“Well. You’ve got that last part right.”
“You could have talked to me, just once,” Charlie said, without the fury he’d packed into those exact words in his many imaginings of this conversation. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
“What you have wanted? Why does what you want count more? I think I’ve made it pretty clear what I want. What I need. Pretty abundantly fucking clear. So what is it? Huh? What is this thing you have to say to me? Just say it.”
Charlie sucked a little groan down his throat. “I just wanted to talk about Oliver,” Charlie said. “Just that. To talk.”
Rebekkah knelt, as if to assess his wounds, but she was only greeting Edwina. “Edwina,” Rebekkah whispered, and she used the pug’s sable coat like a tissue. She carried Edwina from the room, and Charlie sat there for a long while on the bottom step, looking with muted horror at the wrong angle of his littlest finger. At last the erratic foghorn blare of the siren split the silence, and the ambulance lights turned the hallway into a discothèque. The doorbell rang, six or seven times over, and Rebekkah reappeared to open it.
“Rebekkah.”
She paused but wouldn’t turn. “What?”
It had always seemed to Charlie that he’d know just what to ask her if she would let him speak with her for only a minute. But that minute was ticking by now, and Charlie found that he couldn’t remember.
Rebekkah shook her head, and went to let the ambulance men into her apartment. After they had led Charlie to a seat in the rear of the van (despite his vehement protests, affably ignored by one of the men, who told him, “Well, take a gander at that finger of yours. And you never know about head injuries, and not like we got anything else going on tonight”), Rebekkah appeared at the back doors, holding his bag, weighted again with the journal. “You forgot something,” she said. “And Charlie? Next time, it’s the police I’m calling. I mean it, I really do.”
“Please,” Charlie said.
“Please what?”
Edwina was still pressed to her chest. “Please take care of her for me?” Rebekkah nodded to one of the men, who shut the doors. The vehicle pulled away at a lazy speed. A case like Charlie’s apparently did not warrant the emergency lights.
The clock in Charlie’s room at New York Methodist now showed 4:15. He craned his head to see his doctor flirting with the night-shift nurse behind the counter. A young woman in a hijab paced the hall with a murmuring infant in one arm, a video-streaming phone in the other. No one seemed in any hurry at all.
With a miserable little gasp, Charlie lifted himself from the bed and went to the pile of clothes he had kicked to a corner when he changed into his paper gown. He grunted as he stooped to retrieve his phone from his jeans. Lighting its screen, he saw that he had missed one more call from his mother. Charlie inhaled sharply. He couldn’t bear another second of not knowing, and so this room at New York Methodist—another hospital room not wholly unlike his brother’s cell at Crockett State—would be where it would happen. At last he put the device to his ear and listened to the first of her many messages.
Later, Charlie would marvel at how he had done it. With a right arm mannequin-like in its cast, with his swelled brain pinging painfully in his ears, he tore away his hospital gown, buttoned himself back into his street clothes, slipped out of the room, and—when the nurse puttering in the hallway noticed him—“Mr. Loving?”—he ran. Down the emergency stairs, through the hospital lobby, up Seventh Avenue to the subway station, where he took the first train into the city. At Port Authority, Charlie spent half his remaining cash on a Greyhound bus ticket, and as he waited in the deep-pocket smell of the station’s basement, he vomited from pain, twice, into a garbage can that appeared, from its spattered stains, to have been put to that purpose more than once. But if there was one place where a battered, vomiting young man would not seem so out of the ordinary, it was The Port Authority Bus Terminal.
Still, when Charlie would later consider how he managed the dire forty-hour odyssey that followed, a transcontinental crawl, in which he slowly depleted a plastic barrel of pretzels as the pain and poor nutrition sometimes made his vision go dark and narrow, Charlie would think it was borderline miraculous that he made it all the way to the Big Bend without further medical assistance. But then he would play again Ma’s first message, he would listen to the very simple and wholly impossible thing she hardly managed to choke through her tears, and he would know that it had been a night of miracles.
Many hours later, as the bus slammed through Midland and south into the desert, Charlie’s exhaustion fluttered around the soft edges of a cozy dream: that he was back in his Zion’s Pastures bed, that his brother was still there beneath him, in the bottom bunk of a bedroom in a house that was no longer theirs. Oliver was seventeen, and he was done conjuring spirit worlds with his brother. Oliver had just discovered a more marvelous hidden land, on a blanket just next to him, beneath the Perseid meteor shower. All it took was a single phone message from Ma: as on that morning with his brother’s journal years before, Charlie could hear the spectral inhale of one of their ancient, magical portals torn open again, the feeling that their old bunk bed tales had in fact been a kind of prophecy, at last come true. Charlie looked down into that darkness, a hole in the land. Ten years. What words were there for it? “He’s there,” Ma said in her voice mail. “That’s what I need to tell you. Oliver. They can see him now. On the computer screens? Charlie, he’s there. He’s here.”
Oliver
CHAPTER NINE
A portal torn open, but it would take more than your brother and your mother and the latest medical technologies to see into that lost place. It would take, also, the assistance of law enforcement professionals. It would take a man named Manuel Paz, Presidio County captain of the Texas Rangers, a ranking officer in that antiquated band of law keepers.