general store, sipping beer from the cans of older boys; she had school, friends, interests he did not know about. Her tapping at the shutters came less and less frequently.

The boys had dropped out of school one by one and moved to Kingstown to take jobs. They would return for holidays in clean shirts, wearing gold-rimmed sunglasses and speaking in quiet, polite voices, carrying gifts for Soma and Felix: a radio, a Coleman lantern, packets of batteries. By the time she was in secondary school, Naaliyah spent most of her waking hours on St. Vincent. Only once in a rare while would Winkler see her, walking the ferry road in her St. Mary's uniform
(white blouse, navy skirt, high socks), her hair knotted and bunched about her head like a helmet, her blouse dirty, a pile of books clasped against her breasts. “Hi, David,” she would call, and he would stand as straight as he could and smile and continue past as if on critical errands.

She had, Felix told him, removed the posters of soccer players from her brothers' room and replaced them with photos torn from Chilean magazines: a shanty town, the Torres del Paine, a man in a gas mask carrying a rifle. “She blames her mother for leaving,” Felix said. “She thinks we left too easy. But she does not understand. How there were soldiers, how we were afraid to answer the telephone. How Soma's friends were taken.”

Naaliyah turned fourteen; she turned fifteen. They sat and watched a hundred birds, small brown sparrows Winkler did not know the names of, land on the roof of the inn and rest along the gutter with their wings half-folded, panting for a minute, before taking off again, one brief reprieve along a three-thousand-mile migration.

Trolling his shortwave at night, Winkler sometimes came across a frequency where a Spanish-speaking girl read seemingly random numbers into a transmitter: 24. 92. 31. 4. 229.
Tres, ocho, dieciseis.
Her enunciation was painstaking, as though each numeral were a viral, fragile thing. Whenever he found her, tracking along the dial, he would sit and listen until she signed off. Often this could last as long as two hours. Indeed, after a while, he found himself seeking her out, searching the dial for that voice, those mysterious numbers.

Nanton told him, in his cryptic way, that the broadcasts were codes for spies to pick up when they were in hostile territory. Each sequence corresponded to some message from back home:
Your mother has gout. Your son had his first communion.

Winkler would take the radio to the end of the beach and lie in the blue shadows beneath the palms and rove the frequencies. It was not difficult to hope that somewhere there was a channel on which his own daughter was transmitting numbers—a code he might eventually
break. 56. 71. 490.
I have an aquarium. Daddy I'm trying out for the swim team. I like pizza but not pepperoni.

Past midnight: a tapping on the shutter. Naaliyah. She was breathing hard; the front of her T-shirt rose and fell. She seemed darker somehow, a brooder, a dreamer. Her hair slashed into a ragged bob. Wind shouldered through the doorway. She squirmed as if anxious to leave.

“Are you okay?”

“I'm running away.”

The knobs of her collarbone stood out above the collar of her shirt. He thought of his Sunday walks with her, years ago, her hands in his hair, the way her pelvis felt against the back of his neck.

He made tea. They stood side by side in the open door, cradling their mugs and watching stars through the shifting crowns of the palms. She chewed a fingernail. Shadows milled around them. “Where will you go?”

“What's it like in America?”

“Well. I don't know. It's huge. There are a thousand different places.”

“What's your home like? Where you were born?”

“Alaska? Not as cold as everybody thinks. It's dark a lot in December and January. But it's not really dark: it's more purple, like twilight all the time. And there are mountains, real mountains, with glaciers. When the wind is from the east, or the north, you can smell them. A smell of trees and stones and snow.”

“Maybe I will go there.”

“Maybe you should wait until tomorrow.”

She didn't laugh. The breeze picked up again and out in the lagoon the yachts swung around and an anchor line moaned. Naaliyah's voice came out of the dark beside him. “What's snow like?”

Something inside him stirred and he waited for it to settle. “It's full of air. And light, too: each crystal can act as a prism, so when the sun is shining, and the albedo is right, snow glitters, like fires are burning in it.”

She nodded, studying him. “You miss it.”

He sipped his tea.

“You do. I can tell.”

“Maybe.”

“I can't even remember where I'm from, and I miss it. My parents left their friends and their histories and everything. To come here.” She gestured at the walls of the shed, the island beyond them. From a recess in his memory he heard Sandy's voice:
I
look at his suits in the closet and think: This is it?

“My father misses it,” she said. “They left because of my mother.”

“They left because people were dying.”

Naaliyah shrugged. “That was a long time ago.”

“There are worse places to be than here.”

Later, watching her pad across the lawn, past the dark, slumbering inn, he wondered if such things were born into people. If perhaps we cannot alter who we are—if the place we come from dictates the place we will end up.

He shut the door, braced it with the two-by-four, and sat on his bed. She was sixteen years old.

Soon afterward Naaliyah moved permanently to St. Vincent. He saw her on the island only once more, as he paused to knot a shoelace on the road toward town, her face flashing past in the crowded flatbed of a truck. She raised an arm at him; she might have smiled. Then she was gone. The foliage seethed in her wake, and stilled, and the pursuing dust hung awhile in the air, collecting on his shirt as it sifted down.

Felix only shook his head and Winkler did not have the heart to ask Soma about it. Naaliyah had failed out of school, he heard, stopped going to classes. One night Felix showed him her knapsack of abandoned school books. In the margins of her notebook were drawings of shells or a husk of a nymph fastened to the underside of a leaf. But nothing else—she didn't seem to take any notes. Crushed at the bottom of the bag was a geometry exam: she'd written only her name,
then made idle sketches beneath each problem. An anemone standing beneath a question about scalene triangles; a cricket crouched beneath the Pythagorean theorem.

Whole months passed. The only contact he had with her parents was if he worked near the kitchen and could hear Felix barking orders to his dishwashers. Soma began sleeping in an apartment above the St. Vincent post office during weeknights. Sunday nights she'd eat leftovers on the inn's back steps with a plate balanced on her thighs, chewing thoughtfully and staring off into the dark spaces between the trees. She joked less; her attention strayed when he spoke to her. Hen feathers clung to the hems of her skirts.

Felix, too, wore a certain distance in his eyes. Winkler would see him gazing into the space above the grill, or at the tiny planking of one of his models, as if something invisible floated there, and Winkler knew he was back in Chile, weighing the things he had now against the things he had been forced to give up.