Oliver Loving

by Stefan Merrill Block

  A half hour later, there was Bliss Township School, the hundred-year-old, redbrick behemoth on its last night of life, its heart still beating, that season’s popular Beyoncé song thumping into the warm night. You grasped the car door handle, pushed it open, and stood.

  “Oliver?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Ma said in the driver’s seat, her eyes still begging you to spare yourself from embarrassment, her body shifting around awkwardly as if her motherly obligation to let you make your own mistakes was a kind of internal jujitsu move she was presently performing, to outmuscle what she really wanted to tell you. And then your mother said the last thing she would ever say to you on that side of Bed Four. “Try to have some fun, I guess?”

  The school’s gymnasium was nearly unrecognizable, festooned in ribbons and velvet curtains, lit by the whirling sparkles thrown off by the disco ball. As Sarah McLachlan sang her weepy song about the angel and his beautiful arms, teenage bodies in cheap satins and silks swayed softly—white teenage bodies; a school dance, like a football game, was a decidedly white activity. The room’s few Latino kids, a tiny sampling of the boys and girls you recognized from your honors classes, made a small cluster near the snack table, watching on like children at a lake’s edge, looking diffident as they considered a jump in. For a long while, you just stood there near the doors, terrifically uncomfortable in your stained sack of a business suit.

  “You made it.” Pa tossed a jolly arm over your shoulder. “I’m proud of you.”

  “I’m not so sure this was a good idea,” you said.

  “Mm-hm, mm-hm.” He pressed one faux-thoughtful finger over his mouth as he nodded. “She’s right over there.”

  And it was then that the rental lighting kit, rigged into the gymnasium’s rafters, came into perfect synchronicity with your teenage heart. A parting of darkness, as if from the heavens. A single slant of brightness, eliminating the masses from the room, landing on Rebekkah, a dream of Rebekkah, the dream of Rebekkah you would carry with you, her maroon dress like a second, silken skin as she rocked gently in the seraphic light. Somewhere, a DJ pressed a button, a lightning storm of strobe effects erupted, Salt-N-Pepa’s “Whatta Man” blasting forth. At the precise moment Rebekkah’s gaze landed on you, your father gave you a hard nudge from behind, like a shove into cold waters.

  You turned to show him a glare. You turned, also, to receive your last view of Jed Loving in that before. “Be bold,” Pa recited his favorite Goethe quote with a goofy, bemused smirk, “and mighty forces will come to your aid.”

  But you were not bold, not then, and no forces came to aid you. For a long while, it could have been fifteen minutes, you slouched against a corner, striking the posture of a boy having a meaningful conversation with the scuffed leather of his loafers. At last, when you could bear it no more, you lifted your eyes, and they seemed to know just where to find her.

  Rebekkah Sterling was at the room’s far side now, walking in the direction of the snack table. You did not so much follow Rebekkah as you were pulled into the gravity of her sway. Contact, your first in days, was made at the start of an empty hallway, lit dimly by a fluorescent panel at the gymnasium’s edge.

  “Rebekkah,” you said.

  “Oh, Oliver! Hi.” The joy of your proximity to Rebekkah nearly threw you. But, up close, you noticed a little flaw in that disco-lit vision of beauty you’d seen from the gymnasium’s edge, her eyelids ringed with teary swelling. In the story of yourself you were trying again to contrive, you stuck to your new character, Rebekkah’s 120-pound protector.

  “What did he do?” you said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’ve been crying.”

  “Oh, that? It’s nothing. Just this, uh, new makeup I was trying? Must be allergic.”

  “Right, allergic.”

  “It’s just that. I mean it.”

  You scanned the party daddishly, as if everyone in the room bore some responsibility.

  “God, Rebekkah. We’ve got to tell someone. You can’t let him hurt you any more.” Him, you said, not at all sure if you meant her father or Mr. Avalon.

  Even then you doubted that you’d really find the courage to do anything, but you feinted a few steps in the general direction of—who? Someone. Shameful: what you wanted most was for Rebekkah to pull you back, for this little dramatic theater, starring yourself, to continue. For a single grateful second, you were very happy Rebekkah played her part, gripping your wrist.

  “What has he done to you?” you asked again.

  “What has who done?”

  “Who? Mr. Avalon. How long have you—” You paused. The freckles dotting Rebekkah’s cheeks had become suddenly vivid as the color behind them drained away. But Rebekkah never answered you. Because now another boy had come jangling over, in full mariachi regalia. This boy was Ray Lopez, a kid you didn’t know, a boy who himself couldn’t know that he was walking through the last moments of his life. “What are you doing?” Roy Lopez asked Rebekkah. “We’re all waiting for you in the theater room. You have to get into costume. We start in thirty minutes!”

  “I have to go,” Rebekkah told you. “I really have to go.”

  “But—” But the moment passed. Before you could think of what else to say, Rebekkah turned her back to you, as if wishing you out of the room. And yet you did not leave, not just yet. You stood there, eyeing Mr. Avalon, beneath the upraised basketball hoop, waving his arms in Rebekkah’s direction as she slowly began to cross the gymnasium. And when Mr. Avalon’s gaze locked on yours, you learned that the corollary to the six-second hypothesis was also true. You did not blink for much longer than six seconds.

  On a Young Astronomers Club trip to the McDonald Observatory, a docent had told you that when you view any darker spot in the sky through the great telescope, thousands of galaxies become visible in the ambient luminescence. A hidden starscape whose pattern bore the record of the universe’s fourteen-billion-year-old explosion, the secret of the Big Bang. On the night of November fifteenth, you were just starting to see that pattern, but you didn’t have the equations to make sense of it. At the time, you just watched as Mr. Avalon followed Rebekkah toward the theater classroom. You turned, set off down a different hall.

  And so: it was sometime before 9 P.M. on November fifteenth, and you were wandering Bliss Township School. The hallways after hours were surreal and lovely, without the alienating crowds, a nice reminder that time went on there in those stale corridors, and you were only passing through. You ran your fingers along the tattered lines of lockers, over the poster board displays and the many hand-painted encouragements for the Bliss Township Mountain Lions football team, along the cheaply ornamented crenulations of the frame that held Pa’s cheery, wind-warped vision of your school. Distantly, the deep cardiac rhythm of dance music throbbed through the walls.

  In a far wing, you could just make out the familiar chord progression of “Baby Got Back” as you drifted along—lonely as a cloud, you thought in a tragic, poetic mood, remembering a poem you’d read in ninth grade. You were as lonely as a cloud in the West Texan sky, and like condensation, you fell back into the place where that particular lonesomeness first rose up, your desk in Mrs. Schumacher’s empty classroom. The whiteboard said, THE ODYSSEY: HOW IS IT RELEVANT TODAY? You hardly even heard it, that first fractured noise.

  And yet, you stood up from the desk and walked back into the hall. You were feeling afraid, but you couldn’t name why. You crept past the slumbering lockers, the shoe-leather, municipal smell of the library. The polished wood floorboards squeaked under the loafers you’d borrowed from your father. You had nearly convinced yourself that the only thing that could be wrong was bound in your own thwarted heart. The flooring popped, then moaned. Then, an unmistakable sound: a high trill, very different from the ordinary girl-screams that filled Bliss Township. A scream that registered in some primitive part of your brain, panic washing any clear thought away from you, and you were running now
.

  For weeks, you had stolen glances through the window to the theater room, trying to understand, or else trying just to see Rebekkah. Why would she talk with you, kiss you, then leave you to silence? Why would she do what you had seen her do with Mr. Avalon? Your heart churning inside you, you once more turned to the long plank hallway that led to the theater classroom, where the screaming began again, and in your last moments of walking life, the questions only multiplied inside you.

  The sound of firecrackers, rapid, crackling bursts. You turned the final corner, and there he was. The person you had only seen from a distance, that night outside Rebekkah’s house, the same boy you must have shuffled by in the halls for years without noticing, both of you training your eyes on your shoes. A young man who, in your many lovelorn contemplations, you had all but forgotten. You had only ever seen him from the distance of your own bounded story; you couldn’t have known all that you shared. Even up close you oddly could not quite see him clearly. He was shaking so severely, his features seemed to blur. You smelled a sharp, sulfuric tang. Something bad, the primitive part of your brain was saying to you sharply now, but it didn’t offer answers. You never even saw what this person held at his side. Your panic kept you from understanding. His arms moved like unhinged things, jointless and strange. His eyes were extinguished, unreadable. If still you failed to understand, it was only because you, like the 736 other people of your school, could not have imagined, until that night, that something like that was possible, not there.

  “It’s over,” this man told you, his voice a dim echo off canyon walls.

  “Okay,” you said.

  His oil-dark eyes went wide and emphatic, as though he were trying to convince you of an argument. “I had to.”

  “Okay,” you said again.

  “He bought me a dog,” he said.

  Appropriately, your last word was a question. “Who?” And then there was a blinding violence, a terrible whiteness, a crack in time.

  And then what? That is where your family lost you, to that place like the one your father had described that night in his painting cabin. A black hole, in which no telescope could ever locate you. A place of pulverized years, an infinitely heavy blindness, a forsaken desert island in the pooling vastness, and where could your family find you now? Perhaps only in another unlikely idea. Only in the stories they still tried to believe.

  Charlie

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Once upon a time, there was a boy who fell through a crack in time. After Manuel Paz left their house that Sunday afternoon and Charlie stood from his shadowed spot on the stairs, that oft-written sentence of his was feeling autobiographical. With the lid pulled back on his mother’s long-sealed secret, Charlie was swamped by his old teenage guilt, his powerlessness to keep Ma from becoming the kind of person she had apparently become. He felt he wore his lean six feet like the costume of an adult as he timidly marched toward his mother at the kitchen table.

  “Shoplifting, Ma? Seriously? How much are we talking about here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “No I-don’t-knows. How much did you take?”

  “You mean this time, or altogether?”

  “Christ.”

  But after twenty-three years under the tyranny of Ma’s certitude, wasn’t there also something a little wonderful about being in this position with his mother, in the sudden and wholly unexpected position of moral authority? Charlie had to concentrate now not to let a smile into his face.

  “It was all for Oliver,” Ma said.

  “Of course it was,” Charlie said. “Show me.”

  Without complaint, as if she had anticipated this demand as fair punishment, Ma pushed away from the table, led the way back up the whining, thinly carpeted stairs. In an unused bathroom on the second level, she pointed to a string dangling from a ceiling panel. Like a teased cat, Charlie hopped and pulled at it. A collapsible staircase yawned open. And up those stairs, when Ma punched the switch on an old Coleman lantern and unlatched a giant plastic bin, Charlie was frankly astonished by what the light revealed, that little hillock of shrink-wrapped plunder.

  “Ma,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”

  “I know,” she said. “It’s horrible.”

  “That’s one word for it.”

  Charlie felt his skull for a long while then, as if trying to divine his own thoughts.

  “But I’ll tell you what,” Charlie said. “If I’m being honest? What I’m thinking right now is that it reminds me of my book, only in stuff instead of useless pages.”

  He lifted a DVD of 2001: A Space Odyssey, tossed it back into the bin.

  “So,” Charlie said. “About that other thing Manuel mentioned.”

  Ma nodded, her exhaustion vibrating through her. But she held herself together long enough to recount the whole awful scene with Manuel in the hospital conference room, years ago. His questions about Hector and Rebekkah and Oliver, about what she hadn’t told him then, her guilt (“like a sickness I carry in me”) at Oliver’s long-ago conversation about Rebekkah Sterling that she had ended before he could explain anything to her. “I don’t know. This whole thing, Charlie. I just don’t know.”

  “Well,” Charlie said, dusting off his old Man of the House crown, “I’m not saying you shouldn’t feel bad about that, what you never said to us. And as for being less than honest with the police? Probably not your best course of action.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “But Ma?” Charlie said. “Do you know that I’ve wondered the same? About Rebekkah. Wondered so much, in fact, that I practically stalked her out there in Brooklyn, so that she’d just talk to me.”

  She turned away from Charlie, unwilling to show her son what this confession did to her face.

  “Did she?” Ma asked softly. “Talk to you, I mean.”

  “Not really,” Charlie said. “But now I’m wondering. Why didn’t I just tell you about all that business? Why did I keep it to myself like some big secret? It was like I thought—like I didn’t ever want to put you through the pain of talking about what happened that night. But now I’m wondering if maybe that was very wrong of me. If maybe the very, very painful part was not talking about it.”

  “We’re talking now, aren’t we?” Ma said, but the old combativeness in her words was wholly at odds with the way she nodded at the Tupperware bin, touching her mouth with the back of her hand as if the piled mass of her shameful habit was a sickness she had at last expelled.

  “So what do we do now?”

  “Now?” Ma asked. “Now I guess we have to ignore the advice of that Finfrock lady. Tomorrow we’ll just have to ask Oliver all these old questions, right in front of Manuel Paz. Put all this business behind us so we can focus on what really matters here. Focus on helping Oliver.”

  “Right.”

  Charlie hardly slept again that night. By 6 A.M., when he gave up on bed, exhaustion was sanding his eyes. His gut was roiling. The revelation of Ma’s shoplifting: all night, he had kept probing that truly shocking fact, and once the astonishment passed, he quickly lost the sweet flavor of moral superiority. What sort of a woman, Charlie was wondering, could go around stealing other peoples’ things, as if her own crazy needs mattered more than the laws of the world? What sort of a woman, presented with questions from a police officer, could allow herself to reach for such a pathetically false nostrum for her own guilt, when the truth might have led to some sort of explanation? The same sort of woman, he supposed, who decides to pull her child out of school to comfort her in her grief. The sort of woman who chooses to outsource her own suffering onto those nearest at hand.

  Charlie had spent a good part of the night stewing in a noxious memory, a certain day from the first years after, which had left him so furious with his mother, whose emergence from bed he heard in the creaking plywood, that he chose not to wait for her. He deposited a note, telling his mother that he had left early for Crockett State on the Suzuki. He snarfed an English muffin and moved swiftly
through the rooms of the cracked McMansion, silently latched the front door.

  The sun looked bald and gentle as it rose over the distant mountains that morning, its cheery light throwing the etched shadow of Charlie’s motorbike across the asphalt expanse. But, even at top speed, the memory was still holding on there, in Charlie’s wind-lashed head.

  Charlie must have been fifteen, maybe sixteen. Oliver had been gone long enough that Charlie had begun to glimpse the futility of his efforts to keep his mother sane, to engage her in any activity beyond her daily visits to Bed Four. Still, that morning he had been trying.

  “A five-letter word, beginning with T, that means a dance,” Charlie had said, tapping a pencil against the book of crossword puzzles spread over his legs. On the far end of the sofa, his mother hardly flinched, apparently engaged in a staring contest with the wall. “Okay,” Charlie said, “how about a three-letter word that means family?” And when still she did not reply, Charlie scooted next to her, rested the book in her own lap. As if woken from a deep sleep, her hands startled, slapping the book away, the edge of a page slicing her finger, which she sucked at furiously.

  “I don’t know why you can’t just leave me be,” she said. “Why you are always asking me these questions. Why you can’t just be quiet for a while.”

  Ma pulled the wounded finger from her mouth, smacked her hand on the tired cowhide of the sofa. “That’s the difference between your brother and you,” Ma told Charlie then. “You always need all the attention in the room.” And then she stood, leaving Charlie alone in the silence he had disturbed.

  This was one of his mother’s condemnations of Charlie that he had heard before, in many forms. “There are those people who can be alone together, and those people who don’t know the value of listening to their own thoughts,” ran a common variation on her theory. This was, in fact, one of a great many ways his mother had always divided the world into two types of people: the virtuous, contemplative, amenable people like Oliver and Ma herself, and the unsettled, disruptive people like Charlie and his father. In the now mostly unacknowledged prehistory of the Lovings, in the family they had been before the night of November fifteenth, Ma had come to use “like Oliver” as a shorthand to mean good and “like Charlie” to mean bad. But Charlie knew the truth: “like Oliver” just meant someone who would always be what she needed: a timid, ever attentive and agreeable boy.