Edgar and Lucy

by Victor Lodato

  “I don’t want to talk,” he warned, unstrapping the gun and sitting as far from the man as possible. With his back pressed to the door, he positioned the Rossi so the barrel was just a few inches from Conrad’s thigh.

  It was painful, being unkind. How other people did it so easily, Edgar couldn’t fathom. He glanced at the blood on the man’s shirt. The spot was getting bigger.

  When Conrad put the key in the ignition, Edgar told him to wait. He opened the glove box and removed the first-aid kit. Pushed it across the seat.

  “You don’t want me to die?” asked Conrad.

  Edgar, bravely, said nothing.

  * * *

  The truck rocked as it moved down the rutted road. Conrad felt dizzy, watching the snow fall onto the sugar sand. It had never been more beautiful. Fresh snow on old snow, like polished marble. Sheer white veils over the pygmy pines. Almost a tomb.

  After the boy had handed him the first-aid kit, Conrad had opened his shirt to inspect the wound. He’d seen the silver pellet lodged in his flesh, just below the clavicle—and though it would have been easy to remove, he’d neglected to do so. He’d cleaned away the blood, sterilized the wound, and covered it with two gauze patches. Edgar had handed him the white surgical tape—the same tape Conrad had used to change Edgar’s bandage when they’d first met. What a history he and the boy had. Conrad could feel the pulse of blood around the silver pellet, like a second heart. With each rut in the road he winced.

  Edgar asked why they were driving so slowly.

  “The bumps,” said Conrad. “We’ll be on the main road soon.”

  Of course, the man’s preference would have been to stay in the Barrens, to keep driving through the pines for the rest of his life—the snow endlessly accumulating on the white road. He wouldn’t change a thing: the weather, the pain in his chest, the boy with the shotgun. The story could end like this, as an image: the child holding him eternally at gunpoint. Conrad grimaced.

  “Why are you smiling?” asked Edgar.

  “Why are you crying?” the man asked in turn. “Isn’t this what you wanted?”

  * * *

  Edgar held his lips firmly shut to keep his emotions from escaping.

  Anyway, why should he feel any confusion about leaving? He almost felt sad.

  The man was quiet now, slumped at the wheel as he drove, breathing audibly.

  Heat raged from the vents. Edgar was flushed. He needed fresh air but was afraid to roll down the window. Conrad had said they’d be on the highway soon, though it seemed they were driving in circles. The road was still sandy, still bumpy. Nervously Edgar touched the smooth flank of the Rossi. How enamored he’d once been of its elegance—the chestnut sheen of the wood; the polished metal appearing almost blue.

  He hated it now. Hated holding it against Conrad.

  He looked out the window, at the little trees, and felt, with a tilting anxiety, that he was leaving something important—that he was leaving not only the land of the pygmies, not only the man and the dog, but also Florence.

  Because she’d followed him here—and maybe now she’d want to stay in the woods. Maybe she wouldn’t want to go back to her other life at 21 Cressida Drive.

  Edgar’s life in Ferryfield would now be a life without Florence. A life without Conrad. And though these two people were in no sense equal, they were in some ways similar. Both had wanted Edgar to the exclusion of everything else.

  It wasn’t easy being loved like that. Sometimes it was like being in prison.

  Was he really going home? He couldn’t understand why it had taken so long. Someone or something must have been holding him back.

  But when he looked in the side-view mirror, no one was there. Neither Florence nor Jack was chasing the truck. There was only the snow falling, the same as everywhere. The only difference was that the snow behind the truck changed color every time Conrad applied the brakes: when each falling star turned from white to red.

  48

  In Flanders Fields

  Conrad could hear the boy talking to himself. An unnerving habit of his—though merely one among a stunning panoply of quirks. Gestures and twitches that suggested some serious dysfunction—but seemed also to imply a shadowy devotion to a world Conrad couldn’t see.

  Several times, he’d spotted Edgar in the yard, talking to the little doll’s head he’d brought with him. Conrad often had the feeling that the boy was plotting his escape. Talking to his mother or to the police—or even to Kevin.

  It made Conrad furious. He’d never had any success communicating with the dead.

  Possibly because he didn’t believe in such things.

  He drove slowly—the buckshot in his chest sending out rhythmic flares of electric current, almost like music. There was no reason to rush. Edgar didn’t seem to have noticed that they’d driven past Thompson’s Grove twice and were now approaching it a third time. The snow-topped pygmies stretched splendidly toward the horizon, reminding Conrad of a poem he’d learned in school.

  Short days ago, we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow.

  The lead pellet tapped along brightly like a metronome.

  Loved and were loved, and now we lie in Flanders Fields.

  Conrad held tight to the steering wheel. If he turned left, just ahead, he could take the road to the Blue Hole. It was a place children loved. You could swim there. You just had to be careful not to drift too close to the places that might suck you down—a warning that had come from Conrad’s grandfather, who’d explained that the Blue Hole was where the Devil lived. It had made swimming there a profound experience, a test of one’s bravery. A young Conrad had been frightened of the place before he’d learned to love it. It had been the same with Kevin.

  The water was a stunning cerulean—so different from the ubiquitous brown lakes of the Barrens, sullied by bog iron and tannic acid. The Blue Hole was pure—a clear pool surrounded by dense forest. Bottomless, according to legend.

  Of course, it would be too cold to swim there this time of year. But that also meant they’d have the place to themselves. “Are you feeling warmer?” he asked Edgar.

  The boy pointed his chin toward the dashboard. “You’ll need gas soon.”

  Conrad looked. “First thing when we get to the highway.”

  He turned left onto another dirt road. He could show Edgar the other holes, too. The seeping marshes and the slurpy patches of quicksand. And the holes his grandfather had called swallets. Subterranean caves whose roofs had collapsed. Open doors into the Earth, exposing hidden waterways. It was to one of these limestone pits that Conrad had been coming, for months now, to deposit Edgar’s letters.

  Sometimes, with a broken branch, he mashed the envelope into the murky sludge. Occasionally he let the paper float on the surface until the weight of the silt pulled it under. Just at the edge of the waterline, you could see the very top of the cave’s mouth, into which all surface matter eventually flowed.

  There were times he’d actually considered posting one of the boy’s letters. In November, around the holiday, he’d actually stuck his hand into the maw of a blue mailbox not far from the ranger station. And then it would have been over. They would have come—the guns, the flashing lights. Part of Conrad longed for that.

  But he was a coward. He knew this. Despicable, to put one’s destruction in other people’s hands. The truck jolted over some stones and he winced. His yellow shirt was soaked with sweat. He could hear each snowflake detonate as it touched the ground.

  He was ready now.

  In his mind he saw it. Saw the Blue Hole—saw himself taking off his shoes, wading out to the icy center. His body was on fire. The cold water would be a relief.

  Conrad’s reveries were so consuming that he was shocked when another car zoomed past. Shocked, as well, to hear the zing of the truck’s tires on the paved road. Just ahead was the sign: YOU ARE LEAVING PINELANDS NATIONAL FOREST. THANKS FOR VISITING!

  “Why are we stopping?” asked Edgar.

  Conrad
looked at him, but said nothing.

  “Is that the highway?”

  A blur of mechanical life in the distance. Conrad felt an old sadness. He’d always hated leaving this place when he was little. In the car with his father, after the weekend—or at the end of summer vacation.

  “You don’t like it here?” asked Conrad. Kevin had never liked it much, either.

  Edgar was crying now. “I just … I can hear the highway.”

  To Conrad, the sound of cars on a wet road—that endless shoosh—was the sound of a Sunday night. Why was it always raining or snowing when one was leaving? Tires on wet blacktop—was there ever a more depressing sound?

  He shifted gears and began to accelerate. Just beyond the trees: the world. Infuriating, that it could be there again, after this.

  The pellet in his chest was burning.

  Everything would fall apart now. Everything would be lost. Though in what direction it was hard to say. Nothing was set in stone. Ferryfield was over an hour away—practically a lifetime.

  Another hour with the boy: that was something. Some children lived for no more than a minute after being born. Some children were never born at all. Life was precious, no matter how short.

  “You have to go right,” said Edgar, gently nudging the Rossi against Conrad’s leg. “We have to get on the part that goes north.”

  “Yes,” Conrad said quietly, checking his rearview mirror before crossing into the correct lane.

  49

  Maria di Mariangela

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “What?” asked Ron.

  “That’s her name?” Lucy sneered. “It sounds made up.”

  “It’s not.”

  “I mean, why doesn’t she just call herself Shazam?”

  “Why are you being mean? She’s very respected.”

  “I’m not being mean. I’m just saying, what kind of name is that?”

  “It’s Italian.”

  Lucy rolled her eyes. “So—what?—does she, like, ‘talk to the angels’? And what the hell am I supposed to wear?”

  “She’s a friggin’ psychic, Lucy, not the fashion police. Just throw on some jeans.”

  “Nothing fits, if you haven’t noticed.”

  “Wear one of those maternity things Izzy sent over.”

  “I’m not that big yet.”

  “Well, put on something or we’re gonna be late. I’ll wait for you downstairs.”

  “Ron.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What—are you worried? I’ll be sitting right next to you.” He tried to take her in his arms.

  “Stop. I said, I’ll go—so I’ll go. I’m just not getting my hopes up.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  * * *

  The butcher’s question made her want to cry.

  A lot of people thought Edgar was dead. Even Ms. Mann, Lucy sensed. Whenever the detective discussed the case now, she could barely make eye contact.

  Often, in regard to Edgar, Lucy wasn’t sure of her own feelings. She was living in a world unlike anything she’d ever experienced. It was no longer a world one could call home; it was more like a tree house, something made from sticks and mud and leaves—wind-rocked, provisional. Whenever hope bubbled up, Lucy watched it with fascinated horror, unsure whether to squash it like a bug or to shelter it in cupped hands to protect the frail creature from her own fury.

  It was a funny thing, hope. Those who had it baffled her. Take the Schlips, for instance—Henry and Netty—who called Lucy once a week and who regularly sent over baskets of fruit, always with a note attached. Any day now. Always in our prayers. “What am I supposed to do with all this fruit?” Lucy complained one day to the butcher. “Make a pie,” he’d replied. When she said she didn’t know how to make a goddamned pie, Ron kept his cool and calmly said, “I do.”

  And he did. With all his work at the shop, he found the time to cook. Lucy was eating a lot of pie. Red meat, too. The butcher said she needed the blood. She had to think of the baby.

  Eating was a kind of hope, wasn’t it? Ron was an excellent cook. He was kind, too, like the Schlips. She had no right to be mean to him. He was letting her stay at his house, for God’s sake. She planned to go back to 21 Cressida Drive in a few days, right after Christmas. By then, she hoped, the ghosts would be gone.

  “Stay as long as you need,” he’d said. “I like having you here.”

  It was incomprehensible to Lucy that such a thing had happened to her not once, but twice. Hadn’t Pio and Florence been this kind? When she was seventeen and had nowhere to go?

  Still, there was a problem with kindness. Sweet things, sweet thoughts, mostly led to sadness, which implied death—while rage seemed to imply life. Lucy felt she needed to keep a balanced perspective. For example: the woman who’d taken her in at seventeen was the same woman who, years later, had called her a whore—the same woman who, the day before her death, had actually slapped Lucy in the face.

  It was important to keep one’s rage alive. She’d been lazy, lately—mostly sleeping for long hours in the butcher’s bed. She no longer took her car on long hauls across the state. Of course, at least once a day she did drive to 21 Cressida to inspect the house and to ensure that her note to Edgar was still attached to the front door. Even when the mailbox was empty, she banged her hand around inside, just to be sure.

  Ron called from downstairs and asked if she was ready.

  Lucy quickly slipped on one of Izzy’s gifts: a yellow-flowered maternity smock and a pair of powder-blue drawstring pants. When she saw herself in the mirror, she winced. She looked like a clown. Her cheeks were flushed, glowing—though, due to her agitated state of mind, she didn’t attribute the ruddy color to the healthy heat of her pregnant body. The red seemed, instead, the residue of Florence’s slap.

  “Lucy!”

  “One second!” She went to the closet and pulled out the sack of Edgar’s possessions she’d brought from the house. She wanted to take something with her, maybe that little rubber alien. Not that psychics were like bloodhounds; they probably didn’t need something to sniff. What the hell, though—it couldn’t hurt. She put the toy in her pocket.

  “You look nice,” Ron said when she came down. “Put on a hat, though. It’s snowing.”

  * * *

  The psychic’s house was a dump—the outside overgrown with large clackety weeds, and the inside an obstacle course of high-piled newspapers and magazines. Lucy pictured the woman poring over the various papers, hunting for tidbits about people’s lives—stockpiling her intuitions. Surely, she’d read some things about Edgar. Maybe even seen that YouTube video the kids from his school had made, with the boy’s photo spinning over mountains and rivers and then landing in a pair of outstretched hands. “I see mountains and rivers and hands,” the psychic would probably tell them.

  When they’d first arrived, Lucy was confused by the sound of the doorbell—multiple chimes that rang out what seemed to be a sluggish version of “Hava Nagila.” A tall, thin, middle-aged man wearing denim shorts had answered the door. “Pete,” he’d informed them. “I’m the son.” His impeccably parted beetle-black hair was clearly a toupee.

  Four matching lamps with fabric rosettes on their shades imbued the living room with a pleasant pinkish light. The temperature, though, was stifling. Ron instantly began to sweat. “I’m baking cookies,” Pete said festively. “For my friends. Let me show you in to Mom.”

  Lucy, who’d decided in the car that she wouldn’t remove her coat, had no choice but to do so when they reached what Pete referred to as “the reading room”—a chamber no bigger than a walk-in closet, and where the heat was even more oppressive.

  “You’re late!”

  It seemed to be the armchair speaking. The room was underlit (apparently all the lamps had been exiled to the living room). What illumination there was came from a cluster of electric candles, whose wicks flickered with migraine-inducing persistence. Perhaps that was
why Maria di Mariangela was wearing large black sunglasses. Ron and Lucy could see her now as they moved closer—a small woman practically absorbed by the lemon velvet armchair in which she was sitting. Her doll-like feet, which did not reach the floor, were bundled in fluffy green socks with a pattern of tiny candy canes.

  Ron apologized for their tardiness. “The weather is terrible out there.”

  “Be that as it may,” Maria di Mariangela shouted with the rude pomp of the hearing-impaired, “I cannot give you extra time. Please sit.”

  Lucy hesitated before what appeared to be lawn furniture.

  Edgar wouldn’t like it here, thought Lucy. Shouting made him nervous, and he was sensitive to smells. Now that she was seated before the little woman, Lucy could detect a distinct odor—not offensive exactly, but not pleasant, either. A mixture of licorice and Ben-Gay.

  “I’m so glad to have this opportunity to visit,” shouted Maria di Mariangela, fussing with the tie of her terry-cloth robe.

  “Yes, we are, too,” Ron shouted back.

  Lucy closed her eyes.

  “Are you tired?” asked the psychic.

  “She’s just—” began Ron.

  “Not you. I’m talking to the young lady.”

  “I’m fine,” said Lucy.

  “You are hiding something?” suggested Maria di Mariangela.

  Lucy opened her eyes. “I might ask the same of you.”

  “You might, yes.” The old woman adjusted her sunglasses. “Now, as Peter may have explained, I can record this session and you pay only ten dollars more. Okay? Then you can listen again later, at home.”

  Ron nodded. “That’s a good—”

  “No, thank you,” said Lucy. “I have a good memory.”

  Maria di Mariangela frowned, skeptical of this good memory of Lucy’s. “I do not do this for profit, young lady.”

  “Of course not.” Lucy offered a curt smile. Her heart was racing.

  “You are afraid?”

  The wicks of the electric candles were now flickering in synch, their seemingly random patterns exposed as programmatic. “Not at all,” said Lucy.