The machines were singing to themselves.
Change, Michael thought hastily.
He paged again through the book of possibilities.
A better world this time. A world off the cover of an old Popular Science: winged cars, domed buildings, obsidian piers that stabbed across the water. There was a harbor full of boats with blinding white sails. A banner flew from a flagpole yards away, red with black insignia, a leaf and a hammer in silhouette.
Michael was sweating but mesmerized.
Change, he told himself.
An empty shore this time, no boats or people, young seals playing in the tide pools. The seals put their noses up as if they sensed his presence.
Change.
Snow swirling down on dark, spiral structures of riveted iron… Change.
…men in furs building a fire… Change.
… a sea full of ships as big as cities… Change …
He stopped when he was exhausted. He fell back against the reassuring blankness of the rock.
His head was spinning.
It’s all really out there, he thought. All those places and a million others.
And it was not just seeing them. He could have gone there. Walked there across the thinnest of barriers.
He understood that he had a lot to learn. He was shotgunning his attention in a dozen directions, and maybe that wasn’t good. Moreover, he couldn’t toke up every time he wanted to do this—and he knew that he wanted to do it again. But at least he had proved this to himself: anything they could do, he could do.
He thought, It runs in the family.
No secrets anymore.
He turned back to the house in time to see Aunt Laura’s car pull up. His mother climbed out, already scanning for him, anxious as she was so often anxious these days.
But things had changed.
Michael stood up, held Emmett’s battered Gibson guitar by the neck, brushed the sand off the seat of his pants, and began the walk back home.
Chapter Six
1
Michael kept quiet over dinner that night. His mom was quiet, too, frowning into the broad Oriental bowl Aunt Laura had set out for her. It was Laura who did most of the talking, between chopping ginger or tending the wok.
She talked about her work. Laura was a potter, had a kiln in the big shed out back, did clays and porcelains that fetched big prices in the tourist stores out along the highway. She was thinking about maybe a new floral pattern… something simple. Classic. Oh, and the Chinese cabbage was fresh today. (Everything smells so good, Michael’s mom said listlessly.) And wasn’t the weather nice? (The weather was nice.) And so on.
But every once in a while Laura would look at Michael in a thoughtful way, and he was aware of it and began to feel self-conscious. He understood that his aunt’s secret talent was strong and obvious, once you knew what to look for—a kind of glow or aura^-and Michael wondered whether he had acquired the same look.
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.”