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.
Chapter Four
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.”