About Grace (26 page)

In the cabin the insects were as ravenous as ever, some even confused by Naaliyah's artificial lights into singing. But in the shed nearly all of the insects had disappeared. Some of the cages she packed with snow, to insulate them. “They're in there,” Naaliyah told him, tapping the side of a Mason jar, her breath fogging, then freezing on the glass. “They're in diapause now.”

She spent much of her energy worrying over the generator, paging carefully through its owners' manual, her finger tracing the sentences. Each morning she checked the extension cords, the generator's plugs, put her ear to the alternator casing and listened.

Outside the hills were battered by ice. He remembered how his first hydrology professor had begun a lecture: If water had its way, if geology stopped, the seas would chew up the continents, and rain would wear down the mountains. Water would eventually scour the entire planet into a smooth, definitionless sphere. We'd be left with a single ocean, waist-deep, all over the globe. Then, with nothing left to throw itself at, all the divisions and obstacles eroded—no unworn pebbles, no beaches to crash onto, every water molecule touching another—water would disclose, finally, what was in its molecular heart. Would it stand calm and unruffled? Or would it turn on itself—would it throw itself up into storms?

Winkler turned beneath his blankets and watched stars pass slowly in and out of the gaps in the shed walls: there for a few seconds, shining in the breach, then gone. His dreams were of snow crystals, sifting through trees.

For Christmas, Naaliyah thawed a chicken (they stowed uncooked food on the roof inside locked plastic bins) and baked it, and afterward they sat in the cabin watching coals in the stove bank and glow while her insects ate their own meals around them.

“I have something,” Naaliyah said, and pulled a box from beneath the cot.

Winkler shook his head. “You didn't.”

“It's from my mother.”

Inside was a plastic bag of flour mix, and a letter for each of them. The mix had a note in it, a recipe from Felix: they were to beat it with eggs, milk, sugar, and bananas, and bake it.
Happy Christmas, Americans!
Felix had scribbled across the bottom. Winkler and Naaliyah exchanged a smile: they had no bananas or eggs, and only powdered milk. But they stirred it together as well as they could, and set it on top of the stove in a pan. As it cooked it smelled to them like the Caribbean, like Felix, and when it was done they cut the flat, cinnamon-laced loaf in half and ate their portions quietly, with a kind of reverence.

Then they took their respective letters and read them in the firelight. His said:

Dear David
—

Sorry to hear your search went so poorly. But have heart. Hope is something that can be very dangerous but without it life would be horribly dry. Impossible, even. Take it from me.

Here things are as usual. Felix is drinking as much as possible, and will sometimes stand on Nanton's glass floor and shout down at the fish. He thinks this is very funny, despite my and Nanton's assurances that it is not.

The boys are all well, running their various shops, and the island is jammed with tourists for the holidays. Knowing you, you haven't been reading the papers so I'll tell you that the Chilean judiciary suspended the charges against Pinochet and dropped the case. All that, and diabetes saves him.

Nonetheless, we are considering a trip back to Chile. Just a visit. Felix is ready, I know
—
he has been ready for fifteen years. But I'm still not sure. I would like to see Santiago. The parks, the haze on the mountains.

Merry Christmas, David. God bless you. I hope you will appreciate my gift
—
I am trying to give you your daughter back, as you once gave me mine.

Soma

Outside Naaliyah's automatic timer clicked, and the generator rumbled to life. The heat lamps flickered, then glowed. Naaliyah had been watching him read his letter and when he folded it closed, she handed him another envelope.

“It's from my mother, too.”

Inside was a square of paper with an address:

Herman Sheeler

124 Lilac Way

Anchorage, Alaska 99516

Inside the stove a log collapsed and went to embers with a metallic, hollow sound. Winkler felt his epiglottis open and close over his trachea, as if he were gulping phantom liquid.

“We thought you might want to have the address.”

He shook his head.

Naaliyah began to reach toward him, but withdrew her hand. “Are you okay, David?”

Now Winkler could feel anger rising through his chest. He had thought of Herman before, of course: Herman at his big First Federal desk calendar; Herman at hockey practice, crouched in front of a net; Herman at—he could hardly think of it—some event of Grace's, a graduation, a science fair. Herman at Sandy's bedside, Herman at Sandy's funeral. But to see his name printed now in front of him was to somehow make him real again, as real as if Winkler were standing outside Herman's front door, asking if Sandy the metal artist was home.

The address dissociated itself, the letters straying off, becoming cuneiform, meaningless.

Naaliyah watched him with her hands clamped to her knees.

“Soma did this?”

“She wanted to give you something.”

“It's not her business.” He folded the square of paper and folded it over again.

“We just thought…” Naaliyah said, but stopped. The fire was only three feet away and he could have thrown the address in and watched it flare and go to ash. But what would be incinerated?

“Well.” She stood and collected the cake pan and began to wash it in the bucket. “Merry Christmas anyway.”

He set the folded square of paper high on a shelf, between two quart milk cartons stuffed with frozen peat. It was a place he trained himself not to look, a little black hole on a shelf, a location in space too perilous to get close to.

New Year's came and went and he did not allow his mittens or even his eyes to pass over that corner of the shed. Their wood was disappearing quickly—already there was a bit more space in the woodshed, and most of the logs stacked around the cabin had been given up to heat, and smoke.

Someone had lived in that woodshed before. Lids of tin cans had been nailed over knotholes; strands of twine were stuffed into chinks between the boards. Small enough defenses against winter. But the breaches were too many, and cold air slipped easily through them. Indeed, cold passed through the walls themselves, as if the wood was saturated and could hold no more. Whoever had lived in here before, he decided, had not lasted.

Some mornings he could
smell
the cold, a smell like ammonia, a smell he could feel his bones tighten against. He had to shake his limbs to resurrect the blood in them. Even inside the shed, he breathed through a scarf, and in turn through a balaclava, until the moisture in his breath had frozen the fibers so badly he had to turn, and tramp back to the cabin, to thaw it all out.

Although he had still made no acceptable prints, he worked harder than ever, Naaliyah returning from town each week with package after
package of film. After each exposure he turned from the big desk and ran the film into the cabin, dragging the cold in with him, waiting breathlessly to pull out the film leader and separate the positive and negative, only to find his print utterly black, or gray, or a smeary sheen of reflected glare.

But the work suited him, the tediousness of it, the challenge. The way it pushed other thoughts and desires to the edges. The thrill of seeing a magnified crystal, slowly wilting beneath his attention, did not abate. When he woke the day was his, with all its attendant minutes. He and Naaliyah lived simply: they collected the pot of stew from the roof where she'd stowed it and thawed it on the stove. If it wasn't snowing, or hadn't recently, he lost himself in the rhythm of chopping wood or shook snow from tree limbs hoping to dislodge and collect individual snow crystals.

Despite Naaliyah's protests, he continued to sleep in the shed, out of propriety, or obstinacy, perhaps, but also because he had genuinely grown to prefer it. There was something about the cold he liked—it felt purifying, sliding through the dwindling stacks of wood. It was the same thing, he realized, that Naaliyah loved about her insects: the essences of things were clearer with them, the violences and loves of life. Cold demanded a sharper, simpler view of things: in those temperatures death hovered at the margins, offering clarity, providing precision.

But it blurred things, too: the border between dreams and wakefulness, the way it pulled life from fingers and toes, and released them reluctantly, temporarily. The way the wind came, like news from another, more tenuous world, and stirred the trees.

Naaliyah did not mention Christmas again except to ask, each Friday, before she went to town, “Any letters you want to mail?”

In the bitterest parts of January freezing air drained through the woodshed as if it were made of cheesecloth. He rose every hour or so to hurry across the meadow beneath the brilliant, awful sky (the whole arm of the galaxy seeming to drape over the meadow, as if he could reach up and pluck out some blue and frozen sun as he passed
beneath it) into the cabin to shove wood into the stove, to try to kick his feet warm.

Naaliyah would be asleep on the cot, and the heat lamps would click off and on, and the stove would groan as its metal stretched. Outside all the water was going to ice and inside steam formed on the windows and frosted over, as though the cabin had become a body itself, jacketed in ice, with the small, insatiable stomach of its stove burning on and on.

Near the end of January it became truly cold. The ranger on the CB told them it was twenty degrees below zero, but to Winkler cold was cold and he was angry that it prevented him from staying outside for more than two or three minutes. The film stuck; the focus knob locked up—work was impossible. It took an hour by the fire to undo what thirty seconds of exposure could do to his fingers. His toes were pebbles, glued together. If he took a cup of boiling water outside and threw it up in the air, it crystallized before it hit the ground.

On most days now the sky was the same color as the trees and the trees were the same color as the snow. Ice fog, they called it. To move through a landscape like this was to find yourself moving through a dream. His own hand loomed before his face, huge and out of proportion. Winkler could see the fear growing in Naaliyah's face, in the scarlet splotches on her throat, in the way she did not get out of bed until the daylight was nearly gone. You could walk in circles out here; you could almost feel yourself entering the old pioneer tales, the survival stories, trappers eating shoe leather, miners frozen into creeks.

Naaliyah had been right to ask: Were they prepared for this? She listened for the generator above the wind as if her life depended on its rumble. Which, in a single, clarifying sense, it did—as did the lives of her insects, all of them attuned to the tenuous orange glow of the heat lamps.

He brought in wood, brought in snow to melt for water. All around them ice touched at the walls of the cabin and the tip of the chimney like a hundred thousand tiny fragments of glass, tinkling softly. At
night he tried to sit it out in the shed, the cold coming from everywhere now, like a deep, patient submersion, but he could not make it—it was too cold, too impossible, and he'd have to push himself to his feet and drag his body and the furs across the meadow, back into the cabin. He'd sit by the fire, the cold refusing to leave him, and stare into the coals.

Naaliyah would have her eyes open in the cot, her sleeping bag at her chin, two wool hats on her head, one over the other. The insects were silent.

On the twenty-eighth of January the generator quit. Naaliyah spent almost an hour outside over the wooden housing, examining the points, the fuel filter, and another hour pulling relentlessly on the starter cord, but couldn't get it to turn over. They had plenty of fuel, and their batteries were charged, but the heat lamps would suck them dry in twenty or so hours, and then the CB would go down, and they would have to leave.

They did not talk. Winkler went out to the meadow and stood over her for a moment and watched her shiver and the wind turn the pages of the generator manual. “Let's eat something, Naaliyah,” he said. “C'mon. Keep our strength up.”

She relented. He put some larch into the stove—the good, hot-burning larch, a piece of two-hundred-year-old tree that had drifted down the river and been trailered up there to save their lives. Naaliyah clambered up on the log pile to retrieve a pot of frozen stew. Together they sat in front of the fire and watched the broth thaw, and the fat begin to rise to the top. When it was ready Naaliyah—who was still shaking awfully—stood to transfer it from the stove to the table, but she was wearing mittens, and lost her grip, and it spilled. A brown, steaming pool spread across the floor, chunks of carrots and beef surfing out at its edges. Within a minute, the broth closest to the walls began to freeze.

Neither said anything. Wind roared across the meadow. The roof sounded as if it was going to tear off. Winkler could hear their food—pounds
of it in heavy bins—slide toward the edge. What was left of the stew soon glazed the floorboards and he forced himself to his feet and began to chip it free.

Naaliyah stood in the center of the cabin and put her hands over her eyes.

The wind died around midnight and a thick raft of ice fog settled into the meadow. Winkler went out to the generator and peered into it with a flashlight and touched various parts and screws and cleaned frost off the hour meter with his mittened thumb but could not have told the difference between the alternator and a circuit breaker. After ten or so minutes he went in and stood over Naaliyah where she lay, eyes closed on the cot.

“Can you fix it?”

She turned her head. “No.”

“It's totally ruined? A loss?”

She shrugged.

“I think you can fix it. One more try. Give it a half hour. If you still can't do it, then we'll get out of here; we'll go to town and take showers. But I think if maybe you try one more time, you'll get it. I'll keep the fire high. I'll bring you hot tea.”

“David,” she started, but did not say more. He went to sit by the stove. A half hour passed and he thought she might be sleeping when she got up and pulled on her snowsuit and boots and took the little tackle box full of tools and went out.

All day she worked. He brought her mugs of hot water; he brought her canned soup. Every twenty minutes she came inside to shake the blood back into her hands. Around 3
P.M.,
with the daylight failing, Winkler heard the generator rumble to life, then die, then start back up again. She came and pushed open the door and looked at him, grease on her face, both mittens black.

Winkler had thawed a package of frozen peas and turned to Naaliyah and winked. “I'll make dinner tonight,” he said, and she set her tools down on the table, and after a moment, began to laugh.