The Disappearance of Grace by Vincent Zandri Page A

with all their hearts.
    I stare down at the little boy with the dust that covers his face and his arms, spread out over his head like he’s sleeping on his back inside a crib. I wonder if paradise truly exists for him, or simply nothing but unconscious darkness.
    â€¦But then the dream shifts and I’m no longer in the village.
    I am instead inside the studio apartment over the bookshop. I can see perfectly. With my head propped up on a stack of down pillows, I can see the entire room. The kitchenette that makes up the far wall. The leather couch and the long harvest table pressed up against it. Grace’s easel to the right by the always open French doors. Grace lies beside me on her right side. She’s fast asleep, her naked body curled into a question mark of loveliness. She has become so much a part of me now that I ache at the thought of ever being separated from her again. She is my world, my heaven, my God and my soul. And I only want what she wants.
    â€¦And when the dream shifts once more, I am no longer lying beside Grace inside our studio. I am no longer at peace. I am sitting at a table at an outdoor café in Piazza San Marco. It is noon with a warm sun shining on my face on an otherwise cold day. To my left is the wide open basin and the supply barges and boats that bob in its never- ending chaotic wake. To my right are the hordes of tourists who compete with the thousands of gray/black pigeons that fight over their own tiny slice of real estate just outside the stone steps leading up to the cathedral.
    Seated directly across from me is Grace.
    I see her as plainly as I see the black-suited waiter approaching our table. He’s carrying something on the tray. Something we’ve ordered for lunch. When he arrives at the table, he sets the tray down onto one of those aluminum foldout tray stands. Set on the tray is a severed head. Grace’s head, her long black hair draping her face like a veil, a pool of blood collecting on the place below her cut-away neck.
    I shift my eyes to where she is seated across from me. Her headless torso occupies the chair. But she is not dead. She raises her hands, calmly crossing her arms, like she is simply soaking up the view. When I shift my gaze back to her head, her eyes open and she shoots me a smile.
    â€œI. See.” she says.

Chapter 25
    STARTLED AWAKE.
    I open my eyes. What all day had been nothing but a gray-brown blur interrupted only by the rays of the sun and, later on, the manufactured light radiating from your average longer-lasting light bulb, is now gradually replaced with vision.
    Real. Vision.
    There’s a connection here. Sleep and sight. Sight and sleep. And dreaming too. I’m not ignorant to the medical possibilities; the physiological reasoning.
    There’s a man standing in the center of the small square-shaped room.
    â€œI’m sorry to disturb you, Captain Angel,” he says in a soft nonthreatening voice. “You seemed to be caught up in a dream.”
    My thoughts shift from eyesight to the severed head of my wife. It was only a dream , I try and convince myself. But it’s like pretending the knife I’m plunging through my chest into my heart isn’t real either.
    I sit up straight, face the man.
    He’s younger than me. Taller, thinner. Dressed in a finely tailored navy blue suit, white shirt and gray silk tie. His black hair is slicked back with something that Grace would refer to as “product,” and he is clean shaven, as though immune to five o’clock shadow even when it’s more than three hours past that hour. A diplomat to the core, blessed with an assignment that any federal government worker with warm blood in his veins would die for.
    He pulls up a chair, holds out his hand.
    â€œDave Graham,” he states. “US Embassy. How can I be of service?”
    I take the hand in mine, amazed that I can actually see it and feel it. I grip it tightly. Like a soldier