Eve shifted with a grunt in the threadbare driver’s seat, unsettled by the grinding pain in her lower back. Having two children with a West Texan had given Eve a vocabulary moralistically devoid of expletives, but now she let loose a hot torrent of them. “Fuck!” Eve shouted. “Fuck, fuck, fuck you!”
She pulled Goliath to a stop fifteen miles shy of Crockett State Assisted Care Facility, into a square of tarmac that framed Señor Buddy’s Filling Station. Outside, on a high metal column, stood the old billboard tribute to Reginald Avalon, a faded photo of Bliss Township School’s slain theater teacher, back in his youth as a locally famous Tejano musician, in his mariachi getup, singing to the scrubbed blue heavens, a biblical scroll unfurling beneath him: REG AVALON, REST IN PEACE, BELOVED TEACHER. And Eve knew that a couple of lines of Oliver’s poem were there, too, just to the right of Mr. Avalon’s portrait, and she was glad they were there, but it was just too much to look up at them today.
Oliver’s poem, “Children of the Borderlands,” had become a kind of anthem for the grieving town of Bliss. It was something that Oliver had written for his English class in the last weeks before, and its lines had been reproduced dozens of times now, in local papers and commemorative materials; “Children of the Borderlands” had even appeared once in the pages of a statewide magazine. Though it was true that her son had evinced a startling way with words, Eve understood that the reason for this poem’s celebration was mostly just the sentimentalizing sorrow of her town. But, apparently, the highly localized literary renown that tragedy had lent to Oliver had inspired something in his younger brother. Today, somewhere in a benighted apartment in New York City, Charlie was following in Oliver’s footsteps, giving his early twenties to some book he was supposedly writing, telling the tragic tale of his brother, the doomed bard of Bliss.
Still trembling a bit from the adrenaline rush of the scene in Ron Towers’s office, Eve pushed through the door of Señor Buddy’s. When she saw the face of the cashier, Eve felt betrayed. Why did the universe wait until today to place Abbie Wolcott behind the counter? But if it were any other day, Eve would already have arrived at Crockett State for visiting hours. How long had Abbie, her husband’s old colleague, her son’s old calculus teacher, been working the Señor Buddy’s daytime shift? Desert Splendor sat fifty miles from what was left of the town of Bliss, and for the sake of eluding the dreadful heart plunge that was happening now beneath her ribs, Eve tried, as best she could, to avoid the places she knew the old Blissians still frequented.
“Eve! My God!”
“Abbie. You work here now.”
Abbie Wolcott’s once handsome, blockish frame had expanded to linebacker proportions. Her face, beneath her feathery, bleached bangs, had the blank innocence of a collie. Eve nearly pitied her for a moment, sympathy that a bright burst of Abbie’s cheer instantly atomized.
“I do! It ain’t glamorous, but it gets me out of the house.”
“That’s great.”
“Plus I get to chat with people all day long. You know me, a regular chatterbox.”
“Sounds perfect for you then.”
Abbie made a big cartoonish shrug, something from a Cathy comic strip.
“How are you?” Abbie asked. “It’s been forever.”
“Yeah, forever.” Both women fell silent, considering the last time they’d met, years ago, when Eve turned Abbie away at the door to Oliver’s room, declining the casserole that Abbie clearly hoped she might exchange for insider gossip. But Abbie had been only one of a great many visitors to Bed Four. For the first year or so after, a few blackly dressed classmates, many teachers, the parents of the dead, the stooped principal Doyle Dixon, and the occasional religious leader would still show up, uninvited, at visiting hours, to put their hands on the one boy for whom the tragedy was still not yet at an end.
“How is he?” Abbie asked now. Eve could see the great effort it took Abbie Wolcott to dim her sprightliness to match Eve’s face.
“Advil,” Eve pointed to the rows of packaging behind the counter. “He? You mean Oliver? He’s fine, Abbie. Just fine. I’m sorry, but I’m in a hurry. Six dollars?”
“Five ninety-five.” Abbie Wolcott’s voice was glum and empathetic.
“Right.”
“You know,” Abbie said, “I still keep Oliver in my prayers every night.”
Feeling in her purse for the money, Eve pressed the edges of a coin until her fingertips began to ache. “All right.”
“And all of you, too. Charlie. Jed. Poor Jed.”
“Poor Jed,” Eve said.
“Hey, do you want to buy one of these? It’s for that memorial they’re trying to build. For the tenth anniversary.”
Abbie gestured to a corrugated box of bumper stickers beneath a sign that said $5. On the sticker, amid clip art of praying hands, crucifixes, and angels, was the slogan that had become the official death rattle of the town of Bliss, Texas. WE REMEMBER THE FIFTEENTH OF NOVEMBER. Eve hated that phrase, its bombastic, Orwellian undertone. And the memorial dreamt up by the Fifteenth of November set was plainly contemptible. One of those mothers once mailed her an artist’s rendering of their vision: four iron crosses, vaguely in the style of the famous cruciform I-beam that was left of the World Trade Center after the attacks. Four crosses, representing the four murdered. But what about Eve’s son? A half cross, maybe? Just the horizontal beam? Well, Oliver was half Jewish.
“Anniversary, huh?” Eve said. “Like a special occasion.”
“It’s a nice thing. A good thing they are doing. A way to remember.”
“Honestly, Abbie, that whole town is a memorial. Why would we need another?”
Abbie could hardly manage a shrug now. “Eve.” Abbie rubbed at her ear. “You aren’t alone in this.”
Abbie said this with her bland, Christian-comfort voice, but of course Eve knew it was also a kind of reprimand. Abbie meant that small army of grieving families, friends, teachers, and classmates, officially called Families of the Fifteenth of November, who were behind the big memorial plans. It was largely parents who comprised the group; the children had mostly vanished from the area, hoping (Eve supposed, and who could blame them?) to put that night at a great distance behind them, both geographically and psychologically.
Back in the driver’s seat, when Eve reached into the brown paper sack for her pills, she found that Abbie Wolcott had slipped in a complimentary bumper sticker. WE REMEMBER THE FIFTEENTH OF NOVEMBER. As if anyone out there could ever forget. As if she and Oliver both were not still sealed inside that date. As if all the questions of that night, all Eve knew and couldn’t know about what had happened to her son, could ever fade into the past. WE REMEMBER THE FIFTEENTH OF NOVEMBER. There was so much Eve tried not to remember, her whole past lying stained and shattered on the floor of that schoolhouse classroom. Why? She had worked so hard not to think about it, had tried to narrow her concerns to the ten-by-ten room that held Bed Four, but almost ten years later, that question was still in the room with her, every day.
CHAPTER THREE
Eve had no answers that mattered. She only knew the same facts as everyone else. On that November fifteenth, at 9:09 on the night of the Bliss Township Homecoming Dance, a twenty-one-year-old graduate of that school, a scrawny, multiply tattooed, shaven-haired, and sunken-eyed young man named Hector Espina Jr., had parked his pickup outside a rear door of the schoolhouse and entered the building with an AR-15-style assault rifle, which he had purchased at a gun show in Midland. He had walked not to the dance in the gymnasium, where he could have inflicted maximum carnage, but just to a certain classroom near the back door, where the Theater Club was preparing to go onstage to offer its traditional, biannual performance of a few Spanish-language hits. According to that room’s surviving students, Hector said nothing before he lifted his weapon. The horror was amplified by its swiftness: the whole thing lasted less than a minute. Within sixty seconds, three children and Reginald Avalon were gone. As Hector left the classroom, he found one more s
tudent near the doorway, far from the activities of the Homecoming Dance. What was Oliver doing there? A question that Eve knew better than to ask, even if the unreasonable questioner who resided near her heart could never stop asking it. Eve tried to accept it as blunt fact: Hector did find Oliver there, aimed his weapon, and murdered her family’s future.
Perhaps Hector had in mind further bloodshed, down in the gymnasium; perhaps he had already completed his heinous mission. No one would ever know, because as Hector walked from the theater classroom toward the school’s front doors a janitor named Ernesto Ruiz, working extra hours at the dance that night, secreted himself behind one of the Ionic columns that stood in the atrium. Just as Hector passed, Ernesto lunged from his hidden spot, and in the ensuing scuffle, Ernesto managed to wrangle the rifle from the boy’s hands. Hector scampered away, but not—as it turned out—unarmed. In the waistband of his jeans, Hector carried a second weapon that night, a blunt-nosed .45 he had lifted from beneath his father’s bed.
Texas, setting to so many of the West’s great hangings and blindfolded executions, was a state that still made proud and frequent use of the death penalty, but out there, on the schoolhouse steps, Hector took care of that penalty himself, applying the barrel of his father’s handgun to the center of his own forehead, pulling the trigger, leaving the town to tear itself in two with its questions.
In the first weeks after, the governor appointed a task force, a bunch of cheap-suited city guys, to investigate alongside the FBI. Most of what this task force turned up the town already knew: Hector Espina Jr. had been a minor dealer of drugs around town and also the son of Hector Espina Sr., a sanitation worker, undocumented and of Mexican extraction. On television news, Hector Sr.’s friends and neighbors tried to distance themselves from Hector Jr.—“psychopath,” “strange in the head,” “dirt poor,” and “loner” were the diagnoses they offered. “Sad” and “angry” and “motherless” were the only explanations offered by Hector Sr. himself. But it had been a year of growing violence along the border, a summer of a great many deportations, an autumn of heightening tensions and occasional skirmishes outside Bliss Township School, and so a certain element of the county’s white population rushed to their reflexive conclusions.
“Enough of these madmen sneaking over the border with their guns and their drugs,” Donna Grass told Eve, in one of her teary visits to Oliver’s bed, just a few weeks after. “Something has to be done. We owe our children that much. We owe them that.”
“I really don’t see what any of this has to do with drugs,” Eve said. Her son was still intubated then, unbudging and sallow in an induced coma, and Eve’s early grief was still such a combustible, ungainly force that it seemed an accomplishment whenever she could restrain her sorrow long enough to allow any visitor to leave the room unscathed. But Eve reminded herself that Donna had lost her daughter, and so Eve did her best to make a seam of her mouth.
“Have you seen what it’s like down there on the other side of the river?” Donna said. “It’s practically a war. A never-ending war. You have no idea. It makes them all think that violence is a perfectly acceptable response.”
Eve blinked repeatedly, as if allergic to the unwashed, scalpy odor that came off that mourning woman. “And this is what you believe?”
“These are facts, Eve. Facts. Did you hear what the governor said? Terrorism, he called it.”
“Oh, Donna.”
Weeks had passed, and still no one had come up with any persuasive motive that would have brought Hector and his rifle to that particular room, any reason why a graduated student would slaughter a beloved theater teacher and his students, any reason why Eve’s son had been there, too. Mr. Avalon—the school principal, Doyle Dixon, told Eve in one of his own Crockett State visits—had never even been Hector’s teacher. The only person who might have been able to offer any kind of answer, Hector’s father, had vanished from the area.
But Eve’s refusal to join in Donna’s protests would have made little difference. In a televised news conference, a beefy, red-state character actor named Craig Armison, U.S. Representative for Presidio County, called for further “crackdowns” on “illegals.” Facing the ill will of their neighbors and the imminent likelihood of a border patrol officer knocking at their own doors, the majority of the Latino population of Bliss scattered, draining whole streets of their tenants. Even that night’s only certifiable hero, Ernesto Ruiz, fled for the less contentious states to the north. The old school never reopened after that day. At the start of the next semester, the Bliss Township students were incorporated into the drably modern elementary and high schools out in Marathon. Bliss, Texas, had been the sort of town common in the state’s western half: with all its former industry dead or dying, the activity of the schoolhouse had been the only reason people still came to town, the only source of customers to Bliss’s few weathered businesses. When the school closed, Bliss swiftly slipped its way toward becoming just another ghost town, unmoored in the desert’s ancient, evaporated sea.
“There is no why,” Eve very often told Charlie, told herself. “With some things you have no choice but to accept that fact.” Eve couldn’t allow herself the luxury of questions: the early grim opinions of the doctors, her worries for Charlie’s marred future, the fate of her collapsing marriage, the antipathy that ran down her town like a zipper, baring teeth on either side. Her survival, and so her sons’ survival, too, demanded action.
One day, a week after the neurosurgeons had completed the fourth of their procedures, Dr. Frank Rumble released Oliver from his insulin-induced coma and disconnected the respiration tube to reveal the horrible thing he had become, a boy connected to life by electronic umbilicals, his eyes searching in that terrible lost way, his arms snarled like those of a tyrannosaurus. And in that instant, Eve underwent a transformation of her own. It would later seem to Eve that she had actually seen her former self leave her body then, like a harp-plucking soul cleaving away from a slain character in a cartoon. Eve ran for the hallway, where she found a trash can. Impossible. The first uncomprehending word she had thought that night rose again with the sickness in her throat. Impossible, but it was only now that she understood the reality in which she had been living those last months: the impossible thing, the unfathomable horror actually had become her real life. There is no why, Eve had said, and yet she couldn’t help screaming the question now, to no one in particular, to the walls. “Why?” Then she wiped her mouth, walked back into the room, set her gaze on Dr. Rumble. “What do we do now?”
“Now?” Dr. Rumble said, his voice in battle with itself, to accommodate her need and also to tell the truth. “Now that he’s off the insulin, we can assess the extent of the damage. But from what we’ve seen so far—I guess we just wait and hope for a miracle.”
“A miracle?” she asked, and Dr. Rumble shrugged.
Oliver, please, Oliver, Oliver, please, please, Oliver: Eve’s life, for weeks, contracted to those two words, as she waited for her son’s gaze to come back to her face, for his mouth to open, for a word of his own to come.
Eve herself had rarely used the word miracle without irony, but this one was different. The world had gone monstrous and wrong, there was a blight on the land. What had happened to her son was something from a gothic horror, a curse from above. And if Eve suddenly lived in a world where such a mythic affliction could suddenly befall her family, then why couldn’t a miraculous reversal also be possible? A miracle: as time passed she employed that word as antidote to the probabilities of which Dr. Rumble and his colleagues increasingly spoke. Those aging country men intoned falling percentages in the dour tones of priests as they strapped electrodes to the patient’s head, tested his reflexes with rubber hammers. The round had entered near the base of Oliver’s brain stem; in addition to the structural damage, a blood clot had starved his brain of oxygen for five long minutes during his second surgery. Oliver had arrived at Crockett State with his chance of regaining some consciousness at fifty-fifty. That pe
rcentage shrank to thirty, to ten, to five, to far less than one.
And as their hope shrank away, Jed seemed to be vanishing in kind. He appeared to lose track of day and night. When he came back from his shed at wholly unpredictable hours, he smelled like restaurant waste, stale booze, and something sour-creamy. “Tell me what you are thinking,” Eve pleaded with him once. “We need to talk about it.” There had been a time—a very, very long time before—when their young romance had felt like a marvelously efficient device, a glistening machine that could pack away her old sorrows in words and stories. But now Jed dragged so deeply on his Pall Mall, he might have inhaled the filter. “What is there to say?” he asked. “There are just no words anymore.” Eve pitied him, she hated him, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that she knew she couldn’t have him around.
“I can’t have all of this,” she told Jed a few nights later, gesturing at the smoke-rimed contents of his shed. And this, she knew, was the story of her marriage: Jed was a seconder of opinions, a placater, a head-nodder. At his excommunication, he only nodded again.
And as for the only other Loving left with her at Zion’s Pastures? Eve still panicked at the thought of letting Charlie stray beyond the gates of her family’s home, and she dreaded the idea of letting him go to that prison-looking new school in Marathon, where he would sit in those overbright rooms with classmates who would never look upon Charlie as anything but an object of horrible pity. Eve felt that anything important that she’d ever learned she had taught to herself, and she chose to complete Charlie’s education on her own, at home.
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