Mrs. Touchett was certainly a person of many oddities, of which her behaviour on returning to her husband’s house after many months was a noticeable specimen. She had her own way of doing all that she did, and this is the simplest description of a character which, although by no means without liberal motions, rarely succeeded in giving an impression of suavity.
He didn’t much like novels, never had. He couldn’t easily care about made-up people. (Not that he didn’t have plenty of issues connecting to real-life people, as Sonya would no doubt attest.) And the handful of novels that had managed to interest him over the years—a couple of political thrillers, a sci-fi series Sonya had talked up—hooked him mostly through their incorporation of interesting facts and ideas, so that they pleased Wes no more (and usually less) than a good biography or instruction manual might. But he had, in the last week, already exhausted the meager supply of nonfiction in his shared holding cell: a biography of Benjamin Franklin (now there was a man with whom Wes felt some kinship); an old pop-psychology book called Parenting on the Spectrum, which was a weirdly intriguing look at how autism disorders used to be regarded and treated, an era Wes was grateful to have missed. There was a great book about a series of ritualistic murders, never solved, on the Cumberland Plateau in Restoration-era Tennessee, That Evening Sun Went Down. A very outdated and funny (so funny for being so outdated) guide to Linux. That was it. So then he slogged his way through one of the shorter novels, Ethan Frome, enjoying the smell of the brittle yellow pages more than he did waiting for the obligatory big reveal about Ethan’s accident, and now he had this big book in front of him, the kind of important book he always thought he’d read if he were in jail or on a deserted island or something, and now he was in jail, and he still couldn’t focus on it. What he’d give to have his tablet right now! His tablet and a shower and a canister of fiber and one of his power juices, something to clear out the cement works his goddamn colon had become, not that fiber would fix his anxiety about shitting in a bucket with only a thin sheet separating him from Edie and the others.
At least there were fewer others to share this cramped space with. In the couple of days before June sent back Wendy, Lee, Anastasia, and Jesse—well, it had gotten bad. Wes came close to hyperventilating more than a few times, so excruciating was the feeling of having so many other hot, smelly bodies competing for space with his own, and even the more easygoing among them—Edie, Berto—were snapping with little to no provocation. If Wes had been a different kind of man, he and Jesse would probably have come to blows at some point. (Wes felt somewhat consoled by the suspicion that Jesse, too—no matter what else he tried to project—was not that sort of man, and was happy enough that Wes hadn’t waved a fist at him.) He didn’t think he was alone in finding Jesse intolerable. From his whining to his weird bursts of cheer, when he’d undoubtedly take that goddamn ukulele out and start picking out a grating kid’s song or folk song or (worse) one of his own songs, Jesse had amplified every annoyance and indignity, to the point that the tension relieved palpably the moment he left, cheerfully abandoning his long-suffering girlfriend—a girlfriend saintly enough to send him back home with not just forgiveness but sex—sex!—sex that Wes, and everyone else, had spent fifteen endless minutes pretending miserably to sleep through.
Speaking of Edie, she sat in a corner of the room in a shaft of light from one of the opposite windows, reading a book that Wes himself had summarily rejected, a collection of the complete works of Jane Austen. She had her back against the wall, knees drawn up, book spread open across her thighs. She’d been working on the book for several days now, reading almost constantly, and appeared to be halfway through the volume. “I’ve never been much of a reader,” she’d confessed to Wes over one of their now-common bean-and-cornbread suppers. “I work too much now—well, I mean, I did—until Jesse—you know, touring with him and everything, and then this trip.” She looked embarrassed. “And I just took alt-texts in high school, like everybody but the nerds.” The corner of her mouth turned up, and she stabbed at her beans with a tarnished silver spoon. “But I’m kind of enjoying these novels. I didn’t think I would.”
“Yeah, me, too,” Wes had lied. Then, feeling guilty: “Well. To be honest, I’m not much on fiction. But reading again—that’s been fun. I never have time back home to just sit and read. I mean, unless it’s on my tablet. My feeds, articles, stuff like that. Sitting with an actual book slows the heart a little after . . .” He trailed off, but Edie nodded.
“All of this.”
“All of this,” Wes agreed. Before could stop himself, he blurted out, “I’m sorry, Edie. I’m sorry for asking you to go with Tia. Knowing how it all turned out, what could have happened to you—” Goddammit, he was close to crying now, and he swallowed hard against the sensation. “I can’t bear it. I’ve done so much damage, and it doesn’t even matter that I didn’t think I knew any better.” That village of three hundred that June had mentioned. Was that real? Or was that just a cruel manipulation tactic? “Anyway,” he continued, “I just want you to know that I didn’t ask you because I thought you were disposable. Berto and Anastasia wouldn’t do it. I didn’t think Marta could. I’d have gone, but I knew they wanted me, and I thought that taking off would be more harm than good.”
Edie patted his knee. “I overreacted. I know that’s not what you meant. And a part of me wishes I’d done it. Maybe those two wouldn’t have died. Maybe Tia wouldn’t have. She didn’t have a buddy to Stamp her in time. That’s on me.”
“No,” Wes said. “It’s not.”
“Well, I guess we both need to give ourselves a break. For now, anyway.”
“OK. I’ll save it for my therapist.”
Edie smiled in that crooked, rueful way she had, revealing one dimple. “You do that. You’ll have plenty of material after this.”
Embarrassed—Was that weird, mentioning a therapist? Doesn’t everyone have one?—Wes motioned at her Austen book with his spoon. “So it’s good? You’re liking it?”