About Grace (28 page)

On the first Friday in April, Naaliyah returned once more with empty hands. Winkler thought: I am living the same story over and over.

Although there were still nights of astonishing cold (the trees expanding and flexing, one or two giving up and exploding, the echoes dying quickly in the heavy air) the winter began to wane. The auroras diminished; a wedge of geese appeared in the sky one morning, winging north. Some days the sun rose high enough to melt snow off the roof of the cabin, and icicles formed during the night, pillars between the eaves and the ground. There were even hours now when Winkler could work at his microscope without gloves, could chop wood in only a wool shirt.

The warblers returned, and the juncos. Even a robin—so motionless on the eave Winkler wondered if maybe it had frozen solid and Naaliyah had placed it there as a prank. But when he reached for it, it blinked, and flapped off

Aircraft started appearing in the southern sky, Beechcraft and Cessnas and even a big Twin Otter, circling a bit before lazing down toward the airstrip at Eagle. Naaliyah looked better each day, her cheeks taking on color, her work accumulating momentum. The winter had been a triumph she would carry with her the rest of her life. Her insects—many of them—were still alive.
She
was still alive. Some afternoons he would walk into the cabin and she'd be laughing on the CB with the ranger. “Really?” she'd say. “He said
that
?”

He could see health in her arms, in the cords of her neck. When she
bent she kept her legs straight, like an athlete, her hamstrings long and tight. She washed herself with buckets of hot water and wrapped her hair and midsection in towels and walked around with her bare calves sticking out of her boots, laces trailing behind. Desire flared in him—when she brought a spoon out from between her lips, when she stood in the meadow, eyes closed, chin tilted up at the sun. He hated himself for it, for being an old and lecherous man, for the times she caught his eyes on her body a half second too long.

He sat beside the stove until after midnight and wrote. The snow pecking at the window was almost rain.

A Wednesday in early April: the sky a pale, fabulous blue. Naaliyah stood in the doorway and announced, “Tonight I'm going to town. I'm going into town and I'm going dancing. Anybody who wants to can come along.” All afternoon Winkler fumbled with the Stratalab. Naaliyah shaved her legs in the dying light; she brushed her hair; she pulled on a dress he did not even know she had, black printed over with bright red macaws, and zipped her snowsuit over it.

“Do you need me to feed the insects?”

“They'll be fine. I'll be back tonight. You're sure you don't want to come?” He looked around at the meadow; he shook his head. Two minutes later she started the snowmachine and half stood off its bench and throttled off, arcing over the crust frozen on top of the snow.

The daylight slowly left the trees. He could hear the growl of the Skidoo as she guided it down through the trees, and he stood out there a moment longer, watching the light change, snow drifting between branches, and then went in.

She started going often—every few nights, staying in town until past midnight, once not returning until dawn. Sometimes he'd walk out into the spruce, toward her tracks, waiting to see the speck of her headlight as it turned up the long trail toward the camp, shaking snow from the overhanging trees, starting animals from the path. Through
gaps in the treetops the frozen Yukon loomed below him, huge and wide, here smooth as a runway, there buckled with heaves.

He'd eat his dinner alone; he'd stare at the CB and consider switching it on. Certainly it was the park service ranger, the one with the wind-blasted face and khakis, but he did not ask her and it was none of his business anyway.

Silence boomed over the meadow, big and pale. He fell asleep in the chair by the stove and when he woke, still in half dreams, he dragged himself to Naaliyah's cot and continued sleeping there.

He woke later still to the sound of the snowmobile roaring into the meadow. The door opened and closed, and he heard logs thump into the stove. He opened his eyes. The heat lamps were all down and the only light came from embers flaring in the stove and a candle burning on her desk.

She smelled of beer, and hamburgers, and cigarette smoke. Ice melted from her hair and dripped onto the floor. He found his glasses on the shelf beside him. At the far end of the cabin he could just see her, bending over a cage, lifting a wire lid, taking a spider up in her fingers.

We went to the movies on Wednesday nights while you were at hockey games. Only in December did she start going back to my place. She would eat Apple Jacks and look out the window, thinking about you probably. As far as I could tell, she was often thinking about you. I think she had the idea of leaving Alaska before I met her, although I don't say this to deemphasize my role in it. I don't even know if “idea” is the right word, really, just an impulse, a notion
—
she'd open my road atlas and trace routes away from Anchorage with her finger. She said she wanted to be an airline pilot, or a cop, or a doctor. We'd lay on my mattress and look out the window at the sky. I think she wanted, more than anything, to be a mother.

I have a hole in my life because I know so little about my daughter
—
my and Sandy's daughter—and I beg you to search your heart and locate whatever kindness is there. Let me know in some way what happened to her. Probably I do not deserve peace but you could give me some.

I know words aren't going to do it. I used to write Sandy and think I could make her understand, but there was no way. We were too far apart.

Call me a jerk, a demon, whatever you will. But if you can, please, answer this letter.

One by one the ponds gulped down their ice like big, painful pills. The stars changed, and soon Naaliyah was finding tiny blades standing up from the ground when she shucked aside spruce needles to search for grubs. Everything dripped. Branches unloaded snow like they were finally and completely finished with it. In the shed a first chirring started. When Winkler got up to see, something had gnawed its way out of a stick—it had left a neat, fresh pile of wood dust on the floor of the cage.

The sound of the creek, rushing and bubbling, filled the clearing. Naaliyah dragged him down to the water and held him in it and he stood with her, the water painfully cold against his legs and the graveled bed shifting under his shoes. “Quiet,” she said. “Still yourself.” He shifted, shrugged, eventually managed to settle in. And for a brief moment, he felt it, a cloud of insects around him, landing and taking off, a thousand points of sense on his skin, nearly weightless. He tried to see them but could make out little more than a spotty cloud, there one second, gone the next.

“What are they?”

“Adult midges. Just emerged. Still working to harden their cuticles.” She was waving a hand gently through the air. “A hundred thousand will probably hatch on this stretch alone.”

It was a sound, Winkler thought, like the thrumming of the spheres, the mechanisms of the universe made audible. Spring: the sheer vigor of it, the warm and benevolent wind, stirring everything.

Just one more Friday, Naaliyah heading into town for the mail and to use the satellite phone, and check the condition of the roads. It was nearly May and she had been making preparations to leave for more than a week now, preserving insects in jars of alcohol, consolidating others into more portable cages, letting still others go. Five adult mourning cloak butterflies had survived the winter, rolled into the crevices of a stick, and she carried them out into the sun and watched them slowly heat up, opening and closing their wings, finally flapping off.

The snow left the roof, sliding off in big slabs and collapsing to the ground with a
whump.
Winkler jumped each time.

On this last Friday, Naaliyah buzzed up in the snow machine, its suspension and cowl lacquered with mud. “David!” she called, shouting, and he walked out into the boggy meadow and splashed through the slush. “A letter.” She was breathless, glowing, fumbling through her backpack. Mud was smeared across her goggles. “He wrote back.”

She held it out. A single ivory envelope with a First National Bank of Alaska return address embossed in the corner. “He wrote back,” she said again.

She might have said more. But there was only that letter, caught between his hands, a bit of ink—Winkler's own name—on a field of white. If he was not careful he would lose himself in those loops of letters, lose himself there and not find his way back. He stumbled backward, making for the cabin.

Naaliyah waited outside, standing at her big warped desk, not working—all of her mind was on Winkler inside, bent on him, every thought leaning toward him, offering him so much hope that Winkler wondered, teetering before the stove, if hope might be visible on some other, still-imperceptible spectrum, coloring the air, like auroras rippling into the sky.

Sparrows moved up the ancient corridors toward Canada; elk stirred in their beds. Somewhere a brown bear stood and stretched and yawned, and three volleyball-sized cubs went tumbling out of the den
after her. High on south-facing tundra the first lichens, some of them centuries old, spread their scales across the rocks. He opened the envelope.

Dear Mr. Winkler—

Thanks for the snowflakes. There is no question they are handsome, another reason to be proud of Alaska.

Yes, yes, Grace is here, alive and well, all of that. I don't know, though, if she'll want to see you. She has a son, you know. She got married early and is already divorced. She never listened much to my advice.

Anyway here's her address. Don't tell her I gave it to you.

Grace Ennis

208 East 16th, Apt. C

Anchorage

I don't think you're a jerk, not anymore. Maybe an asshole. That's a joke. Sorry it took me so long to respond; I've been out of commission the past few weeks.

Stop by if you're ever in town.

Herman

As with Sandy's box of returned letters, he held this letter in his lap a long time and the light changed around him and the shadows gradually extended their reach.

A sheet of paper, an answered prayer. His mind filled like a pool with a single memory: the morning, before dawn, that his mother died. Winkler was thirteen years old. His father had found her and rushed onto the landing. From his little closet-bedroom, Winkler could hear him hammering on the neighbors' door, yelling about using their telephone. The boy pulled back his mattress and stepped carefully into the parlor. She was still in her chair, her shape rigid already, all wrong, her knees showing beneath the hem of her nightgown, the fingertips of one hand outstretched to touch one of the big
windows. The clamor of his father shouting and banging on the landing was improbably distant, and the smells of that furrier's storehouse-turned-apartments—foxes, lynxes, and the tannins that had been used on their coats—were suddenly, impossibly strong. The walls swarmed with ghosts; they drew out from beneath the furniture, from the radiators and the outlets, from the faucets and fissures in the beams, and the keyholes, and chinks in the plaster, the ghosts of minks and caribou, arctic squirrels and bears, marmots, moose, all these animals pouring into the apartment, hundreds of them, silent and invisible, but there nonetheless, walking about—the boy could feel them, he could smell them, he could all but see them. Their breath was on the windows.

They gathered around her in the darkness. She was so still. The animals stamped and fidgeted and flicked their tails. Her throat was stretched and her chin pointed at the ceiling, and her fingers were horribly motionless against the glass, and outside a brand-new quarter inch of snow had collected on the sill and Winkler had been grateful all his life that he had been given that moment with her, maybe one or two complete minutes, he and the animals and his mother, the only person who had really ever understood him, and he imagined he could see the animals taking her with them, solemnly and delicately, escorting the life out of her, something gauzy and illumined, like a jar full of fireflies, or the flame of a candle behind a curtain, her soul, perhaps, or something beyond words, and carrying it with them back into the walls of the building, heading for the roof.

Eventually his father came sprinting back in with the neighbors, and lamps were switched on, and the windows went black, and she was gone.

The Ford heaved down the ragged track. Naaliyah worked the brake, easing the truck and the Skidoo on its trailer through long patches of slush. Winkler watched an island of birch on a nearby hill, a slash of brilliance through the darker spruce like a seam of silver.

Several times they had to stop, rear wheels spinning, Winkler out of the cab and leaning into the rear bumper, cold air leaking from shadowy places between trees, the cages of insects stacked in the bed rattling beneath a tarp. But the truck always spun free, the trailer splashing through the ruts, as if their passage out of the valley was inevitable now, determined by gravity and the radiance of the day. As they descended the slush occurred less and less, and willows began to appear, wearing a haze of lime green buds, swaying in the wind.

Winkler rode with his old duffel between his legs and his prints of snow crystals stacked in his lap. Air washed over his lace and down the collar of his shirt.

It took only an hour or so to reach the Yukon. Above its vast reaches gulls wheeled and soared. Rays of light dropped from broken clouds. Blocks of ice as big as boxcars littered the banks, and among them were whole trees, stripped of bark and branches, the elaborate knots and elbows of their fiber laid plain. Out in the center, past the breakup ice and a thick line of flotsam, a clear brown channel—wide as a football field—pushed forward, driving great lenses of ice downriver, toward Circle.

It was five hundred miles to Anchorage. To their left, out on the thawed stripe of river, geese were landing, one after another.