A minute later and just a few paces outside Bliss Township School, you came upon the group that congregated, as ever, just beyond the gates. David Garza, a dozen kids whose names you didn’t know, and Carlos “Ah-mare-ee-ka” Ramirez, whose mocking faces registered what you had not, how your own face was slimed with tears, how you were working a fist into an open hand. “Oh, look, it’s Willy Shakespeare,” Carlos said, now not at all the awkward, heavily sighing boy he was in your Honors Literature classroom. “What happened to you this time?”
What happened? Even you couldn’t have said. Even you couldn’t have known what that conversation with Rebekkah had meant; in that day’s unfinished puzzle, you only had your own unplaceable fragment. But at last, years later, the particles of two distant universes began to draw together again. After a very long while away, your father began to visit you at Bed Four.
It wasn’t often, and when he came to see you, his skin exuded hard living, armpit stink and nicotine, the sweetened heat of whiskey pluming from his sighing nostrils. Your father’s visits were very different from the others’. No recounting of the day’s events, no updates on the news, no memories described, no conversations with you, playing both the parts. Your pa watched you in the way he’d sometimes sat with an easel, squinting at a desert valley, his overcast eyes waiting for the vista to reveal some new aspect. When he did speak, he spoke in the way of quiet men, no niceties or small talk to diffuse the crucial content. How could I let this happen? he’d ask, sitting in the silence that was your only reply. How could you ever forgive me? Please, Oliver …
But then your father stood away from the bed. He left. He left you there for another night at Bed Four—no, he only left your body. As for you? You were still someplace immeasurably far away, still just the boy you’d been before, trapped in ancient history.
Charlie
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
One Thursday morning, a few weeks after his return to West Texas, Charlie was out stalking the plains. He was cruising the asphalt on his old neon-pink Suzuki motorbike.
Despite the outsized hopes of his mother and the people of his lost town, that motorbike’s resuscitation had been the only certifiable miracle that Charlie had witnessed since his return. Within forty-eight hours of his arrival to the Big Bend, Charlie had felt himself quickly falling into a kind of adult education version of his old homeschooler’s curriculum, reading his novels and magazines in his room, writing his moody musings he’d share with no one, silently trudging out of any room his mother tried to share with him, glumly staring out the passenger window on the rides to visit his brother’s ruined body at Crockett State. Having failed to pack a single change of clothes, Charlie was even dressed in his old teenage getups, the cringe-inducing cargo shorts and ironic Hawaiian short-sleeves that his mother, for some reason, had held onto. And so Charlie had been enormously relieved when the Suzuki came back to puttering life with a bit of oil and a fresh tank of gas. Its tremble resounded pleasingly in Charlie’s groin now as a high hot wind chased a single cloud over the shabby gasoline-scented tourist settlement of Study Butte. He gassed the throttle.
Charlie arrived early that morning to the beige monstrosity that was Crockett State. Beyond the magazines she had just fanned on the coffee table, Peggy the receptionist waved at him with giddy, Bob Fosse hands. Long ago, Peggy used to work the counter at Bliss Pies N’ Stuff, and though they’d never really spoken in that before, Peggy seemed to lay the same cheery claim on Charlie as the rest of his old town’s people, always flashing her tinsel teeth when Charlie passed. He nodded at Peggy now, turned to the familiar halls, flexing the joints of his left pinky finger, still worryingly tender days after he sawed the cast off with a steak knife. Charlie entered the room to find the wide apricot shape of Margot Strout hunched over Bed Four. The machines made their endless whirs and pings. Margot was whispering something softly into her patient’s ear.
“Mrs. Strout,” Charlie said, and the woman turned lazily.
“Margot,” she said. “I told you to call me Margot. Haven’t been a missus for almost fifteen years now.”
“Margot, hi.”
“It’s a little early for visiting hours, no?”
“Sorry.” The intensity of Margot’s annoyance made Charlie’s pulse quicken a little. “I was just heading out to meet some friends for breakfast, and I had to pass by here. It felt wrong not to drop by, check in.”
Margot shrugged in an aggrieved way. “Same story, different day.”
Over the last weeks, Charlie had watched Margot Strout’s patience with him drop as a nearly visible phenomenon, the falling mercury of a thermometer. But in their first proper conversation, after the bad scene with Manuel Paz when Charlie had proven his willingness to say to his mother what no one else would, Margot had presented herself as a different sort of woman—an affable, solicitous lady, so forthcoming she could make him blush.
“The Lord is giving, isn’t he?” Margot had mused that first day. “I go into this work because I lost a child, and now here I am, working with a boy like Oliver.” Charlie had nodded. He’d grown up in close proximity to Margot’s brand of rosy Christian notions, and he could still find them homey if a little cloying, like a slice of Apple Spice from Bliss Pies N’ Stuff.
“Well,” Charlie had said, “if there’s one right woman for the job, seems like it’s you.” He’d meant it. In that first conversation, Margot revealed herself to be a big toucher, always grasping for his wrist, his shoulder, his knee, in the manner of the Bliss Township teachers, when they had sometimes come by to check up on him in his homeschooled years. “Thank you,” Margot said. “Really. I hope you’re right.”