Oliver Loving

by Stefan Merrill Block

  Out the window, two Border Patrol SUVs blared through the silence that followed, the Doppler effect making whatever immigration emergency they were addressing sound a little silly, Keystone Kops material. Charlie made the furrowed expression of a man puzzling through a credit card statement.

  “So what you’re saying,” Charlie said, “is that if someone had put Oliver in that fMRI thing earlier, it might not have been too late?”

  “I’m not saying it’s too late now. Only that, yes, if I’m going to be honest, that is a possibility.”

  “So then it makes me wonder again. Why didn’t anyone do that test earlier? It must have been, what, eight years since his last MRI? Nine? Why wouldn’t the doctors send him for another one? Get a few other opinions. What was the holdup?”

  Margot shrugged, hunching her shoulders as if to diminish her substantial dimensions. But when she raised her head, her gaze on Eve was no longer that of the helpful professional she’d been playing those last days. She looked frank, accusatory. A little bitchy, Eve thought. Squinting at his mother, Charlie’s mouth fell open a bit as he began to understand.

  “Anyway,” Margot said, “all this language stuff is pretty theoretical. Maybe we don’t know yet if Oliver can even understand us, but I, for one, am not willing to let the boy wait another day. In cases like Oliver’s, it usually takes a lot of fine measurements, a lot of data collection, and a whole lot of frustration. But mostly it takes faith, this sort of work. Faith for now, is what I’m saying, and we can worry about the rest later.”

  Eve watched the antibiotic liquid in an IV bag gather to a drop, release.

  “Have you tried his hands again yet?” Eve asked. “I’m telling you, sometimes he can move the left one. Just a little, but I—”

  “I just don’t get this, Ma. I can’t.” Charlie made a broad gesture with his arms, as if to include Manuel Paz and Margot Strout in some group, as if they had all assembled there today to ask her the same question. “Why wouldn’t you insist on another opinion? Was it too expensive to take Oliver somewhere else? We could have found the money.”

  “So now you are an expert on my finances.”

  “Ma.”

  Eve felt the trembling report of her soup-inflamed innards, but as her gaze met Charlie’s, she strangely calmed, as if they were in some other room together, after this conversation was already long past. “I really don’t know what to tell you, Charlie. This whole time, the doctors and nurses kept telling me about brain death, about the thing actually shrinking, withering away. Another opinion. I’m sure it all seems so reasonable to you now, what I should have done. It’s a very easy thing to admonish me in retrospect, isn’t it? But you are forgetting the days and weeks and months I’ve spent here. Not you, but me. And? And I just couldn’t take any more opinions. All those opinions, those diagnoses, they were killing me. I mean that.”

  On the far side of the bed, Manuel Paz relaxed into his chair with an empathic sigh. “Of course we can understand that,” Manuel said. “It’s just like I’ve always been telling you over the years. Fact is, I can’t imagine what I would’ve done if Oliver were my boy. But anyone could understand that. Ain’t that right, Charlie?”

  Charlie looked at Manuel for a long while, then nodded faintly, as if reminded of something. He grasped his airfoil of hair with his good hand, shook his head deeply.

  “Jesus,” Charlie said. “Jesus.”

  “Listen to me. Listen.”

  “Eve.” A new voice at the door. “Good Lord. Eve!”

  “Oh,” Eve said. “Doyle. And you brought friends.”

  At the helm of a procession of the familiar crowd of flower-bearers, Bliss Township’s erstwhile principal Doyle Dixon hobbled through the doorway, looking like Mr. Monopoly after a few years of bankruptcy, his mustache now blanched to the sullied whiteness of week-old snow. Donna Grass followed in Doyle’s wake, smiling wearily behind piles of carnations. Four of the old teachers were there too, those handsome, blockish ladies, so alike in their sun-dried, earthy cheer that Eve always had a hard time keeping their names straight. Dawson, Henderson, Schumacher, and, yes, Abbie Wolcott. The casserole set who used to stop by Zion’s Pastures, offering their chicken cacciatores and Tupperware tubs of enchiladas along with fistfuls of bromides: “God’s plan for each of us reveals itself in time,” and “The only way up is forward,” and “What Charlie needs most is a little normalcy.” Those women who spent their whole frumpish lives within a hundred miles of their birthplace and so could never understand the decisions of a woman like Eve, a woman from nowhere who made her own choices about what was best for her and her family. They were making a big display of it now, exposing their too-bright teeth as they laughed and hugged all the air out of the room.

  “Can it really be true?” Doyle said, once he emancipated Eve from his marsupial grasp. “And Charlie? Could that be Charlie Loving?”

  “Why does nobody believe it?”

  “I believe it. But what a handsome young man you’ve become.”

  Oh, Eve could believe it, too. Here, after all, was inviolable evidence that Charlie was still Charlie. All it took was the simplest compliment to recalibrate his attitude entirely. Eve’s cold-eyed accuser was presently grinning through a blush.

  And now Eve watched Mrs. Dawson, Mrs. Wolcott, Mrs. Schumacher, and Mrs. Henderson mass around the bed, arranging their cheap glass vases, reaching out their hands for Oliver’s arms, greeting Manuel with overlong embraces. Eve really couldn’t take it; she left her boys to the casserole set and drifted aimlessly through the hallways.

  After long minutes, she found herself in the most distant wing of Crockett State, filled with teddy bears, cheery classroom poster encouragements (LIVE FOR THE DAY! HANG IN THERE!), and the Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s cases making doodles of their spittle, swearing at nothing, yawning in the sanitized air. Above a stooped, wheelchair-bound lady, picking with great ardor at a scab on her thumb, a bulletin board showed a cartoon thermometer wiping his sweaty brow, his speech bubble saying, TODAY’S SEASON: SUMMER! TODAY’S TEMPERATURE: TOO HOT! The indignity that her son was made to live with these geriatrics was as fresh as ever.

  She was hallways away now, but still the image was before her: Charlie grasping his head, his appalled face shaking. The life of a caregiver, Eve had learned, was built upon an unsteady earth, pocketed with many sinkholes. To keep the floor of your sanity from giving way, there were many places you must not step, many thoughts against which you must not rest your weight too heavily. But her rash, accusatory son had a knack for staving in that delicate material, showing her Rebekkah Sterling’s name on his telephone screen, demanding on his very first morning back home for Eve to account for the decisions she’d made while he was gone. And now there was the worst thought again, opening beneath her. It was nothing but love and faith, nothing but goodness that guided her years by her son’s hospital bed, Eve knew that. And yet, in all of Eve’s fretful procrastination in scheduling a better test for her son at better hospitals, might she also have chosen her own hope over the results she couldn’t bear to know? But what else, she wanted to yell at Charlie, could she have been expected to do?

  Eve had made her way back to Oliver’s room now, where she found the whole good-tidings party shuffling out into the hall, a noxious blast of floral-patterned dresses and toothsome grins. They continued to chat among themselves, their eyes ringed with happy tears. Doyle said something funny in a low voice, and the whole group guffawed, a laughter louder, Eve was sure, than those hallways had known for years. Charlie briefly turned back to the commotion.

  “We have to leave Margot to do her work,” Charlie said. “Principal Dixon was just telling me about this new path up at Lost Mine Mountain, offered to give me a ride there.”

  “The park?” Eve asked. “How will you get home?”

  “Should be able to hitch a ride.” Charlie shrugged jauntily. “I’ll call if I need you. But I won’t.”

  Maybe she and Charlie never would be able
to understand each other. Her son was a boy so unlike her, a boy who could so easily engage in happy chatter with Doyle, the sort of conversation Eve herself had declined dozens of times over the years. Charlie was a boy who had found a way to transform himself into the dull, unbothered good cheer of the world’s people, its seven billion Hendersons, Schumachers, Wolcotts, and Dawsons. In truth, Eve envied him. “You enjoy yourself,” she said.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Hours later, when she stopped her car outside the Marathon electronics store, Eve told herself she would only look into a new set of headphones for Oliver to wear at night. And yet, inside the hangar hugeness, Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely” burbling through the speakers, she found the good, pillow-ringed headphones were locked behind glass cases, each price tag another little obscenity. It seemed one too many cruelties. Was there anyone who needed such headphones more, anyone who could afford them less?

  And soon Eve found herself drifting to the back of the place, following the circuit her boys used to make when she’d bring them there for an hour of consumerist envy. As if an antidote to the antediluvian way they lived at Zion’s Pastures, Charlie and Oliver had always wanted to bathe themselves in the cool blue light of high-end electronics, run their hands over magical technologies that couldn’t be theirs. “Just imagine how much more quickly I could write,” Oliver once said, “If I had a computer like this.” Oliver had pointed to things that didn’t even look like computers to Eve, more like spacecraft for a race of diminutive aliens. She had always hoped to save enough money to present him one of these as a birthday present.

  Today, when Eve put her hands on one of those portable computers, its cool curvilinear metal restored to her fingers that old feeling. It began as the most pitiful sort of indignity, that the object that could have made her son a little happier had been there in his hands but wholly inaccessible to him. She was equal parts indignant and grateful that all the laptops were securely tethered to their display table by those electronic ropes that Eve at least had the good sense never to mess with. She left the computer section behind and walked back to the front of the store. The brightness out the sliding doors was only a few yards away.

  But there, on the glass-top customer service counter, a computer shone, in its cool silver promise, the exact model that she had just been fingering in the back of the store. It was noon, and the red-shirted employees were gathered behind an open door, eating their brown-bagged sandwiches. No one was looking at her at all.

  And so Eve had to wonder: How could it not have been a test? The exact laptop she had been admiring, left for some reason unboxed and without security tags at customer service, whose employees were preoccupied by lunch. A part of her, of course, knew that it was no test, only a coincidence. But as she fixed her gaze on the brushed metal casing, it seemed to have come down to this, as it always did. Did she believe in her son’s future or not? Did she still believe in that better future, the one she had never quite been able to give her boys, in which they could have whatever it was they needed? Would she take the plunge, follow her conviction, or obey the opinions of the world and let Oliver rot? And could it have been a coincidence that the present symbol of this dilemma, the object in question, was a computer on which Oliver might someday begin the career he had imagined? And would—

  One of the red shirts in the break room stood, began to wad his paper sack. Eve didn’t have time to consider. She watched her hands clutch the laptop by its perfect sculpted corner and slip it into the wide maroon leather purse that, three years prior, she had selected from a rack at Sears to assist in her thieving. She was already back in the dense, hot air outside before she regained control of her body and commanded it to take a breath.

  “You’re okay,” she said.

  * * *

  Eve was driving, trembling, on the far side of the speed limit down the sun-hammered highway. Her purse was on the passenger’s seat, some light embedded in the metallic casing glowing in the rhythm of deep sleep. Eve knew enough about computers to know this meant the machine was still on, in sleep mode, and she panicked as if it were a living thing, a kidnapped child snatched from his crib who would cry out when he woke in this strange car. She reached for the purse straps and tossed the bag into the backseat. Down the highway, a dust devil manically wrote its signature over the cracked concrete.

  Eve’s body registered the outward manifestations of shame for what she’d just done—the fiery forehead, the excoriating blush—but inwardly this shame went unacknowledged. How was it, even still, that Jed was not present to keep her from becoming the kind of toxic person who could swipe someone’s computer? Oh, on a day like today, she needed chaos, upheaval, a breach, and she wasn’t done yet. Forty minutes later, Eve found herself turning Goliath through the streets of the town she most despised in the five thousand square miles of the Big Bend.

  And Eve soon discovered that the ironic smugness that was Marfa, Texas, had only deepened in the years since she last visited. The old derelict warehouses and big-rig filling stations were now done up like urban lofts, all windows and poured concrete, a few meaningless studies of geometric forms visible in their wide, otherwise empty innards. At lunchtime, some sort of hipster commissary, next to the old train station, served the bearded, tattooed, hardware-studded populace out of a battered taco truck. In front of the Victorian courthouse—a limestone, cupola-festooned building out of a storybook of Old Time Texas—stood a temporary sculpture park, the centerpiece of which was a twenty-foot cast-iron statue, in the rough-hewn style of Auguste Rodin, of a human vagina. A man wearing a knit cap and a modish woman’s librarian glasses presently emerged from the labial folds of this monstrosity, waving to a girl with a camera. The guy was shouting something as if there were an emergency. “It’s a boy!”

  So this was where her husband chose to live. In their few “dinners,” Eve always brought Jed back with her to Desert Splendor, and she dreaded now to see how her husband might be living, a feral creature wallowing in the muck of his own wrecked life.

  The Wild Man of the Navidad: one of her late mother-in-law’s favorite stories. Nunu had liked to relate this hokey legend about a supposed monster born of the filth in the Navidad River. A giant made of mud, a kind of Texan golem who, according to Nunu, had haunted the first settlers of West Texas, lighting out on midnight pillagings, murdering livestock and children, conducting sexual abductions, setting homesteads ablaze. Eve was never as interested as her boys in this sort of hoary lore, and she might not have remembered this tale at all had Nunu not mentioned another name for this Wild Man, the name given to him by the old slaves of Texas. “They called him The Thing That Comes,” Nunu said in her best spooky campfire voice, and that phrase had stuck. In Eve’s life before, The Thing That Comes was the name she’d come to give it, the monster of mud that often came for Jed, stealing him off to some sodden blackness from which it could take him weeks to fight his way free. Eve called it The Thing That Comes just as Jed called it “art,” just as a therapist might simply name it “clinical depression.” The Thing That Comes, of course, was a creature she knew well, from a childhood spent in the passenger seat of Morty Frankl’s Cutlass Supreme.

  Indeed, after a past like hers, Eve had to consider that perhaps it was that same foul monster who had first delivered her to Jed. Even in their delirious first weeks together, in that space she had rented above a bank in Marathon, Eve had seen that there was something unpinnable, something aloof, something really quite sad about her new boyfriend; for whole hours, even in those best weeks, Jed would go mute, his eyes flitting about, as if spectating the harrowing daylong battle that took place in his mind. From the many similarly grim nights she had passed in her father’s company, these silences were familiar to Eve, almost homey. And that was only a small part of what they shared. They had both been their parents’ only children. Jed’s gruff and punishing father, like Eve’s, had died very young; Jed’s grandparents, like her own, were either absent or dead; like Eve, Jed didn’t wa
nt to talk much about the past. “Every girl I’ve tried to be with, it was like none of them really saw me,” Jed said. “Oh, I see you,” Eve told him, slipping her tongue into his mouth. It turned out that she would not have to wander the world alone, after all.

  It did not occur to Eve, at least not for a long while, to wonder if Jed’s own sadnesses might be quite different from the brand with which she was familiar; she was young and grateful enough then not to consider that his history with the imperious mother he one night introduced her to, a lady dolled up in tulle who called herself Nunu, might be part of the cause. Well, she was only twenty.

  But after three years in that far corner of America, her roots began to thread into the hardpan. She got pregnant, and though she worried that a child might double her new mother-in-law’s meddling—Eve had already, for example, agreed that if it were a boy, she’d name the child after the famous cattleman Oliver Loving, to whom Nunu claimed her husband had some distant ancestral linkage—when Nunu looked on her grandson for the first time, Eve saw the power had shifted, the crown passed.

  “Meet Oliver Loving.” Eve propped the infant on her chest. For the first time, Eve recognized the pleasing homophone. All of Her Loving.

  “Praise be,” Nunu said. “A king is born.”