About Grace (15 page)

Twenty-four years before, he and Sandy had been driving from Anchorage to Cleveland in the Chrysler. They were in Manitoba, maybe, or northern Minnesota. It was early morning and the Newport climbed a low rise, pushing east toward a darkness broken only by a thread of white. On a grassy slope beside the freeway, eight small deer, like little impalas, stood chewing. All of them faced westward, staring into the receding gloom. Their shadows—long and hazy in front of them—shrunk slowly back along the hillside.

“Sandy,” he said, and nudged her where she was slumped against the door. “Sandy, look.” But she had not even bothered to raise her head, asleep or feigning sleep, and soon the deer were behind a hill and out of sight. I should stop the car, Winkler remembered thinking. I should double back and force her out and we should climb that hill and watch those deer. But he hardly slowed. The box of welding supplies rattled softly in the backseat; the hood of the Newport cut the wind. He had the strange thought that what he had seen were not deer but the ghosts of them, that if Sandy had looked she would have seen only a hillside, an empty swath of grass.

Were they already seeing things so differently, only two days away from Anchorage? It was hard not to think, back then, of Herman Sheeler calling detectives, hiring private investigators.

Later that day Winkler saw more deer, all of them dead, their bodies broken open on highway shoulders and the dark miscellaneous stains they left on the asphalt. Sandy held her bladder in silence beside him.

Easter Monday. Dusk. He stood on the beach watching the sun recede in a soundless panoply of color, the rays separating and refracting a thousand times in the fields of dust blowing over the sea.

Before he saw her, he could hear the hum of the outboard. Then the launch came into view, crossing the lagoon from the south this time, the same rusty traps stacked in the bow, a wake rolling from the stern. As she passed she turned the boat and killed the motor and coasted onto the beach. She climbed out and dropped a cinder block anchor onto the sand and came up barefoot and stood beside Winkler watching the smear of color on the horizon. She wore a one-piece bathing suit printed with magnolia flowers and a pair of jeans sawed off just below the pockets. Her fingers were cut and scarred in places; her face was broad and smooth and brown and older. But still so young, still the face of the little girl who had taken his eyeglasses and held them over her eyes.

“What?” she said, smiling.

He could not look away. She laughed and hugged him. He felt her breasts press into his chest, and the lean strength of her arms around his back. He wondered how long it had been since he was last embraced.

He blushed. She tilted her head toward the kitchen. “Is he…?”

“Serving dinner.”

“Did you get it? My thesis?”

He nodded.

“It's only a draft. I've collected more data since that one.”

From the deck of the restaurant they could hear silverware clinking. A waiter navigated between tables with a tray on his shoulder. Winkler didn't know what to say, how to begin. She was a grown woman. The sun burgeoned as it neared the horizon. “Take a walk with me,” she said. They crossed the grounds and went out onto the road in the failing light. A hundred yards farther down, a trail switchbacked to the summit of Mount Pleasant, a path they had taken many times when Naaliyah was a girl.

It was a short, steep hike. They didn't speak. By the end of it Winkler was struggling to catch his breath. From the tight, stumpy clearing
at the summit they could see lights in the towns along the necklace of islands to the south, illuminated like small piles of glitter on a black platter. The wind had finally come up and it was blowing hot down from the north and pushing dust through the sky, and the last light of the now vanished sun made a blue stripe at the horizon. Above it the troposphere hung rose-colored in all that haze as if a great fire burned just beyond it. Lights strung along the market and condominiums on the hillsides and along the riggings of boats in the harbor farther off stirred and quaked in the wind and the microwave tower erected beside them on the summit moaned. Small flowers of fireworks bloomed over the neighborhoods to the west.

Yesterday the priest at St. Paul's had told his congregation in his quiet voice that the risen Lord was wandering among the people now, showing them the wounds in his palms. Afterward, during the Nicene Creed, the choir rose to such a pitch that Winkler worried that this Easter, finally, the church was going to tear off its stilts and go careening down the hillside.

Naaliyah smelled faintly of shellfish. She worked her hands in her pockets. “I need a favor,” she said. From her shorts she produced a half dozen envelopes, folded in half, addressed and stamped. “I need letters.”

“Letters?”

“I'm applying to school. To get a doctorate.”

He took the envelopes and held them close to his eyeglasses. They were addressed to schools in the United States: Texas A&M, UMass Boston, Portland State University. Even the University of Alaska at Anchorage. “Graduate school,” she said. “Like you. Like you did. I'll need funding, of course, but my advisor thinks I have a shot.”

“Naaliyah…” The light was failing. A single rocket arced above the harbor and guttered and faded. What did he know about getting her into a graduate program? What clout would he have now? He'd never had any to begin with.

“Will you do it? I don't need it until the end of the month.”

The crowns of the trees below them billowed and shone. A chain of firecrackers erupted somewhere. Naaliyah was saying something about how hard she had worked, how she wanted her thesis to break ground.

“What about the instructors at the institute?”

“I've asked them, too. But I thought one from you…” Winkler leaned against the cement base of the microwave tower. “I'll try,” he said.

“Thank you.” They stood a bit longer watching the small, ephemeral flourishes of fireworks below them, and the ganglions of smoke they left behind. He thought he should say something about her parents, how her father stood sometimes on the beach and gazed over the six miles of sea at St. Vincent. How every Monday morning her mother walked the footpath to the interisland ferry alone, the big tangled trees looming above her.

“Your thesis,” he said. “I'm not sure I'm qualified, but I made some notes and—”

Naaliyah reached over and held his hand. “They'll take me, won't they, David? Some school will let me in?” Out in the harbor the fireworks pitched toward the finale, dozens of green and carmine blossoms that left ribbons of fading gold sparks as they drifted back. “Yes,” he said. “Of course.” He felt as if she might float off into the sky and burn, as if he were what kept her from it.

That night he had the dream again. Even as it began, he felt himself entering a scene at once familiar and intolerable. He was hurrying down a path, crashing through thorns. Off to his left, out at sea, Naaliyah was lowering a cinder block from the stern of a small boat. Every detail was concentrated and intensified: mica shining in the sand, a thousand reflections of sky on the water, each oscillation of her launch. A chain, rifling into the water, caught her ankle and jerked her off her feet. She clung to the transom. The boat tipped. She went under. He was maybe a hundred yards away. He sprinted into the lagoon and swam for all he was worth, but she was too far. The chain hung taut from the stern; the launch turned slowly against it. She did not surface. He stroked forward but the boat seemed to recede. He woke with water in his lungs.

A trend recurred over and over: Winkler was on an airplane, returning home after twenty-five years; Winkler was on an island, dreaming of the future. George DelPrete stepped in front of a bus; his hatbox flew through the air. Grace suffocated in his arms. Now—again—Naatiyah drowned before his eyes. All these deaths, ordained perhaps by chance, or choice, or the complexities of some unfathomably large pattern—was there a difference? Would he be forced to relive the same events over and over? Would he always be compelled along variations of the same trajectories?

Studying ice crystals as a graduate student, he eventually found the basic design (equilateral, equiangled hexagons) so icily repeated, so unerringly conforming, that he couldn't help but shudder: Beneath the splendor—the filigreed blossoms, the microscopic stars—was a ghastly inevitability; crystals could not escape their embedded blueprints any more than humans could. Everything hewed to a rigidity of pattern, the certainty of death.

He was supposed to fix a failing toilet in room 6; instead he ran the mile and a half to town in the still-dark and paid a fisherman $60 E.C. to ferry him to Kingstown. His heart thrummed in his ears. Scraps of the dream resurfaced: an empty launch, a chain hanging motionless. The hull of the boat smacked the waves.

At the post office he cut to the front of the line. Soma frowned. “Did you run here?”

“Where does Naaliyah live?”

“Somewhere near the market. Get your breath, David.”

“Please. Do you know the address?”

“No.”

“Can't you look it up? You've never looked it up?”

It was a concrete building, eight apartments, a flat roof, a strip of front lawn gone to clay. Across the street a butcher cut steaks behind a grease-smeared window. Winkler sprinted the stairs, rapped the knocker. “Naaliyah!” he called. “Naaliyah!”

After a minute a shirtless man with dreadlocks swung back the door. Behind him music played softly in a dark room, sheets tacked over the windows, a weathered-looking couch littered with Heineken bottles, a glass coffee table with a wedge chipped off the corner. “What's this?”

“Where is Naaliyah?”

“Work.” He gestured toward the stairwell, the street beyond. “You having a heart attack?”

“Where is that? Where is work?”

“At the institute. By the quay. Here now, man,” he scratched his hip with the back of his thumb, “what you up to? You the old guy she talks about?”

But Winkler was already down the stairs. He was halfway across the street when the sheet over the apartment window pulled back and the shirtless man leaned out. “Hey,” he called. “Liyah is fine! You got to relax!”

The institute was a series of boats along a jetty and a low trailer lined with sinks. Two men outside the trailer carefully lowered large pieces of coral into a roiling aquarium. Winkler huffed her name. They pointed to the sea. “Collecting. Won't be back for a while.”

“Does she have a radio?”

The men rolled their eyes and laughed. “You here to make a donation? We'll take some radios.”

He jogged to the end of the pier. Barnacles. The white shapes of rocks twenty feet down. A few needlefish flitted past, dim and silver. The sea swung slowly up and back down, leaden and inscrutable. What cove was she in now? Would she be lowering anchor? His heart
shook. Wisps of an older nightmare resurfaced: water at windowsills, his legs wrapped around a mailbox post.

His hamstrings ached and it felt like bones had collapsed in his feet. All this running—and for what? His memory summoned an image of her, maybe twelve years old, tapping at his shutters before dawn. She was breathing hard; the front of her T-shirt rose and fell. Grass clippings clung to her bare feet and she stood before him with a kind of electricity in her body: her fingers quivered; her teeth gleamed. He had struck a match and set it to a candle and swung open the door.

She slipped over the transom; links of chain tightened around her ankle. Bubbles rose like flexing jewels to the surface.

She did not return until nearly dark, easing the launch against the tire casings hung beside the pier, and hauled herself up the ladder. She stopped when she saw him. “You look terrible.”

He took her hand. He practically knelt on the planks. Maybe she was a ghost. “You have to stop collecting, Naaliyah. You can't go out anymore.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Isn't your research completed?”

“Is it ever completed? I didn't do that work just for my thesis, you know. Just to get into a school.”

“Can't you research in the lab from now on? Don't you have enough specimens?”

“What is this? Did my father put you up to this?”

“No. No.” He dragged a palm over his forehead. “Please. Don't go on the water anymore. We need to get you to dry land.” He followed her to the door of the institute and paused outside, unsure, his fingers on her elbow.

“David,” she said, “you're the one we should be worried about. You should go home.” In her hand a net bag full of coral pieces dripped. “Please.”

He waited in front of her apartment, leaning against the butcher's front window. She went up and came down an hour or so later with the dreadlocked man. He tailed them to a cafe, watching from a distance. He saw her smile over a plate of rice; the boyfriend leaned over and kissed her neck. Heat built around Winkler. His eyes stung. An emaciated hound emerged from a lot beside the restaurant and barked him into the shadows.

He walked to the post office, which was closed and still bore the rotting gate where he had spent his first night in that town more than two decades before. Nanton would be furious by now, hammering at the door of Winkler's shed. The beach chairs would need to be folded and stacked; umbrellas taken down; lanterns around the dining deck extinguished. Towels folded. Lawns watered. Walkways swept.

At the wharf two cables hanging from a crane swung heavily against a purple sky. All around him the small lights of houses burned behind their shutters.

He passed the night in a motel meant for tourists that smelled of cigarettes and bleach. Before dawn he was again outside her window.

After an hour or so she left the apartment and hurried up the street. He followed at a distance. A rum-and-cake vendor unbolted his kiosk and propped the awning. Three women on bicycles pedaled past. Naaliyah waved and they waved back. The sun broke the line of Grand Bonum above town and striped the street with light and shadow. He followed her another block and then called her name and she turned to face him as though both were players in some gun-fighters' burlesque.

“David?”

“Don't go out. Don't go out today.”

Her shoulders heaved and she passed a hand over her temples. “Why are you doing this? You of all people are trying to stop me?”

A woman towing a child's wagon full of melons passed and nodded at Naaliyah, and Naaliyah nodded back. Winkler approached. “I can't let you out on the water.”

She stared at him. “But what does that mean? Why can't I? What are you talking about?”

“Please.”

“If I don't go I won't be paid. You have to give me a reason.”

Winkler closed his eyes and inhaled. He was a yard away, within reach. “For me.”

“David.” She turned as if to go. He lunged and caught her T-shirt at the shoulder but she spun away and his hand slipped to her neck and she staggered for a moment. On the sidewalk a man in a white shirt with a short tie stopped and frowned. Naaliyah pushed forward with her legs and Winkler lost his balance and fell.

She stood a few feet away. “Christ!” she said, examining her collar, “What's wrong with you?”

Winkler scrambled on the asphalt for his glasses. “You can't—” he said.

“No. No way.” And she was walking away.

He gathered himself and followed her to the institute but she was nowhere. Her launch bobbed beside the jetty; the little trailer stood dark and empty. Was she watching him from somewhere? Had she taken another boat?

He clambered down the ladder, stood in her wobbling skiff, seized three black tubes leading to the outboard powerhead—a thirty-five-horsepower Evinrude—and pulled as hard as he could. Two of them gave; one squirted liquid onto his hand. Gasoline, mixed with oil. A multihued bloom of petroleum spread across the surface of the water. He climbed back up to the pier and wiped his hands on his trousers. A light flipped on inside the institute. He turned, nodded to a man who stepped out of the trailer, and went on toward town.

Nanton stalked the lobby, throwing his hands periodically toward the ceiling. “You think I cannot hire another gardener? In a minute? You think you are so skilled you cannot be replaced?” Winkler bore it, his gaze on the floor and the waving gray shapes of algae on the rubbled coral below. A tiny trumpet fish nosed along beneath the glass, turned its eye up at Winkler, then darted away.

At the yacht supply, he bought swimming fins and a large pair of
chain cutters. Soma was at the shed door when he returned. He went inside and set his purchases on the table and began stuffing clothes into a two-ply garbage bag.

“What is this? You're leaving?”

He grunted. He unclipped socks from his clothesline.

“I have not seen you behave like this in a long time. Not since the first year you arrived.” She pushed open his shutters and light poured in. “I don't know everything that happened, David. I know you used to write letters. I know you left somebody at home, who you used to telephone. And I know that the box I brought upset you terribly.”

Insects shrieked in the mounds of cut grass beside the shed. A wind came up and stirred dust on the floor. “Naaliyah's a woman,” Soma said. “An adult. She can make her own decisions.” She pulled one of Winkler's shirts out of the bag and snapped it and folded it on the bed.

“Naaliyah will drown,” Winkler said.

Soma studied him. “What do you mean?”

“I know that she will drown. Soon.”

“You
know
it? I don't understand. She swims like an eel.”

“I need you to tell her to stop going out in her launch. We need to keep her from the water.”

“You think she will listen to me?”

“Please, Soma.”

“You
know
she will drown?”

He looked at the floor between his feet for a long time. The sensation of an invisible hand crimped itself around his windpipe. “I dreamed it, Soma. I dreamed she would fall off the back of her boat and get tangled in the anchor.”

“You dreamed it.”

“Yes.”

Soma smoothed the edges of the shirt she had folded and put her hands on her hips. “You dreamed this about my daughter.”

“You don't believe me. It's all right.”

“I believe that you dreamed it. But how do you know the dream will come true?”

“I don't. Not exactly.”

She went to the doorway and stood gazing out. “I just want everyone to be okay. Why do we let things that have already happened torture us?”

Winkler braced his hands on the sill of his window. He felt like rocking the wall back and forth until it collapsed and brought the shed down on top of them. “But this hasn't happened yet.”

“Those, too. The things that have happened, and the things that could happen.”

A half hour later he was on the ferry to St. Vincent. He toted his sack of clothes through the streets and rented an unfurnished room above the butchery across from Naaliyah's apartment. The odor of old meat rose through the linoleum. Ants patrolled the walls. In the bathroom a lustrous green moss had grown over the toilet tank. He bought a dented aluminum chair for $20 E.C. and plugged his hot plate into the extension cord the butcher had run up through the window.

The harder he tailed her, the harder she worked to conceal herself. It might have been comical if it had not been so awful: Naaliyah ducking behind fences, Winkler half jogging after her, a block away. Cat and mouse. But who was the mouse? Winkler chasing Naaliyah, the future chasing Winkler.

Her outboard had been repaired; she began collecting specimens in the early hours, in the evenings. He felt the arrival of his dream grinding like a bus toward him. I have become a stalker, he thought. An obsessed savant, slouching in the shadows outside her apartment, slumping past baskets of oranges at the market.

In the aluminum chair, facing her window, he tried writing the recommendation letter.
Dear Admissions Committee,
he'd try.
Naaliyah Orellana is remarkable.

Dear Admissions Committee, You will not believe how extraordinary Naaliyah Orellana is.

Dear Admissions Committee. Naaliyah Orellana is. Naaliyah Orellana is. Naaliyah Orellana is.

Naaliyah sat across from an overweight white man, perhaps the same age as Winkler. They sipped ice water on a restaurant balcony, waiting for their dinners beneath a faded umbrella emblazoned with red and green roosters. Behind them huge purple batiks shifted uneasily in a breeze. The overweight man gestured at Naallyah with his fork; she smiled.

“I only need one minute,” Winkler told the hostess. He had to interlock his fingers so his hands would not shake. “They are friends of mine.”

When Naaliyah saw him, her face paled. “David,” she said. “Hello. This is Dr. Meyer. He is my advisor at the institute.” The big man shifted his napkin, half stood, and held out a hand.

“Mr., ah—”

“Dr. Winkler,” Naaliyah said.

“Ah,” Meyer said. “The mysterious other recommender.”

Winkler did not take the man's hand. “Naaliyah,” he said. He crouched so his eyes were level with hers. “We have to talk.”

“Is this the best time for that?”

Meyer sipped his ice water. Naaliyah held her hands very carefully in her lap. “Are you all right, David?”

“I had a dream,” Winkler whispered. Meyer was looking over Naaliyah's head. “I don't think you should go out in the boat.”