Margot shrugged again, as casually as she could, as if all her work—her career as a speech pathologist, her future by Bed Four, the sense she had tried to make of the senselessness of her daughter’s death—were not being put to the test. As if she were only indulging the whims of ignorant men. Eve watched Margot click on her EEG software, plug her fingers back into her patient’s palm. And if, as Margot Strout claimed, her brand of speech therapy was like operating a radio, now it was like tuning a cheap transistor model in a rainstorm. Eve could see beads of sweat pearling in the place where Margot’s hand met Oliver’s.
Margot closed her eyes then, and Eve could sense how ridiculous, how perverse the whole tableau would appear to Manuel: the twenty-first-century medical version of an ancient palm reader or a necromancer channeling the dead. Seconds passed, and Eve felt the straining—not just Margot Strout, not just the suspicions accumulating around her. The thing that tightened to the verge of popping, it seemed, was whatever it was that kept Eve upright in this world. Oliver’s left leg spasmed for a moment, stilled.
“Like I said,” Margot told her observers. “All static. Right now.”
All Manuel had offered, at this second theft of Oliver’s voice, was a windy Texan “Oh, Lord.”
“Is this what you wanted?” Eve snapped at Manuel. “Are you happy now?”
“No, Eve. Not happy. Of course not. No.”
A moment of silence had followed then, a collective aphasia. The air-conditioning groaned throatily, the clock clicked. But Margot’s face was blazing, certain, fixed, as if the only failure on display here was her audience’s galling lack of faith. It was a ministerial Dr. Rumble who made the first noise, his throat grunting with his low, eponymous sound. “Mrs. Strout?” he asked. “Have you ever heard of something called the ideomotor effect? I’ve just been reading about it myself.”
Behind the tarantula legs of her plumped lashes, Margot rolled her eyes deeply. But Eve, too, had read about this ideomotor effect. In all her research, there were certain facts that Eve had long ago learned to banish from consideration. Like the diminishing chances of her son ever regaining neurological function, Eve had excommunicated from her awareness the conclusions of a few articles she had read about a controversial form of speech therapy called facilitated communication, sometimes misused with vegetative patients. According to a skeptical breed of researchers, that sort of labor was vulnerable to this ideomotor effect, a.k.a. the Ouija board effect: speech pathologists were known, sometimes, to attribute the subconscious hopes of their own minds to the bodies they palpated for a reply. It was not that these poor therapists were liars but that they were perhaps something worse, so desperate to believe that they convinced themselves of their own illusions. Writing, like authors, in the voices of the characters whom they imagined to be real. A thought to sentence to the far Siberia of Eve’s mental life: like Eve, those deluded professionals could hear the lost voice speaking, beyond all evidence. With all Margot’s machinery—with those neurofeedback monitors and the fancy word processing and waveform analysis software she employed—Eve hadn’t believed that what she saw Margot perform at Bed Four had anything to do with Ouija boards. But now, as Margot’s haughty, dismissive condemnation of this notion burned hotly in her plump and painted cheeks, Eve saw the hideously obvious conclusion, the thought she had occasionally felt brushing at her neck but had never allowed herself to turn and see. Who more than another grieving mother might want to use her son’s hand to write her own little fantasy?
“The ideomotor effect. You can’t be serious. Feel his hand if you don’t believe me. Feel it!” Margot had truly shouted. “It’s him.”
“Okay, okay,” Dr. Rumble said in a tight, paternal voice. “I think the thing we have to do now is just wait. The fact is that we still can’t even know just how aware poor Oliver might even be. Those diagnostic exams in El Paso aren’t far off, and we just need to wait and see what happens.”
Manuel Paz sighed windily then, a desert gale stirring the dead grass. “Eve,” he said, “truth is, we all let this thing get our hopes up too far. We all did. To think there might finally be some kind of change. Some kind of answer. Something. Wishful thinking, I’m guilty of that, too.”
*
Eleven fifteen, twelve fifteen, twelve thirty. Time had become restive, punchy, whole minutes elided, her thoughts darting about sparrow-like, swerving off into the sky just as soon as they landed. Eve looked around the grimed brightness of her living room. The wicked black cracks fissured through her ceiling like petrified lightning. The dust had already made new brown pillows on her window sashes. She hadn’t seen Charlie since that scene in the parking lot, and he hadn’t come home last night. Had he, what, slept in that basement he’d found down the street?
And then a thought, a sharp blast from above that drove her hard back down to earth. An idea she was distressed to realize she should have had long ago, a thought to rewind time, return her to the question she should have asked in front of Manuel Paz and Dr. Rumble yesterday morning. Eve followed this line of thinking, this backward movement of time, back out of her house, back into the hot fug of Goliath’s interior, down forty miles of asphalt, through fields of abandoned oil derricks, their steel heads bowed in frozen prayer.
Eve didn’t have Margot Strout’s address, but she knew the woman resided somewhere in an apartment complex called Vista de Chihuahua, a mass of eighty identical units erected a few years prior, just outside Study Butte. The buildings in Vista de Chihuahua were the same sort of anonymous homes her father had shuttled her among in her migrant childhood. Domestic cubicles, stacked atop one another, all fronted with desert-colored stucco. The immaculate sidewalks and central chlorine-blue swimming pool were empty on a Tuesday afternoon. There was so much Eve had never bothered to learn about Margot Strout, but she did know the woman’s car. And when she found the familiar white Corolla on another identical street, Eve parked, climbed a flight of metal stairs to the nearest door. A sticker affixed to the tin mailbox encased in the stucco read STROUT. Eve took a breath and worked the faux-brass knocker.
“Oh. Eve.”