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.”
Chapter Five
Emmett was a pretty neat guy, Michael decided.
Emmett played acoustic guitar for a Latino folk band called Rio Negro and also did some solo stuff in the local Turquoise Beach clubs. His apartment, which was the floor downstairs from Aunt Laura, looked like a music shop. He had all kinds of stringed instruments hanging on pegs or just leaning up against the walls. Emmett showed Michael how to tell the difference between a flamenco guitar, a classical guitar, and a steel guitar; showed him a Dobro, an F-style mandolin, an old long-necked Vega banjo—“the Pete Seeger model.” Michael wandered through the clutter in dumb amazement. He said, “I took a few lessons a year or so ago … I know some chords.”
Emmett said, “Yeah? Well, hey, there’s an old Gibson over there if you want to try it. Doesn’t look like much but it plays okay.”
Michael held the guitar reverently.
Garage-sale material, he thought, but the joints were good and the strings felt new. He finger-picked a G, Em, C. His fingers felt clumsy but the chords rang out.
Emmett fetched down his own guitar, a twelve-string Martin. “I have handmade guitars, I have foreign guitars. But I keep coming back to this old Martin. Bitch to tune, but I love the sound it makes.” He perched on a window seat with the Venetian blinds and the sea behind him and played complex runs that made Michael feel hopelessly amateur. Emmett smiled through his beard. “You want to play something?”
Michael said he might be able to chord along to some old folkie stuff. Union Maid or Guantanamera or something on that order. “Chord along, then,” Emmett said, and Michael tried gamely to keep up as Emmett launched into The Bells of Rhymney. His voice was a rough, strong baritone and Michael was amazed at the sincerity he brought to the old Seeger protest tune. “Is there no future, cry the brown bells of Merthyr—?” It made him shiver.
They played through half a dozen songs until Michael’s fingers were sore. Emmett grinned massively. “Not bad,” he said. He reached into the pocket of his shirt and took out something Michael was able to identify as a joint. He lit it, inhaled, extended his hand.
Michael maintained his cool. “It might be better if you didn’t tell my mom.”
“About the smoke?”
Michael nodded.
“She disapproves?”
“She would.”
Emmett said, “Okay, then… our secret.”
Michael toked carefully. He had smoked a couple of times in Dan’s basement, weekends. He managed not to cough. But the sweet, pungent smoke went through him like a wind. He felt instantly lightheaded.
He made a move to hand Emmett back the old Gibson guitar. Emmett said, “Keep it.” Michael goggled.
“It’s not an heirloom. Long as you play it, hang on to it. If you get tired of it I’ll take it back.”
He cradled the guitar in his lap. Afternoon sunshine glinted off the varnish. It was a better guitar than Emmett made it out to be. The pain in his fingers had retreated, so Michael hugged the Gibson against his chest and picked out a few bars of an old Paul McCartney song, Yesterday.
Emmett nodded appreciatively. “That’s pretty. You make that up?”
“What, you never heard it?”
“Nope. Should I?”
“The Beatles,” Michael said. “You know? Lennon and McCartney? Sergeant Pepper, Abbey Road?”
“New one on me,” Emmett said happily. “These guys play at your school?”
And so Michael was reminded again that he had come a long way in that car trip with Aunt Laura.
It was so easy to forget. It was not as if they were in a foreign country. Everybody spoke English, everybody drove on the right side of the road. But, he thought, it was a foreign country. The concept was familiar from the science fiction he’d read: a “parallel world.”
Easy to say. Less easy to deal with. He had played ball with Emmett on the beach; he had watched TV;
he had behaved—these last few days—as if everything were normal. He understood that his mother wanted that from him, and for now—at least for a while—he was willing to give it. And it worked, this illusion-making: for hours at a time he really would forget what had happened in the car, or before that, back home, with the Gray Man.