In the way other boys his age might have lied about a club meeting or a sleepover at a friend’s house to conceal recreational drug use, Charlie invented a comic book convention in El Paso, where he in fact tried his luck on the GED in a high school classroom that was that Saturday a room of adolescent outcasts: sallow-faced addicts, tattooed miscreants, moonfaced fundamentalist homeschoolers. Propped up by some eleventh-hour textbook reading he’d done, Charlie passed the exam by an unrespectable margin, and so he proceeded to compose an early application essay to Thoreau, in which he described the events of November fifteenth, the years of aftermath, his brother’s vegetative condition. All the guilt, worry, and hope that he knew his mother could not bear to hear. Maybe Oliver was the real writer in the family, but it was as Charlie watched the unspoken truth of his last years transform into words on the page that he began to think that he might like to write, too. One afternoon, when Ma was off at Crockett State, he raided the bedside drawer where she kept her alarming bank statements and tax returns on her meager income. The next day, Charlie made Xeroxes, to apply for financial aid.
Ma, it is fair to say, did not take his announcement of admission and nearly full scholarship to a good liberal arts college the way most parents would. When Charlie passed her the thick envelope from Thoreau, the document fluttered in her suddenly convulsive hands. Her eyes began to fill, but before they spilled over, she excused herself for her bedroom. “Ma?” Charlie asked, by the door. She was so silent in there that he wondered if she might have suffered a medical event. “You just take care of yourself,” she said at last, and Charlie would never be certain if she meant that as a cruel rebuke or a piece of motherly advice.
Charlie saw his brother just once more. It hadn’t been so long since his last visit to Bed Four, but it felt to Charlie like a very long time since he had seen Oliver clearly. He saw now how his brother was aging too rapidly, his hands furrowed with veins, the tremble of his jaw like one of the geriatrics down the hall gumming his pudding, the scar where the bullet had entered like a gray nickel lodged just behind his right ear.
After his mother excused herself to the bathroom that afternoon, Charlie knelt over the bed. “Hi there,” Charlie said. For a reply, Charlie received only the gurgle of an IV bag. Charlie was thinking of telling Oliver about his leaving for college; was it selfish or was he finally doing the right thing?
“Oliver, listen—” he said. But it was Ma’s voice he heard in his throat. Sometimes death doesn’t look like what you’d expect. And now Charlie was considering Dr. Rumble’s wisdom, which he had long ago raged against. Charlie knew he wasn’t speaking to Oliver, just the vivified meat of his body. And it was occurring to Charlie that maybe the truest fantasy written by his family had nothing to do with parallel universes or spirit worlds. That maybe their grandest fiction was just Ma’s faith that Oliver would come back to them. Charlie grasped for the paper sleeve in which Oliver’s flesh was encased. “Oliver, I know, I should make her let you go, I just don’t—” His voice fell silent in the softly humming room.
When Ma came back, she found Charlie still curled there, bucking with his sobs.
“Ma.” And that, Charlie knew, was the moment he could have said it. His brother was gone, but they still might have had one another, as they had in those first weeks after. But he said nothing, and Ma’s face tightened. She pulled him into the hallway.
“What the hell is the matter with you? Don’t you know he can hear you? Wailing over him like he’s already gone. What were you thinking?”
For a long beat, she assessed Charlie through squinted eyes, like some final exam for their homeschool years. “I truly don’t understand how I raised such a selfish child,” Ma said.
One day, a few weeks later, Charlie carried Edwina onto a bus without so much as a phone call to say good-bye to his father, and he rode for three days. Oliver’s journal in his hand, Charlie stepped into a green, alien planet.
Thoreau! There weren’t words to describe the joy Charlie knew when, after four years frozen in the ice of his family’s grief, his affable, impish, truer self thawed to life. He became the kegger host, the campus gossip, the kid who’d do a naked lap around the quad on a dare. “You are crazy,” said all those charmed faces of his new friends, Nicole, Francesca, Juan, Michael—and too many more to name. And the wonder of snow, which fell and fell that first winter over the high pines and frozen lakes of New Hampshire. There at Thoreau, where even his gayness was not a liability but a kind of social currency—or maybe, he considered, his popularity was just an effect of the prancing pug he trailed behind him—Charlie found himself well liked in the generalized way that meant he received enough invitations, saw enough boys, that he never had to let any one person get to know him well.
To Charlie’s surprise, when he called home, Ma sounded—well, still like Ma. “Oh, Charlie,” she would say, her voice as flat and empty as the Texan hardpan Charlie ached to remember. “I don’t have much time to talk, I’m sorry to say, but you should know not to call so close to visiting hours.”
Even if Ma never had patience for any stories of his collegiate life, even if she treated his time at Thoreau like some indulgent adolescent excursion she was forced to permit, Charlie was both nicely reassured and a little appalled to find how unnecessary he had been in holding her together. When she one day told Charlie that she had sold off Zion’s Pastures to cover medical expenses, he felt more relieved than wistful.
Before Charlie knew it, the bright and blustery graduation day arrived in Thoreau’s quadrangle—springtime elms shooting their ladybug buds, fat New England clouds dawdling through an outrageously blue sky—and where would he go now?
As his classmates stared off into the ambiguity of their futures that afternoon, Charlie was thinking of the essay he’d written years before, which had earned him admission to that school. He was thinking of the lost poems of the lost boy who would have no place in the future Charlie would now make for himself. The true purpose of his education revealed itself to Charlie in an ephiphanic burst, the way he’d always imagined artistic inspiration struck: before he could continue his own life, he would first put down his brother’s story. It was on that graduation stage that Charlie began to conceive of a book that would use Oliver’s poems like illustrations for the story of his lost brother’s life, his family’s life, the life and death of the town of Bliss, Texas, the blurring memory of November fifteenth in the amnesiac awareness of his frenzied, trigger-happy nation, the great and tragic love story of Oliver Loving and Rebekkah Sterling. A book! The idea took shape with ever-greater dimensions in Charlie’s imagination.