About Grace (20 page)

She liked cruise ships? Did they mean she liked looking at them? He tried to imagine Sandy finishing out her days in an Anchorage savings and loan, wearing her bank teller smile, cashing people's social security checks. A ranch house, a weedy lawn, a snowblower, an infertile ex-husband, a closet full of cheap shoes. Pain gathered behind his eyes. I hope they gave her cereal, he thought. I hope they brought her Apple Jacks.

From a motel room near Mansfield he managed to get an operator to give him the telephone number for the Evergreen Memorial Chapel in Anchorage. A woman answered; he asked to speak with anyone who might know something about a memorial service for Sandy Winkler in May of 2000. Twice the receptionist asked his name. She put the phone down. He waited. Hold music started.

The lamp beside the telephone buzzed softly and his fingers left tracks in the dust on its shade. She kept him on hold a long time. When she came back on, she said: “Looks like Reverend Jody Stover did that one. He's since moved to Houston. About two years ago.”

“I see,” Winkler said. “Houston?”

What had he hoped for? Every answer handed to him the moment his plane touched down? An envelope in a safe deposit box, a note taped to the door of 9515 Shadow Hill Lane? He could not face any of it, not yet: the idea that Herman might have shared so much of her life, that Herman might have had the final say. He almost drove back to the library, asked Gene to find Herman.

But it seemed too awful to contemplate, too impossible: Herman the goaltender, Herman the banker, Herman the victor. These things were not about winning or losing, Winkler knew, but clearly Herman had won. Sandy was dead. Herman, ultimately, had been her husband.

At dawn he sat in the motel's diner over a plate of hash browns with the roster of Grace Winklers beside his plate. Sandy had returned to Anchorage after the flood and it seemed likely now that she'd never left again. She'd sent the box of returned letters from there; she'd worked for Northrim Bank there. She'd died there.

But there were no Grace Winklers in Anchorage. And no Grace Sheelers anywhere. Winkler forced himself to consider it—he had been a scientist, after all, he could think analytically. Grace lived in Anchorage under another name, or she, too, was dead, or she had moved away. If the latter, she could be on his list, one of the nine. And this possibility was the one his mind fixed on. She had grieved her mother, left home, started anew. On a three-dollar U.S. map he dotted the locations: Jackson, Tennessee; Middletown, New Jersey; San Diego, California, six others. Then he linked them. The route made a sort of broad, warped loop; a femur shape, a stretched and broken heart: Ohio to New Jersey, south to Virginia, down to Tennessee, across to Nebraska, then Texas, New Mexico, California, Idaho.

New Jersey first: 5622 Skyridge Avenue, Middletown.

He tore Sandy's photo out of the obituary and anchored it in a groove in the dashboard. She stared off to her left, in the slightly cross-eyed way she'd always had, as if she were gazing out the car window at something perplexing. At a gas station he paid an attendant five dollars to permanently sever the power to the car stereo.

Those first miles—despite everything—were miles of hope. Coffee, a straightforward silence in the Datsun's cabin, a list of nine potential daughters—the odds didn't seem so insurmountable. The country was not such a big place. Already he was nearing Pennsylvania. Green faded into green faded into blue.

Along those miles, and the miles to come, he crossed and recrossed
a thousand reinventions of his daughter: Grace as housewife, apron lashed to her hips, biscuit dough drying on her fingers. Maybe a tiny granddaughter, polite, madly pleased, some pureed squash smeared across her cheeks, pushing back from the table. Grandfather, she would say, and curtsy, and giggle. Grandfather: like a father who had succeeded so well and so long he'd been promoted.

Grace as schoolgirl, ponytailed and prim, plaid skirt, high socks. Grace as ski racer, Grace as landscape painter, cartoonist, lounge singer, lover, surgeon, dental hygienist, head chef, senator, activist, cereal box designer. Grace as vice president of marketing research. Grace: five letters, a state of clemency, a beating heart.

He thought of Herman Sheeler composing Sandy's obituary, alone at a kitchen table; he heard Gene say, “The world is a big, big place.” What of the nagging probability that Grace was gone, not on the earth but in it?

He would not allow himself such thoughts. Gene was chairbound and spent his days goggling at a computer monitor and did not know so much. There were plenty of places to look—nine, at least—and the road ran out like a blank scroll in front of him.

By afternoon his eyes were tiring: sedans floated and swam in the distance and were suddenly on him. Trucks roared past in the left lane, invisible until they were nearly past, spinning his heart in his chest.

Around dusk he left the interstate. Tidy green farms gave way to wild, independent-looking ones, buckling one-story farmhouses, cattle dragging their flanks against fence wire. Every few miles a low-slung convenience store touted lotto tickets and budget beer. Teenagers, scowling on the trunks of muscle cars, watched him pass.

The only motels were cinder block bunkers bathed in neon: the House-Key Hotel, Jarett's Pay N' Sleep. His mind shaped itself around a notion of 5622 Skyridge Avenue: a guest room with a vase of dried sunflowers on the dresser, a quilt folded over the footboard. Maybe the smell of breakfast, and gulls outside the window, to wake him.

The road reopened into a highway that eventually dumped him onto
the Garden State Parkway. The sheer volume of automobiles astounded. He kept as far right as he could. Echelons of tollbooths loomed every eleven miles. Twice he missed the coin basket and had to clamber out the driver's door and scrabble in the gravel for errant dimes.

An all-night photomat attendant off exit 114 gave him directions. It was after 11
P.M.
His gut was empty and his back ached and his eyes felt full of sand. He would just take a look, then leave, go to a hotel, rest till morning.

Skyridge was a poorly lit, aging street: brown lawns, asbestos shingles, oversized hedges camped in front of windows. A stoplight flashed yellow; a raccoon sauntered across the road and disappeared into a storm drain.

Five-six-two-two blazed with light. Colorful plastic toys were spilled across the lawn; a sprinkler clicked back and forth. The house itself was single-story, dun-colored. Vines clambered up the siding; two of the three porch pillars had been kicked in, lending the facade a ruinous sag. But if she owned it, he decided, he would compliment her awning, the health of the plants.

Clearly someone was still awake. Every lightbulb in the house was turned on. And where was the nearest motel? He put on his suit jacket, buttoned his collar. Through a window he could see a couch, swathed in clear plastic. A cheap lamp over a side table. A lopsided fan turning. No books on the shelves—didn't she read? He tucked in his shirt and smoothed down the front of his jacket and brought his fist against the door.

Hardly a second later a shirtless boy opened it. His skin was black against his white underpants, and he stood turning the knob back and forth in his small hand.

Winkler cleared his throat. “Miss Winkler? Grace? Is she here?”

The boy looked over his shoulder at a closed door, then turned back.

“Could you tell her a visitor is here? A man with her same name? Tell her I'm sorry about the hour.”

But the boy stood dumbly. Perhaps he was mute? Winkler called a “Hello?” into the room. “Grace? Miss Winkler?” He heard a toilet flush and a man turned out from some hallway and opened the closed
door and the sound of voices and laughter rose from behind it. The man started down some stairs and the door shut behind him.

“Do you mind?” Winkler asked. The boy stepped aside and gave a sort of bow. Winkler crossed the room. A basement: shadows, a blue light. He could hear voices, but when he called hello down the stairwell, the noise ceased. “Miss Winkler?” The stairs were steep and the railing had been torn out. “Miss Winkler?”

She sat behind a bottle of bourbon on a card table. Even from the bottom of the stairs, twenty feet away, he could see she was not Grace, not his Grace—this woman had a broad face, flat nose, and big, black eyes that swiveled neatly in the domes of her sockets. Four heavyset African women lounged with her around the table. On shadowed lawn furniture about the circumference of the basement sat others, women and some men, a thin one sitting on the washing machine tapping his heels against the metal. All watched him and Grace shuffled a deck of cards without looking at it. She was thin and well-dressed and taken out of these surroundings might have been a marketing rep or copyright lawyer.

On the table beside her sat a homemade machine the size of a microwave with wires and tubes sticking off it. One of the women sitting nearby was clipped to it and, upon seeing Winkler, she slowly unclipped each wire and set them on the table and leaned back.

Winkler explained. “I'm looking for my daughter. I thought you might be her. But…”

Grace cut and recut the cards. “You don't know where your daughter is?”

“I've only begun to look.” He pocketed his hands. “I haven't seen her in a long time.”

“I see,” she said. Did she? He could hardly even make out the other faces in the room. Were they sizing him up for the quality of his suit? Were they detaining him so neighbors could ransack his car?

In the room a quiet tension stretched out. There were small footsteps on the stairs behind him and the half-naked boy slipped past Winkler's leg and went to Grace Winkler and stood beside her, a hand on her skirt, his eyes just clearing the tabletop.

“I should go,” Winkler said.

“Stay a bit,” Grace said.

“I don't mean to intrude.” Was she angry? Smiling? It seemed as though she was smiling. The boy watched him. “You have guests.”

“Not at all,” she said. “No one minds. Jed here,” she patted the boy's head, “was just using his future machine to tell Mrs. Beadle's fortune. Weren't you, Jed?” But the boy only looked at Winkler and did not nod or acknowledge him.

“I should be going,” Winkler said.

“Stay,” Grace Winkler said. “Someone give Mr. Winkler something to drink.” The man on the washing machine stood and with one long arm extended to Winkler a forty-ounce bottle.

“Homebrew,” he said, and smiled.

“There we are,” said Grace.

Winkler nodded his thanks, uncapped the bottle, and took a drink. The liquid was warm and thick and, he thought, full of sediment. Grit accumulated in his teeth. Conversation resumed. The boy watched him with large white eyes.

“Jed built this future machine,” Grace said, “all on his lonesome. Isn't it something?”

The women around the table whistled. “Lookit here,” said Mrs. Beadle, and pointed to an array of dials and switches drawn on the front of the box. “And here,” another woman said. She ran her finger over a cluster of blue fibers—more wires, perhaps—that emerged from the box's top and ran out onto the table. “This is where the machine gets its power. Ain't that right, Jed?”

Again the boy did not respond. The beer in Winkler's bottle tasted like hot mulch. Already he could feel his lips numbing. After a while the boy turned to his mother and put his mouth against her ear and whispered.

“Jed here wants to know if you'd like to have your fortune told.”

Winkler glanced about. “I really must get going. I've got to get a motel, early start tomorrow.”

“Nonsense. You can sleep here. On the sofa. A man with my husband's name can stay with us one night.”

“Well…,” said Winkler.

“Well, nonsense. Come over here. It won't hurt a bit.”

Mrs. Beadle groaned up from her chair and Winkler took her place. Again the boy whispered into Grace's hair. She laughed. “Jed says the future machine will need ten dollars before he can make it work.”

“Ten dollars?”

The people in the room chuckled and the boy watched Winkler. Winkler handed over a bill. The boy folded it twice and poked it through a slot in his contraption.

Winkler could see the machine more clearly now—it looked like the body of an old television with all sorts of basement odds and ends crammed inside. The junction box from a ceiling fan, a simple two-wired motor, a copper pipe elbow. No part of it seemed integral to any other, as if Jed could upend it and dump out its parts with a single shake. But the boy was springing into action. He clipped alligator clips with wires trailing off the tails all over Winkler: to his tie, his cuff, one to the tip of his pinkie, another to his left earlobe. Winkler winced—it felt as if the clip had bitten into his skin and he was bleeding. The boy's hands whispered over him. Winkler reached for his ear.

“Don't take it off, Mr. Winkler,” Mrs. Beadle said. “Won't take but a minute.”

The boy's hands scuttled over the old television, aligning wires, pulling switches. Then he lidded his eyes and paddled his arms back and forth. He took the long tress of fibers jutting through the top of the box and stroked and pulled them apart and spat in his hands and rubbed the saliva in.

Winkler lifted his bottle and took a long drink. Amazingly, the bottle was nearly empty. He felt a tingling all through his spine. Were they running a current through him? He thought of the photo of Sandy, up in the car, waiting for him.

“What does it say?“ The boy opened his eyes and peered into his side of the box. Winkler tried to see Grace: her hair chopped at the neck, her wide black eyes, an unadorned string around her throat. Not his daughter at all.

“Jed says the future machine was able to see much. He says the
future machine ranged across the blanket of time and gathered much information.”

The boy glanced at the machine, bent over, and said more into his mother's ear. “Jed says to ask you, Mr. Winkler, if you are sure you want to know what the future machine says.”