“Then it’s a mystery.”
“Yes,” Laura said. “It’s a mystery.”
“Do you think we could ever figure it out?”
The question touched a nerve. She arched her back and turned her face to the sea wind. The wind came up these bluffs like a river; every August you could see people out here with kites. But the weather had changed. Too cool for that now.
She turned to her nephew and said, “We may have to.”
Before they went home, Laura said, “Show me what you can do.”
Michael was reluctant at first. It was something private, something he had only just discovered. But he thought about what she’d told him—it was more than his mother had ever said—and guessed he owed her this.
But maybe he couldn’t do it. Maybe he’d lost the 4cnack. Maybe he had to be stoned to be able to do it… maybe he was too nervous.
He held his arms out in front of him, joined forefingers and thumb as he had yesterday. Nothing happened. Desperately, Michael searched himself for a trace of the electricity he’d been able to conjure down by the shore. He remembered how it had felt, the way it seemed to come, not from him, but through him, sourced up through the ground, a strange voltage of granite and limestone and seabed, magma and tectonics. And, remembering, he began to feel it again, faintly at first, a tingling, and then something more intense. He opened the vortex of possibility between his hands, thinking, Yes.
He showed her the devastated, oceanless world he had discovered yesterday. He showed her the empty world: today the seals were clustered far up the littoral and a gray rain was falling. And he showed her places he had never seen before, worlds that were nothing like Turquoise Beach: desert worlds, an ocean unbroken by land, a sky of high lavender clouds… more. He was dimly aware of her standing just outside the periphery of his vision, peering over his shoulder; her gasps of awe, faintly perceived, made him happy. He thought, She sees it, too. It wasn’t a hallucination, and he wasn’t crazy, and he wasn’t alone. Giddy with it now, he flashed through a half dozen changes, until a sense of fatigue—a kind of interior exhaustion—forced him to stop.
Michael sagged against a boulder. His head throbbed. He took a deep, satisfying breath and said, “How’s that? Is that okay?”
Laura looked at him as if from a great distance. Her voice was ragged, faint. She said, “It’s more than I could ever do…”
2
Karen’s argument with her sister happened in the evening, but the frustration had been building all that day.
It was their third week in this house. Part of the strain she felt was no doubt simply the stress of living in close quarters with Laura, who was still nearly a stranger to her. Part of it was the adjustment that inevitably followed any wrenching change.
But part of it was more than that. Part of it was a dislocation more profound. This world Laura inhabited was, curiously, almost too familiar. Just when Karen began to feel at home, she would stumble over some incongruity that left her head spinning. Yesterday, for instance. She had been lined up at the grocery store when she overheard the checkout girl telling a clerk that John F. Kennedy had died—in retirement, in New England, at the age of seventy-two. A stroke, she said. “Well, I admired that man. Although he was a Catholic.”
FORMER PRESIDENT JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY DEAD, the headlines in the L.A. Times said. Funeral services were announced for Sunday. Dignitaries to gather in Washington. President Bartlett expresses grief, and so on and so forth.
All those years ago, Karen thought. Who was I mourning for?
Can a bullet really be undone? By wishing?
She was dazed for hours, puzzling over it.
But not just that. There was the atmosphere of Turquoise Beach itself, the easy lifestyle Laura seemed so content with. Karen was less pleased by it. It was aimlessly hedonistic, and she was not sure she wanted Michael exposed to it much longer. He had taken a liking to Emmett, Laura’s downstairs boyfriend: Emmett, who played music for a living, and whom Karen had observed down by the beach at night smoking grass.
All this contributed to Karen’s stress. But it was Laura who started the argument, when she insisted on talking about Michael.
Michael had gone to bed. Laura was up finishing the dishes. Karen had put on her nightgown and robe but couldn’t sleep; so she sat in the kitchen under the cool fluorescence of the ceiling lights, listening to the wet clack and rattle from the sink.
Laura declined her offer to dry and said, “You really ought to talk to him, you know.”
“Michael’s doing fine,” Karen said. “He’s adjusted well these last few days.”
“I don’t think platitudes are too useful right now, do you? You know what I mean.”
“The talent,” Karen said. “Does it always have to come around to that?”
“This time it does. Haven’t you thought about how confusing this all must be for him? Not just Turquoise Beach, but all that mess before you left—the Gray Man. What’s he supposed to think about it?”
I would prefer, Karen thought, that he didn’t think about it. She knew how ridiculous that would sound. But it would be simpler—“It would be simpler,” she said, “if we could just lead a normal life here.”
“Normal!” Her sister dropped a plastic gravy boat into the drainer. “You hold up that word like it’s some kind of holy relic! I mean, I understand—but Christ, Karen, I’m not sure ‘normal’ is something you and I can aim for!”
“For Michael’s sake—”
“I’m talking about Michael’s sake. He’s a smart kid, he’s curious, and I think he deserves whatever explanation we can give him.”
Karen was silent a while. Finally she said, “I was hoping to keep him above all this.”
“It’s a little past that.”
Laura dried her hands and sat at the small butcher-block table.
“Michael is a bright, curious kid. He should be talking to you about all this, not me.”
Karen looked up sharply. “He’s talked to you?”
“Yes.”
“What did you tell him?”
“The truth.”
Karen was shocked. “Everything? I mean—back home, Tim and Daddy, all that?” “All that.”
She was mortified. All this had happened behind her back. “He’s hardly ready! He’s only fifteen!” It was like a conspiracy. “Jesus, Laura, he’s my son! I have a right to make some choices!”
“He’s your son. And I’m sorry if I interfered. But he’s also a very confused young person badly in need of answers. He should have come to you… but he didn’t. He didn’t feel like he could.”
“So instead he came to you? Why?” She felt wounded. “Because you inhabit this hippie Utopia here? So what did you tell him? That everything would be okay if we all wore tie-dye and denim a little more often?”
Laura stood up and went back to the sink. She faced the window, which was full of night, and Karen could see her face reflected there, lips pressed tightly together.