“I’m getting the feeling I had a spy in the house.”
“I’m sorry for that. It seemed wrong not to tell your mother you were okay. I found her number in your phone. Remember this thing?” Christopher gave the device a few wags, tossed it at Charlie.
“And she sent you?” Charlie asked Rebekkah. “What are you even doing in Texas?”
“I volunteered, actually, said it was about time I talked to you anyway.”
“No way,” Charlie told the impossible fact of her face in front of him. “I don’t believe this. Why would you come find me? And why now?”
Rebekkah grimaced, nodded for a few seconds. “It’s a good thing we’ve got a long drive ahead of us. It’s going to take a while, what I have to tell you.”
“A long drive?”
“They need you. There’s this big test…” Charlie nodded, held up a palm to suggest she didn’t need to say anything more. She didn’t; the shame of his disappearance was argument enough, but the much more prominent sensation—the trembling in his ears, the cool blue behind his eyes—was relief. Charlie gathered his pages from the teahouse, stuffed them into his bag, and checked out of Anti-House by giving Christopher a firm squeeze. But Christopher? He pressed his mouth against Charlie’s again, the friction of their stubble generating static electricity.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
In the rental car, Charlie rode with Rebekkah through the chaos of stars, the humped black Hill Country. Under the bright beams of the Ford Fiesta, the asphalt was a wire, threading them home.
The first hour or two passed in near silence, as if the gas stations and subdivisions and hill towns were too distracting, as if to tell what Rebekkah needed to tell she had to be in a nullity, a perfect void. As the world was reduced to the occasional streetlamp, burning dimly over the western plains, it felt as if they were the last people alive. “It was a hard year for me,” Rebekkah began. “It seemed like nobody saw me until Mr. Avalon…” But as Rebekkah pressed on into her whole horrible story, Charlie did not exactly listen to her words. Her words transmuted him; Charlie became thirteen years old again, on that first day in the hospital conference room. But the room was different now, the name Mr. Avalon a noxious gas, thick and gray, filling the memory, choking out the air.
Later, after stopping for a bathroom break in Ozona, Charlie took the wheel to let Rebekkah rest. As soon as he turned back on to Interstate 10, Rebekkah fell quickly asleep, Edwina dozing on her lap, her snores mercifully cured of that terrible watery sound.
Mr. Avalon. Their vanished town’s faded deity, their failed musician, their imagined martyr. Why? Even after Rebekkah had at last fallen silent, and the shock of it had passed, Charlie knew that not even this story could ever truly answer the question that had become the organizing principle of his life. Rebekkah’s story might help explain, but there could be no full answer for Hector and the decision he’d made, Charlie saw that now. And, out the windshield, Charlie also saw this: they were already on the border of the desert that had seen five hardscrabble generations of Lovings.
That blue country looked like no place for humans. Charlie was thinking that maybe the wrongness, “the vexation,” as Granny Nunu had always claimed, was in the land itself. The evil, the sickness that had led to his brother’s confinement, his father’s withering, the wasted years, the slain schoolchildren, the silenced abuse of Rebekkah, Hector Espina, and who knows how many others. All of it, taken together, was like some legend Charlie and his brother might once have whispered about in their bunks. A family curse, begun generations before they arrived on that grim stage. However: it was not only Charlie’s life that bent around that damning conjunction. However was his region’s ancestral affliction, the whole story of that Texan borderland, a lifeless country where utopian visions had come to die for more than a century. The last hope of an Apache homeland, the entrepreneurial ambitions of the white settlers with their cattle and mineral enterprises, the parched aspirations of hundreds of thousands of immigrants: to all of those dreams the desert had intoned its ancient reply. However. And, on the night of November fifteenth, his country’s ancient green-grass delusion and the violence it stoked had transformed but was as present as ever, the bloody sequel to the faded tall tales still spinning out in his digitized century, in a country psychotically armed for end times. However was the story of Hector Espina’s West Texan existence, too, a young man who every day must have carried in his pockets the crumpled dream of his own fame. And yet, as a navy selvage of dawn rimmed the eastern horizon, exposing hills that looked like ancient sea creatures, fossilized in the moment of breaching the surface of the long-drained ocean, the sight entered Charlie’s eyes like a key clicking into all its tumblers, unlatching a sensation that even still Charlie could only call home.
*
Rebekkah woke as Charlie pulled the Fiesta over at a filling station–cum–diner outside Fort Stockton. She narrowed her eyes at the sun pouring back into the desert morning. “And now for the next bit of news,” she said.
“The next?”
Rebekkah shrugged. “Ha. You know what? I think I’ll leave it as a surprise for you.”
Charlie was still too adrift in the floodwater of all these new facts to muster anything beyond a survival instinct, throwing his arms over his head.
“But Rebekkah? Have you told my parents? Do they know what you told me?”
“I told them everything. The day after I came back, I told them.” She set her jaw, glanced at Charlie, nodded at his next question, which he didn’t even need to ask.
“It was just seeing Oliver there, I guess. I saw Oliver, and I thought, Charlie is right. I had been so worried for myself, so sorry for myself really, but I thought, Charlie is right, what does Oliver need? And of course I knew what Oliver needed. Had always known. Just the truth.”
“The truth,” Charlie said. “And did my parents tell all this to Manuel Paz?”
“I told him myself. I don’t even know what he could do about it now. What any of us can do now. But I told your mom that if she needed someone to come get you in Austin, that was a thing I could do.”
Rebekkah and Charlie watched a wren pick at an empty box of fries, give up and flutter away. “Hey,” Rebekkah said. “Go grab us some coffee, and then I’m taking the wheel.”
An hour later, Rebekkah turned off Route 385 five miles before it came to Crockett State. Oddly, no words passed between them as the destination became more evident, the crumbling gravel and frowzy buildings of Route 90 dusting themselves off, buttoning up for the one spot of sophistication in the whole of the Big Bend.
“Uh-oh,” Charlie said.