Gypsies

1

His mother and his aunt shared a second-floor bedroom, but Michael had the third floor of this old house all to himself.

He liked it up here. His grandparents were too old to climb the stairs, so everything was covered with a fine layer of undisturbed dust, and everything was antique: furniture, he guessed, they had been packing around all their lives. Michael was accustomed to the house in Toronto, a new house full of new things, as if nothing had existed before the year 1985; the Fauves’ third floor was a shocking contrast.

His grandmother had come up once that first night, gasping on the stairs. She apologized for the clutter. “All this mess,” she said sadly. “When Mama Lucille died we put all her stuff up here. So this is your family, Michael. See? This was your great-grandfather’s rolltop desk. That big old bed belonged to my parents …”

The bed had sat for so long in this room, and was so massive, that the floorboards had curved around it. His mother aired the sheets and pillowcases for him, but the bed retained a characteristic odor, not unpleasant, of ancient down and ticking, of whole lives lived between its sheets. Sleeping there these last few nights Michael had wished he could make windows into past time as well as across worlds: that he could gaze back down the years and maybe discover the secret of his strangeness. Wished this old bed could talk.

He spent a lot of time up here. Considering the situation in the house, it was better to be alone. And, anyway, he liked to be by himself. Alone, he could let his thoughts roam freely. Nothing to fear up here, no Gray Man, only these old high corniced rooms with their ripply windowpanes and the winter sky showing through; only the trickle of the water in the radiator grills. Lying here, suspended in down and history, he could allow himself to feel (but faintly, carefully) the rush of secret power in himself, the wheels of possibility spinning in him; to contemplate a step sideways out of Polger Valley and time itself; to wonder whether Aunt Laura’s instincts might not have been correct all those years ago, maybe there was a better world somewhere, a truly better world, and maybe he could reach it: maybe it was only a quarter step away down some hidden axis… maybe it was a door he could learn to open.

He thought about it often.

Downstairs, things were different. A week in this house had not inured Michael to all the silence and indignities.

His grandmother insisted on cooking. Every evening he helped her with the heavy china platters: chicken and gravy, roast beef and potatoes, meat loaf and boiled peas relayed steaming from the tiny kitchen to the dining room. Jeanne Fauve was overweight but not really fat; she was the kind of nervous woman whose metabolism runs fast. She was constantly in motion but the motion was inhibited, no large gestures but a lot of fluttering. Her hands moved like birds; her eyes darted like a bird’s eyes. She wore her hair in white spring curls bound tightly to her head. Michael kind of liked her and he thought she might like him—she would stare thoughtfully at him when she thought he didn’t notice. But if he looked directly at her, her eyes would dart away.

Tonight Michael helped her carry in a pot roast from the oven. Everything was in place: linen tablecloth, the china, the tarnished silverware. Everybody in their chair except Michael’s grandfather. Michael sat down at the foot of the table. He was hungry and the roast smelled wonderful, but he had learned to be patient. He put his hands in his lap; the mantel clock ticked. His mother whispered something to Aunt Laura.

Then, finally, Willis Fauve came ambling in from the downstairs bathroom, where he had washed his hands. Willis was not really a large man, Michael thought, but he was a big presence in the room. His forearms were big and he wore polyester pants cinched over his expansive belly and a starched white shirt open at the collar. He had a small face set in a large head, blunt features concentrated around heavy bifocals. He wore his hair in a bristly Marine cut and his thick eyebrows made him seem to be always frowning. Most of the time he was frowning. Certainly he did not ever seem happy.

Sometimes he would come to the table drunk. Not loudly or conspicuously drunk, but his walk would be unsteady and he would talk more than he normally did: mainly complaints about the neighbors. He would sit opposite Michael, and his acrid breath would waft across the table. Willis Fauve was a beer drinker. Beer, he said, was a food. It had food value.

Tonight Willis was just detectably drunk. Michael thought of him as “Willis” because he could not imagine calling this man “Grandfather.” Michael was acquainted with grandfathers mainly from TV: kindly, grizzled men in bib overalls. But Willis was not kindly; he was not even friendly. He had made it obvious that he regarded this visit as an intrusion and that he would not be happy until his privacy was restored. Sometimes—if he’d had enough to drink—he would come out and say so.

Willis sat down wheezing. Without looking at anyone he folded his hands in his lap and closed his eyes. Michael was supposed to do the same, but he kept his eyes open. “Thank you, Lord,” Willis Fauve intoned, “for this food which you have seen fit to set before us. Amen.”

Michael’s grandmother echoed the “Amen.” Willis began to circulate the pot roast. Michael took modest helpings.

He felt his grandfather’s attention on him while he ate. He kept his eyes on his plate, worked his knife and fork mechanically. But he felt Willis watching him. His grandmother tried to make some conversation, the shopping she’d done, what the hairdresser had said, but nobody could think of anything to add and the talk ran out of gas. Michael had pretty much cleared his plate and was looking forward to the end of the meal when his grandfather said, too loudly, “You know what I call that shirt?”

Michael’s shirt, he meant. Michael was wearing a Talking Heads T-shirt he’d carried with him from Toronto. Black T with a red-and-white graphic. Nothing spectacular, but he was moderately proud of the way he looked in it.

Nobody wanted to answer the question but Willis himself. Willis said brightly, “I call that a fuck shirt.”

Michael regarded his grandfather with bewilderment.

“I see these kids,” Willis said. “I drive by the high school every morning. I see the way they dress. You know why they dress like that? It’s like sticking up their middle finger. It’s an insult. It’s ‘fuck you.’ They’re saying that with their clothes.”

Michael had observed that Willis, who complained about profane language on TV, loosened up in that regard when he was drinking.

Karen said, “Michael forgot to change before dinner.”

Michael looked at his mother sharply. She returned the look, a warning: Don’t say anything… not now.

“A fuck shirt,” Willis repeated.

“Michael,” Karen said, “go change.” When he didn’t move, she whispered, “Please!”

He stood up sullenly.

At the stairs Michael paused a second to look back at the dinner table, at the quiet tableau of the women with their heads contritely bowed, Willis Fauve still regarding him, frowning. They locked gazes briefly.

It was Willis who looked away. He said to Michael’s mother, “You let him dress like that?”

Michael moved on up the stairs.

“A fuck shirt,” Willis marveled, “at my dinner table.”

But Michael understood the significance of Willis’s complaint. It’s not the shirt, he thought. You know it, I know it. It’s not the shirt you’re afraid of.

In his room Michael thought about Willis and about the silence at the dinner table.

This attic room looked out over the rooftops of Polger Valley toward the river and the mill. The mill dominated the valley like a black, crouched animal. The chimney flues were black and smokeless against a hard gray dusk. Michael put his hand to the window and the glass felt icy under his fingers. Snow soon, he thought.

He kept his T-shirt on.

It wasn’t the shirt, of course; it was the power in him. Willis must have sensed that. Michael thought about what Laura had told him, some of the hints his mother had dropped. He understood that the T-shirt was itself irrelevant; that Willis might as easily have objected to his haircut, his shoes, the way he held his fork. What he really meant was: here is this new person under my roof and I don’t control him and I don’t like that.

Michael understood because the house in Toronto had operated the same way, though without the implied threat of violence. He recognized in Willis the shadow of his mother’s cryptic silences. He had grown up in that silence. The vacancy of unpronounced words. This wasn’t a new thing with Willis, only louder and more frightening.

He wondered whether that was the way it always worked in families, whether fears were passed on from generation to generation, like the color of a person’s hair or eyes. Maybe it was like a curse, something you could never escape, something you carried with you whether you wanted to or not.

But, he thought, some things do change. Willis depended on his ability to scare people, and it worked: Michael’s mother was frightened of him; even Laura was frightened of him…

But not me, Michael thought.

Not me.

He lay on his bed in the gathering dark and watched an early-winter show begin to beat against the window. He felt the tremble of the power in himself and thought, Hell, I’m a long way beyond Willis Fauve. He doesn’t scare me.

2

When Karen stopped in to say good night Michael was already dozing. Cradled in the old bed, he looked almost like a child again. Predictably, he still had the T-shirt on. Rather than wake him, she folded the comforter around him and tiptoed to the door.

He stirred long enough to raise one eyelid. And he said a strange thing, faintly, from the depths of his sleep.

He said, “Don’t be afraid.” “I won’t,” Karen said. “Sleep now.” She eased the door shut.

But she was afraid.

She was afraid of the Gray Man and she was afraid of her father.

It surprised her, the depth of her fear. Maybe it was predictable, maybe she should have expected it. After all, what had changed? Well, she was an adult now, she had been married, had lived on her own. Those things should make a difference. But they didn’t, and maybe that wasn’t unusual; maybe these angles of connection—parent to child, father to daughter—were permanent, timeless. Around Willis she was a child again, hapless and awed. It was not what he said but the force with which he said it… the absolute masculine certainty he projected. The words were like doors into a private blast furnace Willis Fauve kept stoked inside himself; through the words, she could feel the heat.

The next day, after Willis left for work, she helped her mother with the laundry; in the afternoon she carried the plastic laundry basket up to the second floor where Laura was waiting. Karen sat with her sister in the guest room folding sheets. The sheets were warm from the basement dryer; the fabric softener had imparted a faint, delicate scent of lavender.

Laura said, “We’re not getting anywhere.”

“I know,” Karen said. This frightened her, too: this motionlessness. “It’s harder than I thought it would be.”

“It’s hard because nothing’s changed.” Laura whirled a sheet out over the bed. “Everybody’s older but nothing’s different. They say you can’t go home again, but the scary thing is that you can—it’s too easy to step back into all the old mistakes.”

Karen said, “Mistakes?”

“You know what I mean. He rules this house. You saw him at dinner, yelling at Michael. And we sat there. We took it. Nobody challenges Willis Fauve, no, sirree—not on his turf.”

“Well, it is, isn’t it? It is his turf.”

“It was our home for twenty years, for God’s sake! We lived under his roof like prisoners—it was only Tim who ever spoke up.”

But, Karen thought, look what happened to Tim. Tim had disappeared out into the big world; for all anyone heard from him he might as well be dead. Maybe was dead. Maybe worse. Maybe the Gray Man had found him.

But she folded that traitorous thought into a dresser drawer along with the spare sheets. “Tim was braver than us.”

“Brave or stupid. Or maybe he just liked getting bruised. But at least he fought back.”

Karen thought privately that Tim was like a small frightened dog: the harder you kick him, the more he tries to bite… until he chews through the rope and runs away. Tim, after seventeen years of this life, had finally gnawed through his rope. She said, “We won’t find out anything from Daddy.”

“We haven’t tried to find out anything from anybody.” Laura smoothed the sheet over the mattress and slipped the two old pillows into their flowered cases. “It’s Mama we should talk to.”

“She won’t like it.”

“If we wait for her to like,” Laura said, “we’ll be here another twenty years.” It was undeniable.

“Now,” Laura said. “We should talk to her now.”

Karen hesitated and then wondered at her own reluctance. “Doesn’t it scare you at all—what she might say? Don’t you think about what it might mean —knowing?”

Laura walked with her to the stairs. They were sisters now for certain. No time had passed; they were altogether children. Laura said, “I’m more scared of what might happen if we don’t.” The house felt suddenly colder.

Mama was in the kitchen drying dishes.

How full of memories this house is, Karen thought. But it was not so much the house as the furnishing of it, the lay of things. The kitchen was like the kitchen in every other house they had lived in. The tile was peeling up, the cupboards were painted a dingy flat yellow color. Dish towels hung on a wooden rack; the dishes were stacked in a white Kresge’s drainer. Cups on cup hooks, pot holders in the shape of roosters tucked behind the toaster, a hand-stitched sampler on the wall bearing a passage from Proverbs. It was late afternoon and the kitchen window showed a dismal backyard terrain of powder snow and hillside and empty sky. Daddy would be home in an hour or two… longer if he stopped to have a drink.

It was Laura who had the courage to say, “Mama, we need to talk.”

Jeanne Fauve looked up briefly. “Talk about what?”

“Old times.”

Mama stood still for a few moments, then set down the dish she’d been drying and turned to face Laura. Her expression was hooded, unreadable. “Wait here,” she said finally, and bustled out of the room.

Karen sat with her sister at the kitchen table, tracing patterns with her finger in the chipped Formica. How old was this table? As old as herself? My God, she thought, we don’t need to dig up the past: it’s here, it’s all around us.

Mama came back with a shoe box under her arm. She sat down at the table and pried up the lid.

Inside the box there were pictures.

Mama said, “These are the old days. All these photos.” She emptied them onto the table.

Karen sifted through the pile. The photographs had aged badly. She remembered the various cameras Mama used to own: a Kodak Brownie, which had produced most of these mirror-finished black-and-white pictures; and later a big plastic Polaroid camera, the kind where the photograph rolled out by itself and then you had to wipe it down with some evil-smelling preservative.

“Here,” Mama said. “The house on Constantinople… you remember?”

Karen inspected the picture. Daddy must have taken it: it showed Mama standing by their new car, a steely blue Rambler parked in front of the house. Karen and Laura and Tim stood listlessly in the background leaning against the porch railing. How bored we look, Karen thought. It must have been a church day: everyone was dressed up, Mama in her pillbox hat with the preposterous black mesh veil, Karen and Laura in white starched dresses. Tim wore a black suit and collar. How Tim had always hated those collars. It made his child face seem piggish, baby fat pushed up into his chin.

Briefly, dizzyingly, she remembered her dream, the ravine behind the house, the night they had passed into a grim world of Tim’s devising. And not just a dream. It was a memory. It was as real as this photograph.

She thought, If we had taken Mama’s Kodak Brownie through that Door we might have a picture now—a picture of that strange night city, a picture of the Gray Man.

In her mind the Gray Man said, Your firstborn son.

“Those were good days by and large,” Mama was saying. “Your father had steady work. And I think I loved that old house on Constantinople more than any place I’ve lived since. More even than this place.”

Laura said, “Then why did you leave?”

Laura was focused, alert: Laura had not been seduced by the photographs.

Mama said, “Well, you know. You remember what I used to tell you kids? We’re gypsies. We move around …”

Laura said, “That’s not a reason.”

Mama hesitated, then turned back resolutely to the photographs. “Here’s the apartment in the West End. Karen, you were in fifth grade that year. That was your birthday party—you remember that? Here’s where we moved in Bethel. That’s Tim on the streetcar going downtown. Here we are with Mama Lucille taking the boat tour around the Point, I guess it was 1965 or ’66, the summer we had so many fireflies. Oh, and here I am—I was skinny in those days—riding up the Incline with your father. Here—”

Laura said, “There aren’t any baby pictures.”

Mama remained silent, her eyes on the pile of photographs.

Laura went on, “It just seems strange. No baby pictures. And the way we moved. I mean, there was Constantinople Street, there was Bethel; there was the West End, there was Duquesne. And we could have stayed on. Daddy wasn’t drinking so bad in those days. And I remember how we moved. Pack up and leave overnight. Like we were skipping out. But I remember how you always left the rent in a white envelope taped inside the door. So we were running, but not because of money.”

Mama said sullenly, “Is that why you came back here—to stir up all that old trouble?”

“Is it so wrong to want to understand?”

“Maybe. Maybe there was a good reason we left those places.”

“We’re all grown up now,” Laura said. “We have a right to know.”

“If it would help you,” Mama said vehemently, “you think I wouldn’t have told you? It was only ever to protect you … it was only so you could lead normal lives.”

Normal lives, Karen thought. She was passive now, a spectator in this exchange between her mother and her sister, thinking, A normal life is all I ever wanted. A normal life is what I wanted for Michael.

Laura said, “But we don’t lead normal lives.”

“But you could!”

“No. We can’t. Maybe for the same reason you couldn’t.” Laura held up a handful of the flimsy old photos. They looked, Karen thought, like so many brittle leaves. “Is he in here?”

Mama looked fearful. “Who?”

“You know who. Is he in here? Is he looking over somebody’s shoulder? Is he watching from the window across the street while Daddy waxes the Rambler? Is that why we moved all the time, because he found us on Constantinople Street and he found us in Bethel and he found us in Duquesne?”

Karen was holding her breath now. She thought of what Michael had said about the Gray Man on the beach, the way he had flicked that little girl out of the world with a gesture. With his eyes.

Mama said breathlessly, “You shouldn’t even talk about him. It could bring him back. It’s bad luck.”

“It doesn’t matter now,” Laura said firmly. “He doesn’t need luck.”

“God help us,” Mama said. The kitchen clock ticked; a wind rattled the windowpane. Mama added faintly, “He found you?”

“He found Michael in Toronto,” Laura said. “He found all three of us in California. There’s no reason to believe he can’t find us here.”

“So much time passed… we thought you were safe.”

“Did you? What about Tim—is Tim safe?”

“I pray for Tim.” Mama lowered her head. “I pray for him the way I prayed for you all these years.”

Laura looked startled. She opened her mouth, closed it again.

Karen found herself speaking. “We need to know all there is to know.” The words spilled out. “Not just for us. For Michael’s sake.”

“It almost wrecked us,” Mama said quietly. “Do you understand? It could wreck us again… There’s nothing I can say to help you.”

“Please,” Karen said.

Her mother looked infinitely pained and, in that protracted moment, impossibly old. Her cotton print housedress dangled limply from her shoulders. Outside, the wind raised up a whirl of snow.

“I can’t,” she said finally. “Try to understand. I never spoke to anybody about this. It’s hard. Maybe later. I have to think…”

Then, at the front of the house, the door rattled and slammed. A draft of cold air swept in along the floor. Jeanne Fauve stood up, composing her face. “It’s your father,” she said, sweeping the photographs back into the shoe box. “I have to get dinner ready.”

1

The house was quiet that night, but Michael couldn’t sleep.

The dark third-floor windows were shrouded with snow. The snow, he thought, should have melted; it was early for this kind of weather. But the temperature had dropped and the snow had deepened, cold air sweeping down the valley where the Polger met the Monongahela, whipping through these old blacktop streets.

Michael had spent the day exploring the town, walking from the north side to the south and back. He had bought a couple of paperbacks at a sad-looking Kresge’s and stopped for warmth and a cup of coffee at the tiny McDonald’s on Riverside, but mostly he just walked. One long depressing afternoon hike, one side of the valley to the other. The town, he had estimated, was about as big as Turquoise Beach, but older and dirtier and poor in a different way. Michael understood that many of the people in Turquoise Beach had volunteered for poverty, lived that way so they could paint or write or make music. But poverty in Polger Valley was an unforeseen accident, a disaster as tangible as a train derailment.

He had climbed a hillside until he could see all the sooty length of the town and the broad winding of the Mon, the steel mill and the gray highway, clouds rolling like winter itself from the northwestern sky. Standing there in his heavy coat, Michael felt the power in himself—stronger, it seemed, than ever before. It was like a current rising out of the depths of the earth, the old coal veins buried there, carboniferous ruins—it was a river running through him. He understood that it did not come from him but that he was a vehicle for it; the power was something old, eternal, fundamental. There was no end to it; by definition it was limitless. The limiting factor was Michael himself.

He thought, I can go anywhere I can imagine. The places he had seen were real places—as Turquoise Beach was a real place—but accessible only if you could dream yourself there.

He thought about this, walking home. He endured Willis’s pointed stares that evening, thinking about it. He took his thoughts to bed with him.

He lay in the cloistered warmth of this ancient bed with the comforter pulled up to his chin and the wind sifting snow against the window.

He thought, What we dream, we are.

Some things would be closed to him forever. There were worlds he couldn’t reach, worlds beyond his grasp. He felt them out there in the storm of possibility, tenuous doors he could not quite open. It made him think of what Laura had said about Turquoise Beach: It’s the best I could find. She wanted paradise but couldn’t truly dream it… maybe didn’t really believe in it.

He figured Laura knew all this, understood that her ramshackle seaside Bohemia was also a testament to her own limitations.

But at least she had tried. Michael thought about his mother, who hadn’t, who pretended she didn’t have the power at all—and maybe that was true now, maybe she had lost it. Maybe it atrophied, like a muscle. She had spent her life living up to the pinched expectations of Willis Fauve, trying to lead a “normal” life that was, when you came down to it, as ephemeral as Laura’s paradise.

A better world, Michael thought.

Maybe there really was such a thing.

Maybe he could find it.

He felt sleep tugging at him. He felt, too, the maze of possibility, the twining corridors of time. He could walk that maze, he thought, pick a destination, feel for it, follow the tug of intuition… here and here and here.

He closed his eyes and dreamed a place he had never seen before.

He envisioned it from an immense height and all at once, a place where brightly colored cities stood amidst plains and wilderness, buffalo and redwood forests and busy towns where the rivers branched. He thought of names. They came into his mind unbidden, but with the feeling of real names, place names: Adirondack, Free New England, the Plains Nations.

He saw fragile aircraft swimming through a clean sky; the focus narrowed and he saw crowds thronging a city marketplace, caged birds chattering, acrobats in a public square, a man in feathers buying spices from a woman in Chinese robes.

And then he turned his head against the pillow, willed his eyes open, and saw only the dark outline of this attic room, the snow against the window.

The vision was gone.

Sleep, Michael thought longingly. Sleep now.

He lay in the dark and listened to Willis moving through the house, locking and checking the doors, maybe taking a last sedating drink before he climbed the stairs to his own long and dreamless sleep.

2

Laura shared the twin beds in the guest room with her sister, but tonight she couldn’t sleep.

She sat up, glanced at the motionless form of Karen, then pulled a robe over her nightgown and went to the child-sized desk in the corner of the room.

It had been their study desk, hers and Karen’s, years ago. How like Mama to keep it preserved up here. Laura switched on the lamp and blinked at the bright circle of light it made.

The desktop was bare.

She reached into the big bottom drawer and took out two bulky items. One was the shoe box containing her mother’s photographs. The other was an immense, leather-bound family Bible.

Buried truths here, Laura thought sleepily.

She examined the photographs first. There were maybe thirty or forty altogether. She shuffled and fanned them like cards, painstakingly arranged them into a rough chronological order.

One of the pictures was very old, a ghostly image of Grandma Lucille with a tiny girl-child—who must have been Mama—and two older boys, Uncle Duke and Uncle Charlie. Charlie had died in Korea all those years ago; Uncle Duke had vanished out of a bad marriage. Laura could not deduce, from the photo, anything extraordinary about these people. Just Lucille Cousins and her three children by the railing at Niagara Falls—the date on the back was 1932. A sunny day but windy: everybody’s hair was blowing around. Bland, sunny smiles. These people, Laura thought, were about as occult or supernatural as a shirt button. Maybe this was where Mama had derived her vision of perfect normalcy, from this smiling woman, her mother, the easy contentment in those eyes. Grandpa Cousins had died a handful of years after he took this photo; Grandma Lucille had gone on public relief. So here was this picture: the Eden from which Mama had been expelled.

The power, Laura thought, the specialness, must have come from somewhere else.

She had never met any of Daddy’s family except Grandma Fauve, another widow. Laura remembered Grandma Fauve as a huge woman, obsessed with a mail-order fundamentalist cult she had discovered through radio broadcasts out of WWVA in Wheeling. She embroidered samplers with queer, threatening passages from the Book of Revelation; her bookcases spilled out pamphlets with titles like Warning from the Sky and Living in the Last Days. Laura, as a child, had looked very hard at her grandmother, peered deep into those dark unblinking eyes… scary eyes, in their own way; but she had never seen the power there, none of the recognition she had longed for.

Daddy didn’t have it. Mama didn’t have it. She thought, Then we are flukes. Mutants. Monsters.

But the power was an inherited power… Michael had demonstrated that.

She leafed through the other photos quickly. The image of Tim caught her eye, Tim growing up in these old pictures like the frames of a silent movie. He looked less intimidating than she remembered. She remembered how Tim used to bully his sisters, even though he was the youngest—something in his voice, his bearing; or just his stubborn willingness to do what they wouldn’t, to break not just one rule but every rule. But in the photographs he was just a child. His round face looked not threatening but threatened: a frightened child.

There were fewer pictures of Tim as a teenager, but in these she could detect at least something of his brooding sullenness. He wore a leather jacket that not even Willis’s threats had been able to pry off him. Laura smiled and thought, A fuck jacket. He regarded the camera with his chin lifted and his lips set in a grim line. His eyes were narrow, fixed.

Laura looked at her lost brother and thought, How much do you know?

The power was immensely strong in him. He had gone on experimenting even after Willis began to beat him—but privately, warily. Laura remembered how Tim would go off back into the hills or down some lonely road somewhere. She suspected that he practiced his awesome talent there, but she never asked. She was not as prim as her older sister, but Laura had always been a little bit afraid of her power, of the things she might see or conjure. Karen believed what Willis told her; Laura did not, but was cautious; Tim—

Tim, she thought, hated all of us.

She closed away the photographs and hid the shoe box once more.

She opened the Bible. It was a very old family Bible with lined pages in the back marked births and marriages and deaths. The Bible had belonged to Grandma Lucille and the pages were filled with her writing, looping fountain-pen letters, and then Mama’s looser ballpoint script.

Laura bent over the brittle pages with their curious odor of dust and papyrus. Births from the turn of the century. She found Mama here next to Duke and Charlie. She found her cousin Mary Ellen, Duke’s girl by a woman named Barbara before Duke ran off. There were mysterious branches of the family, people she had never met, names she couldn’t recall.

She looked for her own name, for Karen’s and Tim’s.

But the names weren’t there.

Karen’s marriage was recorded—To Gavin White, Toronto, Canada, 1970—but not her birth. None of them appeared in the birth register.

Laura felt suddenly light-headed, breathless. Felt fragile—as if she might float out the window and into the sky. We were not born, she thought, so how can we exist? She thought of the fairy tales she used to read out of her big illustrated Golden Book. We are changelings, she thought. The goblins left us. She remembered those goblins from the pictures. Gnarled and huge-headed, with sharp noses and sinister bright eyes. The goblins left us, she thought, and now the goblins want us back.

She shuddered and pulled the robe tighter around herself. She closed the Bible and put it back in the bottom drawer with the shoe box of photographs on top. She was about to close the drawer when she spotted something at the back, a cluster of faintly familiar shapes, dust-shrouded and gray.

She pulled the drawer open as far as its runners would allow and reached inside.

Three things. She brought them up into the circle of the light.

A paperweight, clouded and opaque.

A tiny, pathetically simple baby doll.

And a cheap pink plastic hand mirror.

I remember, she thought excitedly. I remember!

She thumbed a layer of dust from the surface of the mirror and regarded herself. The old glass was bent and pitted. How she had loved this old thing. The fairest in the land. Who had said that? Another fairytale memory, she thought, a Golden Book memory. She repeated it to herself, aloud but faintly: the fairest in the land.

Ahh… but I’m not.

Her own eyes regarded her sadly from the shrouded depths of the mirror.

Truth was, she had grown old in that quiet California town. She had grown old almost without noticing: mysteriously, effortlessly. I was beautiful once, she thought. I was beautiful and I was young and damn if I wasn’t going to change the world, or anyway find a better one. She had been caught up in that hot, brief burst of Berkeley idealism—all the things people meant when they talked longingly about the sixties. And it had burned like a fire in her and she would follow it out beyond the walls of the world and it would never, ever fail her.

But now I’m old, she thought, and I have spent twenty years watching the waves roll in and out. Twenty years of rose-hip tea and poetry and winter fog; twenty years of Emmett’s facile, occasional love.

Twenty years of stoned equilibrium, she thought, and all this coming home won’t make me young again.

The mirror made her feel very sad.

But these things, these toys, were meaningful. She could not quite recall their provenance, but they had the feel of magic about them. She would show them to Karen in the morning.

In the meantime she tucked them back out of sight in the drawer, switched off the light, and went to bed. In the darkness she could hear the snow beating against the window, a sifting sound like sand in an hourglass—twenty years, she thought, twenty years, my God!—and she watched the faint moonlight until it began to blur and she put her hand to her face and realized with some astonishment that she was crying.

That long night had not quite ended when Michael awoke, alone and desolate in the big upstairs bed.

He took his watch from the night table and held it up to the thin wash of streetlight that penetrated these old dusty windows.

Four a.m.—and he felt as wholly, mercilessly awake as if it were noon.

He sighed, stood up, pulled on his underwear and his Levi’s. He stood a moment at the window.

No more snow tonight. Stars beyond the fading margins of cloud, old streetlights down the back alleys and shuttered windows of this barren coal town. His breath made steamy islands on the glass. His vision of a better world had evaporated entirely. He could not even remember how it had felt. No magic in this place, Michael thought, only these cold empty streets. He shivered.

He wanted to go home.

The trouble with coming awake at 4 a.m., he thought, was that it left you feeling like a little kid. Vulnerable. Like you could cry at any minute.

These were things he had not allowed himself to think: that he was tired of being chased, tired of being afraid, tired of sleeping in strange beds in houses where he did not belong.

But these were thoughts a ten-year-old might have, and Michael reminded himself sternly that he was not ten years old … he only felt that way sometimes.

“Shit,” he said out loud.

He padded barefoot down the stairs past the other bedrooms, down to the ground floor. He switched on the kitchen light and poured himself a glass of milk. The tile floor was cold.

Impulsively, he pulled his wallet out of the right-hand pocket of his jeans.

He opened the card case.

It was still there… the number he had pilfered from his mother’s address book, his father’s phone number in Toronto. Hasty blue pen scrawl on old green memo paper.

There was a telephone in the kitchen—an old black dial phone on the counter next to the cookbooks.

Michael looked at it and thought, But what’s the point? Call long-distance, wake him up at 4 a.m.—or his girlfriend, for Christ’s sake—and get him on the line and say what? Hi, Dad. I just spent a few weeks in California. Well, sort of California. Got to see Kennedy’s funeral on TV. You should have been there.

Right.

But the ten-year-old inside him insisted, Home.

Bullshit. There was no home back there. Only an empty house, and his father living someplace Michael had never seen, with a woman Michael had never met.

That’s not true, the ten-year-old said. You could go back. You could make it be good again.

Bullshit, Michael thought, bullshit, bullshit. How good had it ever really been?

Not that good.

But he was dialing in spite of himself. Standing half dressed in this cold kitchen listening to the hum and chatter of the long-distance lines… and then a muted, brittle ringing.

“Hello?”

His father’s voice. Weary, irritated.

Michael opened his mouth but discovered that he was empty of words.

“Hello? What is this, a joke?”

He’ll hang up, Michael thought. And maybe that would be best.

But he whispered, “Dad?”

Long beat of silence down the wires from Canada. Then, “Michael? Is that you?”

Michael felt a moment of sheer, bottomless panic: there was nothing to say, nothing he could say.

“Michael, hey, I’m glad you called. Listen to me. I’ve been frantic—we’ve been worried about you.”

Michael registered the “we” as a very sour note.

“Michael, are you there?”

“Yes,” he admitted.

“Tell me where you’re calling from.”

No, Michael thought… that would be a mistake.

“Well,” his father said, “are you all right? Is your mother all right?”

“Yeah. We’re okay, we’re fine.”

“Has she given you any reason for dragging you away like this? Because, you know, that’s very strange behavior. That’s how it looks to me.”

Michael thought, You don’t know the half of it. He said, “I just called to hear your voice.”

I called because I want to go home. I want there to be a home.

“I appreciate that. Listen, I know this must all have been very hard for you to understand. Maybe we didn’t talk about it enough, you and I. Maybe you blame me for it. The divorce and all. Well, fair enough. Maybe I deserve some of that blame. But you have to look at it from my point of view, too.”

“Sure,” Michael said. But this wasn’t what he wanted to hear. He wanted to hear You and your mother come home, everything’s fixed, everything’s back to normal—some reassurance for the ten-year-old in him. But of course that was impossible. The divorce wouldn’t go away. The Gray Man wouldn’t go away.

“Tell me where you are,” his father persisted. “Hell, I can come and get you.”

And suddenly the ten-year-old was vividly alive. Yes! Come get me! Take me home! Make it be safe! He said, “Dad—”

But suddenly there was another, fainter voice, sleepy and feminine: “Gavin? Who is it?”

And Michael thought, No home to go back to.

The ten-year-old was shocked into silence.

His father said, “Michael? Are you still there?”

“It was nice talking,” Michael said. “Listen, maybe I’ll call again.”

“Michael—”

He forced himself to hang up. He looked at his watch. 4:15.

1

Michael understood that it was his job to be the man of the family, which involved protection and standing guard.

The routine at the Fauves’ house was that Willis would wake up early and Jeanne would fix him a big breakfast. Then Willis would head off for a day or a half day at the mill and Michael and his mother and aunt would venture downstairs. Nobody yelled “The coast is clear!” or anything, but that was how it felt—they would wait for the thud of the big front door, for the sound of Willis’s feet on the porch. His old Ford Fairlane would rattle out of the garage, and then the house was safe.

Grandma Jeanne insisted on cooking. Her breakfasts were heroic—cereal, toast, eggs, mounds of bacon—and Michael was always turning down second helpings. This morning she let him get away without protest, though, and he noticed the absentminded way she circled from the table to the counter, the odd looks Karen and Laura gave her: something was up.

He was only vaguely curious. He knew why Aunt Laura had brought them here and he was grateful that she was, maybe, beginning to get somewhere with it. He understood that this was necessary, sorting things out from the beginning, but he had already guessed it was not the whole job. Not by a long shot. Because there was still the problem of the Gray Man.

The Gray Man could find them anytime.

Michael bolted a big helping of scrambled eggs, considering this.

The kind of move they had made from Turquoise Beach would throw the Gray Man off their trail, but not indefinitely. He had followed them before and he would follow them here. It was only a question of time. And Michael’s mother and his aunt were preoccupied, so it was up to Michael to stand guard.

Grandma Jeanne took his plate and rinsed it under the faucet. His mom put a hand on his shoulder. “Michael? We’d like to talk to Grandma Jeanne privately.”

He nodded and stood. Grandma Jeanne would not face him; she stared into the foaming sink. Aunt Laura nodded once solemnly, telegraphing to him that this was important, he had better clear off.

“I’ll be out,” he said.

“Stay warm.” His mother ruffled his hair absently. “Stick close to the house.”

He was careful not to promise.

The temperature outside was still below freezing but the wind had let up. The sun was out, melting snow off the sidewalks; Michael’s breath plumed away in the winter light.

He followed the same route he had followed the day before, along Riverside Avenue and out beyond the southern margin of the town, up the snowy hillside until he could see all of Polger Valley mapped out in front of him. He felt the power most clearly in high places like this.

In town, among people, it was blanked out by a dozen other feelings. Up here he could just listen to the singing of it, like some quiet but important song played on a radio far away. He felt it like an engine deep in the earth, humming.

It occurred to him how much all this had changed his life. Not too long ago his main worries had been his term exams and the logistics of enjoying Saturday night when you couldn’t drive a car. All that was gone now—all washed away. But, Michael thought, it never really was like that, was it? He thought, You knew. You knew it before Emmett got you stoned that day in Turquoise Beach. You knew it before Dad left. Knew you were special, or anyway different: singled out in some way. Michael felt the power in him now and guessed he had always felt it, just never had a name for it. He had been timid of it, the sheer nameless immensity of it, the way you might be afraid of falling if you lived on the edge of some canyon… but he had loved it, too; secretly, wordlessly. He remembered nights coming home from some friend’s house, winter nights many times colder than this, and he would be shivering in an overstuffed parka and the stars would be out and there would be an ice ring around the moon, and he would be all alone out on some empty suburban street; and he would feel the future opening up in front of him, his own life like a wide, clean highway of possibility. And there was no reason for it, no reason to believe he was anything unique or that his life would be special. Just this feeling. Time opening like a flower for him.

Still opening, he thought. He remembered his dream of the night before, the cities and prairies and forests he had seen. The vision had come across a great distance. He wondered whether he could reach it— whether he would ever be able to summon it back. Maybe it was too far; maybe it was out of his grasp, never more real than his dreams.

But he had seen it, and he felt intuitively that it was a real place. Maybe he could find his way there— somehow, someday. Maybe that was where his life was headed.

Maybe.

If they could deal with the Gray Man.

Walker, the Gray Man had said. Walker, stalker, hunter, finder …

Michael thought, He almost took me with him. That day before we left Toronto. Had me hypnotized or something, had me following him back down some ugly back door out of the world.

He remembered that place he had almost gone. He remembered the feel of it, the taste and the smell of it. And unlike the world he had dreamed last night, it was not very far away at all… Michael was certain he could find it again if he wanted to.

It might be necessary one day. It might tell them something.

Furtively now, he raised his hands in front of him.

This was probably not a good idea … he told himself so. But it was important, he thought. A piece of the puzzle. This was the step Laura or his mother would never take; this was Michael’s responsibility.

He made a circle of his fingers.

He looked through that circle at the town of Polger Valley, calm under a quarter inch of snow.

Felt the power in him… looked again, looked harder.

The town changed…

It was recognizably the same town. An old steel-mill town on the Monongahela. Maybe even, in a way, better off. The mill was bigger, a huge compound of coal-black buildings strung out along the riverside. There were complex piers busy with odd wooden barges; the river was crowded with traffic. But the town was also dirtier, the sky was black; the houses hugging this hillside were tin-and-tar-paper shanties. There was snow on the ground but the snow was gray with ash; the trees were spindly and barren. The traffic down at the foot of this hill was mostly horses and carts; the one truck that ambled past was boxy and antiquated-looking. Michael caught a faint whiff of some sulfurous chemical odor.

He squinted across town to the police station and the courthouse, plain gray stone buildings a quarter mile away down Riverside. He saw the flag flying over the courthouse and recognized that it was not an American flag, not a familiar flag at all: something dark with a triangular symbol.

Bad place, Michael thought. You could feel it in the air. Poverty and bad magic.

This is his home, Michael thought: this is where Walker lives. Not this town, maybe, but this world.

He shivered and blinked away the vision. His hands dropped to his side.

Maybe they would have to follow Walker into that place. Maybe that was their only choice. It might come to that. But not yet, Michael thought. He felt soiled, dirty; even that brief contact had been chastening. He moved down the hillside toward Polger Valley—how clean it suddenly seemed—thinking, Not yet, we’re not ready for that yet… we’re not strong enough yet for that.

He was halfway home down Riverside, past the Kresge’s and the Home Hardware, when Willis pulled up next to him.

“Hey,” Willis said.

Michael stood still on the cracked sidewalk and regarded his grandfather warily through the rolled-down window of the Fairlane…

“Get in,” Willis said.

Michael said, “I wanted to walk.”

But Willis just reached over and jerked open the door on the passenger side. Michael shrugged and climbed in.

The car was dirty with fast-food wrappers and cigarette butts, but it smelled only faintly of liquor: Willis was sober today.

Willis drove slowly down Main. He looked at Michael periodically and made a couple of attempts at conversation. He asked how Michael did in school. Okay, Michael said. Was it messing him up to be out for so long? No, he figured he could make it up. (As if any of this mattered.) Willis said, “Your old man left?”

Michael hesitated, then nodded.

“Shitty thing to do,” Willis said.

“I guess he had his reasons.”

“Everybody has some goddamn reason.”

Turning up Montpelier, Willis said, “Look, I know what it is you’re running from.”

Michael raised his head, startled.

“You can only make it worse,” Willis went on, “doing what you’re doing.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you do, though. I think you know exactly what I mean.” Willis was talking now from way down in his chest, almost to himself. He downshifted the Fairlane and slowed, approaching the house.

Willis said, “Timmy used to go off like that. Off up into the hills or God knows where. And I knew what he was doing, just like I know what you’re doing. I could smell it on him.” Willis pulled into the driveway and on up into the tiny, dark garage. He pulled the hand brake and let the motor die. “I smell it on you.”

Michael reached for the door but Willis caught his wrist. Willis had a hard grip. He was old but he had hard, stringy muscles.

“This is for your own good,” he said. “You listen to me. It brings him. You savvy? You go out there and make a little door into Hell and he climbs out.”

Michael said, “What do you know about it?”

“More than you think. You don’t give me much credit, do you?”

Michael felt Willis’s huge anger rising up. He shifted toward the door, but Willis held tight to his wrist.

“My Christ,” Willis went on, “didn’t your mother teach you anything? Or maybe she did—maybe she taught you too fucking much.”

Michael remembered what Laura had told him, how Willis used to beat them. He realized now that it was true, Willis could do that, he was capable of it. Willis radiated anger like a bright red light.

“Admit it,” Willis said, “you were up in those hills opening doors.”

Michael shook his head. The lie was automatic.

“Don’t shit me,” Willis stormed. “I’m a good Christian man. I can smell out the Devil in the dark.”

It made Michael think of the sulfurous stink of Walker’s world.

“I don’t do that,” he said.

Willis’s grip tightened. “I won’t have you drawing down that creature on us again. Too many years—I lived with that too goddamn long.” He bent down so that his face was close to Michael’s face. The dim winter light in the garage made him seem monstrous. “I want you to admit to me what you’ve been doing. And then I want you to promise you won’t do it again.”

“I didn’t—”

“Crap,” Willis said, and raised his right hand to strike.

It was the gesture that angered Michael. Made him mad, because he guessed his mother had seen that hand upraised, and Laura, and they had been children, too young to do or say anything back. “All right!” he said, and when Willis hesitated Michael went on: “I can do it! Does that make you happy? I could walk out of here sideways and you’d never see me go! Is that what you want?”

Willis pulled Michael close and with the other hand took hold of his hair. The grip was painful; Michael’s eyes watered.

“Don’t even think it,” Willis said.

His voice was a rumble, gritty machinery in his chest.

“Promise me,” Willis said. “Promise you won’t do it again.” Silence.

Willis tugged back on Michael’s hair. “Promise!”

Michael said, “Fuck you!”

And Willis was too shocked to react.

Michael said between his teeth, “I could do it here! You ever think about that? I could do it now.” And it was true. He felt the power in him still, high-pitched and singing. He said without thinking about it, “I could drop you down through the floor so fast you wouldn’t be able to blink—do you want that?”

Willis was speechless.

Michael said, “Let go of me.”

Miraculously, he felt Willis’s grip loosen.

He wrenched open the door before Willis could reconsider. He stumbled down onto the oily concrete.

“You’re lost,” Willis said from the darkness inside the car. “Oh boy… you are damned.” But there was not much force left in it.

Michael hurried into the house.

2

“I don’t like telling it,” Mama said. “I can’t tell it all. I don’t know it all. But I guess I can tell what I know.”

The kitchen clock ticked away. Karen and Laura sat sipping coffee. Karen understood that silence was best, that her mother was staring past these walls and back into a buried history. Hard for all of us, she thought.

Privately, Karen was frightened. The words pronounced in this room might change her life. Beginning now, she thought, the future is dark and strange.

Karen took another sip of coffee, waiting. Beyond the steamy windows a still morning sunlight filled the backyard.

“Well,” Mama said. “I was a girl in Wheeling when I met Willis. You know, this was all so long ago it seems like a story. Your Grandma Lucille was working at the Cut-&-Curl and that year I had a teller job at the bank.”

She settled back and sighed.

“I met Willis through the church.

“It was a little Assembly of God church, what I guess nowadays they would call fundamentalist. To us it was just church. Willis was very serious about it. He went to all the functions. I was there every Sunday but I didn’t do any work or go to the meetings much. There was a Youth Group that met in the basement and I went there sometimes. Willis was always there. He knew me from Group for most of a year before he worked up the nerve to ask me out. Maybe that seems strange, but it was different in those days. People didn’t just, you know, jump into bed. There was a courtship, there was dating. But pretty soon we started going together. And I liked him well enough to eventually marry him.

“He was different when he was younger. I don’t say that to excuse anything. But I want you to understand how it was. He was fun to be with. He told jokes. Can you imagine that? He liked to dance. After we got married a cousin of his got him a job at a mill up in Burleigh, and that was when we moved out of Wheeling.

“I guess it was hard for me being away from family and in a strange town and living with a man, all for the first time. Just being married, it was very different. Willis wasn’t always as gentle or as interesting as he seemed when we were dating. But you kind of expect that. But he was doing a lot of overtime, too. There were days I hardly saw him. I will admit I was lonely sometimes. I made a few friends but it was never like Wheeling—it was always a strange place to me.

“We wanted children. Mostly I wanted them. I wanted them especially because the house we rented seemed so empty. It was not a big house; Willis was not making a great salary those early years. But it felt big when I was rattling around in it on my own. You clean up, you maybe listen to the radio a little bit, and the time slips by. So it was natural to think about children and how there would at least be company, even if it was only a little baby. The neighbors had kids and that woman, Ellen Conklin, she would come by in the afternoons and just drink one cup of coffee after another and complain about her life. Had a little brat named, I think, Emilia who never left her in peace. I mean a truly nasty child. But I envied her even that. A child— it would be something.

“But we didn’t have any.

“We waited for five years.

“I didn’t know to see a doctor or anything. I just thought you waited. And it would happen or it would not as God preferred. We went to an Assembly church there and one time I asked the pastor about it, privately. Well, he turned so red he could hardly talk. A young man. ‘God willing,’ he said—he used those words. Tray,’ he told me.

“So I prayed. But nothing happened.

“I didn’t know about fertility or about how it worked, except that the man and the woman were together in bed and that was how it happened. I wondered if we were doing something wrong. Because in those days nobody talked about it. Nobody I knew ever talked about it. I finally worked up the nerve to mention how we never had babies to Ellen Conklin and she said, ‘Why, shoot, Jeanne, I thought you were doing it on purpose.’ And it was news to me that there was a way to not have kids on purpose. It was confusing to me… why would anybody not want to? Which made Ellen Conklin laugh, of course.

“She said to see a doctor. It might be me, she said, or it could be Willis. And maybe it could be fixed.

“Well, I saw the doctor by myself. Willis wouldn’t go. He just wouldn’t hear of it. It wasn’t the kind of thing Willis could talk about. So I went by myself, and in the end it didn’t matter that Willis didn’t go because as it turned out it was me—I was the one who couldn’t bear children.”

She looked at Karen and Laura, back and forth between them. “You know what I’m saying?”

Karen was trembling; she did not speak. Laura said coolly, “We were adopted?” Added, “I looked in the family Bible, Mama … I know we’re not in there.”

Karen felt suddenly adrift, a ship cast loose from its moorings.

Mama said, “Not adopted exactly. But I will tell you the story. What I know of it.”

They were a strange couple (Mama said). They had been going to the Assembly church for almost two years, and they were immigrants.

DPs, most people thought, refugees from what was left of Europe after the war. No one could place exactly what country they might have fled. They spoke good English but in an odd way, as if a Dutch accent had mingled with a French. They looked alike. He was tall and she was short, but they had similar eyes.

They just moved into town one day and took up residence in a shack out on the access road. Obviously they’d been through hard times. They gave then-name as Williams, so people were thinking, Well, here’s somebody without papers, somebody maybe who came into the country through the back door—it was possible.

But they were not drifters. The man—he called himself Ben—had no skills but he was willing to work and he was a hard worker. You would see him sometimes at the back of the hardware store, pushing a broom or shelving stock. People said he never complained. And he had a family.

Three little babies.

The oldest was four. The youngest was a newborn.

I see you know what I mean. But wait—don’t jump ahead.

People took pity on them because of this haggard look, a hunted look. In the Depression you might have mistaken them for criminals or hobos, but these were prosperous times and there was nothing criminal about them. And we were reading all the terrible stories then about the war—this was when the truth about the death camps came out. They weren’t Jews but they might have been gypsies or Poles or who knows what. None of us really understood what had happened over there, only that a lot of innocent people had been hunted down and killed.

Ben seemed very serious about the church. I don’t know if it was ever honest conviction, however, or just the urge to fit in. Sometimes at church I would see him a pew or three in front of me, standing there with the hymnal in his hand, not really singing but just mouthing the words. And he would have this utterly lost look, the way you or I might look if we’d stumbled into a synagogue or something by mistake and couldn’t politely leave. I think he liked the processional best. He would always close his eyes and smile a little when the organ played. And he always put money in the plate—for a man in his circumstances he gave very generously.

I never thought he would abandon those children.

He seemed to like it well enough in Burleigh—and he loved those kids. You could just tell.

But this is the part I don’t know much about. Willis never talked about it.

All I know is that there was trouble one night at the shack where they lived. Willis got a phone call and went out with some church people. He came back looking very pale and, you know, shaking. But he never talked about it. Couple of police cars were out there that night, people said, and some stories circulated but no two alike, so I don’t know. Finally it was let out that Ben and his wife had left town, or maybe he had murdered his wife and run away—but I never believed that.

The pastor of our church took charge of the three children. There was a county orphanage two towns away but it had a very bad reputation—and these weren’t registered children; they had no birth or baptismal certificates. In those days, in that place, people were more casual about such things. Well, the pastor thought of us.

He talked to Willis about it.

I don’t know how much Willis liked the idea. But he knew I wanted kids and that I couldn’t have any. Maybe the pastor or some of the deacons leaned on him. Anyway, he agreed. And I think that was a brave thing to do.

He brought you three home.

“I don’t remember any of that,” Karen said dazedly.

“Well,” Mama said, “you were only just four years old—a young four at that. It’s hardly surprising. And Laura was still in diapers and Timmy was just newborn.”

“At least it makes sense,” Laura said. “It puts some order into things.” “Does it?”

“There must be a reason we’re the way we are.”

Mama said, “You shouldn’t even talk about that.”

“But we are talking about it,” Laura said. “Isn’t that what we’ve been talking about all along? Mama, that’s why we’re here.”

Karen watched her mother stand up, pace nervously to the sink.

Mama said—faintly—“It frightened your father.”

She turned to the window.

“I saw you do it once. I mean you, Karen. I remember that. It didn’t seem like such a bad thing. You showed me. You were proud of it. You drew a circle in the air and there was a nice place in that circle—a lake, some trees, a flight of birds. Like a postcard picture. It was pretty and it was the sort of thing a child might try to draw with crayons. I wasn’t frightened of it, not at that moment. Later I guess I was, because it was a miracle, you know, and frightening when you think about what it might mean. But you were so proud of it. Maybe somebody had showed you how, back before we got you. Or maybe you just knew. When I calmed down I said it was nice but don’t do it again and especially don’t show Daddy … I knew how he’d take it.”

Karen thought, I remember that! So long ago, but the memory popped right back up. How it had felt, making that circle, feeling the power in her… she had been proud.

She thought, It’s been so long! Once I was young and I could hear that song inside me, even when I didn’t want to. Now I’m empty. Drained, she thought, like a bottle.

“It was always Daddy,” Mama said, “who decided when we would move.”

“The Gray Man,” Laura said.

Mama nodded convulsively, her back turned. “You could call him that. I saw him once. One time only. Just before we left Pittsburgh. We were riding on the streetcar—I had some shopping to do. Karen, you were in school; but I had Laura and Timmy with me. And he got on the car.

“Timmy looked straight at him… both children seemed to recognize him. And I looked at him, too.

“I knew there was something wrong with him. He made me think of somebody who had been hurt somehow. When I was a girl we used to see veterans who had been gassed in France: he reminded me of that. He moved his head oddly; he had strange eyes under that old slouch hat. I thought he might be, you know, simpleminded.

“But then he sat down and looked straight at the kids and I saw them looking at him, and he smiled, and it was a horrible smile, and his eyes lit up in a terrible hungry way… and when I saw Tim smiling back at him I just felt faint, the way you would feel if you saw your child playing with a rattlesnake or something. I grabbed the kids and rang the bell and we got off at the next stop—ran off is more like it.”

Laura said, “We moved after that?”

“I told Willis about it… and yes, we moved pretty much directly after that.”

“Every time we moved, was it because of the Gray Man?”

“I think so. Mostly. Willis never talked about it.”

“You never asked him?”

“Hardly ever. And he wouldn’t answer.”

We never talked, Karen thought. Nobody ever talked.

Laura said, “I wonder if this Ben Williams is still alive. Maybe there’s somebody in Burleigh who would know… Mama, do you think so?”

Mama said, “You’re determined to go stirring this up?”

“I don’t think we have a choice.”

“Well … I doubt that you’ll be able to find anybody who can help. Most of that Assembly congregation must be scattered by now. The mill closed down years ago. A few of the men knew what happened that night when you three were taken from Ben and his wife. But they never seemed liable to talk about it. In a town of gossips, that is one thing people kept to themselves. And who else is there?”

Karen said, “There’s Daddy.”

Laura looked at her. Mama regarded her with obvious surprise.

“Your father,” Mama began, “would never—”

But then there was the bang and rattle of the big front door, and Michael rushed into the house.

1

The day before they left, Jeanne Fauve took her daughter Laura aside and said in a whisper, “Where are you going from here?”

They stood in the parlor with the faded Persian rug and the relentless tick of the mantel clock. The air was still and dry; the furnace was humming. Upstairs, Michael and Karen were busy packing.

“I don’t know,” Laura said. “Up to Burleigh, maybe—see what we can find out.”

“I think,” her mother said, “if you’re determined to do this, what you need is to talk to Tim.”

Laura said, “You know where he is?”

“Not really. But we got this from him at Christmas… maybe it’s useful to you?”

Jeanne took the card from the pocket of her quilted housecoat. It was not a Christmas card, just an ordinary postcard, a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge from the air, and the white buildings on the hills beyond it like some painter’s dream of a city.

It was the only communication she had received from her son in the past ten years.

Laura accepted the card from her mother. She turned it over and read the message there. Merry Christmas was all it said, but she recognized the handwriting—after all these years—as Tim’s. The message was mysterious; she could not discern either sincerity or irony in it.

But there was a return address there, too, crabbed and small at the top of the card. Someplace in San Francisco.

Laura looked up somberly.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Be careful,” her mother said.

2

That last night in the old house in Polger Valley, Karen stayed up and wrote in her journal.

Rustle of cold wind at the window, scratch of pen on paper.

I think about Daddy, she wrote.

The pen hesitated on the page.

She wrote, I carry him inside me and I have carried him inside me longer than I knew.

He means well, she wrote.

But then she scratched it out.

She wrote, We think we live in a place or we know a person or we have a parent, but it isn’t true. We are those things. They build us. They’re what we’re made of.

I’m made out of Willis, Karen wrote. I see him in the mirror more often than I like. I hear his voice in my voice.

She discovered that her hand was shaking.

She wrote—bearing down hard with the point of the Bic—I think about Michael, too.

Michael is made out of me.

And in this dangerous thing we have begun— dear God, she wrote, I wonder if that is enough.

She closed the journal and was about to switch off the small desk light when Laura said, “Wait.”

Karen turned abruptly. “You scared me … I didn’t know you were awake.”

“I didn’t want to interrupt.”

They were alone in the room with midnight snow heaped on the windowsill and the faint, far hum of the furnace. Karen wore a quilted robe over her nightgown; Laura was tucked up under a comforter.

“Been quite a visit,” Laura said.

Karen smiled. “Hell of a visit.”

“Foundlings,” Laura said.

“Gypsies,” Karen said.

“That’s us.” Laura sat up in bed hugging her knees. “Have you looked in the bottom drawer?”

Karen frowned. She had never been especially fond of surprises. And she was tired. But she opened the big drawer slowly.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, my God.”

“You remember them, too?”

From among the toys Karen picked out the pink, fleshy baby doll. It was tiny; it was naked; dust had infiltrated the pores of the plastic.

“Baby,” she said. She looked at Laura wonderingly. “It wasn’t a dream.”

“None of it was ever a dream. That’s the scary part, isn’t it?”

Karen explained about the dream she had dreamt periodically almost all of her life, the house on Constantinople and Tim’s doorway into that cold industrial city. Laura nodded and said, “That’s more or less how I remember it. Tim was always the explorer. Still is, maybe.”

She replaced the doll where she had found it. There was something unpleasant in the feel of the plastic. “You think we can find him?”

“I think we have to try.”

“You think he still hates us?”

“You think he ever really did?”

“I don’t know,” Karen said. The question troubled her. “It’s been so long …”

She yawned in spite of herself.

“Hey, me, too,” Laura said. “Bedtime. Long drive in the morning.”

But they left the light burning through the night.

3

Willis helped Karen carry the last bag out to the car.

Jeanne stood on the porch with a heavy cloth coat clutched around her. It was a cold day but clear; the sky was a deep winter blue. Everybody had said goodbye; everybody had waved. Michael and Laura were huddled in the car now; the engine was running impatiently.

Willis hesitated with his hand on the open lid of the trunk. His eyes were inscrutable behind his bifocals.

He put his hand on Karen’s shoulder. He said, “You understand why I did it?”

She knew instantly what he meant by that. The fear, she thought, the not-talking… and the beatings.

She nodded once, uncomfortably.

Willis said, “But that’s worth jack shit, right? Understanding doesn’t make it better—right?”

She regarded him in his checkerboard winter jacket and his hunting cap, his gray Marine-cut sideburns and his stubbled cheeks.

“No,” she said sadly. “It doesn’t.”

Willis said, “I wish you luck.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“If I could help—” But he wasn’t moving. He was just standing there. His hands were limp and motionless.

Karen climbed in the car up front with Laura, and rolled up the window and did not look back. She did not want Daddy to see her, because she was crying, and how had that happened? What sense did that make?

4

Willis stood a long time watching the car disappear up the road.

There was a raw wind coming from the north down the valley of the Polger and his cheeks were red and burning, but Willis didn’t care. He watched the car vanish around the corner from Montpelier onto Riverside, and stood a long time after that, hand up to shield his eyes against the sun, staring down these old row houses toward the far brown ribbon of the Mon.

He was surprised when he felt Jeanne’s hands on his arms, his wife steering him gently up the porch.

“Come in and warm up,” she said.

Her voice was kind. But the cold air lingered, the rooms were all too big, and the shadows were crowded with voices and time.