Only you could see that history now. He was with you in that black hole, and his eyes showed his own skewed dimensions, displaying his memories to you like some grim cinema. The son of a sanitation worker, a punishing hiss of a father, whose limbs were heavy with the violence of his own youth. A boy whose mother was cuffed and sent back across the river when he was just five, evanescing into a vague memory of abandonment, a scar in his life that was visible to everyone. A kid who had grown up on the west side of town, in a community treated like itinerant labor, a community that itself treated him—a quiet, stammering boy—like a punch line to some joke; schoolyard couplets had been written about Hector’s pussyness, his supposed fartlike smell. A young man whose only comfort was his unspeakable dream of escape through the songs he’d learned to sing to himself when no one was around. One day, outside the schoolhouse, Hector had been crooning along to a track by Boyz II Men on his Walkman when a heavy palm fell on his shoulder. Wincing, Hector tugged the headphones off to find a mustached face grinning down upon him. “Get a load of that voice!” the theater teacher, Mr. Avalon, said. The next day, under the promise of singing lessons, Hector climbed into Mr. Avalon’s nice Cadillac.
All of this, in the jumbled time of your black hole, you could see at last. And now you understood that the kinship you’d known that night on Rebekkah’s lawn had a deeper cause. Hector was, in fact, a lot like you, but an Oliver of another, much darker planet. He was a stammering, angry creature, what your own awkwardness might have turned you into if not for your mother’s constant bolstering. He was another boy with thwarted artistic dreams, but whereas you could imagine many alternate futures, Hector was not so lucky. When Hector gazed down the forlorn tracks of his future, he could see only his father’s trailer, a blighted career in manual labor, a fate so much worse for the brief hope Mr. Avalon had given him, all the ways Mr. Avalon had used the hope to do with Hector whatever he liked, before losing interest in the boy completely. And no matter the exact events of November fifteenth, they were the sickness that you shared, the particular disease that had transformed you both, the curse that had turned you into some tall tale, shackling you together in that in-between.
Once upon a time there was a boy who fell through a crack in time, but he didn’t fall all the way. Like the woman in the cottonwood tree from his granny’s stories, his torment was to remain there, half of him on either side, pinning a desperate populace below, a cacophony that rattled his every night. But now, at last, hands were reaching to pull him free.
In a swift motion, Hector stooped over you. Ten years prior, he had found his own escape from the hell of his doomed hope, and now he had come back to deliver you the same mercy. Fear pounded in your temples as you waited for Hector to drag you off into his unknowable region, not heaven or hell, not the past or the future, just a relieving nothingness. You could see it: the placeless white place opening its bright, mute crevice. A benevolent eye cracking open. The endlessness that was the truth of time, a great blind sea that would mercifully sweep away the little dark mote of your few years on earth.
Hector reached to your neck, but just as his hands touched your skin, they turned vaporous. No, please, not yet, because now another morning had come to Bed Four, because even after you had failed that last test, your mother had returned.
“See?” Ma said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Someday she’s gonna give birth,” your granny had told you, and now, at the sight of your mother, even still hunched over your body, the story that pinned you there had begun to beat back to life inside you, kicking and clawing its way toward daylight.
Your story. After years of rehearsing the tale of your last days, it had come to seem hardly a story at all, just a life fractured by the bad coincidence of where you had stood at a certain moment in time. Why?: like your family, you had shouted that word, even when you couldn’t shout, and then you had turned an ear to the silence, even still believing that an explanation might come. It never had, at least not in any words you could hear. And yet, you had learned well from your father the cosmological mysteries forever tipped in life’s favor: the invisible and unending battle between matter and antimatter in which matter just slightly won out; the way that a few lifeless molecules, sparked in the right conditions, become a living chain of organic material. For reasons no scientist can name, the universe forever chooses something over nothing, and so why could it not also have chosen something for you? Maybe you had never needed to ask what the days and years in your bed had meant; maybe your survival was the answer. Locked in that space between one world and the next, your body was all that had held open the only passage to a place that no one else could see or know.
And yet, yours was a story you could never have delivered on your own. Those hands—your mother’s hands, Margot Strout’s hands—even still you could feel that they were reaching down to help you. They were still there today, pulling and pulling. But your liberation would also take other hands, hands at last pushing from below, from that hell of silenced voices beneath your bed, that lost dimension, where you had trapped them. You could feel them there now, those two hundred trillion particles entangled with your own, pushing at your feet, allowing little gaps in the seal. Just tiny slits hissing apart, but you paused to look down into those openings. And at last, after nearly ten years, there they were. Rebekkah and your father, coming home.
Rebekkah and Jed
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Halfway down the jet bridge of gate six of the Midland International Airport, Rebekkah Sterling understood she had made a terrible mistake. She flashed on the feverish, chain-smoking image of herself from just two days ago in her apartment on Eighth Street, the self-chastising, resolution-making Rebekkah that Charlie’s condemning voice in her telephone had briefly let loose in her. But she found that this prior Rebekkah was a completely different person than the timid girl who emerged into the dull regional terminal. What could she possibly have been thinking to so impulsively buy a plane ticket? Rebekkah walked up to a woman wearing a silly sailor’s cap, fashioned in the corporate red and blue of her airline. “When is the next flight back to New York?”
“But you’ve just landed,” the airline woman pointed out.
Rebekkah nodded. “You’ve got me there. But when is the next one?”
There was one direct flight to New York a day, and the woman informed Rebekkah it was not until the next morning. Progressing toward baggage claim, Rebekkah hefted a mesh duffel, and through its screening, she spoke to the smushed face of its contents. After the heavy course of expectorants a vet had prescribed, Edwina could once more whine at guilt-inducing volumes.