Oliver Loving

by Stefan Merrill Block

  Like the cruelest kind of review, not only did Rebekkah fail to show up early to class the next day, she didn’t show up at all. She was absent that day, and the next, and the one after that. At first you were embarrassed, then angry, then worried. By that Thursday, the stain you had seen on her Band-Aids seeped dangerously through your reconsiderations. Was she in real trouble? You decided to seek news from the one person at the school who you thought might be able to offer some explanation. You had never spoken with Mr. Avalon before, and it was no minor feat. A localized aura of fame surrounded Reginald Avalon, that former childhood demistar who had become a vaguely rebellious adult, eschewing teacherly chinos in favor of stylish theatrical blacks.

  “Why look,” Mr. Avalon said, dropping his lunchtime sandwich on his desk. “Jed Loving’s boy.”

  “Oliver,” you said.

  “Oliver, right. You are looking for Rebekkah, I’m guessing.”

  Could she have mentioned to her theater teacher you were friends? A painful hope churned inside you.

  “I haven’t seen her around for a few days,” you said. “I’m starting to get worried about her. I thought she might have told you why. Is she really sick or something?”

  “You’re wondering why?” Mr. Avalon looked at you like a housefly in the cake batter. “You and me both. My whole rehearsal schedule is falling apart, thanks to that girl.”

  “So you haven’t heard anything?”

  “Rebekkah is a flake,” he said. “A flake! Can’t stick with a single thing. She says a stomach bug. I think she just can’t be bothered.”

  You tugged at the collar of your polo shirt, which suddenly irritated your neck. “Can’t be bothered?”

  “That’s right,” he said, resuming his lunch, taking an angry bite of sandwich. He spoke to you now through a mouthful of egg salad. “Take this under advisement, and do yourself a favor. Don’t get yourself too involved with that girl.”

  But at last, the next morning, Rebekkah came back. It was Friday, a rare overcast dawn, the brown gray plain of desert doubled in the sky. The sun veiled, the desert was nearly cold as you paced nowhere in particular, killing those before-school hours strolling up and down the four blocks of Bliss. It was still a half hour until class began, and, unable to bear the heartache of waiting alone in Mrs. Schumacher’s room, you were kicking around outside the modest redbrick castle of Bliss Township School. You were watching the fraying laces of your once-white Converses sweep the sidewalk when a hand pulled hard on your sleeve. As if your mind had suddenly developed wizardlike powers, when you looked up, your thoughts conjured their object.

  “Rebekkah,” you said.

  She was slightly breathless. It seemed that she had run to find you, from the direction of the school. “You were looking for me?” you asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “You wrote that poem. And I’ve been waiting there in the classroom, you know? So that I could say thank you, I guess.”

  “You’re welcome,” you said gruffly, your heart alight.

  “I liked it. Really. I know that I might be biased. Ha. I had no idea how much—anyway. I just wanted to say thank you.” Your eyes were back on your shoelaces; the vanilla seduction of her shampooed smell was a kind of cruelty. “You are a real poet,” Rebekkah added, very seriously. “That much is crystal clear.”

  “I think I’m quitting poetry. For a while at least.”

  “That would be a mistake.”

  Did she know how poetry and she had become inseparable for you? Might this have been a sort of invitation? But you remembered your last silent weeks, and you hated her a little for this bit of hope. “Where have you been?” you said.

  “Sick.”

  “You don’t look good.”

  “Really sick.”

  “I was worried. I even asked Mr. Avalon about you.”

  “I know. He told me. You shouldn’t have. Worried about me, I mean. You shouldn’t.”

  “Sorry,” you said gruffly. “But Rebekkah? It’s not just that you’ve been gone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I know it’s weird to say.”

  “What is?”

  You looked at Rebekkah, tried to focus on the density of freckles at the bridge of her nose, but you found you couldn’t say it to her face. You spoke to the sidewalk, the embarrassment of what you had to tell her, with its pitiful admission of how much you had been thinking of her, came out rapid fire, in a single breath. “It’s just that I noticed something, this big bruise on your leg, and I guess, I guess I just let my imagination run away with me, like someone might have hurt you. Or something.”

  And yet Rebekkah did not reply. The word hurt seemed to hurt her afresh. Her eyes filled as if she’d just been slapped.

  “I’m sorry,” you said again, for some reason.

  Rebekkah chewed her lip, looked at her palms, nodded.

  “Technically speaking,” Rebekkah said, “legally speaking, I mean—he hasn’t done anything wrong. Believe me. I’ve researched it online. Corporal punishment seems to be one of your state’s proud traditions. Perfectly legal, when it comes to your own kids.”

  “Your father?”

  Rebekkah felt her hair.

  “And it’s not so bad,” she said. “Not like it used to be.”

  “You’re not a child, and that wasn’t a spanking. God, Rebekkah.”

  Rebekkah shrugged. The sight of her slim shoulders, pressed up to her neck, made you a little breathless. “I’ll tell you something I know for sure,” she said. “It will only get worse if I say anything. If you do. Promise me you won’t.”

  “You have to talk to someone.”

  “I can’t, like I said. But you shouldn’t worry. It really has gotten better. We’re moving in a better direction, I think. I promise.”

  You nodded, puffing your chest out, feeling perversely wonderful in this role. “If it happens again, I’ll have to say something.”

  “Well,” she said, “I believe you.”

  For a second, you could feel the lovely glow of those many before-school chats stoking back to life, still bright and hot beneath the ash.

  “I’m messed up, Oliver,” Rebekkah said. “I don’t do the right things. I’m sorry if I led you on, I know that’s a thing I do. But you don’t want a mean girl like me anyway, right?”

  “Don’t tell me what I want.” And then, to your mutual astonishment, you just left Rebekkah standing there as you began to trudge back to the schoolhouse to serve your daily seven hours of silence.

  A minute later and just a few paces outside Bliss Township School, you came upon the group that congregated, as ever, just beyond the gates. David Garza, a dozen kids whose names you didn’t know, and Carlos “Ah-mare-ee-ka” Ramirez, whose mocking faces registered what you had not, how your own face was slimed with tears, how you were working a fist into an open hand. “Oh, look, it’s Willy Shakespeare,” Carlos said, now not at all the awkward, heavily sighing boy he was in your Honors Literature classroom. “What happened to you this time?”

  What happened? Even you couldn’t have said. Even you couldn’t have known what that conversation with Rebekkah had meant; in that day’s unfinished puzzle, you only had your own unplaceable fragment. But at last, years later, the particles of two distant universes began to draw together again. After a very long while away, your father began to visit you at Bed Four.

  It wasn’t often, and when he came to see you, his skin exuded hard living, armpit stink and nicotine, the sweetened heat of whiskey pluming from his sighing nostrils. Your father’s visits were very different from the others’. No recounting of the day’s events, no updates on the news, no memories described, no conversations with you, playing both the parts. Your pa watched you in the way he’d sometimes sat with an easel, squinting at a desert valley, his overcast eyes waiting for the vista to reveal some new aspect. When he did speak, he spoke in the way of quiet men, no niceties or small talk to diffuse the crucial content. How could I let this ha
ppen? he’d ask, sitting in the silence that was your only reply. How could you ever forgive me? Please, Oliver …

  But then your father stood away from the bed. He left. He left you there for another night at Bed Four—no, he only left your body. As for you? You were still someplace immeasurably far away, still just the boy you’d been before, trapped in ancient history.

  Charlie

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  One Thursday morning, a few weeks after his return to West Texas, Charlie was out stalking the plains. He was cruising the asphalt on his old neon-pink Suzuki motorbike.

  Despite the outsized hopes of his mother and the people of his lost town, that motorbike’s resuscitation had been the only certifiable miracle that Charlie had witnessed since his return. Within forty-eight hours of his arrival to the Big Bend, Charlie had felt himself quickly falling into a kind of adult education version of his old homeschooler’s curriculum, reading his novels and magazines in his room, writing his moody musings he’d share with no one, silently trudging out of any room his mother tried to share with him, glumly staring out the passenger window on the rides to visit his brother’s ruined body at Crockett State. Having failed to pack a single change of clothes, Charlie was even dressed in his old teenage getups, the cringe-inducing cargo shorts and ironic Hawaiian short-sleeves that his mother, for some reason, had held onto. And so Charlie had been enormously relieved when the Suzuki came back to puttering life with a bit of oil and a fresh tank of gas. Its tremble resounded pleasingly in Charlie’s groin now as a high hot wind chased a single cloud over the shabby gasoline-scented tourist settlement of Study Butte. He gassed the throttle.

  Charlie arrived early that morning to the beige monstrosity that was Crockett State. Beyond the magazines she had just fanned on the coffee table, Peggy the receptionist waved at him with giddy, Bob Fosse hands. Long ago, Peggy used to work the counter at Bliss Pies N’ Stuff, and though they’d never really spoken in that before, Peggy seemed to lay the same cheery claim on Charlie as the rest of his old town’s people, always flashing her tinsel teeth when Charlie passed. He nodded at Peggy now, turned to the familiar halls, flexing the joints of his left pinky finger, still worryingly tender days after he sawed the cast off with a steak knife. Charlie entered the room to find the wide apricot shape of Margot Strout hunched over Bed Four. The machines made their endless whirs and pings. Margot was whispering something softly into her patient’s ear.

  “Mrs. Strout,” Charlie said, and the woman turned lazily.

  “Margot,” she said. “I told you to call me Margot. Haven’t been a missus for almost fifteen years now.”

  “Margot, hi.”

  “It’s a little early for visiting hours, no?”

  “Sorry.” The intensity of Margot’s annoyance made Charlie’s pulse quicken a little. “I was just heading out to meet some friends for breakfast, and I had to pass by here. It felt wrong not to drop by, check in.”

  Margot shrugged in an aggrieved way. “Same story, different day.”

  Over the last weeks, Charlie had watched Margot Strout’s patience with him drop as a nearly visible phenomenon, the falling mercury of a thermometer. But in their first proper conversation, after the bad scene with Manuel Paz when Charlie had proven his willingness to say to his mother what no one else would, Margot had presented herself as a different sort of woman—an affable, solicitous lady, so forthcoming she could make him blush.

  “The Lord is giving, isn’t he?” Margot had mused that first day. “I go into this work because I lost a child, and now here I am, working with a boy like Oliver.” Charlie had nodded. He’d grown up in close proximity to Margot’s brand of rosy Christian notions, and he could still find them homey if a little cloying, like a slice of Apple Spice from Bliss Pies N’ Stuff.

  “Well,” Charlie had said, “if there’s one right woman for the job, seems like it’s you.” He’d meant it. In that first conversation, Margot revealed herself to be a big toucher, always grasping for his wrist, his shoulder, his knee, in the manner of the Bliss Township teachers, when they had sometimes come by to check up on him in his homeschooled years. “Thank you,” Margot said. “Really. I hope you’re right.”

  The sensation of Margot’s fingers in Charlie’s palm had been enormous and unsettling; his relationship with mothers, and not just his own, wasn’t right. When his Brooklyn and Thoreau friends used to tell Charlie of their mothers’ offenses, he would enthusiastically encourage their filial laments. But when reading novels or watching movies, Charlie would find that it was always the mothers for whom he wept. And here, in that perfumed, jowly woman, was another mother who had lost another child; her power overwhelmed him. “Tell me about you,” Charlie said.

  And Margot had gladly offered up her whole horrible tale. About her husband’s third-term abandonment of his pregnant wife, and about the terrible genetic condition with which her daughter Cora had been born: Cora’s four years of bronchitic, wordless life before the poor girl at last suffocated. About Margot’s year of listlessness, speaking to her daughter’s memory, and also about Margot’s “rebirth,” her two-year-long-training program in Austin, where her work had been divided between the university lecture hall and the stroke, muscular dystrophy, Parkinson’s, cerebral palsy, and autism sufferers she assisted in the public hospital on Austin’s east side. About how Margot and her classmates had conducted with the enthusiasm of neophytes even their most onerous labors: helping the geriatrics of Austin type out their pervy comments to their nurses, using the medium of hand puppets to help autistic children voice their complaints that they were not allowed enough video game time, displaying vocab flash cards to the stroke-numbed nonagenarians who were able only to roll their eyes at the chatty cheer of their speech pathologists. About how everyone in her modest cohort had shared an ambition to work with a locked-in patient. “Patients like Oliver,” Margot had told Charlie with a rueful smile. “For us speech pathologists, it’s like getting a chance to paint a Sistine Chapel, build a cathedral.”

  “I’ll bet,” Charlie had said and gestured toward the bed. “So where do you put the first stone in this particular cathedral?”

  “There was this incredible professor there at Austin. Professor Brooks. An amazing lady, really. I could go on and on about her. Professor Brooks, she liked to say that working with the locked-in patient is a bit like being an old-fashioned radio operator. Your fingers and the EEG are the antennas, but at first they receive only static. Your job is to make small adjustments, to listen very closely, until you start to receive a signal.”

  Charlie recognized Margot Strout as a type he had known at Thoreau, one of those anxious-antsy students, so grateful their college had not demanded to see their pitiful or nonexistent high school transcripts, so eager to prove themselves in that wondrous second chance. “With a brain injury like Oliver’s, the most likely place to locate purposeful movement is from the neck up, and that’s where I’m starting,” Margot explained, and then she’d let Charlie watch, as he had tried not to scoff at the crude simplicity of her so-called techniques.

  “Blink twice for yes, once for no,” Charlie heard Margot say, a hundred times over, speaking to Oliver like some bound and gagged prisoner of war, as she placed the antennae of her fingers near Oliver’s eyes and kept her own gaze on the readouts from the EEG sensors she had taped to Oliver’s head. Oliver’s eyes, of course, only continued their erratic involuntary flutter, like lightbulbs faultily installed. As the days passed, Margot repeated the procedure on the hinge of Oliver’s jaw, the pad of Oliver’s tongue, the length of his throat, each eyebrow. She flashed colors, pictures, words, sound tones at Oliver from her electronic devices. She paused often to recalibrate the EEG analysis software.

  “I know it might not look like much,” Margot told Charlie and his mother after a few days of work. “But there is a method to this madness. A whole system for exactly where to test, and how. And maybe what I need most right now is just to be alone with him. I hate to say it, bu
t it’s a little distracting to do this for an audience.”

  Message received. Often, Margot was only able to squeeze in half days at Bed Four; some days she couldn’t come at all. But Charlie and his mother knew that even her limited pro bono work with Oliver meant the other neurologically impaired people of West Texas went voiceless, and they didn’t want to do anything that might discourage her, remind her of her other obligations.

  But Charlie hadn’t been able to help himself. At the end of each morning, when they arrived for visiting hours, Charlie asked Margot for updates, as if instead of signal divination, he thought Margot was slowly laying a landline between the world and Oliver. Charlie’s questions plainly annoyed her; the cheery woman, with her former talk of miracles, had become a heavy sigher. But Ma, Charlie suspected, bothered her even more, never able to bear to meet Margot’s gaze for fear of registering the disappointing results.

  “Believe me,” Margot told Charlie now. “When I have something to tell you, I’ll tell you.”

  “Right,” Charlie said, rubbing at his hand as if to encourage Margot to take it once more. “I guess if I’m going to be totally honest here? I really have another question.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well. It occurs to me I’ve never asked you. How long is normal? Like, is there any sort of time frame to expect here? How long does it usually take with patients like Oliver? If there’s anything to find at all.”