You were like the woman from that Kiowa creation tale, jammed in your own passageway, but it wasn’t a pregnancy that had pinned you there. It was the story of your last days, thousands of words, knotted and dense, swelling inside you.
“Half the world’s population on this side of the earth, the other half still trapped beneath,” your grandmother had added. “And sometimes, if you are real quiet, you can hear the humans beneath us knocking at the ceiling of the underworld. Just as those down beneath, from time to time, can hear the clunking of our footsteps. The poor pregnant lady, she split us in two, and all we can do is wonder about what life is like for the people on the other side of things. But listen now. Saynday is a trickster, and here is his greatest trick of all. He left the pregnant lady there, sure, but the thing about a pregnant lady, someday she’s gonna give birth.”
Oh, you could hear all right: on certain nights, green with your room’s nauseating light, you could hear their muffled murmuring beneath the bed. What is it? you’d ask. Tell me.
You could never make out an answer, but through the floor you could hear the familiar timbres and inflections. You knew whose muffled screams resounded in your room, shook your hospital bed. Pa! you shouted and yet did not shout at the floor. Rebekkah! Worse, you knew that it was your hospital bed that stood over the passage, trapping your father and Rebekkah in their own sealed dimensions. Tell me! you tried to scream at the linoleum. Can you hear me? They never could.
Once upon a time there was a boy who fell through a crack in time, and even that boy tried to think of his fate as if it belonged to someone else. And yet each passing day was another cruel confirmation. Oliver, that boy was you. In a fraction of a second, one long ago night, you had been plucked out of an ordinary life and been given the life of a myth. But plucked by who or by what? You asked and yet could not ask the same question as everyone who visited your bed. “Why?”
But you felt that maybe, if only you could have pulled just a word out of yourself and passed it to the woman bent over your bed, then she might be able to tug on that single thread and unravel the whole tangled mass. Maybe, you could feel, your mother really might pull all those words free, and so free you, too. You tried again to speak her name.
Eve
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“Eve.”
“Who is this?”
Eve knew who it was, of course. Even without caller ID, she would have known in the caller’s first syllable, or before that. The unmistakable quality of his breathing; even that silence seemed softened with a little sigh of apology. Still, for some reason, Eve felt she needed to play dumb.
“It’s me.”
“It’s you who?”
“It’s Jed.”
“Ah.”
It was late morning at Desert Splendor. Eve was still wearing the same business suit, the gray, shoulder-padded number, the uniform she donned for thieving and for doctors’ meetings. She hadn’t eaten anything in the last twenty-four hours, as if her body, like Tinker Bell, had begun to dematerialize along with her belief. But the voice of her husband cruelly brought Eve back into her own fetid skin, the quaking toll of her spine, the cranky reports of her thoughts pounding back inside of her. It was eleven fifteen, but she wouldn’t be arriving for visiting hours today. For nearly a decade, Eve had volubly played both sides of their conversation, but she just couldn’t imagine what she might tell Oliver now, how she might explain any of it. And Jed’s voice on the phone seemed like some fitting vengeance he had contrived, in the same way that Charlie always seemed to know that abandoning her, as he had once again, would hurt her most. This was the first time Eve had spoken to Jed since the dump at Tusk Mountain, and she could hear him smoking as he tried to gather his thoughts.
“Dr. Rumble called to tell me about what happened with Margot,” Jed said.
“He did?”
“Eve, I’m so, so sorry.”
“I thought you had officially decided not to get your hopes up,” she said.
“I don’t know that’s a decision I could ever make.”
Another conversation, one Eve and her husband had without saying a thing, conducted itself over the line.
“Listen. Look,” Jed sputtered. “It’s just that—Dr. Rumble mentioned that Manuel Paz was there, too. And I’m wondering, why? Please tell me what’s happening.”
“So now suddenly you want to know. Now you want to help.”
“I know—”
“What do you know?” Eve said, without exactly meaning it, just a bit of the decade-old harangue script on rerun in her brain. A moment later, her telephone screen was black on her kitchen table. Had they said anything else? Had she hung up on him? She couldn’t remember; her panic blotted away whole minutes at a time. She tried to breathe.
But every time Eve let her thoughts settle, they fell, like a neurotic tic, back into an obsessive loop of the same terrible minutes from the morning before. It was, really, an absurdly simple test. A simple test, whose failure robbed Eve of every hope, pulled the air from her lungs, the oxygenated blood from her arteries. The test that had been prompted by her own son’s parking lot accusations. Manuel and Dr. Rumble had plotted it in a corner, enacted the whole exam in less than ten minutes. They sent Margot Strout to wait in a conference room down the hall, subjecting her to a sort of makeshift Cone of Silence as Dr. Rumble told Oliver the story of Hansel and Gretel, showed him a blue plastic cup, sang “Deep in the Heart of Texas.” When Margot returned, Dr. Rumble asked Oliver what story he had told, what object, what song. The EEG wires adhered to her son’s skull now looked to Eve like they were draining some vital substance from him.
“This is ridiculous,” Margot said, before even attempting to feel for an answer. “This isn’t how it works.”
“How does it work, then?” Manuel asked.
Margot, seated on her perch by Bed Four, ran her hands over her slacks, spoke calmly at her lap, as if reading from a manual. “It’s like tuning a radio. Sometimes all you get is static. But then the weather is good and you get a signal.”
“And let me guess,” Dr. Rumble said, his accusatory tone some lame attempt to compensate for the embarrassment that he’d let Margot’s untested work get as far as it had. “Static on every channel this morning.”
Margot shrugged her heavy shoulders to suggest that, sadly, this was the case.
“How about you just give it a try? Just to humor us,” Manuel said.