Nearly ten years later, Eve couldn’t now remember exactly what had followed that day at the hospital. Perhaps Manuel had asked her more questions; maybe she had wept on his shoulder. Eve knew she had not lied to Manuel—replaying this conversation in her mind, Eve could give herself a passing grade for technical correctness. But of course there was a reason that exchange had stained her memory so indelibly. Eve might have mentioned to Manuel those little “study group” meetings Oliver conducted with Rebekkah, but she had neglected to describe the way Oliver had spent whole weekends brooding in his cave fort, nor had she mentioned the splinter of ice that had lodged in Eve’s heart when she had watched that girl disappear into the shadows that night on the television screen.
But her son, Eve knew, was a victim, an innocent, and she wouldn’t let Manuel Paz make him into some character in Hector’s demented story. Let Hector’s story die with him, she had thought, why did that murderer deserve anyone’s consideration, what quote unquote closure could it bring? Let the townspeople have their stories; there was only one story Eve believed, the one in which Oliver came back to her at last.
Over the years, when Eve had occasionally found her thoughts catching on snatches of that long-ago conversation she’d had with Manuel, she told herself: Ancient history, what could it matter? Any random detail from those worst weeks, she had learned, was the molehill that her decade of anxiety could make into a mountain. And yet, Eve knew there was another reason she hadn’t told Manuel the whole truth that day in the conference room. The fact was that Oliver had tried to speak with her about Rebekkah, just once, in the last days before. “I don’t even know where to begin to tell you about her,” Oliver had said haltingly one night, as Eve sat in a motherly pose, resting one hand on his arm. And Eve’s reply? “Believe me,” she had told her son, “with certain people, it’s better if you don’t even try to understand.”
At the time Eve had thought: Let girls, heartbreak, all that fitful longing come later. He was still just a boy, after all. Still, why hadn’t she just shut her mouth for once and listened? What might her son have had to tell her?
But it wasn’t really Eve who had ended that conversation with Oliver before it had even begun, just as it wasn’t quite Eve who had not told the whole truth to Manuel that day in the conference room. It was that lesser, former version of herself that Eve still housed beneath her skin, a timid, needy, nutrient-deprived creature who had grown mothlike in the dimness and stuffiness of the cramped rooms of her childhood. That girl, gone frail with solitude, simply could not bear it, perhaps would not even survive the possibility that Manuel might come back to her with another kind of story, one in which she might have listened to Oliver that evening, one in which she might have done something that could have changed what happened.
But now, Eve knew, Manuel would believe he had some actual reason to hope the impossible questions of the years might find an explanation, as if all the answers for what happened that night really had been sleeping there with Oliver all this time and now he might finally make his reply. But of course Eve knew better. Eve had received a thorough schooling on the outlandish designs your futile hopes could spin, and she knew that this notion was just another fantasy Manuel was letting himself believe. And yet, the enormity of that possibility was like a pillow pressed over her face: a little writhing panic, and then she was asleep.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
She woke the next morning to the truckish noise of her vacuum cleaner whirring downstairs in the living room. Behind the stack of manuscript pages (already a week overdue, and she hadn’t even started her copyedits) for The Holy Light’s latest offering, Jesus Is My BFF, the glowing digits of her alarm clock showed 7:04.
After the visit to Crockett State, when at last they made it to Desert Splendor, Charlie had staggered around the rooms, drunk with exhaustion. But now Eve went downstairs to behold a borderline-fantastical vision. Charlie, down on his knees, a cowboy bandanna tied Rosie the Riveter–style over his head, his good hand working the undercarriage of a moldy love seat with the silver arm of the Eureka’s attachment.
“This place, Ma…” Charlie was standing now, in front of the industrial-gray bricks of the fireplace, a vertical pavement that led up to a vault of fissures in the plaster above. The two second-or third-hand sofas sat with their spattered maroon pillows like the corpses of some monstrous species. The coffee table was a pane of dusty glass, holding a half-dozen mugs, their contents skinned with mold. It hadn’t occurred to Eve to clean up for Charlie, so blinded was she by the miraculous brightness on the fMRI display.
“I know,” Eve told Charlie. “Believe me. If there were any other choice.”
“It’s like a McMansion after the nuclear winter. Holocaust in the ’burbs.”
“Well put, dear boy.”
“It’s full of dirt!” Charlie said cheerily. “It’s coming in through the windows! And those big cracks in the ceiling? I had no idea you were living like this.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Well. I’ve been cleaning.”
“I don’t need you to clean.”
“You’re welcome. Oh, hey!” Charlie extracted his phone from his pocket, displayed its lit screen to his mother. NEW TEST SHOWS SHOOTING VICTIM—
“Apparently,” he said with a big hungry grin, “word about Oliver has gotten out. I have a Google alert for his name, and my e-mail this morning? Jesus. A miracle, they’re all saying. No one seems to mention the next test he’s got coming, what we still don’t know.”
“I guess a miracle is what everyone around here needs.”
“But it’s not just around here! It was in the Houston fucking Chronicle! A short thing, but still.”
“Tell me about it. When I checked my phone last night, you should have seen all the calls I’d missed.”
“Are you going to return them?”
“Don’t see why I would.”
“Don’t see why you would?” Charlie turned away, became an unreadable silhouette in the window. But the view out there, the lumber skeletons of the half-built neighboring McMansions, seemed to explain something to him.
“How about we go out for a breakfast?” Charlie said. “Something cheap. Obviously. Café Magnolia? Not so far from here, right?”
“I really don’t see why it’s worth the money. I have eggs.”
It required an almost surgical effort for Charlie to reach into the pocket of his skintight jeans and extract a single battered twenty-dollar bill. Charlie held his crumpled twenty in a way that the Statue of Liberty holds her torch, as if his independence had just been affirmed by a foreign nation. “My treat,” Charlie said.