When at last Eve managed to lift her head, she noticed that her fingers had fallen to Oliver’s left thumb, which she clutched tightly.
In the end, Eve had learned, she had been right to obsess over that one botched conversation Oliver had tried to have with her just a few days before, and she had admitted as much to that task force officer when she’d at last returned his call. “If I had only listened to him then?” Eve had said to the man over the phone, but she had never offered an answer. That question, she understood, would be the unwieldy mass she would have to learn how to carry in the years to come, but for now, at least, she could do what she had failed to do a decade ago. For once, she could listen.
“Oliver,” Eve said. “Your father is right. We just need you to be honest now. I know you can hear us. I know you can, and I want you to answer for you. Not for me or for Charlie or for Pa, but just for you. It’s okay, that’s what I want to tell you. Okay if you are ready. Even if that’s what you need to tell us, we will find a way to be strong enough. But if you are ready to go, will you just tell us? Please, just tell us if that is what you need?”
The orderlies returned. The Lovings followed the cot down the bumpered hallways to a set of swinging doors labeled X-RAY AND IMAGING. A half hour later, they were on one side of the glass; Oliver was in the great beige machine on the other. They stood behind Dr. Ginsberg and two technicians who were working the control panel. It was, Eve thought, like a scene on the bridge of a starship from one of her son’s beloved old movies. Keyboards clattered, switches turned, and now Oliver’s brain glowed, in three separate angles, on the computer monitors. Oliver was a hive of data, arranged on the x and y and z axes.
“Ma.” Charlie clapped a hand over his mouth. “I can’t.”
“It’s okay,” she said, and she took Charlie’s fingers in one hand, took Jed’s hand in the other.
“Here we go, Oliver,” Dr. Ginsberg was saying into the microphone. “I know you’ve heard this already, but now it’s time to give it a try. First, we need to establish your way of saying Yes. So here is what I want you to do. When you want to say Yes, I want you to imagine you are running. Imagine your feet lifting off the ground, your legs working hard. Can you do that for me? Imagine you are running?”
Eve’s own mind was running now. She was in the air, vaulting a hurdle. She sealed her eyes, and for just a second there, she was at the weightless apex of the leap. One last instant when the only questions that mattered were still just questions.
Despite what her family might think of her now, Eve had never considered herself a very faithful or superstitious woman. Signs and symbols, the densely metaphoric world: that was more the way her sons and her husband saw things. But maybe that was what happened when you grew up in a bounded little land; you ended up fetishizing every inch of it, searching your small world for subtle portents of a better place. You turned a flatulent old steer into a kind of prophet, you assembled Paleolithic monuments out of stone, you chased after a freckle-faced girl as if she were the ticket to paradise. But after her years of confined life at Desert Splendor and Crockett State, after a decade-long conversation with her silent son, Eve better understood her husband and her boys, understood what smallness and silence could make you believe. How you could come to read your life like an invisible text. How you could forever turn one ear to the sound of a lost voice. How that voice, once you began to hear it, would never stop speaking to you in its mysterious ways. For example, in that moment between Dr. Ginsberg’s first questions and her son’s first response—it was only a single suspended second, really—Eve felt that Oliver had already told her all the answers.
Oliver
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
If pressed to choose among your many Bed Four obsessions, it was perhaps the memory of running that obsessed you most. Your last minutes were horrible ones, but you often found some comfort in the thought that the last time you had been able to use your legs, you used them to their fullest, sprinting along the musty hallways of Bliss Township School at night. Oh, you were never what anyone could call athletic. And it’s true that at the end of your own walking life, you were already winded, your pulse pounding in your ears. And yet, what obsessed you was a certain moment when you strained at your limits. That speed was like a narcotic your body cooked up for itself, a hormonal oblivion. When you ran then, at least for a few seconds, you were unable to think. You were nothing but thoughtless speed. A blur of sun-bleached lockers and the ancient school trophies in their display cases. Your school might have been a drab place, but to you those were the beautiful sights of your walking life, which you left behind that night.
What was it like, your body forever frozen beneath you, to remember such speed? It was a feeling not unlike thinking of Rebekkah Sterling. That delicious old vitality might have withered to a rind, but the rind remained there, cruelly, under your bedsheets, never letting you forget entirely.
And yet, in certain dreamy hours, as the ticking of the wall clock blurred into a single, timeless groan, it could still seem that you had not yet spent all the momentum of your last great sprint. Just as you could still sometimes hear Rebekkah’s voice, speaking to you from the place where you left her, so too could you feel that the memory of such speed was enough to hurtle you back to that final moment. Still, impossibly, you could sometimes feel that you would at last pitch yourself just far enough, that somehow it might not yet be too late to save everyone, that you might even still save yourself.
*
In the fMRI machine in El Paso’s Memorial Hospital, you trembled under the hum of orbiting magnets. Familiar to you now, the fMRI’s tube felt almost cozy. It was a liminal place, like a waiting room, a twilight, your creekside cave, a nexus in the universe. A place outside of reality, where reality mattered less.
“Try to put out all other thoughts, think only of running,” Dr. Ginsberg told you.
Your legs had not lifted beneath you in years, but you once more motored them along your last memory of running, through the dim halls of Bliss Township School at night. Yes.
“Oliver! That’s just wonderful,” Dr. Ginsberg said. “That’s just fantastic! So, okay. How about we try saying no? To say no, will you please sing yourself a song? Your mom said you like Bob Dylan. Me, too. Will you do that now, will you sing yourself a Bob Dylan song?”
And yet, as much as you might have liked to lose yourself in those beloved lyrics, you did not sing, not then. The memory of your legs still powered beneath you.