She fished the six bullets from the paper bag and gave them to me. She gestured with her head. Again, I didn’t question her. I threw the bullets, one by one, into the water.
“Wait,” she said.
There was one left. She took it from me, and then removed the gun from the bag.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Trust me,” she said.
Her hands were shaking and she couldn’t get the chamber open.
“Stop.” I took it from her, loaded the bullet, and then raised my arm to throw the gun.
“Let me do it,” she said.
“Ma.”
“Trust me,” she said again.
When I gave her the gun, she told me to stand back.
“Ma, be careful.”
She pointed the muzzle toward the water and pulled the trigger. The chamber was empty.
My heart was racing, but I had no compulsion to stop her. She pulled the trigger again—two more dry shots until on the fourth the horrendous sound startled us both. The ring echoed like the cry of a dying animal. It entered our bones and lingered there.
“We’re done, baby.”
She held out the gun, as if to see it against the sky. Then she dropped it into the water.
* * *
Over the next few years, there were parties at the house—as there must have been when Pio and Florence were young and had just bought the place. A few friends, some neighbors. There was always too much food, always wine. Sometimes the furniture was pushed aside and there’d be dancing.
The parties were never large, but I was still shy and often hid in the kitchen or at the foot of the steps, from where I had a good view of the living room. Emma, up past her bedtime, was easy to spot—walking around proudly in pajamas, controlling the music with her wrist-rover, which was the latest rage—and with which she seemed to rule the very spirit of the house. “Blue music,” she’d command. “Now, red. Now, pink!” No one understood her categorizations, but she kept the room hopping—often dancing herself in a way that never failed to make me laugh, like she was being shocked silly by electricity. On the dance floor she often gravitated toward Toni-Ann Hefti, who shared an equally expressive style. Toni-Ann must have been around nineteen or twenty then. She worked part-time at the Container Store and often gave Emma tiny colored boxes that Emma adored but in which my sister would never put anything. “The box is what matters,” she explained to me.
When Emma got tired, her dance became a slow rocking of her hips that seemed only to make her sleepier. She would dance until her eyes began to close and it was often me who put her to bed—in Florence’s room, which was now my sister’s.
She always said her prayers out loud, without shame. In fact, it seemed she recited them with a savvy awareness of her audience. The night-light of the angel on the bridge was back in action. It still baffled me sometimes that Emma and Florence shared no blood. This truth never seemed quite right.
“The old lady in the pictures?” she’d say, if ever I brought up Florence.
“Yes,” I would say. “My grandmother.”
“I don’t have any grandmothers,” she’d tell me. “But I have you, and I have parents. There’s a girl in my class named Fung who doesn’t have any parents—only guards.”
“Guardians,” I told her.
“Yes, but not like angels—just like normal people.”
* * *
Eventually, I went away to school. Money wasn’t an issue.
My mother, of course, never asked for a penny. Still, I convinced her to fix up the house—repair the roof and the faulty plumbing. Over time we added all the new technologies, according to Emma’s specifications. Florence’s house became wired for transcendence. A skylight illuminated the historically dark staircase.
For a while, there’d been talk about moving—but something in the house wouldn’t let us go, and we didn’t fight it.
When my mother turned fifty, I took her and the butcher on a trip to Italy—mostly to look at the paintings. At one point, in the Uffizi, the butcher took my hand. We were standing before a depiction of the abduction of Ganymede—the boy in the wings of a large black eagle.
The butcher turned to me, and I blushed.
“I’m okay,” I said. “I’m better.”
Of course, the sadness still came and went—and the panic.
It was the same for my mother, who suffered a migraine every time I had to go away again. Often I’d delay my departure a day or two, sit with her in a dark room, stroke her head.
I never stayed away for long—never for more than a few months. Summers we were always together. It became our season. We traveled everywhere, slept in good hotels—from which my mother regularly stole the soap. She said, “I dreamed of doing this with your father.”
My mother died when she was eighty-six—just two years after the butcher passed, at eighty-nine.
I never married. Neither did Emma. There are no children.
Forgive me for rushing, but I want you to feel it as I did—the way the years flew, masquerading as minutes.
21 Cressida Drive is gone now. There’s some kind of warehouse there that I don’t understand, don’t have any desire to understand.
Things dissolve, they disappear, and if you want to keep them, it takes some practice. These days, I mostly stay in my room, trying to remember. I always have a notebook close at hand. My greatest pleasure has been writing the ghosts.
* * *
You’re that boy who was missing.
More than once, when I was young, people would come up to me and say something to this effect. It wasn’t uncommon to learn that these strangers had prayed for me. Such interactions were always brief. People seemed compelled to approach, but soon realized that there wasn’t much to say. And of course my one-word answers or silent nods did little to put them at ease.
Everyone’s lost something—some people quite a lot, some people everything—and I suppose these strangers saw me as a bit of luck. A happy ending.
“Well, I won’t keep you,” they’d often say. “I’m sure your mother is waiting for you.”
“Yes,” I would inform them, trying not to gloat. “She is.”
MIRRORLAND
After Emma died, Edgar returned to the cabin.
It was the same as before: the tricky floorboards, the pink glass window churched by sun, the old clanging stove. The Barrens were the same, too: the towering pines and the pygmies, the milk snakes streaming through fallen needles.
Winters were colder now, of course, and Edgar always had a fire—though gathering wood at his age proved to be a heart-thundering chore. Often he stood baffled before mirrors. How could he be an old man when for most of his life he’d been a child? It seemed a riddle.
* * *
Now and then he found himself staring at words carved on a tree. Edgar loves …
Still unfinished. Sometimes he took a knife with him, intending to complete the sentence.
But what had he meant to write, all those years ago? Who was the object? An old woman in a paisley robe, with workhorse hands and feet like the skin of an orange? Or maybe it was the redhead with the house-burning laugh. There had been others, as well—but they’d come later.
Edgar decided to leave the carving as it was. All he did, with a slow turning of the point of his knife, was to add a period.
Edgar loves.
He’d consider it an honor should he be deemed worthy of such a tombstone.
* * *
But not yet. He’d like to sleep and wake for a few more months. He’d like to see spring again—hear Fowler’s toads in the mud and Chuck-Will’s-Widow in the trees, glimpse Hessel’s Hairstreak in the cedar swamps. He’d like to eat one last sparkleberry.
Soon, these nine hundred acres will be part of the National Reserve—Conrad’s private estate given back to nature. Edgar has it all on paper.
Sometimes he’s too excited to sleep and he sits in the yard, listening to the night birds doing th
eir invisible work. He makes tea and folds himself over the kitchen table, takes a few more notes. He still rocks his body, but only when he’s writing and trying to find his rhythm—the old habit cleansed of anxiety; it’s a kind of freedom now, a breaking through. He works every day. The book is nearly finished.
* * *
Mid-afternoon. He’s kneeling by the woodpile, gathering greens. Above him, a light unlike anything he’s ever seen.
The light explodes, expands. Edgar wonders if a war has begun—and when he tries to stand, he falters. The light in the sky grows larger—an orb half the size of the sun. From its burning surface emerge brilliant bluish tendrils—a living, jellyfish luminescence. Edgar recalls the ships he dreamed about in his childhood, vessels powered by diamonds.
All day he lies on his side by the woodpile, watching the light—and when night comes, it’s still there, brighter than the moon. With the stars out, the sky is a map Edgar can read. The pulsing jellyfish has replaced the shoulder of Orion, the Hunter.
Someone had told him that this would happen. Someone had held him up to the sky, some long-ago night school. He can smell the greeny green scent of tomato vines.
Edgar nibbles a dandelion leaf and rolls onto his back. He once knew all about red giants and white dwarfs and dark matter. He’s forgotten most of it. Something with a B—that was the name of the star. A name that had always made him think of a monster.
He’s no longer afraid, though.
This thing he’s watching—this death—happened a long time ago. There’s no pain. It’s ghost light. Still, it’s hard not to imagine it as something just being born. Lying on the ground, in the wet weeds, it’s as if the dog were licking his face.
The supernova will burn for weeks yet before collapsing into darkness. It’s almost bright enough to write by. If only he could crawl to the house and get his notebook.
He’s too weak, though.
And what would he tell you, anyway?
This is how it ends.
When, really, there’s no art to it. It just happens.
Like the deer, who’s appeared in the pines.
Is it a deer? Maybe it’s a fox. It almost looks human.
Edgar lifts his hand and waves, as the ship throws off its streamers.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank the following people for their invaluable assistance—and for their kindness and generosity.
The living: Bill Clegg, Elizabeth Beier, Nicole Williams, Dori Weintraub, Olga Grlic, Austin Brayfield, Richard Lodato, Daniel Mahar, Janet Neipris, Steve Johnstone, Adam Geary, Marilyn Edwards, Michele Conway, Karson Liegh, and Chris Rush.
The dead: Josephine Lodato, Sophie Lodato, Teresa D’Auria, Jetti and Louis Ames.
For the gift of time and a beautiful place in which to write, I am grateful to Pietro Torrigiani and Maddalena Fossombroni at Castello in Movimento, Italy.
—V.L.
ALSO BY VICTOR LODATO
Mathilda Savitch
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Victor Lodato is a playwright and the author of the novel Mathilda Savitch, winner of the PEN Center USA Award for fiction. His stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, and Best American Short Stories. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Victor was born and raised in New Jersey and currently divides his time between Ashland, Oregon, and Tucson, Arizona. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Book One: The Age of Florence
1. Chanel Nº 5
2. Two Wineglasses and a Banana
3. Beards
4. Best in NJ
5. Fat and Skinny
6. Pinocchio
7. Francesco
8. The Man in the Closet
9. Boo-Boo Bag
10. Saint Christopher
11. Vesuvius
Book Two: Time Regained
12. L.O.V.E.
13. Honey
14. Flow-Rinse
15. Save for Later
16. In the Car
17. Percocet-Demi
18. Tuesday
19. Tuesday
20. Kev
21. Superslut
22. Salvashon
Book Three: The Last Day of Francesco Lorenzo Fini
23. Ten Minutes
24. Shepherd’s Junction
Book Four: Betrayal
25. Holes
26. Egg
27. Harvest
28. Biggleberry Island
Book Five: The Pine Barrens
29. The Seventh Day
30. Extra Credit
31. Goodbye, Toni-Ann
32. The Pine Barrens
33. Soon New Addition to Your Family!
Book Six: Nine Months
34. Withdrawal
35. Jack
36. Signs and Symbols
37. The Waiter
38. The Headless Woman
39. Consolidated Laundry
40. A Hunting Accident
41. First Wednesday of December
42. The Holiday Season
43. Everyone’s Guilty
44. Liars
45. The Devil
46. Alpha Orionis
47. Tomb
48. In Flanders Fields
49. Maria di Mariangela
50. Homecoming
51. The Shell
52. Pilgrims
53. The Goofers
54. The Farm
55. The Golden Rectangle
56. Expecting
57. The White Child
58. The Shed
59. Confession
60. Spring
61. Carnation
62. The Bridge
63. Laughter
64. Madwoman
65. Star of Bethlehem
66. Keep It Clean
67. Seven Bridges
68. Rest
69. Beauty
70. The Fish
71. The Clearing
72. Chicks
Book Seven: Home
73. Time
74. Tree of the Year
75. Blue Music
Mirrorland
Acknowledgments
Also by Victor Lodato
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
EDGAR AND LUCY. Copyright © 2017 by Victor Lodato. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Olga Grlic
Cover illustration © Jeff Nishinaka/Francine Rosenfeld
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-09698-2 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-13708-1 (Canadian edition)
ISBN 978-1-250-09700-2 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9781250097002
Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at [email protected].
First U.S. Edition: March 2017
First Canadian Edition: March 2017
Edgar and Lucy Page 55