Edgar and Lucy

by Victor Lodato

  “I want to go home,” he said quietly.

  The man said nothing as Edgar knelt among the leaves.

  “People are waiting for me,” he cried. “And I have school and I have homework and—people are waiting for me.”

  The man reached for the child’s hand.

  Edgar pulled away and shook his head.

  “You know me,” the man whispered.

  “I thought you were someone else,” said Edgar.

  The man retreated and took hold of his beard to steady himself. “Okay, listen to me, I know you’re scared and you miss your family and—”

  He stopped. The boy wasn’t listening. He had curled up on his side and was emitting a high-pitched drone like a mosquito—a terrible, keening sound.

  “Shhh, listen to me. I don’t want you to be afraid. Why don’t we start all over again? Okay?”

  “My name is Edgar,” the boy cried.

  “Okay, okay. Look. Edgar, look.” The man unstrapped the gun from his shoulder, double-checked the safety, and laid it beside the boy. “I’m putting this here for you.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “Well, I’m giving it to you anyway.”

  “Why?” The boy was shivering.

  “It’s a present.”

  Edgar stared at the gleaming wood of the rifle, a grainy red-brown as perfectly polished as a chestnut. “I’m not allowed,” he said. “It’s dangerous.”

  “Only if you don’t know how to use it. But you’ll learn. How old are you?”

  “Eight.”

  The man swallowed. So young; four years younger than his son. “Well, at eight, it’s time to…” He felt his mind caving to clichés he’d heard as a child from his own father, things he’d repeated by rote to Kevin. He took a breath and began again. “I bet you’re angry at some people, huh? And you’re afraid of things—it’s okay. I’m afraid of some things, too.” The man grimaced and pulled at his beard. “I’m afraid of you.”

  Edgar didn’t see how this was possible. “I’m eight,” he said again.

  “Well, that’s not a baby. That’s old enough to know.”

  “Know what?”

  The man picked up one of the crimson leaves and traced the veins with his finger, as if trying to find a place on a map. “Sometimes you think people are waiting for you, but then you find out that nobody’s there.”

  “Where?”

  “At home or … just in your head or…”

  The man put down the leaf, with full awareness of his own monstrosity.

  “I just wish you’d stay with me for a few more days, that’s all.”

  It was only due to shame that Edgar had been holding back, but now he closed his eyes as another glacier broke free from its wall of ice.

  “It’s okay. Let it out.” The man touched the boy’s head. “Just imagine what it’ll be like when you’re not afraid of anything. When you can take care of yourself.”

  “But I should call her and tell her where I am,” the boy cried.

  “You said she had a friend.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “And now you have a friend.”

  Even in his distraught state, Edgar knew the man was simplifying things unfairly; but he was too tired to argue.

  “I’ll do whatever I can to help you, Edgar.” The man took a green plaid blanket from his pack and placed it over the boy. “And then maybe you’ll help me, sometime.”

  Edgar pushed his clenched fists under the carpet of crimson leaves. “I need my sunscreen,” he said sleepily.

  “I have it,” said the man.

  Briefly, before closing his eyes, the boy looked up at the white tree that had caused the reflection on the pond. He knew it was his grandmother, and he understood now how easy it was to die. A person might do it almost by accident. Like walking too far into a forest, and then not being able to find a way out.

  33

  Soon New Addition to Your Family!

  Lucy’s feet were already in the stirrups. It was an accomplishment, she felt, to have gotten this far. Even when one’s mind was made up, going through with it was something else. She closed her eyes and tried to breathe. Waiting was the worst part. The actual procedure, she recalled, took less than five minutes.

  “You’re all set,” the nurse said, making a final adjustment to the IV. The tranquilizing drip of fentanyl was optional, and Lucy had opted for it without hesitation. She planned to put the whole thing on her credit card.

  “You have someone to drive you home, right?”

  “Yes,” Lucy lied.

  “Good. You comfortable there?”

  “What do you think?”

  The nurse smiled and patted Lucy’s uplifted leg. “The doctor will be in in a minute, hon. Try to relax.”

  Alone, Lucy could still smell the faint fruity sweetness—a lingering trail from the nurse’s perfume or hand cream. Fragrances shouldn’t be allowed in here, Lucy thought with an uncharacteristic puritanism. The judgment propelled her backwards: a dim memory of Frank complaining about a mailman who wore too much cologne.

  Though there was no pain, Lucy clutched her belly and tried to drown her awareness in the sea of beige surrounding her. Everything in this damn clinic was beige, offset by green plastic plants cowering in corners. The wicker pots in which the plants lived were filled with heaps of shredded cellophane that looked, to Lucy, exactly like the fake grass Florence had always used to decorate Edgar’s Easter basket. Again, the phantom pain: a jittery silent movie flickering against the inside of her body. Images of the boy, images of Florence—spliced footage some conscientious demon had meticulously preserved. Lucy glanced at the bag of fentanyl. Her head was spinning.

  It was Easter again. Florence in one of her ridiculous bonnets; the heavy scent of Chanel Nº 5, an indulgence the old woman seemed to allow herself only on holidays. Lucy could picture the white chocolate cross that looked like a gravestone and that always went into Edgar’s basket, along with marshmallow bunnies and dolled-up dollar bills folded into fans and flowers. Sometimes, on the night before the holiday, Lucy would sit at the kitchen table and watch as the old woman composed her Italianate architectures of sugar and cash. Florence was never happier than when she was doing something for the boy. Her Easter baskets had been surprisingly artistic. Lucy had said so once, and Florence had been so tickled that she’d accepted Lucy’s offer of a small glass of wine. “I used to fancy myself an artist,” Florence had admitted.

  The pain was impossible to locate, yet all-encompassing—a ravaging, as if memory were some kind of autoimmune disease. Lucy adjusted her right ankle in its stirrup and took a deep breath, reminding herself that she was doing this for her son. It was a deal she’d struck with the unfathomable. This fractional child’s life in return for Edgar’s. Maybe it was a deal she was making with the dead. Lucy was willing to enlarge the scope of what she believed in, if it would bring Edgar home.

  She tapped her fingers against the onionskin rolled down over the examination table. For Christ’s sake, how long were they going to keep her waiting? She scowled at the door, which the nurse had left ajar as if for a child prone to nightmares.

  Even with the freshly painted walls and the new artwork and the addition of plastic greenery, it was hard for Lucy to forget that she’d been here once before.

  Twice, actually.

  The first time, over fifteen years ago. The outside of the building still looked the same: a pleasant little brick house in which the architect—perhaps a blind man—had neglected to put any windows. The clinic was located on a flowerless street named Bluebell Avenue—a designation Lucy could only interpret as mockery; when in fact the street, during the days of Florence’s youth, had been a favorite stroll for people who wished to take in the purple hyacinths that flourished in the spring in the tiny John Paul Preedy Public Garden. By the time Lucy was born, the garden had become a strip mall—now mostly inhabited by fast food chains, including the wildly popular Wings and Things. Only an hour before,
en route to the clinic, Lucy had pulled her red coupe up to the drive-through window to purchase a Diet Coke and one of the establishment’s Things—which were donuts.

  On her first visit to the clinic—seventeen years ago, to be precise—Lucy had arrived on a bicycle, a fake ID in her pocket, with which she’d successfully jimmied the lock of parental consent, a requirement back then for girls under the age of eighteen. An unlucky Lucy had become impregnated on her first go at intercourse—though, really, one could hardly call it a go; Lucy had given the boy no green light. Technically, there’d been no intercourse; it had been an indisputably one-sided affair—Lucy drunk, and the boy, a fuzzy blond with an alligator on his shirt, doing his business on top of her like some mechanical pony outside a supermarket. And though she’d tried to push him away, her hands had dissolved into the air like useless fins.

  Afterwards, Lucy was afraid that if her father found out he’d kill both her and the baby—a fear that was not in any way an exaggeration. The least she could do was to save herself. She did the awful thing at the clinic and then, having told the same lie about having a ride home, walked the half block to where her bicycle was chained. When she’d tried to mount it, her stomach had cramped. She’d left the ten-speed leaning against a fence—and as she trudged toward her parents’ house, it was in a haze of anger and shame. All of New Jersey appeared to be one giant cliché—an ugly sprawl of pizza and traffic and sleazeballs; green lawns lorded over by Marys on the half shell, and women who forced their hair into unnatural acts of aggression. Lucy, at seventeen, was no exception, with her glitter T-shirt and overblown mane. She stopped on the pavement at one point, noting her reflection in the window of a butcher shop. Within the ghostly transparence of her chest hung a huge hunk of meat—exposing her, it seemed, for what she was: an animal.

  New Jersey was a terrible place, the worst place in the world—and a teenaged Lucy knew that it would only get worse. She could see every part of the Garden State growing fatter and fatter—the people, the buildings, the cars, the hair, until, finally, there was no space between any two things and a mass suffocation ensued. As Lucy stared at her seventeen-year-old self in the window of the butcher shop, it suddenly made sense where the real pain was coming from. It was coming from the future.

  There on the street, she began to cry, bending over as if to trap the pain inside, prevent it from fleeing into the rest of her life.

  Or maybe she could outrun it. Steal her father’s car and drive to Los Angeles.

  She headed in the direction of home, and then, confused, turned back toward her bicycle, uncertain if she’d put the chain back on.

  Fuck it. She was too old for a bicycle, anyway. She turned again the other way.

  “Are you lost?”

  Lucy wiped her eyes.

  “Where are you trying to get to? Miss? Hablas inglés?”

  Lucy turned to the boy framed in the open window of a gumball-blue Camaro. “Do I look Spanish?” she said, mustering a little attitude.

  “You look confused. If you need directions, I can—”

  “I’m fine,” Lucy said, straightening her back. “I live here.”

  The car purred at the side of the road. Lucy could feel the vibration in her chest.

  “Were you in a fight?” asked the boy.

  “No. Why, am I…?” Lucy glanced down at her legs—a sudden mortifying fear that she might be bleeding.

  “Just the way you were holding your stomach, I mean. Like somebody punched you.”

  “What, were you like staring at me?”

  “Kind of, yeah. Sorry.”

  “Well, maybe you should mind your own business.”

  “I should,” the boy said, still staring at her. “You’re absolutely right.”

  “And do I look like the kind of girl who gets into fights? Do I?”

  “Uh, yeah.” The boy was smiling now.

  Lucy noted the nice lips, the perfect teeth. She turned away.

  “Don’t go. Hey, come on, wait up.” The boy got out of the car.

  “Stay away from me!” Lucy wielded a lavender fingernail with a white daisy painted on it.

  “Whoa whoa whoa,” the boy said.

  “You don’t just jump out at people,” scolded Lucy.

  “Who’s jumping? I’m not jumping. You must be thinking of the other guy.”

  The boy’s dark, elaborately lashed eyes seemed capable of reading her mind. “What other guy?”

  “I don’t know. Whoever got you all like … defensive and shit.”

  Lucy caught her breath and pushed some hair behind her ear.

  “I wasn’t trying to freak you out,” the boy said. “Honestly, I just, when I saw you, I don’t know, I was just…” He trailed off and shrugged.

  “Whatever,” Lucy said, leaning awkwardly on one leg now.

  “Whatever, but like … something,” the boy replied.

  He was older than her, maybe around twenty, with a voice like scrap metal wrapped in velvet. His skin, burnished olive.

  “I have to go,” mumbled Lucy.

  “Don’t go.” The boy’s come-on swagger was undercut by a strangely intense earnestness. His wavy black hair matched his eyes. An adorable pout transformed his lips into two small throw pillows.

  Lucy was furious at New Jersey again, this time for its uncanny success at producing so many beautiful boys—brusque and over-blooded and slightly baffled, like shipwrecked princes suffering from concussions. They lingered everywhere, at the edges of the ugliness, like billboards making false promises.

  “What if I’m here to protect you?” the boy said.

  “I don’t need—” She couldn’t even say the word. Protection. It was what she needed more than anything. She began to tremble.

  “Whoa,” the boy said. “You don’t look so hot.”

  Lucy raised an eyebrow—her vanity pricking up like a periscope, even as the greater part of her was sinking.

  “I mean, you don’t look well,” the boy said. “You definitely look hot.”

  Lucy felt the wrong kind of heat rising through her body.

  “Here, come on,” the boy said, “lean on my arm.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re really pale.”

  “I’m always like that. It’s genetic.”

  “Are you like part Chinese or something?”

  “What?” Lucy peered more closely into the boy’s night-gathering eyes. “Are you stoned?”

  “No,” the boy said. “A little.”

  Lucy sighed. “I’m Polish.”

  “Right on, right on,” the boy said. “I’m Italian.”

  “No kidding,” Lucy said sarcastically.

  “You’re not a racist, are you?” the boy asked with an artfully crooked smile.

  “No,” replied Lucy, “but I was raised by one.”

  “Me, too,” said the boy enthusiastically. He extended his hand. “I’m Frank.”

  Lucy, intrigued by the formality, extended her own hand. “Lucy.”

  They shook.

  The touch stopped them both. A lifetime passed, it seemed, before the boy continued.

  “But if you ever want me to find this guy…”

  “What guy?”

  “The other guy, the one who—”

  “Why do you keep saying that?” Lucy interrupted. “There is no other guy.”

  “Okay. But if he ever shows up, you just let me know, and I’ll give him a nice knuckle sandwich.”

  “Oh my God.” Lucy laughed. “Who says things like that? That expression’s like a million years old.”

  “Sorry. My father’s been giving me that line since I was like thirteen.” The boy raised a fist and delivered an impressive cotton-mouthed Brando. “Shut your mouth, Frankie, before I give you a nice knuckle sandwich.”

  “Sounds like a charmer,” Lucy said of the old man she’d not yet met, but in whose house she would live long after the boy standing before her was dead.

  “I have to get home,” she s
aid.

  “Let me drive you.”

  “I should probably walk.”

  “Listen,” the boy said. “I don’t know why I jumped out at you but—”

  “Oh, so now you’re admitting you jumped?”

  “Yeah. I jumped.”

  They both smiled.

  It was disgusting that flirtation could feel this good, sallying through the air with no respect for the greater tragedies of life, or even the smaller one Lucy had suffered less than an hour ago. She tried to remind herself that he was just a boy, and she was still in New Jersey; it was the same old story. But flirtation had a way of tricking you into thinking that, this time, the ending could be different.

  Plus, the sense of a beginning—even if ultimately leading nowhere—seemed the perfect antidote to the unforgivable finality she’d just inflicted on some faceless twitch of consciousness.

  “Sometimes you just do shit, right?” the boy was saying. “Jump out at a hottie on the street.”

  Lucy looked into the boy’s eyes, attempting to get a fix on his game. He seemed sincere.

  “You’ve got glitter on your face,” he said.

  “Oh.” She brushed her hand across her cheek. “From my T-shirt, I guess. It was a gift,” she added quickly, embarrassed suddenly by the stretchy top with its twee motif of heart-shaped vines.

  “Wait, you missed it.” He touched her face, and then together they stared at the tiny silver square on his finger—as if into a mirror that might predict their lives.

  The boy blew at the glitter, and it angled away invisibly.

  “The imp of the perverse,” he said.

  “The what?” Though the boy was still speaking, Lucy perceived nothing but the nimbus of his moving lips.

  “It’s from this story I’m reading by—well, he mostly writes horror stories—you know, the ‘Pit and the Pendulum’ guy—but he also writes these great science fiction pieces—well, some of them, I guess, are more like essays or whatever.”

  “Okay,” Lucy said, trying to keep up. The boy was suddenly speaking very fast.

  “Anyway, in this one there’s this force or—the imp, basically—that makes the guy do certain things, mostly bad shit, but I think it’s probably the same thing that makes us do other stuff, too, stuff that’s not necessarily bad but just different from what we would normally do if we were in our right minds or whatever. I mean, it’s not really about right or wrong but like, you know, why did I have to get out of the car when I saw you, you know, these impulses or…” He paused and rubbed his face. “Am I like completely boring you here?”