CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Snap. Snap. Snap. A spot. The bossy girl from Rebekkah’s theater class, Vera Grass. A dot on her temple, her face vacant. Stippled, perforated, a seeping punctuation on her arm, her torso. Something was also wrong with the face of Roy Lopez. It took a while for Rebekkah to realize a part of it was missing. There were screams that were not really screams, a combustive silence, blowing out and out. She wanted to say, You don’t have to do this. As if it weren’t already too late. It was already too late. There in front of her. There. No longer quite Mr. Avalon, a mark on his face, an opening in his chest, faintly whistling. His eyes rolled back like those of a man forever appalled. Rebekkah put her hands on Mr. Avalon as if she could piece him back together again. When she looked up, her eyes met Hector’s. Hector leaned to her, as if he might explain something. He lifted his weapon and aimed it between her eyes, which Rebekkah closed tightly. But then, without a word, Hector turned and left. He left Rebekkah with the answers she would never speak, and also the questions she could never answer. Why not her, too? Why had he pointed the rifle at her and then just walked away? Was it pity? Was it a kind of punishment for Rebekkah, to make her live with these questions? Or did it have no meaning at all? But Hector left the room, and Rebekkah recoiled at another noise from the hallway. After the sound of footsteps passed, she stepped toward the door, and that was when she saw. Oliver.
November fifteenth: the dividing line, the transformational epoch in her own evolutionary process. Mr. Avalon and Hector were gone, and now Rebekkah was a new species. The truth of what had happened was too obvious for her to name. When Rebekkah tried to speak with Manuel Paz, her throat could hardly produce a sound.
Rebekkah showed up just one more time to Mr. Avalon’s pueblo. The doors were locked, the windows too. She drifted across the yard, and soon found herself standing in the grayed depravity of the outbuilding.
Rusting nails in mason jars, a few screwdrivers hanging from a pegboard, the smell of skin and sweat and heavy breath beneath the cloying stink of something turned, so powerful that she gagged. She found the single bulb, swinging from a rafter, pulled its chain. Beneath the workbench, a swatch of black fur. Edwina was breathing, barely, surrounded by her excrement.
Rebekkah took Edwina home and she nursed her back to health. She became nothing but a nurse to a dog, it was all she could bear. The extent of her parents’ pity for what Rebekkah had survived: they did not make her give the dog away. “I don’t know,” she said when men came back with more questions. I don’t know. She would never answer, not in the way they needed. But when Edwina was well enough she brought her to Oliver’s hospital room. She did not know until that moment that she had come to give her away. Give to Oliver’s family all she had left.
“Her name is Edwina,” Rebekkah said.
“Thank you,” Oliver’s brother replied, but she said nothing else to him. She said to herself every single day that her story was meaningless now, that it was too late to matter. But the truth was that she could have told anyone. The truth was that she could have stopped it.
Time went on. Now she was eighteen, a girl with a GED and a precarious academic standing at a New York community college. Now she was twenty-three, still without a diploma, aimless and moneyed. Now she was twenty-six when, one night, the past she had tried to give away came back to her. Edwina snuffling at her feet on a Brooklyn sidewalk. “Rebekkah. It’s Charlie. Charlie Loving.”
In the time before, she had hardly spoken to the kid, but she had seen enough of him to be surprised by the man he’d become. A handsome guy in snap-button flannels, his eyes bright behind fashionable glasses. But she too had changed and then changed again. Her skin had weathered, the freckles expanding to permanent beige spots. The parents who had once wrecked her had dissipated into her grayish atmosphere. She lived alone and jobless, already like some spinster, minus the cats. Charlie was not a boy anymore, and she was not a girl anymore. “What do you want?”
“Just to talk,” he said. Charlie’s eyes, with their bright gray light, were the eyes of the boy who spoke with her before first period each day, in another life when she still might have become another kind of person. What if she had only kept talking to Oliver? What if she had stopped going to Mr. Avalon’s house? The truth was still there, right at Charlie’s feet. “Edwina,” Rebekkah said.
Just to talk, but how could she? Mental illness, people had said on the television, shaking their heads, violence in the media. Immigration policy. Cartel warfare. Terrorism. And if it were true that Hector Espina, with his muttering tempers, had been unwell, and if it were also true that Hector had seen the horrific footage of how other boys before him had made a gruesome spectacle of their suffering, Rebekkah knew those factors amounted only to kindling for the fire. It was rage that had set the blaze. It was the outrage of a hopeless, abused, and cast-off child, given false hope.
In a unit on Dante’s Inferno, one of her college professors described a special torment that Hell reserves for the wrathful. “They are made to spend eternity in the muck of the river Styx,” the professor said. “Endlessly lamenting their sins, their words lost in that thick black river. Unbearable, am I right?” But Rebekkah, after years in her own underworld, could put her head into those murky waters, where she could still hear Hector’s lament. I had nothing, nothing, nothing, no one helped me, why did no one help me, why did no one stop him, hope was the worst torture of all, why did no one help me?
And now Rebekkah was twenty-seven, standing outside her family’s empty house. The cottonwoods that lined the man-made gully in the backyard had nearly doubled in height. Edwina hopped through the dense, bunched grasses that carpeted the ground below. The pug gamboled about, diligent and delighted, more youthful than her years, as if searching for a shotgunned mallard. “Edwina!” Rebekkah shouted, and the dog ran to her heel. Rebekkah was seventeen years old, giving Edwina to Charlie. She was twenty-seven years old, crouching over the same animal, who was going gray at the snout now. Edwina licked at her face. This poor pug, bound to her own sad history, twice nursed to health from death’s brink. “I’m sorry,” Rebekkah told the dog as she gathered her up and turned for the car.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR