Jed was doing that tight smile thing he did when he got mad. Eve nodded earnestly, gladdened and more than a little surprised by Jed’s anger, the acknowledgment of what was at stake today. “No, screw you,” Eve said, too loudly. She glanced over to find the plump, heavily powdered receptionist grinning behind her desk, her amused eyes informing Eve that later she would be sure to tell her fellow employees of this latest encounter.
Oh, Eve knew what they thought of her, all those nurses and assistants. But Eve had spent four hours a day, six days a week beside Bed Four, and she had learned the routines the doctors prescribed, down to the minute. And so what was Eve supposed to do when the nurses were thirty minutes late in connecting the lunchtime sack of Jevity to Oliver’s gastrostomy tube, not mention it? Was she supposed to remain silent when Oliver’s colostomy bags overfilled, spilling foulness over his belly? And was she, too, supposed to not raise hell when the nurses failed to rotate his body as often as they should and his pressure sores grew so severe that his fever broke out in a drenching sweat, his hospital gown going translucent against his grayish skin? Should she not mention the unclipped nails with which Oliver’s spasming arms could badly scratch himself? The circulation problem that could make his toes and fingers go icy, nearly gangrenous? “Tell me,” she often asked the chief nurse, Helen, “am I supposed to just stay silent?”
“All I’m saying,” Nurse Helen often recited, in their endless argument over the years, “is that no one else seems to make such a fuss.”
But they hardly even came, those children and grandchildren of the dementia and stroke cases babbling down the halls in their wheelchairs and their robes. Eve had come to suspect, by the general failure to visit other than holidays and the occasional hour on the weekend, the true purpose of this institution.
Crockett State Assisted Care Facility, Eve had learned, was a place where people in a particular predicament could displace the burden of their guilt. When stroke or head trauma or Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s collapsed a mind and the body beneath did not follow, what was a family to do? Places like Crockett State existed to allow families to commit the coward’s form of patricide, matricide, fratricide, filicide: to cede care of your loved one to this place, to tell yourself that you had done everything you could, and then, in the quiet indifference of that institution, to let some infection accomplish the act you didn’t have the courage to commit.
Eve would not allow herself that cowardice. She perfected her warning face and would never reward the nurses and doctors with gratitude when they merely followed the prescribed treatments. Eve could feel that her own fixed and pleading eyes were a kind of second and more dependable electricity that powered all those devices, that it was her unblinking gaze that kept the machines clicking and sighing, that fixed Oliver to life. If she let herself look away from the panic of his eyes, the swatting of his reedy arms, the jaundiced pallor of his face, the G-tube might fail, the infection of his bedsores might reach his heart, and Oliver would slip away from her.
To the doctors and nurses, Oliver was just the patient in Bed Four who needed his linens changed. Only Eve was left now to fight for the actual Oliver, the one none of them could know. The boy who loved Bob Dylan, poetry, science fiction, and tall tales. The boy who always insisted everyone stop to look at the sunset, no matter how plain.
Once, watching an old episode of Oprah, Eve heard the widow of a 9/11 victim explain that the hardest part was that in her mind, she continued the conversation with her husband, “just as if he were still there, until I remember he isn’t.” Eve did the same, with the difference that she really had this conversation out loud. She followed Oliver’s favorite filmmakers and writers, and she read to him the reviews of their movies and books. She tried to keep Oliver abreast of the news, both international and domestic. She recalled her occasional phone calls with Charlie in vehement detail.
The extent of her motherly faith: Eve really did imagine, and then believe, in Oliver’s answers, just on the other side of his trembling skull. When once, during an uncommonly tranquil phone conversation with Charlie, she had mentioned this thought, Charlie told her he wasn’t surprised. “Really?” she asked. “Do you sometimes think the same? Then why don’t you come for a visit? Why—”
“What I mean, Ma, is that I’m not surprised that you can go on talking without worrying about a reply. Let’s just say I have some, uh, firsthand experience with that particular phenomenon.”
“I don’t know what you could possibly mean.”
“It’s your way,” Charlie told her. “When you don’t want to accept something, you just talk and talk, like your talking can make a different kind of world come to be.”
“Oh, this again.”
“Believe me, Ma, I’m as tired of it as you are. But maybe if you would just try listening for once? Maybe, for once, you could ask me a question about my life? Maybe you might be interested in hearing what I have to say?”
That conversation had ended as nearly all her conversations with Charlie ended, the receiver conducting a thrumming silence until Eve invented some excuse to hang up. Things were different and awful now, but they still ran along the old lines. A mother didn’t deliberately pick favorites, but she couldn’t help it if one child was more her than the other, just as she couldn’t help if one inherited her coltish ankles, the elfin aspect of her ears, her curls. There were people like Eve and Oliver, who understood that survival demanded endless contemplation and skepticism of others’ easy ideas, and then there were people like Charlie and Jed, who moved through life like a car at night, never able to see farther than their own dim headlights, blindly trusting the world’s dark roads. If there was one modest silver lining to this worst day, it was the phone call she’d get to make to Charlie when it was all over. Whatever the result, she could hope it might summon him home, make him finally see what he had left her to.
The door at last swung open. Professor Nickell looked deeply into his clipboard, a lost man scrutinizing a map. “Mr. and Mrs. Loving?”
“Now?” She scratchily whispered the word, a sound like an unscreamable scream from a nightmare.
“Well.” Nickell was already edging back to the door. “No need to rush. We’re still getting him ready.”