Oliver Loving

by Stefan Merrill Block

  An irony: when you had your first glimpse of the truth of things, you were trying very hard not to think of anything at all. But it was then, in the hazy distance, in the hellfire of four thirty on another West Texan afternoon, that you saw two figures exit the side door of Bliss Township School. They were just mirage-blurred abstractions, but you could recognize them both. The slightly hunched shuffle of Mr. Avalon, and the tentative half tiptoe of Rebekkah. It was just over a week now until the homecoming performance, and you knew that she had after-school rehearsals with Mr. Avalon. And yet there was something odd in the way they left the school at that slightly hurried pace, odder still that they then climbed, together, into the fancy vintage Cadillac Mr. Avalon drove. The engine fired, and they motored away, leaving behind a thick cloud of exhaust.

  Two hours later, after a wearingly silent drive in your father’s truck: the too-bright dining room at Zion’s Pastures, your family taking forks to meat loaf, your brother smirking into his lap as he reread some lengthy letter from a friend. Another request of car keys from your father, another display of your mother’s anxiety, the way she interrogated her ground beef with the business end of her knife. “Rebekkah Sterling again, huh?” your mother said. “Another one of your study groups.”

  You shrugged. “We just have more work to do. Why are you acting like that?”

  A tense second, gathering energy, Ma shifting around in her chair, like she didn’t want to tell you what she had to tell you next, but she was powerless to stop its rise to the surface. “What about how you have been acting? Suddenly we hardly even talk anymore, and you treat my basic questions like—” Her voice broke off before she arrived to the true substance of what she had to tell you, which her better reason kept quiet. But you didn’t need your mother to explain her frustration; you were your mother’s favorite, an invisible umbilical still connected you, and you knew that the defeated way she had often looked at you across the dinner table those last weeks was just a result of accumulating evidence that vast and vital parts of your life would take place beyond the two hundred acres of home.

  And so, by a little after seven thirty that evening, half-sick with filial guilt, you were once more behind the wheel of Goliath, out on another fake study date. The fuchsia blush of sunset; a coyote singing his lonesome song over the plains. After years of citizenship in the teenage tyrannical state imposed by your West Texan classmates, you knew the official condemnation for a boy like yourself at this moment. “Loser,” you said. But you couldn’t help yourself. That evening, you were back to playing private investigator, conducting a stakeout on behalf of your demanding and unreasonable client, your jilted, baffled heart. The oddness of seeing Rebekkah getting a ride from Mr. Avalon, compounded by the strangeness of Mr. Avalon’s anger when you came to ask him about her that day—understanding nothing, you felt you had to do something. These were questions that drove you through another desert night. Not eastward, to the Sterling McMansion, but to the north, past your school, to the address listed in the directory for Reginald Avalon. You clicked off Goliath’s headlights as you approached the house.

  It was dark now, and the last of the daylight made the night sky look electronic, lit bluely from behind. The thickly piled stucco of Mr. Avalon’s pueblo looked like melted candle, or else scarred, burnt skin. All you could make out inside was a single light, the orange rectangle of a lit window against the cooling purple of the evening.

  You told yourself you were being ridiculous, a boy stalking a teacher’s house in his parents’ hatchback. Ha! And yet. You opened Goliath’s door and stepped into the chalky air of the Chihuahuan night.

  But what were you going to do now? Creep up to the one lit window like some Peeping Tom? Crouch down low, beneath the sash, press your fingers to its frame, and slowly hoist your head into the light? Pathetic. But that is what you did anyway.

  You made slow, trespasser progress to the house, testing each step as if the earth might suddenly give way. The remains of a long-abandoned flowerbed crunched and popped. But as you crept closer still, a sound overtook the quiet. Much louder than your own footsteps. The loose music of a guitar emanating from the window. And you were beneath that window now. Your fingertips shook on the stucco frame. You lifted your face into the light.

  You were a silent and pitiable creature, a desert animal crouching in the moonlight, and what you saw inside the window was like a perfect tableau of what would never be yours. Rebekkah Sterling was just sitting there in the living room with her teacher. The music came from Rebekkah’s own hands, as she sat on a kitchen chair, plucking a pretty tune from a guitar. You had no idea she played guitar. Her eyes were sealed now, as if she were becoming the music itself, sweet, simple, melancholic. A wind rose, Rebekkah opened her mouth, and her song drifted out.

  I was living in a devil town, didn’t know it was a devil town. Rebekkah’s voice lifted—Oh, Lord, it really brings me down about the devil town—a voice to break apart your skin, to burst the glass from the window, to atomize the thick stucco wall between you and blow it out into the desert night. Your lanky body might still have been bent there on the other side of the window, but now you were with Mr. Avalon in his living room. You were Mr. Avalon, when Rebekkah struck the final chords. It was your hands that clapped, your body that hoisted itself from the sofa, you who stumbled a bit over the coffee table.

  No, not you. Not anymore. Something bright and furious bursting. Before you could comprehend, before you could measure the meaning, you knew only the lover’s ancient lament, the cruelty of hands that weren’t yours wrapped around her. Rebekkah tilted her head in Mr. Avalon’s direction.

  You were outside the window, and you were also very far away, blinking into the scope of your father’s Celestron. You began to understand in the way that Galileo had cracked the mystery of Earth’s third-class place in the solar system—first, he had to patiently measure shadows moving on the faces of distant planets. You, too, had been measuring. The warm grin Mr. Avalon showed her in the halls. The gloom in Rebekkah’s face when you brought up the man’s name. It was those observations, and just the closeness of your attention to Rebekkah, that let you begin to comprehend what you were seeing. But an amateur astronomer like yourself could not have understood, not at all, the full truth.

  Mr. Avalon stooped to Rebekkah and your world undid itself. Were you wrong? And yet, what was there not to comprehend? Mr. Avalon pressed his lips against her. And not as you had, in your bashful, fumbling way. He held her cheeks and applied his mouth. Rebekkah did not fight, nor did she do much to return the kiss. She just offered her face and received him in an untroubled, routine way.

  You did not speak or cry out. You were careful not to make a rustling sound against the wall. You made a silent plea into the night, which at last Rebekkah’s face answered. Technically, her gaze met yours, but it looked very far away. Light-years.

  A snapping. Snap spap: a dry branch in Mr. Avalon’s dead garden. He turned. You dropped to the ground. Had he seen? What had he seen? What had you?

  Light years: but Spooky Action, the mysterious understitching of our universe, renders our ordinary ideas of time and distance moot. And so, as you looked into Mr. Avalon’s window, so too, ten years later, in the distant world over your bed, did your family look into another kind of opening. Seeing, but not understanding, not yet.

  Eve

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “Yes.”

  In the five days that Margot Strout had been translating her son’s replies into the world, her son’s yes flexed on inside of Eve, even alone in her bed at Desert Splendor. Yes, Eve had come to see, could also be a negation. Eve had quit her secretive little visits to her husband in Marfa. The attic stockpile she had been amassing for her son’s future had not grown by a single hardcover. The day before, she’d even resisted the nice fountain pen someone left on the reception counter.

  Yes: the word in her son’s left hand, exactly where Eve had claimed. More specifically, the thenar muscles, just
beneath his thumb. “I should have listened to you earlier,” Margot Strout admitted, in what surely counted as one of the top ten most gratifying moments of Eve’s life. Eve shrugged. “A mother knows these things.”

  It might have taken Margot Strout—with her EEG feedback software, her communication gear, and her training—to translate those twitches into anything legible, but it belonged to her, Eve felt, this second miracle. She had been very adamant on that point, lecturing Charlie and even Peggy to say nothing to the Fifteenth of November set, the Wolcott/Henderson/Dawson/Schumacher cadre who had dropped by again with a plate of oatmeal cookies, the larger set of politicized mourners led by Donna Grass who had sent carnations, or the reporters who still sporadically phoned her. Harder to ignore, though ignore she had for three days now, were the phone calls from Manuel Paz, asking her to stop by the station. “I know what a time this must be for you,” Manuel said in one of his several voice mails that she let herself play, “but it’s very important we talk.” Even if Hector Espina was ten years in the earth, Eve knew how much the former citizenry of Bliss might make of it. The lost boy, the most inexplicable victim of an inexplicable catastrophe in a vanished town, a nearly forgotten tragedy’s only living memorial, at last able to reply for himself.

  “I think we have a right to know what Oliver has to tell us before we invite the whole world to come crowding in,” she told Charlie. “I think Oliver has that right. I think he deserves a little space here. We all do.”

  “But what about Pa?” Charlie asked. “Shouldn’t we at least tell him? Put the man out of his misery?”

  “Soon,” Eve said, and meant it. “I’ll tell him myself.” But something had thus far kept her from sharing this news with her husband. Perhaps it was only the old vindictive streak, or perhaps something else, something about the dark, silent place she occupied with Jed when she went to see him in Marfa. A warm-sad safe room, securely sealed off from the unsettled atmosphere of her present life.

  It had only been five times with Jed, and each time Eve told herself she was only going to “update” him, offer a little kindness to the leathery old depressive. And yet, each time on the drive over, she felt her whole body swelling with the promise of a quick lance of relief, in the way she could feel her hands trembling to act out another theft. Except this particular need was not about the future, of course it was not. It wasn’t about some shallow and sentimental idea of partnership in her fraught days, certainly not about any hope (God forbid!) that they might actually get together again. Though he lamely claimed it was only turned apple cider, Eve found on one visit two jars of Jed’s urine stashed beneath his bed! But she had been able to ignore the piss jars; the whole thing seemed not quite real, a few crazy, stolen hours in some place so far beyond the boundaries of her daily reality that Eve knew she would never have to acknowledge any of it. Also, no denying it: for all of Charlie’s smug condemnations, his twenty-three-year-old’s certainty that he must know much more than she, there was more than a little pleasure in this one thing he didn’t know. What would Charlie think of that? Often, Eve had failed to keep the grin from her cheeks.

  The morning that Charlie had tearily called from Crockett State to tell her the news, Eve had already discovered his little runaway note fixed to the fridge. “To be honest, Ma,” Charlie later admitted, in the rare bout of honesty the newest development had apparently inspired, “I’m in trouble, real trouble.” Charlie had sobbed, Eve had rocked him quiet in the kitchen chair. “I’ll pay it. Of course I’ll take care of you,” she told him. “I know you sometimes forget this but I’m not only the dictator you think you’ve escaped, I’m also your mother who loves you.” A victorious moment, no doubt, more victorious still when Charlie freshly crumpled into her arms. And so she had no choice but to pay as promised, and now the combined life savings of the family Loving was at $962 and falling. The night before, Eve had felt that the pages of Jesus Is My BFF were radiating moral condemnation from her nightstand—as if her own life were the cautionary epilogue for Christians who denied Christ’s good counsel—and she gathered the papers and slammed them into the stand’s bottom drawer.

  And so the dreaded financial scenario had arrived at last. Eve was falling to the red side of the money line now. The Lovings would have to live on credit, Eve on her shiny blue Visa, Charlie on his mother’s overstrained generosity, her threadbare patience. A question she told herself that she really must stop asking: How could she have raised a son to do something so stupid as to fall three months behind on rent to that gangsterishly accented landlord she’d spoken with on the phone? “Family,” Jimmy Giordano—his actual name!—had told Eve over the phone, “it’s a merciful thing. Glad to know that kid is with a mother who loves him.”

  “Well, for the record, I think we should have already told Pa, but I’ll let you call the shots,” Charlie said.

  “You’ll let me. How decent of you,” Eve said.

  And yet, in the Big Bend, news never stays private for long. Eve didn’t know who summoned her—she suspected Peggy, or Dr. Rumble, or perhaps even Margot—but on that Friday an M.D.-Ph.D. (or, in her own words, “a grief and trauma specialist”) named Linda Finfrock showed up, all the way from Midland, to “help you and Oliver through this exciting but also very complicated time.” Linda Finfrock’s idea of “help” was apparently the lengthy lecture she delivered to Eve and Charlie on the topic of post-traumatic stress, about not prying the lid too soon.

  “It is like the lid on Pandora’s box,” Dr. Finfrock said in her pedantic, lounge singer’s dark-smooth voice. A streak of white rose through the lady’s hairdo like a semicolon. “Of course you’ll have questions for Oliver, I know that everyone will, but we need to move slowly. None of us can possibly even imagine what all this might feel like for him now. And from what Mrs. Strout tells me, Oliver is still struggling to work out basic words. The point here is that we have to give him time, a lot of time, before you force any hard questions. We don’t, you know, want to let out all the ghosts at once.”

  Eve nodded. “I couldn’t agree with you more,” she said.

  “And how are you doing?” the doctor asked Eve, pointing her pen toward Eve’s baggy, reddened eyes. “Everything okay? This is no small thing for you, either.”

  “Never been more wonderful,” Eve said.

  * * *

  “The alphabet,” Margot Strout was saying, after Eve and Charlie had settled into their chairs by Bed Four that Saturday afternoon. “It’s far from perfect. But we’re making progress.”

  “The alphabet?”

  Margot grinned, sucked audibly at a butterscotch candy. Indulging her dramatic streak that Eve had noticed over the last week, Margot declined to explain anything more, leaving her demonstration to do the explaining.

  “Hey, Oliver, do you know who just walked in here? Who I’m talking to?” Margot resumed her work posture, pressing her index and middle fingers in to the meat of Oliver’s left thenar muscles. The EEG wires trembled.

  Eve anticipated the bright, robot cheer of the familiar “Yes.” Instead, Margot did something new.

  “A? B? C? D? E? F?” Keeping her gaze on the biofeedback reading, Margot recited the alphabet until its middle, pausing at M, at which point Margot pressed a key on the screen mounted over the bed and started the alphabet anew. “A?” she asked, but this time she made it no further. And when Margot now pressed another button, the computer spoke Oliver’s name for Eve—not Mother or Mom but the Texan endearment, “Ma.”

  “Oliver.” Ma: like a sharp blow to her back. Eve was breathless, straining. Dr. Finfrock was right, but Pandora’s box did not only belong to her son. It was all screaming out of her now. Years, terror, stolen goods, a disintegrating house, a lost and reckless son, a prayer offered for genuflecting hours each day. It rushed down her cheeks, rose in her throat. She was very nearly sick.

  “Holy shit,” Charlie said. “I mean, shit!”

  “You said it.” Margot laughed.

  “We can ask hi
m whatever we want?” Charlie asked. “We can just say whatever we want, and he can talk back to us?”

  “I’d steer clear of asking his opinion on politics. Ha! It’s slow for now, one letter at a time.” Margot’s voice trembled, quavering away from professional neutrality. “But there are techniques to pick up speed. And we’ll get to all that soon. We’ll start using another kind of alphabet, with the letters arranged by frequency—”

  But then words seemed to abandon the speech pathologist, too. The woman’s skin had gone splotchy, red continents lighting up all over the globe of her head. She was, after all, a mother as well, another mother who had lost a part of her own body. She was another mother with her heart torn out, who had tried to make for herself this second or third life pulling words from the aphasic in the forlorn clinics and hospitals of the West Texas desert. Watching the wetness pool and roll over the blush of her cheeks, it was the first time that Eve let herself consider that Dr. Rumble and the rest might have had a point about Margot. Eve and Margot had never spoken, at least not directly, about the events of that night or about the daughter Margot lost, the husband who had walked out on her, but just now it seemed to Eve that the woman’s story might really have been quietly heroic all along, sublimating all that sorrow into this vital work. To Eve’s considerable surprise, she saw her own arms reaching for Margot Strout, pulling the woman’s heft against her, their mingled tears making a sloppy sound where their necks touched. Even Charlie tried to get in on the act, gently patting both women between their shoulder blades.

  They disentangled and inhaled. Eve cupped a hand over Oliver’s cheek as his eyes carried on their frantic search. Margot lifted his left hand, bored into the meat of his palm.

  What words does one say when one can, after a decade-long silence, speak with a lost son? What are the first words and the second? The first thing Eve came up with might have been the most overused sentence in the English language, the language’s oldest recipe, served again and again to the verge of blandness, but what else was there for her to tell Oliver but “I love you”?