Oliver Loving

by Stefan Merrill Block

  Time went on. Now she was eighteen, a girl with a GED and a precarious academic standing at a New York community college. Now she was twenty-three, still without a diploma, aimless and moneyed. Now she was twenty-six when, one night, the past she had tried to give away came back to her. Edwina snuffling at her feet on a Brooklyn sidewalk. “Rebekkah. It’s Charlie. Charlie Loving.”

  In the time before, she had hardly spoken to the kid, but she had seen enough of him to be surprised by the man he’d become. A handsome guy in snap-button flannels, his eyes bright behind fashionable glasses. But she too had changed and then changed again. Her skin had weathered, the freckles expanding to permanent beige spots. The parents who had once wrecked her had dissipated into her grayish atmosphere. She lived alone and jobless, already like some spinster, minus the cats. Charlie was not a boy anymore, and she was not a girl anymore. “What do you want?”

  “Just to talk,” he said. Charlie’s eyes, with their bright gray light, were the eyes of the boy who spoke with her before first period each day, in another life when she still might have become another kind of person. What if she had only kept talking to Oliver? What if she had stopped going to Mr. Avalon’s house? The truth was still there, right at Charlie’s feet. “Edwina,” Rebekkah said.

  Just to talk, but how could she? Mental illness, people had said on the television, shaking their heads, violence in the media. Immigration policy. Cartel warfare. Terrorism. And if it were true that Hector Espina, with his muttering tempers, had been unwell, and if it were also true that Hector had seen the horrific footage of how other boys before him had made a gruesome spectacle of their suffering, Rebekkah knew those factors amounted only to kindling for the fire. It was rage that had set the blaze. It was the outrage of a hopeless, abused, and cast-off child, given false hope.

  In a unit on Dante’s Inferno, one of her college professors described a special torment that Hell reserves for the wrathful. “They are made to spend eternity in the muck of the river Styx,” the professor said. “Endlessly lamenting their sins, their words lost in that thick black river. Unbearable, am I right?” But Rebekkah, after years in her own underworld, could put her head into those murky waters, where she could still hear Hector’s lament. I had nothing, nothing, nothing, no one helped me, why did no one help me, why did no one stop him, hope was the worst torture of all, why did no one help me?

  And now Rebekkah was twenty-seven, standing outside her family’s empty house. The cottonwoods that lined the man-made gully in the backyard had nearly doubled in height. Edwina hopped through the dense, bunched grasses that carpeted the ground below. The pug gamboled about, diligent and delighted, more youthful than her years, as if searching for a shotgunned mallard. “Edwina!” Rebekkah shouted, and the dog ran to her heel. Rebekkah was seventeen years old, giving Edwina to Charlie. She was twenty-seven years old, crouching over the same animal, who was going gray at the snout now. Edwina licked at her face. This poor pug, bound to her own sad history, twice nursed to health from death’s brink. “I’m sorry,” Rebekkah told the dog as she gathered her up and turned for the car.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Tonight, almost ten years after, Jed was in the cab of his Nissan pickup. Seven thirty in the desert and the sun was a low, unblinking orb. When he reached the road to his wife’s house, it took all the strength he had to turn.

  Maybe Jed’s greatest crime was self-pity. After all, his whole past wasn’t just the tragedy he’d often narrated to himself. There had been actual miracles. His sons. Their skin and muscle and bone and bright eyes flung wide on just another ordinary Sunday morning as they flew through the air, arcing to him from the rope swing over Loving Creek. Cannonball! Maybe the happiest hours of his life, if only he’d known it then. But each day he had failed to be the father he had imagined; he loved his boys so fiercely, he knew he’d make the same mess of it that he made of all things he loved.

  History doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes: a quote that Mrs. Henderson had tacked up in her American history classroom. It was true, and not only in the ways his life echoed his own father’s. As his truck thundered down the county road, Jed found himself thinking of that man he hadn’t thought of in years. He was thinking of Reginald Avalon. Reginald and Jed, Hector and Oliver: two couplets in rhyming verse, four young men with dreams of art that would never come to be. History rhymes, but there is something not quite graspable in the symmetries. The truck seemed to know its own way. He was at that strange and new cracked house of Eve’s now, no home. He was at her door, knocking.

  “Jed,” Eve said.

  “Hi.” He spoke to his hands, his old man’s hands. “Is Charlie here, too?”

  “Charlie? You came here to speak with Charlie?”

  Jed shrugged down at a brown doormat that said WELCOME.

  “Well, he isn’t here,” Eve said. “I honestly have no idea where he might have gone.”

  “Oh,” Jed said.

  “So, what? What is it?” she asked, and Jed looked up.

  Eve. Once Jed had painted better universes for his family, but the only better universe he had really tried to believe in was the one she had offered. Belief, silence to the facts. Their perfect son, withering, sightless, untested for years, too horrible to see. The true story of Jed’s life? His silence was the jail keeper. He had never told Eve, This is wrong, you have to let Oliver go. You have to let Charlie live his own life. He had never told his family, It was I who made him come that night. He had never told anyone, That boy Hector needs some help.

  But now Jed spoke. He opened his mouth and all the contents of the black stomach at last came spilling out. He only had to let go, and the words came and came. Eve said nothing for a long while after he had finished.

  “I don’t understand,” she told him at last.

  “I know.”

  “It was because of you? That he came that night?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Hector—”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? Why are you telling me these things? Why, Jed? Why now?”

  “I couldn’t not tell you. Anymore.”

  “About ten years too late.”

  “You are right. Of course you are right.”

  Eve turned, stepped into her broken living room. Standing there for a long while, they made no sound but their own breathing. When he tried to reach for Eve, she shuddered away. “Please,” Jed said, and she shook her head. Jed had an image of himself bursting apart, his flesh splattering the walls. Somehow he managed to remain upright.

  “Jed,” Eve said at last. She held out a hand, and Jed flinched, anticipating a slap. Instead, she grasped the hair at the back of his head, pressed his forehead hard against her own. Her breath was in his mouth, his tears on her face. “I’m very, very sorry for you,” she said, renewing her hold on his head. “But it is too late for you to come tell me these things now and think you can just be forgiven. Too late to think that everything will somehow change.”

  Jed pulled gently away, held her hands between his own. “There’s still so much we’ve never told each other,” he said.

  “Meaning what?”

  “We have to stop,” Jed said. “We have to stop going on like this. You have to stop.”

  “I have to stop what?”

  “Eve—”

  “Fuck you. I mean it, Jed. Fuck you. I don’t have to listen to another word from you.”

  “But you never did, did you? You only hear what you want to hear.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “Nothing is easy for me to say.”

  “Leave. Just go. It’s what you deserve.”

  “But what about what Oliver deserves?”

  “Go.” Eve pointed at the door.

  “Listen to me,” Jed said.

  “I can’t,” she said. “I won’t.”

  “Listen to me,” Jed said again, and his hand found the corner of a television. For three decades of marriage, Jed had found ways to make no sound. He was alw
ays careful on the floorboards, nodded through dinners, at last retreated into his father’s silence in the settler’s cabin. Tonight he grasped the TV and slammed it into the wall. Jed was a different man now, and Eve gaped at the person he had become. Or not become. Revealed. “Okay,” she said. “So I’m listening.”

  And they were still speaking there in Eve’s kitchen, at six the next morning, when her phone rang.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Midland. Rebekkah soothed herself with the thought of the concrete low-rise hotels she’d seen from the tarmac. She would drive back now, spend the night in an anonymous pod of the Hilton, and in the morning she’d fly away. With a snap of her foot, she fed the engine.

  And yet, as if it had some last vindictive point to make before it let her go free, her rental car’s GPS system guided Rebekkah past the pueblo that would always stand at the black center of her memory. Its stucco walls now badly chipped, its yard littered with detritus. That same old Cadillac on cinder blocks, a tattered blue tarp, a child’s rusting tricycle. Rebekkah told herself that she would pass quickly, yet her Fiesta slowed nearly to a stop. And there her memories still lumbered, walking from shed to house. Mr. Avalon’s familiar hunch, something disjointed in his knees, his arms with their simian swing, a parade of children—How many? He’d never answered Hector’s question—trailing behind him. “No,” Rebekkah said to the driver’s-side window. The memory vanished, leaving a field of dead weeds in the deepening twilight.

  Once upon a time, Oliver was just the lanky love poem writer in her English class; how could she have known then that he would become the only person who had ever seen, the only one who might have had words for it all? Oliver. He still came to her in strange places. He was in the cozy smell of aging paper at the Brooklyn Public Library, the ended possibility of those thousands of pages he would never write. The quiet between notes she still plucked on her guitar. Oliver was his brother following her through the streets of Brooklyn. His eyes were Charlie’s eyes. Gray, brownish around the pupil. “It isn’t right,” Charlie said over the phone. “We never thought about what he might need.” In one of the two trees that stood in the front yard of Mr. Avalon’s house, a shredded kite rustled in the branches.

  Rebekkah turned the wheel. Could she really do it? She imagined the scene that might await her at the hospital. A bedside lamp clicking on, her face coming into focus.

  Once, Oliver had looked at Rebekkah like an angel descended. How, she wondered, would she look to him after all those years? Rebekkah knew: in the end, she had become a different sort of angel, the one who brought death.

  Oliver

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  “The whole cosmos,” your father once told his Young Astronomers Club, “will end just as it began, collapsed back to a single spot of brightness. The Big Crunch, they call it, which in turn becomes the next Big Bang, the universe reborn.” Maybe your father’s arty astrophysical stories had always been more metaphor than science, and yet, once more, it was just as your father had described it. At last, after years of spreading darkness, a sudden contraction; the immeasurable weight of past and present rejoining to a single point of light. A brightness that woke you.

  It was the bulb at the end of the flexible stick of your bedside lamp, and you could make out just the shape of a wrist as your eyes ached to adjust. Whose wrist? The wrist became a hand, which reached to direct the light upward. You blinked, and you blinked, and the image shook slowly into focus.

  Suddenly, I turned around and she was standing there: that was a line from your favorite song in the last of your walking years. Bob Dylan’s “Shelter from the Storm.” In the few months you’d known her, Rebekkah had never exactly been the shelter, she had at least as often been the storm. But in another lifetime, maybe?

  Well, here you both were now, in another lifetime indeed. You might not have been able to turn around, but it was just as Bob Dylan had promised. Suddenly, she was standing there. But not with silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair. Those famous amber ringlets of hers were drawn back in a neat ponytail, and she wore a half-unzipped hoodie over a purplish blouse.

  The hands that were Rebekkah’s hands reached to hold your face steady so that you could not look away. You wanted very much to look away. Enough, you told yourself. You knew your brain had at last torn down the final boundaries and conjured her back for you, but you found that you didn’t have the courage to look upon this pleading hallucination. Rebekkah as you remembered her was one thing, a marvelous flightless bird petrified in iridescent rock. But this dream of her now, looking down at you after all those years? Her parted lips, her widened eyes registering the kind of heartbreak that is lodged between shock and disgust? It was too much, too close. Oh, even her vanilla smell was so achingly convincing. You willed her to vanish. Yet this dream Rebekkah persisted there, and she cleared her throat.

  “Oliver,” she said.

  And still the illusion remained, in such remarkable detail. Even the light throatiness of her breathing, which you had forgotten, was back in your ears. You cheered with the thought that this, at last, was just the true, merciful form your own angel of death had taken.

  “I’ll bet you are surprised,” Rebekkah told you, and that was when you began to believe. Rebekkah, the living, the actual.

  But you were not surprised, not exactly. You were—what’s the word for when your most persistent daydreams take tangible, breathing, ginger-hued life in front of you? Just one word for it, of course. Rebekkah. You could not rise to take in the changes with your arms, and so you did your best to take her in with your eyes, which vibrated across her at a high frequency.

  “Oliver?” Rebekkah’s tone was distant, a voice on a bad telephone connection. As if testing something, she pressed her mouth to your forehead and retreated. “How is this you?”

  In the harsh black and bright white of the bedside lamp, she looked like she had passed through more than a decade. Gray strands wound through those amber ringlets now. As with your mother, her face was a furrowed cartography of the many bad years. And her voice, which you had so often conjured in your memory, was a whole octave lower than you would have expected. She had changed. It was nature’s way, and you accepted it. It was in that acceptance that you found yourself appalled.

  “I can’t, I couldn’t. I’m sorry,” Rebekkah said. “I should have come to see you. Years ago. I just couldn’t.”

  “It’s okay,” you couldn’t say.

  “It’s not okay,” she said.

  What appalled you was the way that, even still, a crazy, vanilla-drunk feeling once more staggered its way upright inside you. Even still, at the mere sight of this half stranger, you felt the old urgency. Everything you still needed to tell her.

  Of course you knew that to the woman presently bent over your bed, you were now Oliver the Martyr, Oliver the Buried Truth, Oliver the Secret Shame, but you had never been Oliver the Lost Love. You were, in fact, just one boy she had kissed; there were many before you, and very many had followed. The tragedy of love, you had learned from ten years spent looking up at your mother, is that it is only possible to love perfectly a person who is lost to you; only a lost person, lodged in a place before the narrow, clumsy gates of language, could ever understand you perfectly. And so maybe the great love of your life was only a crush, blown up to operatic proportions by impassable distance, only a name for your vanished future. But when you had spoken those mornings before school in Mrs. Schumacher’s literature classroom, Rebekkah had seemed to offer the possibility of a new kind of fluency, and maybe it was that better, impossible language you needed even more than you needed her. That better language, more expansive and full of strange beauty, which you needed to tell everything that had happened and not happened, the ways you had survived because you had no choice but to survive.

  Rebekkah clenched her face, released it, clenched again. When your gastrointestinal machine made a little gurgle, Rebekkah startled, and her words came out of her like som
ething she’d spilled, sloppy and wet. “And I know it’s way, way too late. To say I’m sorry? But I am. I am so, so sorry. I’m sorry that I never came. That I never told anyone what was happening before it was too late. That I still haven’t told. For years. Years, like this. Oliver. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’ll say it, I think I’ll really keep saying it to myself like a little prayer forever. Sorry. But what does that word even mean?”

  You might have made Rebekkah into the Penelope at the end of your own bed-bound Odyssey, but even if you could have spoken to her now, you would have had no idea what to say. Rebekkah blinked very rapidly, as if she weren’t seeing straight. “I want to show you something.” She relinquished your face and leaned to one side to extract a paper from her bag. Your eyes, of course, could never focus on the text, but you recognized the shapes of your lines as you would have recognized a photograph of your old school. It was, in fact, the poem about your school, “Children of the Borderlands,” the last poem you’d written for her. In another lifetime. The page was torn from a magazine, worn nearly to a pulp, the words smeared and creased like old money.

  “Recognize it, Oliver? I still read it, all the time. I’ve memorized all the words, but to see them there, on that page? It is like you are still out there somewhere. I read this thing you wrote, and I still feel—I don’t know, Oliver. So glad. That I got to know you.”

  “Me, too,” you could not say. Maybe your hands would never again rise to meet hers. All the promise of your mornings in Mrs. Schumacher’s literature classroom would never be yours. But at least you had this, and maybe it was the best anyone could ever hope for: a roomy idea in which you were not alone. Long seconds passed.

  “Good Lord!” Another voice—the familiar West Texan twang of the current Crockett State receptionist and former Bliss Pies N’ Stuff waitress—filled the room. “Is that Rebekkah Sterling?”