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David Winkler is a 32-year-old hydrologist leading a fairly boring life in Anchorage, Alaska. Since childhood, he has experienced dreams that occasionally turn out to be actual premonitions. The most vivid one involves a man cut in half by a bus. Despite his mother's best attempts to avoid any incidents (she keeps him home for several days after he confides the dream), it comes to pass that, after shopping for groceries on a Saturday, he witnesses a man --- carrying the same hatbox as in his dream --- keeping his inevitable date with the bus of destiny.
In the dream that most affects his adult life, he watches a woman drop a magazine in a store and he picks it up for her. Eventually, he picks up the magazine for one Sandy Sheeler --- a woman he knows he will fall in love with, a woman he semi-stalks for several months, whose magazine he keeps and reads until the pages are tattered, a woman who is married.
Their affair begins with afternoon movie matinees and stretches into Wednesday evenings spent in his apartment as her husband has hockey on those nights. Before long, she becomes pregnant and, since her husband has been deemed infertile, it is obviously David's. They run away together and end up in Cleveland where David has found a job with a TV station as the staff meteorologist and Sandy fulfills an artist's dream by constructing large, elaborate metal sculptures in the basement of their little tract house by a feeder creek of the Chagrin River.
David's baby daughter, Grace, is born, and as babies tend to do, she changes his life in completely unexpected ways. His happiness and contentedness are palpable as he counts the minutes at work until he can go home to watch his little girl sleep and watch his wife (because, despite not being divorced from her husband, they have married) toiling over her art. All is well.
Then he has a dream. He dreams of a long, rainy spell in Ohio, one that swells rivers to flood stage and even causes creeks to rise. He dreams of his house, deserted and filling with water, seemingly empty as he runs room to room, yet he knows this cannot be because he can hear a baby crying. He finds Grace and stumbles outside with her only to be met by a wall of water that sweeps them both away. He awakes. He cannot shake the dream and it stirs his old sleepwalking habit. It gets so bad that his wife will shake him awake in the driveway, sitting in the car with the baby on the seat, having just returned from driving to where or from neither of them have any idea. In addition to panicking about whether his dream will come true, he now panics about what he himself might do to his daughter in his sleep.
Ultimately, the dream comes true. It rains and rains. It floods. He spirits his family off to a motel. But after leaving them there and being sent away by Sandy out of fear of his sleepwalking, he returns to the house after attempting to call the motel and getting no answer. His street, neighborhood and home look exactly like the scene of his dream, and unable to go any further, he runs to his car and literally runs away.
David ends up in St. Vincent for 25 years. He becomes a laborer, then handyman, at a local resort he helps build. He is adopted as a strange, white uncle by an island family, whose daughter forms an unusual bond of the soul with him. He writes letters upon letters to Sharon, trying to find out if Grace is alive or if the entire dream became a reality. His simple life on the island is appealing and satisfying, yet his hunger for information on his daughter finally drives him back to the United States where he tracks down Sharon Sheelers and Grace Winklers from state to state until he ends up back where he started in Alaska. Ironically, his island "niece," Naaliyah, ended up in Alaska (partly due to the college recommendations he wrote for her) and he manages to find her out in the bush where she is preparing to spend the winter studying the hibernation tendencies of insects. They eventually return to the city where he finds answers to the big questions that have been haunting him for most of his life.
It would be easy to scorn David Winkler. It would be easy to call him a "little" man; a man who ran away from his responsibilities and duties; a man who left a "wife" and baby daughter one day and never came back. However, there is a much larger issue at hand. This is a man who really thought that his presence in his daughter's life was jeopardizing her safety. His wife even thought so. If this premonition didn't come to full fruition, then what about the next one he might have? Or the one after that? It is heart-wrenching to put oneself in these shoes; and it is heart-wrenching to watch him deal with this day in and day out for so long. In the end, it seems to make a very strong argument for the case that parental love in absentia perhaps can be just as strong as if the parent were present.
I highly recommend ABOUT GRACE --- it is beautifully written, has a quiet suspense that carries it right along, and a main character in David Winkler who the reader will come to admire and respect as a father, a father figure, and a man.
--- Reviewed by Jamie Layton
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