“No. Very much no.”

“You look tired,” Karen said.

“I am. I’ve been making arrangements.” Added, more guardedly, “Did you read the letter? I’m going away.”

“Going where?”

“You’d probably prefer I didn’t say.”

Karen thought this was probably true.

“You look pretty wild,” she said desperately.

“I guess I do.” Laura peered at Karen then, and Karen saw something suddenly gentler in her sister’s face. “I’m sorry about all this mysterioso stuff. Do you want me to explain? If you came for an explanation—”

An explanation would be better than nothing. “But let’s walk,” Karen said. “I’m sick of this room.”

They took Cokes out along the beach.

“I came out to Berkeley,” Laura said, “mostly because of all the stuff I’d been hearing about California. Sounds stupid, right? Well, it was. Stupid and naive. But it was important to me… the idea that somewhere in the world there were people who used the word ‘freak’ and didn’t mean something cruel by it. It was always Tim who talked about us that way. Remember? ‘We’re freaks,’ he would say. ‘We ought to get used to that.’ ”

Karen said, “Tim always had a cruel streak. He had no cause to say that. Anyway, that was a long time ago.”

“It was when we were in high school. And the thing is, he was right.”

Karen turned toward the ocean. “You don’t believe that.”

“I do believe it. And you believe it.” She touched Karen’s arm. “I’m sorry. I know how you hate this. But we have to talk about it. We’ve spent too long not talking about it. We’re freaks and we’ve been freaks since we were born. That’s why Daddy hates us so much. That’s why he beat us whenever he caught us doing what we can do.”

Karen’s consternation was immense. She tried to summon the objectivity she had cultivated at school. In her psych, course, all this would have seemed very simple. But words like “Daddy” and “freak” lay in uneasy proximity and she dared not inspect them too closely. “Those old dreams,” she stammered, “those old games—”

“They weren’t dreams. They aren’t games.” Laura sighed, hesitated, seemed to consider how to proceed. Began again patiently: “When you’re told long enough, and hard enough, and early enough, that something is bad, and unmentionable, and dirty, then you believe it. You can’t help but believe, I believed it. But I was lucky enough to get beyond all that.”

(Karen thought, But you never did believe it. You were like Tim. Rebellion was always easy for you.)

Laura said, “At Berkeley, everybody was doing acid—”

“LSD?” Karen was horrified.

“Don’t believe what you read in the papers. I mean, it doesn’t live up to Leary’s rap either. But it taught me a few things. I was able to stand outside myself, really look at myself for the first time.” She became fervent. “The sense of possibilities—I think that’s what we’re really all about, you and me and Tim. We can see what other people can’t.”

“Possibilities,” Karen said dully: but this was all way beyond her control…

“Worlds,” Laura said. “Isn’t that what everybody’s looking for? A better world? You know, I used to go down to the Haight with some friends. And there was this same feeling—a better world is possible. You know what the Haight is now? A ghetto full of teenage crank addicts. That whole thing is dying. Dead. Everybody’s gone off—to the desert, to Sonoma, to Oregon. The vision is dead. So I came down here with some people who wanted to set up a community, a more creative way of living together—we used those words. You saw the house? A pit. And Jamie’s gone back to her parents, and Christine is pregnant, and Donald’s in Canada dodging the draft, and Jerry has a very bad needle habit. So the dream dies, right?”

Karen was appalled. Drugs and needles and communes. It sounded squalid.

Laura said, “But it doesn’t have to die. I have this ability, this freakish ability to walk sideways off the planet. And I am convinced that there is a better world out there somewhere. Out in that tangle of could-be’s. Not a dream, and not any of those hellish places Tim was always opening up. I mean a good place. A place where people care about each other, where stupidity doesn’t claw us all down.”

Karen folded her hands in her lap. “I think Mama was right. I think you are crazy.”

“Oh, Karen, come on. If anyone’s living in a dreamworld, it’s you. You remember that night in the old house on Constantinople? When we went down the ravine, and Timmy opened a door into that old cobble city by the sea? How cold it was, and that man—”

“We made that up,” Karen said, more loudly than she had meant to. On the beach, a strolling couple glanced toward her.

She stared at the ground.

“Well, I remember it,” Laura said softly. “I remember Timmy getting beat for it. Then me. Then you. You worst of all. Because you’re the oldest. Our protector. That’s what they wanted you to be. Karen’s supposed to know better. Karen—”

“Stop it.”

“You just can’t admit it, can you?” “No,” Karen snapped.

“No. Because admitting would mean admitting so much else. That the world is stranger than it looks. That Daddy doesn’t know best. That when Daddy beats you it doesn’t mean he loves you. Maybe the opposite. And maybe that’s the worst thing of all.”

Karen stood up. There was sand on her dress. She felt prim and ridiculous brushing it off. Her hands trembled.

Laura said, “Going home?”

“Don’t make fun of me!”

“No… oh, Karen, I’m sorry. But you don’t have to go.”

“I have exams.”

“You don’t have to have exams.” “What?”

“Come with me. We could do it together. Cross some borders.”

She’s serious, Karen thought. My God, she’s serious.

She clutched the strap of her purse. “I never wanted a better world. I don’t need one. Don’t you understand that? All I want is to be normal.”

And in the morning she flew back to Pennsylvania and did not see her wild sister again for twenty years.

She sat in the cafe on Caracol Street with this oppressive memory tugging at her. The Laura facing her now across this table was older—not repentant but certainly less wild. “You were right,” Karen admitted, “about a lot of things.”

“I think each of us believed the other was running away.”

“Maybe we were.”

“Maybe we still are.” Karen frowned. Laura continued, “There are so many questions we never asked. Never let ourselves ask. How come we can do what we do? Are we freaks of nature, genetic misprints? Or something else? And there’s Tim. I haven’t heard from him since he left home back in ’72—have you?”

“No. Nobody in the family has.” But this was still perilous talk. “I don’t think it matters what we are. The past is the past.”

Laura shook her head. “It does matter.”

She put down a bill and change for lunch; they threaded their way out of the restaurant. The sun was shining down Caracol Street from the west. Laura shaded her eyes and said, “It will matter to Michael.”

Chapter Five

Emmett was a pretty neat guy, Michael decided.

Emmett played acoustic guitar for a Latino folk band called Rio Negro and also did some solo stuff in the local Turquoise Beach clubs. His apartment, which was the floor downstairs from Aunt Laura, looked like a music shop. He had all kinds of stringed instruments hanging on pegs or just leaning up against the walls. Emmett showed Michael how to tell the difference between a flamenco guitar, a classical guitar, and a steel guitar; showed him a Dobro, an F-style mandolin, an old long-necked Vega banjo—“the Pete Seeger model.” Michael wandered through the clutter in dumb amazement. He said, “I took a few lessons a year or so ago … I know some chords.”

Emmett said, “Yeah? Well, hey, there’s an old Gibson over there if you want to try it. Doesn’t look like much but it plays okay.”