Eve felt for her eyes, gave a lash a firm tug. “Please stop,” Margot said, pulling Eve’s hands away from her face. “Be nice to yourself.”
Eve crossed her arms, as if to show she couldn’t be persuaded. Yet she found herself checking the time on Margot’s knockoff Rolex to see if they might make it to the end of the day’s visiting hours. And what she said next she said in a voice she saved only for the hard canyon floor of her worst days, the voice displaying its own brokenness, which she had employed with Charlie just a couple of nights before as he stood with her in the attic, looking at her shoplifted booty, her own shameful enterprise to outshame even her son’s dealings with his landlord. “Do you promise?” Eve fairly pleaded with Margot now.
Eve didn’t care that Margot saw her this way. Eve wanted Margot to see her like this. Eve wanted to remember Margot Strout seeing her like this. Eve wanted to store this moment for later, when Charlie came back, when Manuel Paz or Dr. Rumble or Jed berated her for inviting this shyster palm reader back into her family. She wanted to remember her brokenness in that woman’s blank apartment. I was broken. I was vulnerable. I was out of choices.
“Of course I do,” Margot said. “And haven’t you learned by now? You can’t always listen to the doctors. There are certain things only mothers like us can understand.”
*
Except it wasn’t true, not exactly. Eve would have one more choice to make. Forcing her head to a high and confident angle as she led Margot down the retinal-frying brightness of Crockett State’s halls, Eve was trailed by that same shadow, the same decision that had always waited there around Bed Four, stalking her in the dark, just beyond the ring of fire that her insistence had thrown. If all those brain scans and cognition assessments Eve had scheduled in El Paso found no evidence that Oliver was still aware, then Eve, with medical power of attorney, could allow the inevitable conclusion. That Oliver would never speak, that he was lost in his body, that no suffering could be worse.
Eve would have a choice, a choice you couldn’t ask a mother to make. Soon, as on any of the thirty-five hundred days behind her, it would take nothing more than a bit of paperwork, the disconnection of a feeding tube. But what did Oliver want? She knew the only way to answer the question she had asked—in silence, in whispers, occasionally in tearful pleading to Oliver’s quaking body—he might or might not hold in the palm of his hand. Margot had reassembled her gear over the bed, and she pressed so hard into that hand that the woman’s knuckles protruded whitely.
“Oliver?” Margot asked. “Guess who has come back? A? B? C? D?”
“Ma,” the machine replied.
“See?” Eve told her son. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Four days followed that afternoon at Crockett State. There still had been no word from Charlie—where could he have possibly gone this time? But nothing impressed Eve more than her ability not to care much. She ignored the fact that Jed did not even call. She practically shoved Manuel Paz aside when he appeared at the doors of Oliver’s room one morning, asking Eve, “Are you sure you’re thinking straight? I know you’re hurting, but you can’t just carry on like nothing’s changed.”
“This isn’t over,” Eve told him, trying to angle her way around his solid shape.
“Well,” Manuel said, pausing her with an outstretched hand. “Sadly, I have to agree with you there.”
Eve impatiently shifted her weight from foot to foot. “Meaning what?”
“Just that I think you should know,” he said, palming the nape of his neck, “that I felt I had to mention the conversation we had about that Rebekkah business to one of those old task force guys. I’d suspect you’ll be hearing from them soon.”
“Thank you so much for that, Manuel.” Eve said. “Really.”
Manuel rested his hand on Eve’s raised shoulder. “All you have to do,” Manuel said, “is tell them the truth.”
And yet, the next day, when an ominous Austin area code rang Eve’s phone, she ignored that call, too. Once more, Eve found she could narrow the radius of her concern to the body before her.
Outside, high cumulus clouds nearly gathered to rain, then tore apart in the wind. Soon, they would have to take the ambulance to El Paso and her world would change once again. And so why not just a few more days talking with her son? Or even a few weeks? Why not even push back those next exams at El Paso another month or so, until things settled down just a bit?
“Back again,” Eve told her son on her last morning with Margot at Bed Four. “We’re both back again.”
But, for once, the world would not permit Eve her desperate procrastinations. Soon, Eve would be made to understand: how, for years, she had forced Oliver to listen to his mother lovingly converse with nothing more than her own hope’s echo, deaf to the true story beneath, how ready she still was to let that God-fearing woman convince her to allow the one-way conversation to go on and on. An excuse, Jed had said, for what we’ve let him become.
“A? B? C? D?” Margot asked.
The robot voice made its reply; the oldest recipe, served afresh. “Love you,” the computer said.
Oliver
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Oliver, almost ten years trapped in that in-between, and what, exactly, had you become? But how to describe a place like yours, where even words at last lost their shapes?