About Grace. Anthony Doerr

behind his head. There were acne scars on his jaw. “I’m not sure you’ve got the right house.”

      Winkler retreated a step. His hands were shaking badly so he stowed them behind his back. He did not know if he would be able to say any more and was overwhelmed with relief when Sandy stepped forward.

      “Okay,” she said, nodding. She snapped the towel and folded it and draped it over her shoulder. “Pull it into the garage. I can do whatever I want?”

      “As long as it drives.”

      Herman peered over Sandy’s head then back at her. “What are you talking about? What’s going on here?”

      Winkler’s hands quivered behind his back. “The keys are inside. I can come back in, say, a week?”

      “Sure,” she said, still looking at the Newport. “One week.”

      One week. He went to Marilyn Street only once: creeping on foot through the slushy yard and peering through the garage window toward midnight. Through cobwebs he could just make out the silhouette of his car, hunkered there amid boxes in the shadows. None of it looked any different.

      What had he hoped to see? Elaborate sculptures welded to the roof? Wings and propellers? A shower of sparks flaring in the rectangular lens of her welding mask? He dreamed Sandy asleep in her bed, the little embryo awake inside her, turning and twisting, a hundred tiny messages falling around it like snow, like confetti. He dreamed a welding arc flickering in the midnight, a bright orange seam of solder, tin and lead transformed to light and heat. He woke; he said her name to the ceiling. It was as if he could feel her across town, her tidal gravity, the blood in him tilting toward her.

      In his road atlas Ohio was shaped like a shovel blade, a leaf, a ragged valentine. The black dot of Cleveland in the northeast corner like a cigarette burn. Hadn’t he dreamed her in the supermarket? Hadn’t he foreseen all of this?

      Six days after he’d visited their house, she telephoned him, whispering down the wire, “Come late. Go to the garage.”

      “Sandy,” he said, but she was already gone.

      He closed his savings account—four thousand dollars and change—and stuffed whatever else he could carry—books, clothes, his barometer—into a railroad duffel he’d inherited from his grandfather. A taxi dropped him at the end of the block.

      He eased the panels of the garage door up their tracks. She was already in the passenger’s seat. A suitcase, decorated with red plaid on both sides, waited in the backseat. Beside it was the television box stuffed with welding supplies: the torch still in its packaging, the boxes of studs unopened. He set his duffel in the trunk.

      “He’s asleep,” she said when Winkler opened the driver’s door. He dropped the transmission into neutral and rolled the car to the end of the driveway and halfway down Marilyn Street before climbing in and starting it. The sound of the engine was huge and loud.

      They left the garage door open. “The heater,” was all she said. In ten minutes they were past the airport and on the Seward Highway, already beyond the city lights. Sandy slumped against her door. Out the windshield the stars were so many and so white they looked like chips of ice, hammered through the fabric of the sky.

       8

      The convergences of a life: Winkler on an airplane, fifty-nine years old, St. Vincent receding behind him; Winkler waist-deep in a flood, his chin at the gunwale of a rowboat, men prying his drowned daughter from his arms; and Winkler again at thirty-three, speeding toward Cleveland with someone else’s wife—this, perhaps, is how lives are measured, a series of abandonments that we hope beyond reason will eventually be reconciled.

      Vast tracts of country reflected off that big hood: the Coast Mountains, Hazelton’s lava beds. Alberta’s steel-blue granaries. Every hour he was seeing new things, wiping his glasses clean: Saskatoon, Winnipeg. An awe at the size of the continent swelled in Winkler’s chest—here was the water in his cells, moving at last, cycling between states. He could not resist pointing out neatly everything they passed: a jack-knifed truck, a sagging billboard barn, a tractor bucking like a lifeboat in the ruts of a field.

      Sandy hardly said anything. Her entire countenance was pale and several times they had to stop so she could go to the bathroom. At meals she ordered dry cereal or nothing.

      Three days out, he summoned the nerve to ask: “Did you leave him a note?” They were in Minnesota, or maybe Illinois. A roadkilled doe, dragged to the shoulder, flashed past in the headlights—a gory snapshot—and was gone.

      He waited. Maybe she was asleep.

      “I told him,” she eventually said. “I said I was pregnant, that it wasn’t his child, and that I was leaving. He thought I was joking. He said, ‘Are you feeling okay, Sandy?’”

      Winkler kept his hands on the wheel. The center stripe whisked beneath them; the headlights pushed their cone of light forward.

      Eventually: northeast Ohio, a grid of brick and steel nestled against Lake Erie. Smelter fires burned on mill stacks. Huge Slavic-looking policemen stalked the sidewalks in crisp uniforms. A wind hurled particles of sleet through the streets.

      They stayed in an eastside motel, looked at real estate: University Heights, Orange, Solon. Sandy tiptoed through rooms, trailed her fingers over countertops, interested in nothing. In a ravine they found a subdivision called Shadow Hill, the Chagrin River sliding along at the end of a cul-de-sac, a feeder creek beside the road in a landscaped trench. Above the street on both sides the walls of the ravine rose up like the berms of a ditch.

      The house was built on a form and each of the neighbors’ was identical. Two floors, two bedrooms upstairs, an unfinished basement. A pair of mournful saplings in tubs flanked the front steps. A brass knocker shaped like a goose was bolted to the door.

      “Your own little paradise,” the Realtor said, sweeping an arm to take in the hillsides, the trees, the wide stripe of clouds churning above.

      “Paradise,” Sandy said, her voice far-off. “We’ll take it,” Winkler said.

      His job was straightforward enough: he pored through Weather Service data, studied the station’s radar output, and compiled forecasts. Some days they sent him into gales to stand in front of a camera: he clung to an inverted umbrella shouting from beneath his rain hood; he sat three hours in a spotter’s shack on top of Municipal Stadium predicting game-time weather.

      Sandy stayed indoors. They had hardly any furniture, the dining room empty, nothing in the kitchen but a card table encircled by stools. He bought a TV and they propped it on two milk crates and she’d lie in front of it for hours, watching whatever came on, her forehead wrinkled as if puzzling through it. In the basement her box of welding supplies waited untouched. Every few days she threw up into the kitchen sink.

      At four in the morning she’d wake hungry, and he’d tramp downstairs and feel his way through the kitchen in the dark to get her a bowl of Apple Jacks, measure a half cup of whole milk into it. She’d eat with her head propped against the pillows, her whole body lean and warm. “Tell me no one can find us here, David,” she’d whisper. “Tell me that right now, nobody in the world knows where we are.”

      He watched her chew; he watched her swallow. In nearly every way they were still strangers, trying to learn each other.

      “You sleepwalk,” she told him once, her head off the pillow.

      “I do not.”

      “You do. Last night I found you in the kitchen standing at the window. I said, ‘David, what are you doing?’ but you didn’t say anything. Then you came back in here, put on socks, took them off, and climbed back into bed.”

      But it was Sandy, Winkler thought, who woke and disappeared from the bed several times a night, walking the house or