Over the last four days, Eve had slept maybe twelve hours, but after she showed Charlie to the bedroom she’d tried to throw together for him—not really a bedroom, just four walls with a shadeless lamp standing on a milk crate and an old mattress she had optimistically salvaged from Zion’s Pastures in the unlikely case of such a visit—she willed herself to stay awake for a full hour after Charlie’s shuffling, creaking noises down the hall fell silent. For the two waking hours he had spent in the house, half of Eve’s thoughts had been on the bin in her attic, as if their contents might somehow suddenly come blurting out into the room. Her own telltale heart, beating overhead instead of from below. Not like she had any answer for what to do about the vexing throb of it, but she felt she must pay it a visit, double-check to make sure its padlocks were secure. And so she crept from bed to the bathroom, worrying over each creak and pop of the cheap flooring material beneath the balding Berber carpet. She pulled the cord, triggering the hidden door in the ceiling, and the collapsible staircase unfolded.
You don’t keep your sanity amid the chaos of a family of boys without a good sense of order, and let Charlie say what he would about Eve now, but even he couldn’t deny that she was always a diligent organizer. Her attic—a room bursting at the seams with Pink Panther insulation, funky with dry rot—she had neatly divided into two sections, subdivided into a great number of plastic bins. The room’s left half: the Past, the boxes she had not opened once since her move, the boxes containing the remnants of Zion’s Pastures she couldn’t bear to throw away. Mostly the tired Texan heirlooms belonging to the Loving family—those rusting knives, sun-bleached photographs of Jed’s nameless ancestors, and enough shellacked horns, skulls, femurs, and hooves to represent an entire herd. She’d never had any use for those boxes, but she was grateful for her decision to schlep all that junk to Desert Splendor so there was something up there to distract from the sight of the one great bin, sitting alone in the attic’s other half, representing the Future.
Not the actual future. Eve knew that, she did. Only the future her hands still hoped for her son. For some reason, she was relieved to find that all of those objects—an avalanche of cheap electronic devices and DVDs, hardcover editions of sci-fi and fantasy masterpieces, shrink-wrapped desk sets, a hundred pens, several outfits growing outdated and unworn—just as she had left them, beneath a lid fastened with two padlocks. But then it occurred to her that rather than keeping anyone, keeping Charlie, from discovering her purloined bounty, the locks—along with the solitary prominence of the bin—would draw attention, should her snooping son go snooping once more. And so she silently strained to bury the Future beneath the Past. After ten minutes of this activity, when one of the boxes settled, it released a terrible bellow from the pressed wood floorboards, and she panicked. Like some girl past curfew, she raced back to her bedroom and shut the door softly, hoping that her son had not heard.
And there in bed, checking her phone before turning out the lights, Eve discovered a litany of messages waiting for her, the area codes unfamiliar. “Shit,” Eve whispered, but she was hardly surprised. In a place like the Big Bend, where change is measured in geological time, any remarkable news spread over the dry, impermeable land like flash flooding. These foreign numbers might have confused Eve had she not already stood there once before, blindfolded before the firing line of journalistic inquiry. On the night of November fifteenth, Eve had gone from a woman few people thought to notice to some sort of spectacle; for a week or two after, she had become a kind of tragic actress, taking the stage each time she walked into the hospital parking lot, the electronic vultures descending, those news scavengers who fed on human tears. Eve couldn’t know who might have spoken to the press about Oliver’s latest test, and looking at those numbers, she still felt no kindness toward the reporters, whose curiosity this time was not about her family’s tragedy but about the astounding news leaked by some gossipy Crockett State employee. The world was always happy to unveil a new cruelty, and here was one of the cruelest: Eve was so deeply alone where she needed help and so public in the parts of her life she wanted to keep to herself.
There were, in fact, a few things Eve had kept to herself, kept even from the one boy to whom she had otherwise granted almost unfiltered access to her inner life. She had not told Oliver, and certainly not Charlie, the glum report Margot Strout offered her after her first day of work at Bed Four, last Friday, just as she had not told anyone about a strange exchange she’d had with Dr. Frank Rumble.
“Can I speak with you for a minute? In my office?” Dr. Rumble had been hanging around just outside Oliver’s door; it seemed that he had been waiting there for Eve to exit. He actually grasped the sleeve of Eve’s blouse, as if he would drag her into his office if necessary. And there, among the potted cacti and vintage phrenology busts, Dr. Rumble did not even sit in his armchair. He spoke with Eve in a corner, in a hurried whisper, as though the place might be bugged.
“Just so that we’re absolutely clear here, I did tell you that you should get a second opinion. Years ago. Remember? I did tell you. That’s the truth.”
“The truth?” Eve asked. “The truth is that you’ve spent nine and a half years telling me that there was no chance. That Oliver was gone. The truth is that I’m the only one who ever believed any differently.”
Dr. Frank Rumble was the sort of windy old West Texan made for porch sitting, reflecting on the past with a tumbler of whiskey. A dull, circumspect man, as if the business of his life were already behind him. But just now Eve couldn’t find the expected pleasure at seeing this outmoded incompetent, her son’s chief jailer, so ruffled. His panic scared her.
“Jesus Christ, Frank, what’s this all about, anyway? You worried you’re going to lose your job or something?”
“Eve,” Dr. Rumble said. “That officer. Manuel Paz. He came by this morning with a bunch of questions for me. Why not do the tests earlier? Why didn’t you take him for another test? How could this have happened? He was talking to me like I was some criminal.”
“Manuel Paz came to speak with you?” How long had it been since Eve had seen Manuel? Four months, maybe more. To think of Manuel’s troubled, helpless gaze, trained so often on Oliver over the years: it now gave her a little jolt of panic.
“I mean,” Dr. Rumble said, “what is the man possibly thinking?”
“I haven’t the foggiest,” Eve said, but the opposite was true.
Over that decade, in the absence of any real explanation for the events of that night, Manuel had related to Eve a number of the outlandish notions the townspeople had offered him, each more pathetically grasping than the last: supposedly Hector Espina was the nephew of some billionaire cartel boss in Juarez, and it was the cartel that had ordered the hit. Supposedly Hector Espina had been involved in a closeted romance with Roy Lopez, and he had aimed to silence Roy before anyone found out. “Just last week,” Manuel once told her with a sigh, “I had Nicholas York’s father in my office, swearing to me with a straight face that he had reason to believe that Hector had recently converted to Islam.” Still, with that unbreakable patience of his, Manuel had always promised the people of Bliss that he would look into whatever crazed notion they presented him.
And yet, the truth was that one day, very long ago, Manuel had come to Oliver’s room with a certain line of questions Eve couldn’t discount entirely.