And yet, you stood up from the desk and walked back into the hall. You were feeling afraid, but you couldn’t name why. You crept past the slumbering lockers, the shoe-leather, municipal smell of the library. The polished wood floorboards squeaked under the loafers you’d borrowed from your father. You had nearly convinced yourself that the only thing that could be wrong was bound in your own thwarted heart. The flooring popped, then moaned. Then, an unmistakable sound: a high trill, very different from the ordinary girl-screams that filled Bliss Township. A scream that registered in some primitive part of your brain, panic washing any clear thought away from you, and you were running now.
For weeks, you had stolen glances through the window to the theater room, trying to understand, or else trying just to see Rebekkah. Why would she talk with you, kiss you, then leave you to silence? Why would she do what you had seen her do with Mr. Avalon? Your heart churning inside you, you once more turned to the long plank hallway that led to the theater classroom, where the screaming began again, and in your last moments of walking life, the questions only multiplied inside you.
The sound of firecrackers, rapid, crackling bursts. You turned the final corner, and there he was. The person you had only seen from a distance, that night outside Rebekkah’s house, the same boy you must have shuffled by in the halls for years without noticing, both of you training your eyes on your shoes. A young man who, in your many lovelorn contemplations, you had all but forgotten. You had only ever seen him from the distance of your own bounded story; you couldn’t have known all that you shared. Even up close you oddly could not quite see him clearly. He was shaking so severely, his features seemed to blur. You smelled a sharp, sulfuric tang. Something bad, the primitive part of your brain was saying to you sharply now, but it didn’t offer answers. You never even saw what this person held at his side. Your panic kept you from understanding. His arms moved like unhinged things, jointless and strange. His eyes were extinguished, unreadable. If still you failed to understand, it was only because you, like the 736 other people of your school, could not have imagined, until that night, that something like that was possible, not there.
“It’s over,” this man told you, his voice a dim echo off canyon walls.
“Okay,” you said.
His oil-dark eyes went wide and emphatic, as though he were trying to convince you of an argument. “I had to.”
“Okay,” you said again.
“He bought me a dog,” he said.
Appropriately, your last word was a question. “Who?” And then there was a blinding violence, a terrible whiteness, a crack in time.
And then what? That is where your family lost you, to that place like the one your father had described that night in his painting cabin. A black hole, in which no telescope could ever locate you. A place of pulverized years, an infinitely heavy blindness, a forsaken desert island in the pooling vastness, and where could your family find you now? Perhaps only in another unlikely idea. Only in the stories they still tried to believe.
Charlie
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Once upon a time, there was a boy who fell through a crack in time. After Manuel Paz left their house that Sunday afternoon and Charlie stood from his shadowed spot on the stairs, that oft-written sentence of his was feeling autobiographical. With the lid pulled back on his mother’s long-sealed secret, Charlie was swamped by his old teenage guilt, his powerlessness to keep Ma from becoming the kind of person she had apparently become. He felt he wore his lean six feet like the costume of an adult as he timidly marched toward his mother at the kitchen table.
“Shoplifting, Ma? Seriously? How much are we talking about here?”
“I don’t know.”
“No I-don’t-knows. How much did you take?”
“You mean this time, or altogether?”
“Christ.”
But after twenty-three years under the tyranny of Ma’s certitude, wasn’t there also something a little wonderful about being in this position with his mother, in the sudden and wholly unexpected position of moral authority? Charlie had to concentrate now not to let a smile into his face.
“It was all for Oliver,” Ma said.
“Of course it was,” Charlie said. “Show me.”
Without complaint, as if she had anticipated this demand as fair punishment, Ma pushed away from the table, led the way back up the whining, thinly carpeted stairs. In an unused bathroom on the second level, she pointed to a string dangling from a ceiling panel. Like a teased cat, Charlie hopped and pulled at it. A collapsible staircase yawned open. And up those stairs, when Ma punched the switch on an old Coleman lantern and unlatched a giant plastic bin, Charlie was frankly astonished by what the light revealed, that little hillock of shrink-wrapped plunder.
“Ma,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s horrible.”
“That’s one word for it.”
Charlie felt his skull for a long while then, as if trying to divine his own thoughts.
“But I’ll tell you what,” Charlie said. “If I’m being honest? What I’m thinking right now is that it reminds me of my book, only in stuff instead of useless pages.”
He lifted a DVD of 2001: A Space Odyssey, tossed it back into the bin.
“So,” Charlie said. “About that other thing Manuel mentioned.”
Ma nodded, her exhaustion vibrating through her. But she held herself together long enough to recount the whole awful scene with Manuel in the hospital conference room, years ago. His questions about Hector and Rebekkah and Oliver, about what she hadn’t told him then, her guilt (“like a sickness I carry in me”) at Oliver’s long-ago conversation about Rebekkah Sterling that she had ended before he could explain anything to her. “I don’t know. This whole thing, Charlie. I just don’t know.”
“Well,” Charlie said, dusting off his old Man of the House crown, “I’m not saying you shouldn’t feel bad about that, what you never said to us. And as for being less than honest with the police? Probably not your best course of action.”
“Tell me about it.”
“But Ma?” Charlie said. “Do you know that I’ve wondered the same? About Rebekkah. Wondered so much, in fact, that I practically stalked her out there in Brooklyn, so that she’d just talk to me.”
She turned away from Charlie, unwilling to show her son what this confession did to her face.
“Did she?” Ma asked softly. “Talk to you, I mean.”
“Not really,” Charlie said. “But now I’m wondering. Why didn’t I just tell you about all that business? Why did I keep it to myself like some big secret? It was like I thought—like I didn’t ever want to put you through the pain of talking about what happened that night. But now I’m wondering if maybe that was very wrong of me. If maybe the very, very painful part was not talking about it.”
“We’re talking now, aren’t we?” Ma said, but the old combativeness in her words was wholly at odds with the way she nodded at the Tupperware bin, touching her mouth with the back of her hand as if the piled mass of her shameful habit was a sickness she had at last expelled.
“So what do we do now?”
“Now?” Ma asked. “Now I guess we have to ignore the advice of that Finfrock lady. Tomorrow we’ll just have to ask Oliver all these old questions, right in front of Manuel Paz. Put all this business behind us so we can focus on what really matters here. Focus on helping Oliver.”