About Grace. Anthony Doerr

post office prayed over a halved avocado, her crucifix swinging through the light. He dreamed freezing lakes and Grace’s little body trapped beneath ice and the heart of an animal hot and pumping in his fist. Finally he dreamed of blackness, a deep and suffocating absence of light, and pressure like deep water on his temples. He woke with sand on his lips and tongue. The sun was nearly over the shoulder of the island—the sky seemed identical to the previous morning’s. The same cane mill stood brilliant and white in the glare.

      Another day. Beside him a tiny snail worked its way around the rim of an empty rum jar. His dream—the asphyxiating blackness—was slow in dwindling. Dark spots skidded across his field of vision. He rose and picked his way through the grove behind the beach.

      In an alley behind a series of hovels he pulled lemons from a burl-ridden tree and ate them like apples. An old woman tottered out, shouting, shaking a mop at him. He went on.

      In the days to come he telephoned the house on Shadow Hill Lane a dozen times—each time the call went unanswered; each time he begged the operator to wait a few more rings. He wondered again if the freighter had carried him to a new location in time, a future or past that did not coincide with Ohio’s. Here it was a day like any other: a hot, dazzling sky, blackbirds screeching at him from the trees, boats sliding lazily in and out of harbor. There what day was it? Maybe it was years later—maybe, somehow, it was still March, maybe he was still asleep in his bed, upstairs, beside Sandy, Grace sleeping her steadfast sleep down the hall, the first raindrops fattening in the clouds.

      But it was April 1977. Back home the yard was coming to life, the flood receding into memory. Were they burying Grace? Maybe the funeral had already happened and now there were only memorial-fund canisters beside checkout registers, a grave, and leftover vigil programs neighbors had kept on their kitchen counters too long and now were guiltily folding into the trash. Grace Pauline Winkler: 1976–1977. We hardly knew you.

      The American Express office could not reach his wife, they said, to see if she would wire money. A tall, purple-skinned man at the bank said he could not access Winkler’s checking or savings without a current passport. “Technically, sir,” he stage-whispered, winking, “I make a call and you get locked up at Immigration.”

      He pawned his belt; he pawned the laces from his shoes. He ate stale croissants salvaged from bakery seconds, a dozen discarded oranges with white flesh. When he couldn’t bear his thirst he took sips from the second jar of rum: sweet, thick, painful.

      In a moment of courage he asked the post office woman to dial Kay Bergesen, Channel 3’s “News at Noon” producer. Kay accepted the charges. “David? Are you there?”

      “Kay, have you heard anything?”

      “Hello? I can’t hear you, David.”

      “Kay?”

      “You sound like you’re in Africa or something. Look, you have to get in here. Cadwell is pissed. I think he might have fired you already—”

      “Have you heard from Sandy?”

      “—you just disappeared. We didn’t hear squat, what were we supposed to think? You have to call Cadwell right now, David—”

      “Sandy,” Winkler said, wilting against the post office wall. “And Grace?”

      Kay was shouting: “—I’m losing you, David. Call Cadwell! I can’t fend—”

      Twenty-one days since leaving Ohio. Twenty-two days. He tried the neighbor, Tim Stevenson, but no one answered; he tried Kay again but the connection broke before it could be completed. The post office woman shrugged.

      In the afternoons, storms came over the island and he sheltered on the fringe of his small beach under the low-slung palms. Every few hours more blood seemed to drain from his head, as if his heart was no longer up to the task of circulation, as if this place held him in the grips of a more powerful form of gravity. At night tiny jellyfish washed ashore and lay flexing in the sand like strange, translucent lungs. Sand fleas explored his legs. He took to sleeping in long stints and when he woke his same dream of blackness faded slowly as though reluctant to leave. Somewhere out past the reef lightning seethed and spat and he turned over and slept on.

       3

      He had been in St. Vincent six days when he went to the post office and passed his wristwatch to the woman behind the counter.

      “I need to make another call.”

      “You won’t reverse the charges?”

      “Not this number.”

      “Will these people be home?” She started to laugh.

      “Goddamn it.”

      Her smile wilted. She raised a hand to her crucifix. “Permiso,” she said. “I am sorry. I should not make fun.” She held the watch at arm’s length and studied it in a pantomime of interest. She raised the buckle up and down; she squinted at the second hand, which stood motionless over the nine. “What do I do with this?”

      “Tell the time. Sell it. They wouldn’t take it at the market.”

      She glanced behind her at the thin man who managed the place but he was paging through a newspaper and paying no attention.

      “Is it broken?”

      “It works. It got a bit waterlogged. It just needs to dry out.”

      “I don’t want it.”

      “Please.”

      She looked over her shoulder again. “Two minutes.”

      He told her the number for Herman Sheeler’s house in Anchorage and she dialed and handed over the receiver. After the first ring he thought he might pass the phone back and tell the woman no one was home but then he heard the handset being lifted on the other side and it was Sandy.

      There was a satellite delay in the line. Her two syllables—”Hello?”—repeated, tinny and distant, as if she had spoken through a culvert pipe. Somewhere inside the connection an electronic beep reverberated. His throat caught and for a long moment he thought he might not be able to speak. April in Anchorage, he thought. Wind against the garage door, slush sliding off the roof The trout print in the paneled hallway.

      “Hello?” she said again.

      He supported his head against the wall. “It’s David.”

      Silence. He had the sense she had covered the mouthpiece with her palm.

      “Sandy? Are you there?”

      “Yes.”

      He said, “You’re okay.”

      “I’m okay?”

      “You’re all right, I mean. Alive. I’m glad.”

      The line fizzed; the beep sounded. “Alive?”

      “I keep trying the house.”

      “I’m not there.”

      “How long have you been gone? Are you back with him?”

      She did not reply.

      “Sandy? Is Grace there? Is Grace okay?”

      “You left. You just got up and left.”

      “Is Grace with you? Is she all right?”

      There was the sound of the receiver clattering onto a counter or maybe the floor. A second later Herman’s voice was in his ear. “Don’t call here again. Get some help. You need help. Do you understand?” Then a click, and the static fell off.

      He stood a moment. The wall was warm and damp against his forehead. The air smelled like wet paint. He had a sudden image of Sandy in the doorway of that house, toboggan-riding polar bears printed on her pajamas, her bare