Edgar and Lucy Page 17

  It was almost painful, making the first incision. The fruit bled. Edgar proceeded slowly, sawing gently at the base.

  “What are you doing—brain surgery?” The butcher appeared at the boy’s side. “You gotta cut it thicker. And if you do it too slow, you mutilate the poor thing. Here, let me show you.”

  The man pulled another knife from the block, and Edgar—propelled by a small nudge—stepped aside.

  “That’s the wrong knife,” the boy said. The butcher had unsheathed the large chopper that was used for onions and carrots.

  “There’s no right or wrong, Eddie. Whatever does the job.”

  “Let him show you,” Lucy said from the sidelines.

  “But we don’t use that knife for tomatoes.”

  “Watch,” the butcher said. He lifted the silver blade and came down with an easy yet significant force. Edgar flinched, fearing the worst. But, miraculously, the tomato fell apart in two perfect halves, with hardly any loss of water. “See that?”

  Perhaps the man was right. Perhaps his method caused the tomato less pain.

  “Now you try it.” The butcher placed one of the halves in the center of the cutting board, and offered Edgar the large knife. “Quarter it.” Like a tennis coach, he lifted the boy’s skinny arm. “You wanna get a little height so you can put some force behind it.”

  Edgar looked at the half-tomato—the seeds like teeth trapped under a bloody glacier. Never before had he realized the extent to which a tomato was a living thing.

  “Down,” the butcher said, and the boy, against his better judgment, followed the man’s command. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them he saw that he’d quartered the fruit perfectly.

  “Good man! Give this guy a drink.”

  Lucy got up from the table, bringing the boy’s milk.

  Edgar felt giddy. The room spun. Something like a laugh came from his mouth, as his mother set the glass beside the cutting board.

  “I’ll do the other half,” said Edgar.

  “Go for it,” said the butcher. “I’m gonna give this kid a job.”

  Edgar saw the man lean in and kiss his mother.

  Lucy was thoroughly sodden; the butcher only a notch less. Edgar was drunk, too—intoxicated by a potent cocktail of exhaustion and grief, spiked with an exhilarating desire for revenge. As he lifted the knife, he thought of Thomas Pittimore. Across the room, his mother, whom he could see from the corner of his eye, pressed her body into the butcher’s. Her hand strayed suspiciously downward. Supersluts.com flickered across Edgar’s mind—and once again he felt the painful branding of Thomas’s pen.

  He lifted the knife higher and brought it down with uncharacteristic force. His form was excellent—a gesture of martial severity that would have guaranteed success had he not forgotten to move his other hand that held the tomato in place.

  The pain was profound and prevented Edgar from hearing his own scream. When his mother heard it, she briefly mistook the boy’s cry for a shout of triumph. But then she saw the blood—and the way Edgar’s hand jerked away from the cutting board, scattering the tomato pieces onto the floor.

  A thin fountain arced high into the air and, as the boy turned in a strange faltering spin, the red liquid spattered across Lucy’s dress. Netty Schlip gasped and leapt from her chair. The boy was missing the tip of his finger.

  Lucy, paralyzed, began to lose her feet. The butcher, having to choose, reached out to stop the boy from falling. Lucy collapsed to her knees, and Netty Schlip raced across the room with a towel.

  “Where is it?” cried Edgar.

  “Where’s what?” said Henry.

  From the floor, Lucy saw it under the table. She looked from the personless finger to the fingerless person—a simple equation that her mind refused to factor.

  “Pick it up,” yelled Netty.

  “Ice,” said the butcher. He set the boy in a chair and sprinted to the refrigerator. “Where do you keep your plastic bags? Lucy.”

  “Henry,” Netty shouted. “My rain cap. In my pocketbook.”

  The old man dumped the contents of his wife’s bag onto the table and located the see-through plastic kerchief. He passed it to the butcher.

  Edgar watched for as long as he could; watched as the rain cap was filled with ice; as his blood bloomed through the cream-colored dishtowel; as his mother picked up a piece of him off the floor and dropped it into Netty’s kerchief. He even watched long enough to hear Lucy say, “Please don’t die.”

  “Nobody’s going to die,” the butcher said.

  Edgar didn’t have the strength to correct him. He watched his mother pass out, and then, only seconds later, he followed her.

  “I’ll drive them to the hospital,” the butcher said.

  “We’ll come with you,” said Netty.

  The butcher carried Edgar from the kitchen, leaving Lucy to the Schlips.

  “Henry, take her other arm.”

  “Got it.”

  “Ready?” said Netty. “Now pull.”

  “Oooh,” Henry said. “She’s no feather.”

  Netty gently slapped the girl’s face. “Come on, dear. We need to get you in the car.”

  16

  In the Car

  A horrible brightness, as if the car were on fire. Where were her sunglasses?

  “Slow down,” Lucy said, shielding her eyes. Her husband was driving too fast, and Edgar was crying. “Frank, slow down, you’re scaring him.”

  The car made a sudden sharp turn, and Lucy, not wearing her seat belt, slammed into the door.

  “Please, baby, just pull over. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  “Don’t fucking lie to me,” screamed Frank.

  As the car flew at alarming speed, Lucy wrapped her arms tightly around Edgar. She looked up at the Saint Christopher medal swinging from the rearview mirror—and though it was another woman’s magic, she prayed to it.

  “What are you saying?” Frank said. “Why are you whispering?”

  But she didn’t answer him. She moved her hand as slowly as possible toward the lock on the door and clicked it open. She had to get out of the car. Now.

  Entry #1

  She feels the boy’s pain, though she has no body. She calls to him, though she has no voice. And though she feels all-powerful, she feels, as well, as if she’s someone else’s dream. It’s not as easy as she’d imagined—being dead. Being bloodless, while all that blood fills her kitchen. If only she could write something there, something the boy might see. Three words on the red floor:

  I am here.

  17

  Percocet-Demi

  Edgar woke with a throbbing pain in his hand, and his mother’s arm strapped to his chest. In the boy’s twin bed, the two were jammed together—Edgar’s butt to Lucy’s belly. The room was dark, spooked by Lucy’s high-pitched snoring. When Edgar tried to move, he found that his body had doubled, tripled, in weight. Maybe he’d been lying too long beside his mother. Was drunkenness something you could catch?

  He felt as if he’d been sleeping for a hundred years, and yet he was exhausted. He rolled to the floor and examined his hand in the glow of his spaceship night-light. One of his fingers was so bundled in gauze it looked like a corn dog. The pain was strange: it was definitely there, but at the same time it was far away. The throbbing came through like a kind of intergalactic static.

  What had happened, exactly? The last thing he remembered was his mother dropping his finger into a shower cap. Edgar gently pressed the tip of the bandage, uncertain what was underneath. Had someone managed to put him back together? He felt a rising in his throat, recalling the blood in the kitchen. His grandmother would be furious.

  And then he remembered the larger problem.

  He went to her room and, as he feared, she wasn’t there. He touched the bedspread—patted it down as if looking for a lost coin rather than a large body. He pulled the blankets off the bed, and then the sheets, until he was staring at a naked mattress. It looked strange, like Wonder
Bread. His brain seemed the same: flat, mushy.

  In the closet, he tugged a few housedresses off their hangers—headless but surprisingly vivid versions of his grandmother. He did not forget the ones in the back, with the sequins and the beads. He carried the mishmash of dresses to the bed and arranged them in a long pile. He picked up the sheet from the floor, covered the mound, and looked at the clock. It was five A.M.—early enough for optimism. His grandmother didn’t usually rise until six.

  He wandered down the hall and ducked into the bathroom. His face was whiter than usual, covered in a sheen of perspiration. Why was he so thirsty? As he reached for the water glass, he saw the small bottle of pills. His name was on the label, as well as a second, more exotic name. Percocet-Demi.

  Take one-half tablet, as needed, for pain.

  The bottle was open. Maybe he’d taken some already. Just to be safe, though, he shook out one of the little pink pills and swallowed it with some water.

  “Oh,” he said, slapping his head (he’d forgotten to break the little pink pill in half). A few seconds later he giggled—a delayed reaction to the head-clonking gesture he’d witnessed in the mirror. It seemed funny now—like he wasn’t really Edgar, only playing Edgar on television. After another slug of water, he dug out two more pills and slipped them into his pants—a gesture modeled after Florence, who always had an aspirin at the ready in the pocket of her housedress.

  He stood outside the kitchen, reluctant to enter. There was a lot of blood. Two sets of smeary red footprints, one large and one small, faded like ghosts as they traveled toward the living room. The crime scene lacked nothing but yellow tape and the outline of a body. Apparently, the police hadn’t arrived yet. If he worked quickly, he could remove the evidence. What had happened was clearly the butcher’s fault, but Edgar wasn’t worried about him. The boy knew, from the storylines of various police shows, that a careless mother could also be dragged away in cuffs.

  It was obvious what he had to do. He’d seen his grandmother do it a thousand times. He went to the hall closet and retrieved the bucket and the mop and the scrub brush. From under the kitchen sink he got the rags and the spray cleaner, as well as a spare roll of paper towels.

  He rinsed the stained knife, wiped the cutting board—the ruined tomato like chunks of guts. Cleaning the floor took some muscle. When he finished mopping, he went out to the yard and poured the bloody water over the anemic tomatoes. The sun was just coming up. He needed to get ready for school.

  Or was he supposed to stay home today? There was no one to ask. Upstairs, his mother was still asleep. He looked at the books on his desk; the scattered pens; the yellow backpack hanging from the chair. These things seemed to belong to some other Edgar. An expansive light-headedness washed away all sense of familiarity. Plus, the room was spinning. When he looked out the window, the trees were spinning, too—confirming that the phenomenon was of global concern.

  With some difficulty he put on a clean shirt, before heading down the hall to check on the progress of his experiment. He pressed on the mound of dresses, but there was no change—no Florence. He’d have to let it sit for a few more hours. From the bottom drawer of the bureau, he took a votive candle (his grandmother bought them in bulk from the Schlips). He dropped the candle into the blue glass cup at the Virgin’s feet, and then struck a match from the box of chopstick-length matches he was forbidden to touch. When he left the house, he was still wearing his slippers.

  * * *

  Lucy woke to the smell of overcooked pancakes.

  “Edgar?” She felt for the boy in the small bed and then drifted off again, to join Frank at a stock car race. A lowrider skidded against the wall of the track, flipping three times before bursting into flame. Frank cheered, and Lucy jumped from the bed, coughing.

  “Shit.”

  She ran down the hallway, following the smell. In Florence’s bedroom she stood paralyzed before the implausible vision of two-foot flames rising before the Virgin Mary. When she darted to the bed to grab a pillow with which to swat the blaze, she screamed, seeing the body under the sheet. It was not until she felt the heat on her back that she turned again to the fire. It had fully consumed the doily under the statue and was now creeping up the wall.

  In the bathroom she filled a glass with water. When she threw it in the Virgin’s face, the liquid’s only effect was to split the fire in two. Half of it set to work on Florence’s wedding portrait, and half of it leapt to the undernourished leaves of the tall potted ficus beside the bureau. Lucy pulled open a random drawer and grabbed a pair of Florence’s bloomers. As she slapped them over the fire they instantly ignited. She dropped the burning underwear and tore off her sweatshirt. After a minute of desperate swatting that knocked the Virgin from the bureau and the wedding portrait from the wall, Lucy managed to extinguish everything but the obvious culprit: the tiny candle in the blue glass cup. She leaned over and blew it out, before collapsing onto the floor.

  Again she looked at the bed, at the large lump under the covers. What the hell was going on? “Edgar?”

  She crawled toward the mattress and pulled away the sheet. She gasped—even though it was nothing but a pile of clothing.

  “Edgar! Do you think this is funny?”

  It was a strain to shout, and she fell into another fit of coughing. Even after opening the window, she found it hard to breathe. Smoke moved about in shifting eddies.

  Lucy hated this room. Whenever she walked past the door and saw the flickering light, it annoyed her. The candle was part of the old woman’s lunacy—some twisted hope that Frank might still be alive. But Lucy knew better; she’d been there at the end. Of course, whenever she’d tried to talk with Florence about what had happened at Shepherd’s Junction, the old woman would hold up her hand like a traffic cop. “I don’t want to hear it.”

  Lucy picked up the head of the shattered Virgin and stared at the black char on the wall. She reached for one of the dresses—a slinky green cocktail gown adorned with a fringe of orange beads. Eventually, she’d have to sort through all this stuff. Who knew what the old woman had stashed in here? Even now, she could see, in the drawer from which she’d pulled the bloomers, a black metal box tied shut with twine.

  When she poked her head into Edgar’s room, she saw that his schoolbooks were gone, his backpack.

  Fuck.

  The doctor had said the kid had suffered a serious shock. He’d also said the pills might make him confused. In the bathroom, Lucy splashed some cold water over her face. They had to be at the funeral by noon. She picked up the bottle of painkillers and shook out two. She’d suffered a serious shock, as well.

  The phone was ringing. Lucy vaguely recalled that it had been ringing all night. By the time she got to the extension in her room, no one was there. It was probably Ron. What an idiot he’d been, with his fucking Benihana knife routine. And now, if the reattachment failed, her son would be permanently disfigured.

  Reattachment? The word echoed in Lucy’s head, growing less sensible with each repetition.

  A hot shower is what she needed—and then she’d drive to the school and pick up the kid.

  * * *

  Outside the Mark-O-Market, a scrap of paper blew against Edgar’s leg. He leaned down to pluck it from his pants. Eggs, Tampons, Frosting. A grocery list, no doubt, but Edgar, in his altered state, suspected it might be some kind of message from Florence—though he wasn’t exactly sure what eggs and tampons and frosting had to do with his grandmother. Still, he put the list in his pocket before floating into the store.

  When he set the bottle of Coke on the counter, Mr. Zhong, who owned the place, said, “Dollar twenty-five.”

  “What?” asked Edgar.

  “Dollar twenty-five,” repeated Mr. Zhong.

  “Oh, right.”

  Digging for change, Edgar pulled the grocery list from his pocket, and then—since he was wearing the same pants he’d worn to the wake—he pulled out his grandmother’s engagement ring.

  “Oh,
look at that!” Mr. Zhong said. “You getting married? Ha ha ha. You getting married today?”

  Mr. Zhong was a tiny man with a screeching voice. Edgar only now understood that the proprietor of the Mark-O-Market was actually a monkey.

  “I…” Edgar put his hand in his other pocket, but there was nothing.

  “Okay, okay,” Mr. Zhong said, “you pay me tomorrow.”

  Edgar reclaimed his property and walked away.

  “Big shot, big shot, you forget your soda.”

  Outside, the sun was bright, and Edgar, wondering where his soda was, closed his eyes. He continued walking until he slammed into a strangely soft wall.

  “Well, hello to you, too, dahhling.”

  It was Thomas Pittimore.

  Some boys nearby laughed.

  Edgar scrunched up his nose. The fat boy smelled hideous.

  “Oh my God!” Thomas cried. “What happened to your finger?”

  The concern in the boy’s voice made Edgar turn.

  “Were you masturbating again?” The audience of boys snickered, and Edgar blinked. Things had started to spin again, and Thomas seemed to be on every side of him at once. Edgar took a step backwards into the road. A car flashed by, blaring its horn.

  “You’re gonna get creamed,” Thomas said, yanking Edgar onto the sidewalk.

  “Where’s Jarell?” asked Edgar, noting with anxiety that the eggplant-colored boy wasn’t among Thomas’s posse.

  In response to Edgar’s question, the fat boy leaned over and, as he’d done before—as if it were simply the customary greeting of his tribe—released a thin rope of spit. It was surprisingly elastic, stretching a long way before snapping into a compact unit and landing on the little boy’s foot. “Nice shoes,” said Thomas.

  “Oh,” said Edgar, noticing for the first time that he was still wearing his slippers. He looked up into the fat boy’s face. “You smell.”

  “What did you say?”