About Grace (7 page)

“We'll get a hotel room,” he said, carrying a box of copper piping upstairs. “Across town.”

“You didn't go to the doctor's.” Her hands were shaking lightly. “I called.”

“Sandy. The house is flooding.”

“We'll be okay.” But Sandy looked haggard, her face drawn, her shirttails soaked. She held Grace as if marauders might at any moment storm the kitchen and pry her away. “Channel five says it'll end tonight. None of the neighbors are leaving.”

“They will.”

“We'll get a room in the morning. If it hasn't stopped raining.”

Rain was assaulting the roof. They could hear it pouring over the shingles and through the downspouts. “Sandy. Please.”

She looked toward the basement door. “My tree.”

But she relented. They sat in the car, the three of them, wipers ratcheting back and forth. Moisture fogged the windows. It felt immediately better to him, to be together in the car, hemmed in by the dark, the doors and windows of the Chrysler fogged, the smell of wet clothes close around them. Lightning, or a downed power line, flashed somewhere. Overlapping tides of rain washed over the windshield. The dashboard sent forth its frail orange glow.

They took a motel room on Eaton Road, six miles away.

“Will you be okay tomorrow? If I take the car to work?”

“I guess. We can eat in the diner.”

He looked at her, still clutching Grace. “I'm sorry about your tree, Sandy.”

“Let's just get through this.”

Around midnight the rain turned to hail and the motel roof sang underneath it, a sound like thousands of buckets of pebbles being emptied onto plastic. Maybe she believed him now. Maybe they would get through this and be stronger; maybe she would ask him someday to tell her everything. The blanket was heavy on his chest. The muscles in his eyes were giving over to sleep.

He woke to sudden pain and brought his fingers to his lip. He was in the parking lot of the motel. The neon sign above him sputtered in the rain. The car was running and the driver's door hung open—Grace lay asleep on the front seat. Sandy had hit him across the mouth. “Are you crazy?” she shouted. She rushed to Grace and collected her in her arms. Sandy's hair was getting damp and she was standing in her bra and pajama bottoms, barefoot on the gravel. The rain washed down over them. “What the hell are you doing with her out here?” She backed away, bracing Grace's head against her shoulder. He looked up and watched the onslaught of rain, half a million drops riding down.

Sandy was already across the lot. “What's happening to you, David? Why are you doing this?”

He could not answer—he did not know. Sleep was slowly washing from him. Had he been dreaming?

He followed her to the door. She closed it most of the way and spoke through the gap. “Don't come in, not tonight. Don't come near us.” The door shut—a red number seven painted above the peephole—and he heard the bolt slide home.

Winkler stood in the rain a long time before splashing back to the car. His jaw clattered. He could feel his lip swelling against his teeth. He was wearing his suit but his shirt had been buttoned improperly and his tie was tucked into his trouser pocket. Everything—his clothes, his hair, the seats and mats of the Newport—was wet. His
hands shook in front of his eyes.

There was no traffic. From the River Road Bridge he realized he could no longer make out where the river originally ran—it had become a lake sliding through trees. A police car ahead of him rolled haltingly through a deep pool. For a moment he wondered if the sun had burned out and the entire planet was listing off into space.

He locked himself in the weather room at Channel 3, hung his suit over two chairs, and sat in his wet underwear watching the rain-spattered window and the slurred lights of the city. In the morning he taped three outdoor spots in a poncho emblazoned with the network logo. Throughout the watershed, streams were collecting and merging. Even when the rain let up, he told the camera, it would be at least another fifteen hours before the river reached floodpoint. Churches and gyms were filling; neighborhoods lining drainage creeks were evacuating. The mayor had petitioned the governor; the governor was mobilizing the National Guard.

He called the motel, room 7. No answer. It wasn't until early evening that he could get back there. The manager had to let him in.

They were gone. Not in the shower, not in the bed. Sandy's sweater hung in the closet; a stack of diapers waited by the television. There was no note. There was a familiarity to the room that he felt outside of; it was as if, already, he was trespassing, as if the red plaid suitcase on the floor and the green toothbrush on the sink belonged not to Sandy but to some stranger whose possessions he had no right to.

He checked the diner, but they weren't there; he dialed the house, but no one picked up. He had a half hour until his evening spot—he was supposed to be on the Main Street Bridge interviewing volunteer sandbag fillers.

Were they eating somewhere? Walking? The only theory that made any sense was Sandy's Paradise Tree—Sandy was at the house, trying to save it. She had hitched a ride somehow, and had brought Grace with her, and was trying to save her sculpture.

He backed out of the room. Out in the street the daylight was failing. The clouds were matted tightly. He pointed the Chrysler toward the house. When he reached the base of Shadow Hill he could not
believe how much water had collected there. The parking lot of the middle school had become a foaming brown lake. Spirals of debris eddied against the gymnasium wall.

It was impossible to drive farther. He parked on a small knoll and climbed through wet, naked trees, hurrying along the ridge above the neighborhood. Soon he was near the top of Shadow Hill, a couple hundred feet above the lane. Below him the rooftops of neighbors' houses looked like the peaked roofs of so many houseboats. Three separate creeks funneled in at the head of the street and poured through the center of the neighborhood; the front yards and the half of the lane closest to the Chagrin had become a river of mud.

The sound of all that water was pervasive: gurgling, spitting, swallowing, pouring down the hillside and down the trunks of the trees—it sounded as if the atmosphere had liquefied. He counted rooftops: the Stevensons, the Harts, the Corddrys, that Italian family who had barbecues every Saturday. The Sachses' lawn was entirely underwater, just the candy-striped apex of their daughter's swing set showing. In the backyard of his own house the heads of fence posts were the only things visible, wooden buoys marking a shore.

Rain ran down his neck; his soles were heavy with mud. A lesson, half remembered, rose in his memory: Water craves, water is hungry—look at what it does to the stems of roses left in a vase too long. Who had said that? A professor? His mother?

Shades of mist ascended from the hillside. A helicopter shuttled past, passing in and out of low clouds, winking a small light. Already there was an odor in the air like mildew, like wet carpet, as if the houses were great moldy tea bags that had begun to steep.

As he gazed through the rain, at the flooded neighborhood, the tall and stately maple in the Sachses' front yard fell. It leaned grandly, then gave out with a singular groan, a thousand rootlets tearing and snapping, the trunk splashing down, the high branches reaching across the street, a series of percussive waves going out. The current pushed; the tree turned a bit, and held steady.

The smell, the collapsed maple, the sound of water rising and muttering—it was hopelessly recognizable. He wavered a long
moment, studying the wet shingles on the roof of his house, feeling every minute of his life funnel into an instant. Here was a line from one of his hydrology texts:
convergence, confluence, conflux
; a point at which two or more streams combine, and a new stream forms by their combining.

And if Grace was in there? If he waded into the house, looked upstairs, downstairs, found her finally on the top shelf of Sandy's plant stand? If he gathered her in his arms and tried to carry her out, up the street? Her yellow woolie, her bassinet, the cereal boxes on the dresser—everything was in place.

He took a few steps forward, then turned, and walked back over the hill, the way he had come. Down through the mud and leaves. He fell once, twice, lurching back to his feet. He did not run but tried to keep his pace steady, resolved. The soles of his shoes slid in the wet leaves. He staggered to the Chrysler, started it, and turned south on Music Street, Shadow Hill at his back.

He taped his spot in borrowed waders on the Main Street Bridge above Chagrin Falls. Rain was running down his glasses and he could see only the light mounted on top of the camera, a white smear on a field of gray. Behind him men in slickers shoveled sand into burlap sacks. The falls roared.

At the end of the segment he faced the camera and said he hoped the river would crest that night. He said he hoped the rain would not turn to ice. He said we would all have to keep our fingers crossed, and watch the sky, and pray.

By 10
P.M
. he was crossing the Springfield line into Pennsylvania. He rented a motel room in Erie and burst through the door and switched on the television. There were two and a half minutes of footage: a car floating in the library parking lot; an uprooted tree rolling over the falls; a gymnasium lined with cots. Lampposts sparked and drowned in the night; there was the customary video of stop signs submerged to the letters. But no mention of fatalities, injuries, drownings. The anchor signed off, and a movie came on—soldiers storming a hillside, shouting to one another. He turned to the window. A breeze came in, damp, stinking of diesel. He dialed the house—no ringing, just static. He dialed the motel on Eaton Road and asked for room 7 but the phone rang on and on and no one answered. He let it ring until he could not hold his eyelids open.

Exhaustion trundled over him. In a dream he piloted the Chrysler back down Music toward Shadow Hill, descending into the valley. The car stalled a few hundred feet past the middle school, swamped. He waded out into the cold, muddy water. It was soon at his waist; the light was failing. He half waded, half swam the inundated street. Bloated magazines hung in branches; dolls rode the current facedown. Whole clumps of sod turned in eddies. He entered the house, climbed the stairs, roved the rooms. Grace was crying; it was dusk. He lived through the dream again: finding her on the plant stand, lifting her out of the bassinet, wading with her into the street. He slipped. They went under. She drowned.

He had fallen asleep in his still-damp suit and woke to a chill deep inside him, as though he had been sleeping underwater. Beside the window two cords, caught in the updraft from the heater, knocked against the blinds. He bent over the sink and rinsed his face.

It was 5
A.M
. Again he dialed: no one in room 7; no connection at the house. Already he had reached a state where he expected the phone to ring on and on, for no one to be there. At Channel 3 the station attendant said she knew of no fatalities. “When are you coming in?” she asked. He hung up.

Everything seemed intractable. What were his choices? To return home and possibly be the instrument of his daughter's death? How many times would she have to drown? The future had become a swarming horizon, an advancing wall just down the road, raging forward, black and insatiable, swallowing houses and fields as it came.

He left the room key on top of the television, went to the Chrysler, and guided it not toward home, but east. He kept his hands firmly on the wheel and at dawn did not turn back. I have run away before, he thought. It is merely a matter of keeping your foot on the accelerator and not letting it off. The clouds had pulled back and there were only the occasional trucks rumbling in the night, last fall's leaves blowing across the interstate.

All that day he drove, stopping only for gas and to buy chocolate bars, which he ate mindlessly, dropping the wrappers to the floor between his legs. Scranton? Philadelphia? New York? He settled on the latter, as much for its size as anything, its supposed impassiveness, its positioning at the terminus of the freeway. At dusk he brought the Chrysler up through the northern miles of New Jersey and soon was navigating beneath the Hudson in the Lincoln Tunnel, where exhaust-caked girders groaned past in the blackness above him, and when he emerged he was in Manhattan. He was drained and his vision was lapsing badly behind his glasses and what he saw appeared as little more than a hubbub of steel and mirrors, as if he were entering some vast and awful funhouse that would soon seal him into a dead end and pinch off the exits.

He parked the Chrysler in an alley and left it. On the street, big
band music played from a portable stereo and the people on the sidewalks appeared to step in concert with the song—a nun with a blue backpack, an Indian man in a tracksuit carrying flowers, a woman ducking into the backseat of a cab—all of them seeming to fulfill some greater orchestration, stepping up, stepping down, swinging their arms, blinking their eyes, oblivious, hurrying to their ends.

Above a tavern he found a cheap room with a bricked-over window and a hot plate and an orchestra of crickets performing beneath the cot. He lay on his back and watched the cracks in the ceiling as if they might hand down a sentence that did not come. The light, from a dusty and naked bulb, was constant, day or night; he couldn't find a switch or reach the fixture to unscrew it. Every few hours he descended the iron staircase to the bar in his rumpled suit to order coffee and scan the newspapers like some deranged businessman. He dialed home from the pay phone in the back but service must still have been interrupted by the flood—a buzz rose in the line, each time, elections piling up against a resistor, and the signal clicked off. At the motel on Eaton the clerk said that he could not reach anyone in room 7, that the room had not been paid for, that no one had yet checked out.

Directory Assistance got him the number of Tim Stevenson, the neighbor six houses up. Tim answered on the second ring. “We haven't seen anyone. Your place is a mess. The whole street is a mess. There's crap everywhere; all the septics are backed up.”

“A mess?”

“Where are you?”

“Have you seen my wife?”

“Haven't seen anyone. Where are you staying?”

“And my daughter?”

“No one. Are you okay? Hey, which insurance were you on?”

Winkler washed his face and armpits in the bathroom sink; graffiti
had been etched into the mirror: CHUCK WANTS SUE BUT CAN'T HAVE HER. CANDY IS EASY. On the national news the Ohio flooding warranted seventeen seconds, the rushing falls, the half-drowned street signs, a clip of two firemen in a skiff coaxing a Doberman off a garage roof. An anchor came back on; stock indices rolled across the screen.

A telegram:

Sandy
—

I know you must think what I've done is unforgivable. Maybe it is. But I had to go. In case. I think I would have harmed Grace. I'll be back as soon as it is safe.

The first bank wouldn't let him transfer funds; the second allowed him a one-day maximum withdrawal of seven hundred dollars. From a corner stand he bought a sheaf of newspapers and read that the flood had receded. The thawing soil was choking it down, funneling the water into its aquifers. Only two deaths, the paper reported, old men unwilling to leave their homes.

He dialed from a dozen different payphones but no operator could get a call through. Had he gone far enough? Would time take care of itself? Somewhere was there a tally of souls that had marked his daughter's and would seize it regardless of agent?

What if Sandy had drowned in the basement and doomed them both in the process? But wouldn't their deaths have been reported? Not if they hadn't been found. Not if he was the one who should have been reporting them.

A greater fear: What if by leaving he had somehow tampered with the order of things, removed a thread and left the fabric snagged and incomplete?

Or worse—maybe worse than anything: What if years of studying water had manifested themselves into a dream that was nothing more than a nightmare, something to wake from and shake off, a manifested
fear, merely an instance of what
could
be? What if he had left his daughter in that house to die?

It didn't matter. What mattered was that his daughter might still be breathing somewhere, smiling, sleeping, grasping Sandy's ear, gurgling some unintelligible communication.

He wandered the thronged sidewalks and peered up at the sky: spring in New York, the first trees unfolding their leaves, a depthless, pristine blue poised between buildings. Tulips rising from beds on Park Avenue, a woman laughing in an open window—these things seemed impossible, unreal.

During three and a half days, he did not sleep more than twenty minutes at a time. Finally his body gave out on the floor in front of the bed. He managed to haul a chair in front of the door, and sleep took him, and when he woke he had slept twelve hours. What he could remember of his dream was that Sandy had stormed the hall toward his room, the arm that did not hold Grace swinging violently as if to clear demons from her path, her hair standing uncombed and snarled above her head. She was beautiful in her fury; she kicked a hole in his door with the toe of her boot. In the dream he was lying on the cot and she stood over him and unleashed a thousand curses. He raised his hands over his face: spittle flew from between her lips. Grace had begun to scream. He sat up.

“Not in front of the baby,” he said, and in his dream was overcome with happiness—his daughter was saved, the flood had passed, they could begin again. But Sandy was shaking Grace; he rose and gathered her from her mother's arms, wrapped her in a blanket and was leaving the room, moving down the hall, Sandy's voice behind him cracking at its peaks, as if her voice somehow had become the arc of her welding torch, sizzling and snapping, and the child still screaming in his arms, reaching the top of the iron stairs—he would get them all out of there, they would find the Chrysler and drive home, or all the way back to Anchorage if Sandy wanted—and he tripped. Horror plunged through him. The blanket unraveled; Grace hovered, out of his arms, for an
instant, her forehead wrinkling. Sandy screamed. He tried to close his eyelids but in the dream they were wide open, as if propped by invisible toothpicks. Grace dropped spinning down the flight of stairs and landed with a muffled crack, an egg breaking inside a towel.

What was sleep? What was sentience? He studied his reflection and realized he was not sure if
this
was a dream—would he wake at any moment and find himself somewhere else? Was he sleepwalking even now? That night in a state near desperation he crouched in his doorway with his hands wrapped around a quart of coffee. He had stacked the frame of the bed and chair against the door.

Each time a cupboard closed somewhere in the building, or a siren started, or footsteps emerged from the stairwell, an impulse shivered through him:
Run. Run farther.
It was only a matter of time until he would wake and Sandy would be at the door and he would kill his daughter.

In the morning he roved the city. He rented two more hotel rooms and each time the dream was the same with the setting altered. In the second dream he was sleeping on a sidewalk grate with steam rising around him. Beside him slept another man, wrapped in an orange plastic raincoat. Down the sidewalk came the echoing footsteps of his wife, each heel clapping the pavement, and she was shaking him awake, shouting, he was taking the child from her arms, dropping her, killing her.

The terror of sleeping was no better than the terror of waking. His hands seemed pale, strange devices—not his own. He had already spent five hundred and eleven dollars of his and Sandy's money. Any moment now the future—that black, swarming wall—would arrive.

He was at the cage on the first floor of a hostel. A muffled pounding echoed from the ceiling. The clerk had a dozen tattoos beneath his cardigan. “Booked. You've got to check in by three
P.M
.”

“I'll pay double.”

“No beds.”

“I'll take anything. A closet.”

“We're full. You need a hearing aid?”

He stood awhile in front of the desk and then went out. It had gone cold that evening, a last paroxysm of winter, and wind rasped through the buildings. Subways shook the sidewalk as they passed beneath. He drew his suit jacket around him. Above the city nimbus clouds raced to sea. It began to snow: small, wet crystals that seemed to groan as they dropped through the air.

He was downtown in an all-night gyro place, bent over the table, beginning to nod off on his forearms. It was the sight of dust on a vase of fake irises, and then a smell when someone entered, cold air rushing through the door, a smell like oiled metal, like slush, and he knew he was entering the dream. He left the restaurant. A half block away, a figure in an orange plastic raincoat knelt over a grate. Sleep clawed at Winkler, clutched his eyelids; how easy it would be to lie there, up the block in that rising steam, to doze, to let the future catch up with the present.

Instead he ran. He ducked through alleys and tried not to pay attention to the turns he made. His legs ached and his feet chafed in his shoes. After a dozen or so blocks he was passing the faded green awnings of a shore marker, and had reached the edge of the island. Out on the pier a crane was loading a freighter and snow floated beneath its floodlights in slow coils. He stopped, breathing hard, knees trembling, a pain in his lower legs as if his shins had begun to splinter.

He had not seen Sandy for nine nights. A security guard with a clipboard led him aboard and showed him the captain. The ship was the
Agnita
—a Panamanian-registered British merchant freighter bound for Venezuela. For two hundred and thirteen dollars, all the cash he had left, the captain allowed him passage.

“Caracas?” the captain asked.

“Anywhere,” Winkler said.

Snow flew among the telegraph wires and down through the varied masts and antennas in the port and disappeared wherever it touched the harbor. He climbed to the foredeck and watched the city, its thousand
muted corridors. A police launch motored past, its spotlight illuminating a taper of falling snow. Small, granular flakes collected on the shoulders and sleeves of his jacket. He raised his cuff to his eyes: Triangular forms with truncated corners? Hexagonal plates? He looked away, feeling sick.

After an hour or so the loading crane swiveled away and a tug brought the
Agnita
out from the pilings and into the harbor. From the stern he watched as the ship slid through the Narrows. The engines rumbled to life; a great boil went up behind the ship. The tug turned and faded, and the lights of Manhattan reflected off the rimpled water like the lights often cities. The outer harbor waited black and huge off the bow. The freighter sounded two blasts; somewhere a buoy clanged. They steamed past Coney Island and Breezy Point and soon he could see only the lights of fires along the Jersey shore and finally those, too, waned.

Ice glazed the rails. He clambered down to the bunkroom. The ship fell into a steady buck and sway as the long swells of open water took hold of her.