Gypsies

She shuddered and pulled the robe tighter around herself. She closed the Bible and put it back in the bottom drawer with the shoe box of photographs on top. She was about to close the drawer when she spotted something at the back, a cluster of faintly familiar shapes, dust-shrouded and gray.

She pulled the drawer open as far as its ru

Three things. She brought them up into the circle of the light.

A paperweight, clouded and opaque.

A tiny, pathetically simple baby doll.

And a cheap pink plastic hand mirror.

I remember, she thought excitedly. I remember!

She thumbed a layer of dust from the surface of the mirror and regarded herself. The old glass was bent and pitted. How she had loved this old thing. The fairest in the land. Who had said that? Another fairytale memory, she thought, a Golden Book memory. She repeated it to herself, aloud but faintly: the fairest in the land.

Ahh… but I’m not.

Her own eyes regarded her sadly from the shrouded depths of the mirror.

Truth was, she had grown old in that quiet California town. She had grown old almost without noticing: mysteriously, effortlessly. I was beautiful once, she thought. I was beautiful and I was young and damn if I wasn’t going to change the world, or anyway find a better one. She had been caught up in that hot, brief burst of Berkeley idealism—all the things people meant when they talked longingly about the sixties. And it had burned like a fire in her and she would follow it out beyond the walls of the world and it would never, ever fail her.

But now I’m old, she thought, and I have spent twenty years watching the waves roll in and out. Twenty years of rose-hip tea and poetry and winter fog; twenty years of Emmett’s facile, occasional love.

Twenty years of stoned equilibrium, she thought, and all this coming home won’t make me young again.

The mirror made her feel very sad.

But these things, these toys, were meaningful. She could not quite recall their provenance, but they had the feel of magic about them. She would show them to Karen in the morning.

In the meantime she tucked them back out of sight in the drawer, switched off the light, and went to bed. In the darkness she could hear the snow beating against the window, a sifting sound like sand in an hourglass—twenty years, she thought, twenty years, my God!—and she watched the faint moonlight until it began to blur and she put her hand to her face and realized with some astonishment that she was crying.

That long night had not quite ended when Michael awoke, alone and desolate in the big upstairs bed.

He took his watch from the night table and held it up to the thin wash of streetlight that penetrated these old dusty windows.

Four a.m.—and he felt as wholly, mercilessly awake as if it were noon.

He sighed, stood up, pulled on his underwear and his Levi’s. He stood a moment at the window.

No more snow tonight. Stars beyond the fading margins of cloud, old streetlights down the back alleys and shuttered windows of this barren coal town. His breath made steamy islands on the glass. His vision of a better world had evaporated entirely. He could not even remember how it had felt. No magic in this place, Michael thought, only these cold empty streets. He shivered.

He wanted to go home.

The trouble with coming awake at 4 a.m., he thought, was that it left you feeling like a little kid. Vulnerable. Like you could cry at any minute.

These were things he had not allowed himself to think: that he was tired of being chased, tired of being afraid, tired of sleeping in strange beds in houses where he did not belong.

But these were thoughts a ten-year-old might have, and Michael reminded himself sternly that he was not ten years old … he only felt that way sometimes.

“Shit,” he said out loud.

He padded barefoot down the stairs past the other bedrooms, down to the ground floor. He switched on the kitchen light and poured himself a glass of milk. The tile floor was cold.

Impulsively, he pulled his wallet out of the right-hand pocket of his jeans.

He opened the card case.

It was still there… the number he had pilfered from his mother’s address book, his father’s phone number in Toronto. Hasty blue pen scrawl on old green memo paper.

There was a telephone in the kitchen—an old black dial phone on the counter next to the cookbooks.

Michael looked at it and thought, But what’s the point? Call long-distance, wake him up at 4 a.m.—or his girlfriend, for Christ’s sake—and get him on the line and say what? Hi, Dad. I just spent a few weeks in California. Well, sort of California. Got to see Ke

Right.

But the ten-year-old inside him insisted, Home.

Bullshit. There was no home back there. Only an empty house, and his father living someplace Michael had never seen, with a woman Michael had never met.

That’s not true, the ten-year-old said. You could go back. You could make it be good again.

Bullshit, Michael thought, bullshit, bullshit. How good had it ever really been?

Not that good.

But he was dialing in spite of himself. Standing half dressed in this cold kitchen listening to the hum and chatter of the long-distance lines… and then a muted, brittle ringing.

“Hello?”

His father’s voice. Weary, irritated.

Michael opened his mouth but discovered that he was empty of words.

“Hello? What is this, a joke?”

He’ll hang up, Michael thought. And maybe that would be best.

But he whispered, “Dad?”

Long beat of silence down the wires from Canada. Then, “Michael? Is that you?”

Michael felt a moment of sheer, bottomless panic: there was nothing to say, nothing he could say.

“Michael, hey, I’m glad you called. Listen to me. I’ve been frantic—we’ve been worried about you.”

Michael registered the “we” as a very sour note.

“Michael, are you there?”

“Yes,” he admitted.

“Tell me where you’re calling from.”

No, Michael thought… that would be a mistake.

“Well,” his father said, “are you all right? Is your mother all right?”

“Yeah. We’re okay, we’re fine.”

“Has she given you any reason for dragging you away like this? Because, you know, that’s very strange behavior. That’s how it looks to me.”

Michael thought, You don’t know the half of it. He said, “I just called to hear your voice.”

I called because I want to go home. I want there to be a home.

“I appreciate that. Listen, I know this must all have been very hard for you to understand. Maybe we didn’t talk about it enough, you and I. Maybe you blame me for it. The divorce and all. Well, fair enough. Maybe I deserve some of that blame. But you have to look at it from my point of view, too.”

“Sure,” Michael said. But this wasn’t what he wanted to hear. He wanted to hear You and your mother come home, everything’s fixed, everything’s back to normal—some reassurance for the ten-year-old in him. But of course that was impossible. The divorce wouldn’t go away. The Gray Man wouldn’t go away.

“Tell me where you are,” his father persisted. “Hell, I can come and get you.”

And suddenly the ten-year-old was vividly alive. Yes! Come get me! Take me home! Make it be safe! He said, “Dad—”

But suddenly there was another, fainter voice, sleepy and feminine: “Gavin? Who is it?”

And Michael thought, No home to go back to.

The ten-year-old was shocked into silence.

His father said, “Michael? Are you still there?”

“It was nice talking,” Michael said. “Listen, maybe I’ll call again.”

“Michael—”

He forced himself to hang up. He looked at his watch. 4:15.