Eve blinked repeatedly, as if allergic to the unwashed, scalpy odor that came off that mourning woman. “And this is what you believe?”
“These are facts, Eve. Facts. Did you hear what the governor said? Terrorism, he called it.”
“Oh, Donna.”
Weeks had passed, and still no one had come up with any persuasive motive that would have brought Hector and his rifle to that particular room, any reason why a graduated student would slaughter a beloved theater teacher and his students, any reason why Eve’s son had been there, too. Mr. Avalon—the school principal, Doyle Dixon, told Eve in one of his own Crockett State visits—had never even been Hector’s teacher. The only person who might have been able to offer any kind of answer, Hector’s father, had vanished from the area.
But Eve’s refusal to join in Donna’s protests would have made little difference. In a televised news conference, a beefy, red-state character actor named Craig Armison, U.S. Representative for Presidio County, called for further “crackdowns” on “illegals.” Facing the ill will of their neighbors and the imminent likelihood of a border patrol officer knocking at their own doors, the majority of the Latino population of Bliss scattered, draining whole streets of their tenants. Even that night’s only certifiable hero, Ernesto Ruiz, fled for the less contentious states to the north. The old school never reopened after that day. At the start of the next semester, the Bliss Township students were incorporated into the drably modern elementary and high schools out in Marathon. Bliss, Texas, had been the sort of town common in the state’s western half: with all its former industry dead or dying, the activity of the schoolhouse had been the only reason people still came to town, the only source of customers to Bliss’s few weathered businesses. When the school closed, Bliss swiftly slipped its way toward becoming just another ghost town, unmoored in the desert’s ancient, evaporated sea.
“There is no why,” Eve very often told Charlie, told herself. “With some things you have no choice but to accept that fact.” Eve couldn’t allow herself the luxury of questions: the early grim opinions of the doctors, her worries for Charlie’s marred future, the fate of her collapsing marriage, the antipathy that ran down her town like a zipper, baring teeth on either side. Her survival, and so her sons’ survival, too, demanded action.
One day, a week after the neurosurgeons had completed the fourth of their procedures, Dr. Frank Rumble released Oliver from his insulin-induced coma and disconnected the respiration tube to reveal the horrible thing he had become, a boy connected to life by electronic umbilicals, his eyes searching in that terrible lost way, his arms snarled like those of a tyrannosaurus. And in that instant, Eve underwent a transformation of her own. It would later seem to Eve that she had actually seen her former self leave her body then, like a harp-plucking soul cleaving away from a slain character in a cartoon. Eve ran for the hallway, where she found a trash can. Impossible. The first uncomprehending word she had thought that night rose again with the sickness in her throat. Impossible, but it was only now that she understood the reality in which she had been living those last months: the impossible thing, the unfathomable horror actually had become her real life. There is no why, Eve had said, and yet she couldn’t help screaming the question now, to no one in particular, to the walls. “Why?” Then she wiped her mouth, walked back into the room, set her gaze on Dr. Rumble. “What do we do now?”
“Now?” Dr. Rumble said, his voice in battle with itself, to accommodate her need and also to tell the truth. “Now that he’s off the insulin, we can assess the extent of the damage. But from what we’ve seen so far—I guess we just wait and hope for a miracle.”
“A miracle?” she asked, and Dr. Rumble shrugged.
Oliver, please, Oliver, Oliver, please, please, Oliver: Eve’s life, for weeks, contracted to those two words, as she waited for her son’s gaze to come back to her face, for his mouth to open, for a word of his own to come.
Eve herself had rarely used the word miracle without irony, but this one was different. The world had gone monstrous and wrong, there was a blight on the land. What had happened to her son was something from a gothic horror, a curse from above. And if Eve suddenly lived in a world where such a mythic affliction could suddenly befall her family, then why couldn’t a miraculous reversal also be possible? A miracle: as time passed she employed that word as antidote to the probabilities of which Dr. Rumble and his colleagues increasingly spoke. Those aging country men intoned falling percentages in the dour tones of priests as they strapped electrodes to the patient’s head, tested his reflexes with rubber hammers. The round had entered near the base of Oliver’s brain stem; in addition to the structural damage, a blood clot had starved his brain of oxygen for five long minutes during his second surgery. Oliver had arrived at Crockett State with his chance of regaining some consciousness at fifty-fifty. That percentage shrank to thirty, to ten, to five, to far less than one.
And as their hope shrank away, Jed seemed to be vanishing in kind. He appeared to lose track of day and night. When he came back from his shed at wholly unpredictable hours, he smelled like restaurant waste, stale booze, and something sour-creamy. “Tell me what you are thinking,” Eve pleaded with him once. “We need to talk about it.” There had been a time—a very, very long time before—when their young romance had felt like a marvelously efficient device, a glistening machine that could pack away her old sorrows in words and stories. But now Jed dragged so deeply on his Pall Mall, he might have inhaled the filter. “What is there to say?” he asked. “There are just no words anymore.” Eve pitied him, she hated him, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that she knew she couldn’t have him around.
“I can’t have all of this,” she told Jed a few nights later, gesturing at the smoke-rimed contents of his shed. And this, she knew, was the story of her marriage: Jed was a seconder of opinions, a placater, a head-nodder. At his excommunication, he only nodded again.