Margot grinned, sucked audibly at a butterscotch candy. Indulging her dramatic streak that Eve had noticed over the last week, Margot declined to explain anything more, leaving her demonstration to do the explaining.
“Hey, Oliver, do you know who just walked in here? Who I’m talking to?” Margot resumed her work posture, pressing her index and middle fingers in to the meat of Oliver’s left thenar muscles. The EEG wires trembled.
Eve anticipated the bright, robot cheer of the familiar “Yes.” Instead, Margot did something new.
“A? B? C? D? E? F?” Keeping her gaze on the biofeedback reading, Margot recited the alphabet until its middle, pausing at M, at which point Margot pressed a key on the screen mounted over the bed and started the alphabet anew. “A?” she asked, but this time she made it no further. And when Margot now pressed another button, the computer spoke Oliver’s name for Eve—not Mother or Mom but the Texan endearment, “Ma.”
“Oliver.” Ma: like a sharp blow to her back. Eve was breathless, straining. Dr. Finfrock was right, but Pandora’s box did not only belong to her son. It was all screaming out of her now. Years, terror, stolen goods, a disintegrating house, a lost and reckless son, a prayer offered for genuflecting hours each day. It rushed down her cheeks, rose in her throat. She was very nearly sick.
“Holy shit,” Charlie said. “I mean, shit!”
“You said it.” Margot laughed.
“We can ask him whatever we want?” Charlie asked. “We can just say whatever we want, and he can talk back to us?”
“I’d steer clear of asking his opinion on politics. Ha! It’s slow for now, one letter at a time.” Margot’s voice trembled, quavering away from professional neutrality. “But there are techniques to pick up speed. And we’ll get to all that soon. We’ll start using another kind of alphabet, with the letters arranged by frequency—”
But then words seemed to abandon the speech pathologist, too. The woman’s skin had gone splotchy, red continents lighting up all over the globe of her head. She was, after all, a mother as well, another mother who had lost a part of her own body. She was another mother with her heart torn out, who had tried to make for herself this second or third life pulling words from the aphasic in the forlorn clinics and hospitals of the West Texas desert. Watching the wetness pool and roll over the blush of her cheeks, it was the first time that Eve let herself consider that Dr. Rumble and the rest might have had a point about Margot. Eve and Margot had never spoken, at least not directly, about the events of that night or about the daughter Margot lost, the husband who had walked out on her, but just now it seemed to Eve that the woman’s story might really have been quietly heroic all along, sublimating all that sorrow into this vital work. To Eve’s considerable surprise, she saw her own arms reaching for Margot Strout, pulling the woman’s heft against her, their mingled tears making a sloppy sound where their necks touched. Even Charlie tried to get in on the act, gently patting both women between their shoulder blades.
They disentangled and inhaled. Eve cupped a hand over Oliver’s cheek as his eyes carried on their frantic search. Margot lifted his left hand, bored into the meat of his palm.
What words does one say when one can, after a decade-long silence, speak with a lost son? What are the first words and the second? The first thing Eve came up with might have been the most overused sentence in the English language, the language’s oldest recipe, served again and again to the verge of blandness, but what else was there for her to tell Oliver but “I love you”?
“A? B? C? D?”
“L,” Margot announced when she felt the twinned pressure of Oliver’s thenars at that letter. Then O, V, and E.
“Love,” the robot voice said. And though the intent was already clear, Margot worked to give the full weight of the phrase. A minute later, the computer added, “You.”
In the last hours of that day, before they broke for a Sunday off, Margot translated eighty-six words from her patient’s thumb into the robot voice. All these words on Finfrock-approved topics. To the question of comfort, “G-tube tight.” To the question of entertainment, “Tolkien” and “Dylan.” To the question of loneliness, “Sometimes.” To the question of boredom, “Sometimes.” To the question of desired visitors, “Dad.”
“Dad?” Charlie said, glancing up to Margot, who squinted at her neurofeedback screen.
“A? B? C?” Margot asked.
“Want to see Pa,” the computer eventually pronounced.
That evening, after Eve had customarily kissed Oliver’s cheek and gathered her things, she looked for a long while at Margot, unburdening her hand, flexing at its stiffness. When Charlie ran off to the bathroom, Eve spoke the woman’s name.
“Yeah?” Margot looked up from the packing of her gear, sniffed wetly.
“I don’t know,” Eve said. “It’s kind of ironic, right? That I don’t have words to tell you how—grateful? Thankful. I am.”
“Just my job,” Margot said. “Just a very lucky part of my job.”
“The thing is, what I want to say to you—I want to say that I know it can’t be easy. If I had lost a child, and then had to do what you are doing for Oliver now? I don’t think I could quite bear it. Or maybe I don’t know anything. But I want to say thank you.”
Eve, after the fashion of the Loving family, had long ago learned to make her skin into stone, fortifying herself against the outside, bulwarking what was within. The way Margot took her hands was not merely surprising, it was existentially jarring, to be reminded that a human could respond to another human so nakedly. “No,” Margot said. “Thank you.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Sunday morning. Charlie had left at dawn, depositing on the kitchen table a note that read only “Working. Be back later.” And so Eve, in retaliation, decided to offer no further explanation for her own day’s plans than a retaliatory missive that read, “Went out.” She looked at it for a while, penned onto a paper towel, and—deciding to take the higher road—added, “Hugs and Kisses, Ma.”