About Grace. Anthony Doerr

to do big, spectacular rescues or anything, just small things, maybe test blood for diseases or viruses or something, but do it really well, be the one doctor all the parents would trust. ‘Little Alice’s blood must go to Dr. Sandy,’ they’d say.” She giggled; she made circles with a strand of hair. In the theater Winkler had to sit on his hands to keep them from touching her. “Or no,” she’d say, “no, I want to be a bush pilot. I could get one of those passbook accounts of Herman’s and finally save enough to buy a used plane, a good two-seater. I’d get lessons. I’d look into the engine and know every part, the valves and switches and whatever, and be able to say, ‘This plane has flown a lot but she sure is a good one.’”

      Her eyelids fluttered, then steadied. Across town her husband was crouched in the net, watching a puck slide across the blue line.

      “Or,” she said, “a sculptor. That’s it. I could be a metal sculptor. I could make those big, strange-looking iron things they put in front of office buildings to rust. The ones the birds stand on and everybody looks at and says, ‘What do you think that’s supposed to be?’”

      “You could,” he said.

      “I could.”

      Every night now—it was January and dark by 4 P.M.—he pulled on his big parka and drew the hood tight and drove past her house. He’d start at the end of the block, then troll back up, the hedges coming up on his left, the curb-parked cars with their hoods ajar to allow extension cords into the frost plugs, the Newport slowing until he’d come to a stop alongside their driveway.

      By nine-thirty each night, her lights began to go off: first in the windows at the far right, then the room next to it, then the lamp behind the curtains to the left, at ten o’clock sharp. He’d imagine her passage through the dark rooms, following her with his eyes, down the hall, past the bathroom, into what must have been the bedroom, where she’d climb into bed with him. At last only the tall backyard light would glow, white tinged with blue, all the parked cars drawing energy from the houses around them, the plugs clicking on and off, and above the neighborhood the air would grow so cold it seemed to glitter and flex—as if it were solidifying—and he’d get the feeling that someone could reach down and shatter the whole scene.

      Only with great effort could he get his foot to move to the accelerator. He’d drive to the end of the block, turn up the heater, roll alone through the frozen darkness across town.

      “It’s not that he’s awful or anything,” Sandy whispered once, in the middle of Logan’s Run. “I mean, he’s nice. He’s good. He loves me. I can do pretty much whatever I want. It’s just sometimes I look into the kitchen cupboards, or at his suits in the closet, and think: This is it?”

      Winkler blinked. It was the most she’d said during a movie.

      “I feel like I’ve been turned inside out is all. Like I’ve got huge manacles on my arms. Look”—she grabbed her forearm and raised it—”I can hardly lift them they’re so heavy. But other times I get to feeling so light it’s as if I’ll float to the ceiling and get trapped up there like a balloon.”

      The darkness of the movie theater was all around them. On-screen a robot showed off some people frozen in ice. In the ceiling the little bulbs that were supposed to be stars burned in their little niches.

      Sandy whispered: “I get happy sometimes for the younger gals at work, when they find love, after all that stumbling around, when they’ve found their guy and get to talking about weddings during break, then babies, and I can see them outside smoking and staring out at the traffic, and I know they’re probably not a hundred percent happy. Not all-the-way happy. Maybe seventy percent happy. But they’re living it. They’re not giving up.

      “I’ve just been feeling everything too much. I don’t know. Can you feel things too much, David?”

      “Yes.”

      “I shouldn’t tell you any of this. I shouldn’t tell you anything.”

      The film had entered a chase sequence and the varying colors of a burning city strobed across Sandy’s eyeglasses. She closed her eyes.

      “Thing is,” she whispered, “Herman doesn’t have any sperm. We got him tested a few years ago. He has none. Or basically none; no good ones. When they called, they gave the results to me. I never told him. I told him they said he was fine. I tore up their letter and brought the little scraps to work and hid them at the bottom of a trash can in the ladies’ bathroom.”

      On-screen Logan careened down a crowded street. Suits in the closet, Winkler thought. The guy with the birthmark?

      In his memory he could traverse months in a second. He imagined Herman crouched like a crab on the ice, guarding the net, slapping his glove against his big leg pads, his teammates swirling around the rink. He imagined Sandy leaning over him, the tips of her hair dragging over his face. He stood outside their house on Marilyn Street and above the city, streamers of auroras—reds and purples and greens—glided like souls into the firmament.

      Now a soft hail—lump graupels—flew from the clouds. He opened all his windows, turned off the furnace, and let it blow in, angling through the frames, the tiny balls rolling and eddying on the carpet.

      Near the middle of March she lay beside him in the darkness with a single candle burning on his sill. Out beyond the window a trash collector tossed the frozen contents of a trash can into the maw of his truck and Winkler and Sandy listened to it clatter and compress and the fading rumble as the truck receded down the street. It was around five and all through the city, people were ending their workdays, mail carriers delivering their last envelopes, accountants paying one more invoice, bankers sealing their vaults. Tumblers finding their grooves.

      “You ever just want to go?” she whispered. “Go, go, go?”

      Winkler nodded. Without her glasses, that close to his face, her eyes looked trapped, closer to how they had looked in the supermarket, standing at a revolving rack of magazines but trembling inside; her whole body, its trillions of cells, quivering invisibly, threatening to shake apart. He had dreamed her. Hadn’t she dreamed him, too?

      “I should tell you something,” he said. “About that day we met in the market.”

      She rolled onto her back. In five minutes, maybe six, she would leave, and he told himself he would pay attention to every passing second, the pulse in her forearm, the pressure of her knee against his thigh. The thousand pores in the side of her nose. In the frail light he could see her boots on the frayed rug, her clothes folded neatly beside.

      He would tell her. Now he would tell her. I dreamed you, he’d say. Sometimes I have these dreams.

      “I’m pregnant,” she said.

      The flame of the candle on the sill twisted and righted.

      “David? Did you hear me?”

      She was looking at him now.

      “Pregnant,” he said, but at first it was only a word.

       7

      He parked the Newport in a drive-up lane and tugged a deposit slip from the slot.

       Can you get away?

      No.

       Only for an hour?

      He could just make her out through the drive-up window, wearing a big-collared sweater, her head down, her hand writing. The pneumatic tube clattered and howled.

       This is not the time, David. Please. Wednesday.

      Between them was fifteen or so feet of frozen space, bounded by his window and hers, but it was as if the windows had liquefied, or else the air had, and his vision skewed and rippled and it was all he could do to put the Newport into gear and ease