Each child, no matter how awkward, moved as if they were supported by invisible nets or wires; they floated rather than treaded. When an adult walked by, you could see how out of joint he was with the natural order of things. Conrad, sitting in the truck, felt the weight of his own spine, its antagonism with the Earth, like a drill grinding against an impenetrable layer of stone. It was as if there were two realities, side by side: children here, and adults there. They coexisted, but only in an illusory way. The same was true of the happy and the sad. The living and the dead.
There was one child, though, who seemed to exist somewhere in between these contradictory realities. He was the most luminous and, at the same time, the most deadly. And now that child sat across from Conrad every morning, eating a bowl of cereal.
* * *
“Good morning, Conrad.”
“Good morning, Edgar.”
Sometimes the boy’s politeness unnerved the man. Despite everything, they were friends now.
“A little more milk?”
“Yes, please.”
The most casual exchanges felt profound to Conrad, and would make him break out into a sweat.
“I’m just putting on a little sugar,” Edgar said—sprinkling half a teaspoon onto his cornflakes.
“Go for it,” said Conrad with a wink.
That’s what the cabin had always been about. Boys being boys. A place to eat junk, stay up a few hours later—a place a young man could do all the things he wasn’t allowed to do at home with his mother.
Conrad tried not to watch the boy too closely—the thin, white fingers clutching the spoon.
“A can of soda has like ten times more sugar,” Edgar said, glancing up to find the man looking at him the same way his grandmother used to look at him. It made Edgar feel less nervous. “I know some kids who have soda for breakfast,” he continued. “But I’m not allowed.”
“The rules,” Conrad said, and Edgar, feeling understood, nodded.
The man got up and poured himself some coffee. He noticed the sunlight on the walls: a nice day to be outside. “After you eat, we’ll go out and practice.”
Edgar finished chewing. Swallowed. “Okay.” He lifted another spoonful—stopping it just short of his mouth. “But with the little gun, right?”
“Yup.” Conrad quickly sipped the hot coffee, intentionally burning his tongue. It was unpredictable what he might say—feeling himself ambushed suddenly by an unpleasant rush of gratitude. Some mornings, the boy didn’t scream or cry or hide, but actually seemed content, even happy.
“I think the little gun is better for me,” said Edgar.
Conrad mumbled agreeably and poured more coffee into his already full cup. He put a dishtowel over the spill and looked out the window. At this point, the boy was only using Kevin’s old Daisy air gun, shooting pellets. During an early lesson, when Conrad had used the larger Remington to shoot a crabapple off a stump, the sound had frightened Edgar.
Just take it slow, he thought. The same way he’d taught his son. Start with the pellet gun, which had no recoil or muzzle blast to upset the child. When he was comfortable with that, move him up to the Rossi, which had been given to Kevin when he was around Edgar’s age. It was a good youth gun, but still did a man’s job. In a few years, when Edgar was older …
The man stopped, reminding himself that the boy wouldn’t be here much longer. This was temporary. Everything was temporary. Conrad most of all. He’d always planned to leave the guns, the cabin, to Kevin. As things stood, Sara would probably just sell it all to strangers when the time came.
“I don’t think they taste terrible,” said Edgar.
“What’s that?” asked the man.
“The little apples. You said they tasted bad. But I tried one, and it was definitely edible.”
Conrad laughed. He rubbed his eyes and asked the boy to please excuse him; he needed to write something down.
* * *
With very little practice, the kid had become a surprisingly good shot. Whenever he pinged a hole into a can, his mouth fell open in surprise, his natural humility preventing him from shouting Yes!—as Kevin would have done. After a successful shot, Edgar would sometimes turn to Conrad for approval. “Perfect, kiddo,” was the man’s standard reply. Only then would the boy smile shyly and say, “I guess I’m sort of getting the hang of it.”
The Rossi would be more challenging. Especially with moving targets. Conrad would make sure to always follow behind with the Remington.
Follow behind. Or drift ahead.
The boy was by and large still tentative, even with the pellet gun, but there were days when he fired it with an eerie focus and precision. Often these bouts of somnambulant accuracy occurred after a night of crying, or after Edgar had emerged from his hiding spot behind the bookshelf. Sometimes, when the boy pulled the trigger, Conrad could detect a trace of fury in the pale green eyes.
At such moments, Edgar didn’t turn to the man for encouragement; nor did he smile. Conrad understood; remembered. Sometimes a can was more than a can. When you hit it, it was like hitting your father.
* * *
After breakfast, Edgar made three good shots in a row—and Conrad felt something strange. He felt his heart go cold and leap against the boy. This boy who had his whole life ahead of him. For a moment, Conrad imagined a different outcome—one in which no child would be granted things his own son could never have.
Not that he wanted to hurt Edgar. Hurting Edgar was the worst thought in the world.
But someone was always hurt, someone was always in pain.
He watched the boy closely, waiting for clues.
Don’t think you know how it will end, he wrote in his notebook.
And then he wrote: Sometimes I feel I can’t wait much longer. I feel sick, almost hopeful. But it has to stop. It has to be over by Christmas.
41
First Wednesday of December
At 5:42 on a freezing afternoon, Honey Fasinga and Dominic Sparra were making their way across Times Square, having just seen a revival of Annie at the Palace. Several months before, the pair had reconnected on the steps of St. Margaret’s after Florence’s funeral. They looked quite the item now, dolled up despite the miserable day. With one hand, Honey clutched her hat against a strong wind; with the other, she clutched Dominic Sparra. She’d left her cane at home, knowing she’d have a man to keep her steady. The man, though, was slightly tipsy. Dominic had downed two Dewar’s and water during the interval, to soften the assault of another hour of screeching orphans.
They crossed the plaza slowly—Honey, warm in her fur, and dreamy. She was lightly humming “It’s the Hard-Knock Life” when the wind took its advantage and her crimson pillbox harrumphed upward like a startled pigeon. “Crap,” she cried.
“It was,” said Dominic, recalling the play. “Too much stomping.”
“No, darling—look.”
Honey pointed, and Dominic followed her finger to a small blur of red spinning above them. “What is it?”
“My hat.”
“How’d it get up there?”
“Magic,” Honey replied crabbishly, as the hat flew higher. It was a Florence, and damned if she didn’t want it back. The tottering couple craned their heads skyward. Dominic felt dizzy.
Others were watching now, too. A pack of fat Germans, led by a woman with a rainbow flag, began to snap pictures.
“It’s mine,” announced Honey, prophylactically. Some little fashionista in the crowd might get ideas. Finders, keepers—that sort of nonsense.
But the hat seemed to have disappeared—sucked higher into the air, or perhaps it had already fallen into the hands of a stranger. Dominic and Honey saw nothing now but the large glittering screens. The advertisements in Times Square were out of control, thought Dominic. Two-hundred-foot televisions jangling with images. On one loomed a pretty, young model with flawless skin.
“Ah,” gasped Honey, recognizing the face.
“Oh my God,” said Dominic.
“That’s … what’s-his-name.”
Words on the screen faded up to assist.
Edgar Allan Fini. Nine years old. Missing.
Honey reached for Dominic’s hand. He squeezed her fingers—the pair of them thinking, in different ways, how they’d wronged Florence: Dominic and his failure to woo her; Honey and her disastrous affair with Pio. At their ages, it was hard not to see the knottiness of time as some horrible work of macramé, a mass of connected tangles, of which you were one—knitted into its plan like a fly entombed in silk. They were all in this together, the living with the dead—and so much had been done badly, so many mistakes had been made, maybe it was only right to be trapped in the web and let the spider eat you.
For a brief moment Florence’s hat (crushed velvet and honeycomb lace) flashed before the huge white face and then vanished. Honey experienced a wave of nausea and regret. Terrible things had happened; were happening still. Edgar’s face faded out and another child bloomed onto the screen. A brown girl with strawberry lips and crooked teeth.
Benita Cardenza. Six years old. Missing.
Dominic shook his head. “It’s a sick world.”
Honey stared at the screen. “I guess we’re lucky we never had children.”
“We didn’t love the right people.”
“No, we didn’t,” agreed Honey. She watched the little girl’s face for a bit more and then patted Dominic’s hand. “You’re freezing, old man. Let’s catch our bus.”
“I hate going through that friggin’ tunnel.”
“I know, darling—but it’s the only way home.”
Entry #4
Seeing how they suffer, she’s not without sympathy, remembering how she, too, had suffered once. How, even with faith, she had hung her stars in the sky with wires. Had she really not believed, as they do not believe? They might find the boy more easily by giving up and facing the greater void his missingness implies. But they’re afraid of that.
What they desire is something like forgiveness, though that’s not quite the right word. They’re playing at stories they have to finish. She watches—and though she wants to swoop down and shepherd them home, the patterns of their chaos prevent it. Patterns they’re forced to play out. She still remembers her own patterns, her own chaos; remembers who had betrayed her and who had loved her.
It’s all the same to her now, though.
Now that she’s shed the coil of her own wrongdoings.
She understands, of course, that, for them, it’s not as easy. So much gravity down there, so little faith. Remembering again how, every year, she’d set up the little house with Mary and Joseph and the baby—and how, when the prong to hold up the Magi’s star had broken, she’d used a bobby pin to keep it in the sky.
42
The Holiday Season
Edgar’s birthday had come and gone. Thanksgiving, too. Lucy had spent the first occasion in bed. On the second, the butcher had dragged her to his sister Izzy’s place: a bleak condo with a view of Route 46, furnished with faux antiques—the dining room table done up with baby pumpkins and paper maple leaves. “Do you want me to turn up the heat?” Izzy had asked when Lucy sat down to dinner wearing Florence’s black wool coat. “She gets cold,” the butcher had explained, and everyone had nodded and smiled. No one mentioned Edgar.
Lucy liked the old coat, realizing that, during her whole adult life, she’d never owned a proper winter jacket. She’d always been too vain—often wearing, even during the coldest months, only a short leather bolero or a shearling-lined vest. Now, she found herself putting on the bulky black shroud whenever she left the house, caring little for the fact that it added twenty pounds to her appearance.
Most days she wore no makeup, nor did she fluff her hair with spray or foam, but simply pulled it back in a ponytail. Ron thought she looked beautiful but learned to keep this opinion to himself. The last few times he’d said it during sex, she’d requested that he just fuck her quietly. If Lucy cried—which she sometimes did after she came—Ron held her, though he knew not to do it too tightly, or she’d buck.
* * *
There were no baby pumpkins or paper maple leaves at 21 Cressida Drive. The place was a mess. Neither Lucy nor Ron were good housekeepers. They threw clothes on the floor and hung plastic grocery bags on the coat rack. Lucy often ate cookies in bed, the crumbs biting her at night like insects. And though she’d stopped smoking, the butcher’s habit lingered. He indulged in the yard, throwing butts into a coffee can.
Florence’s kitchen was a disaster. The butcher cooked flamboyantly, overheating the olive oil and spattering the wall with grease. After his culinary performances, Lucy always offered to clean up—but she’d often leave the larger pots and pans in a half-submerged scrap heap in the sink. The old woman’s arsenal of cookware was vast; it was possible to let the pot pile build for days. When Netty Schlip was stationed at the house, she wiped a rag here or there, but knew better than to fully attack the problem—understanding that people got attached to their messes, like pets.
The only order at 21 Cressida Drive existed on the dining room table—where Lucy kept, in neat piles, the flyers with Edgar’s face. She and Ron put them up tirelessly. The ones on telephone poles and in shop windows had to be replaced often, because they faded or tore or—appallingly, to Lucy—were postered over by weight-loss ads or babysitters seeking employment. Ron attached a flyer to every package of meat sold at his shop. At St. Margaret’s, the boy’s face was framed in cedar, and sat near the entrance on a small table. Recently, though, Lucy had had to start again from scratch with the posters, because the facts had changed. Ron had suggested they simply cross out the eight and write in a nine for Edgar’s age, but Lucy had insisted on printing a revision. Somehow that seemed less awful.
On the new flyer, Lucy had added the word reward—planning to use the four hundred dollars from Florence’s teacup. The butcher had offered to throw in some money, as well. It wouldn’t add up to much—but Ms. Mann said that even a small amount might encourage someone to come forward with helpful information.
So far, there was nothing. It was as if Edgar had ceased to exist. When Ms. Mann came to the house now, it was more of a courtesy—bringing a box of crullers instead of a handful of leads. Sometimes Lucy asked her to stay for dinner. After several refusals, the detective finally agreed. The butcher baked ziti and opened a bottle of zinfandel. At one point, Lucy watched, amazed, as Ron trotted out a few crude jokes and Mann laughed stiffly, like a mannequin come to life. It’s okay to laugh, one of the pamphlets stated. A good laugh can be as cleansing as a good cry.
But Lucy couldn’t do it. She pushed back her chair and stood. “This damn baby makes me have to pee every ten seconds.” In the bathroom, she turned on the faucet to drown out Mann’s polite chuckle. Lucy tried smiling in the mirror, but wasn’t convinced by her upturned lips pinned into place. All her life, people had commented on her laugh. An explosive cackle that had always reduced Edgar to giggles, even if he didn’t know what she was laughing about. Merely the sound of it would infect him—an inoculation against sadness, to which the boy was prone. Lucy hoped it was still inside him, a shard of her laugher, protecting him. If a person couldn’t laugh, he was as good as dead. She tried to picture the boy giggling, his elfin ears turning pink.
In the mirror she smiled, as her eyes filled with water.
* * *
Around the second week of December, Lucy’s mood began to drift toward mania. She marked up maps before going out to look for Edgar, but then followed none of her plans—driving instead by instinct, often exceeding the speed limit. When she came home, she chewed off the ear of whoever was stationed at the house. She even rambled on to Toni-Ann, telling the girl about the albino she’d spotted in Dover, outside a diner—not Edgar, of course, but surely it was a good sign. During another flash of hopefulness, she agreed to see a psychic (Ron had not stopped pestering her).
Lucy crumbled, though, on a frigid Wednesday (windchill 12 degrees), when she wal
ked in the door and saw the Christmas tree. Ron had come home early to put it up. It was decorated with red bows and white twinkle lights. The effect on Lucy was stunning.
They were all there suddenly: Frank, Pio, Florence. Edgar, at two months, in a Santa hat; Pio unwrapping a plush puppy; Florence kissily jiggling the toy in Edgar’s face.
“We can’t stay here.” Lucy shook her head and turned to the butcher. “Not for Christmas.”
* * *
A few days away is all she needs, she tells him. Just until after the holiday. They can go to his place.
“We’ll go tomorrow,” Ron says, but Lucy insists on driving there that evening.
Before they leave, she asks him to take down the Christmas tree and makes him promise not to put up any decorations in his shop, or in the apartment above, where they’ll be staying. Lucy throws a few things in a shopping bag—clothes, toiletries, a hairbrush. She wants some of Edgar’s things, too. From the top of his bureau, she grabs a handful of tiny farm animals, the rubber alien. She takes the demitasse cup of Chinese fortunes, along with the plush puppy his grandparents had given him. After carrying the stuff downstairs, though, Lucy has second thoughts about leaving. She calls Ms. Mann to ask if it’s okay to spend the holiday at Ron’s.
“You don’t need my permission,” says the detective.
“But I mean, what if…?”
Mann is silent. Three months have passed, and she feels it’s best not to offer too much encouragement.
“Should I have someone stay at the house?” asks Lucy.
“During the holidays that’ll be tough,” says Mann. “Just leave a note on your door with all your information—and I’ll have an officer keep an eye on things.”
“We’ll be gone only a day or two. Christmas is just hard.”
“Get away,” Mann says. “It’ll do you good.”
* * *
Edgar, Lucy writes, I’m at Ron Salvatore’s house. Call me at the number below. I love—
Edgar and Lucy Page 37