Rebekkah turned the wheel. Could she really do it? She imagined the scene that might await her at the hospital. A bedside lamp clicking on, her face coming into focus.
Once, Oliver had looked at Rebekkah like an angel descended. How, she wondered, would she look to him after all those years? Rebekkah knew: in the end, she had become a different sort of angel, the one who brought death.
Oliver
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
“The whole cosmos,” your father once told his Young Astronomers Club, “will end just as it began, collapsed back to a single spot of brightness. The Big Crunch, they call it, which in turn becomes the next Big Bang, the universe reborn.” Maybe your father’s arty astrophysical stories had always been more metaphor than science, and yet, once more, it was just as your father had described it. At last, after years of spreading darkness, a sudden contraction; the immeasurable weight of past and present rejoining to a single point of light. A brightness that woke you.
It was the bulb at the end of the flexible stick of your bedside lamp, and you could make out just the shape of a wrist as your eyes ached to adjust. Whose wrist? The wrist became a hand, which reached to direct the light upward. You blinked, and you blinked, and the image shook slowly into focus.
Suddenly, I turned around and she was standing there: that was a line from your favorite song in the last of your walking years. Bob Dylan’s “Shelter from the Storm.” In the few months you’d known her, Rebekkah had never exactly been the shelter, she had at least as often been the storm. But in another lifetime, maybe?
Well, here you both were now, in another lifetime indeed. You might not have been able to turn around, but it was just as Bob Dylan had promised. Suddenly, she was standing there. But not with silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair. Those famous amber ringlets of hers were drawn back in a neat ponytail, and she wore a half-unzipped hoodie over a purplish blouse.
The hands that were Rebekkah’s hands reached to hold your face steady so that you could not look away. You wanted very much to look away. Enough, you told yourself. You knew your brain had at last torn down the final boundaries and conjured her back for you, but you found that you didn’t have the courage to look upon this pleading hallucination. Rebekkah as you remembered her was one thing, a marvelous flightless bird petrified in iridescent rock. But this dream of her now, looking down at you after all those years? Her parted lips, her widened eyes registering the kind of heartbreak that is lodged between shock and disgust? It was too much, too close. Oh, even her vanilla smell was so achingly convincing. You willed her to vanish. Yet this dream Rebekkah persisted there, and she cleared her throat.
“Oliver,” she said.
And still the illusion remained, in such remarkable detail. Even the light throatiness of her breathing, which you had forgotten, was back in your ears. You cheered with the thought that this, at last, was just the true, merciful form your own angel of death had taken.
“I’ll bet you are surprised,” Rebekkah told you, and that was when you began to believe. Rebekkah, the living, the actual.
But you were not surprised, not exactly. You were—what’s the word for when your most persistent daydreams take tangible, breathing, ginger-hued life in front of you? Just one word for it, of course. Rebekkah. You could not rise to take in the changes with your arms, and so you did your best to take her in with your eyes, which vibrated across her at a high frequency.
“Oliver?” Rebekkah’s tone was distant, a voice on a bad telephone connection. As if testing something, she pressed her mouth to your forehead and retreated. “How is this you?”
In the harsh black and bright white of the bedside lamp, she looked like she had passed through more than a decade. Gray strands wound through those amber ringlets now. As with your mother, her face was a furrowed cartography of the many bad years. And her voice, which you had so often conjured in your memory, was a whole octave lower than you would have expected. She had changed. It was nature’s way, and you accepted it. It was in that acceptance that you found yourself appalled.
“I can’t, I couldn’t. I’m sorry,” Rebekkah said. “I should have come to see you. Years ago. I just couldn’t.”
“It’s okay,” you couldn’t say.
“It’s not okay,” she said.
What appalled you was the way that, even still, a crazy, vanilla-drunk feeling once more staggered its way upright inside you. Even still, at the mere sight of this half stranger, you felt the old urgency. Everything you still needed to tell her.
Of course you knew that to the woman presently bent over your bed, you were now Oliver the Martyr, Oliver the Buried Truth, Oliver the Secret Shame, but you had never been Oliver the Lost Love. You were, in fact, just one boy she had kissed; there were many before you, and very many had followed. The tragedy of love, you had learned from ten years spent looking up at your mother, is that it is only possible to love perfectly a person who is lost to you; only a lost person, lodged in a place before the narrow, clumsy gates of language, could ever understand you perfectly. And so maybe the great love of your life was only a crush, blown up to operatic proportions by impassable distance, only a name for your vanished future. But when you had spoken those mornings before school in Mrs. Schumacher’s literature classroom, Rebekkah had seemed to offer the possibility of a new kind of fluency, and maybe it was that better, impossible language you needed even more than you needed her. That better language, more expansive and full of strange beauty, which you needed to tell everything that had happened and not happened, the ways you had survived because you had no choice but to survive.