“Do you think he still remembers?” asked Lucy.
“I’m sure he must,” said Anita. “And I know he’s heartsore about Edgar, same as everyone.”
* * *
In fact, several days after Edgar’s disappearance, Jarell Lester deleted Thomas Pittimore’s name from his digital contact list. It was a strange thing to do, because he’d known Thomas a long time and deleting him from the phone was sort of like killing him.
It had to be done, though. Pitt had changed. He’d always been insanely funny, like a clown on crack. But recently he’d become mean. It was amusing, at first, what he’d done to Edgar in the woods—forcing him to watch porn. But then Thomas had gone sado and incised the little boy’s arm with a ballpoint pen. Jarell had just stood there and watched.
He knew that his lack of valor showed him to be the exact opposite of what his mother always told him to be—which was a stand-up man. You don’t hurt things smaller than you, she’d once said to him. It hadn’t meant much to Jarell at the time, but now it seemed profound.
* * *
When Toni-Ann sat at the house (always Lucy’s last resort), she drew pictures of tiny snowmen in Edgar’s sketch pads. It made her feel less terrible.
On the day of Edgar’s disappearance, the police had stood in Toni-Ann’s living room and asked her mother if she’d seen anything suspicious. “No. Nothing,” Mrs. Hefti said. “Of course, it’s always been a circus next door.”
Toni-Ann had wanted to tell them about the green truck, but as soon as she began to speak, her mother had shushed her. “Not now, honey—Mommy’s talking.” Finally, a nice policewoman turned to the girl and asked if there was something she wanted to say. Toni-Ann only had to glance at her mother’s hard, impatient face to know the correct answer: “No. Nothing.”
Maybe it wasn’t such a terrible lie. She’d only ever seen Edgar get out of the truck, she’d never seen him go away in it. Still, it bothered her. Whenever she drew the little snowmen, she often decorated them with flowers—mostly yellow daisies. Flowers could protect a person. It was the least she could do to keep Edgar safe. Sometimes she tried to put a rose in the snowman’s hat, but roses were hard to draw—they always ended up looking like snails.
When Lucy returned home from one of her drives, Toni-Ann would hug her. “I waited all day, Mrs. Feen,” she’d whisper as if it were a secret. “I’m the waiter.”
* * *
“I’m Janet,” said the woman at the door. “From ALFJ.” A Light for Jimmy regularly provided volunteers to assist families in crisis.
“I don’t really need anything,” Lucy informed the woman. “I’ve got a lot of people helping.”
“Oh, that’s okay. We can just talk.”
This was the fourth woman the organization had assigned to Lucy. One had spent the afternoon making chocolate chip cookies and banana bread, until the whole house smelled like a bakery. Another had dusted and vacuumed and put Ron’s variously scattered beer and wine bottles into the blue recycling bin. A young woman of about twenty-six, dressed in pink overalls, had spent several hours tending to the yard. She’d even cleared away Florence’s dead, uprooted tomato plants, which she then stuffed into plastic bags and stowed in the trunk of her car.
In another situation, Lucy might have felt grateful for these women. Basically, they were free servants: cooks, housecleaners, gardeners. The problem was, they often wished to be therapists as well—and, even worse, “friends.” The problem was that these woman had once been in Lucy’s position. Each of them was the mother of a child who had disappeared. At first, when Lucy heard about the volunteers, she assumed they offered their time out of gratitude for ALFJ’s help in the return of their children. Soon enough, though, Lucy learned that all of these women were still waiting; had been waiting for years—most of their cases ancient history. A Light for Jimmy somehow kept them going.
“Going into my eleventh year this December,” Janet said at one point, sipping the coffee she’d made for herself in Florence’s kitchen. “Yup.” She nodded, staring into a chipped white mug. “And you know, honest to God, I still feel her. I feel her on her way back to me. This…”—she patted her chest—“this feeling of hope, you know. With every heartbeat it’s like, yes yes yes.”
Bullshit, Lucy wanted to scream.
But she held her tongue and tried to smile as Janet pulled out the photographs, like they all did eventually. “She’s cute,” Lucy said of the dark-haired, bespectacled child, six years old. The child would be seventeen at this point—practically an adult. She’d have a different face.
As if she’d heard Lucy’s thought, Janet flipped to a second photograph. “And this is her now.”
Lucy was confused. “How do you…?”
“Oh, I had it made. It’s an age-progression shot.”
“I didn’t know they could do them that far,” Lucy said. “I thought they did them, you know, just a few years…” She rolled her hand to signify the ghostly wheel of the future.
“No no no,” Janet said with determined enthusiasm. “They have really good computer programs these days. Really accurate. You know, because they test the programs on children who aren’t missing, to refine the technology. I mean, this is probably exactly what Olivia looks like now.” Janet stared at the hypothetical face of her daughter. “I kept her in the same color shirt. She’s always been crazy about pink.”
“Maybe she has pink hair now,” Lucy said lightly, not meaning any offense—only thinking of the blue hair she’d tried on herself, as a teenager.
“No,” Janet said. “I don’t think so. No, she definitely wouldn’t do that. She played the flute.”
Lucy didn’t know what else to say. She gently pressed her fist above her stomach while Janet moved her finger slowly back and forth between the two photographs. “And supposedly, you know, they can just keep going. They can progress them into their thirties and forties. At which point she’d probably start to look like me. I mean, a face can only do so many things, right?” Janet turned to Lucy with a thin, nervous smile.
Lucy nodded, thinking of the face of the child inside her—its features becoming less like Edgar’s, and more like a stranger’s. She still hadn’t told the butcher she was pregnant.
“Are you all right?” asked Janet. “Tummy ache?”
“What? No.” Lucy moved her hand away from her gut.
Janet slid the photographs back inside their protective plastic sleeves and closed the booklet. Lucy was relieved not to have to look at more. God knows what else the woman had in her little album: Olivia photoshopped into a graduation gown or a wedding dress.
Edgar in his thirties. Edgar in his forties. “Would you excuse me a minute, Janet?”
In the bathroom, Lucy experienced a wave of fury that obliterated any obligation to sympathy. It was disgusting how these women lied to themselves. Lucy suspected their husbands, the fathers of the children, weren’t as stupid. The fathers were probably gone—remarried, with new families under which they could bury their sadness. These women had no one to torture but themselves—and now Lucy.
She looked at her tired face in the mirror. She’d never become one of these Light for Jimmy circus freaks who juggled machetes over their heads and called it hope. Besides, Edgar would be back soon. It wasn’t necessary to think about the future. The future was dangerous. That’s where doubt lived. It was only necessary to stand where she was standing, in the here and now, and make demands. There’d be no need for age-progression. Edgar would progress at home, right under her nose.
Besides, if he didn’t come back soon (this sudden doubt she blamed on Janet) … well, then she’d just have to get on with her life. That’s what people did. That’s what she’d done with Frank—hadn’t she? She didn’t carry around pictures of her husband and show them to strangers. And she wouldn’t do that with Edgar. If Edgar ever became part of the past …
She leaned over the bowl and vomited.
Eleven years! Oh my God! She could never wait th
at long. If time were to play such a cruel trick on her, she’d simply make herself forget Edgar—even if the only way to forget him was to rip out her own heart.
Again, she vomited.
“Are you okay in there, Lucy?” Janet’s voice was close to the door.
“Morning sickness,” Lucy croaked without thinking.
Immediately, though, she sensed her error. She could see Janet’s face, as if the door had become transparent. She rinsed her mouth and emerged from the bathroom to find Janet as she knew she’d find her: with tears in her eyes.
“You’re very lucky, Mrs. Fini”—a sudden formality in the woman, as if Lucy’s good fortune had put some distance between them. “I had Olivia late, and so I couldn’t…”
Lucy held the woman’s gaze and took her hand—closing the gap.
“Only child?” Lucy asked, and Janet nodded.
38
The Headless Woman
When the butcher came home, Lucy told him everything. She told him about Janet and Olivia and the imaginary photograph. She told him about the curly hair and the black spectacles, the pink blouse. She told him about the eleven years. The words rushed out of her, and before she knew it she was talking about Frank—and what it was like waiting for him on the nights he would disappear from the house; how, sometimes, she’d even prayed.
She didn’t look at the butcher as she spoke; she looked at her hands, or at the walls. Though she hadn’t been drinking, she felt drunk. Her voice moved about the room like a frightened animal. There was no sense of time. She began to speak about her childhood, about her father—landing squarely on the facts. “He liked to hit me in the face.” She was not complaining or looking for sympathy. It was simply information.
Ron, who was sitting close to her, nodded. It was clear to him that he wasn’t to say anything—only listen. She was talking about her husband again. Ron knew the story, same as everyone, from the news reports and the papers. Well, he knew the end of the story—but only in a general way. Lucy was providing a few more gruesome details—how she’d fallen on the bridge, trying to make her way to Frank.
“That’s why I walk the way I do,” she said.
“I never noticed,” Ron lied—and Lucy made a sound that seemed, at first, like laughter.
She grabbed a bunch of her hair and pulled it. “I can’t do this again.”
“Do what?”
When the butcher touched her, she pushed him away. “I’m not a good person. Is that what you think?”
Ron knew better than to answer.
“Remember that night I came to your house with my knees all bloody? I wasn’t out with my girlfriends. I didn’t trip. Some kid knocked me down after he stole my wallet. I was trying to pick him up, Ron. I was hoping he’d fuck me.” She made the strange laugh again. “I’d just cashed my paycheck. I was the one who was going to run away.”
Lucy felt the past few weeks rise up inside her like a toxic wave. The argument with Florence the night before she’d died, tire burns on the driveway, cutting off the boy’s hair, killing the tomato plants—black water that finally crashed against Janet and Olivia.
“Eleven years,” Lucy muttered. “Oh my God.”
In her confusion she let the butcher take her hand.
“Slow down, babe—breathe.”
She told him that she had no right to fucking breathe. She touched her chest and closed her eyes. A thousand vipers sped downward into her body. “I’m pregnant,” she said.
“Holy shit. Are you serious?”
Lucy nodded. “When we fucked in the bathtub.”
Ron squeezed her hand tighter—and then even tighter when she tried to pull away. He got down on his knees and put his head on her lap.
“Please,” she begged, her voice no more than a whisper. “Please don’t be happy.”
* * *
When the crash came from above, Lucy jumped to her feet and dashed toward the stairs.
“Stop,” yelled the butcher. “Somebody could be up there.”
Lucy’s thought exactly, as she raced toward Edgar’s room.
But there was no one. In her own room, the same.
It was in Florence’s bedroom that Lucy saw what had caused the sound. On the floor, nestled in the fibers of the new cream-colored carpet, lay the body of the Virgin.
Lucy approached the broken figure and then looked toward the ceiling, as if to understand where the thing had come from. She was certain she’d put it away in the closet. Perhaps Honey Fasinga had pulled it out when she’d been messing with the dresses.
But from where had it fallen? The Virgin was in the middle of the room, a good three feet from the bed, and at least the same distance from the bureau.
Lucy picked up the headless woman and traced a finger against the broken seam. A sharp edge pricked her, drawing blood.
Ron came up from behind.
“I think we should see a psychic,” he said.
Lucy turned to look at Florence’s bed—the bare mattress sagging in the middle, as if someone were still sleeping there.
39
Consolidated Laundry
Incoming material had to be sorted. There was a hierarchy of stains, from the simple to the profound—the superficial grimes of dirt and dust, below the deeper invasions of grease, wine, makeup; above which came blood—not to mention all the other effusions of the body, the yellows and browns and occasional greens, often drying into crusts. Sometimes the stained items seemed like paintings made by children or lunatics. On napkins, on towels, facecloths, sheets—all of them white, and so exceptionally vulnerable. Each piece a blank canvas marked by accident or passion or illness, by violence or impatience, or simply by people who, in Florence’s opinion, didn’t seem to know how to properly use a bar of soap.
Consolidated Laundry took care of the linens for a large number of hotels, including upscale establishments such as the Hyland, Hotel Calarco, and the Mattheson House. Upscale whites arrived in better crates, but were no less soiled. Dirt was dirt. Florence, at seventeen, started as a sorter—a disgusting job for which she doubled up on the rubber gloves. Items needed to be placed in various carts, depending on degree and type of soil.
Later, Florence was moved down the line, as a soaker—a promotion, technically, but no less disgusting than sorting. Here, items with difficult stains were placed in large vats of hot water with bleaching agents, where they were mashed for a while by a mechanical agitator before being passed along to the official washers. Sometimes, before being deposited into the chemical vats, a soaker was required to rub particularly offensive items with special powders, or spray them with steam.
The smells made Florence reel; the fumes made her dizzy. At day’s end her face appeared sunburned. Even with protective gloves, the powders irritated her hands, turning them as red as her cheeks. At night her mother rubbed the raw skin with olive oil. Plus, the heat from the vats was so intense that she sweated through her uniform daily, requiring more laundry at home, more bleach. She wouldn’t be caught dead going to work, especially a laundry, with yellow stains under the arms of her shirt.
When she was promoted, yet again, to head washer, she was pleased, but, in her modest way, wanted more. She hoped to move, eventually, to the other side of the operation. Consolidated Laundry had a “soiled side” and a “clean side,” separated by a wall. Only the clothes crossed over, moving through the tunnels of the giant cylindrical washers. Florence loaded the dirty linens, set the dials to allow for the correct speeds and times, the appropriate levels of detergents and bleach and bluing agents. After which she shut the great silver door and pushed down the latch as if sealing the hatch of a spaceship. She wasn’t permitted to open the door again until the light above the machine turned from red to green—which meant that the linens had been removed from the “clean side” of the tunnel, and that the door over there had once again been sealed. There could be no communication between the two sides.
Sometimes, though, through the tunnel of the washer, Flor
ence caught glimpses of the other shore: blurry figures in white uniforms moving about what seemed to be a version of heaven: a well-lit room where the clean linens were dried and pressed and folded; arranged neatly in stacks; after which they were wrapped in stiff brown paper to keep them free of dust. The parcels (still warm, like loaves of fresh bread) would be driven in trucks, back to the hotels.
Florence was doing her part to help return the world to whiteness. The project, though, was not always a success. There was an inspection at the other side. Items not sufficiently clean had to be washed again, and if the stains still couldn’t be dissolved, the damaged linens were stored in a special closet. Mildly stained items were sold off in bulk to some of the cheaper hotels, while the more noticeably ruined towels and sheets were put on picnic tables at the back of the laundry, where working-class people could buy them for ten cents apiece.
The days inside the plant were long and loud—too loud for conversation with fellow employees. A person did her job quietly, focusing on the tasks at hand, trying not to get burned or mangled. Sometimes it was even pleasurable to stare into the suds (which seemed like the sea or clouds) and think about the future.
Florence was going to get married soon—or so she hoped—to a boy named Pio. He worked in a tunnel, too—tiling the walls of a great engineering feat that allowed cars to travel underwater. She would get married to him; they’d have children; they’d be happy. Being happy was another way of crossing over. Florence knew she’d make a good mother. Even in the reeking, sweaty laundry, she kept her heart on the future.
Every now and then, she could see a woman at the other side of washer number 3. Whenever this happened, Florence wondered if the woman was really there—or if what she was seeing was her own face reflected in the glass door at the far end of the tunnel. When Florence smiled, the woman smiled back. It made Florence happy, as if, in some way, by some miracle, she had already crossed over. Sometimes, though, the woman on the other side seemed much older, with gray hair—but maybe that was just a distortion from looking through water and suds.
Edgar and Lucy Page 35