“Not really,” Charlie said, his voice thin. “I called her up a couple times when I got to New York. Thought she might like to know she had another hometown kid in the city. But she didn’t seem to want anything to do with me.”
“So what could she want now?” was all Eve could think to ask. Eve glanced in the direction of her son, the stones and ocotillo outside blurred by Goliath’s velocity and also by the face grease that Charlie, in his forlorn prison-yard stares, had already deposited on the passenger-side window. But Charlie did not reply, only shrugged timidly at the glass. She kept her eyes on Charlie for a dangerous duration, needing to see what this missed call had done to his face, but he wouldn’t look at her. Rebekkah Sterling, or at least her name, back into Eve’s life: horrible to think that the girl still existed, somehow galling that Rebekkah refused to remain what she had become to Eve, just a distant memory of a body walking off into the shadows, a hundred unanswered questions, sealed away in a past. Even now, she tried and failed to come up with a way to phrase the question thrumming inside her: What, exactly, had Charlie hoped to accomplish in speaking with Rebekkah Sterling? Eve reached for the radio, cranked up its staticky music: 93.3, The Golden Oldies. The station happened to be playing Bob Dylan, “Like a Rolling Stone.” Eve and Charlie looked at one another at last, their gaze meeting for less than a second.
*
The sun was already high in the sky, pinning their shadows to the asphalt beneath their feet in the Crockett State parking lot. The oils and sour cream topping of Café Magnolia’s tortilla soup, a few spoonfuls of which Eve insanely let herself eat at Charlie’s urging, made magmatic progress through her belly as they paced down the Crockett State halls. At Oliver’s room, Eve blinked rapidly at the sight of the open door.
“Manuel?”
“Eve. And is that Charlie? My Lord, get a look at you.”
“Hiya. Look too long and it’ll cost you.”
“Har har,” Manuel said.
Texas Ranger Captain Manuel Paz stood from the extra chair someone had deposited in the room. Eve sensed that their arrival had interrupted something. Margot flushed in her seat next to the bed as Manuel awkwardly rotated the ecru brim of his Stetson hat over the brass buttons of his uniform. The man now looked so different from the fleshy Ranger who had made his first reports at Bed Four all those years before. Like a blown dandelion, his final wisps of hair had vanished; Manuel had retracted to the hardened, denser form of himself. Frank Rumble, no surprise, was nowhere to be found.
“What are you doing here?” Eve asked, letting Manuel give her a little pat of a hug.
“Eve.” Manuel pulled away, held her shoulders in his outstretched hands. “My God. I don’t know what to tell you. This news.”
“Margot Strout, I presume?” Charlie said. “I’m Oliver’s brother. I’m Charlie.”
“Oh, I remember you, Charlie.” Margot brightened, rejected Charlie’s offered hand to press his little scarecrow body against herself. “From way back when. And Captain Paz here sure is right. Wow! Now you’re a man.”
A West Texas conversation of course could not begin before the ritual preliminary niceties. Chatter ensued, mostly just talk of the weather—can you believe this heat?—a nonsensical and yet oddly beloved topic for this desert’s inhabitants. At one point, Eve heard Margot say, with the adamant sincerity of original thought, “But, really, it’s humidity that’s even worse. At least we don’t have that to worry about!”
Charlie smiled. “So,” he said, “what did we miss?”
“Yes, to the business at hand. Well. I was just telling Captain Paz what I told you on Friday,” Margot said to Eve.
“Friday?” Charlie asked his mother. “What did she tell you on Friday?”
Margot paused, felt her bangs, looking between mother and son. “I was just telling Captain Paz,” Margot said. “I was just telling him about what I told you I learned in my training program. Over in Austin. About how we learned how people who have been locked in for a few years, how even if their brain function is normal they can still sometimes lose their language.” Margot’s voice, settling now into the substance of her training, gained confidence. “How language is sort of like a muscle. A use-it-or-lose-it kind of thing. Like we read about those feral children, the ones raised in the woods, and how no amount of civilization could teach them to speak well. But it’s more complicated in cases like Oliver’s. Sometimes, after a bunch of years, language goes away. But sometimes not. And of course there’s still the physical brain damage, which we just can’t know about yet, not until they do those next tests, at least.”
Out the window, two Border Patrol SUVs blared through the silence that followed, the Doppler effect making whatever immigration emergency they were addressing sound a little silly, Keystone Kops material. Charlie made the furrowed expression of a man puzzling through a credit card statement.
“So what you’re saying,” Charlie said, “is that if someone had put Oliver in that fMRI thing earlier, it might not have been too late?”
“I’m not saying it’s too late now. Only that, yes, if I’m going to be honest, that is a possibility.”
“So then it makes me wonder again. Why didn’t anyone do that test earlier? It must have been, what, eight years since his last MRI? Nine? Why wouldn’t the doctors send him for another one? Get a few other opinions. What was the holdup?”
Margot shrugged, hunching her shoulders as if to diminish her substantial dimensions. But when she raised her head, her gaze on Eve was no longer that of the helpful professional she’d been playing those last days. She looked frank, accusatory. A little bitchy, Eve thought. Squinting at his mother, Charlie’s mouth fell open a bit as he began to understand.
“Anyway,” Margot said, “all this language stuff is pretty theoretical. Maybe we don’t know yet if Oliver can even understand us, but I, for one, am not willing to let the boy wait another day. In cases like Oliver’s, it usually takes a lot of fine measurements, a lot of data collection, and a whole lot of frustration. But mostly it takes faith, this sort of work. Faith for now, is what I’m saying, and we can worry about the rest later.”
Eve watched the antibiotic liquid in an IV bag gather to a drop, release.
“Have you tried his hands again yet?” Eve asked. “I’m telling you, sometimes he can move the left one. Just a little, but I—”
“I just don’t get this, Ma. I can’t.” Charlie made a broad gesture with his arms, as if to include Manuel Paz and Margot Strout in some group, as if they had all assembled there today to ask her the same question. “Why wouldn’t you insist on another opinion? Was it too expensive to take Oliver somewhere else? We could have found the money.”
“So now you are an expert on my finances.”