Oddly, Margot seemed unsurprised to find Eve there on her doorstep. She poked her dumpling of a head from the dim space of apartment 15 out into the brightness of the day. Margot’s hair, untamed, rose in frizzy curtains, caught the sunlight like a blondish fire. Apparently satisfied that Eve had come alone, Margot waved her in.
Eve walked a pace ahead, examining the living room as if for some detail that might explain something more about Margot Strout. But apartment 15, like Vista de Chihuahua in its entirety, was an austerely appointed no place. The furniture was blocky and cheap, as though mass-ordered from a catalog. No suggestive magazines or books on the coffee table. The artwork all hotel art, canyons and cordilleras honeyed in the ocher light of sentimentalized sunsets, a few of those vistas de Chihuahua unavailable through the sliding glass door, which gave a view onto an identical apartment module. Too horrible to think of all Margot’s hours alone in that boxed nothingness of a home, what on earth Margot might do with them. But then, what did Eve do with her own solitary hours? Eve gulped a breath and asked the question she should have asked days before. She spoke to the closed blinds of the neighboring unit.
“How could you have known all that? About Oliver. How did you know about Rebekkah? Or even, I don’t know, about how he loved Tolkien? Or Bob Dylan? And so what? You just learned all this stuff about Oliver from what people told you?”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Margot said. “People told me things, of course they did. But you’re right. I couldn’t have known everything. I didn’t.”
“Then it’s impossible.”
“Yes. It would be impossible. You’re right about that.”
When Eve turned, she found Margot nodding at her, the way Eve once nodded at her sons as they puzzled through a math problem. You’re almost there.
“Eve,” Margot said. “In our classes, when I was training in Austin, the professors used to say that being a speech pathologist is not just about helping patients speak. It’s about opening a mind to the world. But it’s an imperfect art. And I’ve always said this. I’ve never claimed to get it right every time. I don’t know why Dr. Rumble can’t understand that.”
“You didn’t say that. You didn’t! My God, I should have been making a transcript, if I’d known how you would lie. I should have been recording you. You never said that.” Eve’s back seized and faltered; she was fortunate that there was a sofa to catch her fall.
Margot pulled a clunky wooden chair away from a table in the corner, dragged it close. She made that same concentrated face she had always shown her patient—brow furrowed, mouth a pinprick of careful attention—as if she were now facilitating another mind, the one locked behind the aching musculature of Eve’s aging body.
“Listen. Listen,” Margot said. “After I lost Cora—have I ever told you this?”
“What on earth does your daughter have to do with anything now?”
“I’m just trying to explain something. I wish you would just let me explain.”
Margot patted Eve’s hand twice, and Eve sharply retrieved it, as if bitten. “Okay, fine,” Eve said. “So I’m listening.”
Margot sealed her eyes then, inhaled deeply, as if she were about to dive into cold water. “For a year or so after. Eve? The truth is, I just couldn’t believe it. I was still living in my old place, out near Terlingua. I was still living in the house, and I couldn’t change a thing about my daughter’s room. I kept her tiny bed just as she had left it the morning I drove her to the hospital. I never made the bed. No. It’s worse than that. Honestly, I’d still make her a breakfast sometimes. I even spoke to her picture, I did. I did that. Talking to her like she was still with me. But there was just my silent house.”
“And so?” Eve said. Every little instant now was a battle, and Eve was furious that she couldn’t quite stanch her tears.
“And so eventually I tried to start over. I went back to school. I got this job. I worked. I tried to spend each day acting like I believed my daughter was really gone forever. And the truth is, I still can’t believe it. Where do all your words go when there is no ear left to hear them? And so you believe in an ear, because what choice do you have? I know you think I’m some Jesus freak, but it isn’t a choice, my faith. It’s faith or death. For me, at least, but maybe for you, too?”
Somewhere in the apartment complex, an engine turned a few grunting times, wouldn’t catch. “And so you are telling me that this is what you’ve done,” Eve said. “You’ve come back here to use my son to act out some ridiculous fantasy.”
“No.” Margot spread her hands like a supplicant, or else a woman comparing two invisible weights. “All I’m trying to tell you is that like everything else in this world, in the end it comes down to faith. For me, I know the truth. I know it. It’s imperfect, what I do. I’ll be the first to admit it, but that doesn’t mean I’m lying.”
“I don’t understand this.” Eve shook her head. “I don’t understand all this garbage you are telling me now about faith. You are a medical professional, Margot. Or at least I thought you were.”
“But it’s just like you said, isn’t it? How could I have known all that, everything about Oliver? And so all I’m saying is that, well, what choice do you have? What I’m saying is that even if those next tests turn out good, and we know that Oliver can still hear and understand, how could we help him if he can’t speak back to us?” Margot’s voice had shifted into something more breathless, popping with phlegm. “And so? And so if you think there’s any chance at all that I might be right, then you really don’t have a choice, and no one could blame you for that.”
“Easy for you to say,” Eve said as she stood.
“Eve. There’s a reason you came here to see me. Seems to me that you’ve already chosen and you’re just hoping that I’ll tell you what you want to hear. But I can only tell you what I know. It’s up to you if you want to believe it.”
The larger part of Eve was still incredulous, lectured by this woman. Eve knew things about this world that this simple, Christ-loving lady, whatever her own losses, could never know. But there was also another part of Eve, a little vulnerable piece of her, who sighed and asked, “How could you even go back? I thought Dr. Rumble told you to keep away.”
Margot picked at the flaking maroon edge of her left thumbnail, tore a crescent free. “They can’t stop me from coming to visiting hours. If I’m invited.”
“And so now you are out to prove some point.”
“You think I care about proving anything to anyone? Then you really don’t know anything about me. There were a hundred careers I could have chosen, but this is the path I went down. Something put me here, with you, for a reason. I know that now. What else could matter to me?”