“Ma.”
Eve felt the trembling report of her soup-inflamed innards, but as her gaze met Charlie’s, she strangely calmed, as if they were in some other room together, after this conversation was already long past. “I really don’t know what to tell you, Charlie. This whole time, the doctors and nurses kept telling me about brain death, about the thing actually shrinking, withering away. Another opinion. I’m sure it all seems so reasonable to you now, what I should have done. It’s a very easy thing to admonish me in retrospect, isn’t it? But you are forgetting the days and weeks and months I’ve spent here. Not you, but me. And? And I just couldn’t take any more opinions. All those opinions, those diagnoses, they were killing me. I mean that.”
On the far side of the bed, Manuel Paz relaxed into his chair with an empathic sigh. “Of course we can understand that,” Manuel said. “It’s just like I’ve always been telling you over the years. Fact is, I can’t imagine what I would’ve done if Oliver were my boy. But anyone could understand that. Ain’t that right, Charlie?”
Charlie looked at Manuel for a long while, then nodded faintly, as if reminded of something. He grasped his airfoil of hair with his good hand, shook his head deeply.
“Jesus,” Charlie said. “Jesus.”
“Listen to me. Listen.”
“Eve.” A new voice at the door. “Good Lord. Eve!”
“Oh,” Eve said. “Doyle. And you brought friends.”
At the helm of a procession of the familiar crowd of flower-bearers, Bliss Township’s erstwhile principal Doyle Dixon hobbled through the doorway, looking like Mr. Monopoly after a few years of bankruptcy, his mustache now blanched to the sullied whiteness of week-old snow. Donna Grass followed in Doyle’s wake, smiling wearily behind piles of carnations. Four of the old teachers were there too, those handsome, blockish ladies, so alike in their sun-dried, earthy cheer that Eve always had a hard time keeping their names straight. Dawson, Henderson, Schumacher, and, yes, Abbie Wolcott. The casserole set who used to stop by Zion’s Pastures, offering their chicken cacciatores and Tupperware tubs of enchiladas along with fistfuls of bromides: “God’s plan for each of us reveals itself in time,” and “The only way up is forward,” and “What Charlie needs most is a little normalcy.” Those women who spent their whole frumpish lives within a hundred miles of their birthplace and so could never understand the decisions of a woman like Eve, a woman from nowhere who made her own choices about what was best for her and her family. They were making a big display of it now, exposing their too-bright teeth as they laughed and hugged all the air out of the room.
“Can it really be true?” Doyle said, once he emancipated Eve from his marsupial grasp. “And Charlie? Could that be Charlie Loving?”
“Why does nobody believe it?”
“I believe it. But what a handsome young man you’ve become.”
Oh, Eve could believe it, too. Here, after all, was inviolable evidence that Charlie was still Charlie. All it took was the simplest compliment to recalibrate his attitude entirely. Eve’s cold-eyed accuser was presently grinning through a blush.
And now Eve watched Mrs. Dawson, Mrs. Wolcott, Mrs. Schumacher, and Mrs. Henderson mass around the bed, arranging their cheap glass vases, reaching out their hands for Oliver’s arms, greeting Manuel with overlong embraces. Eve really couldn’t take it; she left her boys to the casserole set and drifted aimlessly through the hallways.
After long minutes, she found herself in the most distant wing of Crockett State, filled with teddy bears, cheery classroom poster encouragements (LIVE FOR THE DAY! HANG IN THERE!), and the Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s cases making doodles of their spittle, swearing at nothing, yawning in the sanitized air. Above a stooped, wheelchair-bound lady, picking with great ardor at a scab on her thumb, a bulletin board showed a cartoon thermometer wiping his sweaty brow, his speech bubble saying, TODAY’S SEASON: SUMMER! TODAY’S TEMPERATURE: TOO HOT! The indignity that her son was made to live with these geriatrics was as fresh as ever.
She was hallways away now, but still the image was before her: Charlie grasping his head, his appalled face shaking. The life of a caregiver, Eve had learned, was built upon an unsteady earth, pocketed with many sinkholes. To keep the floor of your sanity from giving way, there were many places you must not step, many thoughts against which you must not rest your weight too heavily. But her rash, accusatory son had a knack for staving in that delicate material, showing her Rebekkah Sterling’s name on his telephone screen, demanding on his very first morning back home for Eve to account for the decisions she’d made while he was gone. And now there was the worst thought again, opening beneath her. It was nothing but love and faith, nothing but goodness that guided her years by her son’s hospital bed, Eve knew that. And yet, in all of Eve’s fretful procrastination in scheduling a better test for her son at better hospitals, might she also have chosen her own hope over the results she couldn’t bear to know? But what else, she wanted to yell at Charlie, could she have been expected to do?
Eve had made her way back to Oliver’s room now, where she found the whole good-tidings party shuffling out into the hall, a noxious blast of floral-patterned dresses and toothsome grins. They continued to chat among themselves, their eyes ringed with happy tears. Doyle said something funny in a low voice, and the whole group guffawed, a laughter louder, Eve was sure, than those hallways had known for years. Charlie briefly turned back to the commotion.
“We have to leave Margot to do her work,” Charlie said. “Principal Dixon was just telling me about this new path up at Lost Mine Mountain, offered to give me a ride there.”
“The park?” Eve asked. “How will you get home?”
“Should be able to hitch a ride.” Charlie shrugged jauntily. “I’ll call if I need you. But I won’t.”
Maybe she and Charlie never would be able to understand each other. Her son was a boy so unlike her, a boy who could so easily engage in happy chatter with Doyle, the sort of conversation Eve herself had declined dozens of times over the years. Charlie was a boy who had found a way to transform himself into the dull, unbothered good cheer of the world’s people, its seven billion Hendersons, Schumachers, Wolcotts, and Dawsons. In truth, Eve envied him. “You enjoy yourself,” she said.
CHAPTER TWELVE