And as for the only other Loving left with her at Zion’s Pastures? Eve still panicked at the thought of letting Charlie stray beyond the gates of her family’s home, and she dreaded the idea of letting him go to that prison-looking new school in Marathon, where he would sit in those overbright rooms with classmates who would never look upon Charlie as anything but an object of horrible pity. Eve felt that anything important that she’d ever learned she had taught to herself, and she chose to complete Charlie’s education on her own, at home.
Despite what he would say about it later, she and Charlie (somehow, implausibly) had many peaceable, quiet days together at Zion’s Pastures, in the company of Charlie’s snorty new dog, Edwina. Charlie and Eve had to cling tightly together then. That worst night, when a chaplain had brought Charlie to the hospital, he had moved through the hallways as if they were filled with water, his quick little movements now liquid slow, his face panicked and drowning. “When do we go home?” His words had burbled out of him, from some dark and frigid depth. “Soon,” she told him, and eventually they did go back to Zion’s Pastures, but of course they never really went home again. Shocking to consider now: in that first year of homeschooling, they had used “love you” like punctuation.
One March afternoon, Dr. Rumble summoned what remained of Eve’s family into the turquoise and beige tones of his southwestern-motif office, “to make a decision.”
“It is very important,” Dr. Rumble explained, his ringed fingers pinching the quill of a potted cactus, “that you have no illusions here. Sometimes, you see, death doesn’t look like what you’d expect. It is awful to say it, but I feel I must be very clear. From everything we’ve seen in our tests and observations over the last months, we just can’t see any reason to believe that Oliver is still with us. And—this is the hardest part, I know it—the question that you must begin to ask yourselves now is whether you want to keep his body alive.”
Eve looked at Jed and Charlie then, but for a long while no one said anything more. Eve rocked forward in her seat, braced herself on her knees. “Ma?” Charlie said, and all at once Eve straightened in her chair. Liar!: The word spat out of Eve’s mouth unbidden, like something sickly and viscous her lungs had coughed up. “That’s a lie,” Eve shouted at the doctor in his armchair. But Dr. Rumble only puckered his lips, curiously tipping his head, as if Eve weren’t quite speaking English.
In manic bouts of googling, Eve found online several stories of patients like Oliver, patients given those same dire labels of Persistent Vegetative State and Unresponsive Wakefulness Syndrome, who nevertheless emerged from their long paralysis. The chance of a similar miracle befalling her son—less than one-hundredth of one percent—was the little datum she clung to, a fraying rope that kept her from falling into the darkness that had already swallowed her husband. Sometimes, even still, she thought that she could feel in Oliver’s clammy left hand something other than the infinite, mindless tremble. Dr. Rumble promised her it was involuntary, just a variation on a perpetually misfiring nervous system. And when Dr. Rumble again enquired about the subject he had raised that terrible day in his office? “We’re still thinking,” Eve told the doctor many times in the weeks and months that passed, unaware, as the grieving can be, that her indecision was becoming the decision.
Over the years that followed, only one outside visitor continued to arrive regularly at Bed Four. Every three months or so, a man named Manuel Paz would make his way into the room with his slow, wide saunter. Manuel was a kind of police officer, a captain from the Presidio County office of the Texas Rangers, who was also a third-generation Blissian. In Eve’s first months in the Big Bend, she had met Manuel Paz a couple of times on Main Street. Even back then, he had seemed like some biological antique, a fleshy, quiet-stoic Texan of yore, almost comforting in his anachronism, a character from a movie about an older Texas, one in which white and Mexican settlers slugged whiskey in the same saloon. But now he had become something else to Eve. Not an official detective—that whole task force had arrived to Bliss, appointed by the governor—but of all those apathetic half-wits Manuel always seemed the only officer who actually cared. “Just thought I’d check in on you folks, see how y’all are faring,” Manuel would always say in his sun-dried avuncular way.
All those other officials had gone quickly back to Austin, stuffing loose ends into their bureaucratic attaché cases. It wasn’t their town; it was Manuel’s town. A town that was hardly even a town at all anymore, disintegrated now into those questions that perhaps only the boy in Bed Four could ever have helped answer. And yet, whatever his doomed motives, Eve was grateful to have at least this one other partner in her hope. “What’s new?” Manuel would ask, his gaze quickly falling to Oliver as if, at last, some answer might be in the offing.
“Same as ever,” Eve told him, again and again.
And here, Eve would have liked to tell her younger son, was what real fortitude looked like. Even now, even after every good thing had fallen away from her, the future occurrence of that so-called miracle still felt as solid to her as any object she slipped into her purse. She had lost Charlie to college, then to New York City. She had lost her family money, and Jed had long ago quit teaching, hardly turning minimum wage now in his new reception job at a poorly touristed new tourist resort, out in Lajitas. She had lost her home, selling off her husband’s ranch to a family called the Quades. She had nearly lost her sanity. She had lost any discernible future. And at last, in recent months, she had lost what little remained of the money from the sale of Zion’s Pastures, hardly scraping by now on the tiny monthly sum she received from the fund the governor established for victims of that night and her occasional copyediting work for The Holy Light, a local, televangelically funded publisher of fundamentalist books of Bible stories for children, whose commas, semicolons, and run-on homilies she corrected.
Two months ago, as Eve felt her life approaching a new crisis point, Dr. Rumble had called her back into his mini–cactus garden of an office, where a second presence, a bearded, ferrety man, stood to greet her. This was Professor Alexander Nickell, all the way from Princeton University, who presented Eve with “a very exciting opportunity.”
This very exciting opportunity was Professor Nickell’s newfangled functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, which he was planning to take on a long road trip of the nation’s vegetative cases, and this visit to Crockett State was apparently part of his scouting mission. “What we want to study,” Nickell said, as neutrally as if he were speaking to colleagues in a lecture hall, “is how brain death warps and shrinks the size of the organ. We’ve been looking for people like Oliver, but they aren’t exactly a dime a dozen.”
“No, they aren’t,” Eve said.
“What I mean to say”—Professor Nickell pinched at the tight crop of his mustache, as if feeling for its vanished handlebar—“is that they are very special.”
“Warps and shrinks?” she asked.