She sat up, glanced at the motionless form of Karen, then pulled a robe over her nightgown and went to the child-sized desk in the corner of the room.
It had been their study desk, hers and Karen’s, years ago. How like Mama to keep it preserved up here. Laura switched on the lamp and blinked at the bright circle of light it made.
The desktop was bare.
She reached into the big bottom drawer and took out two bulky items. One was the shoe box containing her mother’s photographs. The other was an immense, leather-bound family Bible.
Buried truths here, Laura thought sleepily.
She examined the photographs first. There were maybe thirty or forty altogether. She shuffled and fanned them like cards, painstakingly arranged them into a rough chronological order.
One of the pictures was very old, a ghostly image of Grandma Lucille with a tiny girl-child—who must have been Mama—and two older boys, Uncle Duke and Uncle Charlie. Charlie had died in Korea all those years ago; Uncle Duke had vanished out of a bad marriage. Laura could not deduce, from the photo, anything extraordinary about these people. Just Lucille Cousins and her three children by the railing at Niagara Falls—the date on the back was 1932. A sunny day but windy: everybody’s hair was blowing around. Bland, sunny smiles. These people, Laura thought, were about as occult or supernatural as a shirt button. Maybe this was where Mama had derived her vision of perfect normalcy, from this smiling woman, her mother, the easy contentment in those eyes. Grandpa Cousins had died a handful of years after he took this photo; Grandma Lucille had gone on public relief. So here was this picture: the Eden from which Mama had been expelled.
The power, Laura thought, the specialness, must have come from somewhere else.
She had never met any of Daddy’s family except Grandma Fauve, another widow. Laura remembered Grandma Fauve as a huge woman, obsessed with a mail-order fundamentalist cult she had discovered through radio broadcasts out of WWVA in Wheeling. She embroidered samplers with queer, threatening passages from the Book of Revelation; her bookcases spilled out pamphlets with titles like Warning from the Sky and Living in the Last Days. Laura, as a child, had looked very hard at her grandmother, peered deep into those dark unblinking eyes… scary eyes, in their own way; but she had never seen the power there, none of the recognition she had longed for.
Daddy didn’t have it. Mama didn’t have it. She thought, Then we are flukes. Mutants. Monsters.
But the power was an inherited power… Michael had demonstrated that.
She leafed through the other photos quickly. The image of Tim caught her eye, Tim growing up in these old pictures like the frames of a silent movie. He looked less intimidating than she remembered. She remembered how Tim used to bully his sisters, even though he was the youngest—something in his voice, his bearing; or just his stubborn willingness to do what they wouldn’t, to break not just one rule but every rule. But in the photographs he was just a child. His round face looked not threatening but threatened: a frightened child.
There were fewer pictures of Tim as a teenager, but in these she could detect at least something of his brooding sullenness. He wore a leather jacket that not even Willis’s threats had been able to pry off him. Laura smiled and thought, A fuck jacket. He regarded the camera with his chin lifted and his lips set in a grim line. His eyes were narrow, fixed.
Laura looked at her lost brother and thought, How much do you know?
The power was immensely strong in him. He had gone on experimenting even after Willis began to beat him—but privately, warily. Laura remembered how Tim would go off back into the hills or down some lonely road somewhere. She suspected that he practiced his awesome talent there, but she never asked. She was not as prim as her older sister, but Laura had always been a little bit afraid of her power, of the things she might see or conjure. Karen believed what Willis told her; Laura did not, but was cautious; Tim—
Tim, she thought, hated all of us.
She closed away the photographs and hid the shoe box once more.
She opened the Bible. It was a very old family Bible with lined pages in the back marked births and marriages and deaths. The Bible had belonged to Grandma Lucille and the pages were filled with her writing, looping fountain-pen letters, and then Mama’s looser ballpoint script.
Laura bent over the brittle pages with their curious odor of dust and papyrus. Births from the turn of the century. She found Mama here next to Duke and Charlie. She found her cousin Mary Ellen, Duke’s girl by a woman named Barbara before Duke ran off. There were mysterious branches of the family, people she had never met, names she couldn’t recall.
She looked for her own name, for Karen’s and Tim’s.
But the names weren’t there.
Karen’s marriage was recorded—To Gavin White, Toronto, Canada, 1970—but not her birth. None of them appeared in the birth register.
Laura felt suddenly light-headed, breathless. Felt fragile—as if she might float out the window and into the sky. We were not born, she thought, so how can we exist? She thought of the fairy tales she used to read out of her big illustrated Golden Book. We are changelings, she thought. The goblins left us. She remembered those goblins from the pictures. Gnarled and huge-headed, with sharp noses and sinister bright eyes. The goblins left us, she thought, and now the goblins want us back.
She shuddered and pulled the robe tighter around herself. She closed the Bible and put it back in the bottom drawer with the shoe box of photographs on top. She was about to close the drawer when she spotted something at the back, a cluster of faintly familiar shapes, dust-shrouded and gray.
She pulled the drawer open as far as its runners would allow and reached inside.
Three things. She brought them up into the circle of the light.
A paperweight, clouded and opaque.
A tiny, pathetically simple baby doll.
And a cheap pink plastic hand mirror.
I remember, she thought excitedly. I remember!
She thumbed a layer of dust from the surface of the mirror and regarded herself. The old glass was bent and pitted. How she had loved this old thing. The fairest in the land. Who had said that? Another fairytale memory, she thought, a Golden Book memory. She repeated it to herself, aloud but faintly: the fairest in the land.
Ahh… but I’m not.
Her own eyes regarded her sadly from the shrouded depths of the mirror.
Truth was, she had grown old in that quiet California town. She had grown old almost without noticing: mysteriously, effortlessly. I was beautiful once, she thought. I was beautiful and I was young and damn if I wasn’t going to change the world, or anyway find a better one. She had been caught up in that hot, brief burst of Berkeley idealism—all the things people meant when they talked longingly about the sixties. And it had burned like a fire in her and she would follow it out beyond the walls of the world and it would never, ever fail her.
But now I’m old, she thought, and I have spent twenty years watching the waves roll in and out. Twenty years of rose-hip tea and poetry and winter fog; twenty years of Emmett’s facile, occasional love.
Twenty years of stoned equilibrium, she thought, and all this coming home won’t make me young again.
The mirror made her feel very sad.
But these things, these toys, were meaningful. She could not quite recall their provenance, but they had the feel of magic about them. She would show them to Karen in the morning.
In the meantime she tucked them back out of sight in the drawer, switched off the light, and went to bed. In the darkness she could hear the snow beating against the window, a sifting sound like sand in an hourglass—twenty years, she thought, twenty years, my God!—and she watched the faint moonlight until it began to blur and she put her hand to her face and realized with some astonishment that she was crying.
That long night had not quite ended when Michael awoke, alone and desolate in the big upstairs bed.
He took his watch from the night table and
held it up to the thin wash of streetlight that penetrated these old dusty windows.
Four a.m.—and he felt as wholly, mercilessly awake as if it were noon.
He sighed, stood up, pulled on his underwear and his Levi’s. He stood a moment at the window.
No more snow tonight. Stars beyond the fading margins of cloud, old streetlights down the back alleys and shuttered windows of this barren coal town. His breath made steamy islands on the glass. His vision of a better world had evaporated entirely. He could not even remember how it had felt. No magic in this place, Michael thought, only these cold empty streets. He shivered.
He wanted to go home.
The trouble with coming awake at 4 a.m., he thought, was that it left you feeling like a little kid. Vulnerable. Like you could cry at any minute.
These were things he had not allowed himself to think: that he was tired of being chased, tired of being afraid, tired of sleeping in strange beds in houses where he did not belong.
But these were thoughts a ten-year-old might have, and Michael reminded himself sternly that he was not ten years old … he only felt that way sometimes.
“Shit,” he said out loud.
He padded barefoot down the stairs past the other bedrooms, down to the ground floor. He switched on the kitchen light and poured himself a glass of milk. The tile floor was cold.
Impulsively, he pulled his wallet out of the right-hand pocket of his jeans.
He opened the card case.
It was still there… the number he had pilfered from his mother’s address book, his father’s phone number in Toronto. Hasty blue pen scrawl on old green memo paper.
There was a telephone in the kitchen—an old black dial phone on the counter next to the cookbooks.
Michael looked at it and thought, But what’s the point? Call long-distance, wake him up at 4 a.m.—or his girlfriend, for Christ’s sake—and get him on the line and say what? Hi, Dad. I just spent a few weeks in California. Well, sort of California. Got to see Kennedy’s funeral on TV. You should have been there.
Right.
But the ten-year-old inside him insisted, Home.
Bullshit. There was no home back there. Only an empty house, and his father living someplace Michael had never seen, with a woman Michael had never met.
That’s not true, the ten-year-old said. You could go back. You could make it be good again.
Bullshit, Michael thought, bullshit, bullshit. How good had it ever really been?
Not that good.
But he was dialing in spite of himself. Standing half dressed in this cold kitchen listening to the hum and chatter of the long-distance lines… and then a muted, brittle ringing.
“Hello?”
His father’s voice. Weary, irritated.
Michael opened his mouth but discovered that he was empty of words.
“Hello? What is this, a joke?”
He’ll hang up, Michael thought. And maybe that would be best.
But he whispered, “Dad?”
Long beat of silence down the wires from Canada. Then, “Michael? Is that you?”
Michael felt a moment of sheer, bottomless panic: there was nothing to say, nothing he could say.
“Michael, hey, I’m glad you called. Listen to me. I’ve been frantic—we’ve been worried about you.”
Michael registered the “we” as a very sour note.
“Michael, are you there?”
“Yes,” he admitted.
“Tell me where you’re calling from.”
No, Michael thought… that would be a mistake.
“Well,” his father said, “are you all right? Is your mother all right?”
“Yeah. We’re okay, we’re fine.”
“Has she given you any reason for dragging you away like this? Because, you know, that’s very strange behavior. That’s how it looks to me.”
Michael thought, You don’t know the half of it. He said, “I just called to hear your voice.”
I called because I want to go home. I want there to be a home.
“I appreciate that. Listen, I know this must all have been very hard for you to understand. Maybe we didn’t talk about it enough, you and I. Maybe you blame me for it. The divorce and all. Well, fair enough. Maybe I deserve some of that blame. But you have to look at it from my point of view, too.”
“Sure,” Michael said. But this wasn’t what he wanted to hear. He wanted to hear You and your mother come home, everything’s fixed, everything’s back to normal—some reassurance for the ten-year-old in him. But of course that was impossible. The divorce wouldn’t go away. The Gray Man wouldn’t go away.
“Tell me where you are,” his father persisted. “Hell, I can come and get you.”
And suddenly the ten-year-old was vividly alive. Yes! Come get me! Take me home! Make it be safe! He said, “Dad—”
But suddenly there was another, fainter voice, sleepy and feminine: “Gavin? Who is it?”
And Michael thought, No home to go back to.
The ten-year-old was shocked into silence.
His father said, “Michael? Are you still there?”
“It was nice talking,” Michael said. “Listen, maybe I’ll call again.”
“Michael—”
He forced himself to hang up. He looked at his watch. 4:15.
Chapter Twelve
1
Michael understood that it was his job to be the man of the family, which involved protection and standing guard.
The routine at the Fauves’ house was that Willis would wake up early and Jeanne would fix him a big breakfast. Then Willis would head off for a day or a half day at the mill and Michael and his mother and aunt would venture downstairs. Nobody yelled “The coast is clear!” or anything, but that was how it felt—they would wait for the thud of the big front door, for the sound of Willis’s feet on the porch. His old Ford Fairlane would rattle out of the garage, and then the house was safe.
Grandma Jeanne insisted on cooking. Her breakfasts were heroic—cereal, toast, eggs, mounds of bacon—and Michael was always turning down second helpings. This morning she let him get away without protest, though, and he noticed the absentminded way she circled from the table to the counter, the odd looks Karen and Laura gave her: something was up.
He was only vaguely curious. He knew why Aunt Laura had brought them here and he was grateful that she was, maybe, beginning to get somewhere with it. He understood that this was necessary, sorting things out from the beginning, but he had already guessed it was not the whole job. Not by a long shot. Because there was still the problem of the Gray Man.
The Gray Man could find them anytime.
Michael bolted a big helping of scrambled eggs, considering this.
The kind of move they had made from Turquoise Beach would throw the Gray Man off their trail, but not indefinitely. He had followed them before and he would follow them here. It was only a question of time. And Michael’s mother and his aunt were preoccupied, so it was up to Michael to stand guard.
Grandma Jeanne took his plate and rinsed it under the faucet. His mom put a hand on his shoulder. “Michael? We’d like to talk to Grandma Jeanne privately.”
He nodded and stood. Grandma Jeanne would not face him; she stared into the foaming sink. Aunt Laura nodded once solemnly, telegraphing to him that this was important, he had better clear off.
“I’ll be out,” he said.
“Stay warm.” His mother ruffled his hair absently. “Stick close to the house.”
He was careful not to promise.
The temperature outside was still below freezing but the wind had let up. The sun was out, melting snow off the sidewalks; Michael’s breath plumed away in the winter light.
He followed the same route he had followed the day before, along Riverside Avenue and out beyond the southern margin of the town, up the snowy hillside until he could see all of Polger Valley mapped out in front of him. He felt the power most clearly in high places like this.
In town, among people, it was blanked out by a dozen other feelings. Up here he could just listen to the singing of it, like some quiet but important song played on a radio far away. He felt it like an engine deep in the earth, humming.
It occurred to him how much all this had changed his life. Not too long ago his main worries had been his term exams and the logistics of enjoying Saturday night when you couldn’t drive a car. All that was gone now—all washed away. But, Michael thought, it never really was like that, was it? He thought, You knew. You knew it before Emmett got you stoned that day in Turquoise Beach. You knew it before Dad left. Knew you were special, or anyway different: singled out in some way. Michael felt the power in him now and guessed he had always felt it, just never had a name for it. He had been timid of it, the sheer nameless immensity of it, the way you might be afraid of falling if you lived on the edge of some canyon… but he had loved it, too; secretly, wordlessly. He remembered nights coming home from some friend’s house, winter nights many times colder than this, and he would be shivering in an overstuffed parka and the stars would be out and there would be an ice ring around the moon, and he would be all alone out on some empty suburban street; and he would feel the future opening up in front of him, his own life like a wide, clean highway of possibility. And there was no reason for it, no reason to believe he was anything unique or that his life would be special. Just this feeling. Time opening like a flower for him.
Still opening, he thought. He remembered his dream of the night before, the cities and prairies and forests he had seen. The vision had come across a great distance. He wondered whether he could reach it— whether he would ever be able to summon it back. Maybe it was too far; maybe it was out of his grasp, never more real than his dreams.
But he had seen it, and he felt intuitively that it was a real place. Maybe he could find his way there— somehow, someday. Maybe that was where his life was headed.
Maybe.
If they could deal with the Gray Man.
Walker, the Gray Man had said. Walker, stalker, hunter, finder …
Gypsies Page 12
