Silence: Jed had learned it from his father. When Jed was a boy, his pa, Henry Loving, had conversed with his family in grunts, sighs, coughs, throat clearings. Silence: Jed had learned it from his mother, too. After a stroke ended his father’s life, Jed and his mother hardly spoke of him again—his ma had a knack for twangy chatter that never touched on any subject that mattered. Like some sort of compensation, in the very room where his pa had expired, Jed had spent the balance of his teenage years filling the settler’s cabin with better visions, his paint piled thick. Jed hatched a plot to apply to art school, sketched mental images of himself in New York galleries, paint-spattered in a bathrobe on a European balcony—a life so unlike West Texas, he might forget home entirely. And yet, there he was now, almost thirty years later, just an art teacher at his old school, time still scrolling by, and at last Jed understood. That image of himself painting in New York or Paris? False hope. Jed’s assumption of his own father’s fate, his up-all-night drinking sessions, his brooding? Reality. He was his father’s son. No, except for the lame paintings he still dabbled at, he was his father. A silence in the shape of a man, a family he disappointed daily, worries he never spoke of to anyone.
The years just kept passing, but time was also a salve for a schoolteacher, easing away his students and the concerns they brought to Jed’s room. Hector Espina left Jed’s art class, and Jed never spoke to the boy again. New bodies came into the room with their new problems. Only the teachers remained.
Reginald Avalon. At the time, he was just another faculty member, a man whom Jed had known since they were boys together in that same school; soon he’d become a kind of local deity to the town of Bliss, his sun-scrubbed image singing out from the high billboard over Se?or Buddy’s. Reginald Avalon: Jed would later wonder at the man’s remarkable capacity for transformation. At seventeen, Reg had already been on his way to his brief local fame, playing fandangos and honky-tonks, doing performances at the school assemblies. As a kid, Reg had been nearly as friendless as Jed. Half Mexican, half white, Reg had seemed a boy welcomed by no one. From a distance Jed had admired the way Reg seemed to put his own aloneness to artistic use. What had made his performances so arresting was a certain wizened melancholy in his voice. Watching from the audience, Jed had thought he recognized his own outsider’s sadness, but Jed had never spoken more than a few words to Reg. And he had hardly ever spoken to the man Reg had become. After a few years out in Los Angeles, Reg had come back to West Texas to play his old Spanish songs to diminishing crowds at county fairs until he stopped playing and became a teacher. Those who can’t do—Reg and Jed, the town’s two failed artists, in the end they both couldn’t do.
A dream deferred: a line that Oliver had once showed him, in a book of poems by Langston Hughes. “Everyone will know,” Hector had once told Jed about his own future fame. But what happens to a dream deferred? Hughes asked. It might dry up like a raisin in the sun, as it had for Jed and Reg. Or maybe, Langston Hughes wrote, it just sags, like a heavy load. Or does it explode?
At last Jed would see. Jed hadn’t set eyes on Hector in years, but in the weeks after, Jed would see the kid’s face every day on the local news, in the hospital waiting room. And that was when Jed would know that he could have stopped it, years before. He could have done something. He could have brought that boy’s artwork to the attention of the school counselor or Officer Filipovic, the cop who patrolled the school halls from time to time. He could have sent Hector and Henry to Principal Dixon’s office that day; he could have spoken with the principal about the immensity of Hector’s rage, very unlike the little shoving contests that had broken out in his classroom over the years. But his old worries about Hector Espina would not be the worst fact Jed would never speak aloud.
November fifteenth. Oliver wanted to stay home. Oliver would have stayed home, if not for Jed. And yet, just outside the gymnasium doors, Jed phoned Zion’s Pastures that night. “Now you want me to show up alone,” Oliver resisted, but still Jed managed to talk him into it. “Rebekkah was asking me about you,” Jed even lied to his son, to convince him to come that night. It was just a playful little conversation with Oliver at the time. Later, it would become the sickness Jed would swallow down, unable to admit it to his wife or to Charlie. Jed would have to grow a second organ in his gut to hold it all in. But deep in his black stomach, the unspoken words would only fester, a sickness that would seed his body with infectious growths. It was my fault Oliver was there. Mine. Me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Years later, so many of those nights with Mr. Avalon would remain unplaceable. His eyes, rampant and dark. Cicadas droning, a deafening static. A gagging in her throat. Somewhere, very distantly, a train bellowing through the desert night. Rebekkah’s shame was at its worst when Mr. Avalon kept all the lights burning brightly. What a frail, bruised, freckled girl she must have looked like to Mr. Avalon, what she and Mr. Avalon would have looked like to anyone else. It broke her apart. Rebekkah felt herself shape-shifting then, like a creature in one of the tall tales Oliver had told her. She was becoming a monster, an insect, a toad, and one night, as if it could work like a fairy tale, she found Oliver at the football stadium and let him kiss her once. But it did not work like a fairy tale, at least not for her. Horribly, she could see in his brightened face, it seemed to work that way for Oliver.
It was October now. Everything was building to a climax. At rehearsals Mr. Avalon’s Theater Club had nearly perfected their repertoire for the Homecoming Dance. They had ordered their traditional Mexican costumes, which even the white kids paraded around the school hallways, to the befuddlement and mockery of Hispanic and white students alike. No one, not even her fellow performers, spoke much to Rebekkah at all.
Hector had not, as Mr. Avalon had requested, left them alone. A couple more times she had seen Hector, silent in the school parking lot, watching them get into Mr. Avalon’s car. One morning just before school, Hector cornered her near the back door.
“Just sing for me. Let me hear what this supposedly amazing voice sounds like,” Hector said, his breath flashing on her cheeks. Rebekkah looked at the students filing into the school, saw their eyes watching her.
“Please leave me alone,” she said, as Mr. Avalon had instructed her to say. But even if this guy frightened her, Rebekkah felt so alone in her secret that she nearly asked, What did he do to you?