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By Root 899 0

out at her first glimpse of the Mediterranean. It looked fragile enough to tear, a sheet of thinnest blue silk, streaked pink from the sky. She couldn’t see a beach, but sensed one there, afternoon bathers lingering on the cooling sand, and was overwhelmed by memories of Mirasol, playing on the beach only two blocks from Grandma and Grandpa O’Connor’s house while summer days melted into sultry, bluish nights. At dusk the sand glowed like the moon; she and Faith and Barry couldn’t leave it. Finally their father would come after them, yelling down from the boardwalk, “Come on, you rascals, it’s getting dark.” Then he’d wander down and join them, “just for a minute,” he’d say, lulled by that curious lag time when, despite the darkness, the world still felt gorged on the heat of daylight. He would lie back in the sand with arms crossed at his chest and they would bury his feet, his legs, shrieking and patting down the cracks when he tried to move. Often they got as far as his neck before their mother came outside, calling into the darkness, “Gene? Kids? Honey, I thought you said you were bringing them back.”

Phoebe sat upright in her seat. For days, it seemed, she’d remembered nothing; now she had an almost physical craving to drift, to give herself up to the past. The City of Fun stayed open all summer long in Mirasol, entertaining the Navy kids. After dinner she and Barry and Faith would go there with their father, who bought them garish colored slushes that ached in the chest when you sipped too fast. From the Ferris wheel Phoebe gazed down at the tingling black sea and felt a tremendous worldliness, out past her bedtime, bathed in the amusement park’s eerie colored light. One man who worked there year after year had a pockmark deep in the side of his face, large enough to hold a marble. Phoebe would stare at him, transfixed by this hole and what secret disaster might have caused it. She thought of him in the off-season, too, his cigarette pack rolled in the sleeve of his white T-shirt, his mouth cocked in a half-smile. Where did he live? she wondered. What did he do besides pull the lever that made the ride go?

“You look far away,” Wolf said over the din of the moving train. He lifted Phoebe’s foot and held it in his lap. The sweet-eating women winked their complicity.

Wolf’s hands were warm on her ankle, but Phoebe’s mind drifted from him. “Wolf?” she said, “What ever happened to the terrorists Faith knew in Germany?”

He looked startled. It had been two weeks since they’d spoken Faith’s name. “They’re dead,” he said. “The main ones anyway.”

“What about that one woman?”

“Ulrike Meinhof? She hanged herself in prison a couple of years ago.” Wolf spoke slowly, eyes narrowed. “The other ones—Baader, his girlfriend, Gudrun Ensslin, another guy, Raspe—they all committed suicide in jail. Last October I guess—was it? Yeah, last October. A lot of people say they were murdered.”

“So it’s extinct now, the Red Army?”

“Actually not,” Wolf said. “It’s going strong. Why, you thinking of joining?”

Phoebe smiled. “Right.”

“Last fall they kidnapped a guy, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, this big industrialist. Killed three guards and a driver just getting to the guy, held him two months, then slit his throat.”

“God.”

“They don’t call it ‘terrorism’ for nothing.”

The idea of a link between her sister and such bloodletting sickened Phoebe. It would have sickened Faith. “They must be monsters, the new people,” she said.

“Monsters I don’t know. A few steps further along.”

“If Faith had been there, she would’ve stopped them.”

Wolf laughed. “The entire German police force tried to stop them.”

“But, Faith,” Phoebe said. “I mean, Faith! When Barry threw snails off the roof, she glued the shells back together with Elmer’s glue and they actually lived. You don’t believe me?” she asked, searching Wolf’s face.

“I do,” he said quietly. “She told me that story herself.” After a moment he said, “Ulrike Meinhof’s still kind of a hero in Germany. A martyr. Kids, especially, worship her, but adults, too, liberals. They see her as an innocent, this