Introduction

"A dazzling novel about love, loss, and the mysteries of the mind."
? David Ebershoff, Bestselling author of The Danish Girl and The 19th Wife

"A breathtaking tale of tragedy and redemption... A triumph" ? People

A family in crisis, a town torn apart, and the boy who holds the secret has been cocooned in a coma for ten years.

One warm, West Texas November night, a shy boy named Oliver Loving joins his classmates at Bliss County Day School’s annual dance, hoping for a glimpse of the object of his unrequited affections, an enigmatic Junior named Rebekkah Sterling. But as the music plays, a troubled young man sneaks in through the school’s back door. The dire choices this man makes that evening ?and the unspoken story he carries? will tear the town of Bliss, Texas apart.

Nearly ten years later, Oliver Loving still lies wordless and paralyzed at Crockett State Assisted Care Facility, the fate of his mind unclear. Orbiting the stillpoint of Oliver’s hospital bed is a family transformed: Oliver’s mother, Eve, who keeps desperate vigil; Oliver’s brother, Charlie, who has fled for New York City only to discover he cannot escape the gravity of his shattered family; Oliver’s father, Jed, who tries to erase his memories with bourbon. And then there is Rebekkah Sterling, Oliver’s teenage love, who left Texas long ago and still refuses to speak about her own part in that tragic night. When a new medical test promises a key to unlock Oliver’s trapped mind, the town’s unanswered questions resurface with new urgency, as Oliver’s doctors and his family fight for a way for Oliver to finally communicate? and so also to tell the truth of what really happened that fateful night.

A moving meditation on the transformative power of grief and love, a slyly affectionate look at the idiosyncrasies of family, and an emotionally-charged page-turner, Stefan Merill Block's Oliver Loving is an extraordinarily original novel that ventures into the unknowable and returns with the most fundamental truths.

Editorial Review

An Amazon Best Book of January 2018: They say great fiction has the power to increase one’s empathy, and Stefan Merrill Block’s Oliver Loving does just that. In it, a school shooting compels the denizens of a small Texas town to confront painful (and sometimes ugly) truths, as they try to solve the mystery of why the shooter did what he did. Trouble is, many of the answers are locked inside the mind of one of the victims, Oliver Loving--who is in a coma--and his unrequited love, Rebekkah Sterling, who would just as soon forget. Block does a deft job of capturing the reverberating effects of grief, and the many ways in which it is expressed. You may not always agree with how Loving’s mother, father, and brother deal with the horrible hand their family is dealt, but you understand their actions just the same (and maybe even relate to them). Oliver Loving is a compassionate account of something we see far too often on the news, but never get the full story. And though you’ll need to suspend your disbelief for certain aspects of this narrative, I think it’s much harder to wrap one’s brain around the sorts of real-life tragedies that inspired it. By giving a glimpse inside the mind of both perpetrator and victim, by putting us in their shoes, maybe we can better tease out why such terrible things happen, and take meaningful steps to stop them. --Erin Kodicek, Amazon Book Review

Excerpt

Oliver

CHAPTER ONE

Your name is Oliver Loving. Or not Oliver Loving at all, some will say. Just a fantasy, a tall tale. But perhaps those labels are fitting; maybe you were born to become nothing more than a myth. Why else would your granny have insisted your parents name you after your state’s legendary cattleman, to whom your family had only an imaginary genealogical linkage? Like yours, your namesake’s story was a rough and epic one. The original Oliver Loving, and his vast cattle empire, came to an end when the man was just fifty-four, shot by the Comanche people somewhere in the jagged terrain of New Mexico. “Bury me in Texas,” your namesake begged his trail partner, Charles Goodnight, whose name your granny later bestowed upon your brother. And so you might be forgiven for thinking that your future was foretold in the beginning. Just as the violence of your namesake’s time turned the first Oliver Loving into a folk hero, so did the violence of your own time turn you from a boy into a different sort of legend.

A boy and also a legend: you were seventeen years old when a .22 caliber bullet split you in two. In one world, the one over your hospital bed, you became the Martyr of Bliss, Texas. Locked in that bed, you lost your true dimensions, rose like vapor, a disembodied idea in the hazy blue sky over the Big Bend Country. You became the hopeful or desperate or consoling ghost who hovered over the vanishing populace of your gutted hometown, a story that people told to serve their own ends. Your name has appeared on the homemade signs pumped by angry picketers on the redbrick steps of your old schoolhouse, in many heated opinion pieces in the local newspapers, on a memorial billboard off Route 10. By your twentieth birthday, you had become a dimming hive of neurological data, a mute oracle, an obsession, a regret, a prayer, a vegetative patient in Bed Four at Crockett State Assisted Care Facility, the last hope your mother lived inside.

And yet, in another universe, the one beneath your skin, you remained the other Oliver, the one few people cared to know before, just a spindly kid, clumsy footed and abashed. A straight-A student, nervous with girls, speckled with acne, gifted with the nice bone structure you inherited: your father’s pronounced jaw, your mother’s high cheekbones. You were a boy who often employed the well-used adolescent escape pods from solitude, through the starships and time machines of science fiction. You were also a reverential son, eager to please, and you tried to be a good brother, even if you sometimes let yourself luxuriate in the fact that your mother clearly preferred you. In truth, you needed whatever victories you could win. You were just seventeen; after that night, only your family could remember that boy clearly. But yours was a family that remembered so often and well that it could seem—if only for a minute, here and there—as if the immense, time-bending gravity of their remembering could punch a hole in the ether that spread between you, as if your memories might become their own.

* * *

“According to science,” your father spoke to the stars on that night when your story began, “our universe is only one of many. Infinite universes. Somewhere there is a universe that takes place in a single frozen second. A universe where time moves backward. A universe that is nothing but the inside of your own head.”

At seventeen, you took this bit of soft astrophysics in the way you took all your father’s lectures: less than seriously. Your father, an after-hours painter and teacher of art classes at Bliss Township School, had founded the school’s Young Astronomers Club and more or less forced your brother and you to serve as its president and vice president. But the truth was that you shared with Pa just an artist’s dreamy interest in astronomy. The constellations were mostly twinkling metaphors to you both. But that night, in his Merlot-warmed way, your father was prophetic. Your own journey into another universe, the universe where your family lost you, began very subtly. It began, appropriately enough, with the minute movements of your left hand.

Your hand. That night it was like an autonomous being whose behavior you couldn’t predict. For a half hour or more, it had just lain there, but now you watched in silent astonishment as your fingers marshaled their courage, began a slow march across the woolen material of the Navajo blanket on which you were lying on a reedy hilltop on your family’s ancient ranch, a two-hundred-acre patch of Chihuahuan Desert that an optimistic forbear of yours named Zion’s Pastures. Your eyes hardly registered the blazing contrails and sparkles of celestial brilliance in the sky, the Perseid meteor shower falling over West Texas. Your whole awareness was focused upon your fingers, which were more interested in a different, localized phenomenon: Rebekkah Sterling on a blanket just inches from your own. You breathed deeply, her vanilla smell cutting through the land’s head-shop aroma of sun-cooked creosote.

“Huh,” Rebekkah Sterling said. “That is fascinating.”

“You think that’s fascinating.” Your father then proceeded to hold forth on one of his favorite astronomical lectures, about how the basic atomic building blocks for life, everything that makes us us, was produced in the fiery engine of distant stars. But you did not need your father’s lecture on the epochs of evolution. Your hand offered a better, in vivo demonstration of life’s perseverance despite the bad odds. Your hand, like an amphibious creature clambering out of the primordial ocean, now began its journey over the five inches of hard earth and dead grama grass that separated Rebekkah Sterling’s blanket from yours.

* * *

Rebekkah Sterling! For the year since her family had moved to town, you had been tracking her closely. Well, you tracked many girls closely in the slumped silence of your school days, but what was it about Rebekkah that set her apart? She was a very slight girl; the outline of her bones pressed against her tight skin. It was true what you would later write about her in a poem, her hair really did look like a piled fortune of amber ringlets. But she carried that hair like some burdensome heirloom her mother obliged her to wear, something that faintly embarrassed her. She’d tuck that fortune into barrettes and scrunchies, pull and chew at its ends. She seemed to spend the durations of your literature class together practicing how to make the least sound possible. When she had to sneeze, she’d first bury her head in her sweater. It was the peculiar sadness of her silence that you found so beautiful. But if not for your father’s astonishing pronouncement at dinner one Monday night, your Rebekkah Sterling story would likely have ended the way all your girl stories ended, in your own, far less beautiful brand of silence.

Over the last years, the cumulative effects of disappointment, time, and the considerable quantities of the cheap whiskey Pa consumed had eroded most of your family’s old traditions, but you still maintained a Monday night ritual, Good Things Monday, when each Loving, before supper, had to name one good thing to look forward to in the week to come. That night, as the burnt molasses of Ma’s meat loaf had wafted from the gray slab set before you, you mustered something perfunctory about a novel, Ender’s Game, which you were liking; Ma spoke of a slight alleviation of her back pain; Charlie’s Good Thing was many good things, three separate parties to which he had been invited that weekend. But the only truly Good Thing you heard that night, the first certifiable Good Thing you had heard in a very long while, was your father’s news.

“Looks like we’ll have a visitor,” Pa said.

The permanent roster of the Young Astronomers counted no member who did not share the last name Loving, but over the years, Pa had occasionally been able to cajole one of his pupils to attend a meeting. And when your father that night informed his family that he had convinced a former student of his named Rebekkah Sterling to come to Zion’s Pastures to watch the meteors, you grasped your seat.

“Rebekkah Sterling?”

“That’s what I said.” Pa grinned. “Why? That name mean something special to you?”

“No. Or I guess something. We have English together.”

Before that day you had never exchanged more than a word or two in Mrs. Schumacher’s Honors Literature class. You were certain she wouldn’t actually follow through on your father’s invitation.

Days passed, and you tried to forget that unlikeliest possibility, tried to resign yourself to the glumness of your town in that late summer. That August represented something of a crisis point in Presidio County, but it was a crisis that had been roiling for years—generations, in fact. The border between the English-speaking north and the Spanish-speaking south might have been settled a century and a half before, but it was never an entirely peaceful distinction out in your slice of the borderland. On the white side of that divide, you’d grown up under your late grandmother’s alternative Texas history, “the true story of this country they’d never teach in those schoolbooks of yours,” a place where for 150 years immigrants had been building the towns and doing the menial tasks, the enduring threat of deportation used to enforce a sort of soft slavery. Granny Nunu had told you how, as recently as her own childhood, your school had conducted a mock burial for “Mr. Spanish,” a ceremony in which the Latino students were made to write Spanish words on slips of paper, drop them into a hole in the earth, and bury them. “Shameful, shameful business, behind us now, thank the Lord, but you can’t ever forget it,” Granny Nunu told you.

But in your own childhood, these old divides hadn’t seemed quite so dire. Spanish was now a required course for all students; in your grade-school days, white and Latino children were often invited to the same birthday parties. And yet, in recent years, as the cartels seized vast powers in Mexico, the white population had been fretting, with growing panic, over the stories of narcotic warfare coming from only a few miles away. Down the river, at the border town of Brownsville, police had recently found body parts of a number of Honduran immigrants scattered across the highway. Up in Presidio, local ranchers were reporting bands of cartel soldiers crossing their properties by night. Immigration had leapt to numbers unknown for generations. And as all these addled refugees came over the river, they arrived to a county blighted by lack of commerce. Ranching and mineral mining had long ago gone bust in your hometown. The only real industries left in the county were sluggish tourism, out in the state and national parks; border control enforcement; and the few local businesses that the employees of these federally funded enterprises could support. The last thing that hardscrabble Blissians wanted was a multitude of new workers, willing to toil for less-than-legal wages.

Something had to be done, was the white opinion, and so it had been a summer of a great many deportations, whole families carted from Bliss to the other side of the Rio Grande. For the TV cameras, the West Texas Minutemen—one of those jingoistic militias that patrolled the desert for surreptitious immigrants—were doing frequent demonstrations at the river, shooting their rifles into the Mexican sky.

Though this fraught border between nations lay thirty miles to the south of Bliss, another border ran down the center of your schoolhouse. Just as the towns all over your county were split in two, neighborhoods segregated by language and skin tone, you’d come to see that Bliss Township School was truthfully two schools; the honors classes were almost entirely white, the “regular” classes mostly Latino. All of the school’s officially sanctioned activities—dances, football games, academic clubs—were white, and the Latino activities were mostly ones that the school officials tried to disperse: the Tejanos’ daily gatherings out front, right on the schoolhouse steps, where they blasted music from their cars, causing a minor, perpetual commotion.

It was out there, just beyond the school gates, that something of a brawl had broken out the first week of school, when Scotty Coltrane and his pale cronies began barking abuse at the grounds crew. “Andale, andale!” Scotty was yelling at a lawn-mowing man when a Mexican kid crept up from behind and bloodied Scotty’s nose. Under ordinary circumstances, it might have ended there, the boys called before Principal Dixon, a suspension issued, but in that tense August the fight turned into a brawl, a dozen boys piling on.

But even in this divided school, you felt yourself to be in a further subdivision all your own, a boy who wanted only to pass his days unnoticed. It was shaping up to be another lonesome year, the worst yet, until that actual miracle happened.

You had been in your father’s art classroom, after school that Thursday, marking up your biology homework as Pa worked paint thinner into the student tables. Your brother was sketching something at an easel—a ballerina in a tutu, screaming as two lions devoured her legs—when he turned his head to an arrival at the door. Rebekkah Sterling stepped timidly into the room.

“Rebekkah,” you said, feeling ashamed to speak her name to her face.

“So!” Rebekkah said. “Today I get to see where Oliver Loving lives.”

Through a blooming blush, you watched her closely, something in her wry grin suggesting her attendance at the meteor shower must have been some kind of a joke. Or, more likely, she had only accepted your father’s invitation to be kind.

But then a wondrous thing happened when Pa drove you home. “Shotgun!” Charlie yelled in the parking lot, and climbed into the front seat. And as one of the backseats was piled with Pa’s collection of paper coffee cups and fast food refuse, Rebekkah and you had to sit right next to each other, your denim-clad thighs touching snugly, your leg registering each jostle with ecstatic friction.

“A couple hours till nightfall yet,” Pa said when you arrived at Zion’s Pastures. “Why don’t you take Rebekkah for a little show-around, and we’ll get the picnic ready?” He winked at you, not very subtly.

Most of the land of Zion’s Pastures was just parched country, like photographs you’d seen of the islands of Greece, if someone had vacuumed away the Aegean. But you wanted to show Rebekkah your land’s rare swatch of lushness, guiding her down to the fertile earth along Loving Creek. As you led Rebekkah through the machete-cut trails, your anxiety turned you into some kind of historian. “My great-great-grandfather and his family came from Wales, that’s near England, and they had this crazy idea that Texas wouldn’t be so different from Wales but with enough land for everyone—” You begged your mouth to silence, but it refused to quit its lectures. “This is called a century plant. Its stem supposedly shoots just once in a hundred years.” You awkwardly added, “To reproduce.” Rebekkah silently trailed your elbow. You elected for the most arduous paths, where many times you had to lift a branch for her to duck the tunnel of your arm. At last you came to your destination, the little creekside cave where you spent many evenings and weekends, doing your homework and writing your rhymy poems at the old poker table you had taken from the storage shed.

“Here it is,” you said. “My secret lair.”

“Secret lair? What are you, Superman?”

“That’s the Fortress of Solitude.”

“So no solitude for you, huh?” she asked. “You bring a lot of people here? It’s very cool.”

“You’re the first. The first non-Loving, I mean.”

“I’m honored.”

“You should be. It’s very exclusive.”

Rebekkah emitted a faint “ha” and looked up to observe the fleshy knobs of the mini-stalactites that hung from the ceiling. There had been a time when your boyish imagination could make this pocket of rock seem deep with mystery, a potential burial place for the sort of lost Mexican treasure that your late granny liked to tell stories about. Now it looked to you only like a dim hollow, shallow and gray.

“Oh my God!” Rebekkah shouted, doing a frantic little skip. “A snake!”

You laughed, more loudly than you intended. “That’s just snakeskin. Some rattler must have molted here.” You both knelt to examine the diaphanous material, the translucent scales making miniature rainbows in the early evening light.

“Wow. It’s sort of beautiful,” Rebekkah said.

You poked at the iridescent rattler sheath, and the frail substance crumbled under your fingertip. Rebekkah put a hand to her face. “You ruined it,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“Why did you do that?”

“It’s no big deal. Snakeskin is everywhere around here. Really. We can find some more, if you want.”

Rebekkah stood away, made a frustrated little snort. You couldn’t quite understand what you’d done wrong, but you did understand that you were already failing your first conversation with her.

“Listen,” you said. “You really don’t have to stay all the way to tonight if you don’t want. My pa could drive you home.”

“Your pa. So Texan.”

You shrugged. “Ma and Pa. That’s just what we’ve always called them. I guess it was my grandmother’s doing. Always made us do things the old-fashioned way.”

“Anyway,” Rebekkah said, “thanks for the advice. But when I want to go, you’ll be the first to know.”

“It’s just that I know it’s kind of weird that you’re here. And now you’re looking like you are feeling weird.”

“Weird is how I’m looking?”

“I didn’t mean—maybe not.”

“If anything,” she said, “all this is just making me a little jealous. This place. Your family. You get to live like this every day.”

But you were the jealous one just then, jealous of other boys better suited for a girl like Rebekkah, with her sad, thousand-yard stare. “My dad drinks alone in his shed most nights,” you told her, trying to match your tone to hers, that whispery subdued register. “My mother looks at me like I’m three years old.”

Rebekkah glanced up at you, smiled sadly. “Well, I guess we have a few things in common, then.” And then Rebekkah reached for you and mussed your hair like a child’s. Like a child’s, maybe, but on the hike back to the house, your legs throwing long shadows, you could still feel the warmth of her hand on your head, a kind of imaginary crown.

* * *

“And have you heard about how scientists have been measuring the universe?” Pa asked, two hours later, on that hilltop. The remnants of the picnic your mother had packed were strewn about. In honor of the guest, Pa had limited himself to wine, the emptied bottle of Merlot now tipped on its side. “They’ve found this way to take the whole thing’s weight. They can weigh the universe now! Incredible!”

“Incredible,” you said, but you had much more interesting measurements in mind. Your fingertips had at last forged the great divide, and they fell with exhaustion on the polyester shore of Rebekkah’s blanket. You must have been less than six inches from her now; you felt the warmth that her skin radiated. Your fingers took the land’s measure, stood, and began the final march. A sudden streak of brightness cut the deep purple above. “Oh! Look look look!” Charlie shouted.

“So, Rebekkah, tell us about you,” your mother said, her voice at the edge of that tone she used with strangers, the one she called skeptical and your brother called mean. “You’re new here, right?”

“We’ve been here for a little more than a year now. My father works for an oil company. Fracking. Never in one place long.”

“Poor girl,” Ma said. “I know how that goes. We moved around so much when I was a kid, I’d gone to eight schools before I was fifteen.”

“It’s hard,” Rebekkah said.

“I have to admit,” Pa said, “I saw a little thing about your father in the paper, something about the surveys his company’s been doing around Alpine. Fingers crossed they strike it rich, Lord knows we could use the business.”

Rebekkah shrugged. “He never tells me much about it,” she said. “Just lets me know when it’s time to move again.”

“Our family has lived here for about a million years!” Charlie piped. “We never go anywhere! It’s not always such a picnic, let me tell you.”

“Charlie.”

“Sorry.” Charlie giggled.

Even setting aside the miraculous identity of your guest, it was very strange to witness your family perform itself for an outsider. You couldn’t remember the last time a visitor had come to Zion’s Pastures. A couple of years before, your mother had cured the grandfather clock of its mildew infestation by setting it for two days in the front yard. “Just needs a little sunlight to heal,” she had explained. A seventeen-year-old boy, unkissed, could be forgiven for already beginning to conceive of Rebekkah like that healing sun upon his whole lonesome, mildewed life at Zion’s Pastures.

“So how you liking it?” Pa said. “School going okay so far this year?”

“It’s good. I sure miss your art class.” You noticed that as she spoke she gestured with her left hand, but kept the other lying there, unbudging in the darkness.

“You know,” Rebekkah said. “All this star talk is reminding me of that song. They call me on and on across the universe—”

All four of you tuneless Lovings lay there, stunned, as Rebekkah sang a line of that Beatles tune.

“Crikey,” Charlie said.

“Beautiful.” Pa whistled. “Got some serious pipes on you, good Lord.”

“I don’t know about that,” Rebekkah said. “I just like to sing sometimes.”

After a time, Pa resumed his astronomy lesson. “Of course you know that falling stars is not really accurate. What you are looking at are just minor asteroids burning up in the atmosphere, but it is remarkable…” You were no longer listening. Because your hand understood that it didn’t have forever. And so, in one brave and reckless act, your hand called upon the support of wrist and forearm. It crouched low, and then it sprang. And there would perhaps never be a joy as acute as the joy of Rebekkah’s downy, warm-soft fingers when they did not stray from the point of contact. Your hands remained there, for whole seconds, their backsides pressed together, turning red hot, generating the atomic material of the future. But your hand was no fool. It understood that the snakeskin had been a kind of sign; if you lingered too long, the delicate thing would crumble.

A half-hour later, you were all sauntering back up the dirt road, the weak flicker of your cheap flashlights casting skittish halos over dust and cacti. “Goodness. It’s already nine thirty,” Ma told Rebekkah. “Probably close to your curfew, no?”

“Huh,” she said. “I guess.”

“Well, then, we’d best get you home.”

“We’d best,” Rebekkah said, and Ma nodded, walking ahead to set a swifter pace. For just a second, you turned to look at Rebekkah. The moon was rising now, and you watched as the thinness of her lips bent into a smile. You smiled in reply. But you were a boy who had developed a nearly anaphylactic aversion to prolonged eye contact, and you looked away, gaped up awkwardly at the sky: a poor decision. Before you could understand what had happened, the intense penny smell of blood had already filled your nose. Your boot toe had caught a rock, sent you sprawling on the path.

“Woot!” your brother hollered. “There he goes again!”

“Oliver!” Ma yelped. “Your nose!”

“It’s fine,” you said.

“It’s not. It’s bleeding.”

“It’s nothing.”

“Nothing? Why are you smiling?”

“I don’t know.”

As you sat up, you watched your brother hopping from foot to foot, doing what he did with your frequent teenage-klutzy tumbles, turning it into some slapstick act for his entertainment. “I can’t believe it! Your best spill yet! Gold medal! Classic!”

“Oh my God,” Rebekkah murmured.

“Keep it pinched,” your mother said. “Here, use one of the napkins. You need to lie down! Stay here and we’ll come pick you up with the car. Or, wait, Jed, what about the couch in your studio?”

“My studio?” Pa said, and paused. “Right. I guess come on then.”

The shame of this scene was not inconsiderable, but it was little next to the astonishment you now had to stifle. You were going to Pa’s studio? Your father’s so-called art studio was a tumbledown cabin, a half mile up the dirt road from the big house, and it was strictly off-limits to his family. And in the past few months, Pa himself often seemed off-limits, too. He occasionally dragged his body to the dinner table, but always his mind remained out there, latched behind a cabin door, in a hazy cloud of Pall Mall smoke and whiskey vapors. This latest absence was longer than his previous ones, but throughout your childhood Pa had disappeared to his painting shed most weekends. Like a controlled experiment to refute the old Texan belief in the direct relationship between perseverance and reward, Pa’s countless painting hours had never summed to anything very successful. He spurned the locally ubiquitous landscape art—those shattered canyons and Comanche dragoons in hot pursuit of their bison—that might have fetched him real money in favor of his “true work,” which amounted to artful knockoffs of a number of dead masters who piled the bright paint thickly. Van Gogh, Kandinsky, Munch, Chagall.

In his whole stymied, self-poisoning career, you had seen your father sell just a single painting. This was at the start of your freshman year, when Bliss Township threw its fund-raising jamboree on the school’s front lawn. Amid booths jammed with foil-wrapped brownies, tin-plated pies, and clunky granny needlepoints, Pa set up a stand to sell his students’ work. Of course, nearly all those bleeding watercolors and fingerprint-smudged charcoals sold at asking price—to the artists’ own parents. But, late into that Saturday afternoon, a single piece remained unsold. The same oil painting Pa had unveiled at your last Good Things Monday, his wind-whirled rendition of Bliss Township School, the mass of children out front just a bright yellow suggestion, the schoolhouse’s cupolas and cornices warping into the shapes of the jolly clouds above. For his own asking price, Pa had affixed a blue sticker that said, $250.

As the pies vanished from the booths, as the Bliss Township Marching Band began to fold away their gear, Pa’s painting still languished there, unpurchased. Your brother tugged at Ma and you to huddle with him behind the art booth. “We have to buy his painting,” Charlie said. “We have to!” Ma touched his cheek. “You are the sweetest boy in the world,” she told him. Not to be bested, you felt your pockets for your saved allowance, showing Ma twenty-four dollars. Charlie could contribute only six, and your mother had just eighty-five dollars in her pocketbook. She clutched the gathered money in her fist, worked a finger into one of her curls. “Wait here,” she said, and when she came back, five minutes later, she was smiling so widely you could see her back fillings.

“Just watch.” She pointed in the direction of your father, whom your school principal, Doyle Dixon, was approaching with an outstretched palm. Principal Dixon showed Pa a stack of crumpled money, and you watched your father fight back a lunging impulse to hug the man. Instead, he pocketed the cash, nodded, and presented the painting to his boss.

“Now listen,” Ma said. “Doyle put in the rest himself, and I made him promise he’d never mention our own little contribution. Do you promise you won’t say a thing?”

“You—” Charlie was saying, but by that point Pa had practically skipped his way through the crowd.

“Doyle bought the damn thing,” Pa said. “Told me he’s going to hang it at school. Guess it wasn’t the wreck I was fretting, huh?”

“What have I been telling you?” Ma said, working her grin into submission. “It’s a beauty.”

The sale of this painting, however, had done little for his confidence. “Going through labor,” Pa liked to call his long studio sessions, but as for the results of all those painful gestations? He tossed most of his canvases onto the frequent bonfires he’d make in the fire pit. “Have you heard of installation art?” Pa liked to quip. “Well, I make incineration art.” It had been a very long time since you had seen his work.

But now you were going to Pa’s studio—with Rebekkah Sterling! In huaraches, your father walked on ahead into the desert night, leading the way for a grim, dirgelike march, the hard grind of stones under your feet, bats calling invisibly through the air. You let your family lead you, like a blind man, the blood in your nose beginning to congeal.

At the cabin, you settled yourself on the stain-spangled divan in the darkness, and Pa lit two camphor lanterns. Though you felt the blood pooling back into your nostrils you couldn’t bear to keep your head tilted away from this rare view. Arranged among the stub-choked ashtrays and empty bottles of George Dickel whiskey, his latest paintings, you were sorry to see, were an immediate disappointment. To your eyes, they just looked like a continuation of his artistic thievery.

Rebekkah, however, walked right up to these canvases and paused, as if she had some silent greeting to make to each one. Pa pushed the blunt end of a paintbrush against his lip as he nervously observed her. “They are a little crude,” he at last said. “I know it. I’m having some trouble with my brushes, and I think—”

“No.” Rebekkah spoke to the thickly slathered cerulean sky a few inches from her face. “They are beautiful.”

“Think so?” Pa watched the back of Rebekkah’s head nod slowly.

“Is that us?” Charlie asked. Your brother had noticed something you had not. Near the edge of each frame—beneath the swirling paisleys of a van Goghian starscape, at the periphery of a throbbing field of expressionist colors, amid the animalistic swipes and slashes of abstract brushwork—were four unmistakable figures: your parents, your brother, and you.

“It’s a series,” he said. “Or that’s how I think of them. Actually, it’s based on what I was telling you earlier, about the multiverse. If that’s true about the other universes, then somewhere there must be a whole universe that takes place inside of Vincent van Gogh paintings, right? Another inside of Munch. Kandinsky. And then I thought, what would it be like to live in those other places?”

At the time, you took this cosmological explanation for more of his knockoff canvases as fanciful, sentimental, a little drunken. The whole concept reminded you of the stories that your brother and you, as younger boys, had liked to tell each other about secret passageways, portals to hidden worlds buried in the land, fantasies that you had both outgrown. These paintings embarrassed you a little, on your father’s behalf. In this so-called series of paintings, you saw that Pa had married his life’s two great failures: the confines of his thwarted artistic imagination and his increasingly silent relationship with his family here on this planet. It seemed a little pathetic, Pa’s painting these other universes for his family members when the simpler solution would be just to have actual conversations with you.

“But if there are all these other universes, where are they?” Your brother was always the more credulous, cheery son, untroubled by dark implications. “How do you get there?”

“Don’t know,” Pa slurred in a grave register, as if this were a question that had been troubling him. “Maybe a black hole.”

“A black hole?” Charlie asked. “I thought it was all just dark in black holes.”

“No one knows for sure. Could be blackness or could be that it’s a wormhole. To another universe. The thing about black holes, I read this, is that the science of them is unknowable. To get close enough for a good look, the gravity in there would tear you apart.”

Less than three months later a black hole would open in West Texas, and you would come to see that there was something to your father’s naive cosmology after all. His theory held true of the black hole that would dissolve the floor beneath your feet on the night of November fifteenth: you would only begin to understand the truth—about Rebekkah, your own part in that night’s horrors—just as you lost the ability to describe it. A terrible brightness would break through you. What would make it so terrifying is that it wouldn’t hurt at all.

A beam of light trembled over the thick oils of Pa’s impressionist multiverse, a flashlight shaking in his alcoholic hands. “Anyway,” you told Pa, “Rebekkah is right. They are very pretty.”

And as he grinned, you were grinning, too. Maybe, you were thinking, you didn’t need to perform your unhappiness for Rebekkah, maybe she didn’t want your own sad stories. Maybe it was the possibility of witnessing a better family that had brought her to you? Tomorrow, you had just decided, you would at last spill the secret of Pa’s schoolhouse painting. Despite whatever disappointment you knew looking at his latest output, you were very glad for the promise of this story to tell her, how the three of you had huddled there behind a carnival booth, pooling what little you had to write that day a happier ending for your father.

Oh, of course it would be easy to pity that kid you were then, just a boy feeling the miracle of a freshly touched hand, practicing how to tell his best example of what made his family a family. A boy doomed to a future he could never have guessed. And yet maybe somehow, that night, you were already beginning to rehearse your part in this story? Soon the black hole would open, you would fall to one side, and your family would remain on the other. And after reading all those childhood epics—all those sci-fi, fantasy, survivalist, and tall tales that you so loved, and after all Pa’s talk of parallel universes, too—how not to believe that somehow your own otherworldly bed-bound epic really was foretold? How else to explain that unlikeliest sorrow you and your family were made to endure, the mythological transformations you were made to undergo? How not to believe, even still, that you were chosen?

No, you wouldn’t be able to pity yourself for long. You might have fallen through a black hole, but your family’s fate was equally desperate. They had to stay behind, on Planet Earth.

Copyright © 2017 by Stefan Merrill Block view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. After the incident at the school, Charlie is home schooled. How does Charlie's experience being home schooled by Eve change and influence their relationship?

2. The novel ends on a very hopeful note. Do you think Oliver is ever able to hear the loved ones who have surrounded his bed for years?

3. Why do you think Rebekkah and Jed held onto their secrets for so long? Why do we keep quiet when the truth can help us heal?

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