After a childhood in which her father had treated her the way he treated his Cutlass Supreme—some onerous and cantankerous contraption that he nevertheless was made to drive around and maintain—Eve had just about come to believe it impossible that any other man might one day choose to invite such a burden of a girl into his life. Eve had never had a boyfriend, and it never would have occurred to her to look for one now. Later, Eve would often wonder what kind of muttering loner she might have become if she had not one night made the trip to see the so-called Marfa Lights, a mysterious visual phenomenon on the scrub grass plains just east of town.
These luminous orbs were the source of considerable local lore. Supposedly they were inexplicable, balls of restive light that traveled the desert at night. Some people called them reflections, some called them electricity, most attributed them to supernatural influence. She arrived to the observation spot, a parking lot off Route 90, just after midnight. A little crowd was gathered there, but after an hour staring into the dim plains as trains trundled past, the lights still had not come.
“There!” a man next to her said, very close to her ear. “Do you see that? Look just left of that mountain.” Eve might not have seen the apocryphal lights, but she did notice something else: the waspishly handsome, wonder-struck face of the man pointing into the nothing of the desert night. The man was named Jed, and by that spring they would be married, and she would be a student at Sul Ross State University, a few miles east of where they stood. At the time, however, she only leaned closer to his outstretched arm, nearly resting her head on his shoulder so that she could follow the direction of his pointed finger. “I can’t see it,” she said. “Show me.”
Almost thirty years had passed, and there Eve was now, just a few dozen miles away, waiting for another otherworldly phenomenon to appear on the desert plains. Three days after that morning in the fMRI-mobile, Eve was pacing outside a grimed glass cube—its windows showing sun-bleached posters of downtown Los Angeles’s honeycomb of lights and the blanched sea green of the Mississippi coastline—that passed for the bus station in the town of Alpine. On a white square of pavement, Eve was staring down the perfect straight line of Farm-to-Market Route 28, waiting for the bus that carried Charlie to rise over the mirage-shaken curvature of the earth.
Over the last years, Eve had often harangued a conjured Charlie with scripted diatribes, but as she stood there now, peeling away a fingernail too close to the quick, Eve kept forgetting what it was she meant to tell him first. She hadn’t yet told Jed about Charlie’s imminent return, just as she hadn’t mentioned to Charlie, in any of her numerous phone messages, that Jed had been there with her that day of the test. Like the Great Wall of Texas those crazed politicians had long wanted to build, an unclimbable barrier now stood between father and son. And even if Eve sometimes regretted that she herself had helped construct that partition, she felt that the map of her family had been drawn too long ago to revise the borders now.
At last the Greyhound bus materialized in the hazy suck of the distance and belched slowly toward her. At the station, it hissed to a stop, its flanks showing a dusty Texan brown over the deeper blackish grime of the East Coast. The windows were scratched with vandalism, the sides speckled with bleached-out spray paint, the whole thing like a lousy chunk of New York City, cut away and set on wheels. And there, the only passenger rising at the Alpine stop, was her own young New Yorker. Even through the puckering tint stickers of the bus windows, Eve could see how Charlie tried to keep up the air of an ordinary commuter, his posture a little theater of boredom. As if to tell her, before he said a thing, my existence has become so interesting that my return home is only a station stop on the excellent journey of my life! Like an oversized camel, the bus kneeled awkwardly to offload its rider, and Charlie stepped out, waving as if his mother were just some driver holding his name on a placard. But after the bus abandoned Charlie with a hiss, he was left to cross a field of asphalt, a tiny figure in the desert flat. Eve tried not to laugh to see him now, in his checkered poplin shirt, his painted-on jeans, his roguish mess of hair, buzzed at the sides. Charlie adjusted a pair of clunky tortoiseshell glasses—and since when did Charlie wear glasses?—with a self-consciousness that was almost touching.
“Ma!” he cried, his voice an ironic reenactment of some mawkish scene of return in a TV movie. “Your baby boy has come home to you, dear mother!”
“Oh, shut up.” Charlie in Eve’s arms: she could feel how his New York costume went deeper than his clothes. Charlie was now an anatomy lesson, bones and sinewy muscle. Charlie suppressed a little pained cry, and she noticed the swelling in his lip and his right cheek, the cast strapped over his left forearm.
“My Lord, what happened to you?”
“Oh, you mean this—appendage? Just took a bad stumble. Uneven sidewalks. Our mayor doesn’t care about those of us out on the margins. That whole city is fucked.”
“Your face!”
“I didn’t quite catch myself in time.”
Eve clicked her tongue. “Looks to me like you could use some good mothering.”
“Couldn’t we all?” The glare in Charlie’s silly new glasses forbade a good view of his eyes, showing Eve only her own tired face, reflected with the mountains and low buildings in the last of the day’s light.
“And where is your poor pup?” Eve asked. “Oh God, please don’t tell me—”
“She’s just fine,” Charlie said. “I’ve got a friend looking after her until I go back.”
“Until you go back. And when do you plan on doing that?”
Charlie sighed. “How about we take things one day at a time here?”
“Right.”
Charlie pointed with his plaster mannequin’s arm. “Holy shit. Is that Goliath?”
“Old faithful.”
“Faithful? That is the only car I’ve ever known that literally farts.”
The doors to Goliath whined open and Eve made a face as Charlie cackled at the old beast puttering to dyspeptic life. So it was a comedy to Charlie, the fact that her dire bank account balance kept her saddled with this heap. An angry argument on the topic of her finances took shape in her mind as they drove away. The vaporous ghosts of other arguments were there, too; all the nights she had spent alone, delivering those silent tirades to this boy for abandoning her, for believing he could turn the tragedy of their days into a titillating story for public consumption. But in the warm, close air of Goliath, Eve could still smell, beneath the seedy funk in Charlie’s hair and the stink of his worn clothes, that old Charlie fragrance. That peanut-buttery scent, which cast an unfair effect, eliminating the last years and returning them, for a second, to the Zion’s Pastures of her mind. For the last year, her imagination had tagged along with Charlie’s days in New York, and her imagined city was filled with greater dangers than any actual ones. Her fretted-over Charlie had been beset by muggers, careening taxis, coins dropped from the top of the Empire State Building, air conditioners tipped from tenement windows, HIV-positive party boys. The relief that she could simply reach out a hand and feel for him now was irresistible. But then she felt the hard plaster of his cast and retreated, wrapping her fingers back around the cracked rubber grooves of the steering wheel.
“Did you get to sleep much on the bus?”