But nobody said anything.
He woke up next morning anxious to test himself again. He sat impatiently through the breakfast rituals, watched a little morning TV, wore out his calluses on the new guitar. He wanted to get away without attracting attention. The situation was tight, Laura and his mother moving around the house in restless circles; he might have given up, but a couple of hours before lunch his mom announced she’d do the shopping today, it was only fair, and took off in Aunt Laura’s car with a grocery list and a handful of the weird State Bank bills that passed for cash in Turquoise Beach. Michael waved at the Durant and then sauntered around to the rear of the house, planning to cut past the pottery studio and along the open beach again. But when he came around the shed he saw Aunt Laura standing by the cane fence waiting for him, and it was too late then to turn back.
He liked Aunt Laura. She was only a couple of years younger than his mom, but it seemed like more. She was easy to be around. She was happy most of the time. It was a contrast. He had begun to understand, these few days they had spent here, how unhappy his mom had been since the divorce. Their house in Toronto had been a deep well of silences. How long since she had really smiled? A long time.
Aunt Laura smiled. She smiled now, standing by the broken-down fence in her Levi’s and tank top. She had on a pair of round-lens sunglasses, the kind Michael thought of as Lennon glasses. “Beachcombing?” she said, and the tone of the question was half amused, half serious.
He was embarrassed. “Sort of.”
“You know,” she said, “we really ought to talk.”
“I’d like that,” he said. “Sometime. Sure. But—”
“Talk about you, Michael,” she said. “About what you can do. About what you were doing out on the beach yesterday.”
He could only stare.
She had made an educated guess about her nephew’s long walk yesterday, based on hints, the way he looked, some cryptic comments Emmett had passed on. Judging by the expression on his face, she was on the money.
The amazing thing, Laura thought, was that it hadn’t happened sooner.
She regarded her nephew as objectively as she could. Reasonable specimen of the genus adolescent male. Gaunt in his blue sweatshirt and faded jeans, cropped hair, Nike runners speckled with dry sand. He was beginning to build up a tan; a mild case of adolescent acne was on the retreat. His eyes were dark and sometimes furtive in a way that reminded her of Karen. Karen had had this same habit of dodging uneasy truths; although in Michael it was less pronounced.
She thought, A family trait.
My nephew, she thought. Karen’s child. The only generation we have produced… unless Tim has been off siring wizards.
She walked him along the quiet back streets near home. Turquoise Beach was a town of gardeners, and she liked the tropical greenery spilling out of these trellises and yards: bougainvillea, ground ivy, blooming aloes. Mornings like this, the air was full of wild perfume.
She thought, It would be very hard to leave this place.
But they had not reached that cusp quite yet.
She said, “Did your mother ever talk about home? About your grandmother and grandfather, what it was like living there?”
Obviously Michael had not adjusted to the idea of this interview. He shook his head. “Not much.” Which means, Laura thought, probably never.
She gathered her thoughts. How to communicate this in a way that would make sense to a fifteen-year-old? Too much old pain here. Hard to make a good Story of it. She said, “There were the three of us, your mother and me and Tim. And your grandmother and grandfather. We moved a lot, but Daddy had this little copperplate sign he used to hang up wherever we lived—The Fauves.’ To me it always sounded like some exotic species of animal. And I guess I used to think of us that way sometimes, as a separate species.”
Michael’s look was wary but understanding.
“Mama and Daddy were what you would call plain people. Mon Valley, Ohio River people. I still hear it in the way Karen talks … I hear it in myself sometimes. Daddy worked different places. Mills, mostly, back when the steel industry was good. He was a welder and he could stand in on a lathe. But he drank and got fired a lot. We lived in Duquesne a couple years, then different places around Pittsburgh. The thing about him was, he was hard to be with. He led kind of a sad, sour life. He laid a lot onto us kids.” She drew a breath and saw that Michael was still attentive.
“I think it was easiest for me. I was pretty. I was the middle kid. Tim was the boy, so he had to live up to a lot of expectations. And Karen—well, your mother was the oldest, and maybe that was the worst. Everything Tim and I did wrong, she took the rap for it.”
Michael ventured, “It must have been hard …”
“Being what we are?” But obviously that was what he meant. The crux. Even now, this was hard to talk about: she could never have said these things even to someone like Emmett. “Harder than you know. When we were little we played games. We called it ‘making windows’ or ‘making doors.’ We understood, I guess by some kind of instinct, that it was a thing to keep secret. So we did it at night, in the dark, or out in the ravine back of the old house on Constantinople. And sometimes… sometimes we got caught.”
She had dropped her voice to a whisper. Michael walked on beside, eyes fixed on the laces of his shoes.
“Daddy said it was the worst thing a person could ever do. The worst sin. It was a sin so bad it wasn’t even in the Bible, except where it said about suffering a witch to live. It was bad and it would get us in trouble … or it would kill us.”
“He said that?”
“In so many words. Often. And sometimes with his fists.”
Michael returned to his study of the sidewalk.
Laura said, “We all took it to heart, of course. But for me—certainly for Tim—the temptation was still there. It came naturally to us. We were good at it. And so we still did it sometimes, opened windows and doors, when we were certain we wouldn’t get caught. Did it and then prayed God would forgive us. But Karen took it all very much to heart. All of us believed Daddy, but Karen believed him with this awful, fierce intensity … I think it blinded her. I think in a way she still believes him.”
They walked along the shaded street to a corner and turned left. They passed a couple more of these tall, old houses, then a blankness of sea grass and rock. The pavement stopped at a black-and-yellow saw-horse with the words caution—road ends printed on it. Beyond that was a grassy headland, a fifty-foot drop to the sea. The water down below churned white against the rocks.
Laura sat and hugged her knees. Michael crouched against a rock, gazing off across the water.
She said, “You’re not used to thinking about your mother this way.”
“I guess not.”
“It takes some getting used to.”
He seemed very thoughtful. She let the silence stretch out. This was a place she liked to come and she was content here.
Michael picked a blade of grass and shredded it between his fingers. He said, “Is that all there is?”
“How do you mean?”
“I’ve never heard of anybody else who could do this. Have you? I mean, it’s not even like ESP or witchcraft, something you can read about in a library book. So we were all born this way, right? But why? Where does it come from?”
She shrugged. “We never found out.”
“You mean,” he said, “you never asked.”
“There was never anyone we could ask. Not Mama or Daddy, for sure. They didn’t have the talent. You could look at them and know they didn’t. Their parents? I met Grandma Fauve one time. She lived in an old house in Wheeling with three cats and a Doberman chained to the toolshed. She was normal as any old lady. Too, I think I would have known if Mama or Daddy came from a home where there were people like us. There’s a way of not talking about things… and neither of them talked like that.”