About Grace. Anthony Doerr

said.

      Dad will soak his new pipe in the sink; Mom will come home with a patient’s blood smeared across her uniform; the grocer will hand down two pretzel sticks from the jar on top of his counter and wink. A man, strolling through a park, will try to catch leaves.

      Who would believe it? Who would want to think time was anything but unremitting progression, the infinite and indissoluble continuum, a first grader’s time line, one thing leading to the next to the next to the next? Winkler was afraid, yes, always afraid, terminally afraid, but it was also something in Sandy herself, an unwillingness to allow anything more to upset the realm of her understanding. Her life in Cleveland was tenuous enough. He never brought it up to her again except to ask: “You ever get déjà vu? Like something that happens has happened before, in your memory or in a dream?” “Not really,” she had said, and looked over his shoulder, toward the television.

      But he’d dreamed her. He’d dreamed her sitting on top of him with her eyes closed and her hands thrown back and tears on her cheeks. He’d dreamed the revolving rack of magazines, the dusty light of the Snow Goose Market, the barely visible vibrations of her trillion cells. And hadn’t she dreamed him, too? Hadn’t she said as much?

      It was a thorn, a fissure, a howitzer in the living room, something they taught themselves not to see, something it was easier to pretend did not exist. They did not speak on the drive home. Sandy hurried downstairs and soon afterward he could hear her torch fire up, the high, flickering hiss, and the smell of acetylene rose through the registers. From the kitchen window he watched leaves curl into fists and drop, the landscape revealing itself, deeper and deeper into the woods, all the way back to the river. He checked the barometer he’d nailed to the family room wall: the pressure was rising.

       12

      The daughter came on November 4, 1976. She was beautiful, slick, and dark red: tiny lips, tiny toes, splotches of orange on her cheeks, delicate crinkles in her palms as if her hands were bags her metacarpals had yet to grow into. A flower of black hair on her scalp. Tiny exit bruises dotted her forehead.

      They named her Grace. Grace Creek, Alaska, was a place Sandy had been only once, for a few hours with her father, on pipeline business. “The farthest north I’ve ever been,” she told Winkler, and when she described it—the dome of the sky all white, and the ground white, too, so that you felt you were standing in a place devoid of all perspective, like standing in a dream—it made him think of the view of the Alaska Range from the roof of the apartment where he’d grown up, that white folded into white, so brilliant you’d get a headache if you looked too long. “Grace,” he’d said. “Okay.”

      He could not look at his daughter without feeling his heart turn over. The redness of her lips, the extravagant detail of her eyelashes. The fields of blood vessels on her scalp. The smell of her neck. They would be equals, friends, confidants. After dinner some evening they would lean over their plates and she’d tell him jokes. They’d talk through her loves and fears. Her dreams.

      And Sandy in the hospital bed: flushed, deflated, four drops of blood on the sheet by her hip. She held the child, whispered to her; he fell in love over and over again.

      In the following weeks Sandy seemed more comfortable, her body regaining its shape, her eyes quicker and more alive. She spent only an hour at a time in the basement; she found time to make meals and wash diapers. A first snow fell and she stood holding the infant at the window watching snow sift lightly through the illuminated cones of streetlights. Joining them, he felt his heart lift with the thought of it: family.

      The neighbors brought rattles and packets of formula and nippled bottles. It pleased him when they said that Grace was Daddy’s girl, that she was pretty, that she had his eyes. He felt like holding her up to the sky and shouting, “Here is something perfect! Here is a miracle!” Sucking on her bottle, her legs and toes flexing against his chest, she raised a tiny, perfect hand to his chin: pink around the fingernails, an impossible intricacy to each knuckle.

      Sandy would bring her into the basement and set her in a bassinet and work on her huge metal tree, and the baby would be silent, eyelids slowly falling, amid flaring blue light, the sounds of metal cracking and spitting.

      Winkler, sleepless, sat in a Channel 3 staff meeting and scribbled on the agenda: I can watch my daughter for an hour.

      He began sleepwalking again. Perhaps he had never stopped. He woke to find his feet in wet socks, mud tracked over the carpet. His coat was not hanging where he’d left it; a dresser drawer was upended, his T-shirts scattered over the floor. In nightmares he was encased in ice; he balanced precariously on the lip of Chagrin Falls, river water hurtling past his knees. After midnight he’d wake choking beneath the comforter and hear Grace crying; he’d go to her, lift her from her crib, take her downstairs, and wander with her among the dark shapes of furniture, the striped shadows of the blinds, the submarine comfort of unlit rooms.

      Weeks passed. His dreams went, again and again, to Grace. He dreamed her fist would close around his thumb; he dreamed she would balance herself against the edge of the coffee table and take her first, tottering steps. There was no way for him to know if these were merely dreams—the firing of three billion neurons, the neural pyrotechnics of REM sleep—or if they were more than dreams, apparitions of what would be.

      He brought his mother’s old copy of Bentley’s Snow Crystals to his cubicle at Channel 3 and sat with it in his lap. Ten thousand snow crystals, white on black. Ten thousand variations of a single, inexorable pattern: hexagonal planes, each extension at sixty degrees. Out the weather room window the wind beat Lake Erie into whitecaps.

      The irises of Grace’s eyes abandoned their near-black for a thoughtful gray. A more developed face began to emerge from behind her baby fat; Sandy’s cheeks, Sandy’s pale, thin nostrils. But she had Winkler’s eyes; the shape of them distinctly familiar, like almonds turned down at the corners, absurdly large in her small, round head.

      Christmas, New Year’s, the snows of January and February, and then it was March. Sandy’s Paradise Tree in the basement was growing, the highest branches appearing on it, capped with gilded angels clipped from the tops of trophies; a copper sun soldered to the top, each ray ribboned and sharp. He could hear her working late into the night, hammering and soldering, talking to their daughter.

      The earth froze; the sky hovered blue and flawless above the city. Banners of vapor fluttered above storm drains and vents on the roofs of buildings; the Chagrin waterfall hung frozen from its ledge, bulbous and brown, shellacked with icicles.

      He had the dream: rain on the roof, water three feet deep in the street. The downstairs was flooded; Grace cried from the plant stand. He collected her, carried her outside, and they were caught in the flood. He held her to his chest; he went under; someone called for him to let go, let go, let go.

       13

      After midnight he hovered over Grace in the orange glow of her nightlight and watched her blanket rise and fall. Lately she slept a subterranean, vacant sleep, as if some invisible huntsman came to put her consciousness in a sack and hold it until morning.

      Five months old now, she could hold her head at midline and focus her eyes on him. And she smiled—a raw, toothless smile, a hockey player’s grin—any time he raised her to the ceiling or swung her through his legs.

      Three days had passed since he first dreamed her death and each subsequent night the exact same dream had returned. He stood at her window and gazed down at the Newport in the driveway. He could take her. It wouldn’t matter where. They could find a hotel, wait it out. Up and down Shadow Hill Lane the faces of the neighbors’ houses were dark and blank.

      After a few minutes he went instead to the backyard, where the remnants of summer’s tomato plants lay gray and withered in the mud. The evening