“What you doing?” The voice flies over the garden, a happy bird. “Mistah Feen, what you doing?”
Frank turns to see the little koala-faced girl from next door, standing on her side of the white fence. She’s smiling, tapping her fists together as if trying to produce a spark.
“Where the baby, Mistah Feen?”
Frank gets up and studies the girl. She must be six or seven by now. He’s known her since she came here from wherever children come from; he can’t recall anymore. He’s always been nervous around this squat, thick-limbed creature with the flattened face, but as he stares at her now, he’s astounded by the way her skin absorbs the light. She’s a beautiful child.
Toenail, she seems to be saying to him.
Frank shakes his head.
“Tone-Ann,” she enunciates. “Memba?”
Frank turns away, moves toward the house.
“Where you going, Mistah Feen?”
Frank stops, but is unable to look at her. The beauty of the child is too painful.
“I see a ow-a out here sometimes,” the girl says. “You know, a ow-a?”
Frank keeps his back to her, but listens carefully. He’s been thinking a lot about time lately. Seconds, minutes, ow-as. Timing is so important.
“Fly ova the house sometimes. A big ow-a.” The girl makes the sound of it. “Hoo hoo hoooo.”
Frank closes his eyes and breathes.
“Is it your ow-a, Mistah Feen?”
* * *
Lucy’s gone to the basement, where Pio hides his dirty magazines. Also his money. She removes the yellow plastic lid from the Chock full o’Nuts can labeled “screws and nails” and pulls out the roll of bills. It’s huge—enough, she imagines, for a few months’ expenses: hotel rooms and diapers and gas. Maybe even enough for a deposit, when they find a place to rent. Stuffed into the pocket of her jeans, the money makes a ridiculous mannish lump. At the bottom of the stairs, she hesitates, feeling dizzy. Her excitement borders on nausea.
Upstairs, Frank is waiting in the living room, the car keys in his hand.
“Lucy, thank goodness,” Florence says when the girl returns. “Tell him to give you the keys. He won’t listen to me.”
“It’s okay,” Lucy says. “We’ll just drive around town and come right back. Ready?” she says to Frank; but he only stands there, staring at the wall. Lucy sees that it’s up to her to keep things moving.
“Come here, kiddo,” she says to Edgar, who’s still packed inside the old woman’s arms.
“I’ve got him,” Florence says. “Stop—what are you doing? Don’t tug at him like that.”
“Well, let go then.” Lucy pulls harder.
“Gah, gah.” Florence gurgles as if Lucy’s choking her. “Pio!” she shouts.
But it’s too late. Lucy’s claimed Edgar and is moving toward the door.
“Fine,” Florence says breathlessly. “The two of you go for your drive. But you leave the baby here.”
“You can’t keep him cooped up in the house,” Lucy says. “He needs some air.”
“It’s too sunny,” Florence says. “He’ll burn.”
As the women argue, Frank swoops in and snatches Edgar, who’s crying now. He carries the baby to the couch, arranges him gently between two throw pillows. “Here,” Frank tells the women. “He stays here.”
“No,” Lucy says with a ferocious smile, doing her best to remain calm. “He’s coming with us.”
“He’s not a toy for whenever you’re in the mood,” chides Florence.
“I can take my son for a fucking drive,” snaps Lucy.
Both women freeze. It’s the first time that Lucy has cursed at Florence. A moment passes before either realizes that Frank is gone. Lucy grabs the baby and flies out the door.
Why is he getting into Pio’s car? she wonders. Lucy hates the tacky gold LeBaron. “Let’s take our car,” she says, sliding temporarily into the old man’s Chrysler.
“It’s too small,” Frank says, not looking at her.
When Lucy spots Florence huffing toward the driveway, she quickly locks her door and then leans across Frank’s body to lock his.
“Francesco,” Florence shouts. “Open this door. Francesco.” She comes around to the other side and bangs some more. “Lucille.”
“Give her the baby,” Frank says.
“We’ll be back soon,” Lucy says to Florence through the glass.
“Give her the baby,” Frank says again.
“Don’t be an asshole, Frankie.”
Frank turns to her. He looks terrified. “You want him to come with us?” he says.
“Yes,” Lucy tells him. “Of course.”
Frank is silent, and Lucy says, “Go.”
When Frank turns the key, Florence steps back, startled by the engine’s roar.
“Francesco.”
Edgar turns to the familiar voice. The old woman stands on the lawn, her fat red hand glued to her forehead. The light strikes the diamond, catching the baby’s eye. Pio watches everything from above, framed in an ellipsis of burgundy curtains.
Lucy wants to say goodbye to them. She wants to say thank you and I’m sorry—and something else she’s never said to Florence and Pio. That she loves them. But all she can manage is one last lie. “Ten minutes,” she shouts as Frank pulls away. “We’ll be back in ten minutes!”
Entry #2
It’s strange, but not at all unpleasant—the way she knows everything now. The “past” (she recognizes the unreality of this word) is a crystal she can turn in her hand and see from endless angles, in varying degrees of light and darkness. The crystal is almost too brilliant with sadness, but spectacular in a way she is not at liberty to discuss. “Then,” as the living say—“then,” she had stood on the lawn of a place called 21 Cressida Drive. She’d watched the boy and the girl drive away in the car—the baby with them. The picture had stopped there. But now, if she wants—and sometimes she does—she is with them in the gold LeBaron, moving from body to body, feeling everything. It’s astounding, this ingress she has into their hearts. The way their pain is legible.
If only the dead could write books, she thinks with a laugh.
The living, she knows, would prefer this story not to be told. She is aware—but does not care—that flesh-and-blood will think her and her kind cold and indiscreet. Flesh-and-blood would round up the ghosts, if they could, and put them in camps; seal their lips or take out their tongues.
Still, she speaks, knowing that some will listen.
Of course, she’ll have to make it easy for them. Unversed in simultaneity, they will require a more strict adherence to the facts. It happened like this. This, then that. Cause and effect. She knows, though, that there is no line, no path, no “time.”
All things happen at once.
24
Shepherd’s Junction
Frank drives, not speaking to the girl. It’s a cloudless spring day shot through with clear yellow light. The air is cool and fresh—though, for some reason, Frank won’t let the girl open the windows. She looks out at the scrubby oaks and beeches rushing by at the side of the Parkway. Tiny new leaves filter the late-morning sun; the black road is freckled with quavering pools of brightness.
“So we’re going north?” Lucy asks after another long silence.
Frank doesn’t answer; and now she’s getting angry—but she doesn’t argue, because the baby, finally, is asleep. She holds him tightly on her lap, since there’d been no time to grab the car seat. They can buy a new one later with Pio’s money. For now she keeps Edgar down low in case a trooper spots them. Reckless endangerment of a child. God knows what the fine is for that. She takes the bottom of her blouse and half covers the baby’s head.
“Why are you doing that?” asks Frank.
“His skin,” she says. “Plus, I don’t want anyone to see him.”
What Frank hears is: people are watching us. Slowly, strategically, he begins to increase his speed—only an extra mile or so every few minutes
, so that the observers won’t immediately notice the variance. Frank’s thoughts, too, are increasing in velocity. Though the car’s speed helps him to outrun some of them, others—such as his mother’s words, he’ll burn in the sun—pop up again and again along the road, like mile markers.
Despite Frank’s silence, Lucy continues to talk. It makes her feel calmer. She lays out her plan. Frank can drive for a few more hours; when he’s tired, she’ll take over. A car seat and diapers at the next big town; and then, when it’s dark, a cheap motel. Part of her wants to say Let’s go home, but she scolds her fear and touches her husband’s arm. “We’re gonna be okay,” she tells him.
Frank pulls away. “Why did you bring him?”
Lucy says, “Relax. We can do this, Frankie.”
When she sees that his hands are shaking, she asks him if he’d like her to drive. “You can hold the baby,” she says, hoping to placate him. Plus, she wants him to know something that she isn’t sure of herself: that she trusts him. “You and Edgar can sit in the back and rest.”
“No,” he says. “I don’t want him here. It’s your fault.”
“What’s my fault?” the girl asks—thinking, You made me have this baby, you can’t change your fucking mind now.
“The two of us,” Frank says.
“The three of us,” Lucy says sharply. “We’re doing this.”
The girl doesn’t say anything else, because she’s having trouble breathing. She listens to the sound of it; it’s strange, like the breath of an old woman—as if, instead of forty miles, they’ve traveled forty years. The labored breathing suddenly reminds her of Florence, and Lucy turns to the backseat, half expecting to see her mother-in-law.
“I have to open the window,” she says. “Okay?”
“What’s wrong with him?” Frank asks, pointing his chin toward Edgar. “Why doesn’t he say anything?”
“He’s sleeping,” says Lucy.
When Frank asks if she’s sure the baby isn’t dead, Lucy’s breath constricts a little more. She rolls down the window, despite Frank’s protests, and takes in a big gulp of air. “The baby’s fine,” she says, closing her eyes.
The channeled air streams across her face with a pleasing roughness. It clears her head and blows back her red hair—the tips of which flutter against Frank’s neck. She can smell green things. She can smell water.
“Feel that, Frankie? Doesn’t that feel nice?” She puts her hand on his thigh. This time, he doesn’t pull away. When a raindrop falls into the car, she opens her eyes, confused, squinting at the cloudless day. When she feels another drop—on the hand that rests on Frank’s leg—she realizes that he’s crying. For some reason she can’t bring herself to look at him.
“Hush,” she says, using Florence’s word. She tells the boy that she loves him.
“I love you,” he says, contradicting her—as if only one of them could be in love, and Lucy were somehow a liar.
Sometimes it’s better to say nothing when he gets like this.
She keeps her hand on Frank’s thigh, caressing it softly, letting her mind go flat. Ten, twenty, thirty minutes pass in a turtle shell, before her consciousness sticks out its head again, and she hears the eager sound of air rushing through the LeBaron.
Where are they now? The trees are bigger, wilder; there are hills in the near distance, almost mountains. The car rolls along a snaking local road; beside it, a wide sparkling river—the water high and gushy from the spring melt. Lucy’s pretty sure it’s the Hudson. She thinks of Pio’s tunnel, the stories he used to tell her: how the air inside had made the workers giddy, like they were drunk; how he and a friend had stolen a trunk load of tiles from the jobsite and installed them in the bathrooms of 21 Cressida Drive.
The breeze is suddenly cooler, and Lucy rolls up the window. Huge fair-weather clouds have appeared. Cliffs and rocky slopes and Flintstones boulders make Lucy feel like she’s flying through a kind of prehistoric outer space. Everything feels enormous—and at the same time, the whole landscape is perfected in miniature in the side-view mirror.
Lucy realizes that this might be the most beautiful place she and Frank have ever been. On their honeymoon, they’d stayed at a hotel in Atlantic City, in a suite with a pink hot tub shaped like a heart. Where they are now—where they’re going—might turn out to be just as sweet.
Relax, she tells herself, pushing down to where the innocence is.
* * *
For a while, the girl drifts in and out of sleep. Frank listens to her soft snoring. He takes one hand off the wheel and slips a finger into the baby’s mouth. It’s warm—not at all the temperature he’d expected to find inside the white face. The baby looks up with his pale sea-glass eyes—and Frank notes how the boy’s gaze is clenched, as if he’s looking at Frank from a distance.
This is when Frank realizes that there’s something separating him and his son—though the problem isn’t so much one of space, but of time. Edgar, Frank realizes, is in a different car, yet somehow the two vehicles have blurred together, a kind of quantum crash.
Neither of us are really here, Frank thinks. Which makes the moment more precious, being an act of science. I’m already dead, he remembers. He understands, now, that his finger isn’t in the boy’s mouth; it’s in the dirt behind 21 Cressida Drive, in the black hole. Frank has his finger in the mouth of time. He can feel it sucking. He can feel how hungry it is. How warm it is, when all his calculations had predicted ice.
Lucy stirs, but doesn’t wake. Frank can’t understand how her dead hands can remember to hold the baby. Why doesn’t the baby fall? Frank wonders if the boy’s dead, too—and with a sudden dread he pulls his finger from the baby’s mouth and presses down on the gas.
He can see the two bridges in the distance: a smaller one that goes over a stream, and then the larger one that goes over the river. He recognizes them, even though he’s never seen them before. The LeBaron sails admirably around a sharp curve. The future opens its fist.
But what if he’s wrong? What if the crash of time that brought them together—that spliced Edgar’s story into his—breaks apart again into separate tracks? How can he be sure their lives won’t unspool in the underneath, where there will be confusion, blindness, terror? His family might never be able to find each other again. That’s why he’d wanted to leave the child behind, so that he could wait in the closet, in the darkness of 21 Cressida Drive—the lighthouse of his face beaming into the future, where Frank and Lucy will find him when they’re ready.
Only he and his wife are supposed to go into the water.
Suddenly, a hot plume of fury rises up again against the girl. Why, Frank wonders, would she want to kill the baby—the one thing capable of preserving them across time? If the child falls, too, there will be nothing left in this world to guide Frank back to Lucy’s arms, should he lose her in the underneath. Is that what she wants, to be lost from him forever?
He’ll have to test her.
Frank speeds toward the first bridge, and Lucy wakes from the thump thump thump of the tires against the metal seams. She takes in the rock walls and the stream below. Her stomach jumps; she clutches the baby. “Slow down,” she says.
When they arrive safely on the other side, Lucy sees the larger bridge in the distance, arching over the bright river. “Frank, did you hear me? Slow down.”
Frank guns it for a second, but as soon as he hears the baby’s cry, he remembers what he has to do. He applies the brakes and brings the car to an only slightly jarring stop. The baby falls silent again.
“What’s the matter?” Lucy says. “Why are we stopping?”
“Look.” Frank gestures toward the second bridge. He’s certain that she, too, must recognize this place from her own dreams.
“It’s beautiful,” she says, taking it all in: the clean blue sky, the fleet of identical white clouds receding into the distance, the shimmering trees, the silver bridge high above the foaming river.
“Put the baby out of the car,” Frank
says.
Lucy smiles sleepily at what she assumes is a joke. “Does he need to be changed?” Frank has always had an acute sense of smell. She’s about to remind him that they need to buy diapers when he says more forcefully, “Put him out of the car, Lu.” He points to the side of the road. “Over there. You see those plants with the…”
Lucy glances at some bushes blistered with red-orange berries.
“We’ll write his name on his clothes,” Frank says. “Or on his—”
“What are you talking about? Why would we…” Lucy suddenly feels blinded; she needs her sunglasses. How stupid to have left the house with nothing. She digs noisily through the glove box. “Have you seen my sunglasses?”
“Look at me,” Frank says.
“No,” Lucy says. “Not if you’re going to say stupid things. Please, can we just go?”
“You want to go?”
“Yes.”
“With the baby?”
“Yes, Frank, with the baby. What the fuck?”
She touches her husband’s face. “Listen to me, Frankie. We’ve come this far, right? We’re not gonna stop now. Come on, no, why are you crying?”
When she tries to kiss him, he screams.
“Get out of the car!”
Vertigo strikes. Lucy’s mouth tastes like metal. “Frank—”
“Both of you!”
Lucy shields her eyes. “Baby, why don’t we just rest for a little while, okay?” She gestures weakly toward a tree. “We can pull the car over there, in the shade, and just…”
She can barely hear her voice. Frank is screaming again. When he accuses her of wanting to kill the child, Lucy’s body levitates on a wave of nausea. She opens the door and hangs out her head. Her husband’s condemnations are so strong that, finally, she steps out of the car. “Shhh shhh shhh,” she says to the crying baby. And now Lucy is crying, too.
“He’s fine,” she tells her husband. “Please, let’s just go.”
“Put him on the ground,” Frank says.
Lucy stands with Edgar in the yellow sunlight; it seems like a dream.
Edgar and Lucy Page 23