Pa grinned wearily. “I don’t know how to explain it to you. This is all very, very, very strange. I don’t know. We’re just sorta feeling our way through the dark here.”
“Ha! Ha ha!” Charlie bleated, a little theatrically. And certainly it was true that such a revelation—the surprise of his parents’ ongoing capacity for romance—would, just a few months earlier, have been shocking to the verge of medical danger. But as Charlie now reconsidered the true substance of Ma’s late-night absences from Desert Splendor, the sly grin that would sometimes come into her face, the great shock was that this, after all, made sense. Made sense not only of Ma’s behavior but also as the latest, greatest piece of evidence for the revised theory of life Charlie had just cracked in the backyard of Anti-House, that you can never really know the full truth of the stories spinning alongside your own. Maybe, even after a solid year of full-time navel-gazing, you couldn’t really even know your own.
“Oh, God,” Ma said, appearing in the kitchen doorway, her face blotched with blush. “What now?”
“Nothing,” Charlie said with a laugh. “Your boyfriend here was just telling me an interesting story.”
Later, after they had polished off the better part of the enchiladas, Ma described a phone call she’d had with a neuroscientist named Marissa Ginsberg, who would administer the most important part of Oliver’s examination that Friday in El Paso.
Dr. Ginsberg, Ma explained, working with a machine similar to the one Professor Nickell had driven to Crockett State, had learned of a way she could use the device to remarkable new effect. Apparently, different parts of the brain glowed on the display when people engaged in different mental exercises, and so the clever Dr. Ginsberg had several times used these brain scans as an indirect way of reading a subject’s mind, a way for a person to answer yes and no without twitching so much as a thumb. “Think of running when you want to say yes, sing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ to yourself when you want to say no,” Dr. Ginsberg told her subjects. It was only yeses and nos, nothing more complex she could assess in her machine, and the process, Dr. Ginsberg had admitted, was both laborious and expensive. “It’s not like this mind-reading trick of hers is perfect,” Ma told Charlie. “Not like it could ever tell us everything Oliver is thinking, but yeses and nos with no Margot Strout in between? It’s not nothing.”
“You’re right,” Charlie said. “It’s not nothing.”
*
Early the next morning, as the Lovings readied themselves for another day at Bed Four, Charlie heard something disconcerting, a kind of garbled yelp, maybe a squirrel being flattened by a pickup. It turned out to be the sound his father’s doorbell made, after he had attempted to repair it. Charlie stood there with Ma, in the empty living room, as his father opened the door to reveal a pear-shaped woman, holding something heavy. “Mrs. Strout,” Pa said.
“Margot,” Margot said.
“I can’t,” Ma told Charlie. “I can’t talk to that woman.”
“Okay,” Charlie told his mother, yet he took a few paces in the direction of Margot Strout, whose boots Edwina was already licking. The sight of Charlie, for the first time since that bad morning at Bed Four, made the woman flush deeply. Margot put a hand to her brow as two horseflies orbited her head in wobbly circles, like a cartoon illustration of a slapstick head injury. “I brought you all a casserole,” she said in the direction of Ma, proffering the foil-wrapped tray in her hands.
“Charlie,” Ma said, employing the old passive-aggressive power move she used to use with Pa, “please tell her she isn’t welcome here.”
“I just wanted to talk to you,” Margot said. “I just wanted to try to explain things. Tell you how very, very, very sorry I am.”
“Please tell that woman we’re not interested in talking,” Ma said.
“Eve,” Margot said. “I promise—”
Ma fought back a gasp. “I’m sick of hearing your promises,” she told Margot now.
It was a little fuzzy, Charlie’s picture of just what had happened that morning at Crockett State when Ma at last dismissed the palm reader from her place by Bed Four. But what was perfectly clear was the familiar way Ma was trying to wield her righteous indignation now, to beat back her own guilt by force of condemnation.
“Listen, Eve, please listen to me.” Margot spoke over Charlie’s shoulder, addressing Eve in a tremulous, rapid monologue as her makeup began to seep, waxlike, down her cheeks. “I can lose my job. I can stop doing this work altogether, you can hate me, I’d understand it. And I know how this might sound to you, but I’ll never stop believing it. I can’t. I can’t stop myself from knowing that it really was Oliver I felt there. Just like I can still feel Cora is here, listening to every word I say. Listening to these words right now. Even if you think I should know better.”
Charlie looked at Margot; he looked at his mother. Maybe Margot deserved Ma’s damnation; maybe this woman had come with her Jesus-love and delusions to make of the Lovings a comforting little story for herself. But Charlie was too tired now for this notion to elicit any outrage of his own. Charlie was thinking: Who could understand either of those mothers more than they could understand one another? “Thank you for the casserole,” Charlie told her, unburdening her arms. “I’m sure it’s delicious. Maybe try coming back later?”
She nodded, and Charlie held Edwina back between his ankles as Margot waddled away. Charlie peeled a corner of the foil, looked at the unappetizing mash-up Margot had made. Walnuts, avocado, potato, and chicken scraps all mashed together into a greenish pap. The Lovings dispersed wordlessly from the room, and Charlie slipped the casserole into the fridge. They didn’t speak of Margot that day at Bed Four, nor did they mention her the next day. But that following evening, when Charlie crept out for a late-night snack, he noticed that the casserole tray’s foil wrapping had been disturbed, that a little square of it had been cut away and consumed—and Pa, Charlie remembered, hated walnuts.
Charlie had established himself in the house’s second bedroom, which, boasting no more than a squeaking queen bed and an antique school desk, qualified as the best room he had inhabited since his childhood. But, for once, he looked at the room’s desk without any visions of writing there. Charlie might have had only a few rough pages to show for his sixteen faltering months of writing, but he knew it was time to share what he had with his first reader.