Edgar and Lucy

by Victor Lodato

  He waved it away. “I don’t—”

  “Drink it.”

  “I can’t with my—”

  “Drink it.”

  He shook his head and suggested she have it.

  Lucy stared at him without blinking, and downed the shot.

  Immediately she felt sick. Other than the handful of Communion wafers, she’d eaten nothing this morning; nor had she taken any alcohol since October. An overwhelming heat gripped her inside Florence’s coat.

  “Where are you going?” her father asked her. “Stay.”

  He followed her into the hallway. She could hear the clicking pursuit of his cane—tick tick tick—as if the terrible thing that lived inside the clocks had broken free and was coming to get her.

  The brown threadbare carpet in the hallway, the gauntlet of photographs. Lucy couldn’t help herself from looking—her mother in a Mets cap, obscenely young. Pale skin, red hair—a real beauty. After Lucy had left this house at seventeen, she’d sometimes see her mother on Saturdays. They’d sit in one or the other’s car, eating hamburgers. They’d talked about nothing—never about the bruises on her mother’s arms, or Lucy’s happiness with the young man she’d met. Since they both had jobs, cutting hair in different salons, there were always other women to talk about. Elena Bubko’s beauty was long gone by the time of the hamburgers. Lucy always picked the two bread-and-butter pickles from her sandwich and gave them to her mother.

  Now, as she ran from her father, habit propelled her into her old room at the end of the hall. It was the same as the rest of the house, perfectly preserved. Lucy had forgotten how much she’d left behind, and it was confusing to see her things still here, to see the bed made and the stuffed animals peaceably arranged on top.

  “Who did this?” she asked.

  She slid her hand across her old desk, across her music collection, a long shelf of jewel cases. There was no dust.

  “Who cleans this?” It was disgusting to her, such order. It was deceit.

  “I do,” her father said from the doorway.

  Lucy knelt and looked under the bed, and then went to the closet and threw open the doors. Her clothing still there. She pushed apart the hangers. “Where is he?” She bit her lip to keep back the tears.

  Her father said nothing as he watched her.

  Lucy was sweating. Without thinking, she unbuttoned the black coat—revealing the red spandex top, tight against her body.

  Her father made a small sound of shock.

  “Are you expecting?”

  Lucy looked down at her belly.

  Expecting. It was a word Florence had used when Edgar was inside her.

  It was then she began to cry.

  Her father grimaced and came close enough to strike her.

  She almost wished he would. Because maybe she’d been punished as a child not for who she was, but for what she’d become. A terrible mother.

  “Lucille, Lucille”—his hand was clutching her arm. “What can I do?”

  She shook her head and moaned, waiting until her father’s hand fell away of its own will.

  April

  57

  The White Child

  Jimmy Papadakis often signed the checks personally. He never rushed—preferring to use a slow, schoolboy penmanship that made his signature perfectly readable. He understood that when families saw his name it gave them a lift; he was still a celebrity of sorts—at least in the missing-persons game. He’d been kidnapped at four—missing for seventeen weeks before being found nearly dead in a drainage ditch, less than twenty miles from his home. His parents’ efforts to locate him had been well funded and well publicized (his father was a politician). A Light for Jimmy was now a multi-million-dollar organization. Still, it was important to offer a personal touch.

  The amount of the current payment, to Lucille Fini, was for just over twelve thousand dollars—sixteen percent of what had been collected on behalf of the woman’s son. The remaining eighty-four percent had gone toward the search efforts, as well as toward preexisting programs such as prevention education. And of course there were salaries, fund-raising costs, publicity. Bloodhounds were expensive, too, and ALFJ had the finest—descendants, supposedly, of the famous Saint Hubert hounds of Europe.

  The winter event in Times Square, in which the children’s faces were transformed into goliaths on huge screens, had run more than two hundred thousand in production costs alone. Luckily one child—that little Spanish girl, Benita something—had been found as a result of the project. The Board, though, had hoped for more. Jimmy’s father, Dimitri Papadakis, had said that in a perfect world, the organization would be able to claim one recovered child for every fifty thousand spent. But everyone agreed that cost-effectiveness was a tricky issue when it came to missing children.

  Usually the public sent donations to ALFJ in a general fashion, but over the past few months quite a lot of funds had come in with notes requesting that the money be used specifically in efforts to find the Fini boy. For some reason, he’d become one of the most popular missing children in years. Possibly since Jimmy himself. The boy was cute as a button, heartbreakingly pale; he captured the attention of even the most jaded types.

  Twelve thousand bucks. Jimmy hoped it would be useful to Mrs. Fini. There were never any restrictions placed on the money sent to the families—many of whom had to take time away from their jobs, because of stress or to stay on top of the search efforts. Though, at seven months, which is how long it had been with the Fini boy, there was little one could do. Jimmy understood that the money he was sending to Lucille Fini was more of a consolation prize.

  He’d never seen a case with a more stunning lack of leads, nor with a more inept chief detective—a novice female, neurotically prideful, who seemed to resent ALFJ’s assistance. Of course, had there been any real hope, such personality clashes wouldn’t have mattered. ALFJ would have persisted. As it stood, though, the Board had decided that it was best if the organization eased out of the case.

  In addition to the bad business of pouring resources into what was essentially a black hole, there were other reasons a withdrawal seemed prudent. ALFJ’s reputation might be sullied by remaining involved in a case that had been co-opted by a distinct fringe element. Certain segments of the public were reacting to the boy’s plight in bizarre ways—taking it out of context, turning the story of a missing child into something fantastic, often blatantly spiritual.

  Jimmy, who had no religion per se, could understand, though, how this Edgar kid had been turned into a saint. The photo the family had provided was amazing: the pale boy captured against a dark wall, so that his face popped like a full moon before a black mountain. On his forehead and then extending onto the wall behind him was an odd striated reflection, perhaps from an unseen chandelier—rays of colored light whose point of origin seemed to be the boy’s eyes, which were beguilingly upraised and shyly turned to the side. Even in black and white the photo was noteworthy—but when reproduced in its original color, it had the quality of a painting. The boy’s skin the white-pink of a magnolia petal, and his eyes a watery peridot.

  As was standard with all abducted children, Edgar’s image had been disseminated widely—moving swiftly through official channels to the agencies that dealt with the issue. But at some point Edgar’s likeness had been hijacked by Internet sites not strictly geared toward the recovery of missing children—though one could argue that the electronic prayer circles that Edgar had grown popular in were, in their own quaint way, attempting to do so. These online prayer circles were a global phenomenon, primarily Christian. But as Edgar’s image traveled around the world, he soon began to slip beyond the bounds of Christendom. Every persuasion of god-botherer seemed interested in the albino boy’s plight.

  Of course, on the slop heap of the Internet, information quickly became misinformation. There were willful distortions, bad translations. Soon it seemed that people were not only praying for Edgar, but to him. Just recently, three boys in Cesky Krumlov, in t
he Czech Republic, claimed they’d seen Edgar Fini outside the Church of the Three Snails, eating dandelion greens. When the boys had approached, Edgar reportedly disappeared into the clouds. “Edko up, Edko up” was their tearful refrain, repeated numerous times on the video that Jimmy and the ALFJ Board of Directors had watched online.

  Edgar’s story was out of control—wrested away from the pragmatists who wished to find the child and tossed to the birds, into the hands of people who seemed to want to use the child for their own agendas, or to support their own fantasies. Edgar was a prophet, he was an angel, he was—as one New Age blogger from New Hampshire put it—“the child of our inner light.” It made Jimmy want to spit. Having been a missing child himself, having lived through such horror, he felt personally violated that Edgar should be reduced to metaphor.

  There were poems and stories about “the white child” all over the Internet, in at least sixteen languages. There was no doubt which child they meant, since the text was nearly always accompanied by the haunting photograph of Edgar.

  No longer a real child, but a viral image, something to be “trended,” Edgar effortlessly leaped between the sacred and the secular. Someone in L.A. was already writing a screenplay. Edgar, sadly, had entered the marketplace. His ceaseless repetition had all but obliterated the original. Did these people even remember, Jimmy sometimes wondered, that there was an endangered child behind all this nonsense?

  As he put the check to Lucille Fini in the envelope, he considered adding a personal note to go along with the official letter. Perhaps he should even drive down from Greenwich to hand-deliver it. But the truth was, he always felt sick when he met the families. It brought too much back.

  Not that he remembered very much about his own abduction—though perhaps a bit more than he’d ever admitted to the press, or even his parents. He rarely spoke of those seventeen weeks he’d been gone, so who could know that he thought about it all the time. Even now, almost twenty-five years later. Those terrible days existed for Jimmy as a highly specific blur, like a cloud—a shape that could be drawn sharply only as an outline, empty within.

  He’d been four years old. Outside a department store with his mother. She’d been packing bags into the trunk. When something had knocked into Jimmy, he didn’t immediately understand that it was another human. He was lifted off the ground and then put in a car. It seemed a long time before he started screaming.

  The man—again an outline—was tall and thin, though his hands always appeared, in Jimmy’s memory, absurdly large, like Popeye’s fists. He’d been strong—but what grown man wouldn’t be to a four-year-old? Jimmy had been hurt, but the pain was part of the cloud. It had grown larger over the years, but less distinct, less part of his body. It had turned into something like shame. “No one touched me,” he’d always told his parents—because that’s what people like them needed to hear. He’d had to protect them. Over the years, Jimmy had seen other children come back with that happy-to-be-home grimace he understood to be a mask over terror.

  Children who’d been to the underworld.

  When, after several months, the man was finished with Jimmy, he’d left him, nearly starved, in that slimy ditch. Apparently he’d not expected Jimmy to live.

  Luck was a funny thing. Jimmy’s abductor had had his share, as well. He’d never been found. It seemed odd to Jimmy that the man who’d taken him was still missing. It seemed dangerous. Jimmy’s nightmares persisted to this day. At twenty-nine, he remained with his parents, in the house he’d grown up in. He was not married, and had no children.

  “You’re back now, you can do anything,” his father used to tell him. But Jimmy hadn’t ever felt like he’d come back. Part of him would always be missing. When he thought of a sweet kid like Edgar Allan Fini, gone now for nearly thirty weeks, trapped with who knows what kind of man—because it was always men—Jimmy hoped for only one thing. He hoped that Edgar was dead.

  58

  The Shed

  In the last week of February, as Conrad was approaching his death, he’d found barely a moment of peace. Things had leapt toward him constantly out of the shadows. Some of these things had the feeling, if not the form, of people. There were often doublings. Sometimes both boys were in the room simultaneously—each holding a glass of water to Conrad’s lips. Every sip had made him feel like he was drowning.

  His wife had come, too, asking questions—but not like her former interrogations, or those of the police. She didn’t ask about the shotgun or the woods or how the fuck could a deer look like a twelve-year-old kid. Sara’s questions had little to do with the past; they seemed to be more about Conrad’s plans for the future. Did he have any? Was he taking traveler’s checks or cash? But when Conrad had attempted to think about money, of which he had a great deal, the thoughts dissolved like candy floss—a momentary sweetness followed by a distinct bitterness that burned his tongue. You shouldn’t eat that shit, his father scolded, rots the teeth.

  Conrad had not wanted to talk about candy with the dead man; didn’t he and his father have more important things to discuss? He’d needed guidance from his father just then; a road map. How about a swim in the Blue Hole, the old man had suggested. But Conrad declined, claiming it would be too cold. After that, his father had stood quietly in the corner of the room, whittling a small piece of wood—each flick of the blade signaling his disappointment. As the pine chips had flown toward the bed, Conrad had closed his eyes against the assault. Still, he couldn’t help but to wonder what kind of animal his father was carving, and, more importantly: will he give it to me when he’s finished? Never in his life had Conrad coveted something more. He’d wanted his father’s carving even more than he wanted the child—wishing somehow he could give back everything he’d stolen, asking in return only the small wooden toy.

  A wolf had come into the room at one point, looking for food. It had been difficult to keep it off the bed. The man’s slow starvation attracted only more of what was ravenous. One night, the thing with hooves and wings had appeared in the window. Liar, Conrad had shouted, furious that the tall tale he’d told the boy had had the audacity to come to life.

  The most forceful presence had been an olfactory invasion. And though the scent was sweet—like jasmine and baby powder—it had made Conrad anxious. At first he’d thought it was his mother, because the smell was exactly like the French perfume she used to wear. But when this presence had stood beside the bed, he knew it wasn’t her. It was too kind—a kindness so extreme that it seemed almost diabolic. Sometimes the scented presence had put things inside him—a warm liquid, like blood, straight into his veins. Someone else’s blood, though. Someone else’s memories. Conrad could not understand the nature of the woman’s mercy. “I want to die,” he’d told her one morning—and with a shocking jab she’d put more of the liquid into his veins. A warning, it had seemed, against such language. Conrad had felt ashamed.

  It had gone on like this for weeks. Dying, it seemed, was work. Litanies of recapitulation, committees of approval, the final tortures of persistent affections.

  But, in the end, it had come. The gates had opened for Conrad—and, as he’d hoped, there were flames.

  * * *

  When Edgar first used the key, he’d hesitated before entering—opening the heavy plank door only an inch, and sniffing. At that point, all he’d known of the shed was that it was the place where Conrad had taken the dressed and disassembled buck he’d shot during season.

  Inside, it was dark (there were no windows) and Edgar had had to jump three times to snag the chain that clicked on the light. The first thing he noticed was the food.

  Against the back wall, floor-to-ceiling shelves were lined with cans and jars—each shelf long enough to hold (Edgar counted; counting was calming) twenty-seven cans across, and wide enough to stock them around three deep. Rather than thinking about the meaning of the food, Edgar did the math. Twenty-seven times three equaled eighty-one; times twelve shelves equaled—(Edgar blinked)—nine hundred an
d seventy-two cans of food!

  The boy’s first impulse had been to run and tell Conrad, tell him that there was nothing to worry about, they could both eat as much as they wanted; Conrad didn’t need to deny himself, which he’d been doing for weeks, and which was making him sick. But as Edgar turned to leave the shed, he’d realized that Conrad would already know about the food. It was Conrad who’d given him the key. In light of this new thought, the boy felt afraid.

  Even Florence, who’d always liked to have a good store of canned goods, had never thought this far into the future. The shelves of food suddenly seemed to have everything to do with time. These cans might last Conrad and Edgar for years. More winters, more birthdays—Edgar’s passing in the Barrens, while the baby inside his mother grew up at 21 Cressida Drive. When Edgar heard a low humming, he thought, at first, it was coming from himself—it was not unlike the sound he made right before he started to cry. But then he turned and saw the freezer—an enormous white casket, its moan distinctly human.

  Edgar knew what was inside. More time. That’s what an animal was, after you broke it down. It gave you what you’d stolen from it; let you live that much longer. Edgar could hardly believe he’d ever eaten a dead animal. Pieces of meat wrapped in plastic. He looked down at his finger and remembered how the butcher had once tossed it into an ice-filled rain cap. Conrad had done something similar to a deer.

  Edgar curled up on the floor. Jets of warm air streamed audibly from the bottom of the freezer. Edgar moved closer and hummed along, telling himself that it was wrong to abandon someone who needed you. He told this to himself over and over, until the world fell away.

  * * *

  When he opened his eyes, some time later, he sensed, even in the windowless shed, that it was night. He didn’t remember having closed the door and worried for a moment that someone had locked him inside. He got up and pushed at the heavy plank, which swung outward to reveal the dark yard. The lamp was burning in Conrad’s bedroom—but Edgar knew he’d be sleeping. In the morning, when Conrad woke up, Edgar would force him to eat. It didn’t matter that he no longer had a gun. A man could act without one.