Eve looked down at Oliver’s thin and twitching lips, his yellowed eyelids nearly translucent in the sunlight through the window, his thin blue veins like a delicate web that bound him in his skin. She was wondering what Oliver might have made of his first trip away from Crockett State in nearly a decade. The whole ride out to El Paso, Eve’s own thoughts had been wheeling, buzzardlike, around an image she’d seen that morning on the cover of The Big Bend Sentinel, a picture of the impromptu vigil the old Blissians had held the night before outside Bliss Township School.
With the light-speed conveyance of news in the Big Bend, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that the whole wretched tale Rebekkah had brought back with her—about Reginald Avalon, Hector Espina, all those unspeakable things—had spread quickly, but even Eve was surprised by how rapidly those families and Bliss Country faculty had reassembled their old mourning ranks. Donna Grass and Doyle Dixon had both phoned her yesterday afternoon, leaving voice mails inviting the Lovings to the school last night, and the Sentinel’s front-page image showed the service she had declined to attend: a couple of dozen bodies, making a constellation with their little votive candles just beyond the school gates. In the picture, Eve had been able to make out the bleary shapes of Mrs. Schumacher, Mrs. Henderson, Mrs. Wolcott, and Mrs. Dawson. All those people, Eve had thought as she looked at that picture, but she had always known that it wasn’t her son—or at least it wasn’t only her son—who had drawn all those visitors to his bed, and it wasn’t only her son for whom the town turned out last night. It had been nearly ten years, the memorial candlelight services dimming each November, but the new revelations, the closest to an answer that might ever come, had brought them all out that one last time, the lost town of Bliss temporarily refounded on the old Main Street, to grieve and bury their decade of grieving.
Eve had long ago developed a mental mechanism that converted sorrow into a more useful rage, but this morning, looking at the picture of that sorrowful lot, she hadn’t even been able to summon an appropriate fury at Reginald Avalon. It was just a dizzying, despairing sort of confusion she knew when she looked down that hall of mirrors.
“We dug a little deeper into his past, talked to a bunch of his old students,” Manuel Paz had told Eve, over the phone. “I’ll be honest with you, when I said the man’s name to a couple of those kids? They practically came unglued, right in front of me. Weeping, almost sick. Horrible. Horrible, to think how he must have preyed on those children over the years, and no one saw a thing. But we should have. I really was as blind as anyone, just thinking of Reginald Avalon like some saint, and for that I truly don’t see how I’ll ever find a way to forgive myself.”
“No” was Eve’s odd reply to Manuel, as if she were also addressing those children now. “I’m so sorry. For what I never said.”
Hector. Like the rest of her town, Eve had considered the kid human waste, as if his own story could not have been any story at all. But whatever he had done, Hector did have a story, a very grim one. A luckless, powerless boy, with a profoundly poor father and a deported mother, desperate for the attentions of the nice, middle-class teacher who showed him some interest. Confiding in the one man who might have helped him out of his hell, who had ended up doing just the opposite. Still, there was another unfathomable linkage there, between Hector’s suffering and what he’d done, and what other word was there for it but evil? What else but evil—a bombastic word she’d never truly believed in before—could make a boy want to burn down his world?
Of course, it hadn’t been the entire population of Bliss on the front page of the Sentinel, just a few remaining representatives of its white half. Manuel’s decade-old hope for an explanation that might mend his town had been answered too late. The way Hector had died had only deepened the injustice of the way he had lived; now that those Blissians understood the truth about Reginald Avalon and Hector Espina, now that their ten years of xenophobic fantasies had come to an end, they had few Hispanic neighbors left to whom they might make their apologies. Closure was just a prayer for an ending that would never come, just a professional-sounding word for another hollow kind of faith. People might have turned Oliver into a myth, a martyr, a metaphor for all that the people of Bliss could never understand, a poignant exemplar of the madness that had seized the world, but Eve knew the truth, had always known. The fantasy that Oliver might wake to offer his town the answers they needed had been only that, a fantasy. There was no real reason why Oliver, why Hector Espina, why it had happened there and not somewhere else, why it had happened when it happened and not at some other time. It was truly only chance that had made her family’s quiet little life into a horribly exceptional tale worth telling, just randomness and chaos that had turned the Lovings into a symbol of something unfathomable, that had made her younger son into someone who had no choice but to try to write himself free of the story that would forever be the first thing people thought of when they thought of him. There is no why, Eve had always known it. And yet, how was it that even still she could not quite make herself believe it? Eve found herself remembering that long-ago night, beneath the Perseid shower. That evening, lying with her family on the powdery earth of Zion’s Pastures, she had looked up into a lucid night sky whose static of stars was indistinguishable from the static generated in the rods and cones of her eyes, and Eve had felt oddly exhilarated to consider it, how little her own eyes could ever hope to glean.
*
In the little room at El Paso Memorial Hospital, Eve felt the layer of slackness that had gathered over the firm shape of her husband’s arm. She found herself wishing, just now, that the room were crowded. That the oxygen were thin, that dense body heat could unsettle any thought. But this room was as inhuman and blank as the worst of her insomnias, as frigid and cramped as the final questions they were still living inside. For a few minutes more. There was nowhere here, among the chrome, plastic, and disinfected surfaces, for wishful thinking to gain traction.
“Oliver,” Jed said. He was hunched very close to Oliver now, but still he needed to brace himself to make enough of a noise to be heard. Having suffered hours without a drink, Jed was shaking severely. “I need you to listen.”
Eve watched as Oliver’s eyes continued, as ever, to speed-read some invisible text. Jed pulled away, and his gaze met Charlie’s. Jed nodded, long and slow, as if he had accepted something his son had just told him. He stooped once more to Oliver’s ear.
“I want to say that you need to tell the truth. Okay? When you get in there, you have to promise me you’ll just tell us what you are thinking. No matter what you are thinking. Do you promise?”