* * *
“Why do you say he?” Edgar once asked. After consistently noticing Jack doing number one like a girl, he’d finally peeked between the animal’s legs.
“Just habit,” the man had replied. “Dogs always seem like boys, don’t they?”
Edgar didn’t agree.
“She can’t make babies anymore,” the man added.
“She’s fixed?” Edgar remembered the terminology from something his grandmother had once said about Toni-Ann, how people like her shouldn’t be allowed to have children.
“Yes,” the man said.
“We should probably say she, though,” Edgar suggested meekly.
“And what should I call you?” the man asked.
Edgar blushed, nervously touching his hair, which was getting long again.
“I’m just teasing,” the man said. “You still want me to call you Edgar?”
“Yes, please,” said Edgar.
* * *
Whenever the boy stepped out of his room, Jack trotted over and immediately began to lick. She preferred his face, but if the boy was standing she usually went for his left hand. Edgar noticed the way she gave particular attention to the once-damaged finger, as if she could taste something different there, or wished to soothe whatever hurt remained.
If Florence were here, she would have done something similar. Kissed the tip of his finger every morning. Kisses were another kind of medicine.
But that was more for a baby, and Conrad had said, Eight is not a baby.
Still, Edgar often knelt before the animal and hugged her as if she were someone he loved. Sometimes he rested his forehead against hers and let his breath condense into a small moan. When he was alone in the house and feeling brave, he’d bark, and Jack would bark back. It was a kind of screaming.
Soon Edgar learned that Jack had more than one kind of bark; he’d isolated seven varieties thus far. Plus, in addition to barks, there were whines and yelps and squeals, as well as howls and chirps and sighs. Edgar was a good listener, a good student. He came to understand that a dog’s body—the way it moved—had a lot to say, as well.
This morning, as Edgar stood in the living room yawning, Jack tested him:
The licking was finished and now she was moving in a circle (I want to play), followed by a peculiar tilt of the head (I have an idea), and then the animal’s circle widened and became more of a figure eight—this last movement, combined with a short repetitive squeal, could only mean one thing: I want to show you something.
As Edgar approached, the dog offered a small yelp of approval and skittered away. The boy followed until he was standing beside the dog in front of Conrad’s bedroom door. Jack knelt, lifted a paw, and began to scratch.
“No,” whispered Edgar.
The dog whined.
“No,” the boy said more firmly.
But the dog contradicted him, lifting her head in a regal snap and uttering a brief, sharp demand.
“Shhh.” Edgar looked up. He could hear Conrad on the roof—removing branches or clearing the gutters of pine needles.
“You’re messing up the door,” said Edgar, noticing the white lines the dog’s paws had made on the dark wood. When he knelt down to examine the marks more closely, he saw there were lots of them—more than what Jack could have made in the last minute. Some of the marks were deep grooves that preserved what seemed to be a long history of the dog scratching at Conrad’s door—of wanting in, but being refused.
“Are you not allowed?” asked Edgar. The dog answered by licking his face.
The boy had always assumed that the dog slept in Conrad’s room. If that wasn’t the case, Edgar wondered if he might ask if Jack could sleep with him. His bed was small, but there was room enough for two, considering the size of the two in question. He and Jack were around the same length. Jack was thicker, of course, but together they would still be less than one full-sized person.
Jack was scratching at the door again. It didn’t seem right to deny her. It’s your house, too, Conrad had said.
Edgar stood and tried the handle. It turned, but the door wouldn’t move—it seemed to be stuck. He would have left it at that, had Jack not offered a sustained squeal of encouragement. The boy pushed again and the door popped open with a twang. Instantly Jack flowed through the foot-wide opening.
Edgar couldn’t see much of anything, but resisted the impulse to open the door wider. “Don’t make a mess in there,” he whispered through the crack (the dog had become suspiciously quiet). “What are you doing?” asked Edgar. “Okay, come on—come out. Jack.” Edgar pushed open the door a little more. The curtains in the room were drawn; there was very little light.
When his eyes adjusted, he could see the animal moving with her head down—sniffing the carpet, the man’s slippers, the bottom of the heavy curtains. She lifted her snout to smell the seat of a chair, and then the edge of the quilt hanging from the large bed. The dog even put her head under the quilt—burrowing with a slight thrashing motion that began to mess up the neatly arranged sheets.
Suddenly the dog seemed to Edgar like no one more than his mother. Sniffing around a room that wasn’t hers; trying to root out something of value. The way she’d rummaged through his grandmother’s private papers, stolen her money—it still made Edgar furious.
“It’s not your room,” he scolded the dog. He went to smack her behind, but only lightly patted it—his anger, as always, drawing back at the brink of cruelty. The butt-pat did make the dog emerge from under the quilt, but only in expectation of play. She looked up at the boy, barked, and then jumped up on her hind legs as if she wished to dance.
“No,” Edgar said—“down.”
The dog uttered a thin mewl of disappointment before leaping onto the bed and settling there with a sigh.
“We can’t stay in here,” Edgar whispered. “Jack.”
The animal rested her head on her front paws and peered upward with the sad hope of a saint on a prayer card. The boy uttered his own sigh; took a moment to catch his breath. The small jagged crack between the curtains let in a frail rivulet of flickering light that traveled across the floor. When Edgar followed it to the window, he did so with only slight trepidation: the room didn’t face the woodpile—and anyway, from the sound of it, Conrad was still on the roof.
Larger pines pressed in close to this side of the cabin. Edgar spread the curtains a few inches and saw the dense cluster of trunks—medium thick and muscular. They seemed joined in a common task, collaborating to create confusing pathways of empty space. They were maze-makers, these trees—hypnotists. Outside the window was the beginning of the mirrorland, a place that, should you enter it, you might find yourself—as Edgar had—right back where you’d started.
It was beautiful, though—the forest. Edgar looked up into the rustling green. Sundrops pinballed down through the needles—though very little light actually made it to the ground, which remained densely shadowed.
He glanced back toward the bed. Jack was staring at something, and Edgar’s heart leapt. He clenched his fists and turned, expecting to see Conrad.
Instead he saw a small table near the door, from which two tiny sets of eyes returned his gaze. He hadn’t noticed the photographs when he’d first come in. “Are you looking at those?” he asked the dog. He moved closer, and immediately understood who it was. It was Kevin and the nurse.
Conrad’s son. Conrad’s wife.
Each was consigned to a separate photograph—though both images were obviously taken in the same place. Behind each figure, the same curved background of tall summer trees. The boy looked to be around twelve, and the woman not much older than Lucy. Both were dressed in shorts and T-shirts. They seemed happy—though that was probably no longer true.
“They’re gone now,” the man had said.
Edgar had known better than to ask the man to clarify the nature of their goneness. Whenever Conrad mentioned them, he always looked ill, and his right leg would often start to jitter as if it
had a motor inside it.
Edgar put himself in front of the two smiling faces. The boy was handsome, and the woman pretty. Mother and son, standing among the trees.
Mirrorland.
Edgar felt dizzy. In his own family, it was the father who was gone—the son and the mother still here. But in Conrad’s world, it was the mother and the son who were gone, and the father who remained. It seemed to be a problem of mathematics. Edgar’s solution was to divide the people into two separate families: one family of the living (Conrad, Edgar, Lucy) and one family of the dead (Frank, Kevin, the nurse).
But then he realized his error. The nurse wasn’t dead. Only Kevin was dead. The nurse had simply gone away in a car. Edgar wasn’t sure how he knew this, but sometimes it seemed that, while he slept, Conrad lingered by his bed, telling him stories. When Edgar had nervously asked one day if the nurse was coming back, Conrad had replied in a tone more forceful than usual: “No one’s coming back.”
An exchange after which the man had suddenly embraced Edgar. The boy had stood there, frozen.
Edgar peered closer, scanning Kevin’s face, trying to see some sign of whatever it was that had killed him—some sickness or disease perhaps. Conrad hadn’t said how he’d died.
Edgar sat on the bed, beside the dog, and closed his eyes.
Why was there so much sadness everywhere? And what could be done about it? Frankie, his grandmother had sometimes called him, without even noticing she’d done it. It had seemed to help her somehow—to lessen a sadness that lived inside her, but that Edgar had never managed to understand. He felt ashamed now, as if he’d failed her.
Maybe he should let Conrad call him Kevin—not all the time, just once in a while.
The boy laid his head on the quilt, pulled himself closer to Jack’s warmth, and tumbled into sleep.
* * *
“Kevin.”
Edgar heard the word, but only barely, a snowflake landing on his ear, dissolving instantly. He curled himself into a tighter ball. When he felt the dog beside him, he realized with a start that he was still on Conrad’s bed. He continued to breathe, feigning sleep.
“At least open one eye,” Conrad said, “so I know you’re alive.”
Edgar did.
The man stood in the doorway, pine needles clinging to his blue plaid shirt. In his hand was a plastic bag filled with something lumpy.
“I fell asleep,” said Edgar. “I didn’t touch anything,” he added. “Jack wanted to come in.”
“It’s fine,” said the man. He set down the plastic bag beside the small table of photographs.
When the boy attempted to speak again, no words came—only a sharp garble of sound somewhere between human and animal. Jack pricked up her ears.
The boy swallowed and tried again—pushing out the words. “Where are we?”
“Please don’t shout,” said Conrad.
Edgar breathed. “I want to go back to New Jersey.”
“Where do you think you are, kiddo?”
“Pinelands,” squeaked Edgar, remembering what the man had told him.
“That’s right.” Conrad was smiling, using his Mr. Rogers voice. “Almost a quarter of the whole state is the Pinelands.”
“But what state?” asked Edgar.
The man’s smile was stuck on his face. “New Jersey.”
Edgar couldn’t see how that was possible. New Jersey wasn’t a wilderness.
Conrad shuffled over to the window and threw open the curtains. “And do you know how much of it belongs to me? Nearly nine hundred acres. Pretty amazing, huh?”
In his head Edgar rounded off the number to something just shy of infinity.
“I know it doesn’t seem like paradise now, but wait until the spring. There are flowers here, Edgar—orchids—that don’t grow anywhere else in the world.”
The boy closed his eyes and whimpered. Spring seemed a million years away.
“You know what we need?” Conrad said brightly.
“What?” the boy said, close to tears.
“A miracle,” whispered Conrad.
Edgar could feel his heart hurtling through space. Florence had often said the same thing. “What’s in the bag?” he asked, gesturing toward the plastic sack by the door.
“Apples,” said Conrad.
Edgar’s mouth watered. He’d hardly eaten anything for several days. He asked if he could please have one.
“These aren’t for eating.” Conrad retrieved the bag and pulled out a deformed little bulb covered in black spots. “They’re crabapples. I thought we might play a game with them. Put them on top of some posts, see how many we can knock off.”
Edgar didn’t think this sounded like fun. He asked if, instead, he might write a letter.
“Of course,” said Conrad. “Breakfast first, and then a letter. Here, let me give you a lift.”
As the man swooped in toward the bed, Jack lifted her head and barked.
Conrad immediately pulled back. “What’s the matter, boy?”
“Girl,” Edgar said quietly, before informing the man that the dog didn’t like it when people moved too fast.
“Is that right?” said Conrad.
Edgar nodded. When he climbed down off the bed and headed into the living room, the animal followed.
* * *
If the man felt a twinge of jealousy, it passed quickly. What lingered in his mind, though, was the realization that the boy might be more willful than he’d seemed at first.
Which was a good thing, really. Two weeks had already passed—and though Conrad was happy to have this sweet interlude with the child, it was time to get down to business. Business that would not be served by trying to gain Edgar’s affection. Wasn’t the whole point to get the shotgun into the child’s hands?
Conrad pulled a small notepad from his pocket and jotted down the words.
I am to be despised.
He wrote it repeatedly, until there was no room left on the page.
36
Signs and Symbols
Driving home one afternoon, Lucy saw a boy with an axe stuck in his head. He was walking casually on the sidewalk, swinging a large orange shopping bag.
An hour later, as Lucy was stepping out of the bathtub, the doorbell rang. She quickly wrapped a towel around herself and ran downstairs, leaving wet footprints on the carpet. The doorbell had lately become a poisoned arrow tipped with hope. “Coming,” she cried.
A child stood on the stoop. He was covered in a white sheet—pink lips flashing through a crudely cut mouth hole.
“Trick or treat.”
The voice was high, like her son’s—and he was the right height.
Lucy could feel the water dripping down her legs. When she reached out to touch the sheet, the child retreated, and a woman in a purple tracksuit emerged from the shadows of the lawn. “What are you doing?”
“I just…” Lucy’s hand moved again toward the sheet.
“Miss. Would you please not touch my kid?”
Lucy pulled back as the mother approached, her thin face sketched with whiskers and crowned with two triangles of black felt. She glared at Lucy. “How could you even answer the door like that—half naked—when you know there’s gonna be children?”
Lucy apologized. She stood there, sweating, as the revelers scurried off.
But then the hope-like fear shot through her again, and she dashed across the lawn. At the sidewalk, by the hydrangea, she came up behind the child and pulled at the white sheet.
“What the hell are you doing?” The woman gave Lucy a shove, but Lucy somehow managed to keep hold of the sheet. She nearly had it off when it snagged at the neck, where some elastic had been sewn in.
“Ow,” squealed the ghost.
“Are you crazy?” the woman hissed.
Lucy used both hands now, freeing the child’s head.
A little girl in white leggings and a thermal undershirt stared up, terrified.
Not Edgar.
The words repeated themsel
ves in Lucy’s head like some cruel mantra. Everything in the world, it seemed, was not Edgar. The greatest cruelty being how everything in the world somehow still referred to Edgar.
The woman in the tracksuit continued to shout, threatening to call the police. Lucy barely heard the words—nor did she feel the towel slip from her body.
“Oh my God,” the woman said with disgust—marching away with her daughter.
Lucy watched them go, as other children gathered on the sidewalk—all of them keeping a safe distance from the naked woman. Two boys—one in a black cape, one in a hockey mask—were laughing.
Lucy didn’t feel the cold. She was looking at the sky now. The storm clouds had blown through, and the stars were coming out, clear and bright—close and far at the same time. She felt their light falling into her eyes. The stars were pulsing, speaking in code.
Not Edgar.
When the butcher’s van pulled into the driveway, Lucy saw it only peripherally. She had a sense of standing on a bridge, waiting for an ambulance. But when she felt a coat being wrapped around her, she recognized the voice. “Come on, babe,” the butcher said, leading her back toward the house.
“Get out of here,” he barked to some of the lingering children. “There’s nothing to see.”
To which the hockey mask crudely replied: “We already saw it!”
As soon as the butcher had Lucy settled on the couch, he grabbed one of the flyers with Edgar’s picture. He flipped it over to the blank side and wrote in large block letters: NO CANDY SORRY. PLEASE DON’T RING BELL. He taped the note to the front door, turned on the porch light, and told Lucy to close her eyes and rest; he was making pork chops.
November
37
The Waiter
Under the influence of fentanyl, she’d driven erratically, but with no doubt that she’d find Edgar waiting for her on the bridge or by the berry bushes. The closer she’d got, though, the more frightened she’d grown. Shepherd’s Junction existed on a plane of reality that was bent—the rules of gravity, different. One could easily be torn apart, or crushed.
Edgar and Lucy Page 33
