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 hundreds—the 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 nights—the Perseids, the Orionids, the Leonids—they’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—
I’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—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 downstairs—to 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.