Tonight, almost ten years after, Jed was in the cab of his Nissan pickup. Seven thirty in the desert and the sun was a low, unblinking orb. When he reached the road to his wife’s house, it took all the strength he had to turn.
Maybe Jed’s greatest crime was self-pity. After all, his whole past wasn’t just the tragedy he’d often narrated to himself. There had been actual miracles. His sons. Their skin and muscle and bone and bright eyes flung wide on just another ordinary Sunday morning as they flew through the air, arcing to him from the rope swing over Loving Creek. Cannonball! Maybe the happiest hours of his life, if only he’d known it then. But each day he had failed to be the father he had imagined; he loved his boys so fiercely, he knew he’d make the same mess of it that he made of all things he loved.
History doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes: a quote that Mrs. Henderson had tacked up in her American history classroom. It was true, and not only in the ways his life echoed his own father’s. As his truck thundered down the county road, Jed found himself thinking of that man he hadn’t thought of in years. He was thinking of Reginald Avalon. Reginald and Jed, Hector and Oliver: two couplets in rhyming verse, four young men with dreams of art that would never come to be. History rhymes, but there is something not quite graspable in the symmetries. The truck seemed to know its own way. He was at that strange and new cracked house of Eve’s now, no home. He was at her door, knocking.
“Jed,” Eve said.
“Hi.” He spoke to his hands, his old man’s hands. “Is Charlie here, too?”
“Charlie? You came here to speak with Charlie?”
Jed shrugged down at a brown doormat that said WELCOME.
“Well, he isn’t here,” Eve said. “I honestly have no idea where he might have gone.”
“Oh,” Jed said.
“So, what? What is it?” she asked, and Jed looked up.
Eve. Once Jed had painted better universes for his family, but the only better universe he had really tried to believe in was the one she had offered. Belief, silence to the facts. Their perfect son, withering, sightless, untested for years, too horrible to see. The true story of Jed’s life? His silence was the jail keeper. He had never told Eve, This is wrong, you have to let Oliver go. You have to let Charlie live his own life. He had never told his family, It was I who made him come that night. He had never told anyone, That boy Hector needs some help.
But now Jed spoke. He opened his mouth and all the contents of the black stomach at last came spilling out. He only had to let go, and the words came and came. Eve said nothing for a long while after he had finished.
“I don’t understand,” she told him at last.
“I know.”
“It was because of you? That he came that night?”
“Yes.”
“And Hector—”
“Yes.”
“Why? Why are you telling me these things? Why, Jed? Why now?”
“I couldn’t not tell you. Anymore.”
“About ten years too late.”
“You are right. Of course you are right.”
Eve turned, stepped into her broken living room. Standing there for a long while, they made no sound but their own breathing. When he tried to reach for Eve, she shuddered away. “Please,” Jed said, and she shook her head. Jed had an image of himself bursting apart, his flesh splattering the walls. Somehow he managed to remain upright.
“Jed,” Eve said at last. She held out a hand, and Jed flinched, anticipating a slap. Instead, she grasped the hair at the back of his head, pressed his forehead hard against her own. Her breath was in his mouth, his tears on her face. “I’m very, very sorry for you,” she said, renewing her hold on his head. “But it is too late for you to come tell me these things now and think you can just be forgiven. Too late to think that everything will somehow change.”
Jed pulled gently away, held her hands between his own. “There’s still so much we’ve never told each other,” he said.
“Meaning what?”
“We have to stop,” Jed said. “We have to stop going on like this. You have to stop.”
“I have to stop what?”
“Eve—”
“Fuck you. I mean it, Jed. Fuck you. I don’t have to listen to another word from you.”
“But you never did, did you? You only hear what you want to hear.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“Nothing is easy for me to say.”
“Leave. Just go. It’s what you deserve.”
“But what about what Oliver deserves?”
“Go.” Eve pointed at the door.
“Listen to me,” Jed said.
“I can’t,” she said. “I won’t.”
“Listen to me,” Jed said again, and his hand found the corner of a television. For three decades of marriage, Jed had found ways to make no sound. He was always careful on the floorboards, nodded through dinners, at last retreated into his father’s silence in the settler’s cabin. Tonight he grasped the TV and slammed it into the wall. Jed was a different man now, and Eve gaped at the person he had become. Or not become. Revealed. “Okay,” she said. “So I’m listening.”
And they were still speaking there in Eve’s kitchen, at six the next morning, when her phone rang.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Midland. Rebekkah soothed herself with the thought of the concrete low-rise hotels she’d seen from the tarmac. She would drive back now, spend the night in an anonymous pod of the Hilton, and in the morning she’d fly away. With a snap of her foot, she fed the engine.
And yet, as if it had some last vindictive point to make before it let her go free, her rental car’s GPS system guided Rebekkah past the pueblo that would always stand at the black center of her memory. Its stucco walls now badly chipped, its yard littered with detritus. That same old Cadillac on cinder blocks, a tattered blue tarp, a child’s rusting tricycle. Rebekkah told herself that she would pass quickly, yet her Fiesta slowed nearly to a stop. And there her memories still lumbered, walking from shed to house. Mr. Avalon’s familiar hunch, something disjointed in his knees, his arms with their simian swing, a parade of children—How many? He’d never answered Hector’s question—trailing behind him. “No,” Rebekkah said to the driver’s-side window. The memory vanished, leaving a field of dead weeds in the deepening twilight.
Once upon a time, Oliver was just the lanky love poem writer in her English class; how could she have known then that he would become the only person who had ever seen, the only one who might have had words for it all? Oliver. He still came to her in strange places. He was in the cozy smell of aging paper at the Brooklyn Public Library, the ended possibility of those thousands of pages he would never write. The quiet between notes she still plucked on her guitar. Oliver was his brother following her through the streets of Brooklyn. His eyes were Charlie’s eyes. Gray, brownish around the pupil. “It isn’t right,” Charlie said over the phone. “We never thought about what he might need.” In one of the two trees that stood in the front yard of Mr. Avalon’s house, a shredded kite rustled in the branches.