“So, here I am, listening, as you say. And what is it you want to tell me?”
Charlie pressed the rounded edges of his phone into his cheek, but for a long beat he couldn’t think of any words to add. A few lines came back to him then, from Oliver’s journal. In a poem musing upon the silence that had fallen over his life’s only romance, Oliver had written, Is there anything worse than the torture of lost time? Death would be kinder / than a lifetime this blind. Charlie looked into the blue-black night of Moses’s cataracts as he at last told Rebekkah the thing he had made out of this strange encounter, the lie that was Margot’s work, and his family’s horrible faith, too. That bounded little world the Lovings had made, where they couldn’t see the truth about each other at all. “It’s wrong,” Charlie said. “It’s so, so selfish, Rebekkah. That’s what I’m calling to tell you. That some part of him is still there, he just keeps going on and on, all alone. And never once have you come to visit him. Never once have you come to talk with us.”
“To tell you what, exactly?” It sounded as if the tight weave of Rebekkah’s familiar contempt was coming looser now, distressed. “What is it you think that I could have told you?”
“I don’t know. Something. I believe there is something. I believe that.”
“Right. That’s what you believe,” Rebekkah said.
“And I’m not saying I’m innocent, either,” Charlie told her. “I didn’t see him for five years, did you know that? Five years I left him there, rotting in his bed, with only our crazy mother for company. And you know what? I still can’t take it here. I can’t take it here another day.”
“I’m sorry. I am.”
“Okay. Then why don’t you do something about it?”
“But now you think you somehow get to tell me what I’m supposed to do?” Rebekkah’s voice was rising. “And now you think you know about me, what I’ve been through?”
“So tell me.”
“Oh, fuck off.”
“Right.” For years, Charlie had wanted just one conversation with her, but now he thumbed his phone to end it.
Later, as he climbed back onto the Suzuki, tearing away from Zion’s Pastures, and from the Big Bend, too, Charlie was still thinking of Moses; he was still thinking of Oliver, wandering the barbed-wired desert of all those years, the locks on the gates set by his own family. The moon had sunk behind the Chisos, and the dark of the night hardly relented against the Suzuki’s fitful headlight. What lay beyond? Just the torment of everything Charlie still couldn’t see.
And yet, even then, with the wind bearing into his throat, Charlie found his own old words in his mouth, the spell to conjure a story that had never materialized on his word processor; a spell to conjure, too, his brother back into this world. Just a dream of Oliver waking in his bed, an idea of what might have happened that Charlie still could not quit. Once upon a time there was a boy who fell through a crack in time. Even now, all the answers unknown, Charlie couldn’t help but imagine it: some hidden, mythic version of his brother, even still waiting in some unseeable place, to tell Charlie the answers. Even still, Charlie was drafting his way into the dark.
Oliver
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Once upon a time there was a boy who fell through a crack in time, and then what?
Once upon a time there was a boy who fell through a crack in time, but the truth is that he didn’t fall all the way. Half of the boy remained there, on either side.
Oliver, what were they like, those first seconds after you woke? You must have believed that you were still dreaming. How long, you wondered, would you have to wait in this blank sleep? But in this dream, time was indistinct. You had been mouthing the polyurethane sealant of the schoolhouse’s plank floorboards on the night of November fifteenth, each second a gravely sharp thing in your throat. But then time drew out like cotton, in that gauzy, white-laced sleep.
And then? Eventually your bright white dream took on the air-conditioned, Sheetrock-paneled confines of a hospital room. A downy translucence hung over everything, but after a time it began to pull away. Now faces were not just their fuzzy shapes. You could see their wrinkles and moles. These faces passed over like designs stitched into gossamer. Doctors, nurses, your mother, your father and brother, ministers, a rabbi, reporters, teachers, anonymous visitors. Never Rebekkah. You were still dreaming.
But then the distant groan in your ears resolved into a clock’s ticking. Your mother’s face was above you. She was telling you something. What? A story about your brother, and her tone struck you as odd. She had complained about Charlie before, of course, but never so honestly. Never, at least not with you, had she used this tone, the one that in your childhood she typically reserved for your father.
“And, to tell you the truth, I even understand why a kid like Charlie could start to feel a little—cramped. Cabin feverish. At home all day. But can’t he see what would have happened to someone like him in the Texas public school system—”
You couldn’t say why it happened then, but that’s when you woke, from your deep white sleep. And now you were just your mother’s son, in a hospital room, in an afternoon.
“Huh?” you said. And yet, could not say.
“Ma?” you said. And yet, could not say.
“Ma,” you shouted, but your face held some nostril-interfaced tubing. You reached up to swat that tube away. But could not reach.
“Honestly, it’s like he thinks he’s some sort of therapist or something. He just loves to tell me how we need to quote unquote learn to cope. What I can’t get is how anyone, and especially a son of mine, could be so selfish.”
You gathered your strength; you pressed together all your panic. And yet.
Your mouth was still. Your arms were silent. Your body slept soundly beneath you. But your mind? It was a leashed monster, a jailed dragon, thrashing furiously and futilely at its chains. And as you steeled yourself for another assault on your invisible, inexplicable tethers, you felt a word gather deep in your stomach. It rose with a gag in your chest. It passed by the useless orifice of your mouth. And then it burst in your brain. Rebekkah.
As the clock had begun to tick, as your mother’s face had become legible, your memory, too, had resolved, and terribly. And now you lay there, gaping up at one of the last things you remembered. The thing you’d understood, only too late. The name you tried to yell, and yet—