Oliver Loving

by Stefan Merrill Block

  “Oh, oh! We have to stop this, we have to stop, I’m going to wet myself,” Eve said, which only made them laugh harder still. They laughed until it seemed they arrived to the other side of something. Eve fired the colicky engine, put Goliath in drive, and pulled a whining U-turn across the asphalt.

  “Where are we going?”

  Eve grinned into the darkness to the east, the stars twitching to life. “To see your brother.”

  At eight thirty on a Sunday evening, the lampposts of the parking lot of Crockett State Assisted Care Facility were all dark. The building itself, illuminated by a few security lights, looked like a dinghy at sea. “We’re way past visiting hours, so we’ll have to take the back door. At night, the front is guarded by an Oompa-Loompa named Donny Franco.”

  Actually, of all the facility’s workers, sad-eyed, shiftless Donny was one of the few Eve didn’t despise, and she understood, in that bite of her tone, that she was already slipping back into the banter that was her relationship with Charlie at its most functional, that sardonic repartee.

  “Not Donny Franco? That poor doof from my old class?”

  “One and the same.”

  “Ha!” Apparently the fact that the people Charlie had left continued to live was some good joke. “What happens if good old Donny Franco finds us breaking and entering?”

  “Let’s be sure he doesn’t find out.” This was how they always worked best, she knew, as coconspirators. Even in those tense last years of homeschooling, Eve and Charlie would sometimes take Goliath on joyrides outside Marathon High School and jeer about the poor saps spending their days bedraggled and backpack strapped.

  Charlie, creeping up to the dim building, did a cat burglar thing on his tiptoes. As she watched her son make a caper scene out of the place in which she had suffered all those years, Eve had to hold back another frenzy of laughter. But what about the Eve of three hours ago, the Eve of a silent decade, the Eve who had waited there as Charlie chased his fantasies in New Hampshire and New York City? Motherly love was no sentimental thing. It was irrefutable and unsparing, a squad of riot police mindlessly clubbing the protestor, no matter how righteous her cause.

  “We do have fun, don’t we?” Eve said. “When we get together, I mean.”

  “When do we get together?”

  Inside, the same linoleum-floored, plastic-bumpered hallways Eve had walked six days a week for the last nine and a half years. But with the halls now dim, with Charlie flattening himself to the walls, it was both Crockett State and a funny dream of it. Three turns later, Eve paused to snicker at her own hand as she grasped the cool steel handle to the room that held Bed Four. She turned to Charlie, the humor of their little break-in vanished. Waiting for whatever Eve might say, Charlie looked very young. Down the hall, one of the dementia cases screamed at no one, “Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to you!”

  “He won’t look like you remember. It’s important that you know that. You have to picture the worst, okay? I need you to do that for me right now. Before we go in.”

  To her surprise, Charlie obeyed. He closed his eyes, and she could see them moving behind the lids. It occurred to Eve that she had never before seen someone so clearly, so self-seriously imagining, and she wondered if just maybe, some later day, she might ask Charlie if she could read some of the pages he had been writing.

  “Okay,” he said.

  Eve turned the handle, pressed it open, and then there they were, all together again. Oliver’s bed was silhouetted in the moonlight, making the body it held look like something from a myth, a mute oracle, some blind seer from a legend. That new bed that the facility had bought, a mechanized contraption that was supposed to ward off pressure sores, inhaled, sighed.

  Eve felt along the metal rim of the bedside lamp and when she found the switch, she nearly gasped at what it revealed. Her son’s face, the face she had seen each day, seen afresh through Charlie’s eyes. Hair gone thin at the crown, jaw clenched and thick, skin like flaking parchment. But then, under the brightness of the warm bulb, Oliver’s eyes did the one ordinary thing they could still do. His eyelids fluttered open—an instinctive reflex, the doctor had told her, reptile brain circuitry, but for the length of a single swift inhalation, it never seemed that way to Eve. Even this evening, it seemed that Oliver’s gaze might at last fix on her own.

  “Oliver,” Charlie said. “It’s me.”

  * * *

  Over the last four days, Eve had slept maybe twelve hours, but after she showed Charlie to the bedroom she’d tried to throw together for him—not really a bedroom, just four walls with a shadeless lamp standing on a milk crate and an old mattress she had optimistically salvaged from Zion’s Pastures in the unlikely case of such a visit—she willed herself to stay awake for a full hour after Charlie’s shuffling, creaking noises down the hall fell silent. For the two waking hours he had spent in the house, half of Eve’s thoughts had been on the bin in her attic, as if their contents might somehow suddenly come blurting out into the room. Her own telltale heart, beating overhead instead of from below. Not like she had any answer for what to do about the vexing throb of it, but she felt she must pay it a visit, double-check to make sure its padlocks were secure. And so she crept from bed to the bathroom, worrying over each creak and pop of the cheap flooring material beneath the balding Berber carpet. She pulled the cord, triggering the hidden door in the ceiling, and the collapsible staircase unfolded.

  You don’t keep your sanity amid the chaos of a family of boys without a good sense of order, and let Charlie say what he would about Eve now, but even he couldn’t deny that she was always a diligent organizer. Her attic—a room bursting at the seams with Pink Panther insulation, funky with dry rot—she had neatly divided into two sections, subdivided into a great number of plastic bins. The room’s left half: the Past, the boxes she had not opened once since her move, the boxes containing the remnants of Zion’s Pastures she couldn’t bear to throw away. Mostly the tired Texan heirlooms belonging to the Loving family—those rusting knives, sun-bleached photographs of Jed’s nameless ancestors, and enough shellacked horns, skulls, femurs, and hooves to represent an entire herd. She’d never had any use for those boxes, but she was grateful for her decision to schlep all that junk to Desert Splendor so there was something up there to distract from the sight of the one great bin, sitting alone in the attic’s other half, representing the Future.

  Not the actual future. Eve knew that, she did. Only the future her hands still hoped for her son. For some reason, she was relieved to find that all of those objects—an avalanche of cheap electronic devices and DVDs, hardcover editions of sci-fi and fantasy masterpieces, shrink-wrapped desk sets, a hundred pens, several outfits growing outdated and unworn—just as she had left them, beneath a lid fastened with two padlocks. But then it occurred to her that rather than keeping anyone, keeping Charlie, from discovering her purloined bounty, the locks—along with the solitary prominence of the bin—would draw attention, should her snooping son go snooping once more. And so she silently strained to bury the Future beneath the Past. After ten minutes of this activity, when one of the boxes settled, it released a terrible bellow from the pressed wood floorboards, and she panicked. Like some girl past curfew, she raced back to her bedroom and shut the door softly, hoping that her son had not heard.

  And there in bed, checking her phone before turning out the lights, Eve discovered a litany of messages waiting for her, the area codes unfamiliar. “Shit,” Eve whispered, but she was hardly surprised. In a place like the Big Bend, where change is measured in geological time, any remarkable news spread over the dry, impermeable land like flash flooding. These foreign numbers might have confused Eve had she not already stood there once before, blindfolded before the firing line of journalistic inquiry. On the night of November fifteenth, Eve had gone from a woman few people thought to notice to some sort of spectacle; for a week or two after, she had become a kind of tragic actress, taking the stage each time she walked into the hospital
parking lot, the electronic vultures descending, those news scavengers who fed on human tears. Eve couldn’t know who might have spoken to the press about Oliver’s latest test, and looking at those numbers, she still felt no kindness toward the reporters, whose curiosity this time was not about her family’s tragedy but about the astounding news leaked by some gossipy Crockett State employee. The world was always happy to unveil a new cruelty, and here was one of the cruelest: Eve was so deeply alone where she needed help and so public in the parts of her life she wanted to keep to herself.

  There were, in fact, a few things Eve had kept to herself, kept even from the one boy to whom she had otherwise granted almost unfiltered access to her inner life. She had not told Oliver, and certainly not Charlie, the glum report Margot Strout offered her after her first day of work at Bed Four, last Friday, just as she had not told anyone about a strange exchange she’d had with Dr. Frank Rumble.

  “Can I speak with you for a minute? In my office?” Dr. Rumble had been hanging around just outside Oliver’s door; it seemed that he had been waiting there for Eve to exit. He actually grasped the sleeve of Eve’s blouse, as if he would drag her into his office if necessary. And there, among the potted cacti and vintage phrenology busts, Dr. Rumble did not even sit in his armchair. He spoke with Eve in a corner, in a hurried whisper, as though the place might be bugged.

  “Just so that we’re absolutely clear here, I did tell you that you should get a second opinion. Years ago. Remember? I did tell you. That’s the truth.”

  “The truth?” Eve asked. “The truth is that you’ve spent nine and a half years telling me that there was no chance. That Oliver was gone. The truth is that I’m the only one who ever believed any differently.”

  Dr. Frank Rumble was the sort of windy old West Texan made for porch sitting, reflecting on the past with a tumbler of whiskey. A dull, circumspect man, as if the business of his life were already behind him. But just now Eve couldn’t find the expected pleasure at seeing this outmoded incompetent, her son’s chief jailer, so ruffled. His panic scared her.

  “Jesus Christ, Frank, what’s this all about, anyway? You worried you’re going to lose your job or something?”

  “Eve,” Dr. Rumble said. “That officer. Manuel Paz. He came by this morning with a bunch of questions for me. Why not do the tests earlier? Why didn’t you take him for another test? How could this have happened? He was talking to me like I was some criminal.”

  “Manuel Paz came to speak with you?” How long had it been since Eve had seen Manuel? Four months, maybe more. To think of Manuel’s troubled, helpless gaze, trained so often on Oliver over the years: it now gave her a little jolt of panic.

  “I mean,” Dr. Rumble said, “what is the man possibly thinking?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest,” Eve said, but the opposite was true.

  Over that decade, in the absence of any real explanation for the events of that night, Manuel had related to Eve a number of the outlandish notions the townspeople had offered him, each more pathetically grasping than the last: supposedly Hector Espina was the nephew of some billionaire cartel boss in Juarez, and it was the cartel that had ordered the hit. Supposedly Hector Espina had been involved in a closeted romance with Roy Lopez, and he had aimed to silence Roy before anyone found out. “Just last week,” Manuel once told her with a sigh, “I had Nicholas York’s father in my office, swearing to me with a straight face that he had reason to believe that Hector had recently converted to Islam.” Still, with that unbreakable patience of his, Manuel had always promised the people of Bliss that he would look into whatever crazed notion they presented him.

  And yet, the truth was that one day, very long ago, Manuel had come to Oliver’s room with a certain line of questions Eve couldn’t discount entirely.

  “I’ve got to ask you something,” Manuel had told her that afternoon, just a few weeks after, when he had invited her to speak with him alone in the hospital conference room. “I’m just going to say it once, and then I’m hoping we can put it behind us. I know this must be the worst time for you.”

  “Say what once?” Eve had asked.

  Manuel had nodded then, some hesitancy snagging in his throat. Manuel Paz, it was true, was not even a lead detective in the case, but—as the official Ranger captain assigned to Presidio County and a lifelong Bliss township resident—it was his glum face that was most often featured in the already waning news coverage that played on the waiting room television.

  “I guess my question is about Rebekkah Sterling,” Manuel said.

  “Rebekkah?” Eve asked, as if that were a new word to her.

  “Their teacher,” Manuel said, “Mrs. Schumacher, she says Oliver and Rebekkah had a little friendship.”

  “So what is it you are saying?”

  “I’m just wondering how well they knew each other. If their relationship might have been romantic in nature. Oliver and Rebekkah.”

  “And this is what you called me from his room to ask. This is what you needed to speak with me about in private.”

  Manuel shifted his weight in one of the hospital’s lousy armchairs then, the thing squawking desperately, as if a small and displeased family of field mice lived in the hinges of the undercarriage.

  “Eve,” Manuel said. “Far as I’m concerned? Hector Espina was evil itself. Worse. Probably can’t ever know his reasons, if you could even call them reasons. But it wasn’t just those three kids, there also was poor Oliver, and doesn’t that seem odd to you? That Oliver was there when it happened. I’m just trying to know why.”

  “I thought,” Eve said, “that the story here was that this was some crazy kind of point Hector was making. For the way we had treated your people. That’s what practically every other person is saying, anyway.”

  “My people,” Manuel said a little darkly. “Sure. That’s what they’re saying, but the thing just don’t seem to add up for me. For example, what about the fact that Mr. Avalon himself was half-Mexican, that Roy Lopez’s folks came from Bolivia? Anyway, far as we can tell, that kid never raised a protesting word of any kind.”

  “So what’s your theory then?”

  “You know what one of those Marfa guys Hector dealt to told me? A young man, this burnout named Ken, he told me Hector got a little obsessed with Ken’s girlfriend. The whole thing ended in some fistfight when Hector tried to make a move on the girl. Couldn’t bear the rejection. And you know what they tell a detective on day one? Past behavior’s the best predictor of the future. Jealousy seems to have been the kid’s problem more than some sort of politics.”

  “And all of this has exactly what to do with Oliver?”

  “Thing is, a couple students came to me, swearing they saw Hector Espina talking with Rebekkah out in the parking lot a couple weeks before. And then there’s the fact that every other kid in the whole school was down in the gymnasium except for Oliver. Just the Theater Club kids, and also Oliver. And Rebekkah, coming out of that night without a scratch? And so it occurs to me that if Rebekkah and Hector really did know each other, then it also makes me wonder if just maybe there was some kind of, I don’t know, love triangle situation there. With Oliver.”

  “So you are telling me that my son was what? That he was some kind of reason? A reason that a madman murdered those children?”

  “I’m not telling you anything. I’m just asking a question,” Manuel said.

  “Oh,” Eve said. “Oh,” the strike of a match, the wind of her outrage blowing too hard for any coherent sentence to catch.

  “Eve—”

  “Manuel, I really don’t have time for this. My son never did a single bad thing in his life, and he needs me, and so I’m going to go back to him now.”

  “Okay. That’s fine. And I know. No one is saying anything bad about Oliver, of course not. But maybe if there’s a chance to at least shed a bit more light—”

  “Why don’t you just ask Rebekkah if you have questions?” Eve asked. “Or Jed, for that matter?”

 
“We have. The girl doesn’t want to talk with us much, can’t say as I blame her. But she says she hardly knew Oliver. And she swears to us up and down that she’d never met Hector before, and truth is we don’t got much evidence to the contrary. Just a couple kids claiming they saw the two of them together, but people are making all sorts of claims these days. And as for Jed, let’s just say that conversation with you is a little more, um, fruitful. Can hardly understand the poor man, slurring so much.”

  “Rebekkah Sterling is practically a stranger to me. Jed invited her over to watch the meteorites once. Oliver knew her from class. I remember they had some study group they did together, but as far as I know that was it. End of story. There you have your answer.”

  Manuel rubbed his head like a crystal ball as he gazed at the tabletop. “I wish. An answer. I need it, the whole town does. You must’ve heard about those protests Donna Grass and her group are doing out at the school now? Jail the Mexicans, send us all back across the river, that sort of thing. All day long, my telephone rings, everybody has an opinion, some of them treat me like I myself was in cahoots with that monster. Me! Like I haven’t been a neighbor to those folks their whole lives.” Manuel concluded this monologue with his shoulders slung low, as if each word had been another pound piled onto his back.

  “I wish I could help you, I do. Of course I do. But the town’s business isn’t exactly my foremost concern right now. Speaking of which, I really do have to get back to Oliver now.”

  Manuel snorted long and slow, a dispirited bull. He nodded into his hands.

  “You’re right. I’m sorry to bother you with all this. I am.” Manuel reached across the table for Eve’s arm then. His touch practically melted through her shirt material. “I couldn’t be more sorry. I just need to find—I don’t know, something. Those detective folks from Austin might not stick around long, but I won’t ever stop. I promise you that. Follow every lead I can, even if they lead nowhere at all. I won’t ever quit this thing, I promise you that.”