Yes: the word in her son’s left hand, exactly where Eve had claimed. More specifically, the thenar muscles, just beneath his thumb. “I should have listened to you earlier,” Margot Strout admitted, in what surely counted as one of the top ten most gratifying moments of Eve’s life. Eve shrugged. “A mother knows these things.”
It might have taken Margot Strout—with her EEG feedback software, her communication gear, and her training—to translate those twitches into anything legible, but it belonged to her, Eve felt, this second miracle. She had been very adamant on that point, lecturing Charlie and even Peggy to say nothing to the Fifteenth of November set, the Wolcott/Henderson/Dawson/Schumacher cadre who had dropped by again with a plate of oatmeal cookies, the larger set of politicized mourners led by Donna Grass who had sent carnations, or the reporters who still sporadically phoned her. Harder to ignore, though ignore she had for three days now, were the phone calls from Manuel Paz, asking her to stop by the station. “I know what a time this must be for you,” Manuel said in one of his several voice mails that she let herself play, “but it’s very important we talk.” Even if Hector Espina was ten years in the earth, Eve knew how much the former citizenry of Bliss might make of it. The lost boy, the most inexplicable victim of an inexplicable catastrophe in a vanished town, a nearly forgotten tragedy’s only living memorial, at last able to reply for himself.
“I think we have a right to know what Oliver has to tell us before we invite the whole world to come crowding in,” she told Charlie. “I think Oliver has that right. I think he deserves a little space here. We all do.”
“But what about Pa?” Charlie asked. “Shouldn’t we at least tell him? Put the man out of his misery?”
“Soon,” Eve said, and meant it. “I’ll tell him myself.” But something had thus far kept her from sharing this news with her husband. Perhaps it was only the old vindictive streak, or perhaps something else, something about the dark, silent place she occupied with Jed when she went to see him in Marfa. A warm-sad safe room, securely sealed off from the unsettled atmosphere of her present life.
It had only been five times with Jed, and each time Eve told herself she was only going to “update” him, offer a little kindness to the leathery old depressive. And yet, each time on the drive over, she felt her whole body swelling with the promise of a quick lance of relief, in the way she could feel her hands trembling to act out another theft. Except this particular need was not about the future, of course it was not. It wasn’t about some shallow and sentimental idea of partnership in her fraught days, certainly not about any hope (God forbid!) that they might actually get together again. Though he lamely claimed it was only turned apple cider, Eve found on one visit two jars of Jed’s urine stashed beneath his bed! But she had been able to ignore the piss jars; the whole thing seemed not quite real, a few crazy, stolen hours in some place so far beyond the boundaries of her daily reality that Eve knew she would never have to acknowledge any of it. Also, no denying it: for all of Charlie’s smug condemnations, his twenty-three-year-old’s certainty that he must know much more than she, there was more than a little pleasure in this one thing he didn’t know. What would Charlie think of that? Often, Eve had failed to keep the grin from her cheeks.
The morning that Charlie had tearily called from Crockett State to tell her the news, Eve had already discovered his little runaway note fixed to the fridge. “To be honest, Ma,” Charlie later admitted, in the rare bout of honesty the newest development had apparently inspired, “I’m in trouble, real trouble.” Charlie had sobbed, Eve had rocked him quiet in the kitchen chair. “I’ll pay it. Of course I’ll take care of you,” she told him. “I know you sometimes forget this but I’m not only the dictator you think you’ve escaped, I’m also your mother who loves you.” A victorious moment, no doubt, more victorious still when Charlie freshly crumpled into her arms. And so she had no choice but to pay as promised, and now the combined life savings of the family Loving was at $962 and falling. The night before, Eve had felt that the pages of Jesus Is My BFF were radiating moral condemnation from her nightstand—as if her own life were the cautionary epilogue for Christians who denied Christ’s good counsel—and she gathered the papers and slammed them into the stand’s bottom drawer.
And so the dreaded financial scenario had arrived at last. Eve was falling to the red side of the money line now. The Lovings would have to live on credit, Eve on her shiny blue Visa, Charlie on his mother’s overstrained generosity, her threadbare patience. A question she told herself that she really must stop asking: How could she have raised a son to do something so stupid as to fall three months behind on rent to that gangsterishly accented landlord she’d spoken with on the phone? “Family,” Jimmy Giordano—his actual name!—had told Eve over the phone, “it’s a merciful thing. Glad to know that kid is with a mother who loves him.”
“Well, for the record, I think we should have already told Pa, but I’ll let you call the shots,” Charlie said.
“You’ll let me. How decent of you,” Eve said.
And yet, in the Big Bend, news never stays private for long. Eve didn’t know who summoned her—she suspected Peggy, or Dr. Rumble, or perhaps even Margot—but on that Friday an M.D.-Ph.D. (or, in her own words, “a grief and trauma specialist”) named Linda Finfrock showed up, all the way from Midland, to “help you and Oliver through this exciting but also very complicated time.” Linda Finfrock’s idea of “help” was apparently the lengthy lecture she delivered to Eve and Charlie on the topic of post-traumatic stress, about not prying the lid too soon.
“It is like the lid on Pandora’s box,” Dr. Finfrock said in her pedantic, lounge singer’s dark-smooth voice. A streak of white rose through the lady’s hairdo like a semicolon. “Of course you’ll have questions for Oliver, I know that everyone will, but we need to move slowly. None of us can possibly even imagine what all this might feel like for him now. And from what Mrs. Strout tells me, Oliver is still struggling to work out basic words. The point here is that we have to give him time, a lot of time, before you force any hard questions. We don’t, you know, want to let out all the ghosts at once.”
Eve nodded. “I couldn’t agree with you more,” she said.
“And how are you doing?” the doctor asked Eve, pointing her pen toward Eve’s baggy, reddened eyes. “Everything okay? This is no small thing for you, either.”
“Never been more wonderful,” Eve said.
*
“The alphabet,” Margot Strout was saying, after Eve and Charlie had settled into their chairs by Bed Four that Saturday afternoon. “It’s far from perfect. But we’re making progress.”
“The alphabet?”