“You’ve done everything you could.” Jed made a gavel of his fist, disturbing the little metallic shards on his table. “What else could you have done? What choice did we have? Tell me. I’m all ears.”
Eve shrugged. A part of her wanted to shout her agreement, the other part wanted to give him her own silent treatment, so that his rare anger would escalate further. How was this her husband? Was this at last what the bad years and heavy drinking had done to him? And now a very old tension ratcheted behind her face, like a sneeze that wouldn’t quite come. She had an irrational, feverish sensation that Jed might hit her. But Jed loosened his fist, and in lieu of a fight, Eve chose the next best thing. She walked the three paces to him, pressed her fingertips against the grimed meat of his hand, the skin quite shockingly tough. She wove their hands together, and they both looked at them for a long while, like another sculpture they had just made. What was it they had made? Two boys, of course, but what was the strange form they had taken together, before their children even came along? Something abstract, not exactly beautiful but certainly what an art critic might call arresting, the unlikely transformations they both could undergo only in each other’s presence. Those brief few years, at the start of their marriage, when their better selves prevailed, before their fugitive, hidden other halves—her need to have everyone near her, Jed’s need to have no one near him at all—won out. And how was it that even still—even still!—she received a few seconds of Jed’s unbroken attention like a precious gift? Even still, as soon as she saw Jed, her appropriate anger vanished and she found herself wanting only for Jed to tell her how very much he had missed her, how much he needed her still.
“I know I’m right, I know that,” Eve said. “But why do you always let me be so alone in it all? Am I so horrible?”
“No,” Jed said. “I am. Me.”
It started again as simply as that. Like the logical progression of the held hands in the fMRI wagon days before, like their few “dinners” in her barren house at Desert Splendor, pressed fingers became pressed bodies and mouths. It wasn’t, at first, particularly sexual. Sex happened, but that seemed to be only the best way Eve could think to get Jed as close as she would have liked, and still he could never get quite close enough. The better part of her, after all, was far away, in the hands of Margot Strout.
With the moan of a man cracking a beer after a long day, Jed climbed on top of her. Eve would many times replay that particular instant. Her sigh carried both grief and relief, and also a pang of pity for using her husband this way. But he was, after all, still her husband. And his eyes, in the dimness of the shed, were not as red and swimming as they had appeared under Crockett State fluorescents. They were the eyes she knew, crystal gray and fixed on her, asking the same question they asked in her long-ago apartment above the bank in Marathon, as if decades and so much silence were not between them now, as if he were still only the hopeful stranger she had just met that night at the Marfa Lights. What was the question? Something having to do with beginnings but also (she had sensed, even way back then) with merciful endings. Is it possible?
But when it was all over, and they were lying there in the starlit purple of the evening that filtered through the roof cracks, it was Manuel Paz that Eve was thinking of. And now Eve was wondering whether her hands, which had always known her own needs better than herself, had in fact spent that day operating under a motive she hadn’t considered. Perhaps the madness of the way her fingers had behaved over the last hours had only been an attempt to outrun the old memories brought on by the way Manuel had looked at her today at Crockett State, his expression as stolid and unblinking as the face of the moon. Over the years, in Manuel’s many visits to Bed Four, in the most unlikely town theories that Manuel nevertheless “investigated,” she’d come to see that Manuel really meant what he had said. He truly could not stop. There was something mechanical about Manuel, all old-fashioned gears and cogs, the Southern Pacific that wouldn’t stop trundling down the tracks until it reached its destination.
There is no why: over the years, Eve had offered herself countless ritualistic recitations of that mantra, a spell to ward off the worst thoughts that still sometimes came back to her, of Rebekkah Sterling and of her son’s broody last weeks before, of all she had never told Manuel. How many times had she convinced herself that she was wrong, that her grief had made her a little paranoid, that nothing she could have said to Manuel Paz could have made any difference? And yet, Eve had read Oliver’s “Children of the Borderlands” a hundred times, her astonishment at it dimmed only by the you whom the poem addressed. And one day, near the end of his homeschooling, Charlie showed her a book he had found: Oliver’s old journal, containing even more poems that she saw—in the few glimpses Charlie forced upon her, before the sight of the handwriting overwhelmed her completely—that in those rhymy, adolescent lines Oliver gave that you a name: Rebekkah. And so was it not also a kind of lie that she had failed to mention any of this to Manuel Paz, in his many Bed Four visits? Eve’s dread set her back on her feet.
“I’d better get going,” she told Jed. He nodded.
Back at Desert Splendor, Eve discovered that Charlie was already asleep, and she was touched to find he still dreamed in his profound boyish way, emitting a little “uh” sound before each exhale. Moving around silently, on the sides of her bare feet, Eve located Charlie’s phone in the pocket of the jeans he’d heaped next to his bed.