Sleep was out of the question anyway, at least till Mike was home. She groped her feet into her slippers and shuffled across the bare bedroom floor. Gavin had insisted on exposed wooden floors. Gavin was all sleek austerity and polished pine. Karen thought she might have preferred broadloom. There was something comforting about broadloom. She liked it on her feet. It softened the hard corners of things—it was warm.
In the new place, Karen told herself firmly, we will have broadloom. Wall to goddamn wall.
The move was inevitable. She had household money from Gavin, but it barely covered her expenses. No matter how the divorce was settled, she and Michael would need a new place. She had already begun a haphazard program of packing: the bedroom was full of Mayflower boxes. She hated their shapes, the cumbersome bulk of them along the wall, the nagging reminder that her life could so quickly and utterly come apart.
Downstairs, she warmed up milk and made herself a cup of cocoa. She poured a little more milk in the pan and then set it off the burner—maybe Michael would want a cup.
She switched on one floor lamp and the TV set in the austere pine living room.
Not much on TV at this hour. David Letterman browbeating some guest, a crop of old movies. She stretched out on the sofa with the remote control and punched up the news network.
A bus had been firebombed in the Middle East, the civil service strike was in its second week, a hurricane was threatening the Gulf coast—business, in other words, as usual. She switched off the sound but left the set on for its flicker, the comforting illusion of a second presence in the room. She checked the clock on the face of the VCR. 1:05.
She tightened the belt on her housecoat and took her journal and pen from the end table. Since Gavin moved out she had been keeping the journal, a sort of diary and notebook: it gave her somebody to talk to, even if it was only herself.
The dream again, she wrote.
She pressed the nibbled end of the Bic against her teeth and frowned.
Meaningless, she wrote. Or so I want to believe. But it comes back so often.
Trying to think what was really happening those days. The old house on Constantinople. It would have been 1959, 1960 maybe. No real memories (unless the dream is a memory). But I do remember the house. The bedroom I shared with Laura, Timmy’s room, Mother and Daddy’s room with the big wooden bureau and Grandma Fauve’s afghan carpet. The stairs, the mantel clock, the big RCA Victor TV set.
She hesitated, then wrote:
The doll.
Memory, she wondered, or flotsam from the dream?
“Baby,” she whispered to herself. The doll was named Baby.
Remember Daddy looking at Baby. “Where’d you get this, Karen?”
His big eyes, and the stubble on his cheek.
“From a man,” I said.
“What man? Where?”
I could never lie to him. I told him about Timmy, the ravine, the door, the dark city.
He was angrier than I’ve ever seen him. I waited for him to hit me. But he stormed off to Timmy’s room instead.
Timmy screamed…
She remembered huddling in her bed clutching Baby against herself. Daddy had beaten Tim with a belt and Tim had screamed. But the memory was incomplete, diaphanous; the harder she fished for it, the slippier it became. Well, damn, she thought.
Pretty soon after that they had moved out of Constantinople Street. From Constantinople they had moved to—she thought about it—the apartment in the West End. Right. Then a year in Duquesne, and a dozen places after that.
“We’re like gypsies,” her mother told her one time. “Never in one place for long.”
Karen set aside the journal, more depressed than ever.
1:15, the clock said.
At 1:23 she heard the key in the front door. She picked up her cup, wanting to look casual; the cocoa was stone cold.
The door closed. Michael stepped in from the foyer.
Karen said, not angrily, “You’re late.”
“I know.” He shrugged out ^f his worn leather jacket, hung it on a peg. His dark hair was disarrayed and there were rings under his eyes. “I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t know you’d be up.”
“I was just restless. You want some hot chocolate?”
“I should hit the sack.”
“One cup,” Karen said, wondering at the desperation in her own voice: am I that starved for company? “Helps you sleep.”
Her son smiled wearily. “Okay. Sure.”
They sat in the kitchen, uneasy in the tall-backed vinylette chairs. A wall of sliding doors looked out over the dark backyard. Karen felt the shades of her dream moving like a separate creature inside her. She got up, pulled the drapes, sat back down with her hands clamped around the cup. Her fingers were cold.
Michael had his feet up on the opposite chair. He was good-looking, Karen thought, in a fragile way. His dark hair made his skin look pale; he was thin, young-looking for his age. The paraphernalia of teenage toughness—jacket, tight Hanes T-shirt, faded jeans— wore uneasily on him.
She cleared her throat. “You saw a movie?”
He nodded.
“With Amy?”
“Right. Dan and Val drove us downtown.” “Good movie?”
“I guess it was all right. Car-chase flick. You know.” He forced a smile. “Boom. Crash.”
“Doesn’t sound too great.” She ventured her best guess: “Having problems with Amy?”
“Amy’s okay.”
“You seem down, is all.”
“Not because of Amy.”
“What, then?”
He looked at her across the table—his serious look. “You want to know?” “If you want to tell me.”
He sat back in the chair with his hands in his pockets. “I saw that guy again.”
The words fell like stones in the still air of the kitchen. The refrigerator hummed into silence. Outside, there was a shrill of crickets.
September now. Autumn closing in.
“We were driving home,” Mike said tonelessly. “We turned onto Spadina. He was there. Standing in front of a Chinese restaurant. The place was closed. It was dark. He was just standing there. Like he was waiting, you know? And he saw me. Four people in the car, but it was me he was looking at.” He pushed the cocoa away, put his hands flat on the table. “He waved.”
Karen didn’t want to ask, but the question had its own momentum: “Who? Who waved?”
Michael peered into the darkness. “You know, Mom.”
The Gray Man.
Chapter Two
1
Michael skipped breakfast next morning.
“Straight to school,” Karen said. “And straight home. All right? I don’t want to be worrying about you.”
“Straight home,” Michael said—offhandedly, but with a seriousness under that, maybe even a little fear.
But that was good, wasn’t it? It would make him cautious.
She stood at the window with the curtain tucked back and watched her son walk down this empty suburban street until he was lost from sight, down beyond the intersection of Forsythe and Webster, where the McBrides’ big maple tree was shedding its leaves.
The mailman dropped a letter through the slot in the door: the letter was from Laura.
Karen carried it downtown, beside her on the front seat of her little Honda Civic, to the restaurant where she had agreed to meet Gavin. When he was late—predictably late—she took the letter out of her purse and turned it over in her hands a couple of times. The envelope was of some thick, clothy paper, like vellum; the return address was a P.O. box in Santa Monica, California.