Gypsies

But even now—even now I have dreams about it sometimes.

Karen didn’t know what to say. It was too shocking, too horrible.

Willis said, “I don’t understand it. I don’t pretend to understand it. But I know what I felt the first time I saw Timmy doing that little trick of his. He was out in the backyard on Constantinople one summer night with fireflies all around him. You girls were inside and Jea

“I took him—Timmy—and I beat him nearly senseless.”

Karen said nothing.

“It gave me no pleasure,” Willis said flatly. “I wanted him to be afraid of it. If that meant being afraid of me, then so be it. Whatever he had done, I knew where it led. It led back to that shack—those bodies.”

“But it didn’t work,” Karen said softly.

“Tim always fought me.” Willis rubbed his big callused hand across his face. “He hated me. You said as much.”

“And when we moved,” Karen said, “it was because of the Gray Man.”

“I might see him in the street. Or one of you kids might mention him. Or Jea

“But he would always find us.”

“Eventually.”

Karen said, “You should have warned us before we left home.”

“I always thought—it seemed like Timmy he was after. And I believed sometimes that it was Timmy who would bring him. Timmy was not afraid of that man. I don’t know everything that went on… Timmy may have had some commerce with him.” He ground the stub of his cigarette against the sole of his shoe. “For years I believed that man was the devil.”

Karen understood that this was literally true, that her father had come out of an old tradition of hair-shirt fundamentalism, that he was quite capable of believing in a devil in an old gray hat. Considering what he had seen, maybe it wasn’t so crazy.

She said, “Do you believe that now?”

“I don’t know what to believe.”

She watched her father staring morosely out the window. The afternoon light had faded. The air rushing over the sill was icy cold. She said, watching him stare into the gathering dark, “You wanted us to be afraid.”

“Yes,” Willis said tonelessly.

“Because you were afraid.”

But he did not answer.

Chapter Fourteen

1

The day before they left, Jea

They stood in the parlor with the faded Persian rug and the relentless tick of the mantel clock. The air was still and dry; the furnace was humming. Upstairs, Michael and Karen were busy packing.

“I don’t know,” Laura said. “Up to Burleigh, maybe—see what we can find out.”

“I think,” her mother said, “if you’re determined to do this, what you need is to talk to Tim.”

Laura said, “You know where he is?”

“Not really. But we got this from him at Christmas… maybe it’s useful to you?”

Jea

It was the only communication she had received from her son in the past ten years.

Laura accepted the card from her mother. She turned it over and read the message there. Merry Christmas was all it said, but she recognized the handwriting—after all these years—as Tim’s. The message was mysterious; she could not discern either sincerity or irony in it.

But there was a return address there, too, crabbed and small at the top of the card. Someplace in San Francisco.

Laura looked up somberly.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Be careful,” her mother said.

2

That last night in the old house in Polger Valley, Karen stayed up and wrote in her journal.

Rustle of cold wind at the window, scratch of pen on paper.

I think about Daddy, she wrote.

The pen hesitated on the page.

She wrote, I carry him inside me and I have carried him inside me longer than I knew.

He means well, she wrote.

But then she scratched it out.

She wrote, We think we live in a place or we know a person or we have a parent, but it isn’t true. We are those things. They build us. They’re what we’re made of.

I’m made out of Willis, Karen wrote. I see him in the mirror more often than I like. I hear his voice in my voice.

She discovered that her hand was shaking.

She wrote—bearing down hard with the point of the Bic—I think about Michael, too.

Michael is made out of me.

And in this dangerous thing we have begun— dear God, she wrote, I wonder if that is enough.

She closed the journal and was about to switch off the small desk light when Laura said, “Wait.”

Karen turned abruptly. “You scared me … I didn’t know you were awake.”

“I didn’t want to interrupt.”

They were alone in the room with midnight snow heaped on the windowsill and the faint, far hum of the furnace. Karen wore a quilted robe over her nightgown; Laura was tucked up under a comforter.

“Been quite a visit,” Laura said.

Karen smiled. “Hell of a visit.”

“Foundlings,” Laura said.

“Gypsies,” Karen said.

“That’s us.” Laura sat up in bed hugging her knees. “Have you looked in the bottom drawer?”

Karen frowned. She had never been especially fond of surprises. And she was tired. But she opened the big drawer slowly.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, my God.”

“You remember them, too?”

From among the toys Karen picked out the pink, fleshy baby doll. It was tiny; it was naked; dust had infiltrated the pores of the plastic.

“Baby,” she said. She looked at Laura wonderingly. “It wasn’t a dream.”

“None of it was ever a dream. That’s the scary part, isn’t it?”

Karen explained about the dream she had dreamt periodically almost all of her life, the house on Constantinople and Tim’s doorway into that cold industrial city. Laura nodded and said, “That’s more or less how I remember it. Tim was always the explorer. Still is, maybe.”

She replaced the doll where she had found it. There was something unpleasant in the feel of the plastic. “You think we can find him?”

“I think we have to try.”

“You think he still hates us?”

“You think he ever really did?”

“I don’t know,” Karen said. The question troubled her. “It’s been so long …”

She yawned in spite of herself.

“Hey, me, too,” Laura said. “Bedtime. Long drive in the morning.”

But they left the light burning through the night.

3

Willis helped Karen carry the last bag out to the car.

Jea

Willis hesitated with his hand on the open lid of the trunk. His eyes were inscrutable behind his bifocals.