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 room, 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.