But Rebekkah still would not reply to Charlie’s many e-mails. After the years by Bed Four, Charlie knew how grief was like flash flooding on a desert flat, cutting varied and permanent patterns, but why would Rebekkah not even explain her silence to Charlie?
He resolved to arrange a casual run-in on the street where, according to a public record database, she resided. More than occasionally, he would stroll up and down the same block of Eighth Street ten times in a row. At last, on one otherwise unremarkable Tuesday, Charlie found her down on Seventh Avenue, her arms laden with brown sacks of groceries. “Rebekkah.”
She turned, and the click of recognition behind her eyes seemed to drain the blood from her skin. It was a strange and vertiginous moment, Rebekkah and Charlie, bound by a massacre two thousand miles and eight and a half years away, an open horror that still yawned so monstrously between them.
“Edwina,” Rebekkah said, resting her bags on the sidewalk to kneel to the animal. Edwina did her happy snuffly dance, not so different from how she’d greet any attentive stranger, but Charlie was encouraged by the way Rebekkah tearily hoisted the dog to her chest, like some family reunion.
“I just want to know you,” Charlie said. “Obviously you meant the world to him, and I just want to talk with you.”
Poor Rebekkah. The way she looked between Edwina and Charlie reminded him of one of the dementia cases at Crockett State, suddenly baffled by the year in which she was living. Charlie considered that maybe he had been wrong, that maybe it wasn’t freedom that Rebekkah had found in New York. Maybe it was just an attempted escape.
“I know what you want,” Rebekkah said to Edwina’s face. “I do read my e-mail.”
“It’s a noble endeavor,” Charlie said, a phrase he had rehearsed.
But Rebekkah was right. Charlie did not “just want to know” her. The sight of her fazed, unreadable expression right there in front of him flooded Charlie with unanticipated fury. And it now felt to Charlie that the only true sentences he had composed over the last years were the same questions he never had the heart to raise with Ma, knowing what any mention of that night would do to her, the very questions that Charlie now understood had, in no small part, brought him to New York City in the first place, the same questions Charlie couldn’t summon the courage to ask Rebekkah now. What had she seen? Why, really, had Oliver gone to the dance and why had he known to come find Rebekkah at the theater classroom? Though Rebekkah had become like a minor angel to the people of their town, might her survival that night have been no miracle at all? And now Charlie was wondering if maybe, all those years ago, Rebekkah had given the Lovings a pug in lieu of an explanation. “Rebekkah,” he began.
“No,” Rebekkah said. “I’m sorry, Charlie, I really am. But I’m just not interested in that sort of a thing.” Rebekkah looked at Edwina with a hurt kind of disdain, as if the dog had somehow misled her. She stood, gathered her groceries, and walked away.
Back on Eighteenth Street, Charlie thought of Rebekkah the way a lover might. The thinness of her wrists, her soft ginger tints gone pallid, the way she’d made chewed gum of her lower lip. What were her days like now? Absence might make the heart grow fond / but it’s silence that sets the heart’s cruel bond, Oliver had once written about Rebekkah, and by denying him, Rebekkah had at least given Charlie this: he was learning what his brother had learned long ago. He had learned how Rebekkah’s silence was a godlike force, in which she could take infinite forms.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Charlie’s financial calamity and Ma’s unanswered calls seemed to have worked on his nerves like a twice-struck bell; his hands vibrated clumsily as he lifted the journal from the table and slipped it into his patent leather bag. Edwina burbled curiously up at him. Charlie knelt to her, kissed her slimed nose, teared a little. Even then he wouldn’t have admitted to the decision he was already making.
“Someone wants to go outside?” After days cooped up in his studio, Edwina expressed her relief at the idea of a walk in a frenzied jig, and it took him a minute to link the leash to her jostling rhinestone collar. “Just take it easy,” Charlie told her. Her breathing had deepened to a frightening, sonorous register. “Okay, okay,” he said, stroking her ears until she calmed a bit. Then Charlie went back out, with Edwina, into the Brooklyn midnight.
Edwina’s claws clattered on the fractured pavement, past the storybook charms of the quarried brownstones, vintage lamps burning fashionably through the French shutters, and already Charlie was approaching 511 Eighth Street for the hundredth or two hundredth time. He looked up to the third floor, where he had looked many times for Rebekkah in the softly illuminated windows. She hadn’t answered her phone, but Charlie was not at all surprised to find her windows lit tonight. “Cross your fingers, Weens,” Charlie said.
Whatever it was his mother had called so many times to tell him, this much Charlie understood: that decade of waiting had come to an end, and at last Charlie was going to do with the journal what he should have done with it years ago, giving those poems to the girl Oliver had written them for. He mounted the stoop, and he pushed the buzzer for apartment number three.
His blood chiming in his veins, he pushed again, and waited. Pushed, waited. After a time, he descended, looked up into her lit window. Appalling but true: he saw Rebekkah’s curtains part, caught a half-second glimpse of her face before the thick velvet snapped shut.
He pulled out his phone and dialed her number yet again. No answer, and so he worked the button once more. He stood like that for a while, fingertip pressed against the cracked ivory tab, Edwina pawing at the glass. A different man, a sane man, Charlie knew, would have turned away then. But Charlie felt Oliver’s journal weighting his shoulder strap, and he couldn’t just leave his brother’s last words on her doorstep.
Later, Charlie would never be able to offer himself a satisfying answer for why he did what he did next. Maybe he wanted to scare her; maybe he just wanted to scream at her once, Why won’t you speak to me? Or maybe, Charlie would admit, Terrance was right: maybe he just needed a dramatic scene, a climactic chapter made of the knotty stuff of his real life, in lieu of that other story he could not seem to write.
“I think,” Charlie told Edwina, “that we’ll have to find another way.”
To the left of Rebekkah’s building was a rare New York sight, a narrow alley, an undeveloped meter of space between her four-floor tenement and the long line of brownstones that shouldered into one another down the slope. This alley was guarded by an ungainly combo of hurricane fencing and a tall sheet of lime-colored plastic.