Читать книгу About Grace - Anthony Doerr, Anthony Doerr - Страница 24

Frost, like a miniature white forest, backlit by sun, fringed the bottom of the window. Dendrites, crystal aggregates, plumes of ice—an infinite variety. Strange to think that a few million water molecules frozen now on the fuselage of a 757, hurtling toward Miami, could feasibly be the same molecules that seeped through gaps in the foundation of his house, molecules Sandy might have sopped with a towel and wrung into the yard, to evaporate, become clouds, precipitate, and sink to earth once more.

What is time? he wrote in his pad. Must time occur in sequence—beginning to middle to end—or is this only one way to perceive it? Maybe time can spill and freeze and retreat; maybe time is like water, endlessly cycling through its states.

A flight attendant came by and asked him to pull the shade. The movie was starting. The woman in the middle seat tore headphones out of a plastic bag and clamped them over her ears. Winkler removed his eyeglasses and wiped the lenses.

Before Darwin, before Paracelsus, before Ptolemy even, for as long as memory had existed, humans carried it in a corner of their hearts: We live in the beds of ancient oceans. We carried it in our terrors of drowning, our stories about ancestors delivered from floods: In the beginning God separated the vapors to form the sky above and the oceans below. The end of the world would be watery as well: a resolving storm; a cleansing tide; glaciers grinding over everything.

Overlap, succession, simultaneity—how Noah must have sweated, hammering together his raft, the first raindrops striking the neighbors’ roofs.

The sound of the engine mounted on the wing outside his window made a constant, lulling wash. The sky, pale blue, seemingly infinite, eased past.

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.

The crew was mostly Brazilian; the mate was British. The only other paying passengers were a threesome of Malaysian pepper merchants who whispered furtively to one another in the forecastle like conspirators plotting a hijack. He avoided everyone—what if someone should try to start a conversation? What do you do? Where are you going? Neither was a question he could answer. At meals he chose between the galley’s daily offerings: grilled cheese, boiled sausage, or a shapeless pudding that shuddered grotesquely with the ship’s vibrations. Sleep, if it came at all, arrived weakly, and he entered it as if it were a shallow ditch. When he woke he felt more exhausted than ever. Around him men snored in their bunks. Water roared through the ship’s plumbing.

The vast blue fields of the Sargasso Sea. The Windward Passage. The Antilles. The Caribbean. Birds began to appear: first a pair of frigate birds riding over the bow; then jaegers; finally a squadron of gulls riding over the foredeck. Land came into sight on the seventh day: a trio of islands floating in vapor thirty miles to the east.

The Agnita docked at a half dozen ports. At each, customs officials swarmed her holds and went away with bribes: cases of single-malt, a lawnmower, a New York Yankees jersey. She took on grain in Santo Domingo and sugar in Ponce; she disgorged mattresses in St. Croix, a bulldozer in Montserrat, three hundred porcelain toilets in Antigua.

One noon, as the ship was piloted out of open water and toward harbor once more, he climbed to the deck and stood at the rail. A steep island, with the broad green shoulders of a volcano at its northern end, approached. The sea was unusually calm, and the swell driven in front of the bow held a wavering image: the tall gray hull, punctuated only by the starboard hawsepipe; then the row of scuppers, and the thin spars of the rail; lastly Winkler’s own small and insubstantial shape, hanging on.

It was the cargo port in Kingstown, St. Vincent. Maybe two thousand miles from Ohio, but it might as well have been a million. Far enough.

He disembarked in the lee of three containers of tractor parts and took refuge near the wharf in a ruined hotel, the roof partially caved in, a half dozen warblers preening on the window frame. Within an hour the Agnita sounded twice and pulled out. He watched it all the way to the horizon, the hull fading first, then the white superstructure, finally the tops of the stacks disappearing beyond the curvature of the sea.