About Grace. Anthony Doerr

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      A quarter of a century before, the Agnita traversed the rough gray of the Atlantic, moving in the opposite direction. Six hours out, the sun pushed over the edge of the sea. He climbed to the deck and watched the last gulls sail over the cargo booms.

      The steely green of the Blake Ridge, the floating weed of the Gulf Stream. Never had he seen so much sky, so much water. Near the Bahamas a gale drove ranges of hissing swells against the hull and he clung to the life rail, yellow-faced, sick, the ship rolling beneath him. Scraps of memories surfaced: Sandy stepping into the cold from First Federal, drawing the ruff of her big hood around her face; the way Grace had begun to look up when he entered a room; Herman Sheeler bent over his desk, penciling an appointment onto his calendar: Hockey, Wednesday, 4 P.M.

      Sandy, he assumed, would by now be careening toward ultimatum. He imagined her first night back in the house, propping cushions to dry on the porch, draping curtains over the backyard fence. How much sediment and sludge would have to be pumped out of her basement workshop?

      She’d phone the police and Channel 3; she’d make a list of necessary repairs; she’d stand in the doorway looking out at the space in front of the hedges where the Newport should have been. Maybe she’d board off the basement door and leave her Paradise Tree underwater, an Atlantis in the basement.

      The telegram would be delivered; maybe she would shred it, or stare at it, or shake her head, or nod. At some point she’d have to answer difficult, uncomfortable questions: from the neighbors, from an insurance representative. Where is he? By now, perhaps, she would have stuffed Winkler’s clothes into boxes and taped them shut.

      Or she was making funeral plans. Or the house was destroyed and she and Grace were halfway to Columbus, or California, or Alaska. Or she was dead, lodged underwater, snared in the branches of a tree beside Grace, mother and daughter, their hair fanning like ink in the current.

      All the cruelties of conjecture. Was he simply too weak? Too afraid? Had he wanted to flee? Maybe she had fled, too. Maybe she was glad Winkler had gone: no more tossing in the bed at night, no more sleepwalking, no more waking to find her husband empty-eyed over his sock drawer. Maybe she and Herman had been corresponding all along, while Winkler was at work, while Winkler was asleep. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

      To even think of Grace set a voltage tingling through his skull. Even then, twelve nights since he had last seen his daughter, the continent receding steadily behind him, a small part of him understood that he might not be able to return. After a measure of time—a month, six months, maybe, or a year—Sandy would recover and seal herself off and then she would be finished with him, finished completely, living again in the present, clerking in a savings and loan, making her sculptures. He would be relegated to a past best left fastened and buried, a Paradise Tree in the basement, a body at the bottom of a lake. Grace—if she had lived—would ask about him and Sandy would say he was a deadbeat, nobody.

      He slogged through the hours. At night stars spread across the sky in unfathomable multitudes and pulled through the dark, dropping one by one beneath the sea as new ones emerged on the opposite horizon.