Edwina whined skeptically as Charlie tucked her in his bag, and he made his awkward one-handed vaulting of the fence. In the rear garden, Charlie stood beneath the black and rust-furred fire escape and leapt up to its retractable ladder.
Climbing the steps, Charlie saw that apartment three was a narrow duplex; a spiraling metal staircase led from the rooms downstairs to a little garden-view office above. He hurried past the light of the lower floor and was relieved to find the upper dark and empty. Cupping his eyes against the window, Charlie glimpsed a sight eerily close to the one he had so often imagined. A rutted library table, rows of books, albums, sundry ethnic knickknacks on floor-to-ceiling shelving. In a heap in a corner was a pile of musical instruments. Guitars with their strings snapped, a broken-necked cello, a mutilated banjo. He removed the spring-loaded insect screen and, pressing his palms into the glass, received the one lucky break in that luckless night. The window was unlocked.
Charlie origamied himself inside, and by the time he stood in Rebekkah’s study, he stood also in sudden horror of what he had just done. But Edwina leapt from the bag, doing a rapid tour, smelling at the corners. “Shush, Weens, be quiet,” Charlie was saying, when a horrible, heart-scorching pang split through him. He couldn’t afford to take care of Edwina, and he understood now it wasn’t only the poems he needed to return to Rebekkah.
And so the scheme, his last plan, this little climax he had contrived to cap off his failed New York existence, had come to its end. In this, at least, Charlie had succeeded, and now he needed only to place the journal on the desk, climb back out the window, down the fire escape, and into eviction, the menace of Jimmy Giordano, and whatever much, much worse horror Ma had to tell him, into his own whatever future. Careful not to make a sound, Charlie lifted the chair away from the desk and sat. He worked his fingers over the disembodied shapes of letters etched into the wood’s soft surface.
Charlie knew now that he never could have followed his brother, not really. Not through the internal passage to the clamorous, brilliant otherworld of Oliver’s imagination. The nearness of magic Charlie could sometimes perceive there, the plasmatic, brilliant surface of an internal, hidden sun he could sometimes find on the far side of a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon and 3 A.M. until the actual sun would rise, exposing a clutter of beer cans, bagel wrappers, and a few pages holding the finger-smeared scribblings of an amateur.
Charlie wiped his face with the backs of his hands and stood. Very softly, he pulled open the door to the office, and he waited for a long while at the landing at the top of the stairs, looking down toward the glowing orange outline of the closed bedroom door. The air in the apartment was cool and musty with the smell of burned coffee. Clocks ticked and the refrigerator hummed. “I love you, Edwina,” Charlie said, and turned for the window.
But then, behind the door, Rebekkah coughed, and at the sound of her long-ago human, Edwina flew from the office, so swiftly down the stairs it seemed her legs never contacted a single step. She pawed and burbled at Rebekkah’s door. Charlie heard a muffled gasp. At last the door cracked open, spilling light. Edwina nosed forward, pushing the door wide and revealing Rebekkah, standing there with a hardcover book hoisted over her head, quaking so severely that the object nearly wobbled from her fist. Charlie could not make her face out against the brightness behind her, but he could feel their gazes meet. “Oh, fuck. Charlie?”
“Rebekkah,” he said. Charlie took a too-long step forward then, losing track of the stairs.
*
Three hours later, on the fourth floor of New York Methodist Hospital, Charlie lay alone on the sheet-papered bed of an observation room. The doctor had told him that he would be back soon, once the cranial X-rays printed. Charlie had protested these X-rays, just as he protested the blood work and the resetting of a pinky finger he dislocated in the fall. Charlie’s insurance plan was limited to superstitious knocking on wood and the weekly resolutions to eat better, abstain from smoking, and look both ways before crossing a street. But when Charlie tried to lift himself from the bed, a nurse held him back. “It’s out of your hands,” she said. Charlie’s left forearm now resided in a mold of fiberglass, and he understood why people sometimes called a headache splitting; his swollen brain pushed so terribly against the jar of his skull, he had an image of hairline fissures racing across the bone.
“Jesus Christ, Charlie. What the fuck? Oh, Jesus. Don’t you move,” Rebekkah had told him when he came to rest at the bottom of the staircase. Her fright had still kept that book (an edition of Byron, he noticed) hoisted near her head. He watched her pull a phone from the embroidered pocket of her silk robe, juggling it for a second in her trembling hands.
“Rebekkah,” Charlie said, his mind a grim montage of outcomes: a squad car, handcuffs, imprisonment, death. “Please. You don’t have to call anyone.”
“We—we need an ambulance,” Rebekkah managed to tell the emergency operator, her voice weak with panic. “My friend has had a bad fall.”
After ending the call, Rebekkah at last put the Byron on a table, and she squinted at him. Through the pain, Charlie worked to grin up to her, a twinkly rascalish expression he had perfected at Thoreau, a face he hoped translated into something along the lines of This is very shameful, but aren’t you, at some level, also charmed by my pluckiness? Rebekkah, however, did not look charmed. From this angle, she hardly even looked like Rebekkah anymore, not the freckled girl who had seemed to draw a special sort of light as she passed through the halls of Bliss Township School, who could not fail to attract even the attentions of a ninth grader whose rudimentary love life was limited to the boys from his classes he’d conjure in his mind as he felt himself in his family’s claw-foot tub. Rebekkah was only in her late twenties now, but Charlie saw more closely the face he had so often imagined, her lovely celtic features dulled a little by the years.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Rebekkah said. “I could have you arrested, you know. You can’t just break into people’s fucking houses.”
But Charlie sensed there were two Rebekkahs there: the frightened, angry woman with her wrinkle-webbed mouth and unruly threads of premature gray, and also a distant observer of these events, the younger Rebekkah for whom the horrors she’d seen that night had lowered a muted scrim of numbness between the world and her. His grin dropped.
“I can’t take care of Edwina anymore. She’s not well. She’s really sick, do you hear how she’s breathing? And I just can’t afford to help her. And so I brought her back to you.”
“You could have come in the front door, like a human being. I mean it. What were you—trying to scare me?”
“I tried the front door. I tried to call. You didn’t answer. And you wouldn’t have taken her. You wouldn’t have spoken to me.”