About Grace (16 page)

A group of children, passing below in the street, began to sing “Happy Birthday.” Naaliyah managed a small, forced smile. “You've said this before, David.”

The hostess was standing behind Winkler. “Everything okay?”

“Yes,” said Naaliyah.

“No,” said Winkler.

The hostess leaned over. “Come now, mister. Let's leave them to eat, yes?”

“Please,” Winkler said. He was being led out. “Please, Naaliyah.”

“A pleasure, Dr. Winkler,” Meyer called after him.

He tailed her home; he tailed her to work the next day. From the shadows of the institute, swallowing hard, he watched her start her Evinrude.

But still she did not drown. Still she came back, motoring beside the jetty, apparently whole, apparently breathing. He watched her unload her net bags and empty them into aquariums. He felt like sneaking up behind her and poking her in the side, to see if she was real.

Monday—seven days after he had his dream—there was a knock on the door of the apartment. Soma stood on the iron staircase squinting in. She wore gold bangles through her ears and her crucifix over her sternum and a discolored lace-hemmed dress that stopped at her knees. “The butcher told me you were here,” she said, and stepped through the door and surveyed the gritty tiles, the chair by the window. Over her shoulder hung a bag of books. Winkler returned to his chair and sat down.

“She's inside,” he said. “I'm nearly positive. If she slipped out this morning, I didn't see it.”

“When was the last time you slept?”

“Last night. I think. Did you talk to her?”

She went around in front of him and squatted on her heels. “David, can you look at me? Can you listen? You're afraid for her, that is all. And rightly so. It is dangerous for anyone to be alone on the water. But you can't watch over her every moment. You must learn to let go. Believe me, it's not easy. But you must let whatever will happen, happen.”

“No,” Winkler said, shaking his head, looking past her. “You don't get it.” Pale rectangles of light fell through the panes and divided their bodies into parallelograms.

Soma put her hands on his shoulders. “You had a daughter, no?”

He felt a voltage rising behind his eyes. “Grace.”

“What was she like?”

He looked away. He shut his eyes. Over time his images of the baby, like photographs handled too often, had worn down and creased, lost
their definition. No longer could he recall her face precisely, or her fingers, or the smooth, new skin on the bottoms of her feet. What was the shape of her cheekbones? Of her mouth? All he could remember was Sandy's copy of
Good Housekeeping
, Joyce Brothers and Tupperware, how to trim sugar from your family's diet, a promise to reveal Valerie Harper's real-life loves.

“She had my eyes,” he said. Electricity sizzled behind his forehead.

Still squatting, Soma brought her body toward his, a disjointed embrace. “Okay, David. It is okay. I will talk to Naaliyah. It will be okay.”

A snowflake, a honeycomb, a spider's web stretched across the doorframe. He found a dead katydid in the corner of the apartment and turned it in his hands, the small, polished thorax, ten thousand tiny hexagons in its diaphanous wings. Sixes and sixes and sixes. Were there solutions here, clues to what he was missing?

Roiling skies, burning skies, skies bleached silver with heat. Emaciated dogs dozing in doorways. The levels in the town reservoirs shrank as though drains had been unplugged beneath them. Irrigation canals ran at half their normal levels, then less. Even the banana plantations, the big, hardy trees on the flanks of Mount St. Andrew, seemed to lilt and acquiesce in the hear. In the evenings a hot wind would start up from the west and heave red dust over the island: dust on the sills and louvers, dust in his rice, dust in his throat. The entire island seemed dimmer somehow, as if its hills were crumpling back into themselves.

Insomnia, a pending calamity: Hadn't he been through all this before? He thought of graduate school, growing ice on a supercooled copper pipe. Each dendritic arm of a snow crystal always corresponded precisely to the others, as if, as they formed, each knew what the other five arms were up to. Was this so different from the shape of his own life, the way his personal history seemed to repeat itself: George DelPrete, Sandy, Grace, now Naaliyah? Who next? Himself? He was trapped in the lattice of an ice crystal, more molecules precipitating
around him every second; soon he would be at the center, locked in a hexagonal prison; one of them, a quarter billion of them.

Soma came through the door, her dress soaked with sweat, the skin beneath her eyes swollen. She sat on his aluminum chair and blew her nose into a yellow handkerchief. “She wouldn't even open the door. She said I was trying to keep her from the only thing she loved.”

Her cheeks drew inward; her fingers trembled. She opened a book on her lap and turned pages without reading. A few moments passed, just the two of them in the apartment, a truck passing in the street. Then he took her head in his arms, smelling the back of her neck, a smell like salt, and hens, and soap. The book fell from her lap and neither moved to pick it up. They sat like that, her head in his arms, watching the window go dark.

From then on. Soma joined him every evening after her shift and together they stared across the sandy, unpaved road at the sheets in Naaliyah's windows. They managed to keep watch in a kind of unspoken rotation. Soma blinking in the chair, Winkler retreating to lie on the folded blanket in the corner every dozen or so hours to close his eyes and feel the heat and hear the bananaquits sing from the rooftops behind them.

“You have been fired,” Soma told him. “Nanton put your things in a cardboard box. He says he'll burn them.”

“Let him,” Winkler said.

“He's just talking. I think he misses you.”

“I bet Felix misses you.”

“Let him. He has his rum.”

In the afternoons, with Soma at work and dark stratocumulus banking up overhead, the light in the trees would go so flat he could see no more than a few feet into them, and an immense stillness would accumulate, and he'd get a gagging feeling, as if the oxygen had been choked out of the air. In those moments everything felt as if it were waiting: himself, Soma, Naaliyah's concrete building across the way, the vendors fanning themselves in their stalls, the masts wobbling out
in the harbor. A hot, sickly smell would rise from the tiles, and the cathedral bell would clang, and he'd get a slow, certain sense of the impermanence of his life, the vastness of the universe and his own insignificance in it. Eventually he would run out of hours; eventually Naaliyah would slip away and die.

He crept through town to the pier to sabotage her launch a second time. He snipped a foam-covered hose running out from the Evinrude and yanked out what he thought might be plugs. He cut the anchor chain and heaved the cinder block overboard—the water closed over it with a clap.

Thunderclouds dragged black tendrils of evaporating rain through the sky. Lightning rang back and forth over the horizon and pelicans labored up from warehouse roofs on their huge, prehistoric wings and skimmed the telephone wires.

To the Selection Committee
—

Here are some of the things Naaliyah Orellana showed me, one afternoon, when she was ten. A hermit crab trying out new shells; a large underwater shape (sea turtle? ray? monk seal?) swimming lazy circles between two groupings of coral; boobies raiding each other's eggs; tropic birds (red- and white-footed, with a long white feather trailing behind them); a shining winged beetle like a drop of mercury on a fence post; a militia of tiny ants invading a bag of cereal; black crabs dashing sideways into burrows; a white urchin the size of her thumbnail; two long-necked anemones in a tide pool engaged in slow-motion wrestling; an emaciated feral cat trotting up the path behind us, then carefully stepping back into the vegetation; clown fish, triggerfish, iridescent and turquoise fish; yellow and white angelfish; brackish pools squirming with tadpoles; goats and ewes and one white horse snapping at flies in the corner of his paddock; a tortoise upside down in the road that hissed and groaned at us as we righted him; a beautiful crest-headed bird like an oversized blue cardinal; a half dozen cattle egrets high-stepping behind a lawnmower; a tiny chick in a hole on the ground, its back to us, looking around in the dark; a snail the size of a tennis ball making its way toward the kitchen trash, its eyes waving on stalks. “Look in one spot for a minute,” Naaliyah told me. It was a game she'd play. “Choose grass or sky or beach or water
—
and something will cross it.” And these are just the things I can remember.

To live in the tropics is to always be reminded (I find a hornets in my rice, a minnow in my shaving water) of the impossibility of ownership. The street in front of me belongs more to whatever is tunneling up those hundred or so little mounds of red dirt than to any of us. The beams of this apartment belong to houseflies; the window corners to spiders; the ceiling to house geckos and roaches. We are all just tenants here. Even the one thing we believe is ours
—
the time we're given on earth
—
does that belong to us?

“An amazing book,” Naaliyah once told me, “could be written about mites.” To know her is to realize the thousand forms of inquiry. The least things enrapture her: she used to lie on her stomach and watch a tiny square of reef through a plate of glass for hours. Her shortest excursion into the world is a field trip. For me it is a reminder of the poverty of my own vision.

Naaliyah possesses all the things that keep us from giving up: exuberance, curiosity, hope. She is a gift to the world
—
I pray you will find it in you to grant her the opportunity for more study.

It had taken him a dozen drafts. Soma was asleep and he laid it in her lap to make copies and mail in the morning. “I hope they will accept it handwritten,” he said aloud, into the shadows. It was the first letter he'd been able to finish in twenty years.

Now, in the last hours, he noticed patterns everywhere: a template in the glistening trail left by a slug in the bottom of the sink; another in the veins of a leaf, blown across the sill; yet another in the arrangement of condensation droplets on the toilet tank. He stared at them for minutes, convinced there were answers locked there, correlations, a code he couldn't quite break.

Soma came in the door late—she had missed yesterday altogether. Did she even believe him about his dream? In a borrowed fry pan she cooked a dozen eggs over a foam of butter and they sat watching the dark windows across the way and passing the pan back and forth, eating with their fingers. As if across the street an engrossing film played. But there was only the wind against the sheets in Naaliyah's windows and the isometric reflections of the street lamps.

“You can't keep her from what she wants, David. Even if it means letting her reach a destiny you fear. You have to leave that up to God. If you push at her, she'll just push back harder.”

He closed his eyes; he thought he could hear, although he did not have his radio on, the girl on the shortwave whispering outside the window: 13, 91, 7…

Soma laid a sheet across him, pulled it up to his neck. He shook himself awake. But he could not fight it; his eyelids felt. There was a noise, grains of sand grinding beneath a chair leg. Did dreams, he wondered, when they arrived, make a sound? The smallest kind, like the noise of an embryo being conceived, or a snowflake touching down?

The shadows in the corners of the room pooled toward the center, and at some point the floor of the apartment had become the floor of Nanton's lobby, a window into some greater darkness, the seams giving way, a black, eager liquid rushing the gaps.

In a nightmare Naaliyah dragged chains onto a beach and shook still-living fish from her hair. “These things happen,” she said, “not because you foresee them but because you foretell them. The telling makes it so.” She grabbed his shirt and pushed him down. Then Naaliyah was turning into Sandy, and Sandy into Herman, and the beach was a rainy driveway beneath his back, and Herman had hockey pads strapped to his legs, and skates on his feet. He kicked Winkler; he braced the blade of a skate over Winkler's throat. Numbers dropped from the clouds like leaden kites, huge and spinning.

Winkler moaned in his chair. Soma crept down the iron stairs, made her way to the waterfront, caught the last ferry home. Naaliyah's boyfriend, Chici, came across the road in the final darkness before dawn and set a plate of chicken, wrapped in plastic, by the stairs to Winkler's apartment.

In the end he did not need chain cutters or snorkeling fins. She exited her building in the predawn on Sunday morning and he hurried down the iron staircase, as usual, to follow her A fog clung to the buildings and the street lamps hummed. They were the only two people about. He had the sense she knew he was there, a hundred yards behind. She moved up Halifax Street, walking quickly, the cuffs of her sweatshirt pulled over her hands, the shops dark, the kiosks padlocked, the second-story windows shuttered as if a hurricane had been forecasted, or some worse scene not even buildings could bear to watch.

At the pier she descended the ladder into her launch, unlocked the Evinrude, topped off the tank, and motored out, heading north, keeping the shoreline to her right. He began to run, glimpsing her through the fog and gaps between houses. She gained on him, of course, disappearing around one point, then another. But he ran on, leaving the road when it ended, and crashing through scrub. The hillside shanties petered out; soon there was only a thin trail, and the jumbled prop roots of screw pines, and the sound of her engine, far ahead of him.

Brush lashed his legs. Spiderwebs wrapped and clung to his face. Twice he stopped and walked, clutching a stitch beneath his ribs.

Maybe a mile from town, she killed the motor in a sapphire-blue cove, probably a hundred meters from shore. The trail climbed and he glimpsed her from a low knoll and then kept on. By the time he caught up she had been there a couple of minutes and was already drifting, leaning over the stern, peering into the water. He stood
huffing on a rocky beach, beneath a stand of palms. The muscles in his legs felt unraveled and overstretched; the sound in his ears was of blood.

Naaliyah reached beneath a thwart and produced what looked to Winkler like a diving mask. She strapped it over her head. The air was alive with salt and wind; a pair of fat, golden gulls glided past him and landed placidly in the water.

Then everything was familiar: an imprecision to the shadows, a smell in the fog like decomposing leaves, the sound of palms rasping behind him. Her back was to him; the launch wobbled beneath her movement. The dream broke over him like a wave.

He took off his glasses and set them in the sand. He thought: Here it is again. Naaliyah stooped over something in the stern. Then, impossibly, since he had sunk it five nights prior, she was raising what looked like a cinder block. Before she had dropped it over the transom he was pulling off his shoes and socks, charging forward.

Sharp rocks; a spread of corrugated sand in the shallows; clear, warm water breaking at his thighs; a last glimpse of Naaliyah clinging to the stern. He dove. His arms swept forward, one then the other, and a thought emerged: I should have practiced. She was too far away. His legs kicked, his arms rotated. Almost immediately he was exhausted. The muscles in his neck and upper arms stiffened and threatened to lock.

He forced his shoulders to roll forward. The pain built to a point where he felt his arms melt into a kind of mist and he became, for a moment, limbless, a stone sinking toward the bottom. By now she would be trapped a fathom down and working against the bight of chain around her ankle. The empty skiff would make slow pivots around its stern.

The water was almost impossibly clear. Even without his glasses he could see the sea floor recede slowly away from him, pastel poufs of coral and blizzards of tiny fish and one lone grouper hunkered among the shadows, slowly fanning its pectoral fins.

He breathed, marked his bearing, and forced himself to keep on. The sea buzzed and cracked in his ears, matching the sound of his
blood. One arm. Then the other. He found himself thinking of water, how it is never still, how even in our bodies water never relents: ceaselessly vibrating, each electron in each molecule in each cell orbiting, spinning, nine independent vectors of position and force, a rapture of movement.

His arms became dowels in a vat of honey; his heart inflated until it pressed against the backs of his ribs.

Then, quite suddenly, she appeared ahead of him in the water, a few streaks of sunlight angling past her. She looked as he knew she would, hanging upside down and bent at the waist, scrabbling at the chain, which had looped twice around her ankle and pulled taut, extending in a thin vertical column toward the sea floor. Bubbles rose from her mouth and hair. The chain quivered sluggishly.

His heart pushed through gaps in his chest. The noise in his ears built to a crescendo. Her body slackened, unfolded; her arms swung beneath her. He dove and tried to raise the chain but the cinder block was heavy on the bottom and the chain was fast to her ankle.

He ascended, breathed, and dove again. This time he went below her and hauled on the chain until he had a few seconds of slack as the cinder block rose, and with a final spasm of energy, he loosened the coil enough to free her ankle. She floated up. He watched her head break the surface and grasped the chain a half second longer, little stars bursting across his vision, blazes of light swaying and shifting on the roof of the water.

He surfaced. Her eyes were open but not blinking and her breath would not start. “No,” he heard himself saying. “No no. No no no,” denying not only this moment but every preceding one, all the houses and bridges of time, his thrashing heart, his exploding lungs: George DelPrete, Sandy, Grace—he would deny himself, deny structure, dissolve into the ocean, spin in a tiny, dissociated cloud somewhere in the depths.

A moment passed: silence, just water lapping at their necks and the boat turning calmly against its anchor. A sheet of gold mist lay quivering all around them. Water ran down her face and into the corners of her mouth. A feeling like waking from a dream came over him; the
dream melting away, a sharper, more coherent reality dawning. Sandy's voice reverberated in his memory: “I hate this part. When the lights come on after a movie.”

He fit his hands beneath her rib cage and squeezed. The tide was coming up. With each breath the bottom of the sea, maybe a dozen feet below, sank imperceptibly away. The raging of his heart subsided. Passing swells, low and warm, pushed past them and moved on. Strands of Naaliyah's hair floated into his mouth. “Wake up,” he said, and embraced her as firmly as he could. “Wake up.”

Mucus leaked from her nostrils. He turned her, and with his arms locked around her waist, pressed his lips against hers and blew into her mouth. He inhaled, readjusted his grip, breathed into her again. Her body accepted the air; he could feel her lungs swell against it, her body float a fraction higher in the water.

He thought of Felix and Soma, just now waking. Was this the conclusion of his dream after all? Two refugee parents, lying on their sad, crumpled mattress, while their daughter drowned six miles away?

How easy it is to let water take you. Warm and smooth—it is like surrendering to the bluest sleep. Don't all of us, at our ends, whether we die in a desert or a quiet white room, drown in some way?

He inhaled once more; he breathed into her. Her eyelids fluttered. She coughed and spewed mist. He compressed her midsection and she inhaled a ragged breath. “Thank you,” he said. “Oh thank you.” At the horizon stratocumulus clouds gathered in silent, big-shouldered stacks.