Gypsies

“Stable?”

“Rather than being taken out of school and hauled all over the country.” Petulantly: “I haven’t seen him for months, you know. Maybe you think that’s not important to me. But I’m his father, for God’s sake.”

Karen felt cold. She wondered why she had called at all. It had occurred to her that Gavin might be worried. She had wanted to reassure him.

He said, “Tell me where you are. Better yet, tell me when you’re coming home.”

“You can’t just do that,” Karen said. “You can’t just give orders.”

“That’s not the issue, is it? Michael is the issue.”

“You can’t have him.”

“I mean his welfare. His school. His health. I’ll have to tell the police you called.” “Michael is fine!”

But it felt like a lie when she said it. Gavin said, “It’s not me you’re letting down, you know. It’s him.” “He’s fine.”

“All I want is an address. Even a phone number. Is Michael there? Let me talk to him. I—”

But she slammed down the receiver in its cradle.

After di

Karen was asleep when they let themselves back into the hotel room. “You wash up,” Laura told her nephew. “I’ll take the last shift.”

Ten minutes later the bathroom was hers. She took a long, deliberate shower, the water hot as she could stand it; she washed her hair and toweled herself dry as the steam faded from the mirrors.

The bathroom light was a merciless cool fluorescence and the mirrors were everywhere.

Old, Laura thought.

Look at that woman in the mirror, she thought. That woman thinks she’s young. She moves the way she moved when she was twenty. She thinks she’s young and she thinks she’s pretty.

But she’s kidding herself on both counts.

Shit, Laura thought. It’s just depression and road-weariness and being scared. Hey, she thought, all you have to do is squint your eyes and blur away the wrinkles.

The wrinkles, the sags, the crow’s-feet. Too late, she thought. Too late, too late, too late… you’re old now.

The fairest in the land. Hardly.

Too late for love and too late for children. She had played too long before bedtime and now all the good TV shows were over and the lights were about to go off.

Maudlin, she thought. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Well, she was.

Bed, she told herself. Sleep. A person needs her beauty sleep.

She moved across the faded plush hotel carpet slowly, hearing the creak of her own frail bones in the silent darkness.

2

In the morning they checked the phone book, but there was no Timothy Fauve listed anywhere in the Bay Area.

“Means nothing,” Laura said. “He could be using another name. Anything.”

But, Karen thought, it wasn’t a good omen.

After breakfast they drove to the address on the postcard Tim had mailed home.

It was a hotel in the Mission District. It was a boarding hotel, not the kind of hotel Karen was accustomed to; a derelict hotel, and there were homeless men squatting on the pavement outside. It was called the Gravenhurst, the name printed on an ancient rust-flecked sign. Karen gazed up at it with dismay. It was not the kind of place she could imagine going into.

But she followed Laura up the three chipped concrete steps to the door, Michael close behind her.

The lobby was dark and smelled faintly of mildew and sour hops. There was a barroom off to the right, a desk to the left. Laura stood at the desk and asked about Timothy Fauve. The man behind the desk was hugely overweight and seemed never to blink. He peered up at Laura and said he’d never heard the name. Laura said, “He was here at Christmas last year.”

“People come through here a lot.” “Maybe you could look it up?”

The man just stared at her.

Laura opened her purse and took out a twenty-dollar bill. “Please,” she said.

Karen was impressed. She couldn’t have done anything like that. It just wouldn’t have occurred to her.

The man sighed and paged back through a huge, old-fashioned ledger. Finally he said, “Fauve, Room 215. But he checked out months ago.”

Laura said, “You remember him?”

“What’s to remember? He was quiet. He came and went.”

“Did you ever talk to him?”

“I don’t talk.”

Laura seemed to hesitate. “Is the room empty now?”

“Currently,” the man said, “that room is not occupied.”

“Can we look at it?”

“It looks like any other room. It’s been empty since May. We had a water pipe break.”

“Just for a few minutes?” She took another ten out of her purse.

The man put it in his breast pocket. “If you so desire,” he said, and passed her the key.

But he was right, Karen thought. There was nothing to see. Just this long, dank stucco corridor; a wooden door with a lock and a handle; an empty room.

It was a cubicle. It was the size of a walk-in cupboard. There was a toilet stall behind a cracked door, a washstand but no shower. The walls were covered with gray plaster. The broken pipe had flooded the rug and mold was eating its way toward the door.

Michael said, “He lived here?”

“At least for a while,” Laura said.

“He couldn’t have been doing too well.”

“We don’t know why he was here,” Laura said. “We don’t know anything about him, really. We all lost track of him when he left home. But he was in this room—I can feel it.”

Karen looked sharply at her sister.

“Things happened here,” Laura said. “He traveled from here. It leaves traces.”

“Traveled out of the world,” Karen said.

“Yes.”

She tried to feel it herself. It had been years since she had even allowed herself to believe such a thing was possible. But surely there was no point denying it now? She strained at the blank, empty volume of the room, trying to find a magic in it.

There was nothing.

If I could ever do that, she thought, I can’t anymore.

She said, “Do you know where he went?”

Laura sighed.

“No,” she said. “I don’t.”

Defeated, they moved silently through the lobby. Laura dropped the room key on the desk; the clerk didn’t look up. Stepping outside, Karen shaded her eyes against the light, suddenly alarmed.

There was a man leaning up against the car.

He was only a little taller than Karen, and too thin, but he was reasonably well dressed. A starched white shirt and a pair of fresh Levi’s. His eyes were narrow and his lips were set in a smile. Hands in his pockets. He looked up, and his face was pale in the sunlight.

For a moment she failed to recognize him. And then the recognition, when it did dizzy.

Laura cried out, “Tim!” The man’s smile widened. “Looking for me?” he said.

Chapter Sixteen

1

They drove to Fisherman’s Wharf for lunch.

“You should let me show you around,” Tim said. “Do the tourist thing.”

Karen liked the restaurant. The waitress brought seafood in rich, buttery sauces; and out beyond the big windows she could see San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. The clouds lifted and a bright winter sun glanced from the tour boats lined up at the dock.

Laura said, “But we’re not tourists. We don’t have time.”

“Well, maybe you do,” Tim said. “Maybe things aren’t as bad as you think.” “How did you find us?”