“I suppose,” Manuel said, with a wistful half grin, “to see for myself if we’ve got an honest-to-goodness miracle on our hands.”
Eve did not look up at Manuel as he patted her shoulder twice in parting. She leaned forward in her chair and pressed her face to the cool of the table as the squeak of Manuel’s footsteps retreated.
Eve had long ago learned how to make her anger a steadier, more dependable substance, how to smelt and recast it into a thin barbed wire she strung around her life. And yet, just now the perimeter did not hold. As the sound of Manuel’s squad car rumbled away, Eve was not thinking about that shameful security glossy or even about the fact she had at last admitted to Manuel. She was thinking, instead, of the uncertainty that had come into her voice when she related Margot’s work with Oliver. She was thinking, also, of Jed standing there in the crater at Tusk Mountain, the way he’d spoken Margot Strout’s name like some kind of curse. And she now let herself consider it, her one spot of bother, which her gleeful relief had happily skipped over. “Is there anyone you want to see? Anyone you want me to bring here?” Eve had asked Oliver. When the computer answered, it had said not her son’s name for his father, not Pa, but Dad.
Eve clenched her fist, beat the table with a few quick raps, but it was still there, that worrisome little syllable from the computer speaker. Like that long-ago conversation she’d never let Oliver have with her, a tiny red stain on her certainty. Dad.
And look: this day had one last indignity in store for her. Eve startled at the whine of a body shifting its weight on the floorboards. Apparently, there had been a witness to the scene she had just endured. A room away, Charlie sat in the dimness of the stairwell, palming his stubbled jaw. “We need to talk,” Charlie said.
Oliver
CHAPTER TWENTY
Oliver, the events of your final walking weeks might have become the defining details in the story of your life, but why suffer needlessly, dwelling solely on those last days of your upright existence? There were more than a few happy memories there, in that distant ether on the far side of Bed Four, and before setting you back down amid the worst of your memories, why not first pause to return you to one of the best? Memories of hazy summer light, an inky paperback in your hand, a lingering smell of sandwich condiments. Your family.
July in West Texas was a lot like deep February in four-season country. When you were locked inside for unending days, time became a slack, amorphous substance, the chiming of the clock like some hourly repeated sardonic quip. Truth be told, despite your complaints, Bliss Township’s early-August start to the school year was a relief. The air-conditioning at the schoolhouse was vastly superior to the single little wheezing window unit at Zion’s Pastures.
But on that particular summer day, when you were fourteen, it was still blazing July, a drab 2 P.M. You were all there together in the living room. Lethargic from lunch, huddled around the AC, you hid behind your books. Often, you’d complain about the grunty rustle of your father’s breathing, your brother’s picking at his nose, the weird video game sounds he hummed. Your mother always seemed the least bothered by these forced confinements. When you could bear it no longer and would set off for a dip in the tepid, brackish Loving Creek, she would complain, “But we were having family time!”
But those days were not, in the end, endless. Later, you would all do anything for another.
“I have an idea!” Ma said, cueing the collective groaning that often greeted her inexplicable afternoon inspirations. “Let’s all draw a picture.”
“A picture?”
“Yes!” she said. “We’ll each draw one picture of Zion’s Pastures. The thing that we think about first when we think about home.”
“Ugh,” you said. Yet you were too lazy from the heat to put up a protest when she came back to the living room with a box of colored pencils and four sheets of paper on schoolhouse clipboards. The effort of this activity would be taxing, but worse would be Ma’s silent-treatment punishment for not cooperating. You picked up a brown pencil and began to sketch.
You were never much of a drawer, but the image materializing onto your sheet of printer paper didn’t look so bad to you. You hadn’t chosen a subject, you had only started to doodle an arching shape that, as the line extended, revealed itself to be the wide horns of your ranch’s last steer, Moses.
You weren’t trying to make any sort of point to your mother that your one image of home was not of the meandering and ramshackle house, not the four of you standing portrait style on the lawn, but of your lonesome, wandering beast. It was simply what your hand wanted to draw, and the more you drew, the more surprised you were at the detail you could remember. You could call forth the exact pattern of Moses’s brown patches, the touch of mange on his rear haunches, and you thought you quite expertly captured your longhorn’s eyes, as Zen wise as an infant’s. “Okay,” your mother said. “Let’s compare. On three. One, two, three!”
Laughter split the heat-thickened silence of the living room of Zion’s Pastures. It echoed off the bones hung on the walls, agitated the porcelain figurines of cowboys and stallions in the china cabinet. All four of your pages showed the figure of Moses, wandering the hills. Charlie’s was a crude, grinning stick figure, your mother’s was a hirsute and frenetic squiggle, your father’s was done up in his van Goghian eddying style, and yours looked less like a cow than some sort of cow-hybrid monster. But you were still laughing in bellyful gasps. Laughing and laughing because, in the drowning July heat, when the warmth had pooled between you like deep water, making you each an island, you still all shared the same unlikely idea of what was home.
And yet, Oliver, it is unavoidable now: that pulled drain plug at the bottom of your story, that black hole into which time itself bends, that immeasurable heaviness to which all your memories return. No use in trying to fight its intractable sway. The night of November fifteenth.
November fifteenth: it was just after 7 P.M., and there you were, looking at those portraits of Moses, cheaply framed on your bedroom wall, when the phone rang in the kitchen. Annoyed, you did not so much as turn from the pillow, and at last it fell silent before ringing again. The Homecoming Dance was a supposed privilege for juniors and seniors only, but even your freshman brother had big plans for the evening, another one of his massive friend gatherings, at the Alpine Cinemas. Your mother was off driving Charlie to the movie, which she had agreed to do only with Charlie’s dubious reassurance that he’d find some other friend’s mom to give him a ride home. You plodded into the kitchen, plucked the wireless phone from its cradle, and marched back to your bed.