Oliver Loving

by Stefan Merrill Block

  “It’s too hot to sleep like that,” Eve had told him, shimmying away.

  “Who said anything about sleep?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Why not? Don’t you think it’s time the prisoner deserves a conjugal visit?”

  “Prisoner? And so in this metaphor I’m the jailer?”

  “Eve.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  For whole minutes, they had both just lain there, in the humid silence of the bedroom.

  “The dance is tomorrow,” Jed said at last.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. And I don’t think our poor son has managed to wrangle a date.”

  “I know. But I don’t think it’s such a tragedy. I never went to any dances myself, when I was his age.”

  “I think you should come with me to chaperone,” Jed said. “Maybe we could convince Oliver to come, Charlie, too. I think we’d all have a good time.”

  “You are asking me to homecoming.”

  “Would you do me the honor?”

  “Jed,” she said, “I’m sorry, but those school parties give me the creeps. Bad memories, I guess.”

  In her peripatetic youth, Eve had spent her childhood as the New Girl, the perpetual out-of-towner, the vaguely ethnic-looking intruder in classes filled with plain, pale faces. The story of Eve’s childhood had been the tragedy of chronic self-reinvention. Each time she had taken her new seat in the front row of a classroom, she faced new eyes tracking her, waiting for her to reveal herself. And even after twenty years in West Texas, Eve still felt the outcast among its white, Christian-cheery people, the wives and husbands of Jed’s fellow Bliss Township faculty making her feel like some foreign interloper, some suspect Jewess, some Other slotted in the nebulous racial space between white and Latina. It wasn’t a persona she had at last developed so much as a defense strategy. She had learned to behave like a wallflower until approached, at which point she behaved like a Venus flytrap.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Jed said, his body going rigid.

  (Might her whole future have pivoted on that late-night rejection? If she had only let his whiskey-loosened body overtake her, for the first time in nearly a year, might she actually have let him persuade her to go to the dance? Might her presence there have somehow changed everything?)

  “Jed, listen,” she said after a time, but he had already fallen asleep.

  The next night, 9:15 passed to 9:16. Did she feel her own Big Bang gathering its hot charge, time and space beginning to warp? Hideously, no. Eve was only puttering about the reliquary of a family that seemed, in her solitary night, already vanished. Oliver’s adventure and sci-fi books on the bedroom shelf, her boys’ shirts hanging neatly in the tight little closet, the shellacked longhorn bones shining on the walls. Oliver would be off to college in less than two years, Charlie in four, and she was already indulging the empty nester’s trick, clicking on the television for the sake of noise.

  9:30, 9:45, 10:00. Charlie’s curfew, why hadn’t he come home from the movies yet? She would remember pushing through the screen door, throwing her weight into a rusted aluminum chair on the wonky fieldstone porch. A November night, summery crickets still chirping. A sound of heavy paws crunching through the scrubby mesquite and bunch grass that lined the creek downhill. Eve was just forty. Maybe, before her boys even left home, she could go back to school, become some sort of a scholar? Maybe she could leave West Texas altogether, leave her sad-sack whiskey-swilling husband, and get a Ph.D. at a school not so far from the one—maybe even the same school?—that Oliver would attend. The truth was, Eve couldn’t imagine any future whose every day was not involved with Oliver—well, with both her boys, but (no denying it) with Oliver in particular. She knew it would be a kind of death for her, Oliver’s graduation.

  Something in her atmosphere fell silent. The dryer, she remembered.

  One last cruelty. Eve, glad for activity, took extra care sorting the family laundry that night. It could have been ten minutes she spent there, absently folding and refolding. She arranged the clothes neatly in the wicker basket. She grasped its straw handles and carried it in the direction of the bedroom. She was already well past the television when she paused. Like the time, as a ten-year-old, she had broken her arm in her one failed experiment with skateboarding, at the moment of impact she felt only a perplexing numbness. A picture on the television screen. A riot of squad car lights, the image shaken and smeary. She turned back to the television, but could make no sense of what the woman, Tricia Flip of Action News Six, was explaining into the camera. Impossible: that was the first word Eve thought then, the word that already bound Eve to hundreds of mothers like her, mothers whom she had until that night abstractly pitied as she had watched the news of sudden, eruptive violence in far-off places, thinking: Impossible, no, why add such a calamity to her long litany of anxieties, a thing like that could never happen in a place like theirs. And yet, in the kitchen, the telephone was screaming. She dropped the basket, its contents spilling on the floor. She stumbled over the laundry, lurched for the phone. She put it to her ear, and try as she might, there would never be a way to forget the instant that followed.

  * * *

  Nearly ten years later: the boundless beige of desert, a flesh drawn tight, freckled with thorned vegetation, rusting industrial equipment, the occasional longhorn kept for nostalgia’s sake, subsisting mysteriously on dead grass and stubbornness. A vein of asphalt, running north from the Big Bend of the Rio Grande, cut the desert in two. The chugging gray Hyundai, taking the road at ninety miles per hour, seemed, even to its driver, hardly there at all. An insect on the skin, Eve could have been flicked away.

  She gritted particles of sand between her molars, sniffed at the car’s stale gassiness, as the road began to widen to link up with the elaborate circulatory system of Interstate 10. And there, at the happenstance flat where road met road, the great cement boxes and oversized corporate signage for the newish shopping center came into view. A shopping center a hundred miles from where her paralytic son shuddered in his sheets, and still she could feel Oliver there with her. Eve knew Oliver had woken to another unmarked morning in Bed Four at Crockett State Assisted Care Facility, but Oliver was also in her feet, her hands, the dampness under her collar, as she turned into the parking lot for the chain bookstore, Tall Tales Books & More, the state’s largest bookseller west of the Pecos River. Breathing the heavy fug that her lousy car’s AC only pushed around, Eve parked just twenty feet from the wide automatic front doors. It was nine in the morning, the sun already high enough to rouse whirling mirages from the concrete. Glimpsing her reflection in the shop’s tinted windows, she thought that it still wasn’t too late to turn around. She plucked sharply at her right eyelid, the skin slurping away from the bloodshot globe beneath, and she examined the bulbous white head of the little lash she’d pulled free. The tart throb of pain steadied her for exactly five seconds.

  It was July twenty-second, the day of Oliver’s first real exam in many years. A hundred miles south of the bookstore, a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine was warming up for him now. Of course Oliver had undergone similar tests before, but that was no comfort to Eve this morning. Eve had long ago learned to believe the unlikeliest promises that her own hope, like some charlatan televangelist, outrageously issued, but she wasn’t enough of a believer to fail to understand what today’s test would mean. It had been nine years since Oliver’s last round of neuroimaging; today likely marked Eve’s last hope that the doctors might locate any trace awareness left in her son’s jailed mind. To think of this day, over the past weeks, was to invite a dread that was tidal and annihilating, the white wall of a tsunami thundering toward her across the desert floor. Eve hoisted herself out of the car, through the furnace of West Texan July, into the better boxed oxygen inside the bookshop.

  Other than a couple of bleary-eyed employees sipping brownish slushies behind the counter, the store was empty. In an attempt
to go unnoticed, Eve made swift progress to the Science Fiction/Fantasy section. Since the moment she woke to the terrible fact of today’s date, the object had gleamed brightly in the glass display case of her mind, like some kind of lucky charm to ward off bad outcomes. The object: a boxed collector’s set that held the five-volume saga of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Oliver had begged her for it once, when he was fifteen, but she hadn’t been able to afford it then, and she could afford it even less today.

  But there it was, on the bottom row of one of the faux-oak bookcases. Like a little piece of her son, on a shelf. Her lower back shrieking, Eve stooped and her tailbone landed hard on the navy carpet. As Beethoven’s Fifth rattled the PA system, she dislodged the box and palmed the weight, back and forth, like a football. Stage two of her procedure was to assess the store for skeptical eyes and security cameras, but today, with the weight of those books in her hands, Eve’s surveillance was lackadaisical, hardly more than a quick eye roll.

  Eve knew she was not, as Charlie often liked to claim, delusional. She was aware, even as she peeled a magnetic tag from the box’s bottom, that even if the impossible thing happened, and Oliver rose from the bed in which he had spent the last nine and a half years, he likely would not have much immediate use for the works of Douglas Adams. But the urge worked like any superstition, something in which she did not really believe, something she could even laugh at inwardly, and yet some atavistic, totem-worshiping part of her was afraid to resist. She couldn’t do anything about the test scheduled for today, but here was a self-made test she could pass: Did she believe in a future for her son or didn’t she? She unclasped her wide red leather purse, and she dropped the box’s pleasing heft inside. She pressed the jagged edges of her chewed fingernails against the bookshelf’s lip and rose, made swift progress past the security monitors that flanked the automatic doors. They triggered no alarm. Sweating immensely beneath her blazer, she made it as far as the blinding white pavement outside before a set of thick fingers found her wrist.

  “Whoo boy,” the man said.

  * * *

  The security guy’s name, according to the brass plate on his desk in a tiny, egg-scented back office, was Ron Towers. Eve had met Ron once before, in his previous position at the local Old Navy franchise across the expressway. She remembered his crusty maritime face, as if Old Navy hired its muscle through some casting process. Ron Towers was silently considering her now, like some riddle he was trying to solve. Recognition lit his raw features. “Loving,” he said. “Eve Loving.”

  She nodded, and Ron Towers nodded, too, looking pleased with himself. “It’s those crazy eyes of yours. How could I forget those eyes?”

  “How could I forget a Ron Towers?”

  Ron sneered and typed her name into the computer on his desk. He hit enter and grinned. “Looks like we’ve got a serious uh-oh here.”

  “Uh-oh,” she echoed as Ron consulted a gray metal filing cabinet. He thumbed through the contents of a drawer, retrieved a document, and displayed it like a certificate of accomplishment.

  “Any return will be considered trespassing. Any further shoplifting will be referred to police action.” Ron nudged the document toward her. She didn’t need to read it. She was familiar with its content.

  The list of stores from which Eve Loving was blacklisted had grown. Over the last nine years, in the sallow back rooms of major Big Bend retailers, she had signed a number of similar contracts. The paunchy or gangly guards always put on the kind of tough-guy bravado that Ron showed her now. “We don’t need your kind of business here,” they’d unoriginally tell her as they searched her face. But the truly shameful part was that these guys’ close attention, their consideration of what she might contain behind her nervous smile, always seemed like a potential antidote to her solitude. As those self-serious men led her by the elbow with a firm hand, she could feel the relieving possibility of confession, the sense that everything in her past months and years was at last coming to a climax. When those men lectured Eve, threatened her, wielded their dinky power behind their cheap nameplates, she felt her whole story rise up in her. And yet, in the end, they were always satisfied by her apologies and a contract. The madness or sorrow that might compel a fiftyish woman to steal a book meant for a teenager: a question that a man like Ron Towers was satisfied to consign to another signed document in a desk drawer.

  “So what do we do now?” Ron didn’t say anything more, only looked at Eve as if she’d done something other than shoplift a boxed set, as if he really might be trying to suss out a deeper kind of guilt. She eyed the telephone on his desk. She thought of making a break for the door. Ron Towers was grinning, a little lasciviously.

  In a decade of many cruel paradoxes, one of the greatest tricks that her tragic forties had played on Eve was the way that grief seemed to have sharpened whatever latent beauty she had possessed. As her face had thinned, the overlarge eyes had become cartoon-princess-like in their enormity. All the days she had spent outside to escape the musty stuffiness of her house had toasted her Semitic features with a pleasant brownish glaze. Her back troubles made her stick out her pert rear end like a bustle, made her carry her breasts like a waiter offering a tray of hors d’oeuvres. What might it mean, Eve tried not to wonder, that she wore her suffering so attractively?

  “Please,” Eve said.

  “The one thing I’ll never get,” Ron mused, “is why a nice lady like you would do it. Some poor kid, sure. Some toothless meth head, that’s natural. But a lady like you, is it just the thrill?”

  She couldn’t tell if this was only part of his chest-thumping display or if Ron Towers might actually be troubled. This rosacea-faced man was a poor judge for her life’s crimes, but she was relieved to tell him, “I’m Oliver Loving’s mother.”

  He squinted. Did he possibly recognize the name? There was no doubt that he would have heard about her family on the news, back when it happened. In the news stream spectacle that had followed that worst night, the Lovings had perhaps become the most pitiable of all those families to be so piously and publically pitied. But all that was nearly ten years ago. Ron Towers, living a hundred miles away, had likely forgotten all about Hector Espina and Bliss Township School.

  “My son is in pieces. He’s scattered all over the world,” Eve told Ron now. “And I have to pick them up.” Eve had learned the trick of the homeless and the imprisoned; bad behavior has an inflection point. Act a little strangely and people will correct you, act oddly enough and people will clear you a wide berth.

  “Excuse me?” Ron asked.

  She reached across Ron’s desk then, for one of his massive, furry hands. Ron did not pull away as she held it like another creature, something injured they had just found together, which they could both worry over. She felt Ron’s clunky class ring, its cheap gemstone, and she twisted it loose, as if it were choking his finger. This hand, she knew, was connected to Ron Towers’s haughty, reddened face, but it really did feel separate from him now, like some other object Eve wanted to slip into her purse. She lifted its mass, and she kissed it. But then she made the mistake of looking up. Her gaze on him severed whatever strange spell had momentarily altered the space between them. He pulled his hand away, wiped it against the papers on his desk.

  “You need help,” Ron Towers said.

  * * *

  The clock on Eve’s dashboard showed 9:53, the digits dimly throbbing with the engine. The Hyundai, which Oliver had long ago named Goliath, clanked and sputtered as she pulled out of her parking spot. Now that Ron Towers had let her free, she had no excuse not to retrace the route of the morning errand, ninety-four miles deep into the desert.

  The roads between the shopping center and Crockett State Assisted Care Facility traversed an emptiness so vast it was claustrophobic. The same five chaparral plants—the goofy heads of grama grass, the Gothic tangling fingers of ocotillo, the low paddled clusters of prickly pear, the surreal candelabras of century plants, the spiny, landlock
ed sea urchins called lechuguilla—repeated themselves all the way to the deadness of the mountains to the south and the horizon to the north. Thirty years she had been living in the state’s westernmost notch, and Eve still had not gotten over the strangeness of all that Texan earth, the extraterrestrial aspect of the empty space that lay in the triple-digit mileage between the Big Bend’s few towns. Now shakily powering through the Chihuahuan Desert at a hundred miles an hour, Goliath was like some sci-fi vessel, one of those battered spaceships plundering the galaxy on the covers of Oliver’s old paperbacks.

  Eve was not a daughter of Texas. She was a daughter of nowhere in particular, the only child of a single-father car salesman, Mortimer Frankl, who had schlepped her around the American West in his maroon 1976 Cutlass Supreme. After her father’s death put an end to an unhappy childhood spent mostly in crestfallen hotel rooms and musty sublets where there was never enough space, when Eve met Jed Loving, she had thrilled to the freedom promised by his home’s two hundred acres. She could not have suspected how little those acres would hold for her. The Apache, Jed’s mother once told her, thought this desert was what remained after the world’s creation. The spare raw materials, the leftovers of better places.

  “People go to New York to become something,” Charlie theorized once. “But they go to the Big Bend to become nothing.”

  Nearly a decade had passed and even still she couldn’t graft this ruined life onto the simple linearity of time before. In a single instant, a twenty-one-year-old boy named Hector Espina had shattered time. More than nine and a half years ago Eve had been a full-time mother, already in the twilight years of that profession, staring down the lonesome ambiguities of the forty or so unclaimed, childless years unfurling from the front door of Zion’s Pastures. A decade later, she was a de facto (if not yet de jure) divorcée, the mother of one son lost to violence, the other to his own selfishness. She lived alone in the erstwhile “show home” of an abortive neighborhood complex called Desert Splendor, a failed subdivision of unoccupied homes and half-built house skeletons on a high desert flat. Her new house was plagued. It longed to become a ruin. That April, when she tried to start her air conditioner, it spoke its fitful last words and died. “Maintenance,” the management company said over the phone, “per our agreement, is your responsibility.”