“Give me your arm.”
This was all wrong. He wasn’t hurt; his mother in all likelihood was the injured party. Still, Edgar gave up his arm and watched, in detached horror, as his grandmother soaked a cotton ball in hydrogen peroxide and then swiped it across every letter of Supersluts.com.
“Some scratches you got here, Mister Explorer. Those brambles did a number on you, huh?”
Edgar nodded, confused, as the tears fell down his cheeks. He wiped them away quickly, but the old woman saw the gesture.
“Am I hurting you? I’m almost done.”
She wet another cotton ball and cleaned the last of the letters. Miraculously, the hydrogen peroxide had removed some of Thomas Pittimore’s ink. When she applied the Mercurochrome from an ancient-looking dark glass bottle, all meaning was abolished behind a stain of reddish-brown. A large gauze pad was put over the wound, and held in place with surgical tape.
Someone, Edgar thought, should be putting a cool washcloth on his mother’s cheek.
“All done, soldier,” his grandmother said, lifting his hand to kiss it. She held his fingers to her mouth, and her little kisses sounded like words. She was using his fingers the way she used her rosary beads at church—holding them before mumbling lips that offered up some secret prayer. Edgar pulled away.
She didn’t seem to notice, though. Her eyes were closed. When she opened them a few moments later, she looked confused. She looked sad. “We’re still here, huh?”
Edgar, who could think of no lie, said, “Yes.”
“Well, that’s no good. Let’s get ourselves into bed.” She held out her arm, and the boy had no choice but to take it.
“Up up up,” she said—and Edgar pulled.
10
Saint Christopher
Lucy’s hands were shaking as she pulled over and parked in the dark lot outside Slaphappy’s. Damn them all, she thought. Even Ron. Earlier, from work, she’d called the butcher shop. Ron had answered with a rough, “Yeah?” Even after hearing Lucy’s voice, he’d remained just as gruff. “I have customers coming out of my ass. I’ll get back to you later.” But, of course, he hadn’t.
Get back to her later? Only now did she recognize the cool brush-off couched in those words.
She’d wanted to spend the night with him again, crushed under his massive body, lobotomized by the knife blade of sex. Now she was alone in a dark parking lot. The light from the dash glinted off the Saint Christopher medal Florence had hung, years ago, from the rearview mirror. She’d installed one in Frank’s car as well—and a lot of fucking good that had done. Impulsively Lucy reached up and tore the medal away. She buzzed down the window and flung the patron saint of travelers onto the blacktop. It landed with a tinkle, strangely musical in the darkness. Lucy felt a small stab of fear, similar to what she’d felt two months after Frank’s death when she’d thrown her wedding ring into the Hudson River.
She closed the window and pulled down the visor flap to check her face in the mirror. Eyes monstrously green, trapped inside rims of fire. Delicate wrinkles flared outward from each temple, like a child’s drawing of seagulls. A subtle falling of the cheeks secured a permanent frown. Frank probably wouldn’t even recognize her were his ghost to stroll past the car. She’d changed so much since he left. Because he left. Lucy leaned on the horn and let it blare into the empty parking lot.
God, how she missed him—the part of him that was good, that had saved her from her father, protected her. She missed the boy who kissed her so deeply he could taste her anger—and yet he’d never turned away, never spit it out. He’d swallowed her whole. What the two of them had, it wasn’t something she could explain. It was just everything.
To be honest, she hadn’t remembered it was Frankie’s birthday until she’d seen Florence blubbering in the kitchen and Edgar covered in red sauce. Even if she had remembered, it was unlikely she would have acted differently. She would have still gone out with Ron, still fucked him three times on his ham-colored sheets. Wouldn’t Frank have wanted that? That she keep herself going somehow? To hell with Florence’s judgment about what was right and what was wrong. After what had happened to all of them, it was clear to Lucy that such lines couldn’t be drawn. One had permission to do anything, live however one chose. If there was any law, it was the law of chaos.
There was no place, though, for such wildness in the immaculate house of her dead husband’s mother, a frigid old woman of seething politeness who Lucy often felt hated her more than her own father—and for similar reasons. Lucy’s bent toward pleasure seemed to threaten them. Most days she felt she had to move through Florence’s house with her head bowed, so as not to be blinded by the glare of the old woman’s piety. It was a house of glass—of ice. Of course, Florence and Edgar had made a private circle of fire, into which Lucy had never been invited, and inside of which the two of them seemed to exist in a kind of contented silence.
What ordered beings she lived with! Even with their occasional fits of tears, their days for the most part unfolded under the influence of steadier rhythms. The old woman and the boy moved through the rooms with such ease, with such clear intentions and purpose, that their paths achieved an almost perceptible pattern, a web inside of which Lucy often felt trapped. The house was theirs, its very fiber an extension of their bodies. After living there for almost fifteen years, Lucy still stumbled, confused, over the laws of the territory. If she tried to help with the housekeeping, she always got it wrong. “This vase lives here,” Florence would say, taking it from where Lucy had put it and placing it on the correct shelf. Just last week, she’d been stripping her bed, only to have Edgar poke his head in her doorway and say, “Sheet day is Tuesday, Ma.” She’d watch from the sidelines as the boy held up the corner of an area rug so that Florence could vacuum underneath; or the way the pair of them moved apart and then together as they folded a sheet, their fingers touching at each inward sweep, until the distance between them closed and a perfect rectangle rested in Florence’s hands. The customs of some foreign country. The way the old woman tugged at the boy’s left ear as she kissed the top of his head.
Lucy wanted to touch her son more than she did, but he was babied enough by the other one. She’d kissed him last night though, hadn’t she? When she’d smelled the perfume on his neck. What a strange kid. Even his occasional larks and bursts of zaniness, like his recent habit of barking like a dog, seemed to rise not from a playful ease, but from a kind of gothic nervousness.
A doctor had once said that the boy might be borderline autistic. He’d wanted to do more tests, but Lucy had refused. The stigma of albinism was enough. Besides, Lucy knew there were other reasons for the boy’s oddness—first and foremost the shock he’d suffered on the day of his father’s death. She could also blame the kid’s strangeness on the ridiculous name Frank had given him.
After the boy’s birth, Frank had fallen into a spell of manic excitement, during which he’d insisted that the child be named Edgar. They’d already decided on Frank Jr., but Frank, looking at the newborn’s unnaturally white face, had said it was impossible. Lucy resisted for weeks—a limbo in which the child had remained nameless. Florence, too, had spoken up. “Edgar?” she’d said. “What kind of name is that?” When Frank tried to explain the genius of the author whose namesake Edgar would be, Florence—who only knew the blood-drenched movie versions of this author’s works, starring Vincent Price—was aghast: “You want to name him after a man who hangs knives from the ceiling?” But Frank had been adamant—and since they all knew it was unwise to stand in his way when he was dead set on something, the boy had become Edgar. Edgar Allan Fini.
Lucy reached for her handbag, in need of a cigarette.
Most of the time she simply didn’t know how to relate to the kid. He was nothing like her. Well, he was beautiful, as she’d once been. But even their beauty was different. Edgar was a large-eyed, rail-thin prince from some animated Japanese fantasy. Lucy was top-heavy and ample thighed, with sea-storm hair. And the
boy was timid. When he spoke it was like someone had trapped his voice under a glass bell. Lucy, with her limp, clonked into a room and had fearsome lungs. Her words were rarely misunderstood.
Edgar was afraid to ask for things, whereas Lucy, at her best, had no compunction against demanding, grabbing, or, if necessary, stealing. Life was short, people were selfish; sometimes one had to hold an antagonist upside down and shake the change from his pockets. Lucy imagined her son wouldn’t even steal a penny from his grandmother’s purse.
How could the boy have come from her? Lucy was an open-faced sandwich; Edgar, a closed book. She ate like a day at the races—competitively; Edgar chewed cautiously, food taster to the king. Once, on a plane (Lucy taking a five-year-old Edgar to visit a cousin in Michigan), a stewardess had given them individually wrapped packets of cookies. Lucy immediately ripped open the foil and scarfed down the two dry wafers. Edgar, on the other hand, ate only one before resealing the bag with an origamically precise fold. When Lucy asked why he wasn’t eating the other cookie, the boy replied that he was “saving it for later.” The answer had made her head spin. Save for later? The concept was beyond Lucy’s understanding; she spent or devoured life without delay. Frank had been the same. When Edgar had fallen asleep, thousands of miles in the air, Lucy slowly wriggled the foil bag from her son’s hand and polished off the remaining biscuit.
She was a terrible mother, she wasn’t going to deny it. So kill me, she thought—right here in the parking lot of this sleazy fucking bar.
Immediately came a loud rapping against the window.
Lucy jumped, and turned to see a silhouette standing outside the car. It was exactly Frank’s height. Lucy gasped and quickly locked the door.
“Are you okay?” The man leaned in, close to the window.
“I’m fine. Just don’t…”
“I didn’t mean to scare you, sorry. I saw you sitting there, I thought maybe you were having car trouble.”
When she realized that her face was illuminated by the small light in the visor mirror, she quickly snapped it shut, putting both herself and the man in a more equal darkness. “Do I know you?” she ventured cautiously.
“I don’t know, do you?”
“I can’t see your face,” Lucy said. “I’m not a fucking owl.”
“Oh, sorry.” The man pulled a cigarette lighter from his jacket pocket and lit it a few inches from his nose. The jack-o’-lantern glow showed pale skin, blond hair.
“You shouldn’t knock on people’s windows like that,” Lucy snapped, emboldened by the fact that the man outside the car was not her dead husband.
And then, because the Zippo-wielding stalker was not unattractive, she softened a bit, shifting blame to the establishment. “I don’t know why they don’t put better lights in this parking lot.”
“It’s a shit hole,” the man agreed.
“I didn’t even see your car pull in,” Lucy said.
“Yeah, you looked like you were praying or something.”
“I don’t pray,” scoffed Lucy.
“No, but I mean you were like totally in a trance or whatever.”
The flame from the lighter went out. “Ow,” the man said. “Burned my finger on this bitch.” His face was in shadow again.
But Lucy had seen enough to know what she was dealing with. He was a boy, twenty-five, twenty-six. Jacked up on something, but obviously harmless.
“I’m James, by the way.”
He was speaking loudly, probably in compensation for the darkness, and for the fact that there was a closed window between them.
Lucy buzzed down the glass and extended a hand toward Jimmy (surely that’s what his friends called him). “Lucy,” she said.
The handshake extended beyond its measure of politeness, but neither made the first move to release the other.
“My palms get sweaty,” Jimmy said shyly.
“Yes,” Lucy replied, noting in particular how the heat of the Zippo still lingered on the boy’s thumb.
* * *
A distraught Edgar had trouble falling asleep, but he refused to seek refuge in Florence’s room. After checking under his bed three times, and the closet once (no one was hiding in either place), he crawled under the sheets and began the secret process that often helped him to drift off. By gently rubbing his index finger in steady circles against the palm of his other hand, he slowly unwound himself from thought (someone killed my father) into abstraction (acorns falling into black water). Absorbed by the fluid cosmos of intersecting ripples, he successfully shed his body and drifted into the underlight.
Only to dream of two men fighting on the rooftop of a skyscraper, a lavishly budgeted enterprise in which a basalt-black cityscape was twinkle-lit with the power of a million unleashed brain cells. If he had escaped his own body, he could not escape the others. One of the men had the face of his father. The other, the murderer, took no face at all—a blind spot in Edgar’s consciousness that persisted even here, in the all-possible. As the violent tango on the rooftop veered into edge-taunting dips, its very intensity caused it to dissolve, as is the dreamer’s fickle right. A field of falling leaves, and then falling itself, until the boy was safe in the deepest chamber of sleep, the bottomland below emotion.
In the bedroom down the hall, Florence was falling, too. This after an hour of burning indigestion, a slow poisoning—not of her stomach, it seemed, but of her heart. She had prayed for all of them, but the words only served to blow the evening’s embers back to flame. One couldn’t pray when one was angry. When she finally fell asleep, her rest did not take her to the depth Edgar achieved. She stayed on the fiery plain of emotion, the haunt of the living, where the dead visit only in chains.
He would come, though, if she were patient—come as he was, without redemption or hope. But he would come.
* * *
When Lucy stumbled from the bar, her new friend was perfectly sober. He’d nursed a single pint while Lucy made her way through four bourbons with a beer back. Jimmy was an odd duck, a little twitchy, and the longer they’d sat at the bar the more nervous he’d become. His inability to relax—the tapping foot, the subtle spice of his perspiration—had made Lucy feel like she needed to drink for both of them. Jimmy was not being clear about what he wanted—and someone, Lucy felt, had to bring the crisis of flirtation to a head. The alcohol helped, as it always did, but she feared she was camping it up too much for the boy’s comfort. At one point, he’d glanced around the bar and said, “Shit, we’re the only people in here,” and Lucy, in reply, had put her hand on the boy’s thigh and slurred, in her best older-woman voice: “The only two people in the world, baby.” When Jimmy saw the generous tip she’d left the bartender from her leafy pile of hard-earned cash, he asked with an anxious titter if she was a mobster. “No-oh, baby,” she whispered, patting his smooth cheek. “You’re the mobster. I’m the moll.” The word had taxed his vocabulary. “Cool, yeah,” he said. “Maybe I better get you home.”
A few steps outside the establishment, in the dark parking lot, Lucy stepped on a stone, causing her ankle to go wonky. As she tipped to the left, she crashed into her companion and clutched him ineffectively, as if his thin body were a slippery flagpole. “I can’t … oh shit, I…” She wanted to laugh, but it really wasn’t funny. Finally she felt the boy’s strong arms stopping her descent and the next thing she knew, she was upright again—and then the boy was lifting her like a bride. “No,” she said, “I’m fine.” But he already had her fully in his arms and was carrying her across the parking lot. “I’m too heavy,” she sighed. But the boy’s muscles didn’t seem strained. She gave in and laid her head on the tautly upholstered bones of his shoulder. In an instant, she traded in the hirsute cleaver-wielding giant she’d slept with the night before for this sturdy and nervous usurper. When he put her down in front of his car, she leaned, face-forward, against the back-door window. The glass felt cool on her cheek.
“You’re really wasted,” the boy said, and Lucy’s rebuttal
(“No-um-nah”) only confirmed that she was. Her eyes slowly focused on the inside of the boy’s car, which was jam-packed with the shadowy lumps of his belongings. There appeared to be piles of clothing, a collection of overstuffed shopping bags, and something that looked like a folded-up tent. On the floor lay a computer and a baseball bat—or maybe an ice chest and a rifle. It was hard to tell in the darkness.
“You’ve got a lotta shit in there,” Lucy said.
The boy said nothing as he placed his fingers on her shoulder.
“Are you going on a rip?”
“A what?”
“A trip,” Lucy enunciated.
Again, Jimmy offered no reply—but at least he was touching her. Lucy leaned into the car and moaned as the boy’s hand slid down her side. “We should go someplace,” she suggested. For all her boldness, Lucy was not one for sex in public places. Not since she’d been fined for it, years ago, with Frank. “You live close by?”
“It’s okay,” Jimmy said, as his hand worked more quickly to position her as he wanted. When he yanked Lucy’s arm away from her body, she realized he was getting tangled up in her handbag.
“Is that in your way, baby?” She pushed away from the car to unstrap the bag from her shoulder.
Immediately he pushed her back and told her not to move.
She’d not expected such forcefulness from the boy.
“At least let’s get in the car,” she said. “Or my car, there’ll be more—”
“Shut up for two goddamn seconds, will you.” It was a voice she hadn’t heard from him before—but since she wasn’t opposed to a little aggression in a man, she flattened herself agreeably against the door. When she felt his hand again, it wasn’t on her hip, but inside her bag.
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