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?”