He sends a foot down, noses about for the rung. His foot is as stiff as wood in his boot; in his eye is a blurring, lifting flake, a flying, he thinks, insect. But it isn’t, he knows that it cannot be: the spot stays, moves, watery, a wingy translucence. It begins, as soon as he looks away, to sweep across his eye.
He keeps his eye shut; he is not frightened. His trees, his house, his car in the drive he has kept his world in order. His yard is flawless, as smooth as a lake the ladder rises serenely from.
Walter rests a time, moves again. His leg grabs when he moves — an old hurt-heel to puffy ankle, up, a toothy length of chain dragged up through the vein in his leg. He is bleeding into his boot — that’s what it feels like. His eye is a stone in its socket.
The good leg the one he is standing on gives. Walter crumples, tumbles, the ladder shrilling across the gutter, fast; it doesn’t fall quite. He has the sense to let loose of it, to tuck, pitch, roll, an old athlete.
Hey, hey.
Something dullish at first, and then nothing. Walter lies in the snow looking up.
That was nicely done, he thinks.
Not a scratch, not a tweak he isn’t used to.
A car slides to a stop in the cul-de-sac, knocks the head off the snowman.
Ah ha, he thinks — the News at last. A peep, a word, in the stretch of a day — is it really so much to ask?
He feels his heart thump in the vein of his neck. He wants to lie there, sleep, the snow twisting down. He waits for the sound of the paper. Waits for the light from the lighthouse to pass.
He had a route as a boy, a bag and a bike. Rode through swelter, flood, freakish snow people used to. Mere mortals.
But here it is dusking. A cakewalk, inches. But here it is in the leavings, the very tail of the day, before the goddamn thing, flung out, sails out in its seasonal blue and whomps down onto the drive.
Grace doesn’t see her father, doesn’t notice, hardly saw the snowman before she swung the car into the drive. She can only do so much at once, after all, and Carl, this Carl, he is always talking. If he would hush — he won’t, but if he would — she could concentrate and drive.
She pulls the car up to the chainlink fence, steps out; the dogs are barking. She tries to remember their names. She remembers a dog named Brenja she used to fall asleep with in the hay barn, back when they had a hay barn, years ago, horses. Trees up and down the drive.
Grace walks back to the back of the car and lifts the wheelchair out of the trunk. She stands it down in the snow in the drive and, holding her foot against the wheel, pushes apart the wheels of the chair, the arms where Carl will rest his arms. She pushes until she hears the stays lock and the seat is smoothed and flattened.
Carl shoves his door open. He swings out, his fingers hooked in the raingutters, and drops himself into the chair. “Better lock it. Just because it’s your daddy’s neighborhood—”
She punches the locks down.
Carl catches at the wheels as they move up the drive. Grace feels the pull, the slackened weight — the wheels skipping ahead in the gravel.
“Don’t help me, Carl. Let me do it,” she says.
Grace moves a few steps up the slope of the drive and quits. Her hair, crimped and brassy, falls against his shoulders. “I’ve got to rest,” she tells him. “I’ve got to get some new shoes. This snow.”
“What do you mean?” Carl says.
“The snow always soaks through my shoes.”
Carl reaches down and pushes the wheels and she walks along behind the chair, not making a move to help him.
They pass under the lilted door of the garage, going along in the windowlight. They pass the push mower, the tools. The chair is gliding. There are racks of skis and fishing rods, a canoe hanging down from the rafters.
“Dad,” Grace says.
“He can’t hear you.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he can’t,” Carl says.
Carl reaches up and slaps the window.
“Try the door,” he tells her.
Helen, when she sees the car, doesn’t know whose it is. She does not recognize the girl who steps out of it. There are photographs, of course, of all the girls, portraits that sat on the TV But these have been in a drawer for some months now, almost since Helen moved in.
Helen has her own things, her own teacups to drink from, her own children to want to look at. But the house is full, you can hardly move.
She calls down the stairs to Walter. He must hear her, he must have heard the dogs. But he doesn’t answer.
The door opens, and the girl walks in. She lifts the lid off the pot of potatoes Helen is boiling on the stove.
“Carl,” the girl says and he says, “We got all night, so help me.”
The girl is hauling the front wheels of the chair up the shallow step into the kitchen, her back turned to Helen as she comes down the stairs.
Carl says, “You must be the new wife.”
“What did you say?” the girl says.
“I said you must be the new wife.”
When the girl turns to look at Helen, Helen realizes who she is.
“And you must be Francesca,” Helen says.
Helen holds her hand out.
“I’m the youngest.”
“Of course you are. And you are?” Helen says to Carl.
“Carl,” he says. “It’s Grace.”
He holds his hand out. He has broad, thick hands, a weak mouth. His sleeves are torn off at the shoulder seams.
“Pardon me?” Helen says.
“It ain’t Francesca,” Carl says. “It’s Grace.”
“This is Carl,” Grace says. She smiles a little, wrinkling up her nose.
“Yeah,” he says, “I said that.”
“We should have called first. But we were out,” Grace says, “we were driving around. I thought we’d just “
“Stop by,” says Carl, “you know.”
“Well, what a nice surprise. May I take your coat?”
Helen holds out her hand to take Grace’s coat.
“I ain’t wearing a coat,” Carl says.
“Then let me take your coat,” Helen says again.
“My coat’s all wet from the snow,” Grace says.
She turns her back to Helen, works her coat down to her elbows, straightens her arms, steps out of it, as though she has rehearsed each move. “I don’t have a good coat for the snow,” she says. “It hardly ever snows, you know. These shoes—”
Carl pops his chair up on its back wheels and wheels himself out of the kitchen.
“He likes to look around.”
Grace turns, too, lurches off. She walks on the bias, jerked, her head tipped, one shoulder dropped, weirdly stiff and listing.
That she walks off at all is what works at Helen; it is what Walter docs, with not a word. You want to talk? — fall in, rake leaves, do whatever he is doing. Trail him from room to room.
The snow is melting, dripping from the hem of Grace’s coat onto Helen’s slippers. Helen checks the pockets, lumpy, filled — with butterscotch, scraps of string, wads of wadded tissue. Finders, she thinks, keepers, the whole tribe of them. She is living in a museum of somebody else’s life.
She found packets of letters in Grace’s drawers, sealed, bound with a rubberband, from a boy in Arizona: Baby, where are you? I am not heard from you, baby, baby why?
Saltines and vaginal sponges. Half a dozen splitting pairs of a dead grandmother’s shoes.
Helen hangs Grace’s coat on the back of a chair and follows her into the living room.
Walter is in his wingback, in his usual place at this time of the day, sitting facing the wall. He likes to sit there and listen to music. He has hung his wet coat on the arm of his chair, snagged his cap on the collar. Grace stops behind him.