“Zeke’s gone,” I said.
“What now?” she asked.
“Zeke’s leaving. Mom, is Zeke here? Like, is he here right now?”
“Do you think that Zeke is in the room, Frankie?” she asked, confused.
“No, but . . . is he in the hallway? Like, have you seen him?”
“Frankie? No. No, I haven’t seen Zeke. I was at work and then I got a call from the police that you were in a car accident and it was really bad—well, it turned out it wasn’t bad, okay? You’re fine, and you’ll be fine—and I drove straight here to the hospital, and I’ve been with you ever since.”
“Okay . . . well, Zeke is going back to Memphis. He’s leaving Coalfield.” I started to cry.
“Sweetie, oh god. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry because I know you really liked him,” she said, patting my head, afraid to hold me because of how much pain I could theoretically be in.
“I miss him already,” I said.
“And, honey, you were upset after he told you?” she asked me. “And you drove home?”
“Yeah . . . and I guess I was driving too fast, or I just wasn’t concentrating on the road, maybe? I don’t really remember, Mom.”
“Well, okay, that’s . . . of course you might not remember. But . . . Frankie? Can you look at me, sweetie?”
“I am looking at you,” I replied.
“You’re kind of looking about six or seven inches to the left of me, but that’s . . . okay, maybe we’ll ask the doctor about that when he comes back to check on you. But I just want to be sure of something. And you can tell me. You can tell me anything.”
“Okay,” I said, knowing that I wouldn’t tell her everything. I would leave so much out.
“You didn’t drive into the tree on purpose? Because you were upset that Zeke was leaving?”
“No!” I replied, because it really wasn’t true. It was more complicated than that, but I wasn’t getting into it. “Mom, no. I just . . . I don’t know. I didn’t try to kill myself, Mom.”
“Oh, sweetie, just hearing you say it makes me feel a little sick,” she told me. “And Zeke seems like a sweet boy, but, god, Frankie, don’t ever kill yourself over a boy. Or anything! There’s nothing worth killing yourself over. Your dad left me and started a whole new family. But I wouldn’t kill myself over that.”
“Mom,” I said, suddenly so tired, “I don’t want to talk about Dad right now.”
“Of course not, sweetie,” she said. She started to choke up, her eyes welling with tears. “I just . . . you are the most beautiful and wonderful and strangest person I have ever met. You are the most amazing person in the world. And you just have to live long enough to make the rest of the world understand that, okay? You have to stay alive.”
“I’ll try, Mom,” I said, and I started crying again.
“In ten years,” she said, “when you’re out of Coalfield and you’re successful and happy, you won’t even remember this summer, sweetie.”
“I think I will,” I told her.
“Well, you’ll remember it,” she said, “but it won’t be as important as it seems right now.”
THINGS MOVED QUICKLY AFTER THAT. AFTER CASEY RATCHET HAD been killed and the uproar that ensued, the police force, with the help of the surrounding counties, would not allow anyone into Coalfield for two weeks. If you did not reside within the town of Coalfield, you could not enter the city limits except for deliveries of necessary items like food and gasoline. The governor of Tennessee declared a state of emergency. By this point there were documented sightings of the poster in every single state in the country, and in at least thirty other countries, and Coalfield was still papered over with them. On TV, ABC News ran a story about the posters. They reported that a man in Denver, Colorado, who had been suffering from terminal cancer had killed himself and left behind a note that consisted only of the lines that I had written earlier that summer. Someone in New York City was wheatpasting huge versions of the poster in Times Square and it had become a game for hipsters to take pictures of them before they were torn down. A woman in Hillsborough, North Carolina, said the lines came from an unpublished novel by her late husband, who had written hundreds of erotic novels under the pen name Dick Paine.
They interviewed our mayor, who said he was still convinced that it was the manifestation of the devil, and that he was hopeful that the strangers in the original black van would be found and brought to justice. Four years later, we’d find out that he had a second family in Knoxville, and that family would move to Coalfield and live with his first family in a weird harmony, and he would be the mayor for years and years after that, until he died of a massive heart attack while sitting in a dunking booth at the county fair.