“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.