Oliver Loving

by Stefan Merrill Block

  “Listen, Eve, please listen to me.” Margot spoke over Charlie’s shoulder, addressing Eve in a tremulous, rapid monologue as her makeup began to seep, waxlike, down her cheeks. “I can lose my job. I can stop doing this work altogether, you can hate me, I’d understand it. And I know how this might sound to you, but I’ll never stop believing it. I can’t. I can’t stop myself from knowing that it really was Oliver I felt there. Just like I can still feel Cora is here, listening to every word I say. Listening to these words right now. Even if you think I should know better.”

  Charlie looked at Margot; he looked at his mother. Maybe Margot deserved Ma’s damnation; maybe this woman had come with her Jesus-love and delusions to make of the Lovings a comforting little story for herself. But Charlie was too tired now for this notion to elicit any outrage of his own. Charlie was thinking: Who could understand either of those mothers more than they could understand one another? “Thank you for the casserole,” Charlie told her, unburdening her arms. “I’m sure it’s delicious. Maybe try coming back later?”

  She nodded, and Charlie held Edwina back between his ankles as Margot waddled away. Charlie peeled a corner of the foil, looked at the unappetizing mash-up Margot had made. Walnuts, avocado, potato, and chicken scraps all mashed together into a greenish pap. The Lovings dispersed wordlessly from the room, and Charlie slipped the casserole into the fridge. They didn’t speak of Margot that day at Bed Four, nor did they mention her the next day. But that following evening, when Charlie crept out for a late-night snack, he noticed that the casserole tray’s foil wrapping had been disturbed, that a little square of it had been cut away and consumed—and Pa, Charlie remembered, hated walnuts.

  Charlie had established himself in the house’s second bedroom, which, boasting no more than a squeaking queen bed and an antique school desk, qualified as the best room he had inhabited since his childhood. But, for once, he looked at the room’s desk without any visions of writing there. Charlie might have had only a few rough pages to show for his sixteen faltering months of writing, but he knew it was time to share what he had with his first reader.

  Except, of course, his brother could not read. And so, very late that Thursday evening, Charlie summoned his courage and read for Oliver, out loud from his Moleskine and the reverse pages of his Anti-House flyers, right in front of his parents. Peggy, in a bout of self-aggrandizing defiance, had extended visiting hours to as long as they needed. Over Oliver’s ever-searching eyes, Charlie read his attempted sequel to their old fantasy tales, telling his stories to the boy once more in a bed beneath him.

  In their bunk-bed sessions, Charlie and his brother had once imagined a great number of battles, piecemeal maps, trickster tests they would first have to pass to be allowed passage from one world to another. But maybe the true answer to the riddle of the gates was this: first you had to fall to your knees, admit that what you would see in the place beyond would only be the hopeful and incomplete images you painted onto the air, and then still forgive yourself enough to stand back up and take a first step over that threshold. How not to believe, even still, that you were chosen? Charlie’s voice was growing thin as he struggled through his final pages.

  His mother put a hand to the back of his neck. “Charlie,” Ma said. “I had no idea you had this in you. I had no idea.”

  “Well, I was the valedictorian of my high school after all,” Charlie said. “Though I guess you could also say that I was last in my class.”

  “Just finish reading,” Ma told him.

  It was nearly 1 A.M. when Charlie and Edwina at last climbed onto the bed in the back room of Pa’s house. Only one night stood between that moment and his brother’s final exam. But Charlie wasn’t now imagining what might happen tomorrow. He was thinking not of his brother as he had become, but Oliver as he must have once been, that first day Rebekkah sat next to him before literature class. That morning that still existed somewhere, that place where any other future could still happen.

  Oliver

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Forty miles away, you were with your brother in that memory. You knew what was coming—the final test was the next morning—but what could you do to prepare? Even if freedom were in the offing, you were like the hardened prisoner, unwilling to give up your old ways. You picked at the thread of a certain August morning, lobbed into the darkness that lovely button, and quickly found its shape in your hand.

  August twenty-ninth, near the start of your last semester at Bliss Township: in the soft morning light of Mrs. Schumacher’s literature classroom, a half hour before school began, you were staring into the paper cup of coffee you had bought at Bliss Pies N’ Stuff, sweetened with three sugar packets but still hopelessly bitter. You tried to will yourself to gulp down the brown swill, as if it were a slow-acting potion that might straighten the slouch of your spine, ease the awkwardness from your joints, and make you into a man. You took your effortful coffee drinking as seriously as you took the lines of crummy poetry you had crossed out of the open journal on the desk. This was the morning after your father had cajoled Rebekkah into joining your family for the Perseid shower at Zion’s Pastures, and you were rehearsing what you might tell her.

  “Oliver, hey there.”

  “Oh, hi! You came early.”

  “So did you.” Rebekkah was nodding. “So here we are. What is that thing you’re working on?”

  For many days now, you had been watching Rebekkah closely from your spot in the circle of desk chairs. You could have drawn from memory the planes of her face, her Milky Way of ginger freckles. You had studied the amber ringlets of her hair the way Monet studied the haystacks. And now you again beheld, in impossible proximity, the face you had scrutinized from the distant observation point of your desk. You could once more feel the warmth thrown off her, smell the vanilla fragrance of her shampoo. You blinked furiously; your hand flared where it had touched hers the night before.

  “Poetry,” you told her. You tried to do a gruff James Dean thing with your shoulders.

  “Really?” Rebekkah said. “I didn’t know you wrote. I love poetry. Walt Whitman. E. E. Cummings. Sylvia Plath. Do you like her?”

  You nodded into your coffee. You summoned your courage, drew your breath, and turned to look again at Rebekkah Sterling, who was grinning at you now. A grin to match your own, quivering a little at the edges. This was just your first morning talking together, and in this memory it would always be only your first morning, unbothered by what would follow.

  “Hey,” she said, “maybe someday you’ll write one for me?”

  Eve

  CHAPTER FORTY

  There was a blazing, panicked instant the next day in El Paso, when the driver unsealed the rear doors of the ambulance that had conveyed the Lovings from Crockett State, when the noon heat and Eve’s dread flashed over her skin as a single incendiary substance. But the orderlies who came from Memorial Hospital were businesslike, unlatching Oliver’s cot and lowering it to the pavement, and when they entered the building, they were met by the reassurance of protocol, forms to be signed.

  “Marissa Ginsberg,” a lab-coated lady named herself just beyond the automatic doors. “So wonderful of you to come all this way.”

  Dr. Marissa Ginsberg’s name, in the fervor of Eve’s hope and dread for this day’s test, had become shamanistic, but she turned out to be a rather timid woman, with an academic’s awkward affability, often pulling at the mop of orange stuff she had for hair. And then, after offering the Lovings a short explanation of the various tests she had scheduled, Dr. Ginsberg performed the one simple, uncommon act that made Eve love her a little. She leaned over the cot, pressed a hand to Oliver’s head, and spoke to him in a voice that was mercifully free of condescension. “We’re going to give you a little injection now, Oliver. It’s a kind of tracer, so we can see your brain working on one of the machines later. We’ll give it a half hour to take effect, then we can begin.”

  The orderlies wheeled the cot into another small ro
om, with glistening medical equipment and a smell of bleach and iodine. A room quite similar to the room at Crockett State, minus the nostalgic Old West bric-a-brac. Waiting for the radioactive isotopes to penetrate Oliver’s blood-brain barrier, the Lovings shared a silence as doctors paced the hallway beyond.

  “Well, here we are,” Charlie said.

  “Here we are,” Eve replied.

  Eve produced a small portable speaker she’d stolen long ago, attached it to her phone. Bob Dylan crooned and moaned his way through the first tracks of Blonde on Blonde.

  Eve looked down at Oliver’s thin and twitching lips, his yellowed eyelids nearly translucent in the sunlight through the window, his thin blue veins like a delicate web that bound him in his skin. She was wondering what Oliver might have made of his first trip away from Crockett State in nearly a decade. The whole ride out to El Paso, Eve’s own thoughts had been wheeling, buzzardlike, around an image she’d seen that morning on the cover of The Big Bend Sentinel, a picture of the impromptu vigil the old Blissians had held the night before outside Bliss Township School.

  With the light-speed conveyance of news in the Big Bend, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that the whole wretched tale Rebekkah had brought back with her—about Reginald Avalon, Hector Espina, all those unspeakable things—had spread quickly, but even Eve was surprised by how rapidly those families and Bliss Country faculty had reassembled their old mourning ranks. Donna Grass and Doyle Dixon had both phoned her yesterday afternoon, leaving voice mails inviting the Lovings to the school last night, and the Sentinel’s front-page image showed the service she had declined to attend: a couple of dozen bodies, making a constellation with their little votive candles just beyond the school gates. In the picture, Eve had been able to make out the bleary shapes of Mrs. Schumacher, Mrs. Henderson, Mrs. Wolcott, and Mrs. Dawson. All those people, Eve had thought as she looked at that picture, but she had always known that it wasn’t her son—or at least it wasn’t only her son—who had drawn all those visitors to his bed, and it wasn’t only her son for whom the town turned out last night. It had been nearly ten years, the memorial candlelight services dimming each November, but the new revelations, the closest to an answer that might ever come, had brought them all out that one last time, the lost town of Bliss temporarily refounded on the old Main Street, to grieve and bury their decade of grieving.

  Eve had long ago developed a mental mechanism that converted sorrow into a more useful rage, but this morning, looking at the picture of that sorrowful lot, she hadn’t even been able to summon an appropriate fury at Reginald Avalon. It was just a dizzying, despairing sort of confusion she knew when she looked down that hall of mirrors.

  “We dug a little deeper into his past, talked to a bunch of his old students,” Manuel Paz had told Eve, over the phone. “I’ll be honest with you, when I said the man’s name to a couple of those kids? They practically came unglued, right in front of me. Weeping, almost sick. Horrible. Horrible, to think how he must have preyed on those children over the years, and no one saw a thing. But we should have. I really was as blind as anyone, just thinking of Reginald Avalon like some saint, and for that I truly don’t see how I’ll ever find a way to forgive myself.”

  “No” was Eve’s odd reply to Manuel, as if she were also addressing those children now. “I’m so sorry. For what I never said.”

  Hector. Like the rest of her town, Eve had considered the kid human waste, as if his own story could not have been any story at all. But whatever he had done, Hector did have a story, a very grim one. A luckless, powerless boy, with a profoundly poor father and a deported mother, desperate for the attentions of the nice, middle-class teacher who showed him some interest. Confiding in the one man who might have helped him out of his hell, who had ended up doing just the opposite. Still, there was another unfathomable linkage there, between Hector’s suffering and what he’d done, and what other word was there for it but evil? What else but evil—a bombastic word she’d never truly believed in before—could make a boy want to burn down his world?

  Of course, it hadn’t been the entire population of Bliss on the front page of the Sentinel, just a few remaining representatives of its white half. Manuel’s decade-old hope for an explanation that might mend his town had been answered too late. The way Hector had died had only deepened the injustice of the way he had lived; now that those Blissians understood the truth about Reginald Avalon and Hector Espina, now that their ten years of xenophobic fantasies had come to an end, they had few Hispanic neighbors left to whom they might make their apologies. Closure was just a prayer for an ending that would never come, just a professional-sounding word for another hollow kind of faith. People might have turned Oliver into a myth, a martyr, a metaphor for all that the people of Bliss could never understand, a poignant exemplar of the madness that had seized the world, but Eve knew the truth, had always known. The fantasy that Oliver might wake to offer his town the answers they needed had been only that, a fantasy. There was no real reason why Oliver, why Hector Espina, why it had happened there and not somewhere else, why it had happened when it happened and not at some other time. It was truly only chance that had made her family’s quiet little life into a horribly exceptional tale worth telling, just randomness and chaos that had turned the Lovings into a symbol of something unfathomable, that had made her younger son into someone who had no choice but to try to write himself free of the story that would forever be the first thing people thought of when they thought of him. There is no why, Eve had always known it. And yet, how was it that even still she could not quite make herself believe it? Eve found herself remembering that long-ago night, beneath the Perseid shower. That evening, lying with her family on the powdery earth of Zion’s Pastures, she had looked up into a lucid night sky whose static of stars was indistinguishable from the static generated in the rods and cones of her eyes, and Eve had felt oddly exhilarated to consider it, how little her own eyes could ever hope to glean.

  * * *

  In the little room at El Paso Memorial Hospital, Eve felt the layer of slackness that had gathered over the firm shape of her husband’s arm. She found herself wishing, just now, that the room were crowded. That the oxygen were thin, that dense body heat could unsettle any thought. But this room was as inhuman and blank as the worst of her insomnias, as frigid and cramped as the final questions they were still living inside. For a few minutes more. There was nowhere here, among the chrome, plastic, and disinfected surfaces, for wishful thinking to gain traction.

  “Oliver,” Jed said. He was hunched very close to Oliver now, but still he needed to brace himself to make enough of a noise to be heard. Having suffered hours without a drink, Jed was shaking severely. “I need you to listen.”

  Eve watched as Oliver’s eyes continued, as ever, to speed-read some invisible text. Jed pulled away, and his gaze met Charlie’s. Jed nodded, long and slow, as if he had accepted something his son had just told him. He stooped once more to Oliver’s ear.

  “I want to say that you need to tell the truth. Okay? When you get in there, you have to promise me you’ll just tell us what you are thinking. No matter what you are thinking. Do you promise?”

  When at last Eve managed to lift her head, she noticed that her fingers had fallen to Oliver’s left thumb, which she clutched tightly.

  In the end, Eve had learned, she had been right to obsess over that one botched conversation Oliver had tried to have with her just a few days before, and she had admitted as much to that task force officer when she’d at last returned his call. “If I had only listened to him then?” Eve had said to the man over the phone, but she had never offered an answer. That question, she understood, would be the unwieldy mass she would have to learn how to carry in the years to come, but for now, at least, she could do what she had failed to do a decade ago. For once, she could listen.

  “Oliver,” Eve said. “Your father is right. We just need you to be honest now. I know you can hear us. I know you can, and I want you to answer f
or you. Not for me or for Charlie or for Pa, but just for you. It’s okay, that’s what I want to tell you. Okay if you are ready. Even if that’s what you need to tell us, we will find a way to be strong enough. But if you are ready to go, will you just tell us? Please, just tell us if that is what you need?”

  The orderlies returned. The Lovings followed the cot down the bumpered hallways to a set of swinging doors labeled X-RAY AND IMAGING. A half hour later, they were on one side of the glass; Oliver was in the great beige machine on the other. They stood behind Dr. Ginsberg and two technicians who were working the control panel. It was, Eve thought, like a scene on the bridge of a starship from one of her son’s beloved old movies. Keyboards clattered, switches turned, and now Oliver’s brain glowed, in three separate angles, on the computer monitors. Oliver was a hive of data, arranged on the x and y and z axes.

  “Ma.” Charlie clapped a hand over his mouth. “I can’t.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, and she took Charlie’s fingers in one hand, took Jed’s hand in the other.

  “Here we go, Oliver,” Dr. Ginsberg was saying into the microphone. “I know you’ve heard this already, but now it’s time to give it a try. First, we need to establish your way of saying Yes. So here is what I want you to do. When you want to say Yes, I want you to imagine you are running. Imagine your feet lifting off the ground, your legs working hard. Can you do that for me? Imagine you are running?”

  Eve’s own mind was running now. She was in the air, vaulting a hurdle. She sealed her eyes, and for just a second there, she was at the weightless apex of the leap. One last instant when the only questions that mattered were still just questions.

  Despite what her family might think of her now, Eve had never considered herself a very faithful or superstitious woman. Signs and symbols, the densely metaphoric world: that was more the way her sons and her husband saw things. But maybe that was what happened when you grew up in a bounded little land; you ended up fetishizing every inch of it, searching your small world for subtle portents of a better place. You turned a flatulent old steer into a kind of prophet, you assembled Paleolithic monuments out of stone, you chased after a freckle-faced girl as if she were the ticket to paradise. But after her years of confined life at Desert Splendor and Crockett State, after a decade-long conversation with her silent son, Eve better understood her husband and her boys, understood what smallness and silence could make you believe. How you could come to read your life like an invisible text. How you could forever turn one ear to the sound of a lost voice. How that voice, once you began to hear it, would never stop speaking to you in its mysterious ways. For example, in that moment between Dr. Ginsberg’s first questions and her son’s first response—it was only a single suspended second, really—Eve felt that Oliver had already told her all the answers.