Edgar wasn’t sure how to answer this question. “I got hurt,” he said, shyly holding up his hand.
“I know,” the man said. “You told me.”
“When?”
“Last time we saw each other.”
Edgar was confused. He knew that he’d been in the truck before, but it seemed more like something from a dream.
“We had a big day,” the man said. “You don’t remember?”
“I have to go,” Edgar said. “I have to change my bandage.”
“Well, you’re in luck,” the man crooned, snapping his fingers. “I have a first-aid kit in the truck.”
“It’s not just a scratch,” said Edgar. “It’s serious.”
“Don’t worry. I used to be married to a nurse. I’ll have you fixed up in no time.”
The boy sighed.
“Come on, I promise we won’t go anywhere. We’ll stay parked right here in front of your house.”
“But where would we go?” asked Edgar.
“Nowhere. We’ll just sit in the truck.”
“No, but I mean…” Edgar was afraid to say it. “Where would we go, if we did go somewhere?”
“Oh,” the man said, his voice cracking a little. “I … I don’t know. Was there someplace you wanted to go?”
* * *
Lucy gently swept the ashes of the burned letter onto a Niagara Falls postcard. By the time she reached the window, Edgar was already in the truck. She paid no mind to the vehicle as it pulled away—focused, as she was, on scattering the remains of Frank’s letter onto the lawn.
Done, she thought. Finished.
But as she flicked the last bits of ash off the postcard, a wind came—and a large flake, like a black moth, flew straight into her mouth.
BOOK THREE
THE LAST DAY OF FRANCESCO LORENZO FINI
I like to think the moon is there even if I am not looking at it.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
23
Ten Minutes
Lucy wakes to Frank standing naked beside the bed.
“Where have you been?” he asks in a tight whisper.
“Sleeping,” she says, reaching out to touch her husband’s thigh. “Why don’t you get into bed, baby? Come on.”
Frank shakes his head and moves about the room, pulling at his ears like they don’t fit properly. For the last few days, he’s hardly slept, fearing what he refers to as “slippage,” a phenomenon that supposedly happens at night—and which, if left unchecked, might lead to “a total fucking quantum derailment.” He’s warned Lucy not to spend so much time in bed, claiming the damage she’s already suffered might be irreversible. “I can’t even hear you anymore, Lu.”
Even if this is nonsense, it makes Lucy sad. “You can hear me,” she tells him. But he explains that, no, someone has put something in his ear—“not an insect,” he insists, as if this might be the conclusion Lucy’s jumped to. When he puts the side of his head close to his wife’s face and asks her to look, she isn’t sure what to tell him. There’s nothing there, of course, but, still, she slides two fingers into Frank’s ear, pretends to pull something out—a horrible version of some game you’d play with a child, acting as if you’d removed their nose by holding the tip of your thumb between two fingers.
“I got it,” she says—and when Frank asks her what it is, she tells him, “a piece of silver.” A good answer, she thinks, since, in addition to assaults by ice and mirrors, Frank’s fantasies often involve metal and wires and tiny magnets. Lucy’s relieved that Frank doesn’t ask to see what she’s extracted—but just in case he demands to examine it later, she goes to the window and chucks out the imaginary scrap of metal.
The doctors say she should never play along with her husband’s fantasies—but it works sometimes; it calms him down. Besides, the doctors, in Lucy’s opinion, are either distracted or exhausted. Frank is one of too many patients, a fill-in-the-blank slot they fill with pills—which work for a while, and then don’t. And when they do work, it’s almost worse. Frank is a zombie; dull, neutered, empty. It makes sense, to Lucy, why her husband sometimes refuses to take his meds. In the hospital, the nurses had techniques to make a person swallow, but Lucy isn’t going to force poison down her husband’s throat in his own house. And terrible as it is to see Frank like this—the truth is, there’s something here still recognizable as Frank, unlike the pathetic wet mop of a man, when drugged.
Even Florence is confused about the pills. “I don’t know, Lucille. They know more than we do,” she says of the doctors. Still, Lucy can see how it breaks the old woman’s heart to watch her son flattened by the medication—hunched over on the couch, mute, voided of desire, refusing even her ricotta cheesecake, his favorite.
Lucy and Florence have to work as a team to keep Frank steady. He’s been home from the hospital for over a week now, and he seems worse than ever. On his first day back from Trenton, the two women had cut his nails, which had grown horrifyingly long. Lucy had worked the clippers, and with each snip Frank had winced as if she were performing surgery without anesthesia. Florence had stood above her son, stroking his hair and telling him to think of pickles.
“Shhh,” he says suddenly in the bedroom, even though Lucy hasn’t spoken. “Do you hear them?”
In the nursery, Edgar’s begun to cry—a sound that Frank often misinterprets as sirens.
“It’s okay,” Lucy says. “It’s the baby.”
“Do we have to fix him?” he asks, and Lucy tells him, no—that Florence will take care of it.
Frank’s still naked. He rubs his dick anxiously. “Why did it come out of me like that?”
“It’s nobody’s fault,” Lucy assures her husband, who, each day, seems to grow more troubled by the child’s whiteness. “It’s just something that happens. He won’t die from it.”
Frank nods slowly, as if satisfied. Lucy nods, too, and tries to smile. She walks over to him and kneels down, doing something that always gives him comfort. Florence has faith in food; Lucy, in another kind of pleasure. She puts her mouth over Frank’s dick and begins to suck. He leans against the wall, moans. His hand finds Lucy’s head and caresses it with a gentleness that makes her wet. She sucks harder, devotedly, and has achieved a perfect rhythm when there’s a knock at the door.
“Everything okay in there?” Florence’s timing is always impeccable. Lucy wipes her lips and says, “Yes, we’re fine.”
“Do you need anything? I made some French toast, if you’re hungry.”
A naked and very erect Frank looks down at his kneeling wife and puts his hand over his mouth, like a little boy trying to keep himself from giggling. Seeing the sweetness of her husband’s face, Lucy bursts out laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Florence says.
“Nothing,” replies Lucy.
“Well, come downstairs and we’ll have a nice breakfast. There’s bacon, too. You hear me, Frankie?”
Lucy can detect the anxiety in the old woman’s voice, and worries that it might upset Frank—who often confuses concern for conspiracy.
“Give us five minutes,” says Lucy.
After she hears the slap of the old woman’s slippers moving away, she tries to resume pleasuring Frank, but he refuses her. She snaps a Pogues CD into the player. “Come on, Frankie, let’s get into bed.” When she takes his hand, he pulls away and clicks off the music.
Lucy will always regret not having this last moment with Frank, this final fuck. She knows it isn’t bacon or cheesecake that Frank needs—or Florence’s prayers and saints, for that matter. He doesn’t need pills or cold baths or, according to Pio, a “project” or a decent haircut. Frank needs her; and he needs sex—and Lucy will torture herself for almost her whole life with the belief that she could have saved her husband if, on that last day, she’d somehow managed to get her lips back on his dick.
Because they wouldn’t have stopped. The sex would have gone on all day, all night, until it dawned on them that they’d spent their entire lives i
n that bed, and Frank had missed his death.
* * *
At breakfast, the whole family is at the table—Lucy, Frank, Pio, Florence with the baby on her lap. She feeds him stewed apples, and Frank watches. “What is that you’re giving him?”
“Fruit,” Florence says. “Would you like some?” she asks, noticing that her son hasn’t touched his French toast.
Frank only stares at her, but Florence, unable to help herself, extends the baby spoon toward her grown son’s mouth. He pushes back his chair as if a dead rat’s been thrust in his face.
Pio, who barely speaks anymore, lifts his head from his hand, says nothing. Why doesn’t he take control of the situation? Lucy wonders. But Pio is stunned by a kind of regret that Lucy is still too young to fathom.
The baby’s hand taps gently against Florence’s arm. The old woman regains her composure and redirects the spoonful of stewed apples to a mouth that appreciates it. Edgar eats the warm fruit, oblivious (or so it seems) to the plight of his father. Florence gives the child too much, and the food runs down his chin.
“We don’t all have to stop eating,” Florence says with a false brightness. “Lucy, Pio. Go on.”
Pio refuses, but Lucy makes a dumb show of eating a slice of the sweet toast.
“It’s good, isn’t it?” Florence says theatrically to Lucy, and Lucy says, “Yes, it’s good, Florence. It’s good, Frank.” Her voice is shaky.
She can barely swallow, feeling like a traitor. This is not how she’d pictured her life—her child in another woman’s arms, her husband recoiling from a spoonful of baby food. She and Frank were supposed to have been in San Francisco by now, or Peru, or in a cheap hotel along a highway, destination unknown.
This is why, for the last week, when Frank whispers to her about going away, she listens and doesn’t stop him. Part of Lucy knows it’s a lie, but she’s still a girl, only in her twenties, and susceptible to a poetry of escape and adventure and an all-consuming love that will prevail over every obstacle.
Also, she’s exhausted with this world—and the places that Frank has been whispering about lately seem more than just dots on a map. They no longer have names like Peru or San Francisco; their terrains are wholly emotional, places where, Frank says, “they would never find us” or where “it’s all one thing, one story.”
She knows she has to be careful how she responds when he talks like this. Little murmurs of agreement are best, because if she says too much, Frank can see that she doesn’t fully comprehend the complicated rules and logic, and he gets upset. When she said, just the other day, “We can leave tomorrow. Let’s pack our bags,” Frank pushed her away and shouted, “Do you think they’re gonna let you through with bags? They’ll probably weigh us, see what’s in our stomachs.”
“Right, right,” Lucy said, as if she remembered the rules, the plan. Frank said they shouldn’t even eat for several days before leaving. “Not even a glass of milk.”
In her chest, Lucy feels a kind of pre-travel jitters, even though she knows they aren’t going anywhere. Where could they go with a baby and no money—and, if Frank had his way, no food in their stomachs? Still, within her, there remains a shimmery, abrasive grain of hope. She often feels it at night, scratching against her heart—especially when he kisses her neck and calls her his red star, his Alpha Orionis.
* * *
In the kitchen, Frank watches his family. They look strange to him. His so-called father, eyes lowered, tapping his finger against a stained napkin, signaling in some secret code to his so-called mother, who’s also tapping—her whole hand against the baby’s back, forcing tiny iridescent bubbles from its mouth. What does it all mean? The steady movements of each person working together like a kind of factory or assembly line, whose end product seems to be the tiny bubbles that come from the baby’s mouth. As each one bursts, the atmosphere in the room changes. Some subtle gas is being released. Everyone’s breathing normally, though—so maybe it’s not poisonous.
Frank stares at the baby’s mouth, so pink inside—shockingly so, opening as it does out of the chalk-white face. Even the redhead—his so-called wife—leans in toward the baby. Frank notices that her blouse is wet around the nipples. He watches as she reaches to take the child from its grandmother.
“No,” Frank says. “Give him to me.”
Everyone’s heart jumps, even Pio’s.
“Can I have the baby, please?” Frank’s voice is quiet, but clear.
“Have the what?” Florence says.
“I just want to hold him,” Frank says. “Just talk to him.”
“He can’t understand you,” Florence says with a brush of her hand. “He doesn’t have the language.”
“What language?” Frank says, confused.
“Any language.” The old woman pulls the baby closer to her chest. “Why don’t you just drink your juice, Francesco, eat a little something?”
But Frank wants to make sure the baby remembers him. Time is flying out the window like a swarm of bees. “Edgar,” he says, and the boy turns.
Pio crushes the napkin in his fist. Lucy’s breasts feel cold; her mouth is dry.
“Edgar,” Frank croons sweetly, and the baby responds, uttering a small squeal of contentment as he stretches out his arm to touch the stubble on his father’s face. Frank hasn’t shaved in days. Despite everything, Lucy thinks he looks gorgeous.
Father and son. French toast. The yellow kitchen. For a moment it all seems natural, almost normal.
“Maybe it’s okay,” Lucy says quietly, touching Florence’s arm. Keeping the baby from Frank the last time, behind a padlocked door, had proved a disaster. “Here, give him to me,” she says.
But the old woman won’t let go.
“Florence,” the girl says more firmly. “I need to feed him.”
“He just ate. He’s fine.”
“He’s not your kid,” Lucy says to the old woman, but Frank reacts as if she’s said these words to him.
“Did you fuck a dead person?” he shouts.
“Language,” Florence scolds. She shifts position, obscuring the child in the folds of his blanket.
“No,” Frank says. “Show it to me.” He moves toward the baby.
Florence makes an unexpected sound, like a hiss, and Frank freezes.
“You can’t have all-all-all the air,” he stutters, “all the food.”
“There’s food on your plate, you idiot,” Pio says.
“Sta’ zitto,” Florence whispers harshly to her husband.
Frank’s frenzied attentions land on the brown napkin in his father’s fist. “Don’t try to hide it,” he says.
“Hide what?” asks Pio. “What are we hiding?”
“Try to feed me a plate of shit.”
“This is shit? This is shit?” Pio says, picking up a slice of French toast and waving it in the air. The bread breaks, and a good-sized chunk flies across the room. Frank steps back and makes a strangled sound as if he can’t breathe. He sits on the floor and begins to rock his body.
Everyone watches him, even the baby.
When the moaning begins, from deep inside Frank’s throat, Edgar accompanies the sound with a sharp wail.
“I’m not doing this again,” Pio mutters, hiding his tears inside a sickened growl. He gets up from the table and leaves the room.
Lucy begins to shake. This is all too similar to the morning that Frank was taken to Trenton. He’d been found in the garden before dawn, filthy, moaning. The yard a mess—a series of holes, as if Frank were planning to inter a litter of kittens. When Lucy discovered him, he was sitting before the largest hole, the baby asleep in his arms. Pio had called the police.
In the kitchen, Lucy wonders if Pio is doing it again, calling the cops from the other room. Suddenly she’s afraid she’s going to lose Frank—that they’ll drag him back to Trenton. Pio has made threats. Even Florence seems more concerned about the baby than about Frank. Clearly his parents no longer care about him like she does. In her gut, she k
nows that if Florence and Pio weren’t here, overreacting to everything, she could make her husband well.
Frank had rescued her from her own parents, from a father far worse than Pio; and now she would rescue Frank. Why she loves him so much is beyond her understanding. But she knows that this terrible pain of his is something only she can touch, only she can heal.
Frank stops moaning and approaches her. Sometimes it’s like he can read her mind. He seems calm, seems his old self again. Even the baby is quiet. Lucy leans over to wipe a curdle of snot from the child’s face. Florence allows it.
“It’s time,” Frank says. “We have to go.”
Lucy nods.
“Go?” Florence says. “Go where?”
“Just for a drive,” Frank says so smoothly it almost makes Lucy smile. But then he walks away from her, toward the back door.
“Frankie?” she says nervously.
“I just want to check something,” he says.
“Stay in the yard,” Florence calls out as if to a child.
Lucy wanders to the refrigerator in an attempt to steer clear of the old woman’s eyes.
“He can’t go anywhere, Lucille. You hear me? You make him stay here.”
Lucy stares at a carton of milk. Her hands are shaking.
“What’s he doing out there?” asks Florence.
Lucy looks out the window. Frank is standing in the garden, among the tomatoes.
“I don’t like him out there,” Florence says. “He’s not digging, is he?”
“No.”
The old woman sighs loudly. “At least I have the baby. Thank God for that.”
* * *
Frank checks the holes. No one’s messed with them since he’s filled them back in. Soon it will seem like he’s never been here at all. His wife is watching him from the window. He lifts his hand to her because he remembers her now. She’s the girl who said she’d come with him, that he wouldn’t have to go alone. She’s his safety, his constant. His red star. Frank kneels in the garden. The stars have been dead a long time, he thinks. Sometimes the helpless love he feels for the girl, and the awful gratitude that swells in him in the presence of the baby, pins his heart to the wall. He tears off a tiny tomato leaf and places it under his tongue.
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