Twenty-four years before, he and Sandy had been driving from Anchorage to Cleveland in the Chrysler. They were in Manitoba, maybe, or northern Minnesota. It was early morning and the Newport climbed a low rise, pushing east toward a darkness broken only by a thread of white. On a grassy slope beside the freeway, eight small deer, like little impalas, stood chewing. All of them faced westward, staring into the receding gloom. Their shadows—long and hazy in front of them—shrunk slowly back along the hillside.
“Sandy,” he said, and nudged her where she was slumped against the door. “Sandy, look.” But she had not even bothered to raise her head, asleep or feigning sleep, and soon the deer were behind a hill and out of sight. I should stop the car, Winkler remembered thinking. I should double back and force her out and we should climb that hill and watch those deer. But he hardly slowed. The box of welding supplies rattled softly in the backseat; the hood of the Newport cut the wind. He had the strange thought that what he had seen were not deer but the ghosts of them, that if Sandy had looked she would have seen only a hillside, an empty swath of grass.
Were they already seeing things so differently, only two days away from Anchorage? It was hard not to think, back then, of Herman Sheeler calling detectives, hiring private investigators.
Later that day Winkler saw more deer, all of them dead, their bodies broken open on highway shoulders and the dark miscellaneous stains they left on the asphalt. Sandy held her bladder in silence beside him.
Easter Monday. Dusk. He stood on the beach watching the sun recede in a soundless panoply of color, the rays separating and refracting a thousand times in the fields of dust blowing over the sea.
Before he saw her, he could hear the hum of the outboard. Then the launch came into view, crossing the lagoon from the south this time, the same rusty traps stacked in the bow, a wake rolling from the stern. As she passed she turned the boat and killed the motor and coasted onto the beach. She climbed out and dropped a cinder block anchor onto the sand and came up barefoot and stood beside Winkler watching the smear of color on the horizon. She wore a one-piece bathing suit printed with magnolia flowers and a pair of jeans sawed off just below the pockets. Her fingers were cut and scarred in places; her face was broad and smooth and brown and older. But still so young, still the face of the little girl who had taken his eyeglasses and held them over her eyes.
“What?” she said, smiling.
He could not look away. She laughed and hugged him. He felt her breasts press into his chest, and the lean strength of her arms around his back. He wondered how long it had been since he was last embraced.
He blushed. She tilted her head toward the kitchen. “Is he…?”
“Serving dinner.”
“Did you get it? My thesis?”
He nodded.
“It’s only a draft. I’ve collected more data since that one.”
From the deck of the restaurant they could hear silverware clinking. A waiter navigated between tables with a tray on his shoulder. Winkler didn’t know what to say, how to begin. She was a grown woman. The sun burgeoned as it neared the horizon. “Take a walk with me,” she said. They crossed the grounds and went out onto the road in the failing light. A hundred yards farther down, a trail switchbacked to the summit of Mount Pleasant, a path they had taken many times when Naaliyah was a girl.
It was a short, steep hike. They didn’t speak. By the end of it Winkler was struggling to catch his breath. From the tight, stumpy clearing at the summit they could see lights in the towns along the necklace of islands to the south, illuminated like small piles of glitter on a black platter. The wind had finally come up and it was blowing hot down from the north and pushing dust through the sky, and the last light of the now vanished sun made a blue stripe at the horizon. Above it the troposphere hung rose-colored in all that haze as if a great fire burned just beyond it. Lights strung along the market and condominiums on the hillsides and along the riggings of boats in the harbor farther off stirred and quaked in the wind and the microwave tower erected beside them on the summit moaned. Small flowers of fireworks bloomed over the neighborhoods to the west.
Yesterday the priest at St. Paul’s had told his congregation in his quiet voice that the risen Lord was wandering among the people now, showing them the wounds in his palms. Afterward, during the Nicene Creed, the choir rose to such a pitch that Winkler worried that this Easter, finally, the church was going to tear off its stilts and go careening down the hillside.
Naaliyah smelled faintly of shellfish. She worked her hands in her pockets. “I need a favor,” she said. From her shorts she produced a half dozen envelopes, folded in half, addressed and stamped. “I need letters.”
“Letters?”
“I’m applying to school. To get a doctorate.”
He took the envelopes and held them close to his eyeglasses. They were addressed to schools in the United States: Texas A&M, UMass Boston, Portland State University. Even the University of Alaska at Anchorage. “Graduate school,” she said. “Like you. Like you did. I’ll need funding, of course, but my advisor thinks I have a shot.”
“Naaliyah…” The light was failing. A single rocket arced above the harbor and guttered and faded. What did he know about getting her into a graduate program? What clout would he have now? He’d never had any to begin with.
“Will you do it? I don’t need it until the end of the month.”
The crowns of the trees below them billowed and shone. A chain of firecrackers erupted somewhere. Naaliyah was saying something about how hard she had worked, how she wanted her thesis to break ground.
“What about the instructors at the institute?”
“I’ve asked them, too. But I thought one from you…” Winkler leaned against the cement base of the microwave tower. “I’ll try,” he said.
“Thank you.” They stood a bit longer watching the small, ephemeral flourishes of fireworks below them, and the ganglions of smoke they left behind. He thought he should say something about her parents, how her father stood sometimes on the beach and gazed over the six miles of sea at St. Vincent. How every Monday morning her mother walked the footpath to the interisland ferry alone, the big tangled trees looming above her.
“Your thesis,” he said. “I’m not sure I’m qualified, but I made some notes and—”
Naaliyah reached over and held his hand. “They’ll take me, won’t they, David? Some school will let me in?” Out in the harbor the fireworks pitched toward the finale, dozens of green and carmine blossoms that left ribbons of fading gold sparks as they drifted back. “Yes,” he said. “Of course.” He felt as if she might float off into the sky and burn, as if he were what kept her from it.
That night he had the dream again. Even as it began, he felt himself entering a scene at once familiar and intolerable. He was hurrying down a path, crashing through thorns. Off to his left, out at sea, Naaliyah was lowering a cinder block from the stern of a small boat. Every detail was concentrated and intensified: mica shining in the sand, a thousand reflections of sky on the water, each oscillation of her launch. A chain, rifling into the water, caught her ankle and jerked her off her feet. She clung to the transom. The boat tipped. She went under. He was maybe a hundred yards away. He sprinted into the lagoon and swam for all he was worth, but she was too far. The chain hung taut from the stern; the launch turned slowly against it. She did not surface. He stroked forward but the boat seemed to recede. He woke with water in his lungs.