The sensation of Margot’s fingers in Charlie’s palm had been enormous and unsettling; his relationship with mothers, and not just his own, wasn’t right. When his Brooklyn and Thoreau friends used to tell Charlie of their mothers’ offenses, he would enthusiastically encourage their filial laments. But when reading novels or watching movies, Charlie would find that it was always the mothers for whom he wept. And here, in that perfumed, jowly woman, was another mother who had lost another child; her power overwhelmed him. “Tell me about you,” Charlie said.
And Margot had gladly offered up her whole horrible tale. About her husband’s third-term abandonment of his pregnant wife, and about the terrible genetic condition with which her daughter Cora had been born: Cora’s four years of bronchitic, wordless life before the poor girl at last suffocated. About Margot’s year of listlessness, speaking to her daughter’s memory, and also about Margot’s “rebirth,” her two-year-long-training program in Austin, where her work had been divided between the university lecture hall and the stroke, muscular dystrophy, Parkinson’s, cerebral palsy, and autism sufferers she assisted in the public hospital on Austin’s east side. About how Margot and her classmates had conducted with the enthusiasm of neophytes even their most onerous labors: helping the geriatrics of Austin type out their pervy comments to their nurses, using the medium of hand puppets to help autistic children voice their complaints that they were not allowed enough video game time, displaying vocab flash cards to the stroke-numbed nonagenarians who were able only to roll their eyes at the chatty cheer of their speech pathologists. About how everyone in her modest cohort had shared an ambition to work with a locked-in patient. “Patients like Oliver,” Margot had told Charlie with a rueful smile. “For us speech pathologists, it’s like getting a chance to paint a Sistine Chapel, build a cathedral.”
“I’ll bet,” Charlie had said and gestured toward the bed. “So where do you put the first stone in this particular cathedral?”
“There was this incredible professor there at Austin. Professor Brooks. An amazing lady, really. I could go on and on about her. Professor Brooks, she liked to say that working with the locked-in patient is a bit like being an old-fashioned radio operator. Your fingers and the EEG are the antennas, but at first they receive only static. Your job is to make small adjustments, to listen very closely, until you start to receive a signal.”
Charlie recognized Margot Strout as a type he had known at Thoreau, one of those anxious-antsy students, so grateful their college had not demanded to see their pitiful or nonexistent high school transcripts, so eager to prove themselves in that wondrous second chance. “With a brain injury like Oliver’s, the most likely place to locate purposeful movement is from the neck up, and that’s where I’m starting,” Margot explained, and then she’d let Charlie watch, as he had tried not to scoff at the crude simplicity of her so-called techniques.
“Blink twice for yes, once for no,” Charlie heard Margot say, a hundred times over, speaking to Oliver like some bound and gagged prisoner of war, as she placed the antennae of her fingers near Oliver’s eyes and kept her own gaze on the readouts from the EEG sensors she had taped to Oliver’s head. Oliver’s eyes, of course, only continued their erratic involuntary flutter, like lightbulbs faultily installed. As the days passed, Margot repeated the procedure on the hinge of Oliver’s jaw, the pad of Oliver’s tongue, the length of his throat, each eyebrow. She flashed colors, pictures, words, sound tones at Oliver from her electronic devices. She paused often to recalibrate the EEG analysis software.
“I know it might not look like much,” Margot told Charlie and his mother after a few days of work. “But there is a method to this madness. A whole system for exactly where to test, and how. And maybe what I need most right now is just to be alone with him. I hate to say it, but it’s a little distracting to do this for an audience.”
Message received. Often, Margot was only able to squeeze in half days at Bed Four; some days she couldn’t come at all. But Charlie and his mother knew that even her limited pro bono work with Oliver meant the other neurologically impaired people of West Texas went voiceless, and they didn’t want to do anything that might discourage her, remind her of her other obligations.
But Charlie hadn’t been able to help himself. At the end of each morning, when they arrived for visiting hours, Charlie asked Margot for updates, as if instead of signal divination, he thought Margot was slowly laying a landline between the world and Oliver. Charlie’s questions plainly annoyed her; the cheery woman, with her former talk of miracles, had become a heavy sigher. But Ma, Charlie suspected, bothered her even more, never able to bear to meet Margot’s gaze for fear of registering the disappointing results.
“Believe me,” Margot told Charlie now. “When I have something to tell you, I’ll tell you.”
“Right,” Charlie said, rubbing at his hand as if to encourage Margot to take it once more. “I guess if I’m going to be totally honest here? I really have another question.”
“Oh?”
“Well. It occurs to me I’ve never asked you. How long is normal? Like, is there any sort of time frame to expect here? How long does it usually take with patients like Oliver? If there’s anything to find at all.”
“Unfortunately, there is no such thing as normal. It’s a case-by-case thing. It takes patience. Sometimes a lot of it. And the truth is that we just don’t know yet how much Oliver can even understand. It’s important that we’re all very clear on that point. When they finally do that next test, that will be very useful information.”
Charlie heard a close, croaking noise; it took him whole seconds to recognize it came from his own nasal cavity. The round head of the woman seated before him softened impressionistically. “Ah,” Charlie said, slapping at his tears. “God, I’m sorry.”
And yet here, apparently, was the secret pass code to Margot’s fortified heart. She now took Charlie’s hand again, then his shoulders and torso, too. Charlie was drowning, gulping in the perfumed crevice of the woman’s considerable bosom. “No,” she said. “Don’t you apologize to me. Don’t you say sorry, dear boy. I’m so sorry if I’ve gotten a little gruff, but we’re all on the same team here, right? We all want the same thing.”
Charlie clambered free of the woman’s cleavage, braced himself on her shoulder. And now he was wondering about the empty house Margot must have returned to each day after work, the bravery or else child-simple belief that kept up her Christian cheer in those bleak rooms. “Here’s what I’ve learned,” Margot said. “You have to have faith. That is what the Lord asks of you.”
“The Lord?” Charlie said. “I’m afraid me and the big guy aren’t really on speaking terms these days.”
Margot smiled, almost nostalgically, as if Charlie’s faithlessness were a kind of developmental stage to be passed through, one she herself had long ago outgrown. “He’s all any of us really have, I think you’ll come to see.”
Charlie shrugged.
*