Eve had been so certain that she was right on that long-ago day with Manuel in the conference room, that an explanation couldn’t really change anything, that the only answer for the impossible affliction that the universe had handed to her son could never possibly lie with any one person or any rational accounting. If there was any meaning to be found, Eve had felt, it would forever hover beyond her, in the unknowable force that lay beneath forces, the mystery that birthed gravity and set the stars to spin. But time had proven that Manuel had been right, and that she had been wrong. Why? That silent cry into the scrubbed desert sky, the question that had become her life and Charlie’s life, too, that terrible project of his, shuffling around the lightless rooms of the past, and what else might he find? Eve watched her fingers flip through the contacts in Charlie’s phone until she located the name Rebekkah Sterling. She copied the girl’s number into her own device.
In her bed, Eve held the phone to her face, listening to it ring and ring, until a computer answered and asked if she would like to leave a message. Like some reenactment of her many calls to Charlie, just a few days prior, Eve ended the call and then she called again. At last, on the fourth attempt, the ringing clicked to silence, and Eve could hear the faint stirring of breath. And then, for the first time in all those years, she heard the actual, still-living Rebekkah Sterling speak: too stunning for Eve to muster a reply before Rebekkah ended the call. “You have the wrong number, please stop calling me,” a young woman’s smoky voice told her. And now Eve was wishing for another, different conversation she had also held in silence all that time but needed badly. She was thinking how she might be able to explain any of this to Jed.
Oliver
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Oliver, do you remember your father telling you about a phenomenon called Spooky Action at a Distance? That was how Einstein described the troubling behavior of entangled particles. Those little fuckers stumped Einstein; they broke down the equations with which poor Albert tried to describe the universe. Apparently, once two particles entangle, they move in tandem, even when separated by light-years. One particle zips upward and, a million light-years away, its partner zips in the same direction. What strange force binds them together? Einstein couldn’t make sense of it. But perhaps a similar force blind to the galactic distances was at work in the years after, between your family and you. After all, you were not the only one trapped in a sightless prison, vibrating against the narrow walls.
Your father. For years, he stayed at the periphery of your family’s story, out in that dim shed, beating away at his garbage. A painful truth: he chose to exempt himself, as far as he could, from your tragedy. But the other truth is that, in measuring the effects of Spooky Action at a Distance, its influence was perhaps strongest on Jed Loving. Perhaps no one shared more fully your imprisonment.
Take, for example, one random night from your father’s life, a year or two into your confinement. His place was in a bad way, a house self-made into a jail cell. His little bungalow in Marfa had become like the home-sized version of his old painting shed, a collection of abandoned things: half-drunk bottles of soda, half-eaten carryout, a television set to mute. And yet there in Jed Loving’s lousy house, this was a Sunday night to be celebrated.
Your father unbuttoned his denim shirt, threw himself gratefully onto the butt-cratered mold planet that passed for his sofa. On this particular Sunday, Jed had just completed his second full week of work as floor manager of a new gallery, Gotleib & Krav, which a German couple had established in Marfa’s renovated abattoir. Jed did not understand all the galleries of Marfa—that whole strange art culture seemed somehow a sarcastic joke at the expense of the rubes of West Texas—and he did not care much for the pieces peddled by Gotleib & Krav, a series of wind chimes made from dismantled Nazi artillery. But he arrived to this sleekly modernized slaughterhouse sober and bright each morning. Your mother and your brother had not spoken to him (or was it he who had failed to speak to them?) for nearly three months, but your father had a plan.
Step one in the rehabilitation of Jed Loving was to prove himself a competent adult human, capable of holding down a decent position. With the first full month’s paycheck in hand, Jed would venture into the terrifying, less certain territory of step two, returning home and proving himself a competent human father. But on that warm Sunday evening, he looked around his lousy bungalow as if it were a molted skin he might slough off. He envisioned dinners at the rutted table of Zion’s Pastures. He imagined coming to your bed hand-in-hand with wife and son. Two more weeks.
Jed scratched his age-thinned belly, traced the widening circumference of his bald spot with a thumb. For almost a month, he had not once ventured out to the Marfa version of his art studio, a lean-to in his weed-choked backyard, but on this sober, electric night, he was feeling bold, capable of transformation, and he thought he might just take a peek out there, see if his last bout of work—a series of utopian seascapes he had painted onto scrap metal from the dump—had in fact turned out as miserably as he remembered.
It took less than five minutes for the sight of his work to rub the shine from his mood. He had initially thought the aesthetic juxtaposition would be interesting, a little romantic beauty atop the rust-pocked sheets of aluminum and steel. Instead, the stuff looked like Thomas Kinkade had fallen on very hard times.
Ridiculous. He knew it. Jed knew it was ridiculous that even still he thought he might make something valuable, something perhaps even sellable, something that was at the very least not shameful, from those last, worst years. And yet, for the one thousandth time in his life, your father told himself that it was now or never, that he was, perhaps, very close to making something he could proudly call his own, that to return in the way he must, he needed not only to play at being a functional adult, he needed to become one. Thus began, in the painting shed, the collapse of your father’s latest step one. He blanked out the seascapes, painted strange biblical scenes (angels and demons, à la Bosch) until dawn, at which point he allowed himself a drink, just to steady his fingers. He downed the three inches of bourbon, the heat and head rush offering him five kind minutes. He poured himself another. What happened after? Jed could hardly remember when, on Monday afternoon, he blinked awake to a phone call from Michel Gotleib, informing him that he’d missed the private showing scheduled with a collector passing through town. “Just your third week on the job. Needless to say, this isn’t going to work out.”