“Wrong direction?”
“Last I heard he’s got himself involved in some bad business. Selling drugs around town. It’s such a shame, really, all that wasted talent, what he could have been.”
Mr. Avalon made a boyish display of pouting, sticking out a shining lower lip. “But maybe, in a way, I’m just like him, aren’t I? What I might have been, too.”
Rebekkah could see that Mr. Avalon needed reassuring, but she couldn’t think of the right words.
“It’s different for a girl like you,” Mr. Avalon added, a little viciously. “You couldn’t understand.”
“What do you mean?”
“You probably can’t even see it, can you? The gifts you’ve been given in this world. Hate to think how far I myself might’ve gone if I’d been born to some rich white folks like yours.”
Rebekkah nodded awkwardly. “You’ve given your life to help kids like me. And that isn’t nothing,” Rebekkah said. She did not ask, How many of us have there been?
Rebekkah hated the thought of other super special students before her; she hated the threat of Mr. Avalon pulling his attention away. Someday, when he was through with her. But mostly Rebekkah was afraid, at all times, that she would do something wrong with Mr. Avalon, and she’d have to go back to the way things were before. Everything had gotten better, including her stomach. Even her father, who noticed nothing, had noticed the difference. “Look at you, finally brightening up a bit!” Rebekkah had kindness to spare. Despite Mr. Avalon’s admonishment, Rebekkah still showed up each day for a nice, warm hour of Oliver Loving’s attention.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Hector’s painting scenes of his father as a feast for insects, a mumbling kid who had suddenly become a machine, an instrument of punishment that day in Jed’s classroom: Why didn’t Jed ever say a thing about it?
Silence: Jed had learned it from his father. When Jed was a boy, his pa, Henry Loving, had conversed with his family in grunts, sighs, coughs, throat clearings. Silence: Jed had learned it from his mother, too. After a stroke ended his father’s life, Jed and his mother hardly spoke of him again—his ma had a knack for twangy chatter that never touched on any subject that mattered. Like some sort of compensation, in the very room where his pa had expired, Jed had spent the balance of his teenage years filling the settler’s cabin with better visions, his paint piled thick. Jed hatched a plot to apply to art school, sketched mental images of himself in New York galleries, paint-spattered in a bathrobe on a European balcony—a life so unlike West Texas, he might forget home entirely. And yet, there he was now, almost thirty years later, just an art teacher at his old school, time still scrolling by, and at last Jed understood. That image of himself painting in New York or Paris? False hope. Jed’s assumption of his own father’s fate, his up-all-night drinking sessions, his brooding? Reality. He was his father’s son. No, except for the lame paintings he still dabbled at, he was his father. A silence in the shape of a man, a family he disappointed daily, worries he never spoke of to anyone.
The years just kept passing, but time was also a salve for a schoolteacher, easing away his students and the concerns they brought to Jed’s room. Hector Espina left Jed’s art class, and Jed never spoke to the boy again. New bodies came into the room with their new problems. Only the teachers remained.
Reginald Avalon. At the time, he was just another faculty member, a man whom Jed had known since they were boys together in that same school; soon he’d become a kind of local deity to the town of Bliss, his sun-scrubbed image singing out from the high billboard over Señor Buddy’s. Reginald Avalon: Jed would later wonder at the man’s remarkable capacity for transformation. At seventeen, Reg had already been on his way to his brief local fame, playing fandangos and honky-tonks, doing performances at the school assemblies. As a kid, Reg had been nearly as friendless as Jed. Half Mexican, half white, Reg had seemed a boy welcomed by no one. From a distance Jed had admired the way Reg seemed to put his own aloneness to artistic use. What had made his performances so arresting was a certain wizened melancholy in his voice. Watching from the audience, Jed had thought he recognized his own outsider’s sadness, but Jed had never spoken more than a few words to Reg. And he had hardly ever spoken to the man Reg had become. After a few years out in Los Angeles, Reg had come back to West Texas to play his old Spanish songs to diminishing crowds at county fairs until he stopped playing and became a teacher. Those who can’t do—Reg and Jed, the town’s two failed artists, in the end they both couldn’t do.
A dream deferred: a line that Oliver had once showed him, in a book of poems by Langston Hughes. “Everyone will know,” Hector had once told Jed about his own future fame. But what happens to a dream deferred? Hughes asked. It might dry up like a raisin in the sun, as it had for Jed and Reg. Or maybe, Langston Hughes wrote, it just sags, like a heavy load. Or does it explode?
At last Jed would see. Jed hadn’t set eyes on Hector in years, but in the weeks after, Jed would see the kid’s face every day on the local news, in the hospital waiting room. And that was when Jed would know that he could have stopped it, years before. He could have done something. He could have brought that boy’s artwork to the attention of the school counselor or Officer Filipovic, the cop who patrolled the school halls from time to time. He could have sent Hector and Henry to Principal Dixon’s office that day; he could have spoken with the principal about the immensity of Hector’s rage, very unlike the little shoving contests that had broken out in his classroom over the years. But his old worries about Hector Espina would not be the worst fact Jed would never speak aloud.
November fifteenth. Oliver wanted to stay home. Oliver would have stayed home, if not for Jed. And yet, just outside the gymnasium doors, Jed phoned Zion’s Pastures that night. “Now you want me to show up alone,” Oliver resisted, but still Jed managed to talk him into it. “Rebekkah was asking me about you,” Jed even lied to his son, to convince him to come that night. It was just a playful little conversation with Oliver at the time. Later, it would become the sickness Jed would swallow down, unable to admit it to his wife or to Charlie. Jed would have to grow a second organ in his gut to hold it all in. But deep in his black stomach, the unspoken words would only fester, a sickness that would seed his body with infectious growths. It was my fault Oliver was there. Mine. Me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Years later, so many of those nights with Mr. Avalon would remain unplaceable. His eyes, rampant and dark. Cicadas droning, a deafening static. A gagging in her throat. Somewhere, very distantly, a train bellowing through the desert night. Rebekkah’s shame was at its worst when Mr. Avalon kept all the lights burning brightly. What a frail, bruised, freckled girl she must have looked like to Mr. Avalon, what she and Mr. Avalon would have looked like to anyone else. It broke her apart. Rebekkah felt herself shape-shifting then, like a creature in one of the tall tales Oliver had told her. She was becoming a monster, an insect, a toad, and one night, as if it could work like a fairy tale, she found Oliver at the football stadium and let him kiss her once. But it did not work like a fairy tale, at least not for her. Horribly, she could see in his brightened face, it seemed to work that way for Oliver.
It was October now. Everything was building to a climax. At rehearsals Mr. Avalon’s Theater Club had nearly perfected their repertoire for the Homecoming Dance. They had ordered their traditional Mexican costumes, which even the white kids paraded around the school hallways, to the befuddlement and mockery of Hispanic and white students alike. No one, not even her fellow performers, spoke much to Rebekkah at all.
Hector had not, as Mr. Avalon had requested, left them alone. A couple more times she had seen Hector, silent in the school parking lot, watching them get into Mr. Avalon’s car. One morning just before school, Hector cornered her near the back door.
“Just sing for me. Let me hear what this supposedly amazing voice sounds like,” Hector said, his breath flashing on her cheeks. Rebekkah looked at the students filing into the school, saw thei
r eyes watching her.
“Please leave me alone,” she said, as Mr. Avalon had instructed her to say. But even if this guy frightened her, Rebekkah felt so alone in her secret that she nearly asked, What did he do to you?
What she had done with Mr. Avalon on the sofa, the bedroom mattress, the floor of the shed, the backseat of the Cadillac, had made her wiring go wonky. Her body had started to come up with its own odd decisions; sometimes, after she came home from Mr. Avalon’s house, her hands reached instinctively for a cheese knife and pressed it into her thigh. Her stomach heaved at unpredictable times, so direly that she worried next time, in the middle of literature class, she wouldn’t make it to the bathroom.
Literature class, poor Oliver. She’d still often find him sitting there, pretending not to have waited for her. Sometimes, she’d catch Oliver stealing glimpses of her through the window of the theater room door. She hadn’t spoken with the boy in weeks. She wanted only to spare him from more hurt. In truth she thought little of Oliver at all. But then, one day, Oliver did that astonishing thing: he raised his hand in class and read his poem to everyone. That poem Oliver had made of their conversations, of the stars, of her silence toward him. Rebekkah thought it was beautiful, and so it was awful, the distance from the girl he imagined to the person she had become. She wanted only to disappear, to be the object of no one’s attention. She stayed at home for three days, wanting it all to stop, until her mother noticed and made her return. She tried to think of a way to tell Oliver to leave her alone. Of course, he didn’t understand. She felt she must have worn her secret on her skin, but she perceived anew how alone she was in it.
Or maybe not alone, not completely. Hector came back, just once more. She was at Mr. Avalon’s house. They were together on the couch, watching one of the Shirley Temple films he inflicted upon her. No knock at the door this time. Hector let himself in, careened into the living room on unsteady feet.
“What in God’s name—” But when Hector collapsed into an armchair, the thing he rested on his lap silenced Mr. Avalon’s protest.
“I’m not going to ask you again,” Hector said, his tough guy routine slurry and unconvincing, as he ran a quaking finger along the hilt of a sheathed hunting knife. “If you are so special, let’s hear you sing.” Even in the madness of her fear, some other Rebekkah, the one who had metamorphosed inside her, was relieved that the moment of crisis had at last arrived.
“Hector—” Mr. Avalon said.
“Sing,” Hector told Rebekkah. What could she do? She looked to Mr. Avalon, who nodded at her faintly. She put her hands on her knees. She opened her mouth, but no sound would come out.
“You’ll be nothing. Nothing. Just like me,” Hector said, as if something had been settled. He lifted himself from the chair, knelt clumsily to retrieve the weapon he’d dropped, but Mr. Avalon was faster. The ridiculous way Mr. Avalon waved around that knife, still in its fringed leather casing, was nearly funny. “If I see you again, I’m calling the police.”
Edwina snuffled up to this scene. “A dog,” Hector said. “Don’t tell me you even bought her a dog, too?”
“Her name is Edwina,” Rebekkah said.
Rebekkah scooped up Edwina, as if worried that Hector might abduct her. The boy’s eyes had gone smoky. He asked Mr. Avalon the question that Rebekkah had never asked. “Just tell me. How many of us have there been?”
“Please,” Mr. Avalon said. “Just leave.”
Hector turned to Rebekkah then, his eyes emphatic and wide. “The mistake,” Hector said, “is to hope. I’m sorry for you. I am.”
After that last visit from Hector, Rebekkah and Mr. Avalon tried to continue as before, but the spell was broken, the circuit blown. They hardly touched at all, or at least not in the ways they had. In the days that followed, Hector did not reappear, and Rebekkah just played her music for Mr. Avalon, his favorite songs and a few beloved country hits. “Jolene,” “Achy Breaky Heart,” “Devil Town,” “The Thunder Rolls,” “West Texas Waltz.”
The only time anyone saw the truth, it was the sad-eyed boy from her English class. It was Oliver’s face in the window, as Mr. Avalon hunched over her in a kitchen chair. Oliver was there and then he vanished. Had she just imagined him in the shapes the moonlight etched onto the glass?
And yet. The night of November fifteenth, the Homecoming Dance, and Oliver pulled her aside and told her he would tell someone. She begged him not to say anything; she wanted more than anything for him to say something. A boy from the Theater Club tugged her away, made her follow him to the classroom. Distantly, songs still played: “Baby Got Back,” “Push It,” “Kiss from a Rose.” As the other kids tuned their instruments, studied their lyrics, Rebekkah felt she was watching her bandmates from underwater. She was down there, at the bottom of her own dark sea, when she saw Hector Espina again, framed in the classroom door.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Stashed in the drawer of a desk, Jed kept a certain document, now worn down to the softness of cloth. He’d read it a thousand times. The page was a timeline he’d made, with the assistance of the official police report. The numbers were a torture, but the only containers for the horrors that still flashed through him: the ultrabright gymnasium lights thrown on, a chaos of teenage bodies and squad lights outside, a blind panic hurtling him back down the halls, redness spreading on the shining schoolhouse floors. Arms holding him back, a throat howling. His own.
9:06: Hector Espina enters the school carrying AR-15-style assault rifle.
9:08: Hector Espina enters theater classroom.
9:09: Hector Espina fires first round, striking Brad Rossening in the leg.
9:10–9:11: Twenty-two rounds fired, injuring Jonathan Strom, Brian Hadley, Anna Hoke, Jennifer Schmidt. Fatal shots to Keith Larsen, Vera Grass, Roy Lopez, and Reginald Avalon.
9:13: Hector Espina exits classroom. Hector finds Oliver in the hall. Fires three rounds, two striking the wall, one striking Oliver.
9:16: Ernesto Ruiz tackles Hector in the school atrium, takes Hector’s rifle. Hector escapes out the front doors.
9:20: From the atrium, Ernesto Ruiz hears sound of one more shot fired.
9:25: First police car arrives to find Hector’s body on the school’s front steps, handgun still in his hand.
“Nine thirteen,” Jed said aloud, so many times over the years, as if those numbers might bring him back to that instant. The torture, the appalling fact turning a decade old and as unbelievable as ever: that minute had already passed. Nine thirteen: Oliver, he could have screamed. Hector. He could have tackled the boy. Thrown his body over the weapon. Taken the shot. Killed him. Oliver! Too late: 9:13 passed to 9:14, passed to ten years. Jed had done nothing.
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.
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