Charlie was fourteen years old on the day he first discovered Oliver’s last journal, the same day Dr. Rumble gathered the Lovings in his western-themed office to inform them that, though Oliver’s body might still be there, just down the hall, he was already gone. “Sometimes death doesn’t look like what you’d expect,” Dr. Rumble explained. “Liar,” his mother said, and the truth was that word also burned in Charlie, there in Dr. Rumble’s office. Sometimes death doesn’t look like what you’d expect? The sight of the body in Bed Four might have been nearly inhuman—jaw gone slack, limbs snarled and strange—but the one thing Charlie could recognize—in the vibration of Oliver’s eyes, the ruh-ruh sounds Oliver’s throat made, the endless swatting of Oliver’s arms—was life. Perhaps with its back to a dark corner, perhaps at the bottom of a deep crevasse, but still life, battling its way for light.
That night, when they got back to Zion’s Pastures, Charlie tore through Oliver’s things, as if he could find evidence that his brother still lived. He paged through the sloppy mess of Oliver’s school binders, flipped through his various fantasy novels, felt the pockets of his pants. And there, in a bottom drawer of Oliver’s desk, was the well-worn leather journal he’d seen Oliver toting around. Charlie slammed the drawer shut so loudly that his new pug barked from the next room. In those early months, Charlie’s existence had become nothing but questions, the answers to which he was afraid of learning. Would his brother’s eyes ever regain their focus? Would he ever go back to school? Would Ma and he ever learn to think of a future beyond the end of each day? Would Pa ever stop drinking in his shed? Would he forever wake to his brother’s absence with the nightmarish sensation that somehow he had woken without all of his limbs?
Charlie went through Oliver’s belongings, as if looking for some answer, but as they waited in vain for Oliver to speak actual words, the idea of setting his eyes on his brother’s handwriting was too much. At the bottom of Charlie’s closet was a small toy bank, fashioned to resemble an olden-timey safe from a Western, which Charlie had received as a gift one long-ago Christmas. This bank latched with a brass key; Charlie shoved Oliver’s journal inside and locked it.
When at last he summoned the courage to unlock that safe, he was three years older, seventeen, a different boy. Three years, where did they go? Thinking back on them later, all those years would seem to Charlie a single smeary sameness, one very long overbright Tuesday afternoon. His so-called homeschooling? It was, he would have admitted, true what Ma later liked to claim about that time. “You chose it, Charlie! You told me you wanted to stay at home. It was what you wanted, in case you don’t remember. So would you please stop acting like I was some tyrant?”
“Well. You are right. Technically speaking.”
“Technically? What the hell does that mean, technically? These are basic facts.”
Even still Charlie could not quite bring himself to tell her the truth that he folded inside the bland envelope of that word. But why couldn’t she see it for herself? Technically, he did not see their “homeschooling” as a choice. Ma—the immutable icon, the implacable white colossus that had stood guard over his childhood—had been badly fissuring, and Charlie had known that only he could fill the gaps. After all, Pa had already crumbled.
Though Charlie had spent a good part of the first year or so of their “homeschooling” filling out the worksheets Ma ordered from Time4Learning, which issued curricula for the homeschool set, Ma soon lost her will to grade his assignments, and there was just something demonstrably unhealthy about a boy granting his own math exam a B minus. At last he quit this curriculum altogether. In truth, Charlie spent much of those months doing whatever Ma seemed to need, to which they retrofitted educational motive. Her occasional freak desire to go on manic shopping sprees in the concrete architectural atrocities of the new strip malls became “Home Ec.” When Ma, considering what kind of sentence might await Hector Espina’s father, threw herself into a month of library research into aiding and abetting and felony arms possession, she called it “U.S. Government,” and when she told Charlie it was best that they try not to think of it, she called it “Behavioral Psychology.” After Manuel Paz came by Zion’s Pastures to deliver the news that Hector Sr. had simply vanished from the country, and Ma fell into a blackness Charlie couldn’t do anything about, he called the following six months of novel reading and movie watching “Independent Study.”
“A student-interest-led education,” his mother one day named the endless lazy weekend that his high school years had become. “When a child takes his education into his own hands, that’s when greatness is born.”
“But don’t you worry,” Charlie asked, “that I couldn’t tell you what the word trigonometry even means?”
“Neither could I,” his mother distantly replied, “and I went to school.”
His entire “homeschooling,” Charlie perceived, was truly just an extended lecture on the distance between intentions and facts. Despite the fact that Charlie more than once beat at the cabin door until his fists were raw, Pa never stopped drinking out there. Despite Charlie’s hopes that he might rescue Pa from the Marfa hovel to which he later decamped, Charlie could never get his father to summon any greater action than another fumbling apology. Despite his attempts not to hate Pa, Charlie did come to hate him, refusing his occasional offers for “a nice dinner out.” Despite his efforts to hold his mother together—boiling the brown rice and baking the chicken breast as she continued to look upon even these wholesome foodstuffs as if they were toxic substances, wiping down the dust and grime that silently accumulated around them, pressing Edwina’s mouthy grin into her face in a futile attempt to lift her spirits—Ma was lost to him, arriving each morning to the eggs Charlie had scrambled as bleary and fazed as some mental patient. It was only at Bed Four, with her son’s vegetative body before her, that Ma groped her way out of silence, reading to Oliver from his old paperbacks. Charlie wanted to allow his mother whatever she needed to hold herself together, but a terrible anxiety, the strangeness of the scene he was witnessing, the depth of Ma’s—what? faith? delusion?—was an alarm wailing inside him.
Of course Charlie also did his best to keep any of his own questions about that night’s aftermath from his mother. He never once spoke the name Hector Espina aloud. But Charlie himself couldn’t resist pilfering an occasional newspaper from the Crockett State waiting room, and the stories he found there did little to explain anything.