About Grace by Anthony Doerr
She knelt and pulled shoes from boxes and paper stuffing from the toes of shoes. The seated woman put on a pair of Mary Janes and took a dozen steps in them and sat down. Grace tugged off the shoes and proffered others. Like some servant girl trapped in a fairy tale.
Winkler took off his glasses and wiped them with his shirt and pushed them back on. The song had changed. The air was sour with perfume. From everywhere came the rasp of hangers shifting and clacking against their metal rods.
The customer appeared to decide. Grace boxed two pairs and toted them to the register and stood beside the portly clerk. She slipped the boxes into a bag. The customer paid, smiled, took her shoes, and made for the escalators.
Grace traded words with the other clerk and the other clerk laughed. Then she left the counter and gathered the boxes and shoes the customer had not purchased and returned them behind the counter into the back room.
Winkler forced an inhalation. The dread that had been rising all morning rose higher in his throat as if by capillary action. He was conscious of neither his feet nor the circles of sweat blooming beneath his arms but only the constriction of his collar around his neck and the incontrovertible fact that his daughter was thirty feet away in a white blouse and navy slacks stacking shoes on shelves.
When she reemerged from the back room, he was still there. She came straight for him. He cowered against a table littered with women’s clogs. Her smile was genuine-looking and later he would mull her question over and over in his head until it mushroomed into something larger: “Can I help you?”
He said: “You’re Grace. Grace Winkler.”
She cocked her head slightly. Her smile hardly wavered. “Grace Ennis.”
“Right,” he said. “Grace Ennis.” But the shoe department had slowly suffused with a clarity that set sparks turning along the fringes of his vision, and the thousands of shoes on their racks appeared ready to catch fire and burn. Her face became a revolution of activity, leaves fluttering around the anchors of her eyes. She was already looking at him differently. Her pupils contracted. Her irises were gray. The whites shot through with tiny red veins.
“Sir?”
He drew a breath. Her voice, her smile—all of it was ghosted with Sandy, haunted and distant and irrefutable. Above him the ceiling tiles seemed to peel away one by one and reveal a sky where stars whirled on and on out toward the arms of the galaxy. “My name is David Winkler,” his voice said. “I was married to your mother. Years ago.”
She blinked and took a half step back and cocked her head again and looked at him. As if she had been punched but hadn’t yet processed the blow. He leaned in. He tried to steady his vision. No tricks now. No predeterminations. Just an old man and a daughter he had never met.
She shook her head. His voice came out of his throat of its own volition—”…this isn’t…imagine what you must be thinking…Herman told me…if only we could…”—a torrent of language, a spring off the near-infinite stream of confessions he had harbored half his life, all of hers.
She faded back against the sandal display, continuing to shake her head. “You are not,” she said. Her name tag caught a light and flared and went blank. This ruined father standing before her with his caved-in eyes and big glasses. What memories could she have of him, what knowledge, what expectations after so many failed ones? He had visited her only in dreams and had long since stopped even that but now stood before her in the plain light of the women’s shoe section imploring her. She rubbed her eyes until they were spotty.
He said something about time, about how once they had a little more time it might be easier, how she could take all the time she needed. But all around them the physics of time were coming apart, betraying them both. What was a minute? A lifetime? She said, “I hardly even know what you’re saying.” Then, very quickly, so quickly he could see it, the anger built in her.
“…we were in Ohio…you were born…a river…we watched the snow…”
She brought the side of her hand through the air. He stopped. She said, “You aren’t my father.” He was her father. His nose, his stature, even the hue of his skin—everything testified to it.
Her upper lip trembled. She glanced into cosmetics, then over at the portly clerk who was examining the back side of a calculator. “The Chevron,” Grace said. “The Chevron at Forty-sixth and Lake Otis.”
“I—”
“I’ll meet you there at four o’clock.” He blinked. “Four o’clock.”
“Go,” she said.
For a half hour he stood at the fifth-floor railing looking down at the ice rink in the mall basement, a class of little girls practicing toe loops, leaving the front of the line, one after the other, skating past the coach for their jump, landing or falling or backing off altogether, then swirling around the perimeter to the back of the line.
At the Dimond Transit Center a woman with a half dozen shopping bags helped him sort through the tiny print of a timetable. Number 6 intersected Forty-sixth and Lake Otis but to catch it he’d have to wait seventy-two minutes and he worried it might bring him there late so they decided he should take a taxi or walk. He walked. Three and a half miles, along the cindered shoulder of the Old Seward Highway. Vehicles whipped past and it was all he could do to keep his feet tailored to the gravel. Wind tore the sky into shreds. He kept his gaze down.
The Chevron was busy, painters and utility men and deliverers passing in and out of the convenience store, tossing cigarettes at his feet, not much more real to him than the tremulous shadows of gasoline fumes boiling out of the mouths of fuel tanks, and he sat outside on a half pallet of Duraflame logs and watched the vehicles come and go. He took off his right shoe and examined the blister on his heel and laced it up again. Gulls picked through the Dumpsters. For the next hour and a half he would watch traffic along Forty-sixth and wonder which car would be hers.
At four-fifty a Chevrolet Cavalier with a bicycle rack clamped to the roof pulled beside the pumps and Grace got out and put her hands on her hips. He made his way over.
“It’s you, isn’t it? Who’s been leaving all those things at my house?”
He nodded. She pressed her fingers into her forehead and breathed. Her mascara was streaked. She still had her name tag on. “My God,” she said.
Winkler stammered. “We just need…I only wanted…”
“All day long I’m thinking: He’s a liar, he’s a liar, but I can see myself right there, in your face and in your hands, and still I’m thinking: What does he want? What can he want from me?”
He held up his palms and saw they were shaking and tried holding them against his chest. “Nothing. Only to—”
“You were gone. You were gone my whole life. My whole fucking life and now you’re back and what? You think we can pretend everything is great, Mom isn’t dead, you didn’t leave her?”
“No,” Winkler said. “No.” He reached for her but a crimping in her face made him pull back. “I only want to get to know you a little. To make it up to you, if that’s possible. I’m here now and I know it’s late but I—”
“Mom said you went crazy.”
Winkler lowered his chin. Cars slugged forward and stopped out on Forty-sixth. Trucks rattled along the highway a mile to the west and the overpass appeared to quake beneath them.
“What is this?” Grace asked the gas pumps, the traffic beyond. “A fucking soap opera?”
“I don’t want anything from you. I only want to help.”
“I don’t need help. I’m doing fine.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“My father.”
Winkler trembled beside the pumps. Someone dropped a quarter into the station’s air compressor and it roared to life, ratcheting and chinking.
Grace climbed back into her car. “I ate part of those cakes,” she said, and shook her head at the steering wheel. He could hardly hear her. “I ate them.”
Winkler stooped. He placed his hands on the frame of the car door. “The boy,” he said. “Co
Her head came around. “Do not bring him into this. You do not bring him into this.”
“Yes. Okay. I only thought—”
“Thought what? That I could use the help? A mom on her own? Yeah. Well.” She turned the ignition. “It runs in the family.”
The compressor howled. There was a feeling in Winkler’s chest like a small rockslide had started. A truck had pulled behind Grace’s Cavalier and began to honk. She shook her head back and forth. In the bottoms of her eyes tears welled. “Don’t come by the store again.”
She idled forward with his hands still on the window frame and he stayed with her a couple steps. Then she pressed the accelerator and turned the wheel and he pulled his hands away. The compressor pounded. The big blue rain shelter groaned in the wind. He watched Grace turn right onto Lake Otis, the sight of her leaving like the stacks of a steamship disappearing behind the horizon.
Toward midnight he sat in the Raney Playground swings with his broken, disloyal heart continuing to pump behind his ribs. Maybe fifty feet away his daughter was in her bed, reeling, thinking it out, a thousand betrayals and loves and resentments riding the synapses between brain and heart and back again. Winkler sat on the bench and listened to the occasional traffic. The neighborhood was quiet and impartial; the sunlight nearly gone.
Was Christopher curling against his sheets, winding along a spiral of dream? Would his mother look out at the swings in the morning and sense, somehow, that her father had been there? Would there be a faint imprint of him against the rubber, his palms on the chains, footprints in the gravel, a shadow, a ghost of him?
After so many years of keeping it at bay, finally he was forced to contemplate it: the hours and days of her life. She must have waited; she must always have been waiting. Grace at ballet, scanning parents along the walls; Grace after a camp recital, clipping shut the case of her flute, or violin, or saxophone, wondering if he had been there, among the faces. Her hope carried off bit by bit, as if in the mandibles of an invisible, endless line of ants.
Her father would have left for a very important reason; her father was significant and dashing; if a villain, as her mother claimed, then a misunderstood one. He would return for her in the darkest hours, as she lay awake in her bed, eight years old, nine years old. She’d hear the rich purr of his car in the driveway. She’d hear the soles of his polished, expensive shoes come lightly down the hall.
He’d slip into her room in his dark suit, set his hat on the dresser, sit on the edge of her bed. No lights. Better if we don’t wake your mother. On the porch he’d have left an enormous package, wrapped in silver paper, too big to fit through the doorway. Inside something so good, so perfect, she hadn’t even known it was the one thing she’d always wanted.
He’d offer a stick of gum from a shiny silver case. He’d smell like a barbershop, or very, very good whiskey, or the flax of his linen suit; he’d smell like the limestone of some ancient and important city. Tell me what I’ve missed, Gracie, he’d say, and push the hair back from her face. Tell me everything.
The straining of dreams against the fabric of reality. Growing up meant burying possibilities, one after another. In the LensCrafters display window, stringing up gigantic pairs of cardboard eyeglasses, Gary whispered his riddles: “Hey Dave, what’s the difference between a blonde and a pair of sunglasses?”
“I don’t know, Gary.”
“The sunglasses sit higher on your face.”
The 2 bus heaved through its stops, up Lake Otis Parkway, past Tudor. This was June 12, in Anchorage, Alaska. Winkler was sixty years old. He wore oversized glasses; he had liver spots on the backs of his hands. He had been a gardener at a two-star inn for twenty-five years and now he worked at a LensCrafters in the Fifth Avenue Mall, making $7.65 an hour.
6
The hours crawled, each its own prison. When Naaliyah’s apartment started feeling too small he stumped down to the basement and sat across from the big coin-operated dryers and watched the clothes of other residents spin. The strip mall was halfway finished. Naaliyah spent an hour each night talking to her father on the telephone: he had fibroids in his liver; he was to stop drinking alcohol altogether, probably for the rest of his life. But: He was going home in a few days; he was beating Nanton at gin rummy every night in the hospital. He was planning his trip back to Chile.
Halfway through the morning of June 19, Winkler rode the bus to Herman’s and walked the two miles up Huffman to Lilac and knocked on the door unannounced.
Herman considered him a moment, then smiled. “David,” he said. He wore a chamois shirt buttoned all the way to the collar. He kept his body between the door and frame.
“Herman. What do you think of me watching Christopher? You might be able to get some things done. You could catch up on work.”
Herman glanced over his shoulder, into the house. “What does Grace think?”
Winkler tried to give him a look that would explain it, that would make everything clear. Somewhere behind Herman was the boy.
“But you saw her. You went to see her?”
Winkler said nothing. “Oh,” Herman said. He rested against the half-open door and whistled. “That Grace is one tough cookie, isn’t she?”
“We could tell him I’m a friend. Or a neighbor. A person, someone named David, an associate who helps you out.”
“And not tell the truth?”
Winkler shrugged.
“I don’t know,” Herman said.
Winkler wiped his eyes. “Please. I’d be good with him.”
“You probably would be. But…” Again he looked back into the house and shook his head. “I just don’t know.”
Two days later the phone rang at Naaliyah’s apartment and it was Herman. “Hey, David. Are you working today?”
“No.”
“Do you still want to help with Christopher?”
The bus. The long climb up Huffman. The knock on the door. Herman waved him inside. The boy knelt on the rug and Herman called him over. He approached with his head down. He was five and a half years old. His blond hair was clipped short and his ears stood out as if propped there by small dowels and he looked to Winkler more like Herman than either Sandy or Grace or even himself.
Herman introduced Winkler as David. Christopher executed a solemn handshake, then pivoted on his toe and returned to a cardboard box brimming with segments of orange plastic racetrack. The two men stood in the main room. Herman offered coffee. Winkler tried to hold the cup but had to set it on the hall table.
The boy pieced together sections of track and fixed them in place with little purple tabs. He paused to puzzle through a ramp, tugging a cushion off the couch to serve as a hill. On the table beside him were the remnants of lunch: peanut butter toast, half a glass of orange Kool-Aid.
“He’s real good about playing alone. It’s only later that he gets tougher. Around naptime.”
Winkler attempted a nod.
“She’ll be back at five. To pick him up.” It was not quite noon.
Winkler was not sure how much longer he’d be able to stand. Christopher’s toes were folded beneath him as he knelt by the track and he had not yet turned once to see if he was being watched by the stranger. “Okay,” Herman said. “I’ll be upstairs. Yesterday I got called in on this re-fi project and I’ll be up all night if I don’t get to it. You need anything, give a shout.” He glanced at Winkler, then went upstairs. The boy did not look up.
Soon enough Christopher’s track was built. He had an armada of toy cars in a battered zip-locked bag and took them out one by one and placed them on the coffee table and arrayed them in rows.
Winkler cleared his throat, stepped forward. “Those are all your cars?”
The boy shrugged, as if to say: Whose cars do you think they are? He picked up each one and tried its axles on the coffee table and replaced it in its specific location. Eventually he settled on a green coupe, and opened and closed both its doors and set it on the track and pushed it a
He glanced toward the stairs, collected the car, and started it on another lap.
Winkler breathed. He took a few more steps into the room and sat cross-legged with his back against the base of the television. Christopher guided the coupe around the track a few more times. With each pass he released the car at the top of the little hill and let it coast down where it came to a rest just before the turn.
Finally the boy set the car back in its row on the coffee table and sat back on his ankles. The family room was quiet except for the whirring of the ceiling fan overhead and Herman’s muted voice speaking into the telephone upstairs.
“What’s he doing?” Christopher asked.
“Working. We’ll have to let him work for a bit. He’ll be back down.” The boy picked at his shoes. Winkler’s gaze settled on the Kool-Aid on the table. “You want to see something?”
The boy raised his eyes to meet Winkler’s and tilted his head. It was a gesture almost exactly like something Sandy would have done, diffident and beautiful, blood undercutting the decades, and Winkler had to fight the urge to take the boy up by his ribs and hug him to his chest.
Instead he went into the kitchen and fumbled through the cupboards for a plastic bowl. This he filled with crushed ice from the refrigerator dispenser, and mixed the ice with several palmfuls of salt. The boy had followed him in and watched with a guarded curiosity.