The truth shall set you free. Charlie’s friend Christopher had liked to quote that adage from his AA program. Fifteen minutes later, Charlie was in an expansive, forgiving spirit, thinking about Rebekkah and Pa, thinking that he might call to tell them the wondrous news, thinking it might free them, too, thinking that he would at last tell Ma the whole shameful, dangerous truth about Jimmy Giordano and his “collections guy” and beg for her help, because wasn’t that what family was for?
A decade prior, on the steps outside Bliss Township School, Hector Espina had liberated himself from this world, and at last Charlie knew that his brother had found a chink in his own jail walls, a brightness between the bricks, a starter tunnel, an actual crossing place from his nebulous spirit world. Why? Now that the rapping fist had found a door, it was louder than ever, but maybe they could finally turn the dead bolt, twist the knob, and at last …
Charlie would later remember grinning at a canyon lizard sprinting giddily across the parking lot. It would be difficult to forgive himself that morning’s unquestioning optimism, his old pluckiness kicking back to life, his immense anticipation like some promise that his life’s vexing conjunction was at last done with him. However. It did not occur to Charlie then, not at all, that the coincidence of Margot’s eleventh-hour miracle work might have been no coincidence, only a scene Charlie himself had set in motion.
Oliver
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Spooky Action at a Distance: it wasn’t only your family or the people of your town that were tangled up with you in that vexing physics. Thousands of miles away, in an apartment on Eighth Street, Brooklyn, sat another of your entangled bodies, in a very different sort of prison. Ah, that apartment, lost tenancy of your future! Dark mahogany bookcases, gingko trees filling the window greenishly, a spit of sunshine angling between the buildings. And there she was, Rebekkah Sterling, on another unremarkable afternoon, sitting alone in an upstairs room, plucking something tuneless from a guitar, tossing aside the guitar, grabbing a coat, and stepping out into the day.
Rebekkah Sterling, in her mid-twenties now: another prisoner of that night, setting the reel for another montage of miseries. Her guitar noodlings, her thousand meals of hummus and crackers, her two thousand pots of coffee. Her many abortive careers (an editorial assistant at a magazine: six months, a junior real estate broker: three months, a yoga instructor: abandoned before she had even completed her training at an ashram upstate), the retinue of strangers she brought back to her bed and quickly expelled (“A meeting in the morning,” Rebekkah would say, or just “I’m not so good at sleeping with another person”), countless sobering 3 A.M.s, alone again in her bed. Miserable scenes, but maybe they would have been a kind of solace to you, Oliver? Years had passed, miles stood between you, but Spooky Action didn’t care about these metrics. The long-lost love of your teenage years might have been thousands of miles away, might have grown into a future in which you’d have no place, but she was also still there with you in your bed, bound by that mysterious force. Bound, like you, in silence.
And yet, sometimes there at 511 Eighth Street, she would begin to type some confession into her computer; she would lift her phone and consider your brother’s name. But always, in the end, when it came to the only story that mattered, she was as voiceless as you.
Of course, you would have envied those many men in Rebekkah’s bed, but at least there was this comfort: not a one of them, no one Rebekkah knew there in Brooklyn, could know what you knew. The bad fact that turned the lock on apartment three, set the security chain. The sight you’d witnessed one October night.
*
October fifteenth. The sun had burned off the cloud cover by late that afternoon, when you were once more hanging outside the school. You had a half hour to kill as your father conducted an after-hours detention session, and you were sitting in Goliath, wanting the intensity of the summery warmth still in the car’s interior to make your thoughts go fuzzy. Even the Hispanic kids’ gathering out front had suffered from the heat. Like water, it had vanished into the afternoon haze, leaving behind only a couple doughy boys silently sipping cans of Dr Pepper.
An irony: when you had your first glimpse of the truth of things, you were trying very hard not to think of anything at all. But it was then, in the hazy distance, in the hellfire of four thirty on another West Texan afternoon, that you saw two figures exit the side door of Bliss Township School. They were just mirage-blurred abstractions, but you could recognize them both. The slightly hunched shuffle of Mr. Avalon, and the tentative half tiptoe of Rebekkah. It was just over a week now until the homecoming performance, and you knew that she had after-school rehearsals with Mr. Avalon. And yet there was something odd in the way they left the school at that slightly hurried pace, odder still that they then climbed, together, into the fancy vintage Cadillac Mr. Avalon drove. The engine fired, and they motored away, leaving behind a thick cloud of exhaust.
Two hours later, after a wearingly silent drive in your father’s truck: the too-bright dining room at Zion’s Pastures, your family taking forks to meat loaf, your brother smirking into his lap as he reread some lengthy letter from a friend. Another request of car keys from your father, another display of your mother’s anxiety, the way she interrogated her ground beef with the business end of her knife. “Rebekkah Sterling again, huh?” your mother said. “Another one of your study groups.”
You shrugged. “We just have more work to do. Why are you acting like that?”