“Don’t cry, pupster, we only have to be here for eighteen hours.”
One night on the phone, a few years before, when her mother had tried again tentatively to raise the topic of Rebekkah’s “plans,” Rebekkah had sighed and said that, with her alleged music career going nowhere, she might quite like to be a triage nurse, a wartime Red Cross worker, a stitcher of shrapnel wounds. “Fixing up the war wounded,” her mother replied theoretically. “Don’t have to think too hard about what a shrink might tell you.” Rebekkah’s mother didn’t push the point. Rebekkah’s father had long ago absconded to an early “retirement” in Thailand, and Rebekkah knew that her mother now needed Rebekkah much more than Rebekkah needed her. “I’m being honest,” Rebekkah told her mother. “I think it would be nice to give yourself over to something like that.” The appeal of such employment, or so Rebekkah believed, was not in the mending of shattered history, but in the surrender to a force much greater than herself. Since November fifteenth—no, even before that, really—Rebekkah had always sought irrefutable directives from the world, and now she received the flight schedule of American Airlines like its own airtight argument. A half hour later, as she and Edwina climbed into a rental Ford Fiesta and emerged from the garage into that impossible blue sphere of Texan sky she remembered, Rebekkah tried to believe that this return wasn’t exactly her choice any longer, that the schedule of things had taken her choice away from her.
Of course it was Charlie’s phone call—his call and the terrible, astonishing things she had read about Oliver online—that had brought her back here, but even as Rebekkah piloted her Fiesta in the southwestern direction of the Big Bend, it was hard to imagine how she could really do it, how she could possibly do the thing she had come back to do, say the thing she had come back to say.
And as for visiting Oliver in his hospital bed? Too horrible for her even to consider just now. When Rebekkah still dreamed of Oliver, his skin was painted the vicious red-black of dried blood, studded with the pebbles and dust Oliver accumulated as he dragged his body toward her across a Chihuahuan flat.
The hugeness of the blue above her, the strewn material of desert earth; where, in this sky-blasted land, could Rebekkah go to try to reconstitute any of the resolve she had known two nights ago on Eighth Street? She pushed a lever, signaling a left turn to no one.
Rebekkah, whose family had only landed in Bliss for a three-year stopover on her fracking engineer father’s world-tour plunder of the earth’s petroleum resources, did not know any homecoming feeling or any tragic sense of lapsed time as she drove, two hours later, through the broken, decomposing stuff of Bliss. The town was in reality just what it had become in her memory, a rotting exoskeleton, harmful only if you got too close and inhaled its toxic spores. Rebekkah aimed the Fiesta and half closed her eyes as she passed by Bliss Township School.
And on the far side of Bliss was the end of the earth, or at least the end of human civilization. Not so much a landscape but a minimalist study, perfect cerulean dome above, perfect brown plane below. It was five in the afternoon and the sun went on and on.
Rebekkah continued through the Chihuahuan, in the general direction of the distant blue shapes of the mountains just gnawing their way over the horizon now. Edwina lolled on her back in the passenger seat, luxuriating in a slant of sunlight. This place had never been Rebekkah’s home. Rebekkah’s home was nowhere and everywhere. It was a string of McMansions, in Scotland, Singapore, Rio de Janeiro, Dubai, Norwalk. Then again, Rebekkah felt that West Texas was also exactly the place she was from, nowhere at all. She was a no one from a nowhere. She felt she was a dabbler, a failed musician, a dilettante, a bum who had made her hovel beneath the bridge of a trust fund—a kind of end-of-childhood bonus her grandmother had established for the successful survival of her first eighteen years. Her life was like an organism in a laboratory cage, and Rebekkah was the scientist studying it through a two-way mirror. What happens to a human after unchanging years, what was the smallest amount of human connection a person needed to live, what was the least that was necessary? She made music and shared it with no one. Her past, and the lost future, all of it belonged inside the cheap drywall, particle board, and chintzy masonry that constituted her family’s abandoned house in the Big Bend, alone on Monte Grande Lane, where Rebekkah now put the Fiesta in park.
Oliver. She was not so far from him now, but in the desert distances deceived. She was fifty miles from the actual Oliver in his bed at Crockett State, but the bland house standing on its gray patch of lawn was just like the boy she’d known. The doors locked, the rooms empty. But, no, not empty. It had, Rebekkah knew, been so much easier to believe that Oliver was only an empty house, too, devoid of animating life. And yet, when at last she found out the truth, it seemed to Rebekkah that she had already known, all along.
For nearly a decade, Rebekkah had practiced the words to tell her true story. Often, walking alone in the silent streets of Brooklyn, beneath another stranger’s body in the Lower East Side, burning through an insomnia in the bright lights of midtown, Rebekkah had sickened herself with the plain fact that she could have just told it to anyone. Any police officer, her mother, a therapist, a woman on the street, Charlie. But the words were still there, boxed up and filming with dust inside her.
Rebekkah cracked the car door and the immense heat outside crashed over her, a wave of memory, washing years away. The ache of acne was back on her teenage chin, her stomach cramped in the way it always had in those months. The unwashed body smell of her secret covered her. Rebekkah reached for the handle to reseal the door, but it was too late. Edwina had torpedoed out and was presently doing a manic relay race on the brown front lawn. Rebekkah inhaled a sorcery of dust. She was twenty-seven years old when she lifted a foot out of the rental car and put it on the combed cement. She was seventeen years old by the time she stood.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX