“And what about he who shall not be named?” Charlie said. “Does he know?”
“Your father knows,” Eve said. And, okay, maybe it was just habit, how quickly the lie came fully formed to her lips, the very little lie that would confirm a really, truly true portrait of a father who had never been present for a family like a father ought to be. “Dr. Rumble told me your father seemed very happy when they spoke on the phone. But I don’t think that ‘happiness’ can ever quite be the right word with that man,” she said, because Charlie’s return to her life was all the upheaval Eve could take right now, because she just couldn’t bear to invite Jed back into the mix. And why not let Jed go on brooding in his Marfa bungalow if that was what he wanted?
The mountains were on fire with the sunset. With her son back in Goliath, some old impulse had misdirected Eve. She found that she had turned on the road not to Desert Splendor but to Zion’s Pastures. They had been driving that way for ten minutes when she slapped at her head, as if to fix a wonky contraption.
“Don’t be like that. Of course it’s incredible,” Charlie said. “I mean that. That we know now. Of course it is.”
“He’s back with us.”
“Is he? We really don’t know that for sure, it sounds like. And if he is, does that mean he’s really been with us all along? Or did his brain, like, suddenly switch back on? Like a lightbulb or something?”
“I’ve spent the last three days wondering exactly the same. These are questions for the professionals, I guess. For that next test.”
“But Ma? If he really has been there, every single day, I mean really hearing and seeing us—” Charlie hesitated.
“We didn’t know.”
“It would be hell. Maybe happy news for us, okay. But for Oliver? That would mean he has been in hell.”
“Ah. I had forgotten,” Eve said. “I had forgotten what it is like to have my son at home. This is good news, Charlie. The very, very best news. What about taking things one day at a time? Now that we know, we can help.”
Determined not to let Charlie sense her directional error and so expound on its implications, Eve just kept on, toward Zion’s Pastures. It was dim enough now that when a coyote crossed the highway its eyes flared blue in the headlights.
“Help?” Charlie asked. “How could we help?”
“Do you remember Margot Strout?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“That speech therapist woman. Usually she works with stroke patients, people with dementia. But starting tomorrow, she’ll be working with Oliver every day. They say she’s a miracle worker.”
In that week of a great many reversals, not the least was the fact that—after all those years of shunning Margot in the halls, turning her head away as if the woman were nothing but an offensive smell with charging legs—Eve somehow now found herself in a position to extol Margot Strout’s virtues. “It’s a wonderful thing, ain’t it?” Dr. Rumble had once mused, after Margot passed by the window. “A woman like that—everything she’s been through, losing her daughter, and still she spends her life helping other people.” Eve had paused from her combing of her son’s thinning hair, turned to Dr. Rumble, and said, “What a hero.” But then, just one day after the test, it was none other than Margot Strout who knocked at the door.
“How about this?” Margot said. “How about you and I try to start over?”
Margot’s blue, thickly mascaraed eyes on Eve, so unafraid, so horribly, triumphantly understanding.
“So now you might be ready to listen to me. Now you think I might not be so crazy after all,” Eve said.
“I never said you were crazy,” Margot told her. “But you’re right. You were right, Eve! You were right all along, about Oliver.”
Eve couldn’t resist letting the woman take her hands. She was so eager to share her joy with another human. Jed had walked away from that test as dazed as a man contemplating tax codes; Dr. Rumble and the nurses now tended to their patient like supplicants to a dying king. “I can’t imagine it,” Margot had added. “No, I can. If my daughter could suddenly come back to me? After all these years. Eve, Eve, dear woman. God is good, isn’t he?”
“A miracle worker,” Charlie said to his mother now. “Good. Well. A miracle is what we need.”
“We’ve already had one.”
“Sounds like we need another. Oliver does.” Charlie sighed and shifted in that beleaguered way of his, as if the unfortunate truths of his life were weighty boxes she made him heft.
“You know what that Princeton professor told me?” Eve was strangling the steering wheel, twisting her wrists. “Turns out that it’s more common than anyone knows. It’s horrible, but apparently people like Oliver are misdiagnosed all the time. God. Imagine it. But people don’t know this.”
Charlie nodded, as though this fact dovetailed with the point he was trying to make. “We still just don’t know. We can’t know. What’s in Oliver’s head. What he might think of all this. What he might think of anything at all.” Charlie was speaking to the dashboard, to no one, to the audience he convened in his mind. “Or even how he might think. Now it seems to me—” But Eve had stopped listening. She blinked and blinked at the cooling purple of nothing in all directions.
“What’s up?” Charlie said. “You stopped the car.”
“It’s just too much. You are back here now. No. Not you, but a man with my little boy’s face. And Oliver. And why can’t we, just for one minute, why can’t we just celebrate these facts? Why can’t you let me have just one happy night in ten years?”
“C’mon, Ma. I’m really too tired for the martyr routine right now.”
“Right. Because I’m just some hysterical, manipulative old shrew.”
They were at the start of something, the same old thing. It had taken less than thirty minutes to arrive here. The thunder of the coming fight gathered behind the few words they’d spoken, but Eve was too exhausted to endure that storm now, too sore with the repetitive stress injury of her son’s condemnations. Charlie, who was always insinuating in his pseudopsychological way that there was some deeper part of her that she was unwilling to consider, when Eve’s entire mental life was just an endless spin cycle of consideration and reconsideration. Eve wanted to tear herself open, to let Charlie see all the way down to the deepest part of her where this self-fabricator, this manipulative shrew supposedly resided.
“Just please, Ma, calm down now, okay? Listen to me,” Charlie reached for the back of her head, apparently forgetting the cast on his arm. Its corner slammed into Eve’s face.
“Shit.” Ridiculous: even with the fireworks blooming painfully in her eye, Eve regretted swearing in front of her son.