The Disappearance of Grace (13 page)

“I refuse to believe that she dropped the relationship and the ring, Giovanni,” I say after a time. “If she dropped it, she did it because she wants to be found. Rescued.”

“But no one saw her being taken. You must accept that as a possibility.”

“I understand it as a possibility. But I don't believe it as a reality.”

We sit in silence for another few seconds, until Giovanni asks me if he can escort me home. “But first,” he adds, “should we not alert the detective to our discovery of the ring?”

He's right. We should alert the detective. But then, if the worst has happened and Grace has been abducted, the ring will be constituted as evidence. I feel it in my hand. It is all I have left of my love. I squeeze the ring hard again, as if it's possible to impale it into my skin and flesh. Standing, I shove it down into my pants pocket.

“For now I'll keep the ring,” I insist. “Until we get to the bottom of what happened to my Grace.”

I feel Giovanni lay his hand on my shoulder and squeeze.

“You and I, Captain,” he says. “We are more alike than you know.”

“How's that?”

“I do not trust the police either.”

Chapter 30

ONCE I EXPLAIN TO him where I live, Giovanni escorts me home. Not over the water but through the series of back alleys and stone walkways too impossibly connected to describe. He holds my hand the entire way, like I am a lost child trying to find my way back through a maze. Or maybe I'm just a blind mouse.

When we come to my building, I fumble for my keys and manage to unlock the building's front door on my own. Giovanni leaves me, but not without handing me a card with his cell number written on it.

“If you need me,” he states, “please call me. I am not far away as you can see.”

Then he excuses himself for his choice of words, and walks off.

I climb the stairs to the empty apartment over the bookshop, let myself in, find my way to the couch, and collapse onto it. A lonely shepherd of my desperation and my grief.

Chapter 31

I'M NOT SURE EXACTLY when I fell to sleep. But when I wake up, the sun is emerging as a red orange haze over the distant basin. Not only can I see the sun, but I feel the warmth of its rays shining in through the open French doors on my face. I've slept all night, but not lying down. Fact is, I'm no longer lying on the couch. Instead I'm standing on the terrace that overlooks the feeder canal and the narrow alley that runs perpendicular to it, all the way to the Grand Canal.

I've been sleepwalking again.

It's a little bit disconcerting to know that at any point, I could sleepwalk right off this terrace. But then, maybe if I haven't already, it's never going to happen.

I've undressed during the night.

I'm not naked. But I'm wearing only my pants and nothing else. The air is cool on my skin, but the sun warms it enough that I am not the least bit uncomfortable, even if I am surrounded by water and wind during the coolest part of the year.

I stand facing the sun, until I sense something behind me.

Turning, I peer into the apartment. Something has happened while I've been asleep. The couch has been moved, along with Grace's painting. Stepping inside I can see that I've rearranged the studio living room so that the harvest table is now pressed up against the end of the couch to create one long continuous object. I've laid out the plates and bowls on the floor opposite the couch and harvest table so that at first glance, it gives the appearance of an S-shaped path.

Like a child who's occupied himself on a rainy day by using everyday household objects to create a small city on his bedroom floor, I find myself walking this little S-shaped path until I come to its end. On the floor, centered directly in between the plates to my right and the farthest edge of the couch to my left, is a card. A simple card containing a painting of a woman.

Bending at the knees, I pick the card up from off the floor and discover that it's not just a random card, but a mass card that must have come from one of Venice's many churches. I peer down at the image of a young woman dressed in a Renaissance era gown. Her hair is pulled back into a kind of bun, and she's staring up at the heavens, rays of light beaming into her eyes, which are no longer there. Rather, her eyes have been set on a round silver platter which she holds in her left hand. Below the image are the words, Santa Lucia.

Santa Lucia.

“Saint Lucy,” I whisper to myself.

I try and recall if Grace and I visited a church dedicated to Saint Lucy during our first week together in Venice. For certain I know that we didn't. We haven't visited any churches or museums. Being blind as a bat most of the time, I'd remember something like that. So where did this card come from and why is it on the floor in the middle of a path I've created in my sleep out of couches, tables, silverware and plates?

I stare down at the card, turn it over.

There's a short bio of Saint Lucy printed on the back. Having sworn her devotion to God, Lucy refused to give up her virginity to her pagan husband. In turn, the evil bastard had her eyes gouged out with a silver spoon. The Italian translation for Lucia means “light.” Lucy became patron saint to all those who could no longer see the light because of their blindness. I guess in a small way that makes her my patron saint, even if I've never heard of her until arriving in Venice. I wonder if that means I have to believe in God to believe in Saint Lucy.

I slide the card into my pocket, and once more stare out the open doors into the light of the sun.

I allow the rays to shine into my eyes.

“Dear Saint Lucy,” I pray aloud, “help me find my Grace today.”

My words sound empty inside an infinite and expanding universe. But I am not entirely without faith. As I begin to slip back into my clothes, I wait for an answer. A sign. A voice, a warm breeze, a tickling sensation inside my empty gut. Anything. But nothing happens.

I wonder if the little boy who was killed by the airstrikes sees God.

It's then I decide to check the cell phone in the hope that today, I will finally see Grace.

Chapter 32

THERE ARE NO MESSAGES. Not from Grace. Not from the police. I check my email and my texts. Nothing. I try and call Grace's phone. I get the same pre-recorded message telling me her mailbox is full.

I slip the phone back into my pocket and think about my next move.

I decide to start from the start. To when we first arrived in Venice seven days ago by train from Germany. My blindness at that point seemed total and irreparable, and it was placing more than a considerable strain on a relationship already tested by time, separation, distance, faded dreams, war and, yes, infidelity. Depression had sunk deep into my bones.But that's not all. I felt I deserved to be blinded. I deserved to have my sight robbed from me for what I did to that little boy far up on a hill in a Tajik village in northern Afghanistan. If that small child had to lose his life, than it was only right that I lose my eyes. Maybe it's even right that I lose my fiancée. Lose her back to her ex-husband.

Grace didn't see it that way.

I was only doing what I was told and trained to do. Obeying orders. We're at war. My calling in an airstrike on that village might have saved the lives of dozens or even hundreds of other soldiers and innocents alike. Grace insisted that I had to believe that or else I would never recover my eyesight. But as we rode the train through the Alps and later on as we walked the alleyways and passages of Venice during those first few quiet days, I sensed that what she was really saying was this: You have to believe in your innocence or you will lose me.

* * *

We didn't talk much those first couple of days.

Grace tried to paint and she tried to write some poetry, but in her words, “Nothing will come.” She encouraged me to try and write, but I told her I couldn't see the words. She told me I didn't have to see the words to write them down. I should be seeing them in my head. Writing should be a visual experience, internally. I explained that it just wasn't the same for me. I didn't want to write if I couldn't see the words themselves, and I didn't want to write if that little boy didn't have a life.

So it went for a couple days more until the day before yesterday when finally, we had it out at a local café. If I was going to be blind, then Grace was going to try and work with the darkness. She tried to make me see things with my hands, my ears, my five senses. While a strange black-eyed man in a long brown overcoat stared at us from a distance, she placed her engagement ring into the palm of my hand and she asked me to tell her what I felt. I told her I felt our ring and it made me angry that she assumed I was blind to something so simple and plainly obvious as a wedding band. But the ring, I later came to realize, had nothing to do with what she was asking me.

She was asking me if I felt her love.

* * *

As the dusk approached, we made love in this apartment. It was the first time in over a year that we'd been together physically. Grace also started painting again. That moonlit night I experienced my first bout of sleepwalking. During the experience, my blindness disappeared and I was able to see again, even if the dream state led me up onto the roof of our building and my near death. But regardless of the danger, I was beginning to make progress. I was beginning to see. Grace and I both were making progress. As lovers, as people, as fiancé and fiancée.

Then, later that morning, we got the first call over the apartment's land line.

It was a bad connection. But it didn't prevent Grace from making out a man's voice when he said “I. See.” into the receiver. Later he would call again, and say just the same two words.

When the early afternoon arrived and Grace and I decided to splurge on an expensive lunch at the café just outside the cathedral in San Marco, she spotted that same strange man wearing the long brown overcoat. He wore sunglasses masking his eyes, and his black beard was trimmed. He stared at her from a distance of maybe thirty feet. He stared at her enough to make her nervous. Until he approached the table and then, just like that, Grace was gone.

In the aftermath, no one saw Grace being taken.

No one saw her at all.

The café was simply too crowded with tourists and patrons for anyone to take notice of any one person. Not to mention a woman who didn't scream or appear to make a fuss when she was removed from her chair.

What all this led up to was the police believing Grace might have simply left of her own accord. Witnesses saw us arguing the day before. Grace appeared to be very unhappy. Seemingly happy couples find themselves splitting up in Venice, as if the most romantic destination on God's earth could also cast an evil spell on your relationship. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

It's the same with Venice.

* * *

The buzzer goes off, and I nearly jump out of my skin.

I go to the door, depress the intercom mounted to the plaster wall beside it.

“Pronto.”

“Scuse, Captain Angel. It is the police. May we come up?”

It's the voice of the detective. My stomach drops. If he has news of Grace, why couldn't he just tell me about it over the phone? Why make the trip all the way over here?

“Come up, Detective,” I say into the intercom, while pushing the door release.

It dawns on me then that I can see. But my gut is telling me not to let the detective know that I can see. I'm not sure why it's telling me that. Maybe it has something to with my waiter friend, Giovanni. Like him, I'm not so sure I trust the police. As I hear the flat soles of the shoes of more than one Venice cop stomping up the marble stair treads, I commit myself to acting the part of the blind man, at least while the police are in my home.

Scurrying to the bed, I find my backpack. Inside it I find my sunglasses. As I slide them on, I hear the police arrive on the landing outside my door.

Chapter 33

A KNOCK ON THE DOOR.

“Captain Angel,” barks the detective.

“Coming,” I say.

I open the door, try not to look the stout, bearded man in the eye, nor the uniformed cop who accompanies him.

I tell them both to come in and step aside.

The door shuts behind them.

“You have been doing some redecorating I see,” the detective comments.

My stomach drops for the second time in as many minutes.

“Tell me, Captain Angel,” he says. “How do you manage such maneuvers in the dark?”

“I'm sorry,” I say, as if I don't understand his question.

“Isn't it a dangerous proposition to be moving heavy furniture when you are blind?”

I laugh. But nothing's funny.

“Now I understand, Detective,” I say, pushing the sunglasses farther up on the crown of my nose. “I've been trying to work with my blindness. Testing my skills without the use of my eyes. It's a way for me to try and train myself for a life of no sight, should it come to that.”