Gypsies

“I looked.” Karen heard the subtle emphasis on “looked.” He added, “And I knew you were looking.” “You can do that?” He nodded.

But this wasn’t the place to talk about it. Karen ate methodically, not much conscious of her food, stealing glances at her brother. His clothes looked good. He was healthy enough. But then why had he been living in a Skid Row hotel less than a year ago? Something was going right for him… but Karen noticed a faint, persistent tic tugging at the corner of his right eyelid and wondered whether something might also be going wrong.

Tim turned to Michael, who had ordered the Seafood Monterey when a thorough search of the menu failed to turn up any kind of burger. “Must be strange, discovering an uncle after all these years.”

Michael shrugged. Michael had been quiet all morning. Quiet but attentive.

“A little,” he said.

Tim said, “We should get together and have a talk sometime.”

“Sure,” Michael said.

And Karen felt a stab of uneasiness.

“Home,” Tim said. “That’s where I’ve been.”

After lunch Laura drove to an extremity of parkland overlooking the bay. They sat in the car with the windows up and Karen watched a line of gulls wheeling down toward the water. It was quiet here and they were alone.

Laura said, “I take it you don’t mean Polger Valley.”

Tim laughed, and Karen was suddenly reminded of the old days: this derision. “Is that what you call home? Did it ever feel like home? Be honest.”

“Mama and Daddy admitted a few things,” Laura said.

Tim said, “Well, how about you tell me what you know.”

So Laura told him what they had found out from Willis and Jea

Tim listened intently; he was frowning when Karen finished. He shook his head. “I was aware of some of that from other sources. But it fills in some gaps.”

Laura said, “You knew?”

“I was told.”

“Since when?”

“Well, recently.”

“Who told you—the Gray Man?”

The words seemed to hang in the cool air and for a moment Karen could hear the cry of the gulls.

Tim said, “Obviously I should start at the begi

Laura glanced back at Michael for a fraction of a second and said, “I think the short.”

Tim was sitting up front with Laura, and Karen could only see the back of him, his profile when he turned, but she was watching him as closely as she could, relearning the look of him and trying to pinpoint what had changed. She remembered the sullen child in Mama’s photographs. But he wasn’t sullen now. He was, if anything, too effusive. Karen thought, Sometimes he talks like a salesman.

“I left home,” he said. “I traveled a lot. I took a lot of jobs over those years. And I did some other kinds of traveling, too. But I always ended up back here… because I was familiar here; I know how to get along. Got along well enough—most of the time. But I had the same troubles you did. The Gray Man—I would see him sometimes. And more than that. Maybe you felt it, too… like being homesick for some place you’ve never seen. I swear I never did feel like I belonged here.”

Karen saw Michael nodding fractionally.

“So,” Tim said, “well, eventually I started drinking. And pretty soon that became a problem. I was in hospitals a couple of times. And then I figured out what you two seem to have figured out—that this is not something you can run away from.” His lips compressed into a tight, grim smile. “We can run farther and faster than anyone, right? But not away.”

Laura said, “So what’s the alternative?”

“To stop ru

“Meaning—?”

He said, “I found the Gray Man and I followed him.”

There was another silence in the car.

“I’d done it before,” Tim went on. “When we were kids. When I didn’t know what he wanted. When I trusted him. You remember that night in the ravine —the old city on the coast?”

“Yes,” Karen said, involuntarily.

Tim said, “Well, that’s where he comes from.”

But she had guessed as much.

He added, “That’s where we come from.”

She sat forward, wanting to deny it.

“It makes sense,” Tim said. “Like it or not. Whatever we are, the Gray Man is one of us. You can’t get away from that. There’s this trick we can do, and no one else in the world can do it… except him. What does that suggest?”

Laura said, impatiently, “What did you find out?”

“We’re related,” Tim said. “We’re family. The co

2

Michael listened to Tim’s description of the Gray Man’s world with increasing interest.

It was where they had come from (Tim said), and it was where they had been created. In an important sense, it was the only real home they had or would ever have.

It was not, he said, necessarily a good place. It was like this world: not distinctly good or bad but a little of both. It was not a Utopia, but who believes in Utopias? You had to take it on its own terms.

Things were different there.

History had happened a little differently. Rome and the Roman Church still dominated Europe; America had won its independence and had become a refuge for Europe’s oppressed Protestants. It was not called the United States but the Novus Ordo, the New Order of the Americas, a major military and economic power. Rome had been jealous of the Novus Ordo for two centuries, but now there was a bigger threat: the militant Islamic nations of the Middle East and Africa.

The Novus Ordo, a heretical nation, was able to experiment with forces the Church wouldn’t touch. Alchemy, kabalistic magic, astrology—it was all very different there, all very real. It was the Americans who first understood that the ability to walk between worlds might exist, that it might be a potent and accessible power. Maybe in the past it had occurred randomly, a wild talent in people who might never suspect they possessed it, who dreamed themselves haphazardly out of the world, or who used it to escape their families or their creditors. Now it was possible to identify those people, bring them together, take this thing to the limit.

Not necessarily as a weapon—though that implication was there, too—but as research. A learning tool.

That’s where we came from, Tim said … or at least, that’s where our parents came from.

Our real parents.

Michael said, “And the Gray Man.”

“He’s a failed experiment,” Tim said. “He’s insane.”

Karen said, “He’s hunting us. He’s been hunting us all our lives. And he killed our parents.”

They walked along the sea grass on this promontory, the three adults and Michael.

“Also the girl on the beach,” Michael said. “I saw that. He just pushed her away—like killing a bug.”

“It was never meant to happen that way,” Tim said quietly.

“All these years,” Karen said, “hunting us, finding us sometimes… you would think, if he meant to kill us, he would have.”

Tim said, “I don’t understand all his motives. But we’re maybe not as easy to kill as those others. Our parents trusted him. He was a brother to them. So he could get close without suspicion. None of us ever felt that way.”

Laura said, “Except you. You did.”

Tim looked at her quizzically.

“That night in the ravine,” she said, “in the alley. You talked to him like you knew him. If he had wanted to, Tim, he could have killed us all right then.”

Tim said, “I think he wanted our trust.”

“He seemed to have yours.”