“Well,” Emmett said, “what the hell. I’m not especially fond of the rain myself.”
She turned her face up. He was smiling. “Room for some guitars in there?”
3
Karen phoned Toronto from a hotel room in Santa Monica.
She was surprised at Gavin’s voice. He sounded weary and uncertain. Older, maybe. Maybe things weren’t going too well in the apartment by the lake.
He said, “I guess it’s too much to hope you’ve come to your senses.”
“Not the way you mean—no, I haven’t.”
“If you come home, you know, Karen, it’ll look much better in any kind of custody argument. You’re only hurting yourself by running away.”
She said, “It won’t be a problem for long.”
“Jesus,” Gavin said, “I wish I could figure you out.”
“I don’t think that’s possible anymore.”
“So why bother calling? To gloat?”
She was hurt. Brief but bitter—it was a taste of the way things had been. “Maybe just to hear your voice. Maybe to say goodbye.”
“Don’t be so damn sure you’ve heard the last of me. I’m quite capable of hiring detectives. Maybe I already have.”
“I don’t think it matters.”
“Is Michael with you?”
“Yes.”
“You’re taking this risk—you’re destroying his future.”
But she didn’t believe that anymore. He had lost the power to intimidate her. There was something familiar in the way he spoke, something in his voice she recognized; and she realized suddenly that it was Daddy, that it was Willis Fauve’s voice echoing through Gavin. But it was vitiated, powerless… she had left all those voices behind.
She said, “Do you believe in the wheel?”
“Do I believe—what?”
“Things change,” she said, “but do they get better? Is that a possibility? Can a wheel roll uphill?” Gavin said, “You are crazy.” “Well, maybe.”
“I can have you subpoenaed. You should be aware of that. You’re letting yourself in for a world of trouble. You—”
But this was history.
She looked up and saw Michael watching her.
4
Michael knew it was his father on the phone.
Karen looked at him across the room, hesitated a second, then offered the receiver to him. “You want to talk?”
He thought about it.
Home, he thought.
The apartment by the lake.
Two different places.
Michael shook his head. “Tell him—”
“What?”
“Tell him thanks but I’m okay. Tell him I’m looking out for myself. Tell him…” Long beat, and then Michael smiled a little. “Tell him maybe I’ll come see him someday.”
Karen nodded solemnly. “Anything else?”
“Tell him goodbye.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
The little Durant ran on gasoline, and that wasn’t a common fuel here, but they drove as far as they could down a broad highway marked Camino del Mar, and when the tank ran dry they peddled the car to a scrap-metal dealer for a handful of Commonwealth money —enough to get by on for a while. The city down the road, the scrap dealer said, was Ciudad San Francisco, and there was work there… you could get by in English if you didn’t know Nahuatl or Spanish. Michael said that sounded good but that ultimately they would probably be heading East.
“To each his own.” The scrap dealer opened the hood of the Durant and gazed inside with patient puzzlement. “Personally, I hate snow.”
Michael and Emmett played funny, clumsy guitar duets at the back of the northbound bus. Karen listened a while, to the music and then to the rumble of tires on pavement.
Almost dark now, the last daylight washing up this windy road, this folded coast. Tall pines and mountain shadows and a sky as broad and clean as the ringing of a bell. It was strange, she thought. Not just this place, but everything. You try to lead a decent life, maybe make the world a little better. And then you find out how powerful all the bad things are, how weak you are in the face of that. And so you think you’re doomed to do it all over again, make the same mistakes everybody made for the last hundred thousand years… you live with that, admitting it or not, but with that defeat inside you, a black kernel of unhappiness.
But maybe—and here was this new thought again —maybe it wasn’t true. Maybe if it was true she wouldn’t be here. Maybe the wheel does roll uphill.
Cool air along this mountainous ocean road. She pulled her sweater close around her. Laura was sleeping now; the bus was quiet. Karen thought about her natural parents, who had died at Walker’s hands. They had escaped the narrow cells of the Novus Ordo and found a town called Burleigh; Laura had discovered Turquoise Beach… and Michael had found this place, this quilted, radiant frontier world. A door, she thought, that hope had opened out of fear, imagination out of failure. And maybe that was the only door that really mattered.
The road veered to the right, a gentle rocking, and Karen looked out across the western ocean, which was still called the Pacific, and closed her eyes; and slept at last dreamlessly as the bus rolled down the angles of the night into the morning.