“Oh, no, Ma.”
She clutched the injury, and Charlie reached with his good hand to pull her fingers away. Eve knew it was nothing serious—the pain had already passed—but she held on, making him suffer a little longer. Charlie lit Goliath’s weak dome lamp, and at last she relented, displaying her face to him, blinking furiously. Charlie was so close, and his eyes were still his eyes. Gray and bright.
“We make quite a duo,” Eve said. “A regular slapstick act.”
Charlie chuckled, and so did Eve. Just moments ago they were walking a delicate line, the edge of something vast and deep, and these quick laughs tripped them, pitching mother and son over the cliff. They didn’t just laugh then; they tumbled into laughter, down and down.
“Oh, oh! We have to stop this, we have to stop, I’m going to wet myself,” Eve said, which only made them laugh harder still. They laughed until it seemed they arrived to the other side of something. Eve fired the colicky engine, put Goliath in drive, and pulled a whining U-turn across the asphalt.
“Where are we going?”
Eve grinned into the darkness to the east, the stars twitching to life. “To see your brother.”
At eight thirty on a Sunday evening, the lampposts of the parking lot of Crockett State Assisted Care Facility were all dark. The building itself, illuminated by a few security lights, looked like a dinghy at sea. “We’re way past visiting hours, so we’ll have to take the back door. At night, the front is guarded by an Oompa-Loompa named Donny Franco.”
Actually, of all the facility’s workers, sad-eyed, shiftless Donny was one of the few Eve didn’t despise, and she understood, in that bite of her tone, that she was already slipping back into the banter that was her relationship with Charlie at its most functional, that sardonic repartee.
“Not Donny Franco? That poor doof from my old class?”
“One and the same.”
“Ha!” Apparently the fact that the people Charlie had left continued to live was some good joke. “What happens if good old Donny Franco finds us breaking and entering?”
“Let’s be sure he doesn’t find out.” This was how they always worked best, she knew, as coconspirators. Even in those tense last years of homeschooling, Eve and Charlie would sometimes take Goliath on joyrides outside Marathon High School and jeer about the poor saps spending their days bedraggled and backpack strapped.
Charlie, creeping up to the dim building, did a cat burglar thing on his tiptoes. As she watched her son make a caper scene out of the place in which she had suffered all those years, Eve had to hold back another frenzy of laughter. But what about the Eve of three hours ago, the Eve of a silent decade, the Eve who had waited there as Charlie chased his fantasies in New Hampshire and New York City? Motherly love was no sentimental thing. It was irrefutable and unsparing, a squad of riot police mindlessly clubbing the protestor, no matter how righteous her cause.
“We do have fun, don’t we?” Eve said. “When we get together, I mean.”
“When do we get together?”
Inside, the same linoleum-floored, plastic-bumpered hallways Eve had walked six days a week for the last nine and a half years. But with the halls now dim, with Charlie flattening himself to the walls, it was both Crockett State and a funny dream of it. Three turns later, Eve paused to snicker at her own hand as she grasped the cool steel handle to the room that held Bed Four. She turned to Charlie, the humor of their little breakin vanished. Waiting for whatever Eve might say, Charlie looked very young. Down the hall, one of the dementia cases screamed at no one, “Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to you!”
“He won’t look like you remember. It’s important that you know that. You have to picture the worst, okay? I need you to do that for me right now. Before we go in.”
To her surprise, Charlie obeyed. He closed his eyes, and she could see them moving behind the lids. It occurred to Eve that she had never before seen someone so clearly, so self-seriously imagining, and she wondered if just maybe, some later day, she might ask Charlie if she could read some of the pages he had been writing.
“Okay,” he said.
Eve turned the handle, pressed it open, and then there they were, all together again. Oliver’s bed was silhouetted in the moonlight, making the body it held look like something from a myth, a mute oracle, some blind seer from a legend. That new bed that the facility had bought, a mechanized contraption that was supposed to ward off pressure sores, inhaled, sighed.
Eve felt along the metal rim of the bedside lamp and when she found the switch, she nearly gasped at what it revealed. Her son’s face, the face she had seen each day, seen afresh through Charlie’s eyes. Hair gone thin at the crown, jaw clenched and thick, skin like flaking parchment. But then, under the brightness of the warm bulb, Oliver’s eyes did the one ordinary thing they could still do. His eyelids fluttered open—an instinctive reflex, the doctor had told her, reptile brain circuitry, but for the length of a single swift inhalation, it never seemed that way to Eve. Even this evening, it seemed that Oliver’s gaze might at last fix on her own.
“Oliver,” Charlie said. “It’s me.”
*