Rebekkah didn’t reply as she worked the car through the grid of downtown Marfa. At last she put the Fiesta in park before the vine-choked little ranch house, which now sat far on the feral side of bohemian. “Your father’s place,” she said.
“I see that. What are we doing here?”
“He told your mom that she shouldn’t have to be alone, with everything that’s been happening.” Rebekkah said. “She’s been here for almost a week now.”
“Seriously? I—” Charlie was silenced by the unlikely sight of his bedraggled mother—her curls akimbo, her gaunt frame in a bathrobe of unspeakable pinkness—emerging from the battered front door. Charlie turned back to Rebekkah, his mouth still gaping, to find the girl waving faintly in the direction of his mother.
“Looks like someone wants to say hi to you,” Rebekkah said.
“Looks that way, doesn’t it?” Charlie turned away, watched a turkey vulture make its slow clock-like rotation in the sky.
“She’s been kind to me,” Rebekkah said. “Though I must admit she isn’t always the easiest person to talk to.”
“Come in with me?”
Rebekkah shook her head. “I have the feeling my work here is pretty much done.”
“Done?”
“I told your mom that I wanted to stay, at least until that test, but she made me promise that I’d get myself away from all this. I don’t know if that is her being kind or just wishing me gone.”
“Welcome to the Loving family.”
“Hm,” Rebekkah said, looking at the distance down Paisano Lane.
“So,” Charlie addressed her profile. “Where are you going, then?”
“Who knows,” she said. “Back to New York, I guess? Though I’m thinking that it’s maybe time for someplace new.”
Edwina was panting in Charlie’s lap, and he felt for her ears, pinched them away from her head in that way that made her look like a jumbo-sized bat.
“Edwina—” Charlie said.
“We’re not even going to discuss it,” Rebekkah said. “She belongs to you. Or maybe you belong to her? Ha ha. You and Edwina belong together, anyway.”
Rebekkah, even after her long conversation with Charlie, still could not quite bring herself to meet his sightline, and so Charlie cupped the girl’s cheek in his hand. To his surprise, she leaned into this touch, pressing her face into his palm. She grinned at him now, a little wistfully. “You know,” Charlie said, “I’ve spent a good part of the last year imagining what I might tell you. ‘Thank you’ was never very high on my list.”
Rebekkah sucked at one of her wounded cuticles, nodded. “No,” she said. “Thank you.” Charlie opened the door and carried Edwina out into the Marfa morning. The engine hummed behind him, and the car disappeared down Paisano Lane.
“Ma,” Charlie called across the withered front yard. “What in the hell?”
“Well. Look who’s back again.”
Charlie paused there, on the broken sidewalk. They were still mother and son; a lifetime of apologies and avowals, attacks and defenses were filing up in their ancient ranks. And yet, after all those years, their locked eyes seemed to carry out the tired warfare and settle the terms of truce in the time it took to cross the lawn and meet for a long, muscular hug.
“Can I just say this right now to get it out of the way?” she said.
“Ma—”
“No. I have to just say this, and you know how it pains me. But you were right. Charlie, I shouldn’t have believed. Margot. I should have known better. Did know better.”
Charlie bit down on his lip, trying to suppress the urge to nod vigorously. “What finally convinced you?” he asked.
Ma gestured with her chin to where Rebekkah’s rental car had just sat. “We brought her to this room, and Margot couldn’t even get Oliver to type out her name. Like Rebekkah Sterling was just some stranger. And she was, of course, though only to Margot Strout.”
“Ah.”
“I was talking to a lie, I think I must have known it all along.” Ma put a trembling finger to her mouth. “But it was all I had.”
“It wasn’t all you had,” Charlie said.
“No.” Ma showed him her palms. “You are right. I had you.”
“Have me. You do.”
“I do,” she said.
“I’m back,” Charlie said. “I shouldn’t have gone.”
“And Rebekkah told you.”
“Everything.”
Ma nodded, looking puzzled as to what she might say next. Charlie sucked at the air, particles of dust lodging in his teeth. “But, honestly, maybe you can at least explain this to me? What are you doing staying here?”
But she only bit her lip, a little guiltily.
*
Pa’s house, on the inside, was not at all the larger, rambling, bottle-and-butt-clogged rendition of his ancient painting cabin that Charlie remembered from his few bad visits, years before. Apparently, as Charlie had been indulging his project at Anti-House, Ma had been heading a little project of her own. Pa’s rooms were emptied, the tomb of his solitary years sitting in a Hefty-bag pyramid in the drive. It was an odd, awkward place. What little furniture remained gave them nowhere to hide. But after taking a long, feverish nap, Charlie tried to get into the strange, anarchic spirit of the day. As Pa prepared dinner that evening, a sauce-heavy sheet of enchiladas that Charlie happily anticipated watching his mother try to choke down, they did their fumbling best to muster a conversation over the heavily dented, corrosion-carpeted stove. “Listen,” Charlie said. “About what I said last time, at the hotel?”
“You don’t have to explain yourself to me,” Pa told him. “If there’s anyone to do the explaining, it’s me.”
“So explain it then,” Charlie said. But his old teenage id, that chain breaker with his sardonic quips, was very tired now, nursing a nosebleed in some dim basement of his brain. Charlie looked into Pa’s badly worn face, the lines near his mouth a leathery lattice. At that moment, the only question Charlie wanted to ask was whether his father might consider one of those Alcoholics Anonymous meetings they hosted at the Marfa courthouse.
But then Pa really did explain it to Charlie, as best he could. Charlie would later wish that he could remember all the words Pa used, but he would remember only fragments, the sodden debris that splashed around in his father’s well-liquored memory: Pa’s unspoken worries about his old student Hector, his shame for failing to see the truth about Reginald Avalon, “And your brother, Charlie. Did you know that I was the one who convinced him to come that night? And I’ve never said that. Ten years, I’ve never said a thing about it.” Charlie turned a burner knob, fiddled with a shirt button as an excuse not to see Pa breathing heavily into his outspread fingers.
Charlie knew that perhaps he should still have been outraged, this one feeble attempt of his father’s, a decade too late. But the tragedy of Jed Loving, just then, seemed so much truer than Charlie’s own dog-eared indignation. He nodded.
“So, uh, if I recall correctly,” Charlie said, “this place only has two bedrooms. If I’m taking the guest room, then…”