Edgar and Lucy

by Victor Lodato

  “Where you going, babe?”

  “Nowhere, I just…” She didn’t turn. “I have to pee. I’ll be back.”

  The butcher, slit-eyed, dream-tapped, admired her wide ass wriggling out the door. “Bring back a blanket,” he called after her. “I took the day off, we can lounge all morning.” He lifted his head. “Luce, you hear me?”

  * * *

  She had, but was unable to reply. The silence in the yard was too heavy, a plank over her chest. Her bare feet took small shocked steps in the wet grass. The house was dark, the hour indeterminate. The back door seemed a hurtful distance away. Something was wrong with the light. It was barely there—the not-quite mind of it watching her. Halfway to the house she stopped, snagged by a crooked bone of déjà vu.

  The light wasn’t wrong at all, but exactly right. The same predawn crepusculence, the trees dusted with dregs of moonmuck, ravenous shadows taking their last licks. It was the same darklight in which she’d found Frank at his holes. The same season—the angle of the unhatched sun a perfect match. The light was like a map, and Lucy realized that when she’d come out here in October, after finding Frank’s note in Florence’s room, she hadn’t dug in the right spots. Her excavations had been wildly off target.

  This knowledge didn’t inspire her, though. She no longer wished to get on her knees and claw at the ground. She passed over the filled-in holes, over the gun she didn’t know was buried there, and entered the house, unarmed—her mind pulsing with the words from Frank’s note.

  Your mother and I are gone now.

  She passed through the kitchen, headed upstairs.

  We were your parents, Frank and Lucy Fini.

  Why had she refused to go with him? Her error lay here. Even with Edgar: why had she hidden him in the berry bushes? It would have been better had they all stayed in the gold LeBaron. There’d be only silence now, only blackness.

  She went straight to Florence’s room and pulled the box from the back of the closet. The Virgin’s headless body, the silk-lined case with its braid of hair, the burnt wedding portrait. Wrapped in newspaper, she found the night-light with its frosted panel of molded glass. She ran her fingers over the angel, the bridge. She even dared to plug it in. As she stared at it, whatever pain there was was tempered by the weightless sensation that none of this was real. How could it be? Someone must have made it up; a story. She had every right to leave it behind, go back to the tent, back to the drowning lips of the butcher.

  She stood, drifted into the hallway, found herself downstairs, but moving in the wrong direction. She opened the front door.

  There was no sun yet, though the darkness thrummed nervously, the last stars biting through the gloaming. Lucy stepped onto the porch. Some idiot had parked in front of the house. In the beginning there was always a policeman stationed there—and then, later, reporters, do-gooders, tragedy hounds. Now it was just disinterested strangers taking the free space.

  As Lucy turned away, the car’s lights flashed—a brief disturbance she sensed only from the corner of her eye. She spun around, looked in error toward the sky. When the vehicle’s lights flashed again, Lucy’s heart jumped. She took a step back, squinted.

  A truck, an old pickup.

  “What do you want?” What she’d meant to shout came out as whisper.

  The truck shuddered to life, its motor turning like a sluggish helicopter. Lucy could just make out the figure behind the wheel. Tall, skinny, an oddly shaped chin—maybe a beard.

  It couldn’t be. She said his name quietly, and then listened for a long time to the ratchet of her own breath. When she moved forward, the truck pulled away—but only slightly, into the middle of the road.

  Lucy was in no mood for games. Particularly at five in the morning, or whatever hellish time it was. This is why she liked to sleep in. Early mornings were minefields, mindfucks. Still, she steeled herself and made a dash forward.

  Instantly the truck rumbled away.

  “Stop, asshole!” yelled Lucy, with no desire whatsoever that the man respect her wishes. She watched the truck tear down Cressida Drive—and then halt, halfway to the corner. It stood, without apology now, under a streetlight. Pale green, freckled with rust, the license plate covered with black paper. Lucy felt an incomprehensible stab of hope.

  For several seconds neither she nor the truck moved. And then, without turning away, she stepped slowly backwards toward the house, thinking she had better wake the butcher.

  As if the truck had a better idea, it flashed its lights again and rolled forward a few inches.

  Lucy felt her face burning in the chilly air as she continued to backtrack toward the house, saying, Ron, Ron, Ron, in a pathetically quiet voice. Without taking her eyes from the truck, she blindly stepped up onto the porch and then dashed inside—but only far enough to grab her car keys, along with Florence’s coat hanging by the door.

  “Ron!”—and though she shouted now at the top of her lungs, there was no time to wait.

  Outside, a strange relief that the truck was still there. Lucy got into her little red coupe. As soon as she’d pulled out of the driveway, the pickup began to move. Lucy followed, glancing only quickly toward the house, where the butcher was standing on the porch, waving his arms. A moment later she turned from Cressida onto Laurel, free to give her full attention to the tar-papered license plate.

  She kept her eyes solely on that. It gave her a point of focus, and it made her decision to follow the truck seem somehow more logical. She wasn’t following a bearded man at five in the morning, she was simply following a small black rectangle, the signifier of all she didn’t know.

  * * *

  Without looking at the buildings or the signs, she could tell that she was no longer in Ferryfield. Peripherally glimpsed shadows informed her that she was passing through West Mill, where she’d grown up. She now noticed the scribbled-over bumper sticker on the rear fender of the truck. She squinted, could almost make out a word. Control.

  The truck sped up.

  Now they were inside other towns, where the light was better or the hour later—Lucy couldn’t tell which. Time was locked down, held in stasis by the glitch of Lucy’s heartbeat. When she saw the sign for Bluebell Avenue, she was confused, thinking that the man in the truck might be leading her back to the abortion clinic. But he didn’t turn there; he drove onto some wider roads where there were more cars. Lucy cut ahead of a few sluggish drivers to stay with the truck. Her rising nausea was tinged with giddiness, that peculiar sloshed sobriety. She found it difficult to swallow. Near the entrance to the Parkway, in a pocket of congestion, she lost sight of the pickup.

  North or south? She pressed on the horn to clear her thoughts, startling a raven from a maple. The bird flew to the left, and Lucy followed it. North.

  On the highway, though, she couldn’t find the man—or couldn’t be sure which vehicle up ahead was his. The sun, just risen, was hampered by clouds. She stepped on the gas, and after a while she saw the truck flash its lights in her rearview mirror. Strangely, the man was behind her now, a distressing distance away. Lucy was unable to slow down, locked in a freight train of aggressive commuters.

  She flashed her own lights to let him know that she’d seen him. In the semi-darkness, communication seemed enhanced—and as she moved swiftly in the flow of traffic, it produced an exotic effect. The Parkway itself seemed conscious—each driver a part of its brain. So what if the man was behind her? She’d beat him there.

  A funny thought, since she had no idea where she was going.

  Still, she kept driving. Humming a song she didn’t know. She covered a great distance with a startling absence of thought—startling because she sensed her blank mind was only a curtain, behind which everything was set: elaborate scenery, all the props in place.

  She’s felt like this before, a frightened spider, architect of her own web.

  She drives, humming; she drives in silence. Ten minutes, an hour. She checks the mirror regularly; the truck is still a ways
behind her—though now she isn’t sure if it’s the same one. When its lights flash again and an arm emerges from the window, pointing, Lucy tries to understand the gesture. She sees an exit ramp just to her right and takes it—a last-second turn that sends Saint Christopher swinging.

  She’s so sure she’s correctly interpreted the man’s directive that she fails to look behind her, to see if he’s taken the exit, as well. The angle of the emerging sun is distracting. Breaking clouds, a twisting narrow road, a sudden increase in the number of trees. It’s a lot to take in, but when she rolls down the window, she can smell Edgar.

  Never stop looking.

  You will want to dedicate part of each day to your missing child. And though your grief is likely to come unannounced, don’t dwell on it. Remember: You have work to do!

  When Lucy finally looks for the man in the mirror, she doesn’t see him. All she can see are trees. She adjusts the rearview. An approaching car blares its horn. Lucy moves quickly back to her lane, and when she speeds around a rib-contorting curve, she sees the two bridges.

  She doesn’t make a sound. Her shock is not the choired shock of revelation, but the silent shock of terrors recalled.

  She’s been tricked. The man or the raven. She should have driven south. The truth is, she hasn’t been sure of the green truck since right before the Parkway. She races ahead anyway. The thump thump thump of the first bridge rocks her body like gunfire. On the other side, she slows, looking for the berry bushes, the spot where she’d laid Edgar on the ground.

  The wild field’s been paved, though—the bushes ripped out. Some kind of warehouse or storage facility has been put up. A series of padlocked doors Lucy can’t stand to look at.

  Not everything has changed, of course. There’s the second bridge, the slatted guardrail grinning. She drives as close as she can, stops the car. She gets out, walks to the rail—though walking is the wrong word. She feels carried. There’s no pain in her leg, as if the injury hasn’t happened yet.

  She climbs over, works her way down to the small rock ledge high above the water—knowing now that she’s been tricked by no man, no raven. She’s done this to herself. The river moves swiftly. The baby kicks. She raises her arms to something she doesn’t understand, wanting to scream but able to eke out only dry pebbles of sound.

  Had Frank’s pain been this great? Had Florence’s? To have lost her only son. Why had Lucy never realized how terrible it must have been for the old woman?

  She leans forward into the void. The sound of the canyon like a huge seashell pressed to her ear; the river a cold blue flecked with white. She only wishes she could detach her belly, leave it safely on the ledge. All she wants to do is to swim in the river, to understand it. Frank said it might be possible to find each other again under the water, even in the darkness. Edgar’s face, he said, was the light. Swim toward that.

  It’s only a matter of how to get down there. She takes a step forward, uses her toe to envoy a stone. It falls silently—the reverie interrupted by the sound of wheels on gravel. Lucy turns and sees the truck.

  Except it’s white now, like before. An ambulance.

  Like the one that took her away with a bleeding broken leg, a sunburned Edgar in her arms. No, she’d pleaded with the men that day—telling them she needed to go back for her husband. But somehow they’d managed to silence her. By the time she’d regained consciousness, they’d set her leg, encased it in plaster, the police outside the room asking if there was anyone she needed to call.

  Just—just take me back, she’d stammered, throwing things until they’d relented. They’d put her in another ambulance after that.

  They didn’t drive her back to the bridge, though, but to 21 Cressida Drive—the old woman rushing outside at the sight of the white truck. When Lucy was wheeled from the back, the baby in her arms, it was someone else’s turn to scream.

  “Where’s Frankie? Where’s Frankie?”

  Lucy shakes her head, covers her face. Florence goes white, runs down the street.

  Runs until she falls, sobbing. Pio goes to her, pulls her up, drags her back.

  When the old woman approaches the wheelchair and takes the baby, Lucy doesn’t resist. She knows she can’t be trusted. It begins here—the boy no longer hers, but belonging to his grandmother.

  Even now, Lucy senses, she would be made to keep her promise. Edgar would be Florence’s even unto death.

  “Lucy!”

  She opens her eyes to the truck.

  Not an ambulance, though. A white van painted with red letters.

  Let us MEAT your needs!

  “Don’t move,” he says.

  She takes a step back—though that’s the wrong direction. She doesn’t care, though.

  The butcher climbs over the rail.

  “Don’t!” commands Lucy. “I don’t want you—”

  “Goddamn you.” His massive body engulfs her. “Goddamn you,” he cries, clutching her.

  When she tries to pull away, the water breaks from between her legs and slaps against the rocks.

  63

  Laughter

  The man placed his hand on the boy’s head, shaved clean after the fire. The dog was sleeping on the bed, which made it seem safe to close one’s eyes; the boy did so, and barely sighed when he felt the man’s thumb caress the singed eyebrow. There was no pain. All things, lately, had escaped the grip of what should have destroyed them.

  Even the pygmies.

  The little pines behind the shed had been horribly charred—black daggers, dead to the core. A few weeks later, though, seedlings appeared in the ash. It seemed a miracle, but it was merely science. Fires, the man had explained, were common in the Barrens—and the pygmies had learned how to survive them. In fact, it was the heat of the flames that caused the pinecones to open and the seeds to fall. While it often killed the tree, fire was good for the tree’s children. Evolution required sacrifice.

  The boy thought a lot about the pygmies while lying in bed. He only wished he could tell Mr. Levinson—though Mr. Levinson, being a science teacher, probably knew all about the fire-foxing trees. Besides, it was unlikely, the boy realized, that he’d see Mr. Levinson again. Mr. Levinson was part of the dream of before.

  If this was sad, it was folded up, put away in a drawer. The boy’s spring-roaring blood turned him manic; roiled the darker concerns of his plight into the general mud of his native melancholy. Anyway, things weren’t so terrible now at the cabin. Life seemed almost normal.

  Which is not to say the boy was happy—though he knew he should be. He was lucky to be alive. There was even plenty of food. The stocks from the kitchen were long gone, but some cans from the shed had been salvaged.

  Everything else had burned—the shed itself a pile of black bones. The boy was glad the notebooks were gone, though he hated himself for feeling this way, knowing the man must have spent a lot of time working on his stories—most of which were more than stories. It was terrible what people said when they thought no one was listening.

  When the boy remembered what he’d read, it seemed like something from another planet.

  Private stuff about people named Sara and Kevin and Edgar.

  Names were a funny thing. They, too, could be burned away. For several days after the fire, the man and the boy had slept in the same bed—not as Edgar and Conrad, but as something else. The fire had changed them, cooked them, making them less who they were, and more who they might be.

  Shock. That was the word Conrad had used. This shock had somehow corrected them.

  They’d slept, it seemed, for a long time—every now and then one or the other stumbling into the kitchen for a glass of water or something to eat. Kibble for Jack, flakes for the fish. Brief excursions, after which they returned to the dark cave of Conrad’s bedroom. For days they’d smelled like smoke, and their hair had been horrible. Later, when they were awake for real, the man had used his beard trimmer to shave their heads. It was almost funny, then, the way they’d resembled each oth
er.

  “The baldies,” Conrad had said, and Edgar had found himself smiling.

  Every now and then, it happened again—Edgar’s lips going up instead of down. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, it was disturbing.

  Sometimes Edgar wasn’t sure who he was. Even his face had changed. At first it was a bright red—a raw color that reminded him of his grandmother’s hands. “Superficial burn,” Conrad had said, whose own skin had been the same.

  But as Conrad’s burn had faded and healed, Edgar’s had turned flaky. Pieces fell off, translucent curls like the molt of a snake. What was underneath made no sense. The boy’s skin was noticeably darker.

  “Do you think something’s wrong?” he often asked.

  “You’re fine,” Conrad assured him.

  “But why is it like that?”

  “Like what? It looks normal.”

  Edgar shook his head. “Don’t you remember what I looked like before? When you first met me?”

  Conrad said that he did.

  “Well, that’s how I look,” persisted Edgar. “I was born like that. It doesn’t go away. It’s a condition.”

  Not that he’d ever liked his shock-white skin, but he’d gotten used to it; it was one of the things that made him who he was. Now, he looked different somehow—and not just his face. His chest, too, his legs, the whole run of him like someone in makeup.

  “Come away from the mirror, Edgar.”

  “I’m getting darker.” He rubbed his cheek as if it were smudged, as if the real boy might be underneath. There was too much blood in his face, too much color. He looked down at his painted hands.

  Conrad took the boy by the shoulders and turned him around. “Stop. There’s nothing you can do.”

  “But why would it happen?”