About Grace by Anthony Doerr Read Free Book Online Page B

fused onto it: sections of coat hangers and unfurled springs for branches; flattened lamp finials and metal scrap for leaves.
    For Winkler each hour was another hour between Cleveland and Anchorage, between who they were becoming and who they had been. That summer was the first truly hot weather he had ever experienced; he hiked the riverbank, watching fishermen, inhaling the aroma of warm soil, feeling the humidity wrap his body like a net. A pair of mallards paddled shyly through an eddy. A plastic bag came rafting down.
    Ohio, he decided, bore less of the everyday vulnerabilities: there wasn’t as sharp an edge to the air, or the threat of winter always hovering beyond the horizon; there were no tattered prospectors or pipeliners mumbling into their beards in the grocery stores. Life here was sane, predictable, explicable. The backyards had fences; the neighborhood had covenants. Each night, with the burgeoning, hot shape of Sandy sweating beside him, he found himself entering a mild and dreamless sleep. If he dreamed of things to come, he did not remember them when he woke. There were days when he could almost pretend that he had never even had such dreams, that his nights had always been like anyone else’s, that there wasn’t anything more Sandy could know about him.
    Each morning, leaving to drive to Channel 3, he’d stop at the door and glance above the roof at the slope of the ravine. The light seemed tobring a stabbing clarity: the edges of clouds, the illumined leaves, early shadows playing beneath the trees—Ohio teemed with small miracles. Standing there some mornings he imagined he could glimpse the architecture of the entire planet, like an enormous grid underlying everything, perfectly obvious all along—the code of the universe, a matrix of light.
    I have never, he thought, seen things so clearly.
    A robin hopped through the blades, hunting worms. The woods beside the river rang with singing insects. Tears gathered at the backs of Winkler’s eyes.
    Soon Sandy would descend to the basement, the child inside her waking from its own fetal dreams, the bones in its ears hardening, its hooded eyes peering into the flaring darkness.

9
    Winkler remembered his mother as a supremely pale woman: hands like they had been dipped in milk, hair a creamy silver. Even her eyes were almost pure white, the irises pale, the sclera devoid of visible capillaries, as though the color had been rinsed out of them, or else her blood ran clear.
    She had lived her first thirteen years in Finland before coming to the New World with a grandfather who promptly died of pneumonia. She finned salmon on a floating fish processor, then waitressed for Lido’s Café, then washed sheets at the Engineering Commission Hospital; she worked her way through nursing school, joined the Women’s League, married the milkman. In 1941 they moved into a bankrupt furrier’s storehouse converted to apartments, a small fourth-floor flat blessed with a trio of huge parlor windows that overlooked the pharmacy across the street, the rail yard, and Ship Creek beyond. All during the Second World War P-36 Hawks descended across those windows left to right and disappeared behind Government Hill to land at the airfield at Elmendorf. And every summer thereafter those windows buzzed with the comfortable drone of passing two- and four-seaters, hunters and prospectors, gliding in and out of the bush. Men bent on gold, oil, wilderness. She would live in that apartment the rest of her life.
    The rooms existed in his memory as clearly now as they always had: the big-beamed ceilings, the smells of fur still lingering in the corners, as though invisible foxes and marmots moved silently inside thewalls. His bedroom was a broom closet with a door that opened inward—he had to fold back his mattress each morning to get out. The smell in there, he decided one night, was of caribou, and he imagined their ghosts snuffling in the sitting