Aimee (Book It Forward) > Recent Status Updates

Although disgusted with each other, Jed and Eve always wound up having sex after their visits with Oliver. she writes, “A life so dire that often, turning the wedding ring on her finger, she could surprise herself to remember she was still a wife.”

She felt it was hideous that Jed would show up today, acting like he’d been some partner in all this. He was a trespasser.

Eve hasn’t seen Jed on over a year. He’s a mess. “She has to swallow a gasp at what time had done.” 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.

When the Doctors shine flashlights in Oliver’s eyes they don’t dilate and when his sternum is rubbed he doesn’t lift his hand to bat them away.

Oliver is in a Persistent Vegetative State. Doctors have urged his family to take him off life support but they have not. A man named Professor Alexander Nickell wants to study how brain death warps and shrinks the size of the brain using a magnetic resonance machine. It will show neural activity at microscopic levels. They say Oliver has a reptilian brain only keeping his heart beating and lungs breathing.

There had been a time a very very long time before when their young romance had felt like a miraculous device, a glistening machine that could pack away her old sorrows in words and stories

Oliver was shot near the base of his brain stem. Hope was lost quickly that he would recover. His Dad Jed seemed to be “vanishing in kind” drinking too much and staying in his shed away from the family home. Eve tried to get though to him but their marriage collapsed.

FBI and media’s explanation of who Hector was and “a certain element of the country’s white population rushed to their reflexive conclusions”

Hector did find Oliver there, aimed his weapon, and murdered her family‘s future.

Eve wants to know why Hector went into that classroom and shot the drama students then shot Oliver on his way out. She worked so hard not to think about it but almost 10 years later, the question was still in the room with her every day

We remember the 15th of November. As if anyone out there could ever forget. As if she and Oliver both were not still sealed inside that date.

For crosses, representing the four murdered. But what about Eve’s son? A half cross, maybe? Just the horizontal beam? Well, Oliver was half Jewish.

For the first year or so after, a few blackly dressed classmates, many teachers, the parents of the dead, the stooped principal Doyle Dixon, and the occasional religious leader would still show up, uninvited, at visiting hours, to put their hands on the boy for whom the tragedy was still not yet at an end.

Nearly a decade had passed and even still she couldn’t graft this ruined life onto the simple linearity of time before. In a single instant,a 21-year-old boy named Hector Espina had shattered time.

My son is in pieces. He’s scattered all over the world, Eve told Ron now. And I have to pick them up.

The urge worked like any superstition, something in which she did not really believe, something she could even laugh at inwardly, and yet some atavistic, totem worshiping part of her was afraid to resist.

She stumbled over the laundry, lurched for the phone. She put it to her ear, and try as she might, there would never be a way to forget the instant that followed.

Over the years, Eve had learned the variety of moods Jeds drinking brought forth. There mope, the discontent, the manic, but last night he had scooted up to Eve as that rarest of his species, the affectionate.

It was that lost, oblivious minute that haunted eve loving most. What has she been doing at precisely 913 on the night of November 15?

The last night her universe was still intact.

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

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?

Soon A black hole would open, you would fall to one side, and your family would remain on the other.

His theory held true of the black hole that would dissolve the floor beneath your feet on the night of November fifteenth...A terrible brightness would break through you; what would make it so terrifying is that it wouldn’t hurt at all.

Even setting aside the miraculous identity of your guest, or was very strange to witness your family perform itself for an outsider.

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.

It was the peculiar sadness of her silence that you found so beautiful.