Edgar wondered how far out they were, but he didn’t get up to look. Not because he wasn’t allowed, but because an invisible weight held him down. Maybe it had something to do with his head, which seemed to be getting heavier and heavier the more he thought about things.
“Are you asleep?”
Conrad said he wasn’t.
“Do you know what that one’s called?” Edgar pointed toward a pulsing star in the center of the sky.
Conrad aligned his eyes with the boy’s finger. “No—what is it?”
“I don’t know,” said Edgar. “I thought you knew.”
“No—sorry. Rest,” said Conrad. He pulled the boy closer.
And though the man’s body was a mystery, Edgar folded himself into it, as he’d folded himself into those other bodies—which had been mysteries, too.
When he told Conrad that his head hurt, the man caressed his hair. “Go to sleep.”
But Edgar’s heart was racing. “What happened?” he said.
“When?”
“At the restaurant.”
“You hit me,” said Conrad, turning his face toward Edgar.
“No I didn’t.”
“Yes. You said you hated me.”
Edgar had once said the same thing to his mother. The memory made him sick. The tears fell, as before.
“I won’t tell them, Conrad.”
“Okay, shhh.”
“If they come, I mean. We don’t have to say goodbye.”
“Who said anything about goodbye?” whispered Conrad. “You rest.”
* * *
The boat moved steadily on the waves, like the burrowing snout of an animal. Everything was quiet now. Even the sound of the anchor scraping the sand had stopped—which must have meant that the water was deeper. Conrad had pulled the blanket up too high; it was over their heads.
Edgar shut his eyes. He was supposed to rest.
To rest, his grandmother had said, was to go home.
Everything was fading. If there were sirens, the bay blew them back toward shore. When Conrad made a small sound like a baby, Edgar sleepily patted him—meaning, I won’t let them hurt you.
69
Beauty
Lucy sat by the window, with the curtains open. Her pink robe glowed—and in her arms the little body wriggled. It was hungry again, its dumpling fist knocking against Lucy’s ribs.
She looked away.
In the mirror, she saw a painting—a stony-faced woman with one breast exposed. She’d seen something like it before, in a museum with Frank; had shrugged it off as Old World porn. But Frank had disagreed, saying, “No, babe, it’s not just a tit. She’s potent and she’s not afraid to show it.”
Lucy, though, felt frightened, sitting in the plush nursing chair by the window. What frightened her wasn’t the child’s coloring (Mediterranean skin, black honey hair) or its willful shrieks; what frightened Lucy was how much she had to offer it, how her milk flowed freely, like wealth.
Words slipped from her mouth, too, before she could stop them. “You hungry, beauty?” Though part of her wanted to ignore the child, she found it impossible to be unkind.
The suckling felt good, and she caressed the baby’s head.
Learning kindness late in life was a kind of torture. The pain often came from the past, from kindnesses withheld. The knife was particularly sharp when those who most deserved your kindness were long gone. And unless you wanted to die of sorrow, you had to give this unspent kindness to those you loved less.
Lucy tried to keep the people from her life in separate camps, keep now from before, the living from the dead. It wasn’t easy, though—nearly impossible, really, when your body was mostly fluid, and the sun touched the skin of something impossibly lovely.
This impossible loveliness didn’t have a name yet. Lucy had agreed to a christening, though, and needed to come up with something soon.
The butcher would have liked Angela, his mother’s name, but didn’t suggest this to Lucy. “Whatever you want is fine,” he’d told her. “But hurry, or the boys won’t know what to tattoo on their arms”—nuzzling his face against the baby’s as he’d said this. “Isn’t that right, gorgeous? Yes, you are. Yes, you are.”
The child had Lucy’s pale green eyes set in the butcher’s proud swarthiness.
Now he appeared in the doorway of the bedroom. “I’m off to the shop,” he said, catching Lucy’s eye in the mirror—and then her breast. “That looks nice.”
“Pervert,” she said.
Ron smiled and told her to watch her language, or his daughter might end up with a mouth like her mother’s—a mouth he stepped into the room to kiss.
“Look at that hair,” he said, touching the baby’s black curls. “Look at those fingers.” When the little hand grabbed his meaty thumb, he sighed, and his eyelids dipped as if he’d just been shot with heroin.
The drug, though, was blood—something Lucy, growing up as she had, had never really understood. But Ron was another Italian; his métier was family. Sometimes Lucy was so grateful to him that she could hardly bear it, and was glad for the hours he spent at the shop.
“See you tonight, babes”—after which he left them with a chaste kiss to Lucy’s breast.
* * *
Thank God it was a girl.
A boy would have been harder. A boy would have made the central fact more glaring—the central fact being that the child was not Edgar.
Not Edgar. Those words, with Lucy for so long now, in response to every kid on the street, every star, every crumb on the table, had now found their final resting place. Had they come to rest in a boy, how would she have been able to love it? The green eyes were bad enough. In addition to being Lucy’s, they were also Edgar’s.
A girl seemed less of a thief.
Lucy had planned to parse out her love, deliver it in increments—but it had happened all at once. As soon as you fed one of these things, you felt the clever red thread that bound you to it eternally.
As Lucy nursed the girl, she noted that it looked a bit like Frank, even like Florence—something about the brow—and it was a shock when she realized her error. The child shared no blood with either of them.
Still, she’d decided to make the nursery in Florence’s old room. Not that they were staying here much longer. Ron wanted them in a new house by Christmas.
Maybe they should reconsider, though. There was something here—in the walls, in the floors, in the white tiles stolen from the Lincoln Tunnel. History was a terrible word, but it had to be faced. Lucy recalled how, after Frank’s death, the old woman had performed a kind of miracle. Their world had been destroyed—and while Lucy and Pio would have been content to burn down what little remained, the old woman had somehow rebuilt the house. The foundation had been Edgar. Maybe it could be done again, with this child.
Not start over—but continue.
* * *
The early white blossoms had withered, and Ferryfield was purple with lilac and azalea. As summer staged its miracles, the dramatis personae arrived, one by one, to visit the baby.
Anita Lester came. She’d of course been there for the delivery. It had been a difficult labor, with a fair amount of blood. The butcher had fainted. Hard to believe that it had only been a week ago. But Lucy and the baby were healthy now—and when Anita came by it was mainly to bring crumb cake or gossip.
Henry and Netty, hearing of the messy delivery, had brought a new set of sheets to replace the birth-stained ones—and then they’d stayed for tea. “Good she doesn’t have red hair,” Henry had remarked of the baby.
Lucy had lifted an eyebrow. “Why is that?”
Henry simply said, “Unlucky.”
“Your luck begins now,” chirped Netty, in an attempt to deflect Henry’s faux pas. She reached for a shopping bag. “Look! We brought you towels, too.”
There were other gifts, as well—some of them surprisingly intimate—from women with whom Lucy was not particularly close. Celeste from the salon arrived wi
th a homemade salve for sore nipples, and Florence’s old friend Honey Fasinga brought an expensive cream for stretch marks. “I thought you never had children,” Lucy said—and Honey said, “That’s right,” explaining that she used the cream on her face.
People were clueless and—it couldn’t be avoided—kind. In addition to the cream, Honey bestowed a velvet bed jacket with a faux-fur collar—something, Lucy imagined, Joan Crawford would have worn. Either that or a pole dancer. Honey assured Lucy that such jackets were in again.
“Plus,” said Honey, “it’s so much better to receive visitors in something like this than in that. What do you call that?” She stuck a bony finger into one of the holes in Lucy’s moth-bitten Pogues T-shirt. When Lucy explained that the T-shirt had sentimental value, Honey said, “Be that as it may, fashion imprinting begins at birth.”
* * *
“You could have died,” Anita had told her. “It was a very dumb thing not to go to the hospital.”
“I know,” said Lucy.
“Now you have to think about…”
“I know,” said Lucy.
The future was a difficult word, too. There was no need to rub it in.
Anita pushed back the baby’s curls. “She’s a looker.”
“Yes,” agreed Lucy. “God help her.”
* * *
The girl had sucked like a pro and was sleeping now. Lucy put her in the crib.
The house was so quiet. Lucy wandered in pretense of aimlessness, though she knew where she was headed.
In Florence’s room, she stared at the old black telephone. She picked it up and listened to the dial tone—the sound like a tunnel. Sometimes she could hear indistinct voices, faraway conversations, laughter. She sat on the old woman’s bed where she’d delivered the baby. It had been an exhausting six-hour labor; Lucy had been delirious—glimpsing Edgar in the doorway. She’d seen other children, too—kids from the billboard in Times Square. She’d seen Olivia—the dark-haired, bespectacled girl, whose mother had shown Lucy not only a picture of the child at six, but also an age-progressed one at sixteen.
Of course, Olivia in the doorway had still been six—Edgar still eight. Every child had been white—and they’d just stood there, silently, as Lucy had screamed and pushed. By the time it was over, though, the ghosts had cleared out, leaving behind only flesh and blood.
Lucy hung up the black telephone and went to the closet—pulling out the cardboard box marked Florence. From it she took the blue glass cup, along with a new candle.
The old woman and her flickering votives, her saints, her girlhood hair in a black silk box—she suddenly seemed, to Lucy, more than what she’d been in life. Not just a balding, semi-illiterate biddy in a faded housedress. She seemed wise—some kind of sad genius whose art had had something to do with those tiny fires.
Of course, the dead tricked you. They came back, telling you they were someone other than who they’d been; tried to improve themselves in your eyes.
Still, why not wish them well, even if you had no hope of seeing them again?
Lucy’s affection for the dead, though, was not distributed equally. When she told Ron that she loved him, she said it loudly, so that Frank would hear it—and when she said the same words to the baby, it was quietly, so that Edgar would not.
The bureau was dusty, and Lucy wiped the surface with her T-shirt, before setting down the candle and lighting it with one of the chopstick-length matches Edgar had liked to play with. She held her palm over the flame, and had no idea what her life was, or meant.
Not two seconds later, she heard a strange sound—Chuk! Chuk! Chuk! It sounded like a chicken or a held-in sneeze. When she went to the window, she saw the squirrel in the tree. Chuk! Chuk!
Then, she looked down and noticed the police car in front of the house.
“No.”
She didn’t want to know. She returned to her bedroom and grabbed Beauty—after which she ran downstairs, and out the back door.
70
The Fish
Edgar woke to a bang, but could see nothing. He shielded his eyes against a chaos of light. Against the bottom of the boat, Conrad’s foot was flailing desperately. Edgar reached out to help and immediately pulled back.
It wasn’t Conrad, but a silver oblong the size of a flattened football. Slits by its head opened and closed, and it was flopping with such force that it flew into the air. There was blood by its mouth.
For a moment the creature was still, and Edgar noted the terrible glass eye staring at him. Then it flipped again, as if trying to cook itself against the warm metal. When Edgar grabbed it, it slipped away and slammed into the side of the boat.
“Stop,” shouted Edgar. He couldn’t help the thing unless it calmed down.
The fish seemed to understand. Only the mouth moved now, releasing a thin stream of red. Edgar spotted the hook—which he deftly removed by holding the fish down.
When it thrashed again, Edgar scooped it up and tossed it over the side. It darted under and away with a graceful flick, as if it had become another creature entirely. A red thread trailed behind it, dissolving instantly.
It was only then that Edgar realized he was alone in the boat.
He looked into the water where he’d thrown the fish. A panic seized his throat.
“Conrad?”
Everywhere was boiling light. As Edgar wiped the blood from his hands, he noticed the rope at the front of the boat. It was cut, and the anchor was missing. Edgar touched his pocket. The knife was gone, too. The diamond, though, sat on the plank, beside Conrad’s shoes.
When Edgar looked out at the water, it took him a moment to understand that the glittering oval in the distance was the bay, and that he was on the other side of the breakers.
“Conrad!”
Edgar grabbed the oars. And though he rowed furiously, some invisible conveyer belt dragged him backward, farther into the ocean. He screamed, squinting into the glare.
He howled and barked and worked his arms, until a huge black shape materialized on the water. It cut across the glittering surface, blocking the sun. Edgar’s tiny jon boat fell into shadow. The black thing roared and came closer. It was as big as a house. Someone waved from the porch.
Edgar let go of the oars, sobbing.
The house hovered above him now—and a voice said, “Come.”
He felt like a baby again at the bottom of the world. He stood and reached out his arms, just as the person on the porch of the floating house leaned down to raise him up.
71
The Clearing
Far above her, black birds glided through a white haze. At her feet, a cluster of yellow mushrooms. Ron was shouting from the house.
Lucy didn’t answer, though. She wanted to stay here with the baby a little longer.
“What you doing, Mrs. Feen?”
Toni-Ann stepped into the clearing, breathing heavily. Like Lucy, she’d run into the woods when she’d seen the police car.
“Why are you following me, Toni-Ann?”
“Not following you. I didn’t know you were here.” Toni-Ann looked down. She looked at the leaf dust and the yellow mushrooms—but she refused to look at the baby.
“Lucy!” Ron’s voice was louder.
Toni-Ann banged her fists together anxiously. “They arrest me?”
“No, sweetie.” Lucy tried to smile, but already she could hear the footsteps.
Toni-Ann made a sound like an owl. Possibly she was crying.
Lucy only shook her head.
72
Chicks
Edgar said nothing to the fisherman. He was unable to speak.
The floating house had turned out to be a boat, and the person on the porch an old man who smelled of sardines. The man had sandpaper hands and a calico beard like the pelt of a guinea pig. When he’d first lifted Edgar aboard, Edgar had hugged the man, thinking it was Conrad.
The next thing he remembered was something awful under his nose, like ammonia. Edgar had pulled away,
but the man had persisted, saying it was only spirits of hartshorn. “From deer bones,” he explained, making things worse.
The boy was grateful, though, for the blanket and the tea, and for the fact that the man had turned the boat around and was headed toward shore. When he asked if Edgar was alone out here, Edgar looked back at where he’d been. The abandoned jon boat was barely visible—a flash of silver lost in the sword-fight light on the surface of the water.
“What’s your name, young fellow?”
“You live around here?”
“Where are your folks?”
“Are you deaf? Boy. Can you hear me?”
Edgar was mortified that he couldn’t answer.
“It’s okay, just breathe,” the man said, because someone—Edgar slowly realized it was himself—was gasping.
The man poured out more tea. It tasted like smoke and moved inside the tin cup like it was part of the ocean.
Edgar watched the old man steer. His fingers were unwashed parsnips, and now and then he used one to scratch inside a tufty ear. Florence had said that Jesus was a fisherman.
At the thought, Edgar checked his pocket. The ring was still there. He gripped it as a tangle of birds circled overhead. Nothing seemed real. The first words he spoke cracked in his throat.
“Twenty-one.”
“Twenty-one what?”
The man patted the boy’s face. “Tell me.”
But Edgar could manage no more.
* * *
There were police and lights and plain-clothed men with guns; people talking on phones and into radios; static and briefcases and rustling paper. A woman with a thermos and a clipboard sat with Edgar inside what seemed to be a makeshift trailer. The woman’s hair was wet and smelled of shampoo. She tried to calm the boy, to stop him from rocking. What she said was friendly, but seemed recorded. The main questions, repeated again and again: “Have you been hurt?” “Who were you with?” “Can you describe him?”
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