She remembered that she giggled, she thought it was funny, the idea of setting up a table in the middle of the woods. She leaned back against her granddaddy’s chest with his hand on her head and his smell of soap and grass and manure and she dozed off right there in that din. Then the minister’s deep voice started yelling out, “Who wants to enter the Kingdom of Heaven? Who is here to testify? Who is here to be healed by His power? Make your presence known.”
She opened her eyes and people were walking up the aisle. Walking is the wrong word. They were shuffling or hobbling or wheeling was more like it. There were people in wheelchairs and people holding children older than she was who couldn’t walk by themselves. They came up to the front and they said their names and all of them were related to each other. I’m Sister Green. I’m Brother Morgan. Like that. One after the other. And all of them were sick. They were all part of the same sick family, with toothaches and stomach cancer and gout and clubfoot and blindness and palsy. She’d never seen so many different varieties of pain.
Maybe some of them had been healed that day, but she didn’t think so. She didn’t remember if they had. All she remembered was being shocked that the world had so much pain in it, and the unfairness that one family should take on so much of the suffering.
And her granddaddy was dead now. He’d gone to Tulsa to buy some tractor equipment and collapsed on the sidewalk with a heart attack, and since no one thought it strange to see a black man lying there or stopped to take him to the hospital, he died on the sidewalk under the hot sun. And her grandma died a few years later, from grief. And her mother a few years ago, from diabetes. And now Tommy, too, was dead.
And now it was her turn.
“I’m sorry—”
That was Charlie’s voice. Faint, troubled, carried on the wind; she’d know her own child’s voice anywhere.
Charlie was out there, somewhere, in trouble. Thinking it was his fault.
No, no, Charlie. Not your fault. My fault.
I should have checked on him sooner. I should have called the police. I was enjoying the quiet. I should have checked on him sooner and then I could have called the police because time was of the essence. Who didn’t know that? When a child was missing you needed to get on it right away, that was rule number one, the golden rule of the Amber Alert Bible. You called the police. Right away.
But she didn’t know he was missing and so it had been hours and hours by the time she had called.
Not your fault, Charlie.
She had to tell him. She had to tell him not to be sorry, that he had nothing to be sorry about.
I should have been a better mother to Tommy. And to you. To you.
All this time he’d been waiting for her, her Charlie. Years had gone by, and she’d left him alone, she’d lost track of him, and yet there he was, still waiting for her somewhere, waiting for her to say: not your fault, baby. My fault. All mine.
Can God set a table in the wilderness?
She opened her palm and looked at the twelve half-crumbled pills that had been clenched so tightly in her fist. She considered them for a moment, and then she ran into the bathroom. Threw all the pills into the sink, sending the water rushing down over them, pushing the white residue down the drain with her fingers. She washed her hands well and dried them. She straightened herself in the mirror, smoothing down her hair, wiping her face with a wet towel. Nothing to do for those eyes.
Then she walked down the stairs and out into the night to find the place where Charlie was.
Thirty-Two
The lizard was gone. That’s what Charlie had noticed first. Someone had taken Horntail from the tank in his room.
His high had faded now but for a jittery feeling that nothing was right and nothing would ever be right again. It was a familiar feeling. The feeling of not being stoned.
He was looking for the kid and he saw Horntail missing and then he knew. He just fucking knew where the kid was.
He slammed out the back door, through the yard, beyond the birdbath, until he reached the very edge of the woods. There was an old oak tree there that had wooden pegs pounded deep into its bark, and at the top of the pegs there were some planks of wood that his father had nailed together one day in an attempt to make a tree house. The tree house had never been completed—building the thing was more complicated structurally than his father had counted on. He had sworn up and down about stability and bracing and never finished it, and their mother had forbidden them to go up there, since it was only a floor and nothing else, without any sort of railing or walls to keep them from tumbling down. But he and Tommy snuck up there anyway, sometimes, when they didn’t want to be found. It was high up and in the summer you couldn’t see it through the leaves.
They used to call it their fort. They kept stuff up there—the diary Tommy wrote in for a few months, Charlie’s rock collection, gun and car magazines they had stolen from the dentist’s office. Sometimes Tommy liked to take Horntail there and let him run around like it was the jungle. Until last year Charlie used to go up to get high.
Now he had to push his big body through the hole.