But it never lasted.

They stopped for dinner at a Trailways diner somewhere in Ohio. She was not sure where they were except that they had driven through barren wheat fields for the last hour and a half. Laura picked up a USA Today at the candy counter and carried it into the cafeteria with her. She folded it on the table so that Karen was able to see what she was reading. It was a page-two story on the Detroit murder stats for 1988 and Laura read it twice, frowning so intently that she seemed about to burst into tears. Then she looked up at Karen and said, “It’s not normal!”—as if Karen had been arguing with her. “My Christ! It’s ugly, and it’s worse than that—it’s so fucking unnecessary!”

The man at the next booth peered up from under his Cleveland Indians cap, blinking. The waitress, passing, neglected to refill their coffee cups.

Michael looked blankly at his aunt.

And Karen thought to herself, It’s real, then. We are what we are and the Gray Man is real and he can kill people—children!—and my son, my only son, Michael, is in real danger, and we’re going home, my God, after all these silent years, we really are going home.

Chapter Nine

They came over a long wooded ridge and Laura could see the town, then, shouldering up against the Monongahela River, one more fucked-up old mill town, the ancient coke ovens and rolling mills and blast furnaces fouling the air—but not the way they did when times were prosperous—and the slatboard houses and the row houses all built back in the twenties or earlier, when the railroads were making money and the demand was big for rolled steel and bituminous coal.

The sight of Polger Valley from this height invoked a rush of memory so intense that she pulled the car over to the gravel shoulder, her hands clenched on the wheel. She had never lived here—had left home a month before Mama and Daddy moved from Duquesne—but it was like every other place they had lived; it was like Duquesne and it was like Burleigh; it was like Pittsburgh with its hills and narrow streets. She looked at Karen beside her, Karen with her eyes fixed somewhere off beyond the river. “You drive,” Laura said. “You know the way.” Her sister shrugged.

Laura walked around the car to the passenger side. Her legs felt hard and tense from driving. It was a cold, late, cloudy afternoon; the ragged hillside maples were spindly and bare. Streetlights blinked on in the distant, empty industrial alleys along the river.

Climbing back into the car, she glanced at Michael in the rear seat. He was gazing out blankly over the valley, lost in some thought. He had been like this —sullen like this—ever since California.

She rolled up her window. “Cold back there?”

He only shrugged.

Last week, in a hotel room outside Cleveland, Laura had asked him why he was so quiet these last few days. Karen had gone shopping for winter clothes; Michael was sitting on the bed, watching a football game with the sound turned down. He looked up at her briefly, unhappily. “Am I?”

“Yes. But not just quiet. Pissed-off quiet. So who are you mad at, Michael?”

He shrugged.

She said, “At me?”

“Do I have to talk about it?”

“No. Of course not. But we’re living in each other’s pockets and there’s no way around that. It might make life easier if you did.”

He shrugged again. “I just think it’s stupid… all this should have happened before.”

“All this?”

“What we’re doing. Where we’re going. What we’re finding out.” He straightened his shoulders. “I mean, you knew what you were. All your life. All three of you did. But nobody ever asked? Nobody said, Where did I come from, what am I? Not until now?”

He pressed his back against the wall of the hotel room, hugged his knees against himself. Laura said, “We were negligent and we screwed up your life—is that it?”

“Maybe. Maybe not just mine.”

“So, Michael, who should we have asked?”

“Who are you planning to ask?”

Well, all right, she thought. He was bright and he had a point. But he didn’t really understand. He was fifteen years old and everything seemed too obvious. “You don’t know what it was like back home.”

“I know, it was rough. But—”

“Michael, listen to me.” She sat down next to him, and maybe he sensed the seriousness in her voice, because he was quiet again, not sullen now but attentive. She said, “I did ask once. I was maybe five, maybe six years old. I went to Daddy. I showed him what I could do. Made a little window for him. A window into some nice place, a child’s idea of a nice place, a sunny day and, you know, flowers and meadows, and a deer standing there. I meant to find out whether he could do it. I think most of all I wanted to know what I was supposed to do with it, this strange little trick—what was it for?”

Michael said, “He wouldn’t tell you?”

“I don’t remember what he said. All I remember is showing him, wanting to ask him. And then I remember lying in bed. There were bruises on my face. Bruises on my arms. Five very clear bruises on my right arm above the elbow, and I knew he’d grabbed me there, that those bruises fit the shape and angle of his fingers.”

“He beat you,” Michael said.

“Yes. It sounds terrible, but… yes, that’s the word for it.”

“That’s sick.” Michael’s outrage was obvious and heartfelt. “You must have hated him for it.”

“No. I did not.”

Michael frowned.

She said, “Do you hate your father? I mean, hey, he walked out on you. Walked out on you and your mom. That’s a pretty big thing. You hate him for it?”

“No.” Cautiously now. “But that’s different.”

“Is it? Maybe it’s only a matter of degree.”

“He never beat me.”

“Should I have hated Daddy for that? Well, maybe you’re right… maybe I should have. Tim did, at least eventually. But, Michael, I was too young. When you’re five years old you don’t have that kind of hate in you. You forgive. Not because you want to but because you don’t have a choice. Can you understand that? Sometimes you forgive because there’s nothing else you can do.”

It was more than she had meant to say.

He looked at her steadily.

“But now,” he said, “you do have a choice.”

And there was nothing Laura could say to that— no answer she could think of.

They pulled up at the house just after dark.

It was an old row house on a hill that ran down toward the river, and behind it there was a steep wooded slope. The street was called Montpelier and it dead-ended against a chalky cliff.

This was not the greatest neighborhood. Some of these houses had been mended and repaired; many had not. Once upon a time, Laura thought, this would have been a street full of working people, Poles and Germans, but now, she guessed, most of these folks were laid off from the mills, and there were more than a few black faces peering out from shuttered windows as she parked beside the curb. Down where Montpelier met Riverside there was a big noisy bar; Riverside, a commercial street, was crowded with pawnshops, barred and locked at dusk.

Odd that her parents had stayed here so long. All my life, she thought, we moved every year, every two years. Sometimes because Daddy got laid off for drinking, sometimes for no discernible reason. Here, finally, they had settled. Maybe because they were alone together at last; maybe because Daddy had finally built up some seniority at the local mill.

Maybe because we left.

But now, she thought, we’re home.

There was a yellow bulb burning over the porch. Karen parallel-parked and Laura unloaded luggage from the trunk. Michael hefted a suitcase in each hand. He regarded the house warily. “So,” he said, “this is it?”