A tense second, gathering energy, Ma shifting around in her chair, like she didn’t want to tell you what she had to tell you next, but she was powerless to stop its rise to the surface. “What about how you have been acting? Suddenly we hardly even talk anymore, and you treat my basic questions like—” Her voice broke off before she arrived to the true substance of what she had to tell you, which her better reason kept quiet. But you didn’t need your mother to explain her frustration; you were your mother’s favorite, an invisible umbilical still connected you, and you knew that the defeated way she had often looked at you across the dinner table those last weeks was just a result of accumulating evidence that vast and vital parts of your life would take place beyond the two hundred acres of home.
And so, by a little after seven thirty that evening, half-sick with filial guilt, you were once more behind the wheel of Goliath, out on another fake study date. The fuchsia blush of sunset; a coyote singing his lonesome song over the plains. After years of citizenship in the teenage tyrannical state imposed by your West Texan classmates, you knew the official condemnation for a boy like yourself at this moment. “Loser,” you said. But you couldn’t help yourself. That evening, you were back to playing private investigator, conducting a stakeout on behalf of your demanding and unreasonable client, your jilted, baffled heart. The oddness of seeing Rebekkah getting a ride from Mr. Avalon, compounded by the strangeness of Mr. Avalon’s anger when you came to ask him about her that day—understanding nothing, you felt you had to do something. These were questions that drove you through another desert night. Not eastward, to the Sterling McMansion, but to the north, past your school, to the address listed in the directory for Reginald Avalon. You clicked off Goliath’s headlights as you approached the house.
It was dark now, and the last of the daylight made the night sky look electronic, lit bluely from behind. The thickly piled stucco of Mr. Avalon’s pueblo looked like melted candle, or else scarred, burnt skin. All you could make out inside was a single light, the orange rectangle of a lit window against the cooling purple of the evening.
You told yourself you were being ridiculous, a boy stalking a teacher’s house in his parents’ hatchback. Ha! And yet. You opened Goliath’s door and stepped into the chalky air of the Chihuahuan night.
But what were you going to do now? Creep up to the one lit window like some Peeping Tom? Crouch down low, beneath the sash, press your fingers to its frame, and slowly hoist your head into the light? Pathetic. But that is what you did anyway.
You made slow, trespasser progress to the house, testing each step as if the earth might suddenly give way. The remains of a long-abandoned flowerbed crunched and popped. But as you crept closer still, a sound overtook the quiet. Much louder than your own footsteps. The loose music of a guitar emanating from the window. And you were beneath that window now. Your fingertips shook on the stucco frame. You lifted your face into the light.
You were a silent and pitiable creature, a desert animal crouching in the moonlight, and what you saw inside the window was like a perfect tableau of what would never be yours. Rebekkah Sterling was just sitting there in the living room with her teacher. The music came from Rebekkah’s own hands, as she sat on a kitchen chair, plucking a pretty tune from a guitar. You had no idea she played guitar. Her eyes were sealed now, as if she were becoming the music itself, sweet, simple, melancholic. A wind rose, Rebekkah opened her mouth, and her song drifted out.
I was living in a devil town, didn’t know it was a devil town. Rebekkah’s voice lifted—Oh, Lord, it really brings me down about the devil town—a voice to break apart your skin, to burst the glass from the window, to atomize the thick stucco wall between you and blow it out into the desert night. Your lanky body might still have been bent there on the other side of the window, but now you were with Mr. Avalon in his living room. You were Mr. Avalon, when Rebekkah struck the final chords. It was your hands that clapped, your body that hoisted itself from the sofa, you who stumbled a bit over the coffee table.
No, not you. Not anymore. Something bright and furious bursting. Before you could comprehend, before you could measure the meaning, you knew only the lover’s ancient lament, the cruelty of hands that weren’t yours wrapped around her. Rebekkah tilted her head in Mr. Avalon’s direction.
You were outside the window, and you were also very far away, blinking into the scope of your father’s Celestron. You began to understand in the way that Galileo had cracked the mystery of Earth’s third-class place in the solar system—first, he had to patiently measure shadows moving on the faces of distant planets. You, too, had been measuring. The warm grin Mr. Avalon showed her in the halls. The gloom in Rebekkah’s face when you brought up the man’s name. It was those observations, and just the closeness of your attention to Rebekkah, that let you begin to comprehend what you were seeing. But an amateur astronomer like yourself could not have understood, not at all, the full truth.
Mr. Avalon stooped to Rebekkah and your world undid itself. Were you wrong? And yet, what was there not to comprehend? Mr. Avalon pressed his lips against her. And not as you had, in your bashful, fumbling way. He held her cheeks and applied his mouth. Rebekkah did not fight, nor did she do much to return the kiss. She just offered her face and received him in an untroubled, routine way.
You did not speak or cry out. You were careful not to make a rustling sound against the wall. You made a silent plea into the night, which at last Rebekkah’s face answered. Technically, her gaze met yours, but it looked very far away. Light-years.
A snapping. Snap spap: a dry branch in Mr. Avalon’s dead garden. He turned. You dropped to the ground. Had he seen? What had he seen? What had you?
Light years: but Spooky Action, the mysterious understitching of our universe, renders our ordinary ideas of time and distance moot. And so, as you looked into Mr. Avalon’s window, so too, ten years later, in the distant world over your bed, did your family look into another kind of opening. Seeing, but not understanding, not yet.
Eve
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Yes.”
In the five days that Margot Strout had been translating her son’s replies into the world, her son’s yes flexed on inside of Eve, even alone in her bed at Desert Splendor. Yes, Eve had come to see, could also be a negation. Eve had quit her secretive little visits to her husband in Marfa. The attic stockpile she had been amassing for her son’s future had not grown by a single hardcover. The day before, she’d even resisted the nice fountain pen someone left on the reception counter.