“Eve,” Jed said as she hoisted herself out of the chair, shoved her way to the ladies’ room. She almost did not make it to the toilet in time. She had not been able to eat that morning, and in the spotless, thrumming stall, only a few drops of ocher acid trickled from her mouth. The truth was that, in nearly every one of those “miracle” stories she had read, the patient did not exactly “wake up.” In nearly all of them, a new doctor or scientist simply discovered that the patient had been awake and aware all along, that the patient had only been wrongly diagnosed by antiquated technology or incompetent doctors. And what sort of doctors worked at Crockett State? What sort of a man was Dr. Rumble?
On the slate-blue tile of the ladies’ room floor, Eve snapped open her purse and felt for the reassuring shape, half of her somehow hoping she had not actually lifted it from the desk of Ron Towers. But there it was, in her palm. A glistening new phone, which was really just a screen, whose lit face showed Ron Towers delivering a half-nelson to a chubby ten-year-old with Ron’s shiny, rosacea-ruddy features. She wondered if Ron had yet noticed its absence. She thought of some surreptitious way to return the thing. And yet, more alluring was the inexorable thought of her son’s hands, returned to him, manipulating the glass face of this device. Geez, how long was I out?
Eve slipped the phone back into her purse. She rose from the tile floor and ran her palms over the gray polyester blend of her business suit. She freshened her face in the mirror, cupped handfuls of water into her mouth, but could not quell the dryness in her throat.
Back in reception, Eve nodded at Professor Nickell and Dr. Rumble, and the men led her and Jed out into the parking lot, where that trailer that held the fMRI waited, where her son had already been transferred. Eve made the most of the short walk across the apron of asphalt, looking out at the apathetic enormity of the slaggy country, the mountains purple with the false coolness of distance. She trailed Jed into a gray-walled room inside the trailer, a little booth behind a Plexiglas partition, the fMRI just on the other side.
Over the last decade, Eve had watched as machines took over Oliver’s body; they had colonized his gastrointestinal regions, his systems both muscular and urinary. And now, as she watched his body shudder into the humming plastic aperture of the fMRI, she had the crazy apprehension that the transformation was about to be complete. As if once the key of her son’s awareness docked into the machine, it might suddenly throw forth a holographic image, a Wizard of Oz face, which at last would speak back to her.
And yet, Oliver was in the machine now, electromagnetic energies penetrating the dome of his skull, and to the doctors he was still only a twitching, thoughtless body, a specimen. As the massive computers began to hum, Professor Nickell explained to Eve and Jed what would come next. He pointed their attention to a screen, which showed a human skull in profile. Oliver’s skull: a mother could recognize it immediately, even electronically bisected.
Eve looked at the technicians’ screens. She was a forty-nine-year-old mother of a massive-head-trauma victim observing the results of an fMRI and she was a forty-year-old woman carrying laundry through the rooms of Zion’s Pastures on the night of November fifteenth, when the shaken, emergency-lit image of Bliss Township School on the television caught her eye. Today, the ruin that was left of the man she had married felt for her hand, but Jed also spoke to her, on the telephone, from all those years ago. “Eve—” her name the start of his wail that was not quite human, something animal and dying.
“What? What is it? Tell me. What happened?”
Eve had tried to turn away from the ticking clocks of this world, but time was a vexing, irrefutable math, a tally of prison wall scratches that her counting fingers couldn’t resist feeling for in the dark. On that morning, Oliver had been lost in his body for 3,537 days. Leaning into the Plexiglas divide, Eve felt herself grabbing Jed’s arm, ropier than before, but the rolling pin shape of it still achingly familiar. She held it against her belly.
And it was odd that it was now, of all times, that a certain memory came worming back into Eve’s awareness, from the heavy soil she had long ago heaped upon it. It was something she’d seen on the television coverage in the worst days after, playing in the hospital waiting room. Amid the softly droning montage of police officers and weeping students, Eve had seen a single long shot of that girl she had met only once, that night at Zion’s Pastures. Only two of the theater kids had made it out of that room wholly unscathed: Ella Brew, who had concealed herself behind the teacher’s desk, and also the person Eve now saw on the TV monitor. Rebekkah Sterling, a pale, auburn-haired whisper of a girl, not answering the reporters as she sauntered off into the darkness beyond the school. Rebekkah Sterling ambling away from the violence that had ended the lives of her classmates, set free to disappear into the parking lot shadows.
Eve had never seen her again. Whatever questions Eve had at that moment, Rebekkah carried off with her into that darkness and the years that followed. And yet, what happened that day, what was happening right now inside the fMRI machine in the Crockett State parking lot—the two days, in some unknowable science, were the same blind second, the same question, still unanswered. Why? Despite all her vehement claims to the contrary, despite the rational part of her knowing better, Eve couldn’t help but feel that at last she was standing at the precipice of some vast and otherworldly presence, that she was finally at the edge of an answer to why this unimaginable fate had chosen her family. That November fifteenth and this July twenty-second, almost ten years later, were connected by the immeasurable heaviness of one of those black holes that once fascinated Jed, pulverizing time, dematerializing her body, atom by atom. Was there light on the other side? Was there anything at all on the other side? Even now, looking at her son’s brain coming into the screens, Eve couldn’t know: Should she let herself hope, for her own sake, that it would show something, or would it be much better, for her son’s sake, if it showed nothing at all?
The professor presented Eve with a big radio announcer’s microphone, its output piped through the speakers hung on Oliver’s side of the partition. She clenched a fist, struggled to gather enough air to shape a word. And when Eve did speak, it came out very loudly. “Oliver!”
Oliver
CHAPTER FIVE
Oliver! A shot across the void.