Oliver Loving

by Stefan Merrill Block

  “You found him,” Christopher said, joining them a minute later.

  “I’m getting the feeling I had a spy in the house.”

  “I’m sorry for that. It seemed wrong not to tell your mother you were okay. I found her number in your phone. Remember this thing?” Christopher gave the device a few wags, tossed it at Charlie.

  “And she sent you?” Charlie asked Rebekkah. “What are you even doing in Texas?”

  “I volunteered, actually, said it was about time I talked to you anyway.”

  “No way,” Charlie told the impossible fact of her face in front of him. “I don’t believe this. Why would you come find me? And why now?”

  Rebekkah grimaced, nodded for a few seconds. “It’s a good thing we’ve got a long drive ahead of us. It’s going to take a while, what I have to tell you.”

  “A long drive?”

  “They need you. There’s this big test…” Charlie nodded, held up a palm to suggest she didn’t need to say anything more. She didn’t; the shame of his disappearance was argument enough, but the much more prominent sensation—the trembling in his ears, the cool blue behind his eyes—was relief. Charlie gathered his pages from the teahouse, stuffed them into his bag, and checked out of Anti-House by giving Christopher a firm squeeze. But Christopher? He pressed his mouth against Charlie’s again, the friction of their stubble generating static electricity.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  In the rental car, Charlie rode with Rebekkah through the chaos of stars, the humped black Hill Country. Under the bright beams of the Ford Fiesta, the asphalt was a wire, threading them home.

  The first hour or two passed in near silence, as if the gas stations and subdivisions and hill towns were too distracting, as if to tell what Rebekkah needed to tell she had to be in a nullity, a perfect void. As the world was reduced to the occasional streetlamp, burning dimly over the western plains, it felt as if they were the last people alive. “It was a hard year for me,” Rebekkah began. “It seemed like nobody saw me until Mr. Avalon…” But as Rebekkah pressed on into her whole horrible story, Charlie did not exactly listen to her words. Her words transmuted him; Charlie became thirteen years old again, on that first day in the hospital conference room. But the room was different now, the name Mr. Avalon a noxious gas, thick and gray, filling the memory, choking out the air.

  Later, after stopping for a bathroom break in Ozona, Charlie took the wheel to let Rebekkah rest. As soon as he turned back on to Interstate 10, Rebekkah fell quickly asleep, Edwina dozing on her lap, her snores mercifully cured of that terrible watery sound.

  Mr. Avalon. Their vanished town’s faded deity, their failed musician, their imagined martyr. Why? Even after Rebekkah had at last fallen silent, and the shock of it had passed, Charlie knew that not even this story could ever truly answer the question that had become the organizing principle of his life. Rebekkah’s story might help explain, but there could be no full answer for Hector and the decision he’d made, Charlie saw that now. And, out the windshield, Charlie also saw this: they were already on the border of the desert that had seen five hardscrabble generations of Lovings.

  That blue country looked like no place for humans. Charlie was thinking that maybe the wrongness, “the vexation,” as Granny Nunu had always claimed, was in the land itself. The evil, the sickness that had led to his brother’s confinement, his father’s withering, the wasted years, the slain schoolchildren, the silenced abuse of Rebekkah, Hector Espina, and who knows how many others. All of it, taken together, was like some legend Charlie and his brother might once have whispered about in their bunks. A family curse, begun generations before they arrived on that grim stage. However: it was not only Charlie’s life that bent around that damning conjunction. However was his region’s ancestral affliction, the whole story of that Texan borderland, a lifeless country where utopian visions had come to die for more than a century. The last hope of an Apache homeland, the entrepreneurial ambitions of the white settlers with their cattle and mineral enterprises, the parched aspirations of hundreds of thousands of immigrants: to all of those dreams the desert had intoned its ancient reply. However. And, on the night of November fifteenth, his country’s ancient green-grass delusion and the violence it stoked had transformed but was as present as ever, the bloody sequel to the faded tall tales still spinning out in his digitized century, in a country psychotically armed for end times. However was the story of Hector Espina’s West Texan existence, too, a young man who every day must have carried in his pockets the crumpled dream of his own fame. And yet, as a navy selvage of dawn rimmed the eastern horizon, exposing hills that looked like ancient sea creatures, fossilized in the moment of breaching the surface of the long-drained ocean, the sight entered Charlie’s eyes like a key clicking into all its tumblers, unlatching a sensation that even still Charlie could only call home.

  * * *

  Rebekkah woke as Charlie pulled the Fiesta over at a filling station–cum–diner outside Fort Stockton. She narrowed her eyes at the sun pouring back into the desert morning. “And now for the next bit of news,” she said.

  “The next?”

  Rebekkah shrugged. “Ha. You know what? I think I’ll leave it as a surprise for you.”

  Charlie was still too adrift in the floodwater of all these new facts to muster anything beyond a survival instinct, throwing his arms over his head.

  “But Rebekkah? Have you told my parents? Do they know what you told me?”

  “I told them everything. The day after I came back, I told them.” She set her jaw, glanced at Charlie, nodded at his next question, which he didn’t even need to ask.

  “It was just seeing Oliver there, I guess. I saw Oliver, and I thought, Charlie is right. I had been so worried for myself, so sorry for myself really, but I thought, Charlie is right, what does Oliver need? And of course I knew what Oliver needed. Had always known. Just the truth.”

  “The truth,” Charlie said. “And did my parents tell all this to Manuel Paz?”

  “I told him myself. I don’t even know what he could do about it now. What any of us can do now. But I told your mom that if she needed someone to come get you in Austin, that was a thing I could do.”

  Rebekkah and Charlie watched a wren pick at an empty box of fries, give up and flutter away. “Hey,” Rebekkah said. “Go grab us some coffee, and then I’m taking the wheel.”

  An hour later, Rebekkah turned off Route 385 five miles before it came to Crockett State. Oddly, no words passed between them as the destination became more evident, the crumbling gravel and frowzy buildings of Route 90 dusting themselves off, buttoning up for the one spot of sophistication in the whole of the Big Bend.

  “Uh-oh,” Charlie said.

  Rebekkah didn’t reply as she worked the car through the grid of downtown Marfa. At last she put the Fiesta in park before the vine-choked little ranch house, which now sat far on the feral side of bohemian. “Your father’s place,” she said.

  “I see that. What are we doing here?”

  “He told your mom that she shouldn’t have to be alone, with everything that’s been happening.” Rebekkah said. “She’s been here for almost a week now.”

  “Seriously? I—” Charlie was silenced by the unlikely sight of his bedraggled mother—her curls akimbo, her gaunt frame in a bathrobe of unspeakable pinkness—emerging from the battered front door. Charlie turned back to Rebekkah, his mouth still gaping, to find the girl waving faintly in the direction of his mother.

  “Looks like someone wants to say hi to you,” Rebekkah said.

  “Looks that way, doesn’t it?” Charlie turned away, watched a turkey vulture make its slow clock-like rotation in the sky.

  “She’s been kind to me,” Rebekkah said. “Though I must admit she isn’t always the easiest person to talk to.”

  “Come in with me?”

  Rebekkah shook her head. “I have the feeling my work here is pretty much done.”

  “Done?”

  “I told your m
om that I wanted to stay, at least until that test, but she made me promise that I’d get myself away from all this. I don’t know if that is her being kind or just wishing me gone.”

  “Welcome to the Loving family.”

  “Hm,” Rebekkah said, looking at the distance down Paisano Lane.

  “So,” Charlie addressed her profile. “Where are you going, then?”

  “Who knows,” she said. “Back to New York, I guess? Though I’m thinking that it’s maybe time for someplace new.”

  Edwina was panting in Charlie’s lap, and he felt for her ears, pinched them away from her head in that way that made her look like a jumbo-sized bat.

  “Edwina—” Charlie said.

  “We’re not even going to discuss it,” Rebekkah said. “She belongs to you. Or maybe you belong to her? Ha ha. You and Edwina belong together, anyway.”

  Rebekkah, even after her long conversation with Charlie, still could not quite bring herself to meet his sightline, and so Charlie cupped the girl’s cheek in his hand. To his surprise, she leaned into this touch, pressing her face into his palm. She grinned at him now, a little wistfully. “You know,” Charlie said, “I’ve spent a good part of the last year imagining what I might tell you. ‘Thank you’ was never very high on my list.”

  Rebekkah sucked at one of her wounded cuticles, nodded. “No,” she said. “Thank you.” Charlie opened the door and carried Edwina out into the Marfa morning. The engine hummed behind him, and the car disappeared down Paisano Lane.

  “Ma,” Charlie called across the withered front yard. “What in the hell?”

  “Well. Look who’s back again.”

  Charlie paused there, on the broken sidewalk. They were still mother and son; a lifetime of apologies and avowals, attacks and defenses were filing up in their ancient ranks. And yet, after all those years, their locked eyes seemed to carry out the tired warfare and settle the terms of truce in the time it took to cross the lawn and meet for a long, muscular hug.

  “Can I just say this right now to get it out of the way?” she said.

  “Ma—”

  “No. I have to just say this, and you know how it pains me. But you were right. Charlie, I shouldn’t have believed. Margot. I should have known better. Did know better.”

  Charlie bit down on his lip, trying to suppress the urge to nod vigorously. “What finally convinced you?” he asked.

  Ma gestured with her chin to where Rebekkah’s rental car had just sat. “We brought her to this room, and Margot couldn’t even get Oliver to type out her name. Like Rebekkah Sterling was just some stranger. And she was, of course, though only to Margot Strout.”

  “Ah.”

  “I was talking to a lie, I think I must have known it all along.” Ma put a trembling finger to her mouth. “But it was all I had.”

  “It wasn’t all you had,” Charlie said.

  “No.” Ma showed him her palms. “You are right. I had you.”

  “Have me. You do.”

  “I do,” she said.

  “I’m back,” Charlie said. “I shouldn’t have gone.”

  “And Rebekkah told you.”

  “Everything.”

  Ma nodded, looking puzzled as to what she might say next. Charlie sucked at the air, particles of dust lodging in his teeth. “But, honestly, maybe you can at least explain this to me? What are you doing staying here?”

  But she only bit her lip, a little guiltily.

  * * *

  Pa’s house, on the inside, was not at all the larger, rambling, bottle-and-butt-clogged rendition of his ancient painting cabin that Charlie remembered from his few bad visits, years before. Apparently, as Charlie had been indulging his project at Anti-House, Ma had been heading a little project of her own. Pa’s rooms were emptied, the tomb of his solitary years sitting in a Hefty-bag pyramid in the drive. It was an odd, awkward place. What little furniture remained gave them nowhere to hide. But after taking a long, feverish nap, Charlie tried to get into the strange, anarchic spirit of the day. As Pa prepared dinner that evening, a sauce-heavy sheet of enchiladas that Charlie happily anticipated watching his mother try to choke down, they did their fumbling best to muster a conversation over the heavily dented, corrosion-carpeted stove. “Listen,” Charlie said. “About what I said last time, at the hotel?”

  “You don’t have to explain yourself to me,” Pa told him. “If there’s anyone to do the explaining, it’s me.”

  “So explain it then,” Charlie said. But his old teenage id, that chain breaker with his sardonic quips, was very tired now, nursing a nosebleed in some dim basement of his brain. Charlie looked into Pa’s badly worn face, the lines near his mouth a leathery lattice. At that moment, the only question Charlie wanted to ask was whether his father might consider one of those Alcoholics Anonymous meetings they hosted at the Marfa courthouse.

  But then Pa really did explain it to Charlie, as best he could. Charlie would later wish that he could remember all the words Pa used, but he would remember only fragments, the sodden debris that splashed around in his father’s well-liquored memory: Pa’s unspoken worries about his old student Hector, his shame for failing to see the truth about Reginald Avalon, “And your brother, Charlie. Did you know that I was the one who convinced him to come that night? And I’ve never said that. Ten years, I’ve never said a thing about it.” Charlie turned a burner knob, fiddled with a shirt button as an excuse not to see Pa breathing heavily into his outspread fingers.

  Charlie knew that perhaps he should still have been outraged, this one feeble attempt of his father’s, a decade too late. But the tragedy of Jed Loving, just then, seemed so much truer than Charlie’s own dog-eared indignation. He nodded.

  “So, uh, if I recall correctly,” Charlie said, “this place only has two bedrooms. If I’m taking the guest room, then…”

  Pa grinned wearily. “I don’t know how to explain it to you. This is all very, very, very strange. I don’t know. We’re just sorta feeling our way through the dark here.”

  “Ha! Ha ha!” Charlie bleated, a little theatrically. And certainly it was true that such a revelation—the surprise of his parents’ ongoing capacity for romance—would, just a few months earlier, have been shocking to the verge of medical danger. But as Charlie now reconsidered the true substance of Ma’s late-night absences from Desert Splendor, the sly grin that would sometimes come into her face, the great shock was that this, after all, made sense. Made sense not only of Ma’s behavior but also as the latest, greatest piece of evidence for the revised theory of life Charlie had just cracked in the backyard of Anti-House, that you can never really know the full truth of the stories spinning alongside your own. Maybe, even after a solid year of full-time navel-gazing, you couldn’t really even know your own.

  “Oh, God,” Ma said, appearing in the kitchen doorway, her face blotched with blush. “What now?”

  “Nothing,” Charlie said with a laugh. “Your boyfriend here was just telling me an interesting story.”

  Later, after they had polished off the better part of the enchiladas, Ma described a phone call she’d had with a neuroscientist named Marissa Ginsberg, who would administer the most important part of Oliver’s examination that Friday in El Paso.

  Dr. Ginsberg, Ma explained, working with a machine similar to the one Professor Nickell had driven to Crockett State, had learned of a way she could use the device to remarkable new effect. Apparently, different parts of the brain glowed on the display when people engaged in different mental exercises, and so the clever Dr. Ginsberg had several times used these brain scans as an indirect way of reading a subject’s mind, a way for a person to answer yes and no without twitching so much as a thumb. “Think of running when you want to say yes, sing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ to yourself when you want to say no,” Dr. Ginsberg told her subjects. It was only yeses and nos, nothing more complex she could assess in her machine, and the process, Dr. Ginsberg had admitted, was both laborious and expensive. “It’s not like this mind-readi
ng trick of hers is perfect,” Ma told Charlie. “Not like it could ever tell us everything Oliver is thinking, but yeses and nos with no Margot Strout in between? It’s not nothing.”

  “You’re right,” Charlie said. “It’s not nothing.”

  * * *

  Early the next morning, as the Lovings readied themselves for another day at Bed Four, Charlie heard something disconcerting, a kind of garbled yelp, maybe a squirrel being flattened by a pickup. It turned out to be the sound his father’s doorbell made, after he had attempted to repair it. Charlie stood there with Ma, in the empty living room, as his father opened the door to reveal a pear-shaped woman, holding something heavy. “Mrs. Strout,” Pa said.

  “Margot,” Margot said.

  “I can’t,” Ma told Charlie. “I can’t talk to that woman.”

  “Okay,” Charlie told his mother, yet he took a few paces in the direction of Margot Strout, whose boots Edwina was already licking. The sight of Charlie, for the first time since that bad morning at Bed Four, made the woman flush deeply. Margot put a hand to her brow as two horseflies orbited her head in wobbly circles, like a cartoon illustration of a slapstick head injury. “I brought you all a casserole,” she said in the direction of Ma, proffering the foil-wrapped tray in her hands.

  “Charlie,” Ma said, employing the old passive-aggressive power move she used to use with Pa, “please tell her she isn’t welcome here.”

  “I just wanted to talk to you,” Margot said. “I just wanted to try to explain things. Tell you how very, very, very sorry I am.”

  “Please tell that woman we’re not interested in talking,” Ma said.

  “Eve,” Margot said. “I promise—”

  Ma fought back a gasp. “I’m sick of hearing your promises,” she told Margot now.

  It was a little fuzzy, Charlie’s picture of just what had happened that morning at Crockett State when Ma at last dismissed the palm reader from her place by Bed Four. But what was perfectly clear was the familiar way Ma was trying to wield her righteous indignation now, to beat back her own guilt by force of condemnation.