About Grace

Winkler is 59 years old and is returning to Cleveland, Ohio, from Kingstown, St. Vincent, for the first time in 25 years. He looks around the plane and notes that most of the passengers appear to be American, including the couple seated beside him. Winkler drifts off to sleep, and the woman beside him wakes him with a gentle shake of his shoulder. He warns her that the luggage compartment above her isn’t latched and will pop open. The woman asks her companion about it, and he tells her it’s fine. Winkler doesn’t push the issue, but a moment later, the plane hits some turbulence and the compartment pops open, causing one of the couple’s bags to fall. Something inside breaks.

Winkler has dreams that come true. Usually, the dreams are quickly forgotten until something causes him to recognize the moment, such as a smell or a sound. Sometimes the dreams are more intense, making themselves known as more than a simple dream. Remembering these makes him remember the past.

Winkler thinks back on one of these particularly intense dreams: His infant daughter, Grace, is crying somewhere in the house while a flood rages in the neighborhood outside. He rushes to his daughter’s bedroom, but she isn’t there. He searches through the house, aware of the sound of motorboats outside. The phone isn’t working. He opens the basement door and finds it completely flooded. He turns to the living room, finally finding his daughter on a high shelf on his wife’s planter. He takes Grace outside and struggles to wade through the waist-deep water. Trying to get the attention of a nearby boat, he stumbles. The water pulls at him, and he can’t regain his footing. He holds Grace high above him, but his own head goes underwater. Eventually, he regains his feet. He calls again for help. The boat approaches, and in its light, he can see that Grace is pale and nonresponsive. Someone tries to take her from him.

Winkler’s memories go back further to 1975, when he’s 33 and living in Anchorage, Alaska. He works for the National Weather Service. At lunchtime, he goes to the local grocery store to buy a sandwich and sees a woman studying the rack of magazines, two boxes of cereal in her cart with a half-gallon of milk. Winkler realizes that he dreamed this moment. He knows she’ll drop a magazine and he’ll pick it up. When this happens, his hand is shaking. She doesn’t take the magazine. Instead, she runs out the door. Winkler buys the magazine, the contents of her basket, and his own sandwich. Winkler studies the magazine and eats the cereal.

Several months later, Winkler sees the woman at the grocery store again. He follows her to the First Federal Savings and Loan, where he sees that she works as a bank teller. One day, Winkler goes to the bank with fresh boxes of cereal and the magazine and approaches her window. He tells her about meeting her that day in the grocery store. She tells him to keep it all. Winkler asks her to a movie, but she shakes her head no and indicates that she’s married. He gives her his name and tells her where he works in case she changes her mind.

Several months later, the woman, whose name is Sandy, calls him and arranges to meet him at the movies on a Wednesday while her husband plays a hockey game. At the end of the movie, they speak briefly. She admits that she had a sense he’d be there in the grocery store that day and that he’d pick up the magazine for her. She tells him she’ll call the following Wednesday. They begin to meet every Wednesday.

Winkler learns that Sandy married her husband, Herman Sheeler, 15 years ago after their senior year of high school. She doesn’t like Herman’s fondness for garlic salt. Herman is a branch manager at the same bank where Sandy works. She finds him boring and her life uneventful.

Three months later, Sandy asks to go to Winkler’s apartment with him. They sit awkwardly in his living room for a while, talking about his dissertation on ice crystals, before going to bed. Winkler thinks he’s in love, living only for those Wednesday afternoons. Sometimes he goes to the bank and slips notes to her through the drive-through or leaves a flower on her counter. She talks about her dreams for the future and her desire to pursue a more exciting career, such as a doctor, pilot, or metal sculptor.

Sandy tells him that she isn’t unhappy in her marriage to Herman. She just feels trapped, and she envies younger women who are living their lives more fully. She tells Winkler she knows Herman can’t have children but never told him. Several months later, Winkler tries to tell Sandy about the dream he had before meeting her, but she interrupts to tell him that she’s pregnant.

Winkler’s work begins to suffer because he’s distracted by Sandy’s pregnancy and her failure to tell him what she plans to do. One day, he learns that she called in sick at the bank, so he goes to her house. He offers to run away with her, but she refuses to speak to him where her neighbors might see. He convinces her to meet him for coffee, but she still won’t talk about things. He learns that she stopped going to work. She also won’t answer the phone at her home. He buys a starter kit for metal sculpting and leaves it at her home.

When he gets a job in Cleveland, Ohio, he takes his car to Sandy’s house and leaves it with her, asking her to use her skills as a metal artist to make it more exciting. Although Herman doesn’t know what Winkler is talking about, Sandy agrees to the contract. Winkler promises to return in a week. After six days, Sandy calls and asks Winkler to come to her garage late that night. He withdraws all his money from the bank, packs a duffel bag, and takes a taxi to her home. She opens the garage door, her things already in the car, and they leave Anchorage together.

They drive in silence. Sandy only tells Winkler that she told Herman the truth and he thought she was joking. When they arrive in Cleveland, they search for a house, seeing several before Sandy is inspired by a two-story home in a subdivision called Shadow Hill near the Chagrin River. Winkler works for a local television station as a meteorologist and occasionally does live broadcasts. Sandy is worried about someone finding them and often refuses to answer the phone or the doorbell. Eventually, she loses her fear and begins leaving the house on her own. She asks Winkler to marry her but refuses to answer him when he asks if she plans to divorce Herman. When they marry, they celebrate with Winkler’s coworkers. Sandy turns the unfinished basement into her art studio. She begins work on a project she calls “Paradise Tree.” Winkler stops having dreams. He feels safe in his new life.

Winkler’s mother immigrated from Finland and worked various jobs before putting herself through nursing school and marrying a milkman. They lived in a furrier’s storehouse converted into apartments. Winkler developed a fascination for snow when his mother taught him about frost and snowflakes and shared a book called Snow Crystals by W. A. Bentley that included micrographs of snowflakes. At eight, he created a book of drawings for his mother of snowflakes he studied with a Cracker Jack magnifier. In grade school, he learned about the water cycle. In high school, he became fascinated by the patterns of water and its distribution phenomena. In college, he gleefully studied the hydrologic cycle, which bored other students, but in graduate school, his study of water and snow was limited to the mundane due to an academic focus on engineering applications.

One night, at age nine, Winkler had a dream that he saw a man get hit by a bus. His mother woke him, telling him he’d sleepwalked. Two days later, Winkler was walking home with his mother from the grocery store when he began to recognize details from his dream. He told his mother something was about to happen to the man leaving the store across the street. His mother saw the bus coming and realized what was about to happen. She waved to the man but was too late to warn him. Everything happened just as Winkler saw it in his dream.

This wasn’t the first time Winkler predicted something for his mother. She asked him questions about the dreams, but Winkler struggled to answer them. After the man, George DelPrete, died, the dreams stopped for a while.

In October 1976, Sandy is near her due date. She and Winkler are walking through a park near the river when Winkler begins to recognize details from a past dream. He points out a man to Sandy who is about to attempt to catch falling leaves. Winkler explains how his dreams sometimes come true. Sandy isn’t open to the possibility. They never talk about it again even though Winkler feels as though it’s a dangerous elephant in the room.

Their daughter is born on November 4, 1976. They name her Grace. Winkler instantly falls in love with her, excited when people comment on how much she looks like him. Life returns to its routines, disrupted only by Winkler’s sleepwalking. He begins dreaming again, mostly about Grace, but he can’t tell if these are normal dreams or something more. Then he has the dream about the flood.

A few days after the dream, Winkler considers leaving with Grace. He wishes he could convince Sandy to believe that his dreams are visions. He continues to have the dream and suggests to her that they move across town or go on vacation, but she insists that they can’t afford it. She says he’s acting oddly. He recalls the support his mother gave him after George DelPrete died, wishing he had the same support from Sandy.

Sandy tells Winkler he’s sleepwalking again. When he predicts rain, he tells Sandy about the dream, but she insists it’s only a dream. One night, he wakes up outside by the car with Grace in his arms. Sandy takes Grace and goes back into the house. He tells her it’s going to flood because the ground is frozen, giving the rainwater nowhere to go. Sandy is angry because she’s afraid Winkler will hurt Grace while he’s sleepwalking. She insists that he see a doctor.

Sandy makes a doctor’s appointment for Winkler, but he doesn’t go. He continues trying to convince her of the danger of the coming rains. He hides the hat Grace is wearing in his dream, but Sandy makes him return it. The rain has begun, and flooding has already caused chaos in the area. Water is filling their basement. Sandy worries about her sculpture, but it’s too large to remove. Winkler insists that they get a hotel room. That night, Sandy wakes Winkler when he sleepwalks again and places Grace in the car. Sandy locks him out of the hotel room.

Winkler sleeps at the television station. He does several spots in the morning and then returns to the hotel to find the room empty. Sandy left no note, and he can’t find her anywhere. He drives home, but the flood waters are too high for him to get close to the house. He parks at a neighborhood school and walks. As he approaches his house, he sees a tree fall in a neighbor’s yard. He studies the house but is afraid that if he goes inside, his dream will unfold. Instead, he returns to the car and to work.

After work, Winkler drives to Pennsylvania. He gets a motel room and watches the news before calling Sandy’s hotel room. There’s no answer. He calls the house, but the phones are out. He has the dream again, wakes, and calls Sandy’s hotel again, but no one answers. He calls his television station to ask if there are fatalities from the flood. They say no. Winkler drives to New York and abandons his car in Manhattan.

Winkler rents a room above a tavern. He calls Sandy’s hotel and learns that no one has checked out, but the room is empty and unpaid. Winkler calls a neighbor, who says that no one is at the house. Winkler sends a telegram to Sandy and then withdraws $700 from their joint account. He continues to attempt to call her, his imagination torturing him with all that might have happened to her and Grace.

Exhaustion finally forces Winkler to sleep. He dreams that Sandy finds him and that he takes Grace and begins to walk out of the room but trips and drops Grace on the stairs. The next day, Winkler leaves the room and stays in several motel rooms over the next few days. Each time he sleeps, he has a similar dream. He doesn’t know if these are premonitory visions or just dreams, but he can’t risk it. On a night when he’s turned away from a hostel, he wanders onto the docks. Winkler uses the last of his money to buy passage on a British merchant freighter, the Agnita, bound for Venezuela.