*
On the way home, Eve panicked a little as the traffic slamming up the westbound lane warped and blurred with the tears that were coming. But Eve focused on the yellow and white lines of the pavement, a textbook lesson on vanishing point, and she managed to make it back to Desert Splendor. Parked in the driveway, Eve dabbed furiously at her leaking nose. She jammed the heel of her palm into her eyes until her vision sparked and exploded. But, pulling her hands away, she could smell it: beneath the oily funk of the garbage she had handled, the acrid, nicotine scent of Jed Loving.
Eve had never had any patience for smoking. Even when he claimed to have quit, her father still often smoked his cigars in motel bathrooms, the fumes leaking out underneath the door, an excellent example of his noxious decisions, their pernicious, secondhand effect on his daughter. Eve could never imagine the utter stupidity required to put death into your mouth and light it up. But that hated smell, the chemical tang of self-destruction, she furiously sniffed at now. The smell that had, in the haywire circuitry of her exhaustion, become inseparable from the warmth that cracked open when she was in close proximity to Jed. What was it about Jed’s sorrow that always overthrew her fury? Maybe it was her father, leaving some ruinous stain on her psychic life, setting a pattern she couldn’t break? Maybe she—Eve let the thought go when she located the odor’s epicenter, the knuckles of her left hand, and shoved them halfway into her tear-prickled nostrils. She inhaled and thought of turning the car around. She thought, also, This will be the last time I will smell him. A part of her knew she was being melodramatic, scoffed silently at that knuckle-sniffing Eve. The other part of her sniffed away, miserably.
When Eve unbuttoned her jeans and worked the free hand beneath the elastic, the sensation was curiously like her megastore purloinings, the glee of appalling herself, this demonstrable if peculiar evidence that she was giving herself what the world refused her. Eve had not touched herself like this in a very, very long time; the lost Eve, the younger Eve, now communicated with the present aging knuckle-sniffer via her pressed fingers. She moaned loudly, obliviously, and so did not hear the sound of the car’s approach up her drive. She could not, however, miss the thump of a car door slamming. She startled, retracted her hand, did not quite manage to button her pants before Manuel Paz was tapping at the window.
“Manuel?”
Looming over her car, Manuel did not quite look like the man she knew, her occasional Bed Four visitor with his hangdog grimace. Now he was Ranger Captain Paz, making a gun shape of his hand, his stubby index finger for a barrel, which he pointed at Eve. She rolled her window down with a few angry cranks.
“Look who came to drop by,” Eve said.
“You really should have returned my call,” Manuel told her. “Why didn’t you just call me back?”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Well,” Manuel said sadly, “next time you should probably call back when an officer phones you. Because now this conversation isn’t exactly optional.”
Eve looked for a while at this bald Ranger, halfheartedly playacting the part of a serious law enforcement professional. Beyond Manuel, the land shimmered with heat in all directions, the sky bluely doubled in the earth. They could have been alone together, Manuel and Eve, in the middle of the ocean.
“Okay, then,” Eve said.
*
Ten minutes later, on the peeling veneer of Eve’s kitchen table, Manuel Paz had placed a fuzzy, still image from a camera at the electronics store, a grainy picture of Eve dropping a laptop computer into her purse. Eve oddly accepted this police evidence of her own larceny like a development that had happened long before, eyeing the five-by-seven glossy as if the woman in the picture were not quite she. Eve’s initial reaction to this image bothered her only in its suggestion of how unhealthy—how gaunt and mildly deranged—the woman in the picture looked to her. Even now, the fact that her son was communicating was like a velocity that could keep Eve running over any canyon, like Wile E. Coyote before he looks down. “The security guy sent some tape of a certain lady in a business suit,” Manuel explained. “Local cops couldn’t figure the thing out, though it didn’t take me but a second to recognize you.”
Eve nodded, received this news philosophically. She was thinking of the glowing light, the computer’s electronic slumber. It seemed that she had been right; the laptop really had been a test. Though of what she couldn’t exactly say now. “I’ll give it back,” she said. “Of course I will.”
Manuel squinted at her, worked a thumbnail between two upper bicuspids. “Right.”
At last, Eve did look down. She was thinking of the irrefutable argument her fingers spoke to her just before they made their many petty thefts. Those same fingers, feeling a black chip in the surface of her tabletop: in this room they now seemed the hands of a madwoman.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Eve said. The sight of Manuel’s familiar, age-pocked face was going a little fuzzy. “I’m sorry.”
“You know what that thing costs?” Manuel asked with a paternal kind of disappointment. “Two thousand dollars. Two thousand.”
Eve hung her head. “And I never even would have turned it on, honestly. I can’t explain it.”
Manuel felt for Eve’s fingers, gave them a squeeze. “Try,” he said, not entirely kindly.
Eve nodded again, because hadn’t something in her, a wild something that began in her fingers, always thrilled at the thought of being caught, the very private crisis that was her life forced into public view, when she would at last be made to speak the unspeakable? Had a scene like this, in fact, been the secret plot her fingers had been contriving for years? “It was for Oliver,” Eve found herself instantaneously relieved to admit. “I know how crazy that might sound. And I know it’s wrong, I know that. It’s hard to explain. But sometimes? I see something he would want. And it’s like—it’s like I’m a bad mother if I don’t. I think that you of all people might be able to understand that.”
Manuel’s gentle demeanor broke now. He pulled away from Eve, and the frustration in the fist he made around a pen seemed oddly husbandly, resentment petrified to stone. “For your information,” Manuel said, “this ain’t the first time that one of those stores has sent pictures of you. For your information, you’ve given me some explaining to do over the years. The poor woman lost her son, she ain’t thinking straight. Just leave her be, don’t let her back in the store. I’ve even lied for you. Don’t know that person in the picture from Adam. This ain’t the first time I’ve had to lie for you, Eve.”