And even still she wanted to scream at him, Leave? Why not fight? Why not fight for yourself? Why not fight to stay here with me? But after half a life, after nineteen years of marriage, she knew her husband well, didn’t understand him at all. This time, Eve had been the one to nod.
Eve couldn’t remember exactly where Jed lived now. She had driven Charlie to Jed’s miserable new place a few times in the first years after, and her memories were of a downtrodden ranch house, its chipped siding thronged by a snake nest of vines, somewhere on the west side of town. Eve turned Goliath up and down the same streets half a dozen times before she realized she had been passing it, again and again. It was easy to miss, hidden by a dense and terminal foliage. The vines had spread wildly and died, as if they had choked the house to death, leached all its vital nutrients, and expired. It was the sort of house whose doorbell young boys might dare one another to ring.
But when Eve herself pressed that doorbell, a dozen times over, she heard no report from within. Her knocking produced no reply. She could practically hear it echoing off the tired furniture, the stacks of unread magazines, the empty liquor bottles she imagined inside. Something twinkled in the blue sky overhead. A surveillance drone, bound south for the desert. Eve was turning back for the car when a great mechanical sound erupted from the shed ensconced in the dun tufts of grass that crowded the backyard.
“Jed, Jed! Hey there! Jed!”
Glimpsed through the open door of the shed, Jed appeared to be reenacting a scene from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. An industrial ventilation mask covered his mouth like a muzzle; his goggles gave him the eyeless face of an automaton; he wore a thick headset over his ears. Jed drew back the roaring chain saw and drove it deep into whatever metallic material was before him, a swarm of sparks fireflying through the room. Eve had the irrational notion that she had to stop him before he did something drastic. She entered the dank, ferric space, black against the combustive glitter coming off his workbench. She pressed a hand between Jed’s shoulders. He startled, and the chain saw slipped his grip, gnawing a few inches across the concrete floor. Jed stooped over it, flipped a kill switch and unmasked himself.
“Eve. What on earth are you doing here?”
Jed moved around awkwardly, as if trying to conceal with his body the contents of the shed.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I thought you might like an update.”
Jed wiped his forehead with a filthy denim sleeve, slouched into the wrecked posture of the man she recognized. As her eyes adjusted to the grimed light seeping through the gaps in the shed’s wooden slats, Eve received a glimpse of the actual art Jed had been working on. As it turned out, it was not at all like the glum abstract canvases she had imagined. Nothing like his old second-rate van Goghs and Munchs. Suspended from the rafters of the shed were human forms, rendered from strange materials. The rusted bumpers of cars, bones of dead desert animals, barbed wire, food containers. The sort of refuse that littered the region, what the Chihuahuan Desert left behind after the wind and sun, turkey vultures and hyenas all took whatever they could. And no, not just human forms, Eve saw. From the crushed, rotten scapulae Jed had fashioned, each body sprouted rusted wings.
“You’re a sculptor now.”
“Not really,” Jed said. “I don’t know what you’d call these things. Sculptures? I’m not so sure. Garbage.”
“Garbage angels,” Eve said.
“Couldn’t have said it better myself.”
“These are really quite beautiful. I had no idea.”
“The seven archangels.”
“It looks like you’ve got at least two more than that.”
“I guess I couldn’t stop,” Jed said.
The mauled sheet of scrap Jed had been working at—it appeared to be the door to an old-fashioned refrigerator—emitted a strangled moan.
“What are you going to do with them?”
“Do? I don’t know.” Jed gave Eve a grateful look, full of sad knowledge. “I can’t see how anyone would be interested.”
“Hey, guess what? Heeee’s baaack,” Eve said Charlieishly, a line from some campy old horror film.
“Excuse me?”
“Charlie. I called to tell him the news. About the test. Would you believe it? The boy finally bought a bus ticket.”
“My God.” Jed looked at his angels, shook his head. “Charlie. How is he? I’ve been wondering and wondering.”
“Why don’t you go see for yourself?”
Jed didn’t reply. The question just hung there for a while between them, like another strange object suspended from the ceiling, the meaning of which neither of them spoke aloud.
“This update,” Jed said. “What is it? Something new? With Oliver.”
She tried to come up with a few sentences to explain why she had come to Marfa. But Eve’s thoughts flew sixty miles southeast, to Margot Strout’s second day palpating Oliver for some sign. Words that were no longer words.
“I guess it’s not really an update. They are working with him, trying to find a way for him to communicate. No update, really. But I thought I should tell you anyway.”
As Jed returned his chain saw to a hook, an odd kind of nostalgia overtook Eve, a nostalgia unlike the usual, not for the sun-bright years when her whole family was with her at Zion’s Pastures, but for the glum quietude of her life spent between Desert Splendor and Crockett State, her leftover life that the results of Professor Nickell’s fMRI had just ended. That recent time when Eve hadn’t had anything very specific to hope for and so her hopes could be vast, a life that was nothing but mother and son and the wild hopes that still bound them together. That time when Oliver had still been all her own. The wind outside the shed rose, whistled through the gaps between the walls’ wooden planks. When it passed, the silence was immaculate.
“We’ve done everything we could for him, haven’t we?” Eve heard herself say.
“What do you mean?”
“Oliver. Sometimes I just don’t know. Sometimes I wonder if he might have been better off if we had just let him go. Do you ever wonder that? What it must be like for him. Even now.”
Eve watched Jed pinch a loose corner of the metal on his table, bend it back. When he turned to her, his face was transformed with a beautiful kind of rage. But standing there with Jed, Eve understood that her question also held another question. The thought that had, from time to time, haunted her from the shadows of her days. Had Jed ever wished Crockett State would do to their son what Crockett State was built to do, to let some infection or act of medical incompetence free them of the decision, free them from the spiral of doubt, self-recrimination, and the arduous numbing grief that was their every day? “You can let go,” Eve tried telling Oliver once, repeating that line she’d heard in dozens of movies, horrified to hear how the words sounded in her own mouth. But the part that truly shamed her, and shamed her still, was the corollary that came to her lips as this avowal’s logical conclusion: she had added, “please.”