Authors: Anthony Doerr
A dream: Naaliyah was grown, maybe twenty-five years old. She lowered a cinder block from the stern of a boat. An anchor chain, looped through the block, paid out through her hands. The chain picked up speed, rifling into the water as the block sank; a bight of chain caught her ankle, jerked her off her feet, and dragged her over the transom. Water closed over her head. Winkler watched all this from a beach, a hundred yards away. Fog swept over the boat. She did not surface. He sprinted into the lagoon and swam toward her, but the boat seemed to recede; water poured into his lungs. The boat was too far away. His chest overflowed.
He woke panting over the girl where she slept on the bench of the picnic table. He was shirtless and barefoot in his torn work pants. The three boys cowered in the doorway to their room. The remnants of the stove fire cast the kitchen in a dim red light. Naaliyah's ankle was in Winkler's fist and he realized he was holding her leg at his chin as though he might take a bite. Her eyes were serious and trusting. She flexed her foot and he could feel the muscles in her calf contract. Although it was dark and he did not have his glasses, Winkler could see the sheen of the picture of the Virgin above the bench; his eyes were level with hers.
Felix threw back the curtain to his bedroom. Winkler set down Naaliyah's leg. “Go back to sleep,” Felix told the boys. He hefted the girl like a house cat in his arms and brought her across to the bedroom and pulled the curtain shut. When he reemerged Winkler could hear
Soma speaking softly to Naaliyah and he realized that she, or perhaps one of the boys, had almost certainly shouted. Felix went out into the yard and motioned for Winkler to follow.
The sky was drawn back and the Milky Way made a soft avenue overhead. A single star fell. Felix bent and collected stones from the path and began pitching them one by one into the high grass.
“I sleepwalk,” Winkler started to say. “Iâ”
Felix held up a hand. Without his watch cap on, his hair stood up from his head in all directions. He tossed another stone. “You find somewhere else to stay. Tomorrow. Someone will take you in.”
“I'll leave now.”
“No. In the morning.”
But he left that night, collecting his airmail envelopes and pencils and his plastic box of savings, carrying them out the gate, over the hill, and down to the construction site, where the frame of the inn stood dark and empty with the wind passing through the shells of the rooms. He dragged a tarp under the palms and lay the rest of the night on the sand with the waves reaching for his feet and the sheering snapping in the breeze and the most desolate kind of lonesomeness in his heart.
Sandy
âIt must be nearly autumn in Anchorage by now. Are leaves falling? Are you even reading this there? It's hard to believe seasons go on when one is in a place like this, where every day is so much like the one before. I miss cool weather. I miss rain. Here we have rains but they are nothing like rain at home. Here the rain never seems to last more than twenty minutes. The clouds haul back and unleash these enormous droplets, then quickly dissipate. And then the heat builds back up. The surface of the sea gets so bright you cannot look at it.
Out on the water, right now, I can see virga
â
fallstreaks
â
where rain leaves clouds but evaporates before it reaches the ground. It looks like hair blowing out there. It is hard not to think about Grace every few minutes. I miss her. I miss you. I am truly sorry I left.
One day:
Sandy
â
Please write back. Send a photo. So I know she's alive. Write just one word.
And another, in his ungainly cursive, across the first line of the page:
Is she alive?
They still sat beside each other at lunch, and Felix might hand over a packet of rice, or boiled eggs wrapped in cheesecloth, but when they worked Felix always seemed to find a spot away from him, in what would be the kitchen, or out on the porch, or by the band saw helping the framers halve bamboo for siding. Six-year-old Naaliyah did not come with her father to the site anymore. Weeks passed and Winkler did not see her. When he finally mustered the nerve to ask, her father said they'd enrolled her in the island school.
Sometimes, in the evenings, Winkler would walk the dusty road past the small blue house and watch the hens scratch at a corner of the yard. Maybe he'd hear, through the screen door, one of the boys shout, or the stove door clang shut, but that was as close as he and the family came. He wrote his letters, still using the Kingstown post office as a return address. He cooked beans in a salvaged pot; he kept to himself. In the darkness from his spot on the beach he listened to lambs bleating from their paddocks high on the hills. A steady rain fell on the sea and small waves lapped at the framework of the inn and there were no lights save the washed-out gloss of the moon on the water and leaves, and no sounds but the lambs and wind moving the trees and drops slipping into the understory, and the two-note frogs, and the sea, always the sea.
Like most people in Anchorage, his father had shut out night. He drew curtains, dead-bolted the door, switched on lamps. In the depths of winter, by mid-February, Winkler could see the strain in his father's
face, would see him study a travel ad in the newspaper with almost preternatural longing: a surf girl smiling beneath a thatch umbrella, her skin drenched with sunlight.
But his mother had welcomed it. “Please, Howard,” she would say to Winkler's father, “do we need all these lights on?” The hospital, she said, was bright enough. Her eyeballs hurt. In late September, after the days had broken and night made its long, cool entrance, she would take Winkler to the roof to watch. Lights came on up and down the rail yards, and above them a chevron of geese would laze along, and far off the mountains would go blue and hazy, seeming to gather a thinness as day fell, as though they were fading off into another dimension. The smell of his mother's container garden, frosted once already, on its way to death, would rise. Stars emerged, one by one, and soon enough by the hundredsâthe sky would be studded with lights.
“There's plenty of light in winter,” she'd tell David. “More than enough. Your father isn't paying attention.”
The roof of that building seemed as real to him now as it did then: scraps of snow in the shadows, fumaroles of smoke rising from the tar-specked chimneys, his mother's tomato plants sagging against their stakes in the southwest corner. On rare nightsâthe Perseids, the Orionids, the Leonidsâthey'd sit on blankets and watch meteorites sizzle through the thermosphere. “Count them, David. See if you can get every single one.” He marked them in a little notebook and in later days his father would find the untitled pages littered about, covered with dashes, and wonder what the boy had been tallying.
Once Winkler asked his mother if the constellations would be left with holes in them but she said no, that shooting stars were merely flecks of iron burning in the air, no bigger than thumbtacks, and that the stars above him were huge and ancient and would never leave nor change their positions and in the following nights he saw that it was so.
Sandy
âI'm sleepwalking again. I woke up in the ocean last night. I was up to my waist, standing there. I'd dragged my sleeping tarp in behind me, and I must have taken my shirt too, because I can't find it
anywhere. The tarp was covered with snails and after I got back to shore I had to pull them all off. You were right
â
I should have gone to Dr. O'Brien's, a sleep lab, somebody.Every night I hope to dream of Grace. If I could just dream her once, in your arms, in her crib, then I might believe she's still alive. But I never do. Lately I dream mostly of darkness. What am I doing here? Am I following a path already laid out for me, or am I making it myself?
Am I scaring you? I don't mean to. There were so many things we should have talked more about.
It was nearly impossible to write the Marilyn Street address on an envelope, to walk to the village to mail it: he imagined Herman in the hall, shuffling through bills, stopping when he saw another envelope, another postmark, more of Winkler's handwriting. He'd burn it; he'd shred it and bury the pieces in the backyard.
Would he let her sleep in the bedroom? Would she want to? Would he even have her back? Would Grace be across the hall, out in a taxi, screaming her lungs out in some foster home? Here was something he could imagine: Sandy reentering First Federal Savings and Loan, the looks from the other tellers, the whispering down the line. Herman watching her from his big desk. She would keep her face up.
He could be in Kingstown in an hour. He could be in Ohio in one revolution of the sun. Eight hundred more dollars.
To close his eyes and be on the hillside above their house, the big wet trees blowing and murmuring. To cross the lawn and peer through the glass door into the kitchen: the high chair, the card table ringed by mismatched stools. A light would come on. Sandy would bring Grace downstairsâto see their shadows rise along the stairway wall would be enough.
Memory, dreams, water. Through an unfinished hall of the inn a paper bag dragged about in the wind.
They completed the inn in March 1978. He had been gone almost a year. The inn was not, Winkler thought, as glamorous as Nanton had hoped. It had twelve guest rooms, a bar at the end of the dining deck, a huge dry molasses vat that was to become the swimming pool. The grounds were still scrubby, the beach still overgrown, and littered with sea logs and nylon ropes, and every Wednesday, when they burned garbage at the dump, the wind carried smoke through the rooms, and with it the reek of smoldering plastic.
At night, though, it did possess a certain enchantment; with the lanterns of the restaurant aglow, and a few lamps switched on inside the lobby, the inn stood on its pylons half-submerged in the lagoon like the top floor of a skyscraper in a flooded metropolis: wall sconces visible through the windows, a yellow radiance hanging in the tide.
Inside, square-meter sheets of Plexiglas windowed the reef and indeed fish did swim and skirt in lazy loops beneath, and the tide sucked and pushed great flexing air bubbles along the bottom of the floor like foamy, hypnotic jellyfish. Wrasses, jacks, ladyfishes, onceâNanton insistedâa spotted eagle ray as wide across as a dining room table, flapping along down there. Winkler would see Nanton and Naaliyah down on their hands and knees looking into the floor and pointing out wonders to each other as if an engrossing film played ceaselessly on the sea floor.
There were dinghies for guests to shuttle between their yachts and the beach; there was a paved shuffleboard court beside the driveway. Big wooden loungers studded the lawn and nautical maps framed the walls of the lobby. A rope bridge hung between the shore and restaurant. Music piped through outdoor speakers. Sea fans and wooden parrots stood on bedside tables. Felix began ordering food for the kitchen and Nanton took up post behind the front desk.
Guests came, boating in or taking the water taxi from St. Vincent. They would hang about a few nights, marveling at the weather and the glass floor, and be replaced by others. As an exchange for staying on to tend the grounds and maintain the glass flooring, Nanton allowed Winkler to move off the beach into the old boat shed at the corner of the property, a tin structure with one glassless window, a dirt floor, and a door that consisted of the entire western wall, swinging upward in a rusted aluminum track. Inside Nanton helped arrange a cot, chair, and basin. “This is fine,” Winkler insisted. “I won't be here long.”
Each night, before he lay on the humped, musty mattress, he barricaded himself in by wedging a two-by-four between the door and a guide wheel.
He went about his work diligently enough, staining lawn furniture, distributing seeds and laying flagstones, planting whatever decorative ferns and flowers he could harvest from the hills. Nights he walked the dark, rustling thickets, returned to his shed for a few fitful hours of dreams, and was up before dawn, pushing barrows of dirt, raking clumps of beached weed off the sand.
He did not buy clothes or spend money on rum. In his plastic box he had accumulated somewhere around two thousand E.C. He calculated his wages in the sand. Maybe by June. Home by June. He allowed himself images of a reconciliation: the goose-shaped knocker in his hand, Sandy pulling back the door. Behind her leg a shy little girlâGraceâsmiling up. “Dad?” It was a kind of hope. But his dreams spoke to none of that: when he slept he dreamt of darkness, or of people he did not recognize, or of water closing slowly, almost gratefully, over his head.
A May evening. Soma called him out of a flower bed near the back steps of the kitchen. The crucifix on her chest heaved. “I came as quickly as I could. Something arrived for you last night.” From inside the screen door she produced a cardboard box. One end was partially crushed. On top his name was printed in lowercase. It was Sandy's handwritingâhe knew this without thoughtâher big looping D's, circles floating above the I's. The lettering was dark, and definite, as if she had pressed so hard she had nearly driven the tip of the marker through the cardboard. His breath stopped somewhere in his throat. He took the box from Soma and shook it.
A thudding inside. Cheap brown packing tape. An Anchorage postmark.
“Is it from home? Is it what you've been waiting for?”
He could not take his eyes from his name. He managed to say yes.
Soma let out a sigh. “Oh, I am glad. I'm happy for you, David. I have prayed for you.” Already he was turning away. “Take it,” she said. “Of course.”
He crossed the yard to the boat shed and raised the door and lowered it behind him. It was nearly dark inside, and he dragged the chair to the window and sat in his damp shirt trembling and looking at his name on top of the box.
Twelve months. Out in the yard a few guests on the deck laughed and fell quiet. A wasp buzzed against the window. He had to remind himself to breathe. After several minutes he withdrew a pair of pruners from his rear pocket and brought the blade across the seam of the box.
Inside was a thick bundle of letters. His letters: the ones he had sent to Anchorage and what looked like most of the ones he had sent to Cleveland as well. Many, the first ones, had been opened, but someâmaybe a hundredâhad not. Not a single letter had been opened since January. She had bound them between two rubber bands, so that the packet was pinched at the ends and bulged in the middle. Clamped beneath one of the elastics sat a folded square of paper, its creases sharp. That was all.
His rib cage thudded. The air in the shed tasted faintly of burning
garbage, smoke from the dump. He unfolded the note:
Don't come back. Don't write. Don't even think of it. You are dead.
She did not even sign it. Outside the last light was failing and the clouds freighted a tenuous red and the long shadows of frigate birds glided across the lawn and over the roof of the shed and continued out over the sea. After maybe ten minutes the bundle of letters fell from his lap. He held the note and the gloom stretched over him. Soon it was fully dark. Frogs started screaming in the trees. A window banged at the inn.
What might have been an hour passed. Then another. In the lobby tourists held their inconsequential conversations and asserted their hierarchies and praised the qualities of the states in which they lived and feigned yawns and retired to their rooms. Nanton closed his book, switched off his lamp. A mile inland Felix bent over a sleeping Naaliyah and set a kiss in the center of her forehead.
It was after midnight when Winkler rose and hauled open the door and made his way in the darkness to the beach. The inn stood rigid and immobile in the water, all the lamps extinguished. One of the dinghies was turned hull-up on the sand with its oars under the thwarts. He flipped it, and dragged it into the water.
Big combers were breaking far out on the reef, but in the lagoon they came low and small and the boat rose and fell lightly on the water. He clambered in. Little waves slapped the bow. It was the same handwriting she used for any note.
We need milk. The sliding glass door is broken.
Or:
How much?
The stars sent wavering lines of silver onto the water. The inn was dark and still. The few yachts in the anchorage bobbed and turned against their moorings. The Earth at that latitude rotated at a thousand miles an hour, sailed around the sun at eighteen miles per second, spun with the entire solar system around the two billion stars of the Milky Way at something like 135 miles per second, and yet, he thought, it went so silently, whispering on its axis, roaring soundlessly through the vast, prehistoric jug of space.
Don't come back. Don't even think of it.
He unshipped the oars and rowed out.
It took twenty minutes to reach the edge of the reef. The breakers
howled as they pummeled the seaward side. The oars dripped and the little boat wobbled in the foam. A trio of gulls squabbled in mid flight and veered past his head, heading inland.
In alcoves he saw large blue blotches, maybe jellies. An iridescent crab cantered sideways through the shadows, big and hurrying. If anything made noise he could not hear it; the waves disallowed any other soundsâa rising and falling, violent and ceaseless, the abiding element.
The spring after his mother had died, he tried to restart her garden, stepping through the slush on the roof with leftover seeds and pressing them into the potted soil. But for some reason the seedlings, if they appeared at all, came up weak and pale, as if they could tell who planted them, as if grief overwhelmed their roots. Maybe he watered them too much.
Why him, why now? What use are memories when memories can do little more than fade? The air in the box had smelled of nothing, cardboard, old paper.
In the lagoon whirlpools left by his oar blades pulsed with phosphorescence. The dinghy listed uncomfortably. Behind him another comber reared and detonated across the coral. Grace was dead. She had to be. How few days are left in the lives of anyone. How few hours.
He reset the oars and stroked toward the reef, across overlapping sheets of foam. It took only three or four strokesâthe hull ground over rocks, he pried it free, and then he was into the waves. The first came bowling low over the bulwarks, throwing water past his feet. The next lifted all the way over the bow, and broke over his back. He marveled at the size and strength of them. They were nothing a person on shore or the deck of a freighter could appreciateâyou had to be in among them. He fought to keep the oars tracked but it felt as if the blades were caught in cement and they slipped on the tholepins.
His arms were not up to the task anyway. Foamy water rolled through the bottom. In a matter of seconds the boat began to turn. The oar shafts sang under the stress. A third wave exploded against the hull. He could seeâfor one moment, as the boat plunged into a troughâthe ledge of the reef as it fell away beneath him, illuminated
by starlight, plummeting into blue darkness. Then the little boat stood up on its stem, and went over.
The oars fell away. He thought: Take me. The dinghy landed upside down with him beneath it. He was dragged across the coral.
An undertow hauled him out and down. The next waves were passing over his head, and he was driven two fathoms deep, the reef shelf looming in bubbles in front of him, and still the tow swept him back, past a slope of sand studded with delicate, waving ferns, past a swarm of tiny phosphorescent shrimp, grazing against the current. They vanished, too, receding as quickly as if a window shade had been pulled, and he was hauled into deep water. The pressure of the sea filled his ears: fierce, grumbling, a thousand tiny cracklings. His eyeglasses were taken from his face. The surfaceâa roiled sheet of quicksilverâseemed a mile away.
The ocean was so warm it was almost hot, and the feel of the rip and the darkness against him was not unlike the feel of a damp, insistent wind. Urgency traveled through his chest, but despite it a kind of seduction fell over him. How easy it would be to open his mouth and pull water into his lungs.
Above him swells sucked and pulled. Pain squeezed the tips of his jawbone. His ribs began to throb; his epiglottis swung shut over his larynx like a trapdoor.
A body drifting in the sea. A corridor into the light. Suddenly he had all the time in the world to consider things. To the propeller of a passing yacht, to a bird, to the sky, he would be dead, a floating object, little more than a log, a thousand organisms trying his orifices, the world without him precisely as it had always been, or nearly so: waves turning over on the rocks, sun flaring in the eastern sky. Blood would sink in his corpse, gravitating toward the sea floor, purpling his face, his tongue. Plankton would venture into the tunnels of his ears.
For a hydrologist these things were not hard to imagine; they were even acceptable: he would dissolve into the great blue cauldron; his skin into the gastric sacs of sea life; his bones into shells and exoskeletons; his muscles into energy, rifling through a claw, a fin.
Water around him, water inside him. Two hydrogens, one oxygen;
after all, it was the ultimate solvent. Who had he been? A failed father, a runaway husband. A son. A packet of unopened letters. He was dead; he was dead.
Across his eyes passed the fleeting blues and greens of dreams. The stars he had been watching were now like the floodlights of some slow undersea vehicle, toiling the murky bottom. There was time for one fleeting vision: Grace and Sandy at a kitchen table. Sandy passed an orange cereal box and Grace took it with a careful hand. Sandy poured milk into their bowls. A television flickered over their shoulders. That was all he could see, really: a houseplant in the corner, a painting he didn't recognize above it. Behind them a glass door reflected light from a naked bulb. They were talking but he could not hear what they were saying. Grace was two years old, perhaps. She raised a spoon to her lips.
Saltwater poured into his mouth. He would have given his life a hundred times over to continue peering in at them. Little Grace had curls bunched up against the back of her head. Her pajama top was too small, tight across her belly. She chewed a mouthful of cereal.
But the sea bore him up. His head was at a trough in the swells; he surfaced. A switch threw in his lungs somewhere and he was gasping.
All night he grappled with a luminous doom. The rip had carried him nearly a quarter mile out. A smashed thwart, still nailed to one of the dinghy's bilge panels, drifted past and he clung to it. Every few moments a star rose over the islands and another disappeared on the opposite side, under the horizon. Was the galaxy turning or was it the Earth?
By morning he had drifted closer and the sea had calmed to a fluid, rolling glass. The island rose and fell on the horizon. Birds traveled the lagoon. Even without his glasses he could identify Mount Pleasant, and the thick cane smoke pluming from the sugar mill. He kicked toward it until his lungs and heart throbbed, then rested, clinging to his float, occasionally letting his face down. In a few hours he was riding a wave through a channel in the coral, his knee striking something
hard and sharp at the reef crest, and he was washed onto the packed, ridged sand of the intertidal flat, coughing, paddling forward. When he reached the shallows his legs would not bear him up. He crawled out of the wave break and fell onto the beach. The piece of the dinghy floated up beside him.