About Grace

Winkler was not popular at school. Parties blazed in A-frames set back in the spruce, and couples strolled arm in arm along the boggy paths, and leaves fell, and snow, and rain, and he went on in a state of more or less permanent solitude. He carted around stacks of books; he examined drops of Lake Spenard under a microscope. Water was a sanctuary—not only hot showers or condensation on his window or the sight of Knik Arm on a fall day, but reading about it, collecting it in an eyedropper, freezing it, sublimating it. Two hydrogen atoms bonded to one oxygen—always—at a 104.5 degree angle. The distances between atoms was—always—.095718 of a nanometer. Every thirty-one hundred years a volume of water equivalent to all the oceans passed through the atmosphere. These were facts, bounded by inviolable laws: water was elastic and adhesive, it held its temperature longer than air, it was perpetually in motion.

But he sensed, even then, that any real understanding would continue to exist beyond the range of his capacities. The more he studied water, the more he examined snow, the more mystified he became. Ice could be unpredictable and baffling. Unforeseen variables could set the entire hydrological cycle reeling: an unsuspected front, riding an unexpected event (a deep ocean current, a shearing microburst), could transform a clear, blue noon into an afternoon deluge. A predicted blizzard—snowplows rumbling on highway shoulders, workers in roadside salt huts braced over their shovels—did not arrive. Rain threw itself at the windows while the radio burbled out a forecast for sunshine. Scientists had engineered elaborate models, radar, radio beacons—now satellites coasted above the atmosphere, peering in—and still it was nearly impossible to gauge the size and shape of a raindrop. No one knew exactly why an ice crystal bothered with such elaborate geometry; no one knew why liquid water was able to carry so much heat; no calculation was able to account qualitatively for the surface tension on top of a simple puddle.

Water was a wild, capricious substance: nothing solid, nothing permanent, nothing as it appeared.

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When Winkler was nine he dreamed a man he had never seen before would be cut in half by a bus three blocks from where he lived. In the dream he watched—paralyzed—as a hatbox flew from the man’s arms and landed on its corner, dented. The lid fell; a gray fedora spilled out. He woke with his mother’s hands on his shoulders. In front of him the apartment door was ajar and he was sitting on the doormat with his school shoes pulled halfway onto his feet.

“You were screaming,” she whispered. “I was shaking you.” She soaked a washcloth in the bathroom and pressed it to the back of his neck. “I watched you do it. You went to the door and opened it and tried to pull on your shoes. Then you screamed.” Her hands trembled. She led him to his bed and brought him tea thick with honey. “Drink it all. Do you want the lights?”

He shook his head.

She moved past him in the darkness. He heard the faucet rumble and cough and heard her put more water in the kettle, and heard her push the door shut and set the chain. After a while she settled into his father’s chair and he went to her and climbed into her lap. She closed her arms around his shoulders and they sat there until the windows brightened and the sun lit the clouds, then the building across the alley, and at last the rail yard and Ship Creek below.

She kept him home from school, brought him to work, where he stuck labels on files for forty cents an hour. Two days later it was Saturday and they were heading home from Kimball’s with boxes of groceries in their arms when the air became abruptly familiar: a smell like boiled crab drifted from the restaurant beside them; the low winter light struck the bricks of Kennedy Hardware across the street in a way that was unmistakable. He had been here; these moments had played themselves out before.

Ice, glazing the road, sent back wedges and sheets of glare. The whole scene trembled, then fused with radiance. A woman exited a storefront with two little girls in tow; a green and white cab chunked over a pothole; three Aleuts in rubber bibs walking past burst into laughter. Every small, concurrent event had slowed down and assumed an excruciating clarity: through his glasses he could see each blue polka dot on one of the little girls’ wool hats; he watched the shadow of the passing taxi slide black and precise over the ice. His mother turned. “Come along, David.” Her words condensed in the air. Her eyelids blinked once, twice. His shoes felt as if they had been frozen to the sidewalk. A teenager in a green muffler tugged a wooden toboggan past them, whistling. Did no one see? Could the future ambush people so completely?

His eyes roved to the revolving door in Koslosky’s across the street. Each pane flashed as it turned and reflected the light. From up the street came the sound of a bus chugging down the block. He dropped his box of groceries and the potatoes inside rolled about and then settled.

His mother was at his ear. “What is it? What do you see?”

“The man. Leaving the store.”

She squatted on her heels with her own box of groceries in front of her. “Which one? In the brown suit?”

“Yes.”

A man in a brown suit was stepping into the street from the revolving door. In his left arm he carried a hatbox. He had his head up and seemed to be watching a place directly across the road, just to the left of Winkler and his mother.

“What is it? Why are you watching him?”

He said nothing. He heard the tires of the bus hum over the ice.

“What do you see?”

The man stepped from the curb and began to cross the street. He walked carefully so as not to slip. A van passed and left a short-lived cloud of vapor and exhaust in the man’s path but he did not slow. His skin was pale at his throat and his hair looked thick and glossy and lacquered. His lips were almost orange. The sound of the bus came whistling down from the man’s right.

“Oh my God,” his mother said, and added something else in Finnish. Already she was lunging forward, too late, her hands waving in front of her as if she might wipe the whole scene away. The bus entered the boy’s field of vision, bearing down, but the man in the brown suit kept walking forward. How could he not see? The sun flashed a square of light from the toe of his shoe. The hatbox swung forward on his arm. The bus’s horn sounded once; there was the wrenching, metal-on-metal shriek of brakes, the whisper of space being compressed. The bus lurched on its frame and began its skid. All too quickly the man was struck. The hatbox flew, making an arc through the air, catching a star of sun at its apex, then falling to the street, landing on a corner, and denting the box. A fedora spilled out, gray with a black band, and wobbled in the road. The bus slid to a stop—nearly sideways now—thirty feet farther on. His mother had knelt and taken up the dying torso of the man in her arms. The fists at the ends of the man’s arms closed and unclosed automatically. A first thread of blood had appeared beneath one of his nostrils, and finally a lock released somewhere in the boy’s chest and he began to scream.

In the deepest part of that midnight there was no sound but a water pipe ticking somewhere in the walls. His mother stood with him by the big parlor windows. She had changed her clothes but there was still a spot of the man’s blood on her wrist, perfectly round and toothed at the circumference, a tiny brown saw blade. Winkler found himself incapable of taking his eyes from it. In his mind, over and over, the hatbox sailed through the air, caught a star of sunlight, and came down uncaught. The man had been George DelPrete, a salmon merchant from Juneau. For years the boy would keep a clipping of the obituary in his pencil box.

“How did you know?” she asked.

Winkler began to cry and raised his hands to cover the tears.

“No, no,” she said. She reached for him and stroked his hair. His eyeglasses were hard against her side. Her eyes were on the window. The space above the city appeared to stretch. The moon stepped lower. Any moment, it seemed, something could tear the sky and whatever was on the other side would push through.

Once, a year before, her son had told her, as they sat on the rooftop watching the sun settle behind Susitna, that the tumbler of iced tea she held in her hand would slip through her fingers and fall to the street. Not three minutes later, the glass fell, each chip of ice spinning and sending back light before disappearing, the tea falling in a spray, the tumbler exploding on the sidewalk. Her hands shook; she had hurried downstairs to fetch a broom.

Even though it was beyond the range of her understanding, she had the evidence before her, and intuition filled in the gaps. Two weeks after George DelPrete was killed, she sat beside David at the big dining table as he ate graham crackers. She watched him until he was done. Then she took his empty plate to the sink and said, “You dreamed it, didn’t you? That night. When you got up and opened the door with your shoes half on?”

The color rose in his cheeks as if he were choking. She came to him and knelt beside him and pried his hands from the arms of the chair and embraced him. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay.”

From then on she slept out in the main room, on the sofa outside David’s bedroom door. She had always slept lightly, and David’s father did not complain. She slept there for the rest of her life. Even then it was clear David could not talk about it, was too afraid. Only rarely would she bring it up: “Do you have the dreams often?” or “Did you sleep through the night?” Once she said, “I wonder if the things could change. Between the time you dream them and the time they happen,” but by then, after George DelPrete, the dreams had ceased coming, as they often did, retreating somewhere else for years, until another event of sufficient significance neared, and the patterns of circumstance dragged them to the surface again.

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Dust shifting and floating above the bed, ten thousand infinitesimal threads, red and blue, like floating atoms. Brush it off your shelves, sweep it off your baseboards. Sandy dragged sheets of tin across the basement floor. Winkler cleaned the house, fought back disorder in all its forms, the untuned engine, the unraked lawn. All the chaos of the world hovering just outside their backyard fence, creeping through the knotholes; the Chagrin River flashing by back there, behind the trees. Wipe your feet, wash your clothes, pay your bills. Watch the sky; watch the news. Make your forecasts. His life might have continued like this.

In October of 1976, Sandy was in the last, engorged weeks. Winkler coaxed her into walking with him through a park above the river. A generous wind showed itself in the trees. Leaves flew around them: orange, green, yellow, forty shades of red, the sun lighting the networks of veins in each one; they looked like small paper lanterns sailing on the breeze.

Sandy was asking about the anchor of the morning show who always had two cigarettes burning beneath the desk, and why she couldn’t see any smoke on TV. She walked with her hands propped beneath her distended abdomen. Winkler gazed up periodically at the twin rows of clouds, altocumulus undulatus, sliding slowly east. As they crested a hill, although this was a place he had never been, he began to recognize things in quick succession: the enameled mesh of a steel trash can, broken polygons of light drifting across the trunks, a man in a blue windbreaker climbing the path ahead of them. There was a smell like burning paper in the wind and the shadow of a bird shifted and wheeled a few yards in front of them, as—he realized—he knew it would.

“Sandy,” he said. He grabbed her hand. “That man. Watch that man.” He pointed toward the man in the wind breaker. The man walked with a bounce in his step. All around him leaves spiraled to earth.

“He wants to catch leaves. He’ll try to catch leaves.”

A moment later the man turned and jumped to seize a leaf, which sailed past his outstretched hand. Another fell, and another, and soon the man was grasping around him and stepping from the path with his hands out in front of him. He lunged for one and caught it and held it a moment in front of his eyes, a bright yellow maple leaf, big as a hand. He raised it as if hoisting a trophy for cheering onlookers, then turned and started up the hill again.

Sandy stood motionless and quiet. The wind threw her hair back and forth across her face. Her cheeks flushed.

“Who is he?”

“I don’t know. I saw him in a dream. Two nights ago, I think.”

“You saw him in a dream?” She turned to look at him and the skin across her throat tightened—she looked suddenly, he thought, like Herman, standing in the doorway to his house, looking him over.

“I didn’t even remember it until just now, when I saw him again.”

“What do you mean? Why do you say you saw him again?”

He blinked behind his eyeglasses. He took a breath. “Sometimes I dream things and then, later, they happen in real life. Like with you, in the grocery store.”

“Huh,” she said.

“I tried to tell you. Before.”

She shook her head. He exhaled. He thought he might say more, but something in her face had closed off, and the opportunity passed.

She went on, walking ahead of him now. Again she laced her hands at her belt, but this time it struck him as a protective gesture, a mother hemming in her cub. He reached for her elbow. “Take me home, please,” she 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?