“I don’t know,” she said. Everything seemed strange and sudden now, the appearance of her sister, these old connections and older barriers. She felt a kind of panic, the urge to back off a step, to reconsider. “I’m grateful for the invitation. And it’s what we came here for. Of course. To see you … to visit. But I’m concerned about Michael.”
Laura said, “He doesn’t know?”
Karen thought, We always did this, didn’t we? Talked in these ellipses. We do it still. “There was never any need for him to know.”
They found a bench overlooking the tarry beach. Offshore, against the white glare of the horizon, a tanker moved toward port.
“I’m not like you,” Karen said. “I’m even less like Tim. I never wanted it—to be able to do what we do. I didn’t ask for it and I didn’t ever want it.”
“None of us asked for it. What are you saying, that Michael doesn’t know anything?”
“Why? Why force it on him? If he can live without knowing, why make him conscious of it?”
“Because it’s in him,” Laura said calmly. “It’s part of him. You must feel it.”
Maybe she could. Maybe she had felt it from the first, since his birth, before his birth: that he was different in the way she was different, that the frightening ability to walk between worlds was there in him— enclosed, like the bud of a flower, but real and potent.
But it was not something she wanted to consider. She said, “I worked hard, you know, to give him a normal life. Maybe you don’t know what that means. I guess it never mattered to you. But a normal life… it was the best thing I could give him. Do you understand that? I don’t want to throw it away.”
Laura put her hand on Karen’s arm. The gesture was calming, and it seemed for a moment as if she and not Karen were the older sister. “Don’t blame yourself. He forced the issue. Not Michael but—what do you call him? The Gray Man.”
The memory was like a weight.
“Stay with me,” Laura said. “At least a while. It’s been too long since we saw each other. And I want to get to know my nephew. And I want you both to be safe.”
“Is it really very far?” “We can drive there.” “What’s it like?”
“Like here. Very much like here. But nicer.” “All right,” Karen said sadly. “Yes.”
2
They checked out and loaded up the luggage in Aunt Laura’s car—a car Michael could not identify, probably foreign. It was small and boxy and the name Durant was written on the gas cap. The trunk swallowed all their luggage effortlessly.
They were on the road an hour before the change began.
It was a long drive. They followed the San Diego Freeway south past shimmy instant suburbs and forests of desiccated palm trees, past oil wastelands and cracked concrete underpasses scrawled with Hispanic graffiti. Laura didn’t talk much, seemed to be concentrating on the driving. It was coming on for dusk, rush-hour traffic, blinders pulled down to keep out the setting sun. Michael felt the tension rising in the enclosed space of the car.
He understood that something important was happening. They were going to Aunt Laura’s place to visit, to stay a while, that had been established… but more than that. His mother’s anxiety was obvious. She sat beside Aunt Laura with her spine rigid and her head held almost primly forward. And he could see the concentration gathering in Laura herself, a tensing of muscles.
They left the freeway on an off ramp and turned west toward the ocean, through a range of scrubby brown hills. There was more housing going up along these dry ravines. Billboards for Model Homes. Who would live here? Michael wondered. Why? What was there to draw all these people?
And then they came within sight of the ocean, a gray flatness, shabby roadside stalls and businesses, salt air and the rancid smell of diesel oil.
The change began as the sun was setting.
Michael thought at first it was a trick of the light. The sunset seemed to suffuse the car through the windows on the right. It was momentarily blinding, the way a lance of sun off hot, still water is blinding. But not only that. He felt a surge of something inside him, a disorientation, as if he had been blindfolded and spun a dozen times around. For a fraction of a second Michael thought he was falling, that the car was plummeting through empty space. He blinked twice and held his breath. Then the tires bit pavement again, the suspension bottomed and then steadied. The brightness faded.
But the memory lingered. This was a familiar feeling. When had he felt it before? Just a little while ago, he thought … in Toronto. With the Gray Man.
Like this, Michael thought: a stepping outside and beyond, through the secret doors of the world; and he looked outside with sudden startlement: Where are we now?
But the world—this road—looked the same. Or nearly the same. It might be imagination, but it seemed as if some of the shabbiness had gone. The storefronts were a little cleaner, a little brighter. The air (he was almost certain) felt fresher, the sunset brighter but less gaudy.
He caught Laura’s eye in the rearview mirror.
She looked at him and nodded solemnly, as if to say, Yes, I did that. Yes, it’s real.
He cleared his throat and said, “Where are we going?”
“My place,” Laura said calmly. “I told you.” A sign announced the distance in miles to a town called Turquoise Beach. “That’s it… that’s where I live.”
3
Karen had never been good at dealing with the unexpected. She was cautious, therefore, in evaluating this place Laura had brought her to. Turquoise Beach.
A name not on any map she had ever seen, though she supposed you could go to a gas station—here—and buy a map that would have Turquoise Beach marked on it. And other strange places.
They arrived after dark, but the town, what she could see of it, was an innocuous old seaside town, Victorian buildings and newer stucco storefronts. There was something quaintly bohemian about the beaded curtains fronting doorways and the stained glass shining from upper-story apartments. They drove down a crowded beachfront main street, cafes and patio restaurants open to the warm night. A tiny storefront window proclaimed all kind of shells. The one next door offered antiques, hurricane lamps, drift glass—sale! And the people on the street were almost as quaint. They were dressed in what Karen thought of as gypsy fashion: faded Levi’s, quilted shirts in bright colors. There was a woman with feathers braided into her long dark hair.
Beyond this hub was a network of shadowed streets and quiet houses, a similar mix of Victorian brickwork and airy wood-frame buildings. Laura, humming to herself, turned west toward the ocean and parked at last in a patch of gravel adjoining a three-story slatwood house. “We’re the top two floors,” she said, climbing out.
Karen stood in the coolish night air feeling suddenly alone in this new world, reminding herself that it really was that, a new world. Did Gavin exist in this place? If she phoned their old number in Toronto, would he answer?
Did Canada exist, or had the borders been redrawn?
Strange. It made her shiver. She listened to the faint rushing of waves against the shore, prosaic and real. And the stars, she thought: the stars were still the same.
Laura came abreast of her holding two suitcases. Karen said quickly, “Here, let me have one.” But a bearded man bustled out of the front door of the house and took the case out of her hand. “You must be Karen,” he said.