When at last he summoned the courage to unlock that safe, he was three years older, seventeen, a different boy. Three years, where did they go? Thinking back on them later, all those years would seem to Charlie a single smeary sameness, one very long overbright Tuesday afternoon. His so-called homeschooling? It was, he would have admitted, true what Ma later liked to claim about that time. “You chose it, Charlie! You told me you wanted to stay at home. It was what you wanted, in case you don’t remember. So would you please stop acting like I was some tyrant?”
“Well. You are right. Technically speaking.”
“Technically? What the hell does that mean, technically? These are basic facts.”
Even still Charlie could not quite bring himself to tell her the truth that he folded inside the bland envelope of that word. But why couldn’t she see it for herself? Technically, he did not see their “homeschooling” as a choice. Ma—the immutable icon, the implacable white colossus that had stood guard over his childhood—had been badly fissuring, and Charlie had known that only he could fill the gaps. After all, Pa had already crumbled.
Though Charlie had spent a good part of the first year or so of their “homeschooling” filling out the worksheets Ma ordered from Time4Learning, which issued curricula for the homeschool set, Ma soon lost her will to grade his assignments, and there was just something demonstrably unhealthy about a boy granting his own math exam a B minus. At last he quit this curriculum altogether. In truth, Charlie spent much of those months doing whatever Ma seemed to need, to which they retrofitted educational motive. Her occasional freak desire to go on manic shopping sprees in the concrete architectural atrocities of the new strip malls became “Home Ec.” When Ma, considering what kind of sentence might await Hector Espina’s father, threw herself into a month of library research into aiding and abetting and felony arms possession, she called it “U.S. Government,” and when she told Charlie it was best that they try not to think of it, she called it “Behavioral Psychology.” After Manuel Paz came by Zion’s Pastures to deliver the news that Hector Sr. had simply vanished from the country, and Ma fell into a blackness Charlie couldn’t do anything about, he called the following six months of novel reading and movie watching “Independent Study.”
“A student-interest-led education,” his mother one day named the endless lazy weekend that his high school years had become. “When a child takes his education into his own hands, that’s when greatness is born.”
“But don’t you worry,” Charlie asked, “that I couldn’t tell you what the word trigonometry even means?”
“Neither could I,” his mother distantly replied, “and I went to school.”
His entire “homeschooling,” Charlie perceived, was truly just an extended lecture on the distance between intentions and facts. Despite the fact that Charlie more than once beat at the cabin door until his fists were raw, Pa never stopped drinking out there. Despite Charlie’s hopes that he might rescue Pa from the Marfa hovel to which he later decamped, Charlie could never get his father to summon any greater action than another fumbling apology. Despite his attempts not to hate Pa, Charlie did come to hate him, refusing his occasional offers for “a nice dinner out.” Despite his efforts to hold his mother together—boiling the brown rice and baking the chicken breast as she continued to look upon even these wholesome foodstuffs as if they were toxic substances, wiping down the dust and grime that silently accumulated around them, pressing Edwina’s mouthy grin into her face in a futile attempt to lift her spirits—Ma was lost to him, arriving each morning to the eggs Charlie had scrambled as bleary and fazed as some mental patient. It was only at Bed Four, with her son’s vegetative body before her, that Ma groped her way out of silence, reading to Oliver from his old paperbacks. Charlie wanted to allow his mother whatever she needed to hold herself together, but a terrible anxiety, the strangeness of the scene he was witnessing, the depth of Ma’s—what? faith? delusion?—was an alarm wailing inside him.
Of course Charlie also did his best to keep any of his own questions about that night’s aftermath from his mother. He never once spoke the name Hector Espina aloud. But Charlie himself couldn’t resist pilfering an occasional newspaper from the Crockett State waiting room, and the stories he found there did little to explain anything.
Like a tic in his brain, Charlie couldn’t help but imagine and imagine it, the impossible fact of it, what it would have felt like to be Hector Espina on that night, the hate that aimed that weapon upon children and fired. There was another kind of border there, a towering wall over which his imagination could not climb. There is no why: Charlie was beginning to see the wisdom in his mother’s motto. “There is no why,” Charlie told the dog that Rebekkah Sterling had delivered to Oliver’s room, as if Edwina might be in possession of some knowledge to contradict him. But Edwina just licked his nose.
By the so-called senior year of their so-called homeschooling, student and teacher exchanged hardly a word. Ma spent her days like an old lady, her movements gone slow and stooped, as she shuffled clumsily through whole lightless seasons, lost in a kind of internal arctic night. Somehow, Charlie managed to convince her to let him buy a used Suzuki motorbike, and he spent the better part of his senior year’s first semester making a tour of the freaks, goths, gays, and other various castoffs of West Texas. He frequented Atomic Age Comics and Fantasy, where he met a twenty-eight-year-old named Antonio Mendoza, whose silver-riveted tongue at last put to bed any final doubts Charlie might have harbored about his inclinations. But Charlie was only seventeen then, his youth itself seemed a promise of something, and he began hatching a plan for a greater escape. Very late one sleepless night, he unlocked the toy safe. He opened Oliver’s journal.
And what Charlie found there, in Oliver’s chicken-scratch script, was a fitful record of his brother’s attempts to become a poet. Many disembodied lines, dozens of abortive stanzas, a lot of rhymy, jangly nonsense, but also a few complete poems. Half of Oliver’s reply to the world, cut off midsentence.
When Ma had shown Charlie Oliver’s one published work, “Children of the Borderlands,” which Oliver’s old English teacher had sent to The Big Bend Sentinel, it had seemed so unlike the dreamy, fantastical stories they had imagined that it appeared to Charlie that it must have been written by another person entirely. The truth was that Charlie hadn’t loved that poem when he first read it; the clipped language seemed disjointed and strange. But Oliver himself had seemed disjointed and strange to him in those last months before, when a nameless rift had opened between their upper and lower bunks. (“What are you thinking about?” Charlie once asked his brother, a full half hour after he had shut the lights. “You wouldn’t understand,” Oliver told him.)
But now, on the inky, chaotic, loosely bound pages of this journal, Charlie knew he had found the missing link in his brother’s poetic evolution, from the lower-bunk storyteller he’d been to the almost-poet he’d become. Though the notebook lacked any sort of organizational scheme, Charlie identified the theme, announced on the fourth page.
I still can’t explain it,
I could never find time,
For my words couldn’t contain it,
And now I’m failing in rhyme.
Rebekkah.
I once heard of a land,
Where time bends its arrow,
Hours at our command
To widen or narrow.
So come away with me?
Through a hole in the sky?
Our little infinity,
To figure out why.
So overwhelmed was Charlie that he did not see any childlike clumsiness in Oliver’s lines. To his own seventeen-year-old eyes, these lines were like a signpost, establishing the poetic journey to follow. The majority of the journal’s poems fixated on the possibility of hidden, better realities, as borrowed from the stories they had told as children. In another world / I might become anyone / an Oliver unfurled / with ten bodies in one / But sometimes at night, / in the darkness I’m freed
/ to thinking that I still might / become whatever you need, one short poem read. In my dreams time is frozen, / a universe of you / a single morning chosen / to be endlessly true, another poem began. They were, Charlie saw, all love poems for the kind, vaguely sad girl he’d met once upon a time, on the night of the Perseid shower, the girl who had given Charlie his pug. Rebekkah Sterling, who clearly had not quite loved Oliver back. In one homage to his beloved Bob Dylan, Oliver had written, Though a Rolling Stone / Might gather no moss / Like a complete unknown / I gather just loss.
Charlie read patiently, staring down Oliver’s cryptic scrawl until it yielded its words. By the time he reached the journal’s conclusion, the dawn was beginning to gray the lechuguilla-dotted hills out the windows. The fantastical glee of their long-ago bunk bed sessions might have faded years before, but it was only now, seeing his brother’s last words, that Charlie felt a draft of that long-ago magic swirling back into the room. And then a thought occurred to Charlie. It was a silly, nostalgic notion, he knew that. But how else to explain what had happened to Oliver—how else to make sense of the mysterious linkage between the stories of hidden lands they had invented and the actual buried earth where his brother now resided—than to believe, in a space beyond understanding, that something really had chosen Oliver?
It was after that morning that Charlie began to hear another voice, the word that his heart softly but persistently beat: go, go, go. He had to go. In the Marathon Public Library, at a battered old computer terminal, its beige keyboard yellowed with a long history of fingers, he did an Internet search for the words homeschool and college, and that is how he found out about a place called Henry David Thoreau College, in Merrymount, New Hampshire. “In the autodidactic spirit of our namesake, our aim is a diverse campus of independent thinkers.” Thoreau College, the Web site informed him, was a school that “considers each student as an individual and bases admission decisions not on the common metrics but on the strength and originality of student writing.” The Web page featured the grinning faces of immigrants, reformed juvenile delinquents, and homeschoolers, all aglow in democratic New England light, autumnal sycamore leaves fanning over a Georgian colonial backdrop. The school’s message seemed to be that all he needed to join that hearty cohort was a high school graduation equivalency certificate and an original thought in his head.
In the way other boys his age might have lied about a club meeting or a sleepover at a friend’s house to conceal recreational drug use, Charlie invented a comic book convention in El Paso, where he in fact tried his luck on the GED in a high school classroom that was that Saturday a room of adolescent outcasts: sallow-faced addicts, tattooed miscreants, moonfaced fundamentalist homeschoolers. Propped up by some eleventh-hour textbook reading he’d done, Charlie passed the exam by an unrespectable margin, and so he proceeded to compose an early application essay to Thoreau, in which he described the events of November fifteenth, the years of aftermath, his brother’s vegetative condition. All the guilt, worry, and hope that he knew his mother could not bear to hear. Maybe Oliver was the real writer in the family, but it was as Charlie watched the unspoken truth of his last years transform into words on the page that he began to think that he might like to write, too. One afternoon, when Ma was off at Crockett State, he raided the bedside drawer where she kept her alarming bank statements and tax returns on her meager income. The next day, Charlie made Xeroxes, to apply for financial aid.
Ma, it is fair to say, did not take his announcement of admission and nearly full scholarship to a good liberal arts college the way most parents would. When Charlie passed her the thick envelope from Thoreau, the document fluttered in her suddenly convulsive hands. Her eyes began to fill, but before they spilled over, she excused herself for her bedroom. “Ma?” Charlie asked, by the door. She was so silent in there that he wondered if she might have suffered a medical event. “You just take care of yourself,” she said at last, and Charlie would never be certain if she meant that as a cruel rebuke or a piece of motherly advice.
Charlie saw his brother just once more. It hadn’t been so long since his last visit to Bed Four, but it felt to Charlie like a very long time since he had seen Oliver clearly. He saw now how his brother was aging too rapidly, his hands furrowed with veins, the tremble of his jaw like one of the geriatrics down the hall gumming his pudding, the scar where the bullet had entered like a gray nickel lodged just behind his right ear.
After his mother excused herself to the bathroom that afternoon, Charlie knelt over the bed. “Hi there,” Charlie said. For a reply, Charlie received only the gurgle of an IV bag. Charlie was thinking of telling Oliver about his leaving for college; was it selfish or was he finally doing the right thing?
“Oliver, listen—” he said. But it was Ma’s voice he heard in his throat. Sometimes death doesn’t look like what you’d expect. And now Charlie was considering Dr. Rumble’s wisdom, which he had long ago raged against. Charlie knew he wasn’t speaking to Oliver, just the vivified meat of his body. And it was occurring to Charlie that maybe the truest fantasy written by his family had nothing to do with parallel universes or spirit worlds. That maybe their grandest fiction was just Ma’s faith that Oliver would come back to them. Charlie grasped for the paper sleeve in which Oliver’s flesh was encased. “Oliver, I know, I should make her let you go, I just don’t—” His voice fell silent in the softly humming room.
When Ma came back, she found Charlie still curled there, bucking with his sobs.
“Ma.” And that, Charlie knew, was the moment he could have said it. His brother was gone, but they still might have had one another, as they had in those first weeks after. But he said nothing, and Ma’s face tightened. She pulled him into the hallway.
“What the hell is the matter with you? Don’t you know he can hear you? Wailing over him like he’s already gone. What were you thinking?”
For a long beat, she assessed Charlie through squinted eyes, like some final exam for their homeschool years. “I truly don’t understand how I raised such a selfish child,” Ma said.
One day, a few weeks later, Charlie carried Edwina onto a bus without so much as a phone call to say good-bye to his father, and he rode for three days. Oliver’s journal in his hand, Charlie stepped into a green, alien planet.
Thoreau! There weren’t words to describe the joy Charlie knew when, after four years frozen in the ice of his family’s grief, his affable, impish, truer self thawed to life. He became the kegger host, the campus gossip, the kid who’d do a naked lap around the quad on a dare. “You are crazy,” said all those charmed faces of his new friends, Nicole, Francesca, Juan, Michael—and too many more to name. And the wonder of snow, which fell and fell that first winter over the high pines and frozen lakes of New Hampshire. There at Thoreau, where even his gayness was not a liability but a kind of social currency—or maybe, he considered, his popularity was just an effect of the prancing pug he trailed behind him—Charlie found himself well liked in the generalized way that meant he received enough invitations, saw enough boys, that he never had to let any one person get to know him well.
To Charlie’s surprise, when he called home, Ma sounded—well, still like Ma. “Oh, Charlie,” she would say, her voice as flat and empty as the Texan hardpan Charlie ached to remember. “I don’t have much time to talk, I’m sorry to say, but you should know not to call so close to visiting hours.”
Even if Ma never had patience for any stories of his collegiate life, even if she treated his time at Thoreau like some indulgent adolescent excursion she was forced to permit, Charlie was both nicely reassured and a little appalled to find how unnecessary he had been in holding her together. When she one day told Charlie that she had sold off Zion’s Pastures to cover medical expenses, he felt more relieved than wistful.
Before Charlie knew it, the bright and blustery graduation day arrived in Thoreau’s quadrangle—springtime elms shooting their ladybug buds, fat New England clouds dawdling through an outrageously blue sky—and where
would he go now?
As his classmates stared off into the ambiguity of their futures that afternoon, Charlie was thinking of the essay he’d written years before, which had earned him admission to that school. He was thinking of the lost poems of the lost boy who would have no place in the future Charlie would now make for himself. The true purpose of his education revealed itself to Charlie in an ephiphanic burst, the way he’d always imagined artistic inspiration struck: before he could continue his own life, he would first put down his brother’s story. It was on that graduation stage that Charlie began to conceive of a book that would use Oliver’s poems like illustrations for the story of his lost brother’s life, his family’s life, the life and death of the town of Bliss, Texas, the blurring memory of November fifteenth in the amnesiac awareness of his frenzied, trigger-happy nation, the great and tragic love story of Oliver Loving and Rebekkah Sterling. A book! The idea took shape with ever-greater dimensions in Charlie’s imagination.
He would write, but where? The answer to that question, Charlie believed, was also in the journal he carried onto the commencement stage. Rebekkah Sterling and he had not spoken since the gift of Edwina, but Charlie had been conducting routine Internet searches for her name. She had made it to New York, where her name appeared in the listings for a few nightclub music shows. Charlie was proud of her. New York! Just like that long-ago night in the VW, New York seemed the very name of freedom, which Rebekkah had already found and Charlie would follow. He pictured them becoming friends. He would become friends with the girl who his brother had chased after until that last night, the only person who could tell Charlie the story he needed most, about his brother’s last months before. He imagined long conversations with her in sidewalk cafés, Edwina panting at their feet, steam rising from their cappuccinos, Oliver regenerated in the mist. Never mind that Rebekkah had not yet replied to any of his e-mails. Charlie could convince her.
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