Edgar and Lucy

by Victor Lodato

  “No, no,” Lucy said. “Not at all.”

  Though she didn’t understand everything the boy was saying, what she did grasp seemed to make sense. She herself sometimes did things a normal civilized person would never do.

  “Like a voice in your head,” she suggested.

  “Or even more than a voice,” the boy said. “Like another person almost.”

  “Totally,” Lucy said. “Like a couple of weeks ago, I broke all these beer bottles for like no reason.”

  “Done it, too,” the boy said, touching his chest. “I love breaking shit.”

  “Or like when I tried to stab you before with my fingernail.”

  “Exactly,” the boy said.

  They nodded self-consciously. A bird yakked boisterously above them in a tree. The boy looked up. “Right on,” he said—maybe to the bird; Lucy wasn’t sure. “You know, you should really let me drive you home.” This part, definitely to Lucy. “What do you say?”

  She looked away and then looked back at him. “Let me ask you something.”

  “Anything,” the boy said.

  She asked him if he owned any shirts with alligators on them.

  He asked her, in reply, if he looked like a loser.

  “Too early to tell,” she said.

  When, at last, she was sitting inside the gumball-blue Camaro, her stomach began to flutter. Maybe this was a bad idea. The leather-hushed interior of the car was like another weather system, with its gentle hum of cool-flowing air, the cloud cover of tinted windows, and the clean scent of pine blooming from a Christmas-tree-shaped air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. Dangling there, as well, like a real ornament on the fake tree, was a religious medal of some kind. The inside of the car seemed more manicured than man cave.

  “It’s so clean,” Lucy said.

  A smile emerged like a ninja from the corner of the boy’s lips. “My mother always says, you have to be ready for company.”

  “Uh-huh.” Lucy rolled her eyes. “You get a lot of company in here?”

  “No one of your ilk,” the boy replied.

  Lucy didn’t know the word. Maybe it had something to do with the imp. She glanced at the odometer: just under fifty thousand miles. The Camaro still had a long life ahead of it. Once again, Los Angeles flickered through her mind.

  “Where do you live?” the boy asked—and then, using his obnoxious telepathy again: “Unless you want to go somewhere else?”

  “No,” Lucy said quickly. “Just home. I live in West Mill.”

  “Cool. I’m in Ferryfield. We’re practically neighbors.”

  The boy was smiling at her again.

  “The key goes in there,” she said, pointing. The longer they sat in a parked car, the more likely the boy was going to get the wrong idea.

  “How old are you anyway?” he asked.

  “Twenty-two,” Lucy said, the lie delivered with confidence, fresh from its successful debut at the clinic.

  “Yeah, right,” Frank said.

  “I can show you my ID.”

  “Okay, show me.”

  Lucy pulled it out and handed it over before realizing that the boy would now know her last name and her weight, both of which she hated.

  “Terrible work,” the boy said of the ID. “Who made this for you?”

  “It’s real,” Lucy protested.

  “I can get my cousin Vincenzo to make you a better one.”

  “I’m good,” Lucy said, snatching it back. “I really need to get home.”

  “And what, may I ask, do you need a fake ID for, Lucille Bubko?”

  “You know what? I think I’ll walk,” Lucy said, reaching for the door.

  “No no no, come on.” The boy started the car. “I’m sorry. Just tell me how to get there.” Carefully he pulled out onto the road. The religious medal came to life, swaying and ticking.

  “Which way?”

  “Straight,” Lucy said. “For now.”

  The boy did as he was told. “Lucy Bubko,” he said quietly, nodding to himself, as if the name were a memory and he were trying to recall the story that went with it.

  Lucy, without warning, began to cry.

  For a while, the boy said nothing. He didn’t seem troubled by the girl’s tears, neither embarrassed nor angry. He didn’t pretend it wasn’t happening, as Lucy’s mother would have done; nor did he shout, Shut the fuck up, in the parlance of her father. When the boy did speak, it was only to offer a simple “Yup. Yup yup yup,” nodding his head at the girl’s tears, as if familiar with the idiom.

  “Left here,” Lucy managed.

  There was something oddly liberating about crying in front of a stranger. She’d never done anything like that before. Of course, she’d never killed a baby before, either. It was a day that for the rest of her life would always seem like a dream.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, wiping her face.

  “No worries,” said the boy. “You want me to put on some music?”

  It seemed a kindness. “Sure.”

  “The Pogues,” Frank said, slipping in the CD. “They’re like from the eighties.”

  “That’s okay,” Lucy said.

  A snarling dirge blasted through the speakers, eliciting another rush of tears.

  I met my love by the gas works wall

  Dreamed a dream by the old canal

  “Do you want me to turn it off?” asked the boy, and Lucy shook her head.

  Cats are prowling on their beat

  Dirty old town, dirty old town

  For a moment it seemed Lucy was singing along, muted dog-howls to round out the cats. The car was nearing her house, and it was probably a good idea to get the last of it out. By the time the song was over, she felt better—her body strangely calm, and her mind clear.

  “Oh my God.” She manufactured a fairly convincing laugh and covered her face. “You probably think I’m like insane.”

  The boy turned off the music. “The opposite.”

  “That’s me over there.” Lucy pointed to a squat two-story with dingy yellow aluminum siding. “But don’t pull in the driveway,” she instructed. “They’ll see you.”

  The boy stopped by the curb, a short distance away. “I live in a house like that, too,” he said. “Eyes everywhere.”

  Lucy reached for the door, but didn’t open it. The two of them sat for a while without speaking. Late-afternoon light crashed through the windshield like a cataract.

  “It was just a really weird day,” the girl began. “I’m not usually so…” Her voice was suddenly false.

  The boy waited, desolately, for the girl to reduce herself to just another boring chick feigning frilly empty-headedness.

  “Why am I apologizing?” she continued. “It’s your own fucking fault for picking me up.”

  Frank relished her attack. “It’s the imp’s fault.”

  She asked if he had any more pot—and then, in reply to his endearingly nervous face: “I really am twenty-two.”

  “Dream on, little sister.”

  “I am.”

  Frank sighed, to register that what he was about to do went against his better judgment. He looked both ways out of the car, and when he’d ascertained an all clear, he opened the ashtray and pulled out a half-smoked, pinky-thick doobie.

  “What about the eyes?” Frank said, gesturing toward the yellow house.

  Lucy shrugged. “Fuck them.”

  “You’ve got a mouth on you.”

  “You picked up your knuckle sandwiches, I picked up my fucks.”

  “I’ve got a foul mouth, too,” Frank said.

  “It’s not a contest,” said Lucy. “Are you going to light it or what?”

  “Maybe I should kiss you first.”

  The boy leaned in and placed his lips on Lucy’s cheek. Despite its G-rated positioning, the kiss was more familiar than any the girl had ever known. He lingered there, breathing into her ear.

  “I hate my family,” she whispered. “My parents.”

  The
boy answered with more breath in her ear.

  “Do you hate yours, too?” she asked.

  He kissed her again before pulling away to light the joint.

  “My parents, shit, they’re from like another world,” the boy said. “Literally.” The rolling paper flashed red as he took a deep drag. “And they’re total pains in the ass.” He inhaled again. “But, yeah, I don’t know, I guess I love them.”

  Lucy saw how it was sad either way with parents. Love or hate. When the boy held out the joint, she took it and sucked in the smoke until she began to choke. “Skunk!” she cried, slapping her chest.

  “It’s good shit,” the boy concurred.

  In five minutes, they were banging their heads to the Pogues and laughing hysterically.

  “Hey,” Frank said, “why don’t you come over to my house for dinner?”—and Lucy, thinking the invitation the most ridiculous thing in the world, accepted. “Why the fuck not?”

  “Why the fuck not indeed,” Frank proclaimed, setting off more laughter. Machine-gun bursts of it they fired at everything and nothing—the hilarity carried straight into the house at 21 Cressida Drive, where the boy’s stout, crucifix-wearing mother asked them what was so funny, had they swallowed a box of feathers?

  Which only made them laugh more.

  * * *

  Until eight years later, when Lucy found herself, at twenty-five, in the same windowless clinic on Bluebell Avenue, married to Frank and carrying his child. Her plan had been to get rid of it. Now, under the drip of fentanyl, Lucy began to mumble—apologizing to Edgar for what she’d almost done to him.

  Lucy had never wanted a baby. And besides, Frank was too far gone by the time she’d gotten pregnant. Sometimes he’d disappear for days, come home looking like an African Jesus fresh from the desert: sun-darkened skin, wild hair, the whites of his eyes shocked by visions. Lucy hadn’t told him she was pregnant. When she’d made the appointment, she’d done so in secret, from Tricia Migliorisi’s house. But then Tricia had ratted her out, and while Lucy had sat in the waiting room, flipping through the pages of a fashion magazine, in stormed Frank, wearing nothing but a pair of ripped jeans. No shoes, no shirt.

  He’d knelt in front of her, pleading. The other girls had stared—the younger ones with envy, and the older ones with pity.

  “We need him, Luce.” Begging. Putting his head on her lap.

  “It’s not a him, Frank,” she’d tried to explain. “It’s not anything.”

  But Frank had said he could feel what it was. “It’s a boy,” he shouted. “It’s me.”

  When a security guard approached, Frank had grabbed Lucy, crying, “Please don’t kill me.”

  It was too much. Lucy had stood. “It’s okay,” she said to the guard, to Frank, to the other girls—to herself. She kept saying it, like some idiotic robot, as she held on to her husband and walked out of the clinic onto an impossibly sunny street. It’s okay it’s okay it’s okay, like she’d lost everything but the ability to utter a profoundly ridiculous lie.

  “Where are your shoes?” she asked Frank, but he wasn’t listening. He was pushing her into the car—the gumball-blue Camaro now replaced by Pio’s gold LeBaron—telling her they had to get home, she had to rest. “He’ll save us,” Frank said. “You’ll see. This baby was sent for a reason.”

  * * *

  Lucy’s foot cramped in the stirrup. She turned to look at the tan walls and squinted, as if still on that sunny street with her husband.

  But he wasn’t her husband anymore, was he? Were you still married to someone after they died? Lucy felt a stab of anxiety. Dead wasn’t dead. Frank was forever, and here she was, carrying the butcher’s baby. She was a whore; Florence had been right.

  Where was the fucking doctor?

  She closed her eyes and saw Edgar barking, Edgar oinking. The thing growing inside her suddenly seemed half human, half pig.

  Or was it Edgar, playing a game? Lucy touched her belly, confused.

  Drip drip drip, ticked the fentanyl, as time moved back and forth like the shuttle of a loom, weaving fantastic cloth: maybe Edgar hadn’t been born yet.

  Maybe the reason no one could find him was because he was still inside her.

  Was it possible, Lucy wondered, to have the same child twice?

  She fumbled for the IV and pulled it from her arm. She couldn’t do this again. This was something a woman could do only once. Plus, she didn’t wish to bring further punishment on herself. It was entirely possible that Edgar had been stolen in retribution for the fact that, once, she’d tried to destroy him.

  But she hadn’t known him then. When she’d made the decision to kill him, he was nothing but a bunch of cells she’d conceived with a lunatic.

  In fact, it seemed that she hadn’t known him until this past week, after he was gone. A boy with the glowing eyes of a sea monster. Who ate one pea at a time. Who saved the fortunes from cookies in a demitasse cup. Lucy had pored through them just a few days ago. You always bring others happiness. People are attracted to your delicate features. Soon new addition to your family!

  Lucy tried to stand, her hand tearing the onionskin covering the table.

  “Mrs. Fini, sorry to keep you— What’s wrong?” The doctor rushed over and grabbed Lucy’s arm to keep her from falling. “What are you doing? I need you to sit back down.”

  “I have to go.”

  “Please, Mrs. Fini, you’re in no state to—”

  But Lucy ignored him. She took her clothes from the hook and began to dress. It was like putting on cobwebs.

  “Change your mind, hon?” The fruity-smelling nurse was back. “I’ll take care of her,” she whispered to the doctor. “You can see Ms. Ramirez in room three.”

  “Where are my shoes?” asked Lucy. “Where are my shoes?”

  “Right there.” The nurse pointed. “But I want you to rest for ten minutes, okay? And then we’ll call your ride.”

  “He’s waiting outside.”

  The woman tried to lead her back to the table.

  “He’s waiting,” shouted Lucy. “I have to go!” She picked up her shoes and arranged her face carefully for the nurse. “I’m fine.”

  Passing through the outer room, she saw the other girls, bored faces in beige chairs, as if waiting for pedicures. One little blonde was smiling, texting into a rhinestoned iPhone. A child—she could almost be forgiven for her stupidity. Lucy had no such luxury.

  As soon as she emerged into the shock of daylight, she knew where she had to go. She had to drive to the bridge at Shepherd’s Junction. In her drug-shadowed state, dressed in cobwebs, it seemed the obvious place to look for the boy. Possibly he was still there. In the berry bushes at the side of the road, where she’d left him, all those years ago.

  BOOK SIX

  NINE MONTHS

  Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.

  —ATTRIBUTED TO CICERO

  October

  34

  Withdrawal

  Thwok. Thwok. Thwok.

  It was like a clock—louder, though, and with the ticking slowed down. Edgar woke to the sound. He rolled from under the comforter and peeked out the window.

  Thwok!

  Conrad was splitting logs. Conrad was the man’s name—and though Edgar felt funny calling him that, it was better than the other suggestions the man had made as to how Edgar might address him.

  Edgar mostly just said, “Excuse me.” It was important to be polite when you were a guest in someone’s house. Conrad had said, “It’s your house, too,” but, of course, it wasn’t. The situation was still confusing—in some ways more so now that Edgar had finished his pills. To be without them had proved disastrous.

  In addition to the unaccountable horror Edgar had felt, five days ago, when faced with the empty bottle, there had been physical repercussions, as well. A ringing in his head had left him unable to sleep for more than a few hours at a time—and when he did drift off, it was on a wave-tossed
raft, from which he’d crash ashore with his limbs shaking and his skin drenched. Fever, delirium. For three days the boy’s awareness skittered through a blinding lexicon of water and bones. Plus, there’d been a terrible twelve hours of constant running to the bathroom. Worse than all of it, though, had been the sadness—a walled-in, suffocating grief that left no room for tears. It was as if Florence had died all over again.

  Ironically, the man—Conrad—had tended to Edgar exactly as Florence would have done—setting up a chair beside the boy’s bed, always at the ready with a cool rag or a soothing pet. Whatever words he’d whispered—and there’d been lots of them—had arrived in the boy’s ear as nothing more than mush, a steady stream of background noise, void of sense. If they had a meaning, it was only in their quality, which Edgar had been able to recognize even from the depths of his shudders. It was the quality of kindness—something of which, one might say, Edgar was a connoisseur. For most of his life he’d sipped from an excellent vintage.

  Thwok.

  Of course, kindness only made the situation more confusing. What was clear was: big things, like time and place, had shifted. It was odd to be awake again after a long dream under the powder-pink thrall of Percocet-Demi, and to find oneself living a completely different life. The oddest thing was how familiar it all was—as if during the powder-pink dream Edgar had been learning things, or rehearsing them, and now, finally shoved onstage, he found he knew how to go about his business. He knew the ins and outs of the set, and where the props went.

  He knew where to find the cereal bowls and the spoons, and he knew what time Jack took his breakfast and how much wet food and how much dry to give him. He knew to use extra force to turn on the hot water in the bathroom sink—but not too much, or the fixture would come loose.

  Thwok.

  He knew that even though there was electric heat in the cabin, the man liked to make a fire first thing in the morning, and then again after dinner. The stone floor in the living room was often numbingly cold, and the fire was the only thing that helped to warm it. As for keeping one’s body warm, Edgar recalled that the man had shown him a good trick: how to sit close to the flames, but facing away, and then after a few minutes, when you could barely stand the heat, to quickly lie on your back on one of the little rugs. It was amazing how the heat from your back bloomed into your entire body—a warm liquidy unfurling that was almost unbearably pleasurable.