Gypsies

1

Michael skipped breakfast next morning.

“Straight to school,” Karen said. “And straight home. All right? I don’t want to be worrying about you.”

“Straight home,” Michael said—offhandedly, but with a seriousness under that, maybe even a little fear.

But that was good, wasn’t it? It would make him cautious.

She stood at the window with the curtain tucked back and watched her son walk down this empty suburban street until he was lost from sight, down beyond the intersection of Forsythe and Webster, where the McBrides’ big maple tree was shedding its leaves.

The mailman dropped a letter through the slot in the door: the letter was from Laura.

Karen carried it downtown, beside her on the front seat of her little Honda Civic, to the restaurant where she had agreed to meet Gavin. When he was late—predictably late—she took the letter out of her purse and turned it over in her hands a couple of times. The envelope was of some thick, clothy paper, like vellum; the return address was a P.O. box in Santa Monica, California.

California. She liked the look of the word. It radiated warmth, security, sunshine. Here in this Toronto restaurant everybody was dressed in fall grays and fall browns, fashionable downtown people scattered among these mirrors and tiles like leaves. Cold air prickled on her arms whenever the door swept open.

She opened the envelope slowly, with a halting motion that was eager and reluctant at once.

Dear Karen, the letter began.

Open loops and dark fountain-pen ink. The words as she read them took on Laura’s throaty contralto.

I got your note and have been mulling it over. Since you ask—and I know it’s none of my business— here are some thoughts.

First off, I am sincerely sorry about you & Gavin. Is it any consolation to say I think you are 100 percent correct on this? (Even if the divorce isn’t—as you say— your own idea.) We gypsies aren’t cut out for middle-class life.

I know the whole thing must come as a blow. And of course there’s Michael. Fifteen years old—dear God, is that possible? I really would like to meet my only nephew. Is he as cute as his pictures? (Don’t tell him I said that) But I take it for granted. A heartbreaker. Is he adjusting?

I’m convinced that we ought to be more than Christmas-card relatives. It would be nice to see both of you again.

Yes, big sister. These are hints.

Karen, listen: they play old songs on the radio and I think of you. “Cast Your Fate to the Wind.” Remember? It’s better advice than you think.

I’m serious. Auntie Laura could use your company.

I can put you up for a week, a month, whatever. On short notice or immediately.

If you can’t say yes, say maybe. Ask and I’ll send directions, but RSVP.

It was signed in Laura’s unmistakable, overflowing script. Karen smiled in spite of her misgivings, reading it.

P.S., it said, under the bottom fold of the paper. The age of miracles is not over. Her smile faded.

She looked up and saw Gavin standing across the table. He gazed at her loftily and said, “You look like shit.”

She sighed. It was the kind of opener he seemed to prefer these days. “Well,” she said, “you don’t. You look impeccable.” It was true.

Gavin was nervous about clothes. He studied the fashion columns in Esquire as solemnly as a general planning a military campaign. He was tall, with a build he had developed at the racquetball club across the street from his office; he smelled of Brut and antiperspirant. “Seriously,” he said, pulling up his chair, peering at her. “Are you sleeping okay? You look tired.”

“Well, I am… hell, yes, I am tired.”

“I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“No,” she said. “I know.” It was just his way of talking. Truce, she thought desperately. What was important now was that Michael was in danger. “We’re here to talk.”

To talk. But it sounded ominous, so they ordered lunch instead. It was a restaurant Gavin knew, close to his office. He was in his element here. He ordered a seafood salad and a light beer. Karen ordered cottage cheese and fruit. Gavin talked a little about his work; Karen told him how Michael was doing in school. They were talking, she thought, and that was a beginning, but they were not talking—she didn’t mention the Gray Man.

There had been a time when talking to Gavin was easy. They had met at Penn State, where Karen was a year behind him in a B.A. course. Gavin was dissatisfied—not randomly rebellious in the way that was fashionable then, but looking for a way to inject meaning into his life. He was a Canadian, and he had resolved to go back home and study law. Law, he said, was a point of entry into people’s lives. It was where you could apply leverage, make a difference, change things for the better. We all want to change the world, Karen thought, recalling the Beatles tune, lately a TV ad for Nike shoes. Maybe Nike was one of Gavin’s clients.

The divorce was still pending. They were, in Gavin’s preferred language, “separated.” “Separated” meant he had left her last May to live with his girlfriend in her lakefront apartment. It had come as a shock: the separation, the girlfriend, both. Gavin cheated as impeccably as he dressed; Karen had never suspected. He just told her about it over breakfast one morning. It’s not working between us. I know that, you know that. Very cool. I’m moving out… Yes, I have somewhere to go… Yes, there is a woman.

She hated it. All of it. She hated the fact of his infidelity and she hated this feeling that her role had been defined for her: the jealous wife. Well, she told herself, to hell with that. I can be as cool as he can.

So she had gone along blithely: no yelling, no major scenes. Now she wondered if that was not simply another kind of surrender. Gavin, a lawyer, understood life as gameplaying, rough sport played in earnest, and what he had achieved with Karen was a kind of checkmate. Because she concealed her feelings he wasn’t forced to deal with them.

She had been bluffed and outmaneuvered.

No more. Too much at stake now for fuzzy thinking. She had made a list before she left the house: Questions to ask. Gavin was pressing to begin the legal proceedings, and she knew she shouldn’t agree to anything before seeing her own lawyer—as soon as she found one—but she wanted to raise the question of the house.

She wanted to move. She needed to move. Not only did the house contain what had become sour memories, but there was the problem of the Gray Man. She was vulnerable and alone in the big suburban house; she felt encircled there, besieged. For Michael’s sake, it was vital that they leave… and she wondered if they should not move out of the city entirely. The problem was that she had no independent income. Last week she’d gone to see an employment counselor and when he asked for a resume Karen was forced to admit she hadn’t worked outside the home for as long as her son had lived. Her prospects, the man informed her, were limited.

And now the household money was low and she didn’t want to ask Gavin, again, for cash. Come the divorce, she guessed he would be paying support. But that was in the future.

So she had worked out a plan. They would sell the house. With her share of the income Karen could relocate and take a vocational course, programming or something. And the support payments, when they finally began, would keep her and Michael fed.

It had seemed like a good plan when she worked it out at home; now, here in the restaurant, she was less certain. Gavin embarked on some story about the firm, office politics, it was endless; the waiter stole away with her half-eaten cottage cheese and replaced it with coffee and she realized, panicking, that lunch was almost over, time had run out, her courage had failed. “The house,” she said abruptly.

Gavin sipped his coffee, rested a knuckle thoughtfully against his chin. “What about it?”

She stammered out her plan. He listened, frowning. She didn’t like the frown. It was his patient look, his concerned look, the look she imagined him exercising on his clients. She thought of it as his yes, but expression: Yes, but it will cost more than you think. Yes, but we’ll have to go to court.

“It’s a good idea,” he said when she finished. “But not practical.”

He sounded so sure of himself. The finality of it was crushing. She mumbled something about common property, the divorce laws—it wasn’t his house, not entirely—

“Nor yours.” He drained his cup. “I explained this years ago, Karen. The house is a tax write-off for my mother. She bought it out of Dad’s estate. In the eyes of the law, we’re tenants. The house doesn’t belong to either of us.”

She had some vague memory of this. “You said that was a technicality.”

“Nevertheless.”

She sat upright, shocked at her own disappointment, the depth of the frustration welling up in her. “Don’t tell me it’s impossible. We could work something out.” But this was too much like pleading. “Gavin—I made plans—”

“It’s not up to me.” He added, “It’s the way things are. But you always had trouble with that, right? Dealing with reality—it was never your long suit.”

Her coffee cup twisted in her hand. The coffee spilled out; the cup crashed against the saucer. She pushed herself away from the sodden table.

“For Christ’s sake,” Gavin said tightly.

He had always hated scenes.

She drove away dazed.

Home, she felt feverish. She poured herself a drink and sat down with her notebook. Her mind felt busy but blank, a motor revving in a motionless car. She turned to a clean page and wrote:

Dear Laura.

It was like automatic writing, unwilled, a conspiracy between pen and fingers. She surprised herself by continuing:

Invitation accepted. Michael & I arriving by the time you get this. We’ll be staying at that hotel in Santa Monica, you remember the one, same as last time. Or I’ll leave a message at the desk if there’s no room. Look for us there.

Love—

And signed it. And put it in an envelope, and addressed the envelope, and marked it SPECIAL DELIVERY and loaded it with stamps.

She would mail it later. Or maybe not. Well, she thought, probably not. It was a dumb idea, an impetuous idea; she was only disappointed because of Gavin.

She crumpled the envelope. Then, “Well, damn,” she said, and unfolded it and put it in her purse. Outside, the light was failing. She looked at her watch. It was after six o’clock. Michael was late.

2

Michael left school at a quarter after four and began the walk home alone.

He had evaded Dan and Valerie on his way to the lockers. He didn’t want company, he didn’t want a ride. It suited his mood to be alone.

He wondered, not for the first time, whether solitude might not be his natural condition.

It was only September, but autumn was setting in in a serious way. He lived six long suburban blocks from the school and the shortest route home took him down two winding residential streets and across a power company right-of-way, past high-tension towers that sang in a demented high-pitched buzz whenever the weather turned cold. He walked that way now, no buzzing today but only a silence, the sound of his feet in the brown summer grass.

He liked this place, the isolation of it, the trees and wild meadows and high steel towers. On the left, there were box homes under construction, beams like naked ribs; on the right, an old stand of wild maples. Down the middle ran this meadow, gently rolling pastureland gone to seed at the foot of the power-line gantries. Walking here, he felt suspended between worlds: school and home, tract and countryside.

Real and unreal.

He pushed his hands down into his jacket pockets and rested a minute against a length of Frost fence. Off among the trees, a cicada began to hum. The wind, already an autumn wind, tousled his hair.

He felt sad for no reason he could understand.

The sadness was connected with his mother and connected with the divorce—a word Michael had only just permitted into his vocabulary. No doubt, it was connected somehow also with the Gray Man.

The worst thing, he thought, was that there was nobody to talk to about it. Especially not at home, especially not these days. You just couldn’t say certain things. Everything was fine, until somebody said the wrong word—literally, a word, like “divorce”—and then there would be a chilly silence and you understood that this terrible thing, this obscenity, must never be mentioned again. He couldn’t say “divorce” to his mother: it was taboo, an unword.

On TV, he thought, it would be easy. She would ask him how he was feeling, he would admit something—guilt, pain, it wouldn’t matter, something— maybe cry a little—there would be that release. Roll credits. Out here, however, here in the real world, it wasn’t practical.

And it wasn’t just the divorce. Michael didn’t have much trouble with the idea of divorce; half his friends had divorced parents. Much more problematic was the notion of his father living with someone else, a woman, a stranger—trading his family for that. It was hard to imagine his father’s life meandering on like a river, with Michael and his mother becoming something abandoned in the course, an elbow lake or an overgrown island. Michael wasn’t angry—at least not yet—but he was bewildered. He didn’t know how to react.

Hate him for leaving? It didn’t seem possible.

Hate his mother for driving him away?

But that was not an allowable thought.

Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe he wasn’t affected by it. That was possible. He had, God knows, other problems.

But he recalled the moment last week when he had crept into his mother’s bedroom, opened the top drawer of her desk, and copied out the telephone number she had written on the last page of her address book… the number of Michael’s father’s new home, the lakeside apartment Michael had never seen.

Strange thing to do, for someone who wasn’t affected.

But “divorce” wasn’t the only unmentionable word around Michael’s house. Deeper and more disturbing was this business of the Gray Man.

Michael thought of him as the Gray Man. He had come up with the description when he was six, back when the Gray Man started to appear in his dreams. Gray because of the slate-gray clothes he always wore; gray, too, because a kind of grayness seemed to radiate from him, like an aura, a gray aura. Even his skin was chalky and pale. Michael understood very soon that talking about these dreams disturbed his mother, that any other nightmare might elicit a hug or permission to sleep with the light on, but that the Gray Man would only invoke these frightened looks and frightened denials. No, there’s no such thing. And stop asking me.

But it was a lie.

He did exist. Out here in the world, out in the real world, a real Gray Man.

Michael had seen him for the first time when he was ten years old. They were driving cross-country and they had stopped at a gas station along the highway somewhere out in Alberta. A hot day, car windows down, nothing but blank space and blue horizon and this shanty filling station, some old guy pumping gas, and in the shade of the plankboard souvenir store, obscure amidst all this clutter and dust: the Gray Man. The Gray Man peered out from under a gray slouch hat with a fixed, attentive look Michael remembered, too vividly, from his dreams.

Terrified, Michael looked to his mother, but his mother had seen the Gray Man at the same time and she was terrified, too. He could tell by the way she was breathing, tight little gulps of air. Dad was paying the pump jockey, attention focused on his credit card as it ratcheted through the stamper in the old man’s hand, worlds away. Michael opened his mouth to speak but his mother laid a warning hand on his arm. Like a message: Your father won’t understand. And it was true. He knew it without thinking about it. This was something he shared with his mother, and only with his mother. This fear. This mystery.

The Gray Man didn’t move. He just watched. His face was calm. His eyes radiated a profound and scary patience. He watched as Michael’s father started the car, watched as they accelerated down the highway. I’ll wait, the eyes promised. I’ll be back. And Michael returned the stare, kneeling on the rear seat, until the Gray Man and the gas station both had vanished in the sun haze.

The horizon made him feel safe again. The Gray Man lost in an ocean of space: it was like waking up.

He knew better than to ask about it. What bothered him most was seeing his mother so scared. Her fear persisted all that day; she was not reassured by distance. And so he was carefully silent. He didn’t want to make things worse. “You’re awfully quiet today, kiddo,” his father said. “Sure you’re feeling all right?”

“Yes.”

No.

He was confused. How did he feel? Frightened, obviously.

But there was something else: he recalled it all these years later, here in the power company meadow. He felt it again.

Curiosity? But that was too mild a word. More like—

“Fascination.”

The word hovered in the cool September air like some dark bird.

Startled, Michael turned.

Briefly, the world seemed to go in and out of focus.

He thought, I should have been safe here. This was home turf, his own territory. It was certainly not a place for the Gray Man, who was a lurker, an alley person, a shadow person. But here was the Gray Man only yards away, slouch hat pulled down against the sunlight, the same man Michael had seen at the gas station in Alberta five years ago, not appreciably older but maybe—it was a sour joke—maybe a little grayer.

Michael took a shocked step backward and felt the fence press into his spine.

The Gray Man spoke. “You don’t have to be afraid.” His voice was rough, old, but deep and calming. He smiled, and the smile made his angular face seem less scary. His eyes, small in their battlements of brow and cheekbone, remained fixed. A thin line of scar tissue ran from brow to ear and up into the shadow of the hat. “I only want to talk.”

Michael suppressed an urge to run. With animals, they said, you should never show your fear. Did the same rule apply to nightmares?

“Going home?” the Gray Man asked. “Home to your mother?”

Michael hesitated.

“Your mother,” the Gray Man said, “doesn’t talk much, does she?”

Michael reached out and wrapped his fingers in the links of the fence, steadying himself. He felt weak, bewildered. His legs felt tremulous and distant.

The Gray Man stood beside him. The Gray Man was tall and calm. The Gray Man put a hand on his shoulder.

“Walk with me,” the Gray Man said.

Michael’s attention was tied up now in the Gray Man’s voice, the sweep and cadence of it; he wasn’t conscious of the route they were following, the places they passed. By the time he thought to look around they had left the power company meadow far behind.

“You feel different,” the Gray Man said. “You’re not like other people.” His hand on Michael’s shoulder was firm, fatherly.

The words brought back a flicker of fear. “Because of you,” Michael said accusingly. “You—”

“Not because of me. But we can start there. What is it you call me?”

“The Gray Man.” It was silly. It was a childish thing to say out loud in the cool September air. But the Gray Man’s laugh was indulgent, amused.

“I have a name. Well, I have lots of names. Sometimes—” His voice lowered a notch. “Sometimes I’m called Walker.”

“ Walker,” Michael repeated.

“ Walker. Tracker. Finder. Keeper.”

Like a song, Michael thought absently.

“What matters is that I know things about you. The things your mother won’t talk about.”

Michael asked in spite of himself, “What things?”

“Oh, all kinds of things. How lonely you feel. How different you feel. How you wake up sometimes… you wake up sometimes in the night, and you’ve been dreaming, and you’re afraid because it would be so easy to wake up inside a dream. As if dreams were real, a place you could go, maybe a place you visited once.”

And Michael nodded, strangely unsurprised that the Gray Man knew this about him. It was as if he had passed beyond fear and surprise into an altogether stranger realm. Sleepwalk territory, Michael thought.

They walked past darkened houses and brittle, silent trees. There was no wind. He didn’t recognize the neighborhood; he wondered fleetingly how far they had come. Nowhere near home, anyway. There was no neighborhood like this near home.

“We don’t go to the obvious places,” the Gray Man said, and Michael felt included in that we: a brotherhood, a special few. “We don’t walk where other people walk. You know that already. Deep inside yourself… you know that.”

He had never spoken about it. Seldom even thought about it.

But yes, it was true.

“You could walk out of the world if you wanted to.” The Gray Man stopped and bent at the waist and looked into Michael’s eyes. “The world has angles other people don’t see. Corners and doors and directions. You could step sideways and never be seen again. Like this.”

And the Gray Man moved in a direction Michael could only just perceive. Not away, exactly, but somehow… beyond.

And Michael took a tentative step after. “This,” the Gray Man said, smiling now. “This. This.”

A step and another step.

Michael felt an electricity flowing in him, a tingling sense of power. He was dizzy with it. Angles, he thought. Angles and corners and doors. A door in the air.

He could see the place the Gray Man was standing now, a cobbled hilly street, a horizon of hard blue sky and old industrial smokestacks, a faint smell of fish and salt in the air. He could not hear the Gray Man’s voice but saw him beckoning, a subtle but unmistakable motion of his pale hand. This way. This way. Only a step, Michael thought. This quiet miracle. It was only a step away …

“Michael!”

The sound came from far away. But his attention wavered.

“Michael!”

Closer now. Reluctantly, with a sense of opportunities lost, faltering, he turned away from the Gray Man, the cobbled street, the cold blue sky.

The sky he faced now was dark. A few stars blinked above the blue nimbus in the west. He did recognize this neighborhood: old houses and a slatboard grocery store on the corner, a mile or more from home and school.

His mother’s Civic was at the curb. The door opened and she was framed in it, breathless and frightened, beckoning him in. It was like the gesture the Gray Man had made. He wondered how much she had seen.

But he turned back to look for the Gray Man and the Gray Man was gone … no blue sky, no cobbled street, only a tattered hedge, this cracked slab of sidewalk.

Strange, he thought. Strange. He was so close.

His mother tugged him into the car. She was trembling but not angry. Shaking his head, still dazed, he buckled the shoulder strap around himself in an automatic motion as she gunned the car away from the curb.

“We’re leaving,” she said between her teeth. “We’re leaving tonight.” “Leaving?”

“We’re going to California.”

3

Karen stopped at the house long enough to pack a couple of cases, drove north to the airport, and left the car in the garage. God knows when she’d be back to claim it. But, technically, the little Civic belonged to Gavin, anyway. Let him worry about it.

She managed to buy two one-way tickets on a redeye flight to Los Angeles, departing a couple of hours before dawn. They waited the night out in the gate lounge, Michael stretched out over a bench. He looked dazed and sleepy against the comfortless vinyl. Karen hugged herself, watching him. The air conditioning was relentless.

After midnight she remembered the letter in her purse, the one she had written to Laura. She stood up, laid out her coat over her sleeping son, and went to the rest room in the lounge. Her face in the mirror was haggard and thin, cheekbones projecting under pale skin. It was the face of some stranger, some fugitive.

She dictated her letter over the phone to a telex agency. The telegram might make it across the continent before they did.

She had to wake Michael when it was time to board the plane. His eyes were heavy; he leaned instinctively against her. Long time since he had done that.

She did not want to think of how far she had driven to find him, or of how lost he had looked, standing on that broken sidewalk with one foot out of the world—or of the shadow she had seen beyond him, tall and patiently smiling.

4

Michael slept through the long plane trip.

He woke once a little after dawn. His mother was asleep; most of the plane was asleep. A sleepy-looking stewardess moved up the aisle, smiled absently at him, moved on. The drone of the aircraft filled his head.

He looked down through the window and saw the desert. He guessed it was the desert. It was swept with morning light, stark with shadows, a complex undulating wilderness. It was pathless, strange and empty, another world. Canyons and arroyos; arid Triassic seabed. Full of hidden angles, Michael thought, curious corners.

You could walk out of the world if you wanted to. And it was true.

Angles, Michael thought. Angles and corners and doors.

1

Later, when Karen explained why she had come, her sister Laura said, “I can take you to a place. A safe place. It’s where I live.”

And Karen turned to face the window of the hotel room. A crescent of beach, tousled palm trees, the murmur of the traffic. “You mean,” she said, “not here.”

“Not here. No. But not far away.”

Coming into California was like walking into a memory.

She had spent a week here in 1969. It was a bad time; she had argued with her sister; they had not parted amicably. Times change, Karen reminded herself. But the streets had not, the hotel in Santa Monica had not, not in any significant way. Michael sat dazed beside her in a miasma of vinyl and stale cigar smoke as the cab barreled down these broad, gray freeways from the airport. Involuntarily, she recalled odd bits of knowledge she had picked up over the course of a lifelong magazine addiction. Fact: palm trees are not native to Southern California. Fact: without irrigation, these endless stucco housing tracts would be as dry as the city of Beirut. But most of all she was struck by the quality of the sunlight, its angularity, a kind of light you never saw back East. It was not a brighter light but whiter, opalescent; it made hard shadows that faded, in the distance, to a wash of gray.

And of course the ocean. She remembered the ocean, the reach of it, how it filled the horizon. She stepped out of the taxi into this strange sunlight and marveled a moment at the distance she had come.

They were alone in the hotel for a few days. Michael didn’t talk much. He seemed to understand why they had come, the urgency of the trip, and Karen figured he was disoriented by it: certainly she was. He asked one morning why Aunt Laura hadn’t met them and Karen explained about the post office box—“She won’t have picked up her mail yet.” And so they waited in the room, ordered their meals from room service, left a message at the desk when, one afternoon, they went out to walk along the beach. Karen guessed she had become very Canadian in the years she had spent in Toronto, because the people she saw along the littered beach seemed very strange to her. A man wearing roller skates and a striped tank top bowled her off the sidewalk and, as she sat bewildered in the sand, looked over his shoulder and said something abusive. The words, thank goodness, did not register.

I’m a stranger here, she thought. I don’t belong here. No future in this place.

She was grateful Michael hadn’t seen. He was at a stall buying hot dogs. They ate silently, staring out at the ocean. Michael had always been quiet, Karen thought, but this new silence was disturbing. He seemed to be bracing himself for the next inevitable disaster. She sympathized with this intuition that their troubles might not have ended: it was her intuition, too.

And then they walked back to the hotel, and found Laura was waiting in the lobby.

Karen saw her first. She had that privilege, for a moment, of seeing without being seen. She found herself wanting to prolong it, to avoid announcing herself. Looking at her sister Karen felt a strange sensation of double vision, of time turning back on itself.

Laura was older, of course. But the two decades since 1969 had been kind to her. She was lightly tanned, very California, her hair cut boyishly short. Her figure was good. She was wearing a white sundress, a gaudy headband tied at the back, and cheerful bracelets at her wrists. As she turned, the bracelets chimed.

Their eyes met, and Karen thought for a fleeting moment: I could have been like that. She looks like me, Karen thought, but airier, lighter. Karen had always thought of herself as solid, earthbound; her sister looked as delicate as the wind.

She wondered, Is this envy? Am I jealous?

“Aunt Laura,” Michael said, seeing the recognition that leaped like a spark between the women.

Laura came across the tiled lobby with a mad grin and hugged them both.

They had lunch in the hotel coffee shop. Laura devoured a massive salad. “It’s the smog,” she said. “I’m not used to it. It does weird things to my appetite.”

Michael looked at her oddly. “I thought you lived here.”

Laura exchanged glances with Karen. “Not here,” Laura said. “Not exactly.”

Karen left Michael in the hotel room to pack— and to catch the end of a Dodgers game on TV—while she and Laura took a brief stroll down the boulevard.

“I don’t know,” she said. Everything seemed strange and sudden now, the appearance of her sister, these old connections and older barriers. She felt a kind of panic, the urge to back off a step, to reconsider. “I’m grateful for the invitation. And it’s what we came here for. Of course. To see you … to visit. But I’m concerned about Michael.”

Laura said, “He doesn’t know?”

Karen thought, We always did this, didn’t we? Talked in these ellipses. We do it still. “There was never any need for him to know.”

They found a bench overlooking the tarry beach. Offshore, against the white glare of the horizon, a tanker moved toward port.

“I’m not like you,” Karen said. “I’m even less like Tim. I never wanted it—to be able to do what we do. I didn’t ask for it and I didn’t ever want it.”

“None of us asked for it. What are you saying, that Michael doesn’t know anything?”

“Why? Why force it on him? If he can live without knowing, why make him conscious of it?”

“Because it’s in him,” Laura said calmly. “It’s part of him. You must feel it.”

Maybe she could. Maybe she had felt it from the first, since his birth, before his birth: that he was different in the way she was different, that the frightening ability to walk between worlds was there in him— enclosed, like the bud of a flower, but real and potent.

But it was not something she wanted to consider. She said, “I worked hard, you know, to give him a normal life. Maybe you don’t know what that means. I guess it never mattered to you. But a normal life… it was the best thing I could give him. Do you understand that? I don’t want to throw it away.”

Laura put her hand on Karen’s arm. The gesture was calming, and it seemed for a moment as if she and not Karen were the older sister. “Don’t blame yourself. He forced the issue. Not Michael but—what do you call him? The Gray Man.”

The memory was like a weight.

“Stay with me,” Laura said. “At least a while. It’s been too long since we saw each other. And I want to get to know my nephew. And I want you both to be safe.”

“Is it really very far?” “We can drive there.” “What’s it like?”

“Like here. Very much like here. But nicer.” “All right,” Karen said sadly. “Yes.”

2

They checked out and loaded up the luggage in Aunt Laura’s car—a car Michael could not identify, probably foreign. It was small and boxy and the name Durant was written on the gas cap. The trunk swallowed all their luggage effortlessly.

They were on the road an hour before the change began.

It was a long drive. They followed the San Diego Freeway south past shimmy instant suburbs and forests of desiccated palm trees, past oil wastelands and cracked concrete underpasses scrawled with Hispanic graffiti. Laura didn’t talk much, seemed to be concentrating on the driving. It was coming on for dusk, rush-hour traffic, blinders pulled down to keep out the setting sun. Michael felt the tension rising in the enclosed space of the car.

He understood that something important was happening. They were going to Aunt Laura’s place to visit, to stay a while, that had been established… but more than that. His mother’s anxiety was obvious. She sat beside Aunt Laura with her spine rigid and her head held almost primly forward. And he could see the concentration gathering in Laura herself, a tensing of muscles.

They left the freeway on an off ramp and turned west toward the ocean, through a range of scrubby brown hills. There was more housing going up along these dry ravines. Billboards for Model Homes. Who would live here? Michael wondered. Why? What was there to draw all these people?

And then they came within sight of the ocean, a gray flatness, shabby roadside stalls and businesses, salt air and the rancid smell of diesel oil.

The change began as the sun was setting.

Michael thought at first it was a trick of the light. The sunset seemed to suffuse the car through the windows on the right. It was momentarily blinding, the way a lance of sun off hot, still water is blinding. But not only that. He felt a surge of something inside him, a disorientation, as if he had been blindfolded and spun a dozen times around. For a fraction of a second Michael thought he was falling, that the car was plummeting through empty space. He blinked twice and held his breath. Then the tires bit pavement again, the suspension bottomed and then steadied. The brightness faded.

But the memory lingered. This was a familiar feeling. When had he felt it before? Just a little while ago, he thought … in Toronto. With the Gray Man.

Like this, Michael thought: a stepping outside and beyond, through the secret doors of the world; and he looked outside with sudden startlement: Where are we now?

But the world—this road—looked the same. Or nearly the same. It might be imagination, but it seemed as if some of the shabbiness had gone. The storefronts were a little cleaner, a little brighter. The air (he was almost certain) felt fresher, the sunset brighter but less gaudy.

He caught Laura’s eye in the rearview mirror.

She looked at him and nodded solemnly, as if to say, Yes, I did that. Yes, it’s real.

He cleared his throat and said, “Where are we going?”

“My place,” Laura said calmly. “I told you.” A sign announced the distance in miles to a town called Turquoise Beach. “That’s it… that’s where I live.”

3

Karen had never been good at dealing with the unexpected. She was cautious, therefore, in evaluating this place Laura had brought her to. Turquoise Beach.

A name not on any map she had ever seen, though she supposed you could go to a gas station—here—and buy a map that would have Turquoise Beach marked on it. And other strange places.

They arrived after dark, but the town, what she could see of it, was an innocuous old seaside town, Victorian buildings and newer stucco storefronts. There was something quaintly bohemian about the beaded curtains fronting doorways and the stained glass shining from upper-story apartments. They drove down a crowded beachfront main street, cafes and patio restaurants open to the warm night. A tiny storefront window proclaimed all kind of shells. The one next door offered antiques, hurricane lamps, drift glass—sale! And the people on the street were almost as quaint. They were dressed in what Karen thought of as gypsy fashion: faded Levi’s, quilted shirts in bright colors. There was a woman with feathers braided into her long dark hair.

Beyond this hub was a network of shadowed streets and quiet houses, a similar mix of Victorian brickwork and airy wood-frame buildings. Laura, humming to herself, turned west toward the ocean and parked at last in a patch of gravel adjoining a three-story slatwood house. “We’re the top two floors,” she said, climbing out.

Karen stood in the coolish night air feeling suddenly alone in this new world, reminding herself that it really was that, a new world. Did Gavin exist in this place? If she phoned their old number in Toronto, would he answer?

Did Canada exist, or had the borders been redrawn?

Strange. It made her shiver. She listened to the faint rushing of waves against the shore, prosaic and real. And the stars, she thought: the stars were still the same.

Laura came abreast of her holding two suitcases. Karen said quickly, “Here, let me have one.” But a bearded man bustled out of the front door of the house and took the case out of her hand. “You must be Karen,” he said.

Laura said, “This is Emmett. Emmett lives downstairs. Emmett is helpful.” Emmett smiled somewhat shyly.

He’s courting her, Karen thought. But wasn’t someone always? Laura had always attracted men. Laura had a knack with men.

Whereas Karen had married the first man who showed any interest in her… who had left her to live with his girlfriend by the lake. “Hello, Emmett,” she said.

Michael came around the car with his own suitcase weighing him down. Emmett wisely didn’t offer to take it; instead he said, “Let me show you the stairs. Mike—right?”

Michael followed him into the house.

“He’s nice,” Karen said.

“So? You approve?”

“My first impression is good.”

Laura smiled. “Emmett and I are pretty much loners. But we’ve been circling a little bit. There are—” She made a seesaw gesture with her hand. “Possibilities.”

Karen said hopefully, “You have coffee?”

“Costa Rican. Fresh-ground.”

“I want a big cup of coffee. And a shower.” And a bed, she thought privately. Something soft. With clean sheets.

“Can do. Told you it was nice here.”

And Karen understood that they had begun to be sisters again. After all these years. In this strange place.

4

They sat around Aunt Laura’s old kitchen table for an hour before bed, the two women talking about nothing in particular, sipping coffee from porcelain mugs. Michael watched with a growing impatience. He felt excluded: not from the conversation so much as from what was left unsaid. Between them, he thought, they know. They understand.

When he couldn’t take it anymore, he stood up. It had been a long day and his head was buzzing. But he felt the urge to say something, to make them acknowledge the thing that had happened. This was taboo: but the world was different now; he felt the words come welling up.

“You ought to explain,” he said. And into the sudden silence: “I mean, I’m not blind. I don’t know where we are, but I know you can’t get here from the hotel. Not down the regular roads.” Roads, he thought, angles, doorways. “I felt it,” he said. “You should explain.”

His mother looked away, folded her hands in her lap, regarded her folded hands wordlessly. Michael felt a sudden remorse. But his Aunt Laura wasn’t angry or surprised. She looked at him steadily from her place by the window.

“Soon,” she said quietly. “I promise. All right?”

The gratitude he felt took him by surprise: it was that intense. “AH right,” he said.

Because, the thing was, she meant it. He could tell.

“But bed now,” Laura said. “I think that’s a good idea for all of us. Can you find your room?” Upstairs and to the right.

Tired as he was, Michael lay awake for a time in his new bed in the dark, listening to the night sounds of his aunt’s house and the quiet pulsing of the surf. The house was quiet. For a long time, there were no voices from the kitchen.

1

A stranger to this world, Karen decided her wisest course would be to understand the immediate neighborhood.

She found an old Texaco road map in one of Laura’s cluttered kitchen drawers. On the map, the town of Turquoise Beach was a black dot nestled in a curve of coastline between Pueblo de Los Angeles and San Diego. Pueblo de Los Angeles sounded strange, but everything else—she was not very familiar with California—seemed roughly in its place. Across the border from San Diego was a Mexican city called Ciudad Zaragoza. Was that right? San Francisco was familiar and reassuring, but what about the large towns marked Alvarado, Sutter, Porziuncola? She couldn’t find Hollywood: should it have been on the map? Still… the familiar outweighed the strange.

I’ll get used to it, she thought. In time, I’ll know where I am. As a gesture toward the future, Karen taught herself the layout of her sister’s apartment. Two bedrooms up and a futon in the spare room downstairs, a large central living room with polished wooden floors and broad windows overlooking the sea. Paperback books on homemade shelves and gauzy curtains that moved in a daily breeze from the west. On the living-room wall Laura had hung a poster print of the Edward Hopper painting of a lonely Pittsburgh diner.

The beach was undemanding, so Karen followed it north for a mile or so one morning. Beaches were not susceptible to change. Rock and water and sand would not surprise her. The littoral was a complex terrain of black stone and tide pools, which discouraged casual sunning but was good for beachcombing. Karen felt an instinctive liking for the people she saw that overcast day, picking their way along the water-line with somber expressions and knitted sweaters. From a promontory overgrown with sea grass she was able to sit and look back at the town, its quiet grid of roads, to identify Laura’s tall house among all the others. Home, she thought tentatively. But the word was only hypothetical. She tasted it with her tongue and wondered whether it would ever make sense again.

The wind came in from the sea, and she shivered and began the long walk back.

The next day Laura drove her into town for lunch. Michael said he’d be okay at the house with Emmett. They were tossing an old softball down by the water; Emmett grinned and nodded. Emmett was a musician (Laura said), but trustworthy; yes, he would make sure Michael was fed.

By day, the town of Turquoise Beach seemed even more cheerfully low-rent. Laura explained that it was pretty much a bohemian town. The oldest houses, she said, dated from the twenties. There had been a successful cannery operation in Turquoise Beach from 1923 through the Depression, and the cannery barons had built these brick Victorian-style houses on the hills overlooking the sea. When the cannery closed for good, in the fifties, Turquoise Beach had almost closed with it. But it struggled on as a very marginal resort town, too far from the city to attract much tourist trade, a weathering anachronism, increasingly home to literary hermits and similar eccentrics.

By the mid-sixties it had become a booming seaside Bohemia. Aldous Huxley had lived out his last years in a big red-brick house on Cabrillo; the poet Gary Snyder was supposed to have spent some winters here. In the seventies a lot of arts-and-crafts businesses had moved in, and so Turquoise Beach—in its small way—had prospered. Today many of the residents were perfectly straight, middle-class types employed at the new aerospace plant up the highway. But the atmosphere persisted.

Laura parked along the main street, which was called Caracol Street, and Karen followed her sister into a cafe restaurant with folding chairs and tiny tables that spilled out onto the sidewalk. It was past one and the lunch crowd had faded. Twice, Laura nodded and smiled at people passing in the street. But for the most part they were alone—it was a place where they could talk.

Laura said, “You like it so far?”

Karen wondered what to say. She decided it was not a decision she could make. Not yet. She said, “I want to know more about it.”

“The town? The world? What?”

“I guess—the world.”

“Tough question. Where to begin?”

“Anywhere,” Karen said. “Anything.” But what did she want to know, really? “Is there a Canada?”

“Yes.”

“Is there a Soviet Union?”

“Yes… but the borders are a little different.”

“Have there been wars?”

“Yes.”

“The same wars?” “Not quite.”

“Are there atomic bombs?”

“Very few. Is that the kind of thing you want to know?” Laura put down her napkin and looked thoughtful. “Geopolitics. Well, let’s see. The Yalta Conference came out a little differently. The Beirut Accords banned the proliferation of nuclear weapons in 1958, and the ban is enforced, and with a vengeance. Poland is a member of the EEC. Turkey is a Moslem nation, but Iran isn’t. Uh—”

Karen shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. What you’re saying is that it’s a more peaceful world?”

“I think that’s the most basic thing. Yes, it’s more peaceful. And no, I don’t know why, exactly. There’s no process, nothing obvious that stops wars from happening. They do happen. World War II happened… although the Holocaust was a much more limited event, and Japan was wise enough to stay out of it entirely. Still, the European war was bloody, Americans died in trenches. All the awfulness, barring Hiroshima. But some peace came out of it. Nobody looking for enemies, nobody wanting enemies. No McCarthy era. America was prosperous and maybe complacent in those years, but not hysterical.”

Karen said—it came out sounding more skeptical than she intended—“No more bad guys?”

“Plenty. There’s racism, there’s religious intolerance, there’s conformity. There are famines. But the scale of it is different. Just slightly shifted. I would call it a gentler world. No CIA, no military advisers in Third World countries, and the crime rate is pretty low —although everybody complains about it.” She smiled. “And the weather is nice.”

Karen tried to think of all the things that had frightened her in her daily life. “Pain,” she said. “Disease. Death.”

“We’re not in paradise. But you can get into a hospital without taking out a second mortgage.”

“Drugs.” The great parental nightmare.

“There are drugs,” her sister said. “But I’ve never heard of a real heroin problem outside the worst urban neighborhoods. Not as much alcoholism either. Not too much demand for cocaine or amphetamines. Life’s, you know, a little slower. But you can buy small amounts of marijuana. Legally.”

Karen said, “A great place to run away to.”

“Hey, if that’s what you’re doing, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Sometimes you have to run away.”

You should know, Karen thought, and was instantly ashamed of herself. She said, “It is nice. Well, obviously.” Added, “You’re happy here?”

Her sister did not immediately answer. Karen understood that she had asked one of the basic questions, one of the dangerous ones. Abruptly Laura became her little sister again, and Karen thought old, unanswerable thoughts: I should have protected her… I should have…

“I’m as happy,” Laura said carefully, “as I can imagine myself being. And I wouldn’t go back. Not to stay. This is home now.” Home. That word again.

Karen said, “Then I was wrong … all those years ago.”

Laura put her hand across the table, bracelets jangling. “That’s not what I meant.”

But the awareness of that old argument hung in the air between them. Karen turned to face the street, hoping to shake this sudden melancholy, or something worse than melancholy. But the street, Caracol Street in this odd town in this peculiar world, seemed abruptly foreign. A shrill and passing thought: You shouldn’t have come here. It was bad to come here. Daddy’s voice echoing in her head.

She thought of Laura twenty years ago, in the hotel in Santa Monica.

2

It was 1969, a bewildering year. Karen was working on an English degree at Penn State, commuting home odd weekends. Tim was restive in high school; Laura was in her second semester at UC Berkeley and —Karen’s mother said—in serious trouble.

Karen had come home for the Easter break. Home that year was the house in Polger Valley, an old steel town in the Mon Valley, its ancient mills revived by the war in Vietnam. Daddy had taken work at the foundry; Karen’s mother was working part-time at the hairdresser. Karen had mostly paid her own tuition at Penn, with only a little help from her parents. Laura’s college had taken a respectable bite out of the savings, though, and Tim’s education remained in doubt—he was bright but refused to take a job. The draft was a threat, but Tim claimed he would find a way to fail the physical, or maybe run off to Canada… and maybe he would; but it was Karen’s idea that he said these things mostly to make Daddy angry. Then Tim could storm out of the house and commiserate with his longhaired friends. Tim, who wore an American flag stitched upside down to the back of his denim jacket, was a lightning rod for conflict.

Daddy was sulking the weekend Karen came home; Tim was absent. The scenario was familiar.

Her mother took her aside after dinner. Lately, Karen had acquired some perspective toward her parents. They were adults, and she was an adult; she should be able to talk to them in an adult way.

At least that was the theory. In practice it was more difficult. But she tried to be objective.

“We had a letter from Laura,” her mother said.

Her voice was restrained. She didn’t want Daddy hearing this. Daddy was in the room he called the den, a tiny room off the downstairs hallway, watching TV. Karen and her mother sat in the kitchen. The kitchen, Karen thought, was the most reassuring room in the house, and therefore the best room for bad news. Karen focused this moment in her mind: dishes stacked on the drainboard, her mother in a flower-print housedress, the envelope clutched in one hand. “Laura’s not in Berkeley anymore.”

Karen blinked. Not in Berkeley? “Well, where is she? Is she coming home?”

Mama shook her head and handed Karen the letter.

The letter was very brief. It explained that Laura had dropped her courses and moved in with some friends, that “you might not be hearing from me too often,” that “I want to find a place for myself in my own way.” The return address on the envelope was in Los Angeles.

Her mother said, “I haven’t mentioned this to Daddy. You know how he is.”

He would be angry, Karen thought. Her new objectivity allowed her to understand that Daddy was often angry with his children. She had not yet fathomed the reason why.

Her mother did something astonishing then. She reached into the pocket of her housedress and took out two one-hundred-dollar bills and pushed them across the kitchen table toward Karen.

Karen looked at the money, bewildered. “Take it,” Mama said. “Household money. It doesn’t matter. Take it and go out there. Find her and try to talk some sense into her.”

I have finals, Karen thought. I have to study. I can’t take the time.

But she could not bring herself to say any of this. Instead, faintly awed, she took the money and folded it into the pocket of her Levi’s. It made an uneasy presence there.

Her mother said, “You always were the sensible one.”

She booked tickets and a hotel room through a travel agent. The process was frightening—she had never traveled so far in her life. “Is this a vacation?” the travel agent asked. “I don’t know,” Karen said. “I guess so.”

She rented a car at the Los Angeles airport, J mapped out a route to the hotel and followed it scrupulously, showered, and then drove to the address Laura had written on the envelope.

She was dismayed when she saw the house. It was a single-story box at the foot of a canyon road. The blank walls had been painted canary yellow; the paint was peeling. A motorcycle was parked in front.

She knocked on the frame of the screen door. There was a pause, then the door wheezed open. The man inside was tall and very thin. He was wearing a sweatshirt and tight, threadbare jeans. He had a beard.

“Hey,” he said. He seemed confused. “You look like Laura.”

“I’m her sister.” Karen’s eyes began to adjust to the dimness. The room was a mess. An open mattress, a water pipe, bundles of clothes… “Can I talk to her?”

“Laura? Laura’s not here. Hasn’t been here for a couple of days.” Blankly: “You want to come in?”

Karen shook her head. She took a notebook and a pen from her purse and scribbled the address of the hotel. “Will you give this to her?”

The man shrugged. “If she shows up.” He hesitated. “It’s Karen, right?”

Karen paused on her way down the concrete steps. “You know me?”

“She talked about you.”

And so there was nothing to do but wait. The waiting made her feel guilty, passive. She ought to be doing something. But what? Hire a detective? It was ludicrous. And she couldn’t afford it. She waited by the phone and tried to bury herself in the texts she’d brought with her. Faulkner and Sir Walter Scott. The books blended in her mind, a weird double exposure, all these strange families haunted by the past. When the phone finally did ring—a day before her return ticket came due—she jumped as if she’d been slapped.

She yanked up the receiver and said, “Laura?”

“It’s no good you coming here, you know.” Small, distant voice. “I mean, I appreciate it. But it’s pointless.”

She gripped the phone with all her strength. “I want to see you.”

“I appreciate that. I don’t know if it’s possible.” “Today,” Karen said. “I’m leaving in the morning.”

There was a long silence then, the ticking and whispering of the Bell exchanges.

“All right,” Laura sighed. “You’re at some hotel?” She repeated the address. “I’ll be over later.” Click and hum.

Karen was faintly shocked when she saw her sister, though obviously she should have been expecting this: Laura looked like a hippie.

“Hippie” was a word Karen had heard mostly from the TV news. Scruffy people in protest parades. Drug abusers. At Penn State she had kept herself aloof from that kind of thing. She had a circle of friends, mostly women from her English courses, mostly conservative. She had seen joints circulating at sorority parties, passed from hand to hand like votive candles, but that was as radical as it got. They were all against the war, all politically progressive, never too much involved. They took a secret pride in their levelheadedness.

I Like me, Karen thought. She was the sensible one.

She had sensible friends.

Laura wore ancient denims and a T-shirt that had been dyed a blinding variety of colors. Her hair was braided and she had painted what looked like the signs of the zodiac on her fingernails. Karen felt strangely outmaneuvered by this, this visible declaration of eccentricity. She might be able to talk her sister out of a bad idea, a stupid plan: but a wardrobe was too concrete. That’s why they dress this way, she thought, to bother ordinary people.

Laura came into the room and sagged limply into a chair. “My guess,” she said, “is that you’re here because Mama sent you. Right? ‘Go find Laura, talk some sense into her.’ ” Laura mimicked the broad Mon Valley cadences of her mother’s speech.

Karen felt stung. “Mama gave me the money, yes.”

“So you think she’s right? I’m crazy?”

“You don’t have to be defensive about it. I don’t know—ere you crazy?”

“Yes. It’s a common condition.”

“You want to be talked out of it?”

“No. Very much no.”

“You look tired,” Karen said.

“I am. I’ve been making arrangements.” Added, more guardedly, “Did you read the letter? I’m going away.”

“Going where?”

“You’d probably prefer I didn’t say.”

Karen thought this was probably true.

“You look pretty wild,” she said desperately.

“I guess I do.” Laura peered at Karen then, and Karen saw something suddenly gentler in her sister’s face. “I’m sorry about all this mysterioso stuff. Do you want me to explain? If you came for an explanation—”

An explanation would be better than nothing. “But let’s walk,” Karen said. “I’m sick of this room.”

They took Cokes out along the beach.

“I came out to Berkeley,” Laura said, “mostly because of all the stuff I’d been hearing about California. Sounds stupid, right? Well, it was. Stupid and naive. But it was important to me… the idea that somewhere in the world there were people who used the word ‘freak’ and didn’t mean something cruel by it. It was always Tim who talked about us that way. Remember? ‘We’re freaks,’ he would say. ‘We ought to get used to that.’ ”

Karen said, “Tim always had a cruel streak. He had no cause to say that. Anyway, that was a long time ago.”

“It was when we were in high school. And the thing is, he was right.”

Karen turned toward the ocean. “You don’t believe that.”

“I do believe it. And you believe it.” She touched Karen’s arm. “I’m sorry. I know how you hate this. But we have to talk about it. We’ve spent too long not talking about it. We’re freaks and we’ve been freaks since we were born. That’s why Daddy hates us so much. That’s why he beat us whenever he caught us doing what we can do.”

Karen’s consternation was immense. She tried to summon the objectivity she had cultivated at school. In her psych, course, all this would have seemed very simple. But words like “Daddy” and “freak” lay in uneasy proximity and she dared not inspect them too closely. “Those old dreams,” she stammered, “those old games—”

“They weren’t dreams. They aren’t games.” Laura sighed, hesitated, seemed to consider how to proceed. Began again patiently: “When you’re told long enough, and hard enough, and early enough, that something is bad, and unmentionable, and dirty, then you believe it. You can’t help but believe, I believed it. But I was lucky enough to get beyond all that.”

(Karen thought, But you never did believe it. You were like Tim. Rebellion was always easy for you.)

Laura said, “At Berkeley, everybody was doing acid—”

“LSD?” Karen was horrified.

“Don’t believe what you read in the papers. I mean, it doesn’t live up to Leary’s rap either. But it taught me a few things. I was able to stand outside myself, really look at myself for the first time.” She became fervent. “The sense of possibilities—I think that’s what we’re really all about, you and me and Tim. We can see what other people can’t.”

“Possibilities,” Karen said dully: but this was all way beyond her control…

“Worlds,” Laura said. “Isn’t that what everybody’s looking for? A better world? You know, I used to go down to the Haight with some friends. And there was this same feeling—a better world is possible. You know what the Haight is now? A ghetto full of teenage crank addicts. That whole thing is dying. Dead. Everybody’s gone off—to the desert, to Sonoma, to Oregon. The vision is dead. So I came down here with some people who wanted to set up a community, a more creative way of living together—we used those words. You saw the house? A pit. And Jamie’s gone back to her parents, and Christine is pregnant, and Donald’s in Canada dodging the draft, and Jerry has a very bad needle habit. So the dream dies, right?”

Karen was appalled. Drugs and needles and communes. It sounded squalid.

Laura said, “But it doesn’t have to die. I have this ability, this freakish ability to walk sideways off the planet. And I am convinced that there is a better world out there somewhere. Out in that tangle of could-be’s. Not a dream, and not any of those hellish places Tim was always opening up. I mean a good place. A place where people care about each other, where stupidity doesn’t claw us all down.”

Karen folded her hands in her lap. “I think Mama was right. I think you are crazy.”

“Oh, Karen, come on. If anyone’s living in a dreamworld, it’s you. You remember that night in the old house on Constantinople? When we went down the ravine, and Timmy opened a door into that old cobble city by the sea? How cold it was, and that man—”

“We made that up,” Karen said, more loudly than she had meant to. On the beach, a strolling couple glanced toward her.

She stared at the ground.

“Well, I remember it,” Laura said softly. “I remember Timmy getting beat for it. Then me. Then you. You worst of all. Because you’re the oldest. Our protector. That’s what they wanted you to be. Karen’s supposed to know better. Karen—”

“Stop it.”

“You just can’t admit it, can you?” “No,” Karen snapped.

“No. Because admitting would mean admitting so much else. That the world is stranger than it looks. That Daddy doesn’t know best. That when Daddy beats you it doesn’t mean he loves you. Maybe the opposite. And maybe that’s the worst thing of all.”

Karen stood up. There was sand on her dress. She felt prim and ridiculous brushing it off. Her hands trembled.

Laura said, “Going home?”

“Don’t make fun of me!”

“No… oh, Karen, I’m sorry. But you don’t have to go.”

“I have exams.”

“You don’t have to have exams.” “What?”

“Come with me. We could do it together. Cross some borders.”

She’s serious, Karen thought. My God, she’s serious.

She clutched the strap of her purse. “I never wanted a better world. I don’t need one. Don’t you understand that? All I want is to be normal.”

And in the morning she flew back to Pennsylvania and did not see her wild sister again for twenty years.

She sat in the cafe on Caracol Street with this oppressive memory tugging at her. The Laura facing her now across this table was older—not repentant but certainly less wild. “You were right,” Karen admitted, “about a lot of things.”

“I think each of us believed the other was running away.”

“Maybe we were.”

“Maybe we still are.” Karen frowned. Laura continued, “There are so many questions we never asked. Never let ourselves ask. How come we can do what we do? Are we freaks of nature, genetic misprints? Or something else? And there’s Tim. I haven’t heard from him since he left home back in ’72—have you?”

“No. Nobody in the family has.” But this was still perilous talk. “I don’t think it matters what we are. The past is the past.”

Laura shook her head. “It does matter.”

She put down a bill and change for lunch; they threaded their way out of the restaurant. The sun was shining down Caracol Street from the west. Laura shaded her eyes and said, “It will matter to Michael.”

1

Michael kept quiet over dinner that night. His mom was quiet, too, frowning into the broad Oriental bowl Aunt Laura had set out for her. It was Laura who did most of the talking, between chopping ginger or tending the wok.

She talked about her work. Laura was a potter, had a kiln in the big shed out back, did clays and porcelains that fetched big prices in the tourist stores out along the highway. She was thinking about maybe a new floral pattern… something simple. Classic. Oh, and the Chinese cabbage was fresh today. (Everything smells so good, Michael’s mom said listlessly.) And wasn’t the weather nice? (The weather was nice.) And so on.

But every once in a while Laura would look at Michael in a thoughtful way, and he was aware of it and began to feel self-conscious. He understood that his aunt’s secret talent was strong and obvious, once you knew what to look for—a kind of glow or aura^-and Michael wondered whether he had acquired the same look.

But nobody said anything.

He woke up next morning anxious to test himself again. He sat impatiently through the breakfast rituals, watched a little morning TV, wore out his calluses on the new guitar. He wanted to get away without attracting attention. The situation was tight, Laura and his mother moving around the house in restless circles; he might have given up, but a couple of hours before lunch his mom announced she’d do the shopping today, it was only fair, and took off in Aunt Laura’s car with a grocery list and a handful of the weird State Bank bills that passed for cash in Turquoise Beach. Michael waved at the Durant and then sauntered around to the rear of the house, planning to cut past the pottery studio and along the open beach again. But when he came around the shed he saw Aunt Laura standing by the cane fence waiting for him, and it was too late then to turn back.

He liked Aunt Laura. She was only a couple of years younger than his mom, but it seemed like more. She was easy to be around. She was happy most of the time. It was a contrast. He had begun to understand, these few days they had spent here, how unhappy his mom had been since the divorce. Their house in Toronto had been a deep well of silences. How long since she had really smiled? A long time.

Aunt Laura smiled. She smiled now, standing by the broken-down fence in her Levi’s and tank top. She had on a pair of round-lens sunglasses, the kind Michael thought of as Lennon glasses. “Beachcombing?” she said, and the tone of the question was half amused, half serious.

He was embarrassed. “Sort of.”

“You know,” she said, “we really ought to talk.”

“I’d like that,” he said. “Sometime. Sure. But—”

“Talk about you, Michael,” she said. “About what you can do. About what you were doing out on the beach yesterday.”

He could only stare.

She had made an educated guess about her nephew’s long walk yesterday, based on hints, the way he looked, some cryptic comments Emmett had passed on. Judging by the expression on his face, she was on the money.

The amazing thing, Laura thought, was that it hadn’t happened sooner.

She regarded her nephew as objectively as she could. Reasonable specimen of the genus adolescent male. Gaunt in his blue sweatshirt and faded jeans, cropped hair, Nike runners speckled with dry sand. He was beginning to build up a tan; a mild case of adolescent acne was on the retreat. His eyes were dark and sometimes furtive in a way that reminded her of Karen. Karen had had this same habit of dodging uneasy truths; although in Michael it was less pronounced.

She thought, A family trait.

My nephew, she thought. Karen’s child. The only generation we have produced… unless Tim has been off siring wizards.

She walked him along the quiet back streets near home. Turquoise Beach was a town of gardeners, and she liked the tropical greenery spilling out of these trellises and yards: bougainvillea, ground ivy, blooming aloes. Mornings like this, the air was full of wild perfume.

She thought, It would be very hard to leave this place.

But they had not reached that cusp quite yet.

She said, “Did your mother ever talk about home? About your grandmother and grandfather, what it was like living there?”

Obviously Michael had not adjusted to the idea of this interview. He shook his head. “Not much.” Which means, Laura thought, probably never.

She gathered her thoughts. How to communicate this in a way that would make sense to a fifteen-year-old? Too much old pain here. Hard to make a good Story of it. She said, “There were the three of us, your mother and me and Tim. And your grandmother and grandfather. We moved a lot, but Daddy had this little copperplate sign he used to hang up wherever we lived—The Fauves.’ To me it always sounded like some exotic species of animal. And I guess I used to think of us that way sometimes, as a separate species.”

Michael’s look was wary but understanding.

“Mama and Daddy were what you would call plain people. Mon Valley, Ohio River people. I still hear it in the way Karen talks … I hear it in myself sometimes. Daddy worked different places. Mills, mostly, back when the steel industry was good. He was a welder and he could stand in on a lathe. But he drank and got fired a lot. We lived in Duquesne a couple years, then different places around Pittsburgh. The thing about him was, he was hard to be with. He led kind of a sad, sour life. He laid a lot onto us kids.” She drew a breath and saw that Michael was still attentive.

“I think it was easiest for me. I was pretty. I was the middle kid. Tim was the boy, so he had to live up to a lot of expectations. And Karen—well, your mother was the oldest, and maybe that was the worst. Everything Tim and I did wrong, she took the rap for it.”

Michael ventured, “It must have been hard …”

“Being what we are?” But obviously that was what he meant. The crux. Even now, this was hard to talk about: she could never have said these things even to someone like Emmett. “Harder than you know. When we were little we played games. We called it ‘making windows’ or ‘making doors.’ We understood, I guess by some kind of instinct, that it was a thing to keep secret. So we did it at night, in the dark, or out in the ravine back of the old house on Constantinople. And sometimes… sometimes we got caught.”

She had dropped her voice to a whisper. Michael walked on beside, eyes fixed on the laces of his shoes.

“Daddy said it was the worst thing a person could ever do. The worst sin. It was a sin so bad it wasn’t even in the Bible, except where it said about suffering a witch to live. It was bad and it would get us in trouble … or it would kill us.”

“He said that?”

“In so many words. Often. And sometimes with his fists.”

Michael returned to his study of the sidewalk.

Laura said, “We all took it to heart, of course. But for me—certainly for Tim—the temptation was still there. It came naturally to us. We were good at it. And so we still did it sometimes, opened windows and doors, when we were certain we wouldn’t get caught. Did it and then prayed God would forgive us. But Karen took it all very much to heart. All of us believed Daddy, but Karen believed him with this awful, fierce intensity … I think it blinded her. I think in a way she still believes him.”

They walked along the shaded street to a corner and turned left. They passed a couple more of these tall, old houses, then a blankness of sea grass and rock. The pavement stopped at a black-and-yellow saw-horse with the words caution—road ends printed on it. Beyond that was a grassy headland, a fifty-foot drop to the sea. The water down below churned white against the rocks.

Laura sat and hugged her knees. Michael crouched against a rock, gazing off across the water.

She said, “You’re not used to thinking about your mother this way.”

“I guess not.”

“It takes some getting used to.”

He seemed very thoughtful. She let the silence stretch out. This was a place she liked to come and she was content here.

Michael picked a blade of grass and shredded it between his fingers. He said, “Is that all there is?”

“How do you mean?”

“I’ve never heard of anybody else who could do this. Have you? I mean, it’s not even like ESP or witchcraft, something you can read about in a library book. So we were all born this way, right? But why? Where does it come from?”

She shrugged. “We never found out.”

“You mean,” he said, “you never asked.”

“There was never anyone we could ask. Not Mama or Daddy, for sure. They didn’t have the talent. You could look at them and know they didn’t. Their parents? I met Grandma Fauve one time. She lived in an old house in Wheeling with three cats and a Doberman chained to the toolshed. She was normal as any old lady. Too, I think I would have known if Mama or Daddy came from a home where there were people like us. There’s a way of not talking about things… and neither of them talked like that.”

“Then it’s a mystery.”

“Yes,” Laura said. “It’s a mystery.”

“Do you think we could ever figure it out?”

The question touched a nerve. She arched her back and turned her face to the sea wind. The wind came up these bluffs like a river; every August you could see people out here with kites. But the weather had changed. Too cool for that now.

She turned to her nephew and said, “We may have to.”

Before they went home, Laura said, “Show me what you can do.”

Michael was reluctant at first. It was something private, something he had only just discovered. But he thought about what she’d told him—it was more than his mother had ever said—and guessed he owed her this.

But maybe he couldn’t do it. Maybe he’d lost the 4cnack. Maybe he had to be stoned to be able to do it… maybe he was too nervous.

He held his arms out in front of him, joined forefingers and thumb as he had yesterday. Nothing happened. Desperately, Michael searched himself for a trace of the electricity he’d been able to conjure down by the shore. He remembered how it had felt, the way it seemed to come, not from him, but through him, sourced up through the ground, a strange voltage of granite and limestone and seabed, magma and tectonics. And, remembering, he began to feel it again, faintly at first, a tingling, and then something more intense. He opened the vortex of possibility between his hands, thinking, Yes.

He showed her the devastated, oceanless world he had discovered yesterday. He showed her the empty world: today the seals were clustered far up the littoral and a gray rain was falling. And he showed her places he had never seen before, worlds that were nothing like Turquoise Beach: desert worlds, an ocean unbroken by land, a sky of high lavender clouds… more. He was dimly aware of her standing just outside the periphery of his vision, peering over his shoulder; her gasps of awe, faintly perceived, made him happy. He thought, She sees it, too. It wasn’t a hallucination, and he wasn’t crazy, and he wasn’t alone. Giddy with it now, he flashed through a half dozen changes, until a sense of fatigue—a kind of interior exhaustion—forced him to stop.

Michael sagged against a boulder. His head throbbed. He took a deep, satisfying breath and said, “How’s that? Is that okay?”

Laura looked at him as if from a great distance. Her voice was ragged, faint. She said, “It’s more than I could ever do…”

2

Karen’s argument with her sister happened in the evening, but the frustration had been building all that day.

It was their third week in this house. Part of the strain she felt was no doubt simply the stress of living in close quarters with Laura, who was still nearly a stranger to her. Part of it was the adjustment that inevitably followed any wrenching change.

But part of it was more than that. Part of it was a dislocation more profound. This world Laura inhabited was, curiously, almost too familiar. Just when Karen began to feel at home, she would stumble over some incongruity that left her head spinning. Yesterday, for instance. She had been lined up at the grocery store when she overheard the checkout girl telling a clerk that John F. Kennedy had died—in retirement, in New England, at the age of seventy-two. A stroke, she said. “Well, I admired that man. Although he was a Catholic.”

FORMER PRESIDENT JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY DEAD, the headlines in the L.A. Times said. Funeral services were announced for Sunday. Dignitaries to gather in Washington. President Bartlett expresses grief, and so on and so forth.

All those years ago, Karen thought. Who was I mourning for?

Can a bullet really be undone? By wishing?

She was dazed for hours, puzzling over it.

But not just that. There was the atmosphere of Turquoise Beach itself, the easy lifestyle Laura seemed so content with. Karen was less pleased by it. It was aimlessly hedonistic, and she was not sure she wanted Michael exposed to it much longer. He had taken a liking to Emmett, Laura’s downstairs boyfriend: Emmett, who played music for a living, and whom Karen had observed down by the beach at night smoking grass.

All this contributed to Karen’s stress. But it was Laura who started the argument, when she insisted on talking about Michael.

Michael had gone to bed. Laura was up finishing the dishes. Karen had put on her nightgown and robe but couldn’t sleep; so she sat in the kitchen under the cool fluorescence of the ceiling lights, listening to the wet clack and rattle from the sink.

Laura declined her offer to dry and said, “You really ought to talk to him, you know.”

“Michael’s doing fine,” Karen said. “He’s adjusted well these last few days.”

“I don’t think platitudes are too useful right now, do you? You know what I mean.”

“The talent,” Karen said. “Does it always have to come around to that?”

“This time it does. Haven’t you thought about how confusing this all must be for him? Not just Turquoise Beach, but all that mess before you left—the Gray Man. What’s he supposed to think about it?”

I would prefer, Karen thought, that he didn’t think about it. She knew how ridiculous that would sound. But it would be simpler—“It would be simpler,” she said, “if we could just lead a normal life here.”

“Normal!” Her sister dropped a plastic gravy boat into the drainer. “You hold up that word like it’s some kind of holy relic! I mean, I understand—but Christ, Karen, I’m not sure ‘normal’ is something you and I can aim for!”

“For Michael’s sake—”

“I’m talking about Michael’s sake. He’s a smart kid, he’s curious, and I think he deserves whatever explanation we can give him.”

Karen was silent a while. Finally she said, “I was hoping to keep him above all this.”

“It’s a little past that.”

Laura dried her hands and sat at the small butcher-block table.

“Michael is a bright, curious kid. He should be talking to you about all this, not me.”

Karen looked up sharply. “He’s talked to you?”

“Yes.”

“What did you tell him?”

“The truth.”

Karen was shocked. “Everything? I mean—back home, Tim and Daddy, all that?” “All that.”

She was mortified. All this had happened behind her back. “He’s hardly ready! He’s only fifteen!” It was like a conspiracy. “Jesus, Laura, he’s my son! I have a right to make some choices!”

“He’s your son. And I’m sorry if I interfered. But he’s also a very confused young person badly in need of answers. He should have come to you… but he didn’t. He didn’t feel like he could.”

“So instead he came to you? Why?” She felt wounded. “Because you inhabit this hippie Utopia here? So what did you tell him? That everything would be okay if we all wore tie-dye and denim a little more often?”

Laura stood up and went back to the sink. She faced the window, which was full of night, and Karen could see her face reflected there, lips pressed tightly together.

Laura said, “This is the best I could do. You understand that? I think… whatever this talent we have is, I think it’s connected somehow with imagination. The ability to see what isn’t there, at least the shape of it, the outline. I wanted to find the best place I could, a place to live, a sane place—I wanted to dream it into existence. And this is the best I could do.” Her shoulders moved in a shrug. “Maybe I didn’t do too well.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Maybe Michael could do better. Did you ever consider that?”

She was taken aback. “Michael?”

“It’s obvious enough. Look at him sometime. I mean, really look.” Laura turned away from the window. Her fingers were tight against the rim of the counter. “I think he’s more talented than any of us… more talented even than Tim.”

But it was not something Karen wanted to think about.

Bad enough that Michael had to know about all this. Bad enough that she had brought him here; bad enough that Laura had dragged him into all that old family misery. Bad but, okay, maybe understandable. He was a part of it, and maybe she should have talked to him.

But she had not wanted to admit to herself that Michael himself might have the talent.

Had not allowed herself to admit it. It was the Great Unthinkable. The last time she had considered the idea—the memory came rushing back—was when she was pregnant. Michael had not been Michael then, had only been this presence inside her, an awkward weight, a coiling of life against her belly. Lying in bed at night, feeling him kick, she had allowed the thought: What if he is like me? She guessed it was like having one of those genetic diseases, that disease Woody Guthrie had. It had corrupted her life and might corrupt her child’s.

Could she bear that?

She had pressed herself against Gavin, who was sleeping soundly, until his warmth suffused her body. She resolved then, drifting toward a troubled sleep, that she would not even consider the possibility. Their child would be normal. She would make him normal. She would wish him into normalcy, pray him into normalcy; their home would be a normal home. Surely that was enough?

So Laura was right, of course. She had made an icon of that word, “normal.” It was a gift, and she had tried to give that gift to Michael.

Tried and—well, it should have been obvious— failed.

She raised her head and regarded her sister. “You’re saying I was the one who ran away… who hid.”

“I believed that once. I don’t think I can be so self-righteous now. I think we both ran away from it, each of us in our own way.” She added, “Michael’s different.”

Fearfully: “What do you mean?”

“He never learned to be afraid of it. He’s been asking questions you and I can’t answer. Did we inherit this? Is it a miracle, or is it something we can understand?”

Karen shook her head. “There aren’t any answers.”

“We can’t be sure of that. We never really tried to find them.”

“How would we?”

“Karen, I don’t know. But I think we would have to start at home, with Mama and Daddy. And we would probably have to talk to Tim.”

“That’s absurd.”

“Is it?”

“We’re safe here.” Laura said, “Are we?” “What do you mean?”

She spoke in careful, somber tones. “The Gray Man. That’s something else we never talked about. But he’s the same man, isn’t he? The same man we saw that night in the ravine, with Tim, all those years ago.”

Karen was precipitated suddenly back into her dream, the dark streets of that other seaside town, cold cobbles against her bare feet, and the Gray Man (it was him), offering gifts from the cavernous hollow of his coat. And Laura remembered it, too; therefore it wasn’t a dream, it was a memory; and only her desperate wanting had convinced her otherwise. She said, “He can’t find us here.”

“I would dearly love to believe that. Only I’m not sure it’s true. We just don’t know. And isn’t that the point? We don’t know enough to protect ourselves.”

“You said we’d be safe here!”

“Safer than where you were. But I can’t guarantee for how long.”

Karen whispered, “I don’t want to go back home… I don’t want to dig up all that trouble.”

Laura straightened the dish towel and hung it to dry. She walked to where Karen sat, put her hands on Karen’s shoulders. The touch was cool, soothing. “Neither do I,” she said. “You don’t know how much I don’t want to go home. I wouldn’t do it for myself. You want the honest truth, I don’t believe I would do it for you. But I think we should do it for Michael.”

3

Laura slept downstairs that night, with Emmett.

The affair was on-again, off-again, usually at Laura’s call. Emmett was almost pathologically easygoing about relationships. If Laura wanted to be his lover, fine. If she had something else to do or somebody else to see, well, he could live with that, too.

It was not an unhealthy attitude—it pretty much mirrored her own approach—but it lacked something in the way of passion.

But tonight she needed his warmth. She lay beside him in his bed, a beat-up four-poster he had acquired at a junk shop in Pueblo de Los Angeles, cradled in this outrageous down-filled mattress. They had made love and now the bedroom was dark and cool, a comforting place. Sometimes she liked to imagine Emmett’s bed as a sailing ship drifting out to sea, timbers creaking. She thought that was a fine way to fall asleep.

Emmett sat up, lit a joint, offered it to her. She toked, but only lightly. She was afraid it might make her paranoid. It was good, though, to take the rough edges off things. Tonight she wanted gentility, calm, ease.

Outside the bamboo blinds there was darkness and the sound of the tide coming in. Emmett’s big hand moved in time, stroking her shoulder. The sheet on Emmett’s bed was light and cool as rain. Emmett toked deeply; she saw the tip of the joint flare in the darkness.

She said, not exactly meaning to, “What would you think if I went away?”

Emmett, whose reaction time was glacial even when he was not stoned, thought it over. Eventually he said, “Where are you going? How long?”

She moved her hand through the bristly hair on his chest. “Can’t say where. Maybe for a while.”

“Long time?”

“Could be long. What would you say?”

“I would ask,” Emmett said thoughtfully, “whether you were coming back.”

“Coming back probably for sure.” She added, “You’re dodging the question.”

“You know the answer.” He sat cross-legged, and she admired the way the trickle of moonlight played over the exposed ridge of his hips. Pale flesh like distant mountains. He said, “I’d miss you ’til you came back.”

It should have pleased her. Oddly, it didn’t. She was annoyed both with Emmett and with herself. What did she want him to say? “I can’t live without you”? “Stay or I’ll shoot myself”? She had cultivated a certain kind of relationship with him and she could hardly complain if he cooperated in it.

But (the irritation peaking now) it was not just Emmett, it was everything, Turquoise Beach, her life here. Karen’s visit had jogged too many old memories. Laura had arrived here straight out of the heady psychedelic whirl of Berkeley at the end of the sixties, and Turquoise Beach had seemed like a distant colony, a gentler outpost of that same dizzying empire. And yet. And yet. In those days she had been full of energy, obsessed with the idea of going beyond, further, deeper. Since then, imperceptibly, by inches, her life had slowed. The final revelation, what they used to call the White Light in her sophomore LSD sessions, remained always out of grasp. And so the fervor cooled. Life became merely pleasant.

Her sometimes affair with Emmett was pleasant. It would always be pleasant. But Karen was—and this had taken Laura by surprise—a chastening example. Karen had showed up with her compulsive conformity, her exaggerated regard for the “normal,” her fears all intact; but Laura saw the way she cared for her son—cared for him profoundly, wordlessly, wholeheartedly—and understood that her own passions were trivial by comparison; that her idea of love was something truncated and selfish. Karen loved Michael in a way that was genuinely beyond, further, deeper.

She felt a wave of vertigo from Emmett’s highly potent grass. The bed seemed to rotate backward. The night had closed in, suddenly, like a wall.

Love, she thought, is a very dangerous thing.

Emmett stretched out, moving toward sleep. He turned his head against the pillow. “You know,” he said distantly, “Mike was right… you are kinda spooky.”

But time passed, a week, ten days, and she began to think she had been unnecessarily alarmed, unreasonably paranoid… until the evening Michael came home ashen-faced and said he had seen the Gray Man out along the beach.