But what about the most voiceless of all the Crockett State residents? At last, seven or so years ago now, Margot had agreed to give a little of her time to Oliver. “From what Dr. Rumble says,” Margot told Eve, “you truly cannot expect a speech pathologist will do him any good at this point. But believe me, Eve, I know what it can mean to have someone at least try. You should have seen me, the way I used to badger the doctors about my Cora.”
The next week, Margot had come down to work at Bed Four. Margot spent nine hours with Oliver, nine agonizing hours during which Eve had to wait in the lobby, a dangerous hope like a pestle grinding against the stone of her skepticism, her stomach pinched in between. Because of Oliver’s draconian insurance policy, Margot worked pro bono that day, and so Eve didn’t want to pester the woman, but when Eve looked through the little window into Oliver’s room, she was a little appalled at what it apparently meant for Margot to “try”: Margot seemed only to be speaking softly to Oliver, putting her hands gently against his body, scanning Oliver’s twitchings with her fingers. And at the end of just a single day palpating the patient, Margot seconded the doctors’ diagnosis. “Just involuntary tremors, I’m afraid,” Margot said, in a voice that was unbearable in its pity. “Nothing he can control. I’m so sorry.”
“One day and you just give up.”
“No, Eve,” Margot told her. “I’m not giving up. It’s just the truth. And, speaking from some personal experience, the truth is the hardest part.”
The automatic doors into the squat stucco box of Crockett State now shushed open at Eve’s arrival, and she was stunned by the face she found there, waiting for her to arrive.
“Jed.”
It had been nearly a year since Eve had seen her husband and she had to swallow a gasp at what that time had done. Jed’s coveralls were spattered with paint and grime, his face was as still and sun pleated as a taxidermy desert animal in a display case. She was looking at the rind of a man, his lips puckered, his eyes red and troubled, his cheeks twin bushels of gin blossoms, his fingers yellowed and quaking.
“Eve.”
Jed stood and came for her, extending his arms to strike an image almost perfectly identical to the Crockett State logo emblazoned on the Band-Aid-colored fa?ade outside. Jed’s smell was sharp and sour; she felt the bristle of his thinning hair against her cheek. To her chagrin, her eyes watered. “I never thought you’d be here.”
“Of course I came. I’ve been counting the days. I can’t believe it has finally come,” Jed said in a close voice.
“I can’t, either.” So this was what July twenty-second looked like. It looked like any other blazing summer day, terrible for its normalcy. Nothing and no one here, other than her husband and the RV, to mark what was about to happen. She felt it was hideous that Jed should show up today, acting like he’d been some partner in all this. He was a trespasser.
But the worst part was that, on a number of occasions, Eve had tried tentatively to crack open the long-sealed gates of their marriage. From time to time, in the first years after Charlie left for college, Eve would call Jed and invite him to visit Crockett State, as if the man needed an invitation, as if they had decided their son belonged only to her. At Oliver’s bed, Jed was always a tremulous, stammering, teary wreck, sitting at a distance, as if his son’s paralysis might be contagious. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he’d say, as if the thing had just happened. And yet, after visiting hours, she’d always ask Jed back to her house at Desert Splendor for dinner. Dinner—ha! They rarely ate.
Why? Was she trying somehow to undo the thing she had done on that last night before, now shimmying her backside against him? No, it was only for the release. Only for those few tumbling, sweating minutes when, for once, she was not thinking of much at all, her mind an empty place, just a bell in which a clapper struck. And yet, after it was over, they came back into their aging skins, the shopworn roles they had long played in the theater of the family Loving. Jed silent, Eve incredulous. After each of their dozen or so “dinners,” her husband just acted like one of those bovine-eyed security guys, never saying much or asking much of her, never making her tell the truth about the way she was living, how things had become between Charlie and her, the lengthy conversations she conducted with their silent son in his hospital bed. A life so dire that often, turning the wedding ring on her finger, she could surprise herself to remember she was still a wife.
Waiting for Professor Nickell to appear, Eve and Jed shared a silence in their stiff upholstered chairs. Deep in Eve’s gut, the giddiness of her shoplifting and the panic of this appointment did battle, a hot column of something advancing up her chest. Her dread was expansive, taking in everything around her now: the splashy comic-book hues of the vintage western movie posters decorating the walls, the gaudy receptionist, Peggy, clacking at her keyboard, the crackle and wheeze of the facility’s air-conditioning, the antique horseshoe bolted over the entranceway for good luck. She couldn’t bear the silence a second longer, and she pointed to the neon purple spatter on Jed’s jeans.
“Where do you even find paint that color?” she asked.
“Oh. It’s not paint.”
“No?”
“Nah. It’s hipster blood. Turns out, when you flog one of those half-beards to death, he bleeds out in the color scheme of the 1980s.”
“Har har.” Jed’s joking about his hipster cohort in Marfa was one of his few conversational go-tos, as if to prove to Eve he was different from all the vaguely artistic layabouts with whom he shared that town.
“Hey, where do you go to drown a hipster?” Jed asked. “The mainstream.”
“Okay, that’s enough.”
Jed’s smile widened a tick too far, became a baring of clenched teeth through which he said, “Sorry.”
The reception’s swinging door seemed to move, but then it failed to open.
“No, you know what?” Jed said. “Screw you. You don’t get to tell me how to deal with this.”