Oliver Loving

by Stefan Merrill Block

  In your solitary walks at Zion’s Pastures, in your days gazing unfocusedly at schoolhouse blackboards, in your nights beneath the grinning cow skulls that lined your bedroom walls, in the sad silence that had fallen over the bunks that you and Charlie once filled with your stories, you had addressed an imagined Rebekkah with a thousand variations on one same question: If she were only going to abandon you to your failed poems and the lonesome throb of your blood, why torture you with the hope of that kiss? “Rebekkah,” you very often sighed to no one in those weeks, her name involuntarily escaping your mouth. Each day, after school, you couldn’t resist turning a few extra hallways in the direction of Mr. Avalon’s theater classroom, for the chance to glimpse Rebekkah through the little wire-veined window in the door as the club rehearsed its selections for the Homecoming Dance. And as you trailed Rebekkah, a word trailed you as well, the word for what you were making yourself into. Stalker.

  And so, what did a lonesome speck of a boy have to lose? Back at school that morning, you were doing a sort of stakeout, waiting a few paces down the hall from Mrs. Schumacher’s classroom. When Rebekkah brushed past, you surprised even yourself by the clarity of your anger, how forcefully you grabbed her shoulder.

  “You have to at least explain it to me,” you said. “At least once.”

  Rebekkah cocked her head. She did not seem just to be playing innocent; she looked truly innocent, as if she were oblivious to the devastation she could cause. “Explain what?”

  “Explain what? How about the fact that you talk to me every morning for a month, that you even—and then, what? Nothing.” You were dismayed that the speech didn’t come out with the fury you intended. You said this with the full eyes, the cutely halting voice of a thwarted teen lover from some rom-com. All it took was one second of Rebekkah’s attention to restore you to the feeling that had begun in those mornings before school in Mrs. Schumacher’s literature class, brought to consummation, or at least your PG version of consummation, outside the football stadium.

  “I’m sorry, Oliver.” Rebekkah’s eyes darted about, as if looking among the thinning crowds for someone to rescue her from this scene she couldn’t quite tolerate. “I don’t know what to say. I don’t like you like that.”

  “You don’t like me like what?”

  “I have to go. We have to go to class. I’m sorry, okay? Sorry.”

  And how is this for foreshadowing? It was that very day that Mrs. Schumacher began a monthlong unit on Homer’s Odyssey. “Does anyone know the secret about this gift that the Greeks gave the Trojans?” asked Mrs. Schumacher. “What was inside the horse?”

  The class was silent. “It wasn’t a gift at all,” you said. “It was a trap.”

  “Bingo!” Mrs. Schumacher tossed, as was her custom, a Hershey’s Kiss as a reward.

  And it was then—your mouth pulverizing the stale chocolate, Rebekkah flushing under your gaze—that you saw it. Under the intense beam of your hard stare, Rebekkah shifted in her chair, a little movement like the ones that you had tracked so closely for weeks. This time, however, you noticed something strange there, just above the hemline of her skirt. A purplish mass, threaded with red. Very unlike her slight blue discolorations that you occasionally noticed, this was a severe bruise that ran halfway to her knee, its epicenter bound together by two Band-Aids, the cotton of which was stained a rusted brown.

  By late third period, you were learning a new lesson about love, one that perhaps gave you a little sympathy for the mother whose worries so often agitated you. The sight of the bruise on Rebekkah’s leg shot your veins with a very pleasing brand of upset. Heartsick boy that you were, you found, in that quick glimpse beneath Rebekkah’s school desk, a merciful exit from your moody solitude. A new grim story, veering away from the ordinary dull one about your own rejection, a mystery you could pursue if you could no longer pursue her directly. Just one quick glimpse of a bad bruise, and you were conjuring monstrous abuse scenarios. Her father? You remembered her worry that night at the football game, her fear that the two of you would be seen together. Maybe her father was one of those jealous, faintly incestuous types familiar to West Texas, the kind of man who wielded his righteous morality like a bullwhip, disciplining his daughter like livestock, warning boys off what he believed belonged to him. Your dejection needed a face to clutch at, a reason, and here (or so you tried to convince yourself) was an answer for why Rebekkah would limit your company to your morning sessions, why she would steal a kiss, why she would be afraid to let it go any further. She must have been protecting you! But if her father was a hitter, why did she only ever speak of him like some obnoxious stranger in her house? Why—after all you said about your own parents—did she never tell you a thing about it?

  You were silent as Pa drove you home that afternoon, silent at the dinner table as Charlie ran relays back to his backpack on an armchair to display the recent fruits of his labors, his marker- and sparkle-bedazzled report on Mount St. Helens, the A– paper on the construction of Versailles, the B+ on his math exam. You could only poke at Ma’s “famous” macaroni casserole.

  “How about you?” Ma asked. “Good day?”

  “Great day. Actually, I was wondering if I could borrow the car tonight?”

  “What for?”

  “I have a study group.”

  “A study group? For what?”

  “It’s, ah, for this project on The Odyssey. Something I’m doing with Rebekkah, actually.” Why did you mention her name? Perhaps just for the magic of the sound of it in your mouth.

  “Rebekkah? Rebekkah Sterling? For real?” Pa asked. “Good for you. Good for her, too, of course. Lucky to have a, ah, study partner like you, huh?” Pa was grinning at you now, in his dumb-sly way.

  “It’s just random. We were randomly assigned, I mean.”

  “This study group, it’s at her house?” Ma asked. “Can I at least speak with her parents first?”

  “Speak with them about what?” you said. “What do you think will happen?”

  “It’s just a normal thing parents do, Oliver. They check to be sure there will be parental supervision.”

  “Ma,” you said, loading an entire counterargument in that word. In another family, this might not have seemed such an unusual conversation, but in the history of your life as Eve Loving’s son, this tense impasse represented a new escalation of the cold war of wills you and she had been conducting those last weeks.

  “Fine,” she said, waving her hands. “You do what you want.”

  Just after seven that night, you went ahead with your lie. It was ridiculous, you knew it, but the outrage of your heartache, funneling into the narrow trough of your worry, roared through you, and you needed to release it. As Goliath tore through the night, a Bob Dylan cassette wailing—What drives me to you is what drives me insane—the divider lines under the bright beams looked like stars at warp speed. Just after eight, you pulled up outside the address for Rebekkah Sterling that was printed in the spiral-bound school directory open on the passenger seat.

  What would you say to her? You tried to convince yourself that the right words, the real poetry, came when they were needed, and you hadn’t planned them. And yet, you wouldn’t be needing them tonight. All the windows in Rebekkah’s house, one of those new stucco McMansions metastasizing over the high plains, were lightless at 7:45 P.M. Only the foyer light was on, and just minutes after you arrived, it too went dark. Two adult bodies came from the front door, arguing over something you couldn’t make out. The man was barreling unsteadily—drunkenly; a drunkard’s son could recognize a drunk man even from fifty yards. He was a rotund, rook-shaped man, with no apparent genetic linkage to the girl you knew, but the rail-thin, birdish woman hovering behind him? You felt your heart click into higher gear, the sight of her parents like some secret your imagined, often-conjured Rebekkah was at last whispering into your ear. But where was the actual Rebekkah? You remained very still as they boarded the wine-dark Mercedes in the drive and drove away. You remai
ned there for a long while, looking into those vacant, spotless panes of glass as you imagined Rebekkah’s presence beatifying each sterilized room. You imagined what it might feel like for her to live in a gargantuan, automated museum of a house like that.

  But no one was home now, or at least no lights were on, and so what else could you do but continue your group project for one? It would have been too shameful to return home so soon. You reclined in the seat, distantly hoping and also fearing Rebekkah might come if you waited long enough. You waited and waited, and you were trying again to play the lovesick poet; you tried to pass the time by composing a few lines. But you could not compose, that certain damning word was coming back to you with too much brutalizing force—a boy watching silently from a parked car outside a girl’s house, what word for it but stalker? Still, you passed an hour that way.

  You were startled by a dull thud. You flailed about, but fortunately you were at some distance, in a car shadowed beneath a stand of cottonwoods. And from that darkness, you saw that another vehicle had pulled up, a ways down Monte Grande Lane. A figure was marching across the pavement. This wasn’t Rebekkah’s father, come home—this man’s gait was swift and youthful. This guy walked toward the front door, and it was there, in the dim and far-off light of the wall sconces, that you first glimpsed his face. The wide dome of a shaven head, the features beneath crowded and unreadable. A young man, who had the courage to do what you did not, to try the doorbell. When no light came on, when the door refused to budge, he knocked at it, so forcefully that the report reached your window. No response, so he knocked harder still. Was this, in fact, your imagined abuser? The violence with which he assaulted the door fit the monster you had been conjuring, but even from this distance he seemed an unlikely candidate. He seemed too old for Rebekkah, too forceful a presence to imagine a quiet-sad girl ever knowing him in a meaningful way.

  At last, after repeated applications of fist to door, finger to doorbell, this man kicked the wall once, marched back to his old Ford pickup. And yet he paused there, the truck door halfway opened. He was not now looking at the darkened house; he was not looking at the door in his hands. He was looking at the car parked in the shadows. He was looking at you. Panicked, you started the engine, and Goliath’s headlamps blinked on, casting him in the lurid brightness of a snapshot. This man did not cover his eyes; he squinted, as if challenging the light itself. There was just a moment there, a fractional second in measurable time, but also an oddly suspended duration, when you sat very still, staring back at him. And it was then that the fitful wattage of Goliath’s lamps worked in parallel with your own memory, lighting up a certain recognition. The rounded slope of this person’s forehead, the slight pronation of his feet, and—more than anything—that disquieting illegibility in his eyes: you couldn’t name him, but you did feel you recognized him. An old student at your school, maybe? Or perhaps the recognition you knew in that moment was only a sense of what you and this stranger shared, two young men both on the same hopeless errand, trying to speak with the girl who was nowhere to be found.

  It was just an odd bleak feeling of kinship you knew then—even Goliath’s bright beams could not have shown you how much you truly shared with him, another boy who had wanted only to vanish into the crowds. Hector Espina, only three years ahead of you in school, whom you must have passed hundreds of times in the halls without even noticing. “Sometimes,” your Pa had said, “there is a crack in this universe, where you can see into the next.” And though you might have glimpsed the strangeness of the fissure that opened just a sliver that night, the unlikeliness that had brought you both to the Sterling residence, you couldn’t have known then how your history and this young man’s history were already entwined. You could not have known that the way he would escape his hell would be the same way yours would begin. You said nothing to Hector Espina, not then.

  Much later, it would be easy to chide your younger self. Speak! You might have saved yourself, your town, your family if only you had rolled down your window and asked him a question or two. But that night, you just pulled a U-turn on Monte Grande Lane, wondering over this visitor to Rebekkah’s house, this angry young man you would not see again until the night of November fifteenth. He was the black hole through which you’d fall. But just then he was only another question you wondered over as you puttered off for home.

  Eve

  CHAPTER TEN

  A lifetime before, when she was only nineteen, Eve herself had fallen into a different sort of chasm. Only two months prior, her father (just forty-six) had died of a heart attack on the floor of an El Paso dealership, and in the surreal, weightless months that followed, Eve found a job at a diner, Bliss Pies N’ Stuff, rented an apartment in Marathon, bought a battered Jeep with doors that zippered off. She created a simulacrum of a life, then tried to believe it was her own. Eve was still hanging around West Texas only because, in the dislocation of her late teenage orphanhood, she couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.

  Eve’s mother, a foster care graduate named Devorah, had died when Eve was just four (a stupid death, a brain infection from an abscessed tooth she had failed for months to bring to medical attention), and Eve’s memories of the woman she once called Mameleh were now like impressions of some long-ago-jettisoned photo album, flashes that might have been true snapshots, might only have been Eve’s later fabrications. That ringlet hair dangling over Eve’s chubby, clutching fingers. Hands so white the mechanics of vein and joint were visible.

  Unfortunately, in those first weeks after his death, Eve’s memories of her father were still damningly vivid. The way Mortimer Frankl had lived his adult life: in his rumpled houndstooth coats and soup-stained neckties, Eve’s father had been fired or else walked out on car dealership jobs in Topeka, St. Louis, Crested Butte, Pasadena, Albuquerque. “I don’t know why you whine so much,” Morty often chastised Eve. “At least, unlike me, you get to see something of the world. I never got so many chances to start over when I was your age.”

  Start over? As the Frankls had cycled between frowsy, underpopulated cities and sterile, soulless exurbs, Eve’s father remained the same glum, twitchy, cigar-puffing man, just becoming himself more and more deeply. Morty’s parents—a shrunken, Yiddish-speaking, blue-collar Baltimore couple—seemed to want nothing to do with their son or granddaughter. Solitude was what Eve’s father and her wandering childhood had raised her to expect, and that was how she passed the weeks after his death. Eve spent her off days in the great desert that lay to the south, an infinity in which she could be alone. She fell a little in love with that barbed, shattered, blazing desert, and she became its diligent tourist. She visited the Ernst Tinaja, hiked the South Rim Trail in the national park, camped often in the Chisos Basin.

  After a childhood in which her father had treated her the way he treated his Cutlass Supreme—some onerous and cantankerous contraption that he nevertheless was made to drive around and maintain—Eve had just about come to believe it impossible that any other man might one day choose to invite such a burden of a girl into his life. Eve had never had a boyfriend, and it never would have occurred to her to look for one now. Later, Eve would often wonder what kind of muttering loner she might have become if she had not one night made the trip to see the so-called Marfa Lights, a mysterious visual phenomenon on the scrub grass plains just east of town.

  These luminous orbs were the source of considerable local lore. Supposedly they were inexplicable, balls of restive light that traveled the desert at night. Some people called them reflections, some called them electricity, most attributed them to supernatural influence. She arrived to the observation spot, a parking lot off Route 90, just after midnight. A little crowd was gathered there, but after an hour staring into the dim plains as trains trundled past, the lights still had not come.

  “There!” a man next to her said, very close to her ear. “Do you see that? Look just left of that mountain.” Eve might not have seen the apocryphal lights, but she did notice something else
: the waspishly handsome, wonder-struck face of the man pointing into the nothing of the desert night. The man was named Jed, and by that spring they would be married, and she would be a student at Sul Ross State University, a few miles east of where they stood. At the time, however, she only leaned closer to his outstretched arm, nearly resting her head on his shoulder so that she could follow the direction of his pointed finger. “I can’t see it,” she said. “Show me.”

  Almost thirty years had passed, and there Eve was now, just a few dozen miles away, waiting for another otherworldly phenomenon to appear on the desert plains. Three days after that morning in the fMRI-mobile, Eve was pacing outside a grimed glass cube—its windows showing sun-bleached posters of downtown Los Angeles’s honeycomb of lights and the blanched sea green of the Mississippi coastline—that passed for the bus station in the town of Alpine. On a white square of pavement, Eve was staring down the perfect straight line of Farm-to-Market Route 28, waiting for the bus that carried Charlie to rise over the mirage-shaken curvature of the earth.

  Over the last years, Eve had often harangued a conjured Charlie with scripted diatribes, but as she stood there now, peeling away a fingernail too close to the quick, Eve kept forgetting what it was she meant to tell him first. She hadn’t yet told Jed about Charlie’s imminent return, just as she hadn’t mentioned to Charlie, in any of her numerous phone messages, that Jed had been there with her that day of the test. Like the Great Wall of Texas those crazed politicians had long wanted to build, an unclimbable barrier now stood between father and son. And even if Eve sometimes regretted that she herself had helped construct that partition, she felt that the map of her family had been drawn too long ago to revise the borders now.