The Disappearance of Grace (5 page)

“Yes, love,” she says, her voice trembling.

Gently, slowly, I extend my right arm out and lower my body onto my right side. Then I extend my right leg out so that it too rests on the clay tiles. Many of the tiles break underneath my body, sending shards of sharp clay up into my skin. It stings like dozens of needle shots. But I try and ignore the pain.

Now that I'm lying prone on the edge of the roof, I try and lower my left leg. I start by sliding it off the edge and then gently down towards the terrace's stone railing.

“How'm I doing, Gracie?”

“Almost there, love.” Her voice is high-pitched, full of stress. My every movement bears its weight on her beating heart.

Then I feel it. The solid firmness of the banister.

“Okay, now for my arm,” I say. “When you can reach it, take hold of my hand.”

“Yes, love. I'm here. I'm. Here.”

This time, in order for me to extend my hand down over the roof edge, I have to stretch. I must bring my body so close to the edge that I find myself on the brink of dropping. It's as if I'm floating in midair. Makes me wonder how I managed to climb up here onto this steeply angled roof in the first place. But take it from an Afghan vet: The climb is always the easy part. Especially when you're doing it under the fearless guise of sleepwalking. It's getting back down that's treacherous.

“Can you reach it, baby?”

“I'm trying!” she cries.

In my head, I see her struggling to make herself taller so that she can reach my fingers and then my hand. I stretch all the more, until I feel our fingertips touching, and then our hands, and then her tight grip.

“Gotcha!”

“Don't let go,” I insist.

I pray I don't suddenly drop and pull her over with me. How will the headline look? Blind solider/writer and artist fiancée fall to their tragic death in romantic Venice. The news will be an international sensation. Death in Venice…Tragedy in Midst of Rekindled Love…Fiancé Falls for Fiancée…

I press my weight onto my left foot.

“Grace!” I shout. “When I tell you, I want you to pull me in towards the door. You got that?”

She's already pulling on me.

“Got it!”

“On three,” I insist.

“I'm ready.”

“One. Two. Three—”

She pulls me in towards the apartment and I slide off the roof, drop onto the banister and onto the slate-covered terrace floor, my left hand still gripped in Grace's.

A wave of pain shoots up and down my butt cheeks since they cushioned the fall. But at least I didn't drop to my death onto the stone cobbles or into a filthy, shallow lagoon.

Grace drops to her knees and hugs me.

“You stupid jerk,” she says through a haze of tears. “What could have prompted you to do something so stupid? So selfish?”

I try and stand. I peer into Grace's swelled, tear-filled eyes. I want to see them before I lose my sight again.

“I was sleepwalking,” I explain. But the truth sounds ridiculous.

“We'll learn to lock the doors,” she says. “I'll hold you all night long.”

I pull her into me and as I do, I see the light of the sun begin to fill the studio. I see the back of Grace's canvas and the new painting it contains. I see the couch and the harvest table and I see our bed, the covers and sheets tossed about. As I soak in the vision, I sense the darkness coming on. It's a like a total eclipse of the sun, only not as achingly slow.

We enter back into the apartment, hand in hand.

“When I was sleepwalking,” I say, “I was asleep. But I could see.”

“How can that be?” Grace asks. “What difference does sleeping make?”

We approach the bed and I sit myself on the edge, then lie back, feel the small cuts and scrapes from the shards of the broken rooftop tiles.

“Because there's nothing wrong with me,” I say, my chest filling with a strange sense of optimism.

“How can there be nothing wrong?” Grace asks. “You spend most of your life in the dark.”

“There's nothing physically wrong. There's only my memory. I fell asleep last night to some bad remembrances.”

She lies beside me, curls into me.

“What remembrances, Nick?”

I see the little boy . I see the bodies that surround his . I hear my voice ordering the bombing. I hear the jet and see the rockets shooting out from below its straight wings. I feel the concussion of the explosions.

“Never mind,” I say, as I close my eyes. “I just can't talk about it yet.”

Grace exhales but doesn't respond, as if to make another sound will somehow send me back up onto that roof. With the sun coming up and bathing our top floor studio in radiant warmth, I once more feel exhaustion invade the blood that swims through my veins, and I surrender to a deep sleep.

Chapter 10

WHEN I WAKE UP again, I smell coffee.

The good news: I'm still in bed.

The bad news: Grace is gone.

I reach out for her, but she's not there.

I have no idea how long I've been out. A few minutes or half the morning. I feel exhausted, but somehow energized that I'm alive and not being dragged from the bottom of the feeder canal. As expected, the sight has left my eyes again. But it is not replaced with complete blackness this time, as if a war is being waged inside my brain between the power of the light and the power of darkness.

As I crawl naked out of bed, feeling the scrapes and cuts from my rooftop sleepwalk, I decide to let the opposing powers go ahead and duke it out. I have no control of the outcome. I have only the memory of that little boy killed in the bombing. Maybe if I can learn to forget him, or at the very least figure out a way of storing his memory away inside a brain-vault, I can one day lose the blindness forever.

But forgetting the death of a little boy…forgetting the thin coat of dust that covered his face, his wide-open blue eyes, the star-shaped hole in his chest, or the way his feet were so distorted…forgetting something like that would be like living without breathing.

* * *

The smell of oil paint, turpentine and freshly brewed espresso fills the air of the studio when I make the six steps to its center. The smells tell me Grace is painting. If I look in the directions of the open French doors, I can make out the dark silhouette of Grace sitting at her easel. She is surrounded by light. I can almost feel the fire burning off of her as she creates an image I can only hope to see one day.

“Good morning, sleepy head,” she says, the tone of her voice having entirely lost the stress and panic that filled it just a little while ago.

“What time is it, Grace? How long have I been asleep?”

“It's eight-thirty. You slept for another two hours after I saved your life.” She laughs.

“You saved my life?”

“That's my story.”

I hear her get up from off her stool.

“Coffee,” she says.

“Keep painting, Gracie,” I say. “I can manage—”

“—to burn up the building. That's a gas stove, my lovely husband-to-be. And must I remind you that at present we live above a bookshop. Real paper books.”

“That place downstairs has been practically emptied out last I looked,” I say.

“Last time you looked?” Grace says.

“Very funny.”

“You've got to look on the bright side, love.” She giggles at what she just said and how she said it. “Oops, there I go again.”

She makes the coffee for me, and I take it out onto the terrace with me. If I stare directly into the sun, my head fills with a light so profound it warms my entire body. Heaven must be like this. Light and warmth and happiness.

I drink my coffee with milk and soon I feel a hand on my shoulder.

“Come,” Grace says. “I want to show you something.”

Taking me by the hand she leads me the three or four steps back inside the apartment through the open French doors, past her easel.

“I think I'm done,” she says, as she releases my hand. “I worked like a fiend while you slept.”

“You're kidding right, Grace? I'm blind as a bat right now.”

It's true there have been a few times I've been able to see with near 20/20 vision over the course of the past week. But during those times, Grace has always made sure to cover her work-in-progress with a paint-stained drop cloth. Even though it was very likely I would not be able to see her new painting at all, she nonetheless would not take a chance on my seeing it during my temporary bouts of eyesight. Now she wants me to see when I am blind.

“Here, Nick,” she says, once more taking hold of my hands. “What do you see?”

Gently, she lifts my hands and brings them so close to the painting it's as if I can feel the heat radiating off the canvass. She proceeds to move my hands in the exact shape of the object she has spent the past week sketching and painting.

“Take your time,” she says. “I want you to try and see it.”

I feel my hands making a kind of circular motion. Then she drops them just a bit, and my hands make a more elliptical motion. Next she moves my hands to the right, then to the left. She lowers them another few inches and moves them up and down, not once, but twice, as if to translate two parallel sticks or piers or even legs. I'm still confused and blind. But, at the same time, something strange is happening inside me. I feel like laughing, but I also feel like crying. I feel Grace's hands wrapped around my own and feel her feathery hair brushing up against my face and I smell its rose petal scent.

Grace is not my wife yet. But she can see and I can't. Somehow, I know what she is painting and I know that it has everything to do with us, and what we will make together one day.

“Now what is it you see?” she begs me.

I release a deep exhale. I feel as if a spirit or ghost has just passed through my worn body.

“I know this is crazy,” I whisper. “But I see our child. Our baby.”

Grace lets go of my hands and she holds me so tightly I feel our beating hearts pressing up against one another. The salt in her tears stings the cuts and scrapes on my face. They remind me of how much I cannot live without her.

My future wife. My life. My heart. My Grace.

Chapter 11

THE STUDIO APARTMENT ABOVE the old bookshop is a peaceful oasis surrounded by the memories of war. It is a safe haven for a blind man who is neck deep in love and war. But it is also small and cramped. Which is why, blindness or no blindness, we decide to get dressed and take the boat taxi to Piazza San Marco where we can blow a week's pay on lunch and a bottle of Valpolicella at the outdoor café across from the cathedral.

Grace is happy with the idea.

Giddy happy.

I don't have to see her to be able to feel her happiness. Her infectious happiness. It is better than the absolute panic she experienced when I nearly fell to my death from up on the roof. Better than the anxiety-ridden woman she was yesterday afternoon at the café when I gave her a hard time and a strange man with black eyes kept staring at her. She keeps placing her open hand on her flat belly. I don't require perfect eyesight to know she's doing it. She is always holding my hand and she must release it in order to do this. I know she is touching her belly, because just moments ago, when I wrapped my arms around her from behind, she once more took hold of my hand and pressed it there for a time that seemed very long. Her hand was warm and so was her bare belly. I know she was trying to tell me something. Sometimes the best conversations I have with Grace are the ones we carry on silently.

When we are dressed and have our black leather coats on, Grace opens the door. I'm about to step out behind her when the phone rings again.

“Let me get it this time,” I say.

I step back inside the apartment, shuffle the couple of steps to my right, where the wall-mounted phone is located beside the door. I feel for the receiver, pick it up.

“Pronto.”

My ear fills with white noise. Not loud white noise. More like the static that comes from a bad connection, or a cell phone with bad reception. I listen for a voice, but thus far, I hear nothing but the static.

“Who is it?” Grace asks from outside the open door on the stone landing, her soft voice echoing in the open stairwell.

I find myself turning in order to glance at her. But of course, this is just instinct kicking in.

The sound of her booted feet shuffling against the stone landing tells me she is taking a step closer to the open door.

“It's him again, isn't it?”

I hold up my hand as if to say,
Please don't talk
.

Grace gets the message and goes silent. It's possible she's holding her breath.

“Who'sthere?” I say into the phone. Tone even keeled, not at all threatening.