Something in her atmosphere fell silent. The dryer, she remembered.
One last cruelty. Eve, glad for activity, took extra care sorting the family laundry that night. It could have been ten minutes she spent there, absently folding and refolding. She arranged the clothes neatly in the wicker basket. She grasped its straw handles and carried it in the direction of the bedroom. She was already well past the television when she paused. Like the time, as a ten-year-old, she had broken her arm in her one failed experiment with skateboarding, at the moment of impact she felt only a perplexing numbness. A picture on the television screen. A riot of squad car lights, the image shaken and smeary. She turned back to the television, but could make no sense of what the woman, Tricia Flip of Action News Six, was explaining into the camera. Impossible: that was the first word Eve thought then, the word that already bound Eve to hundreds of mothers like her, mothers whom she had until that night abstractly pitied as she had watched the news of sudden, eruptive violence in far-off places, thinking: Impossible, no, why add such a calamity to her long litany of anxieties, a thing like that could never happen in a place like theirs. And yet, in the kitchen, the telephone was screaming. She dropped the basket, its contents spilling on the floor. She stumbled over the laundry, lurched for the phone. She put it to her ear, and try as she might, there would never be a way to forget the instant that followed.
*
Nearly ten years later: the boundless beige of desert, a flesh drawn tight, freckled with thorned vegetation, rusting industrial equipment, the occasional longhorn kept for nostalgia’s sake, subsisting mysteriously on dead grass and stubbornness. A vein of asphalt, running north from the Big Bend of the Rio Grande, cut the desert in two. The chugging gray Hyundai, taking the road at ninety miles per hour, seemed, even to its driver, hardly there at all. An insect on the skin, Eve could have been flicked away.
She gritted particles of sand between her molars, sniffed at the car’s stale gassiness, as the road began to widen to link up with the elaborate circulatory system of Interstate 10. And there, at the happenstance flat where road met road, the great cement boxes and oversized corporate signage for the newish shopping center came into view. A shopping center a hundred miles from where her paralytic son shuddered in his sheets, and still she could feel Oliver there with her. Eve knew Oliver had woken to another unmarked morning in Bed Four at Crockett State Assisted Care Facility, but Oliver was also in her feet, her hands, the dampness under her collar, as she turned into the parking lot for the chain bookstore, Tall Tales Books & More, the state’s largest bookseller west of the Pecos River. Breathing the heavy fug that her lousy car’s AC only pushed around, Eve parked just twenty feet from the wide automatic front doors. It was nine in the morning, the sun already high enough to rouse whirling mirages from the concrete. Glimpsing her reflection in the shop’s tinted windows, she thought that it still wasn’t too late to turn around. She plucked sharply at her right eyelid, the skin slurping away from the bloodshot globe beneath, and she examined the bulbous white head of the little lash she’d pulled free. The tart throb of pain steadied her for exactly five seconds.
It was July twenty-second, the day of Oliver’s first real exam in many years. A hundred miles south of the bookstore, a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine was warming up for him now. Of course Oliver had undergone similar tests before, but that was no comfort to Eve this morning. Eve had long ago learned to believe the unlikeliest promises that her own hope, like some charlatan televangelist, outrageously issued, but she wasn’t enough of a believer to fail to understand what today’s test would mean. It had been nine years since Oliver’s last round of neuroimaging; today likely marked Eve’s last hope that the doctors might locate any trace awareness left in her son’s jailed mind. To think of this day, over the past weeks, was to invite a dread that was tidal and annihilating, the white wall of a tsunami thundering toward her across the desert floor. Eve hoisted herself out of the car, through the furnace of West Texan July, into the better boxed oxygen inside the bookshop.
Other than a couple of bleary-eyed employees sipping brownish slushies behind the counter, the store was empty. In an attempt to go unnoticed, Eve made swift progress to the Science Fiction/Fantasy section. Since the moment she woke to the terrible fact of today’s date, the object had gleamed brightly in the glass display case of her mind, like some kind of lucky charm to ward off bad outcomes. The object: a boxed collector’s set that held the five-volume saga of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Oliver had begged her for it once, when he was fifteen, but she hadn’t been able to afford it then, and she could afford it even less today.
But there it was, on the bottom row of one of the faux-oak bookcases. Like a little piece of her son, on a shelf. Her lower back shrieking, Eve stooped and her tailbone landed hard on the navy carpet. As Beethoven’s Fifth rattled the PA system, she dislodged the box and palmed the weight, back and forth, like a football. Stage two of her procedure was to assess the store for skeptical eyes and security cameras, but today, with the weight of those books in her hands, Eve’s surveillance was lackadaisical, hardly more than a quick eye roll.
Eve knew she was not, as Charlie often liked to claim, delusional. She was aware, even as she peeled a magnetic tag from the box’s bottom, that even if the impossible thing happened, and Oliver rose from the bed in which he had spent the last nine and a half years, he likely would not have much immediate use for the works of Douglas Adams. But the urge worked like any superstition, something in which she did not really believe, something she could even laugh at inwardly, and yet some atavistic, totem-worshiping part of her was afraid to resist. She couldn’t do anything about the test scheduled for today, but here was a self-made test she could pass: Did she believe in a future for her son or didn’t she? She unclasped her wide red leather purse, and she dropped the box’s pleasing heft inside. She pressed the jagged edges of her chewed fingernails against the bookshelf’s lip and rose, made swift progress past the security monitors that flanked the automatic doors. They triggered no alarm. Sweating immensely beneath her blazer, she made it as far as the blinding white pavement outside before a set of thick fingers found her wrist.
“Whoo boy,” the man said.