She did not want to think of how far she had driven to find him, or of how lost he had looked, standing on that broken sidewalk with one foot out of the world—or of the shadow she had seen beyond him, tall and patiently smiling.
4
Michael slept through the long plane trip.
He woke once a little after dawn. His mother was asleep; most of the plane was asleep. A sleepy-looking stewardess moved up the aisle, smiled absently at him, moved on. The drone of the aircraft filled his head.
He looked down through the window and saw the desert. He guessed it was the desert. It was swept with morning light, stark with shadows, a complex undulating wilderness. It was pathless, strange and empty, another world. Canyons and arroyos; arid Triassic seabed. Full of hidden angles, Michael thought, curious corners.
You could walk out of the world if you wanted to. And it was true.
Angles, Michael thought. Angles and corners and doors.
Chapter Three
1
Later, when Karen explained why she had come, her sister Laura said, “I can take you to a place. A safe place. It’s where I live.”
And Karen turned to face the window of the hotel room. A crescent of beach, tousled palm trees, the murmur of the traffic. “You mean,” she said, “not here.”
“Not here. No. But not far away.”
Coming into California was like walking into a memory.
She had spent a week here in 1969. It was a bad time; she had argued with her sister; they had not parted amicably. Times change, Karen reminded herself. But the streets had not, the hotel in Santa Monica had not, not in any significant way. Michael sat dazed beside her in a miasma of vinyl and stale cigar smoke as the cab barreled down these broad, gray freeways from the airport. Involuntarily, she recalled odd bits of knowledge she had picked up over the course of a lifelong magazine addiction. Fact: palm trees are not native to Southern California. Fact: without irrigation, these endless stucco housing tracts would be as dry as the city of Beirut. But most of all she was struck by the quality of the sunlight, its angularity, a kind of light you never saw back East. It was not a brighter light but whiter, opalescent; it made hard shadows that faded, in the distance, to a wash of gray.
And of course the ocean. She remembered the ocean, the reach of it, how it filled the horizon. She stepped out of the taxi into this strange sunlight and marveled a moment at the distance she had come.
They were alone in the hotel for a few days. Michael didn’t talk much. He seemed to understand why they had come, the urgency of the trip, and Karen figured he was disoriented by it: certainly she was. He asked one morning why Aunt Laura hadn’t met them and Karen explained about the post office box—“She won’t have picked up her mail yet.” And so they waited in the room, ordered their meals from room service, left a message at the desk when, one afternoon, they went out to walk along the beach. Karen guessed she had become very Canadian in the years she had spent in Toronto, because the people she saw along the littered beach seemed very strange to her. A man wearing roller skates and a striped tank top bowled her off the sidewalk and, as she sat bewildered in the sand, looked over his shoulder and said something abusive. The words, thank goodness, did not register.
I’m a stranger here, she thought. I don’t belong here. No future in this place.
She was grateful Michael hadn’t seen. He was at a stall buying hot dogs. They ate silently, staring out at the ocean. Michael had always been quiet, Karen thought, but this new silence was disturbing. He seemed to be bracing himself for the next inevitable disaster. She sympathized with this intuition that their troubles might not have ended: it was her intuition, too.
And then they walked back to the hotel, and found Laura was waiting in the lobby.
Karen saw her first. She had that privilege, for a moment, of seeing without being seen. She found herself wanting to prolong it, to avoid announcing herself. Looking at her sister Karen felt a strange sensation of double vision, of time turning back on itself.
Laura was older, of course. But the two decades since 1969 had been kind to her. She was lightly tanned, very California, her hair cut boyishly short. Her figure was good. She was wearing a white sundress, a gaudy headband tied at the back, and cheerful bracelets at her wrists. As she turned, the bracelets chimed.
Their eyes met, and Karen thought for a fleeting moment: I could have been like that. She looks like me, Karen thought, but airier, lighter. Karen had always thought of herself as solid, earthbound; her sister looked as delicate as the wind.
She wondered, Is this envy? Am I jealous?
“Aunt Laura,” Michael said, seeing the recognition that leaped like a spark between the women.
Laura came across the tiled lobby with a mad grin and hugged them both.
They had lunch in the hotel coffee shop. Laura devoured a massive salad. “It’s the smog,” she said. “I’m not used to it. It does weird things to my appetite.”
Michael looked at her oddly. “I thought you lived here.”
Laura exchanged glances with Karen. “Not here,” Laura said. “Not exactly.”
Karen left Michael in the hotel room to pack— and to catch the end of a Dodgers game on TV—while she and Laura took a brief stroll down the boulevard.
“I don’t know,” she said. Everything seemed strange and sudden now, the appearance of her sister, these old connections and older barriers. She felt a kind of panic, the urge to back off a step, to reconsider. “I’m grateful for the invitation. And it’s what we came here for. Of course. To see you … to visit. But I’m concerned about Michael.”
Laura said, “He doesn’t know?”
Karen thought, We always did this, didn’t we? Talked in these ellipses. We do it still. “There was never any need for him to know.”
They found a bench overlooking the tarry beach. Offshore, against the white glare of the horizon, a tanker moved toward port.
“I’m not like you,” Karen said. “I’m even less like Tim. I never wanted it—to be able to do what we do. I didn’t ask for it and I didn’t ever want it.”
“None of us asked for it. What are you saying, that Michael doesn’t know anything?”
“Why? Why force it on him? If he can live without knowing, why make him conscious of it?”
“Because it’s in him,” Laura said calmly. “It’s part of him. You must feel it.”
Maybe she could. Maybe she had felt it from the first, since his birth, before his birth: that he was different in the way she was different, that the frightening ability to walk between worlds was there in him— enclosed, like the bud of a flower, but real and potent.
But it was not something she wanted to consider. She said, “I worked hard, you know, to give him a normal life. Maybe you don’t know what that means. I guess it never mattered to you. But a normal life… it was the best thing I could give him. Do you understand that? I don’t want to throw it away.”
Laura put her hand on Karen’s arm. The gesture was calming, and it seemed for a moment as if she and not Karen were the older sister. “Don’t blame yourself. He forced the issue. Not Michael but—what do you call him? The Gray Man.”
The memory was like a weight.
“Stay with me,” Laura said. “At least a while. It’s been too long since we saw each other. And I want to get to know my nephew. And I want you both to be safe.”
“Is it really very far?” “We can drive there.” “What’s it like?”
“Like here. Very much like here. But nicer.” “All right,” Karen said sadly. “Yes.”
2