His mother’s Civic was at the curb. The door opened and she was framed in it, breathless and frightened, beckoning him in. It was like the gesture the Gray Man had made. He wondered how much she had seen.
But he turned back to look for the Gray Man and the Gray Man was gone … no blue sky, no cobbled street, only a tattered hedge, this cracked slab of sidewalk.
Strange, he thought. Strange. He was so close.
His mother tugged him into the car. She was trembling but not angry. Shaking his head, still dazed, he buckled the shoulder strap around himself in an automatic motion as she gunned the car away from the curb.
“We’re leaving,” she said between her teeth. “We’re leaving tonight.” “Leaving?”
“We’re going to California.”
3
Karen stopped at the house long enough to pack a couple of cases, drove north to the airport, and left the car in the garage. God knows when she’d be back to claim it. But, technically, the little Civic belonged to Gavin, anyway. Let him worry about it.
She managed to buy two one-way tickets on a redeye flight to Los Angeles, departing a couple of hours before dawn. They waited the night out in the gate lounge, Michael stretched out over a bench. He looked dazed and sleepy against the comfortless vinyl. Karen hugged herself, watching him. The air conditioning was relentless.
After midnight she remembered the letter in her purse, the one she had written to Laura. She stood up, laid out her coat over her sleeping son, and went to the rest room in the lounge. Her face in the mirror was haggard and thin, cheekbones projecting under pale skin. It was the face of some stranger, some fugitive.
She dictated her letter over the phone to a telex agency. The telegram might make it across the continent before they did.
She had to wake Michael when it was time to board the plane. His eyes were heavy; he leaned instinctively against her. Long time since he had done that.
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.