Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

rocket that never came down: She wasn’t manic-depressive; there was no depression, just manic and more manic. Although to be honest, it wasn’t mania in the clinical sense, just high energy and no brakes. Two separate therapists diagnosed her as a borderline personality. I had to look that one up. Some things seemed to fit, some didn’t, and the rest I wasn’t sure about, but it all sounded pretty bad.

In the end, I decided the diagnosis creeped me out, not my sister. Quinn could be frivolous and silly, the grasshopper to everyone else’s ant; she could be self-centered and even insensitive, with the attention span of a gnat and poor impulse control, but she had never been mean or spiteful. Most of the time she was good-natured, slow to anger, and quick to kiss and make up. And more than anything else, generous.

My mother never missed a chance to point out Quinn’s good qualities. There’s no malice in her. She’s got a good heart. She never goes out of her way to hurt anyone. She’d give you the shirt off her back. What my mother didn’t mention, however, was that when Quinn ran out of shirts, she’d expect you to volunteer yours. Her tendency to presume wasn’t as attractive as her thick, curly black hair or her silvery gray eyes or her smile, features that could usually persuade the susceptible to overlook her flaws.

It didn’t always work to her advantage, of course. Because she was a child, she had a hard time telling the difference between excitement and trouble. I’m not sure she even knew there was a difference. Because there’s no malice in her, my mother said. Because she’s got a good heart.

In November of 1989, Quinn went to Berlin with her good heart, which had been captured by a tall, rangy blond man with blue eyes, cheekbones like the white cliffs of Dover, and snake hips. It was a package that would have held my attention even without the German accent. With it, everything he said sounded exotic and even a bit mysterious, at least to my tin American ear. Especially after a few glasses of red wine.

And very good red wine it was, too, a French Bordeaux that actually tasted as good as the label looked. He brought two bottles when he and Quinn turned up at our parents’ house for the annual your-father-won’t- celebrate-his-birthday dinner in early September. Only Kath, Lisa, and I were not-celebrating with our parents. Our oldest sister, Marie, and her wife were stuck in Toronto seeing their twins through chicken pox, and as far as any of us knew, Quinn was traveling—the family euphemism for that period beginning with the last time anyone had heard from her and ending when she finally called one or more of us to say she was OK and hint she needed a small loan. Unpredicted and unexpected again. Surprise, everybody, and oh, hey, meet Martin.

The not-a-birthday dinner immediately turned into the Quinn Show, with special guest. Quinn was bubbly, vivacious, and entertaining, Martin was personable, witty, and utterly covet-worthy, and everyone enjoyed themselves. Though Kath, Lisa, and I sneaked commiserating looks at each other even as we did; sometimes it was hard not to feel drab around our baby sister.

But if we felt drab next to Quinn, we were positively lackluster compared to Martin. Originally from East Berlin, he was barely more than a toddler when his parents had given him over to some trusted friends who had smuggled him through the Berlin Wall and taken him to live with them in London. Since then, he had heard precious little of his family: All he had was a blurry photo of his parents with the two younger sisters and a brother he had never met. My mother teared up. This embarrassed Martin, who apologized. Quinn, however, sat back with a faint smile, and I knew she was pleased to have brought us someone to prick our social conscience—very much a Quinn thing to do.

She and Martin didn’t stay long after that. “And there they go,” Kath sighed as we stood on the front steps watching Martin’s sports car pull out of the driveway. “Back to life among those more beautiful and exciting than us.” Her gaze swiveled to Lisa, the grammar Nazi of the family.

For once, Lisa wasn’t taking the bait. “What color do you suppose the sky is on that planet?” she asked wistfully.

“Dunno,” I said. “Our eyes are probably too ordinary to see it.”

“Don’t be silly, Jean.” Kath elbowed me. “It’ll be gold lamé. With real gold.”

“Girls.” Mom was right on cue. “There’s no malice in her. She’s got a good heart.”

Dad gave a small hmph. “I hope this Martin doesn’t break it.”

My sisters and I looked at each other, knowing immediately he would.

* * *

Quinn’s call came on one of those rare nights when I had a few friends from work over for drinks and hors d’oeuvres. The conversation was mostly about East European politics. Was this really the beginning of the end for Communism, and, if so, did that mean changes for China after all, despite Tiananmen Square? Current events along with Martin’s brief visit had me thinking more about politics than I ever had before, although he and my sister were the furthest things from my mind when the phone rang.

She was talking so fast that I couldn’t understand a word she was saying. I couldn’t even tell whether she was happy, angry, or scared. I tried calming her down so I could call her back after everyone left; instead, I ended up mouthing apologies at my guests while they showed themselves out. Eventually Quinn wound down enough so that I could get in a few questions.

Martin had gone back to London in mid-October, promising to return in a week, ten days at the most. There’d been two brief phone calls from him—one the day he’d arrived in London to let her know he’d arrived safely, the other two weeks later to say he had the flu and was too sick to fly. And after that, nothing—no calls and only the answering machine when she called him. She went on phoning at all hours of the day and night until she’d finally gotten an answer—not Martin but the neighbor who said she was watering his plants while he was in West Berlin. No, she didn’t know when Martin was coming back, big things were happening. He hadn’t told her much before he left, just something about people coming through the Berlin Wall, which would be very exciting if it were true, wouldn’t it. Quinn managed to wheedle the name and number of the hotel where Martin was staying out of her, then decided to take more direct action.

So here she was in Berlin, at the hotel where Martin had supposedly been staying. Only he wasn’t there now, and she had been running all over West Berlin for days trying to find him. And now she’d heard about people who had gotten out of East Berlin going back through the wall and getting stuck, unable to get out again even if they had passports from the UK or West Germany or even America.

That didn’t sound right to me. Could any country, even East Germany, prevent a foreign national from leaving? I thought of what I’d seen on the news about Hungary’s relaxed border with Austria allowing East Germans to escape to the west. Maybe East Germany was tightening its own borders with everyone else to counter this, making travel problems for everyone, regardless of nationality? It didn’t seem likely, but I just didn’t know. Stranger things had happened.

“Maybe the best thing to do is get on the first flight out of there,” I said the next time she stopped for breath. “Come home, wait for Martin to call you.”

“Absolutely not,” she said. “Martin needs my help, I just know it. He’s one of those people who went back through the wall and can’t get out again. I can feel it in my bones.”

“What makes you think that?” I asked.

“I just told you, I can feel it in my bones,” Quinn said, as if I had questioned the existence of gravity. “Haven’t you ever felt that way, like you just know something?”

It was on the tip of my tongue to say, Yeah, but I’ve always been wrong unless it was something bad that I was in denial about, but she was talking again.

“A lot of the people here think something’s about to happen, but they don’t know if it’s going to be something good, like more travel restrictions being eased, or something bad, like Czechoslovakia in 1968—”

“Do you even know what happened in Czechoslovakia in 1968?” I asked, amazed.

“Tanks,” she said vaguely. “But whatever happens, I can’t leave Martin to face it alone.”

I sighed. “Quinn, honey, I think you’ve got it backward. I think Martin left you.”

“He wouldn’t. I know it in my heart. We have a bond.”

There’s no arguing with what someone knows in their heart or feels in their bones, but that’s never stopped me from trying. It was especially counterproductive in this case, because the more I argued against it, the surer she was about Martin and the more determined she became to help him.