Oliver Loving

by Stefan Merrill Block

  Nearly ten years later, Eve couldn’t now remember exactly what had followed that day at the hospital. Perhaps Manuel had asked her more questions; maybe she had wept on his shoulder. Eve knew she had not lied to Manuel—replaying this conversation in her mind, Eve could give herself a passing grade for technical correctness. But of course there was a reason that exchange had stained her memory so indelibly. Eve might have mentioned to Manuel those little “study group” meetings Oliver conducted with Rebekkah, but she had neglected to describe the way Oliver had spent whole weekends brooding in his cave fort, nor had she mentioned the splinter of ice that had lodged in Eve’s heart when she had watched that girl disappear into the shadows that night on the television screen.

  But her son, Eve knew, was a victim, an innocent, and she wouldn’t let Manuel Paz make him into some character in Hector’s demented story. Let Hector’s story die with him, she had thought, why did that murderer deserve anyone’s consideration, what quote unquote closure could it bring? Let the townspeople have their stories; there was only one story Eve believed, the one in which Oliver came back to her at last.

  Over the years, when Eve had occasionally found her thoughts catching on snatches of that long-ago conversation she’d had with Manuel, she told herself: Ancient history, what could it matter? Any random detail from those worst weeks, she had learned, was the molehill that her decade of anxiety could make into a mountain. And yet, Eve knew there was another reason she hadn’t told Manuel the whole truth that day in the conference room. The fact was that Oliver had tried to speak with her about Rebekkah, just once, in the last days before. “I don’t even know where to begin to tell you about her,” Oliver had said haltingly one night, as Eve sat in a motherly pose, resting one hand on his arm. And Eve’s reply? “Believe me,” she had told her son, “with certain people, it’s better if you don’t even try to understand.”

  At the time Eve had thought: Let girls, heartbreak, all that fitful longing come later. He was still just a boy, after all. Still, why hadn’t she just shut her mouth for once and listened? What might her son have had to tell her?

  But it wasn’t really Eve who had ended that conversation with Oliver before it had even begun, just as it wasn’t quite Eve who had not told the whole truth to Manuel that day in the conference room. It was that lesser, former version of herself that Eve still housed beneath her skin, a timid, needy, nutrient-deprived creature who had grown mothlike in the dimness and stuffiness of the cramped rooms of her childhood. That girl, gone frail with solitude, simply could not bear it, perhaps would not even survive the possibility that Manuel might come back to her with another kind of story, one in which she might have listened to Oliver that evening, one in which she might have done something that could have changed what happened.

  But now, Eve knew, Manuel would believe he had some actual reason to hope the impossible questions of the years might find an explanation, as if all the answers for what happened that night really had been sleeping there with Oliver all this time and now he might finally make his reply. But of course Eve knew better. Eve had received a thorough schooling on the outlandish designs your futile hopes could spin, and she knew that this notion was just another fantasy Manuel was letting himself believe. And yet, the enormity of that possibility was like a pillow pressed over her face: a little writhing panic, and then she was asleep.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  She woke the next morning to the truckish noise of her vacuum cleaner whirring downstairs in the living room. Behind the stack of manuscript pages (already a week overdue, and she hadn’t even started her copyedits) for The Holy Light’s latest offering, Jesus Is My BFF, the glowing digits of her alarm clock showed 7:04.

  After the visit to Crockett State, when at last they made it to Desert Splendor, Charlie had staggered around the rooms, drunk with exhaustion. But now Eve went downstairs to behold a borderline-fantastical vision. Charlie, down on his knees, a cowboy bandanna tied Rosie the Riveter–style over his head, his good hand working the undercarriage of a moldy love seat with the silver arm of the Eureka’s attachment.

  “This place, Ma…” Charlie was standing now, in front of the industrial-gray bricks of the fireplace, a vertical pavement that led up to a vault of fissures in the plaster above. The two second- or third-hand sofas sat with their spattered maroon pillows like the corpses of some monstrous species. The coffee table was a pane of dusty glass, holding a half-dozen mugs, their contents skinned with mold. It hadn’t occurred to Eve to clean up for Charlie, so blinded was she by the miraculous brightness on the fMRI display.

  “I know,” Eve told Charlie. “Believe me. If there were any other choice.”

  “It’s like a McMansion after the nuclear winter. Holocaust in the ’burbs.”

  “Well put, dear boy.”

  “It’s full of dirt!” Charlie said cheerily. “It’s coming in through the windows! And those big cracks in the ceiling? I had no idea you were living like this.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “Well. I’ve been cleaning.”

  “I don’t need you to clean.”

  “You’re welcome. Oh, hey!” Charlie extracted his phone from his pocket, displayed its lit screen to his mother. NEW TEST SHOWS SHOOTING VICTIM—

  “Apparently,” he said with a big hungry grin, “word about Oliver has gotten out. I have a Google alert for his name, and my e-mail this morning? Jesus. A miracle, they’re all saying. No one seems to mention the next test he’s got coming, what we still don’t know.”

  “I guess a miracle is what everyone around here needs.”

  “But it’s not just around here! It was in the Houston fucking Chronicle! A short thing, but still.”

  “Tell me about it. When I checked my phone last night, you should have seen all the calls I’d missed.”

  “Are you going to return them?”

  “Don’t see why I would.”

  “Don’t see why you would?” Charlie turned away, became an unreadable silhouette in the window. But the view out there, the lumber skeletons of the half-built neighboring McMansions, seemed to explain something to him.

  “How about we go out for a breakfast?” Charlie said. “Something cheap. Obviously. Café Magnolia? Not so far from here, right?”

  “I really don’t see why it’s worth the money. I have eggs.”

  It required an almost surgical effort for Charlie to reach into the pocket of his skintight jeans and extract a single battered twenty-dollar bill. Charlie held his crumpled twenty in a way that the Statue of Liberty holds her torch, as if his independence had just been affirmed by a foreign nation. “My treat,” Charlie said.

  An hour later, they were among the beaded curtains and half-blinded strands of Christmas lights inside Café Magnolia. They sat at opposite sides of the same wonky laminate table—with its chipped, beatific face of Our Lady of Guadalupe—which they’d claimed as their favorite fifteen years before. The same woman, Ana Maria, brought Charlie his huevos rancheros and tortilla soup. Eve could see Charlie’s face relaxing, as if his smug, urbane mien were bound up by a series of internal ties, undone by the invisible fingers of chipotle spice and fatty queso that fluttered through Café Magnolia.

  As Eve carefully shelled her boiled eggs and Charlie bolted his beans and tortillas, Charlie attempted to scandalize his mother with some of his New York tales. The boys he had dated. Terrance, Christopher, Bradley—on and on. Charlie was putting on a real show of his New York self, come alive once the cloistered dimness of Café Magnolia eliminated the desert outside, restoring him to a Brooklyn atmosphere. At one point, Charlie actually told Eve, “That boy has a body like forked lightning.” Eve couldn’t decide if Charlie was telling her these things to make a point, to try to squeeze a few vindicating drops of conservative disapproval from a mother who in truth had always enjoyed an outsider’s pride at having a son whose unorthodox romantic inclinations she’d never once questioned. Or was this only the way he now told his stories to people he liked? She
tracked his eyes, looking for the answer, but they were turned up and away, as he held forth into the mid-distance, as if his stories took place only in his mind (a mother could hope).

  Eve was trying now to do the thing she knew a mother ought to do to a child’s reports of his adult life. She tried to nod along encouragingly; she tried to remind herself of the perfectly rational conclusion she had come to over the years, that Charlie had no choice but to leave and make a life for himself away from the traumas of his late childhood. And yet, that insecure girl Eve still carried inside her wouldn’t be persuaded. That needy teen even still worked the gears and pulleys of Eve’s heart, manufacturing her own conclusions: that it was not the Big Bend that Charlie had needed to flee. Like Jed and Eve’s own father, it was just Eve herself who Charlie had wanted to escape.

  “Well, that’s enough salaciousness for me,” Eve said.

  Charlie’s face fell, as if, chastened, he might actually be ashamed. “There’s something I haven’t told you yet,” he said.

  “All right.”

  “It’s not the hugest deal. Promise you won’t make a huge deal about this, okay?”

  “Tell me what it is first.” Eve was feeling suddenly afraid.

  “The thing is just that I need to borrow some money.”

  “Money?”

  “The green stuff? With the presidents on it?”

  “You need to borrow money for what?”

  Charlie made his furniture-hefting sigh. “You have to know that things haven’t been going so well. With the writing, I mean.”

  “And money figures into this how exactly?”

  “I’m behind on rent. A few months. I owe some money, Ma. That’s it. That’s my whole story. So help me God.”

  Eve glanced at his arm in the cast, his lower lip, still as thick as a gherkin. She held a hand to her face. “You owe money to who?”

  “Don’t freak out. It’s not even so much. It’s only five thousand. Nothing next to what I’ll get when I finish.”

  “Five thousand. Are you insane? I mean it, Charlie. I think you must be mentally ill to be asking me for five thousand dollars right now. Do you think I choose to drive that car? That I choose to live in that house?”

  “All right.”

  “I’m sorry, but no. No! Why should I finance something I never wanted you to do in the first place?”

  Charlie considered the plaster on his wrist and tucked his arm away, like an embarrassment.

  “I don’t know, Ma. Maybe you’d do it to support your son.”

  Honestly, she couldn’t help pitying the boy a little, but Eve had thought and thought about it; she had even listened patiently to Charlie’s many caffeinated diatribes about his “work,” but all she had ever been able to register was the troubling possibility that Charlie had taken after the worst of his father, making of New York City his own profitless cabin. And she could locate no explainable reason for Charlie’s project other than the obvious and appalling fact of his use of their family tragedy to kick-start a career.

  “Typically,” Eve told Charlie, “in financial negotiations, you don’t berate the lender. Anyway, I don’t have it. Even if I could, what, enable you, I don’t have it. How about you ask your father for once?”

  “Don’t be cruel.”

  “I’m being realistic.”

  “Yeah, right. Like Pa would have the cash. It’s a wonder he can keep himself fed.” Charlie’s face went a little purple. Pa: the first time he had said the word to his mother, possibly in years. “And, anyway,” Charlie said, surprising her by grabbing her hand, “I’d never turn to the dark side, no matter how much dough Darth Vader offered me.”

  “He’s not Darth Vader, Charlie. He’s just a sad little man who can’t help himself.”

  “So now it’s Pa you are suddenly standing up for?”

  “No,” Eve said. “It’s not.”

  As chance would have it, Eve did have the money. According to her last statement from West Texas Savings and Loan, her account contained $7,817, and she had another fifteen hundred headed her way, five hundred from the governor’s fund, a thousand if she could only make her eyes focus on the absurdist parables of Jesus Is My BFF, in which the savior offered advice to the teenager contemplating an offered joint, a sweating can of beer, a racy post on social media. But Eve possessed other numbers, too, which she had so often felt for, like scabs. More than five years was how long Charlie had been gone. Nine times was how many times he had phoned her in the last twelve months. Nearly two thousand now: that was how many times she had visited Crockett State in Charlie’s absence.

  The next meeting with Margot Strout was scheduled for nine that morning, and by the time they left the café, Eve was horrified to find it was already 8:50. Outside, in the gathering heat, Goliath hacked and grunted, like a drifter prodded awake with a bully club. Eve was wondering if she should have told Jed about this meeting; she was more than a little furious at him for seeming to have no discernible interest in the aftermath of the wonderful thing he had witnessed with her. Out the windows, the dross chaparral and prickly pear studded the flat all the way to the end of the planet.

  After a tetchy, silent twenty minutes, Charlie began to slither around in the passenger seat, contorting himself to reach for the phone vibrating in his pocket. He extracted it, looked at whatever flashed into its screen in the way he once looked, as a child, at a juice glass he had dropped and shattered. “What?” Eve asked, “Who is it?” In a trembling hand, Charlie turned its glowing face toward her, the name written in bright Arial font.

  “Rebekkah Sterling?” Eve said. “Rebekkah Sterling is calling you now?” Charlie considered the phone for a moment, but the name vanished, the screen gone black. He shook the thing, as if it had malfunctioned.

  “I guess she must have heard the news?” he said, as if to himself.

  “How does she even have your number? You and Rebekkah are in touch?”

  “Not really,” Charlie said, his voice thin. “I called her up a couple times when I got to New York. Thought she might like to know she had another hometown kid in the city. But she didn’t seem to want anything to do with me.”

  “So what could she want now?” was all Eve could think to ask. Eve glanced in the direction of her son, the stones and ocotillo outside blurred by Goliath’s velocity and also by the face grease that Charlie, in his forlorn prison-yard stares, had already deposited on the passenger-side window. But Charlie did not reply, only shrugged timidly at the glass. She kept her eyes on Charlie for a dangerous duration, needing to see what this missed call had done to his face, but he wouldn’t look at her. Rebekkah Sterling, or at least her name, back into Eve’s life: horrible to think that the girl still existed, somehow galling that Rebekkah refused to remain what she had become to Eve, just a distant memory of a body walking off into the shadows, a hundred unanswered questions, sealed away in a past. Even now, she tried and failed to come up with a way to phrase the question thrumming inside her: What, exactly, had Charlie hoped to accomplish in speaking with Rebekkah Sterling? Eve reached for the radio, cranked up its staticky music: 93.3, The Golden Oldies. The station happened to be playing Bob Dylan, “Like a Rolling Stone.” Eve and Charlie looked at one another at last, their gaze meeting for less than a second.

  * * *

  The sun was already high in the sky, pinning their shadows to the asphalt beneath their feet in the Crockett State parking lot. The oils and sour cream topping of Café Magnolia’s tortilla soup, a few spoonfuls of which Eve insanely let herself eat at Charlie’s urging, made magmatic progress through her belly as they paced down the Crockett State halls. At Oliver’s room, Eve blinked rapidly at the sight of the open door.

  “Manuel?”

  “Eve. And is that Charlie? My Lord, get a look at you.”

  “Hiya. Look too long and it’ll cost you.”

  “Har har,” Manuel said.

  Texas Ranger Captain Manuel Paz stood from the extra chair someone had deposited in the room.
Eve sensed that their arrival had interrupted something. Margot flushed in her seat next to the bed as Manuel awkwardly rotated the ecru brim of his Stetson hat over the brass buttons of his uniform. The man now looked so different from the fleshy Ranger who had made his first reports at Bed Four all those years before. Like a blown dandelion, his final wisps of hair had vanished; Manuel had retracted to the hardened, denser form of himself. Frank Rumble, no surprise, was nowhere to be found.

  “What are you doing here?” Eve asked, letting Manuel give her a little pat of a hug.

  “Eve.” Manuel pulled away, held her shoulders in his outstretched hands. “My God. I don’t know what to tell you. This news.”

  “Margot Strout, I presume?” Charlie said. “I’m Oliver’s brother. I’m Charlie.”

  “Oh, I remember you, Charlie.” Margot brightened, rejected Charlie’s offered hand to press his little scarecrow body against herself. “From way back when. And Captain Paz here sure is right. Wow! Now you’re a man.”

  A West Texas conversation of course could not begin before the ritual preliminary niceties. Chatter ensued, mostly just talk of the weather—can you believe this heat?—a nonsensical and yet oddly beloved topic for this desert’s inhabitants. At one point, Eve heard Margot say, with the adamant sincerity of original thought, “But, really, it’s humidity that’s even worse. At least we don’t have that to worry about!”

  Charlie smiled. “So,” he said, “what did we miss?”

  “Yes, to the business at hand. Well. I was just telling Captain Paz what I told you on Friday,” Margot said to Eve.

  “Friday?” Charlie asked his mother. “What did she tell you on Friday?”

  Margot paused, felt her bangs, looking between mother and son. “I was just telling Captain Paz,” Margot said. “I was just telling him about what I told you I learned in my training program. Over in Austin. About how we learned how people who have been locked in for a few years, how even if their brain function is normal they can still sometimes lose their language.” Margot’s voice, settling now into the substance of her training, gained confidence. “How language is sort of like a muscle. A use-it-or-lose-it kind of thing. Like we read about those feral children, the ones raised in the woods, and how no amount of civilization could teach them to speak well. But it’s more complicated in cases like Oliver’s. Sometimes, after a bunch of years, language goes away. But sometimes not. And of course there’s still the physical brain damage, which we just can’t know about yet, not until they do those next tests, at least.”