“Memory gallops, then checks up and veers unexpectedly; to memory, the order of occurrence is arbitrary. Winkler was still on an airplane, hurtling north, but he was also pushing farther back, sinking deeper into the overlaps, to the years before he even had a daughter, before he had even dreamed of the woman who would become his wife.”

This comment on memory becomes important as Winkler moves through his life and spends much time reflecting on the events that brought him to the place where he finds himself. Winkler often uses memory to explore ideas of motivation, purpose, and time. By relying on his memory to understand what’s happening in the present, Winkler explores the idea that time cycles and that experiences often reflect certain repetitions that he might learn from.

“The light seemed to bring a glaring clarity: the edges of clouds, the illumined leaves, early shadows playing beneath the trees—Ohio teemed with small miracles. Standing there some mornings he imagined he could glimpse the architecture of the entire planet, like an enormous grid underlying everything, perfectly obvious all along—the code of the universe, a matrix of light.

I have never, he thought, seen things so clearly.”

In the early days of his marriage to Sandy, Winkler finds contentment in the life they’re building together. His sense that he can see things clearly foreshadows his dream of his infant daughter’s death and his subsequent actions. This moment is significant because Winkler will never again see as clearly, either metaphorically or, as at the end of the novel, physically.

“When Winkler was nine he dreamed a man he had never seen before would be cut in half by a bus three blocks from where he lived.”

The introduction of death in Winkler’s dreams is important, as it foreshadows his dreams of both Grace and Naaliyah’s deaths. The fact that this first death occurs in front of Winkler and his mother is also important because it’s the beginning of Winkler’s belief that his dreams will always come true. This undying belief is the reason he abandons Sandy and Grace after his dreams of Grace’s death.

“How much easier it would have been if he and Sandy could have fought: a skirmish in the night, some harsh words, some measure of the truth actually spoken aloud. Maybe even—was it too much to hope?—a final belief: ‘I believe you,’ she would say. ‘It’s impossible, but I believe you. We have to leave.’”

Winkler’s desire to argue with his wife in an attempt to convince her that his dreams are real shows his desperation not only to protect his child but also to have his wife’s support like he once had his mother’s. This moment showcases the fear that both parents feel and their drive to protect their child, as well as how little they know each other at this early point in their marriage. Winkler thought he could count on Sandy’s support and is surprised that he can’t, but he also fails to recognize the fear she must also feel for Grace in light of Winkler’s insistence that she’s danger and his constant sleepwalking.

“All the cruelties of conjecture. Was he simply too weak? Too afraid? Had he wanted to flee? Maybe he had fled, too. Maybe she was glad Winkler had gone: no more tossing in the bed at night, no more sleepwalking, no more waking to find her husband empty-eyed over his sock drawer. Maybe she and Herman had been corresponding all along, while Winkler was at work, while Winkler was asleep. Maybe, maybe, maybe.”

After leaving his wife and child, Winkler questions his own motivations, and this leads him to question Sandy’s motivations. Not only does this reveal Winkler’s understanding that what he did wasn’t right, but it also shows his desire to place blame somewhere other than on his own shoulders. At the same time, it reveals a lack of trust and knowledge of the woman he married as well as the understanding that taking Sandy from Herman was wrong.

“‘She is beautiful,’ Winkler said. He wanted to ask about her, how old she was, if she went to school, but tears were flooding his eyes and he had to get up from the bench and go out into the night.”

Supporting the theme of Parental Bonds, when Winkler is introduced to Naaliyah, Felix and Soma’s daughter, he becomes emotional. Clearly, his tears reflect his sense of loss over Grace and the regret he’s struggling with over having to leave her. However, this moment is the beginning of a new bond between Winkler and Naaliyah that lasts far into Naaliyah’s adulthood.

“A day passed, then another, and another. As long as he did not think of Grace, it was almost easy. Had it been twenty-five days or twenty-seven? A month? The sun came up, the sun went down. Sandy did not appear at the door of Felix and Soma’s little blue house fuming with rage. No one appeared. He thought of his year with Sandy in the house on Shadow Hill, how her eyes went to the windows, the silent desperation of everything they never said, gaps and absences in every conversation, the past circumscribing the present, the future hemming in the past. He tried to imagine life as it must have been for Herman, how he must have let each day fall away, going to the bank, tuning out the inevitable gossip, each hour that much more distance between himself and his wife. Maybe he had found a new job. Maybe he had never given up hope.”

As time passes and Winkler settles into his new life in St. Vincent, he often thinks of Sandy, reflecting both on their past together and on her future life. These thoughts are marked by his growing understanding that they never knew one another deeply and shared little, which could also be his way of offering himself excuses for his actions. Additionally, Winkler reflects on the hurt he and Sandy caused Herman. In this reflection, he creates an existence for Herman not unlike his own, almost making himself and Herman interchangeable, something he does again later in the novel.

“All night he grappled with luminous doom. The rip had carried him nearly a quarter mile out. A smashed thwart, still nailed to one of the dinghy’s bilge panels, drifted past and he clung to it. Every few moments a star rose over the islands and another disappeared on the opposite side, under the horizon. Was the galaxy turning or was it the Earth?”

This is Winkler’s second fight against nature in a fit of despair. This explores the theme of Human Versus Nature as Winkler develops a habit of fighting nature each time he loses hope or loses focus on his motivation, in this case his determination to return to Sandy and Grace. Each time, Winkler comes very close to death only to survive by the grace of some object or person coming to his rescue.

“Perhaps, he’d think, staring at the sky above his shed—a brightening green bowl of light—this is a dream. Any moment I’ll wake and be thirty-three years old, in Ohio, in bed, in the middle of the night. The warm shape of Sandy will breathe beside me; I’ll hear Grace mumbling in the nursery. I’ll pull back the blanket; I’ll go to her.”

After 25 years of living in St. Vincent, Winkler imagines that he’s living in a dream, touching again on the symbolism of his dreams. While this isn’t a dream, it softens the unhappiness in Winkler’s current life and offers him a sort of hope he hasn’t allowed himself before. It also shows that Winkler’s focus and motivations remain on his wife and child despite time and distance.

“A trend recurred over and over: Winkler was on an airplane, returning home after twenty-five years; Winkler was on an island, dreaming of the future. George DelPrete stepped in front of a bus; his hatbox flew through the air. Grace suffocated in his arms. Now—again—Naaliyah drowned before his eyes. All these deaths, ordained perhaps by chance, or choice, or the complexities of some unfathomably large pattern—was there a difference? Would he be forced to relive the same events over and over? Would he always be compelled along variations of the same trajectories?”

The repetitiveness of time is an important motif in Winkler’s thought processes. In this moment, Winkler contemplates the dream he had about Naaliyah’s drowning, struggling with the finality of it as well as its similarity to the dream that brought him into Naaliyah’s life in the first place. As he looks at the patterns of the past that have constructed the life he has lived, he fails to see what future patterns might look like, once again missing the possibility that his dreams, though powerful and often frightening, don’t necessarily have to come true.

“How easy it is to let water take you. Warm and smooth—it is like surrendering to the bluest sleep. Don’t all of us, at our ends, whether we die in a desert or a quiet white room, drown in some way?”

As Winkler struggles to resuscitate Naaliyah after her near drowning, he reflects on the power of water over life and death. This again explores Winkler’s fascination with water and calls to mind not only Grace’s potential death but Winkler’s as well. The mention of the desert foreshadows a time when Winkler will nearly succumb to the power of the sun in a desert.

“The butcher carefully stretched his back. ‘You still don’t see it?’

‘See what?’

He shook his head. ‘This woman. Across the street. What did you dream when you dreamed her in the water?’

‘I dreamed she would drown.’

‘But did she?’

‘No.’”

While Winkler has searched for little sparks of hope throughout his time in St. Vincent, he has never truly felt hopeful. The butcher gives him real hope by pointing out how Winkler changed Naaliyah’s fate. While this might seem obvious, in exploring the theme of Love and Loss, the novel shows that Winkler’s fear for his daughter and his profound desire to protect her have kept him from believing in the possibility that she survived the flood, until an outsider points it out.

“She enjoyed sculpture. Pets and cruise ships. She had kept his name. He lowered his head to the desk. All I have to do is wake up, he thought. If I concentrate I will wake up.”

The theme of Love and Loss arises again when Winkler reads Sandy’s obituary and learns a few truths about her that he hadn’t expected. The fact that Sandy kept Winkler’s name for the rest of her life suggests both that she didn’t get back together with Herman and that she felt a connection to Winkler that she cherished enough to keep his name. This moment is surreal for Winkler and causes him to once again wish that he was dreaming, an ironic thought since it was a dream that took Sandy from him in the first place.

“The future machine says there are many Grace Winklers and all of them are the real Grace Winkler, so in that way your journey will never be done. He says you will see fire and you will die. The future machine says that to enter a world of shadows is to leave this world for another.”

Winkler’s visit to the first Grace Winkler on his list takes him to the home of a woman whose child gives him a prediction of his future for $10. This prediction is profound while also vague enough to sound true. However, the prediction foreshadows not only Winkler’s journey to meet each of the Graces on his list but also another fight with nature that nearly causes his death.

“Already the truth was becoming plain: this place would be no happy ending, no slate wiped clean, no port in the storm. He was arriving at the end of the line, no markers above him, no prospects, no tenth Grace on the list. Sandy was dead and his daughter had likely drowned twenty-five years before, and here he was in Boise, Idaho, after nearly sixty years of living and what did he have to show for it?”

Touching once more on the theme of Love and Loss, the novel depicts Winkler contemplating the end of his list of Graces and seeing nothing in his future. The hope that the butcher gave him has gone, and Winkler is regretting his choices in life. His idea that he has nothing to show for his life is a recurring thought that arises again later in the novel as he comes face-to-face with Herman.

“Who among us, in our lowest hour, can expect to be saved? Have you loved your life? Have you cherished each miraculous breath?”

Winkler reflects on the idea of rescue after his ordeal wandering in the desert of Idaho, which is the third time in the novel that he goes up against nature at a time of despair and survives. Like the times before, Winkler is saved. However, he can’t answer his own questions in the affirmative because he hasn’t loved his life or cherished anything since leaving his family 25 years ago, leaving these questions open to interpretation as likely Winkler’s own curiosity about why he continues to live when he feels that he has no purpose.

“Even without eyeglasses Winkler could see this place had its own kind of light: pale but brilliant, permanently waning, something like the light he had seen reflecting off the Alaska Range from the rooftop of his youth.

He listened to the trees shift and toss, a sound like breathing.”

As he recovers from his ordeal in Idaho, Winkler reflects on the past as well as nature. The light in the Yukon reminds him of the light his mother had taught him to see on the roof of their apartment building. In addition, Winkler personifies the movement of the trees, reflecting on the life going on around him as he recovers from his near-death experience. This opens the door for Winkler’s reflections over the winter, comparing time and water, and contemplating the repetition of life.

“But the work suited him, the tediousness of it, the challenge. The way it pushed other thoughts and desires to the edges. The thrill of seeing a magnified crystal, slowly wilting beneath his attention, did not abate. When he woke the day was his, with all its attendant minutes.”

Like he did on the island, Winkler turns to work to keep his mind off Grace and Sandy, forcing himself to focus on something else. This time, he returns to his boyhood fascination with snow crystals, trying to capture pictures of them. In reality, however, he’s clearly trying to avoid the address for Herman that Soma sent him as he continues to work out his grief in both knowing that Sandy is gone and believing that Grace is dead as well.

“A C on the door. Behind which lived his daughter and grandson. It was incomprehensible.”

After spending over 25 years believing that his daughter was dead, Winkler stands outside her door. In a moment that explores the themes of both Love and Loss and Parental Bonds, he wants to reach out to Grace to attempt to build a relationship with her, but he can’t find the courage to knock. This begins a process in which Grace expresses anger at Winkler’s abandonment but in which he eventually experiences redemption when she begins to soften and allow a relationship to develop between them.

“‘She didn’t stay with me, you know,’ Herman said once. ‘I mean, for years she only lived a quarter mile away, but she raised that girl on her own. I helped get her on her feet, found her a job at one of the banks. But she did it on her own. Took Grace to ballet and sent her to camp and washed her clothes and all of it. You know she was still married to you? Far as I know, anyway. Maybe she had boyfriends, but I never saw them.’”

Herman’s assessment of Sandy after she returned to Alaska reveals a side of her that Winkler wasn’t aware of and takes some heat from the anger that Sandy expressed just after he left. Apparently, Sandy continued to love Winkler, which suggests that her feelings for him were deep and lasting. It also suggests that she struck out in hurt but would have welcomed him home if he’d ignored her plea not to reach out to her. Winkler never really considers Herman’s comments, but his thoughts after visiting her grave suggest that they made a difference to him.

“He produced an adult-sized wallet from the pocket and unfastened it and withdrew a photo and stared at it a minute, then set it on the table and continued eating.

‘Your father,’ said Winkler, and Christopher, looking out the window, nodded.”

Winkler recognizes patterns in his own life, and now here is a pattern that will continue into Christopher’s life. Grace grew up without her father, and Winkler imagines that she wondered where he was, making up fantasies about him. Christopher is also growing up without a father but carries around a picture of him, suggesting both that Christopher has the same questions and imagines the same sort of meeting Grace once did and that Grace understands his need to know some things and thus provided Christopher with a picture of his father, something she likely didn’t have of Winkler.

“In memory, in story, in the end, we can remake our lives any way we need. To be surprised, truly and utterly surprised by what came into your life—this, Winkler was learning, was the true gift.”

Winkler contemplates what it means to get what you want, to know what’s coming in the future, and to believe that life is preordained. As he considers these things, he begins to sleepwalk again, and the dreams return. Knowing things before they happen is what changed the course of his life, so the fact that he’s appreciating the unknown shows a change in his outlook and a new hope for his life.

“He had knelt there maybe ten minutes when Grace tiptoed in behind him and stood to his right. Neither of them said anything. The beeping that was Herman’s heart sounded steadily. She shifted and her bicycle shoes clicked against the floor as she knelt beside him. Together, the unlikeliest of penitents, silently, grafting words to air, they sent their prayers into the room.”

Grace and Winkler’s relationship takes a meaningful turn after Herman’s heart attack and culminates in this moment of prayer. Winkler seldom refers to religion and only mentions going to church on Christmas, despite Soma’s deep religious beliefs. This moment not only joins Grace and Winkler in hope for Herman but also reveals the friendship that has developed between Winkler and Herman.