Rebekkah clenched her face, released it, clenched again. When your gastrointestinal machine made a little gurgle, Rebekkah startled, and her words came out of her like something she’d spilled, sloppy and wet. “And I know it’s way, way too late. To say I’m sorry? But I am. I am so, so sorry. I’m sorry that I never came. That I never told anyone what was happening before it was too late. That I still haven’t told. For years. Years, like this. Oliver. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’ll say it, I think I’ll really keep saying it to myself like a little prayer forever. Sorry. But what does that word even mean?”
You might have made Rebekkah into the Penelope at the end of your own bed-bound Odyssey, but even if you could have spoken to her now, you would have had no idea what to say. Rebekkah blinked very rapidly, as if she weren’t seeing straight. “I want to show you something.” She relinquished your face and leaned to one side to extract a paper from her bag. Your eyes, of course, could never focus on the text, but you recognized the shapes of your lines as you would have recognized a photograph of your old school. It was, in fact, the poem about your school, “Children of the Borderlands,” the last poem you’d written for her. In another lifetime. The page was torn from a magazine, worn nearly to a pulp, the words smeared and creased like old money.
“Recognize it, Oliver? I still read it, all the time. I’ve memorized all the words, but to see them there, on that page? It is like you are still out there somewhere. I read this thing you wrote, and I still feel—I don’t know, Oliver. So glad. That I got to know you.”
“Me, too,” you could not say. Maybe your hands would never again rise to meet hers. All the promise of your mornings in Mrs. Schumacher’s literature classroom would never be yours. But at least you had this, and maybe it was the best anyone could ever hope for: a roomy idea in which you were not alone. Long seconds passed.
“Good Lord!” Another voice—the familiar West Texan twang of the current Crockett State receptionist and former Bliss Pies N’ Stuff waitress—filled the room. “Is that Rebekkah Sterling?”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s Peggy. Peggy! From the old diner!”
“Oh, right. Hi there,” Rebekkah said, her voice fumbling. “I was just visiting Oliver, but now I need to go.”
“What are you even doing here? I heard you were living in New York.”
“I am. Just passing through and thought I’d make a little visit, but I really have to run.”
“Not so fast! Don’t you want a picture with the boy? I bet he’d want it. His folks, too.”
Please, you thought. Better for there to be no picture. Better for this memory to remain where it had taken place, behind your changed and strange skins. But of course you could not protest when Peggy produced a camera and gestured for Rebekkah to come huddle near your bed. As if this visit were just some excellent excursion you were all taking together, Peggy fixed her face into a wide grin, and she extended her arm for a group self-portrait. Rebekkah strained to brush the wetness from her face.
And then whatever relief this visit might have brought sucked out into the Chihuahuan night. Peggy held her camera at arm’s length, snapping photo after photo. It was not the photos that you begged to end. It was the horrible thing that this camera of Peggy’s showed you. The screen lit with a bright image: an electronic mirror, the three of your faces pressed together.
Your eyes, unfocused and scuttling, took a long while to find yourself and see. You only held the gaze for a second at a time, before your vision scared off in some other direction. But you did see, over and over and over. It was your face in the screen. And also, terribly, not. Your jaw had grown thick from the labor of its constant tremble. Your hair, as if from shame for the face beneath it, had begun to fall away. Your eyes looked at your eyes, like a senile man groping out of sleep for a clue as to where he’d woken. And you felt now that all the stories you had told yourself weren’t really true. Your buttons weren’t magical wormholes, just very lucid memories. In truth, you were just trapped in a hospital bed, not a passage between dimensions. You weren’t really a ghost inhabiting some other slain boy’s body. And yet, the only bit of yourself you could find in this vegetable staring back at you looked just like a ghost of you trapped in something else. A monster.
After Rebekkah left that night, your only hope was that maybe, at last, you really could will your brain to pull its own plug. Yet that was just a fantasy, too.
In the morning, Margot Strout arrived once more. “Here I am!” she said, that tragic woman come back to happily write her fictitious Oliver while the actual Oliver had only his silence. You tried to go slack, to will yourself to fall into that other place, where voices could once more become as meaningless as storm clouds over your roof. But the explosion of the floral hand grenade that was Margot Strout’s perfume was enough to rouse the dead.
“A? B? C? D?” Margot asked. At last the computer replied, “Missed you.”
That morning, for perhaps the blackest minute of your Crockett State years, there was nothing beneath your graying skin but rage. And it was not the usual anger at the young man who had put you into that bed, nor was it at the pungent woman writing her stories with your thumb. The fury, just then, was at another woman, the one who had spent all those years hunched over your transformation into this hideous creature. How many times, in your screaming silence, had you begged her to let you go? But Ma only carried on, as if her daily devotion to you were an act of selfless love, when it had always, or so it seemed to you now, been the opposite. Your mother, whose unspoken and darkest dream was always plainly visible to your brother and you: that you remain the perfect recompense for her sad, wandering childhood, that you and Charlie never grow away from her, your needs giving shape to the life of a woman who had never quite been able to make any other shape of herself. “I always believed,” she’d told you. But her belief was the cocoon in which you’d metamorphosed in reverse, turning into a grublike, wingless insect.
And rage, too, at your father. The man who committed his sins with a nod of his head, the man who carried on as if he had no role, as if his family would right itself if only he kept his lips sealed. And Charlie. The boy who had run off into the world, as if your future were still out there somewhere, as if he could free you with a story, as if he could find some better, wholly whole Oliver someplace thousands of miles away.
Over Bed Four, Margot Strout was speaking at you still, something about one of your favorite old books, Wind, Sand and Stars by Saint-Exupéry, which apparently Charlie had told her you’d loved. “Once you get past all the racism, he really does have quite a story to tell…”
But then, an hour or so into that morning’s visit, Margot fell silent at another arrival to the room. Even with Margot’s domineering scent clogging your nostrils, the faint smell of vanilla shampoo in the air was unmistakable.