But no one was home now, or at least no lights were on, and so what else could you do but continue your group project for one? It would have been too shameful to return home so soon. You reclined in the seat, distantly hoping and also fearing Rebekkah might come if you waited long enough. You waited and waited, and you were trying again to play the lovesick poet; you tried to pass the time by composing a few lines. But you could not compose, that certain damning word was coming back to you with too much brutalizing force—a boy watching silently from a parked car outside a girl’s house, what word for it but stalker? Still, you passed an hour that way.
You were startled by a dull thud. You flailed about, but fortunately you were at some distance, in a car shadowed beneath a stand of cottonwoods. And from that darkness, you saw that another vehicle had pulled up, a ways down Monte Grande Lane. A figure was marching across the pavement. This wasn’t Rebekkah’s father, come home—this man’s gait was swift and youthful. This guy walked toward the front door, and it was there, in the dim and far-off light of the wall sconces, that you first glimpsed his face. The wide dome of a shaven head, the features beneath crowded and unreadable. A young man, who had the courage to do what you did not, to try the doorbell. When no light came on, when the door refused to budge, he knocked at it, so forcefully that the report reached your window. No response, so he knocked harder still. Was this, in fact, your imagined abuser? The violence with which he assaulted the door fit the monster you had been conjuring, but even from this distance he seemed an unlikely candidate. He seemed too old for Rebekkah, too forceful a presence to imagine a quiet-sad girl ever knowing him in a meaningful way.
At last, after repeated applications of fist to door, finger to doorbell, this man kicked the wall once, marched back to his old Ford pickup. And yet he paused there, the truck door halfway opened. He was not now looking at the darkened house; he was not looking at the door in his hands. He was looking at the car parked in the shadows. He was looking at you. Panicked, you started the engine, and Goliath’s headlamps blinked on, casting him in the lurid brightness of a snapshot. This man did not cover his eyes; he squinted, as if challenging the light itself. There was just a moment there, a fractional second in measurable time, but also an oddly suspended duration, when you sat very still, staring back at him. And it was then that the fitful wattage of Goliath’s lamps worked in parallel with your own memory, lighting up a certain recognition. The rounded slope of this person’s forehead, the slight pronation of his feet, and—more than anything—that disquieting illegibility in his eyes: you couldn’t name him, but you did feel you recognized him. An old student at your school, maybe? Or perhaps the recognition you knew in that moment was only a sense of what you and this stranger shared, two young men both on the same hopeless errand, trying to speak with the girl who was nowhere to be found.
It was just an odd bleak feeling of kinship you knew then—even Goliath’s bright beams could not have shown you how much you truly shared with him, another boy who had wanted only to vanish into the crowds. Hector Espina, only three years ahead of you in school, whom you must have passed hundreds of times in the halls without even noticing. “Sometimes,” your Pa had said, “there is a crack in this universe, where you can see into the next.” And though you might have glimpsed the strangeness of the fissure that opened just a sliver that night, the unlikeliness that had brought you both to the Sterling residence, you couldn’t have known then how your history and this young man’s history were already entwined. You could not have known that the way he would escape his hell would be the same way yours would begin. You said nothing to Hector Espina, not then.
Much later, it would be easy to chide your younger self. Speak! You might have saved yourself, your town, your family if only you had rolled down your window and asked him a question or two. But that night, you just pulled a U-turn on Monte Grande Lane, wondering over this visitor to Rebekkah’s house, this angry young man you would not see again until the night of November fifteenth. He was the black hole through which you’d fall. But just then he was only another question you wondered over as you puttered off for home.
Eve
CHAPTER TEN
A lifetime before, when she was only nineteen, Eve herself had fallen into a different sort of chasm. Only two months prior, her father (just forty-six) had died of a heart attack on the floor of an El Paso dealership, and in the surreal, weightless months that followed, Eve found a job at a diner, Bliss Pies N’ Stuff, rented an apartment in Marathon, bought a battered Jeep with doors that zippered off. She created a simulacrum of a life, then tried to believe it was her own. Eve was still hanging around West Texas only because, in the dislocation of her late teenage orphanhood, she couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.
Eve’s mother, a foster care graduate named Devorah, had died when Eve was just four (a stupid death, a brain infection from an abscessed tooth she had failed for months to bring to medical attention), and Eve’s memories of the woman she once called Mameleh were now like impressions of some long-ago-jettisoned photo album, flashes that might have been true snapshots, might only have been Eve’s later fabrications. That ringlet hair dangling over Eve’s chubby, clutching fingers. Hands so white the mechanics of vein and joint were visible.
Unfortunately, in those first weeks after his death, Eve’s memories of her father were still damningly vivid. The way Mortimer Frankl had lived his adult life: in his rumpled houndstooth coats and soup-stained neckties, Eve’s father had been fired or else walked out on car dealership jobs in Topeka, St. Louis, Crested Butte, Pasadena, Albuquerque. “I don’t know why you whine so much,” Morty often chastised Eve. “At least, unlike me, you get to see something of the world. I never got so many chances to start over when I was your age.”
Start over? As the Frankls had cycled between frowsy, underpopulated cities and sterile, soulless exurbs, Eve’s father remained the same glum, twitchy, cigar-puffing man, just becoming himself more and more deeply. Morty’s parents—a shrunken, Yiddish-speaking, blue-collar Baltimore couple—seemed to want nothing to do with their son or granddaughter. Solitude was what Eve’s father and her wandering childhood had raised her to expect, and that was how she passed the weeks after his death. Eve spent her off days in the great desert that lay to the south, an infinity in which she could be alone. She fell a little in love with that barbed, shattered, blazing desert, and she became its diligent tourist. She visited the Ernst Tinaja, hiked the South Rim Trail in the national park, camped often in the Chisos Basin.