Edgar and Lucy Read online

  “Put him on the ground.” Frank peels off his shirt. “Here.” He tosses it out of the car. “Put him on this.”

  It’s the denim shirt she gave him years ago, knowing how good he’d look wearing it on his motorcycle. The motorcycle on which they were going to ride to San Francisco, live by the ocean. Her legs go weak at the memory.

  “Frank,” she cries—feeling dreams she’s been clutching for so long, with all her heart and muscle, slipping away.

  “Spread it out underneath him.”

  “I think I hear sirens,” Lucy lies, in an attempt to disrupt Frank’s preoccupation with the baby.

  “I know,” he says, pulling at his ears. “Do it.”

  Lucy kneels in the dirt. She brushes away some small stones before spreading the blue shirt on the ground. Maybe we’ve come far enough, she thinks desperately, her mind spinning. We could just live here at the side of a road; forget California. Live in a shed, a shack. She tries to reduce her hope to something so small, so humble, that it would be too cruel for the wish not to be granted. She’s sorry if, before, she’d asked for too much.

  “Make sure he’s in the shade,” Frank says.

  Shivering, Lucy does as she’s told, following a logic that’s beyond her comprehension, but seems to be understood by the baby, who’s no longer crying.

  “Write his name,” Frank says.

  A black pen lands in the dirt.

  “On his hand,” Frank says—and then, “No—on his arm.”

  Lucy touches the child’s soft unmarred skin. His face and body glow strangely blue in the shadows.

  “Write his name, Lu.”

  “No.” She pushes away the pen and lies in the dirt next to the baby, crying so quietly it’s as if she’s melting.

  Frank is beside her now. He takes the tiny pale forearm, and Lucy watches as, slowly, the words appear on the baby’s skin.

  Edgar Allan Fini.

  Frank kisses the boy’s arm. He rests his stubbled cheek against Edgar’s face. I’ll come back to find you, he confesses. I don’t know when.

  Then, he grabs the girl’s hand. “Get back in the car.”

  He pulls, and a dazed Lucy stumbles to her feet. He pushes her inside the door. The quiet child turns toward her vanishing and wails.

  As Frank gets behind the wheel, Lucy sits with her legs still dangling on the ground. She’s lost a shoe. She stares at the crying baby, confused. How could he even be there? She’d made an appointment at the clinic, hadn’t she? She remembers the lights, the table.

  “Shut the door,” Frank says.

  Someone had forced her to have this baby.

  Frank starts the engine, and Lucy sobs.

  “Shut the door!”

  She shuts the door.

  They’ll find you, she thinks. They’ll take you home to Nana.

  For a moment the wheels turn on the rutted dirt without making traction. The car bounces violently in place. When it suddenly lurches forward, Frank touches Lucy’s leg.

  She sees the sign (SHEPHERD’S JUNCTION) and the large metal bridge. Soon they’ll be across it, on their way to another life—and Edgar will be gone; he’ll be the past. A living cord inside her stretches away from her baby. The pain is beyond anything she’s ever felt.

  “Stop the car,” she whispers.

  But it only moves faster.

  “Stop,” she screams. “I don’t want to go! Stop!”

  When Frank slams the brakes and the car skids to a halt, there’s an awful silence, broken only by the ticking of Saint Christopher swinging from the rearview mirror. Frank reaches out his hand to stop it, as if it were the pendulum of a clock.

  The lovers shake. Neither speaks, nor looks at the other.

  When they do speak, the conversation is like something happening at the bottom of a well.

  “Can’t we take him?” Lucy asks quietly.

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  The only answer is an atmospheric disturbance in the distance. A green pickup truck flashes on the bridge, coming from the opposite direction. As it zooms past Pio’s LeBaron, it makes a sound like a candle being blown out.

  The girl feels the first flutter of doom.

  “Please, let’s just go back,” she begs.

  “No,” the boy says. He says it three times, like a child.

  “Edgar,” says the girl.

  “You have to choose,” says the boy.

  Lucy stares at him in disbelief. She opens her mouth, but there are no words.

  Her stunned silence confirms Frank’s worst fear.

  “You don’t love me,” he says.

  And even though she knows—the doctors have explained—that Frank says things like this only because something is misfiring in his brain, she’s suddenly furious. For the first time she understands Pio’s anger, his dismissal of Frank’s illness as nothing more than willfulness.

  But maybe Frank’s right. Maybe she doesn’t love him anymore. Because suddenly the love she feels for him is so violent it’s a kind of hatred.

  “You stupid fuck,” she says, hitting him, slamming her fist into his arm. “You stupid stupid fuck. You know I love you!”

  “Then come with me,” he says.

  “I’m not leaving him by the side of the road!”

  But Frank doesn’t relent, telling her again that she has to choose.

  And though Lucy can see the tears in her husband’s eyes, she hits him again before turning to open the door.

  “You want me to get out, Frankie? Is that what you want?”

  He looks at her, seeing an incontestable beauty. My love. These words are in his head, but the hole they make is in his chest. This girl he will remember. He almost wants to have her again, to fuck her right now in the car, her red hair falling over his face. It’s not a lie when their bodies crash together; it always works.

  But it never lasts.

  In the end, everything is drawn into the machine, a painful contraption that picks you apart until you’re so far away from other humans that words like help me or hold me lose all meaning.

  Frank says nothing.

  “I’m getting out of the car,” the girl cries, poised at the open door. “Is that what you want?”

  “Yes,” he says.

  A single fear grips them both.

  “That’s what you want?” she asks again, her voice small now.

  Frank nods, not looking at her.

  “Fuck you,” she says, kicking her way out of the car. “I wasn’t going to choose you anyway.” She’s crying now on the blacktop.

  Frank closes his eyes and tries to breathe.

  Lucy is bent over—the barked sobs jackknifing her body.

  It’s better this way, Frank decides. The girl needs to stay and take care of the baby.

  “What are you waiting for?” she says, kicking the side of the car. “Go.”

  But he wants to give her something before he leaves. Except he can’t find the right thing inside his head. On the front seat, only a silver gum wrapper.

  “Go!” She slams shut the door of the car. “See how far you get without me.”

  When he turns to look at the girl one last time, she’s already gone. He sees her in the rearview mirror, walking away in a single shoe, growing smaller and smaller.

  “Lu,” he says.

  But she can’t hear him.

  Frank touches his neck, revs the engine.

  Hearing it, Lucy rushes toward the berry bushes. If he sees her holding the child, if he sees the two of them standing by the side of the road …

  Frank picks up the silver wrapper, and though the procedure terrifies him, he crushes it and pushes it into his ear. He doesn’t want to leave any metal behind. He wants to remove all traces of the machine.

  When Lucy hears the wheels of the LeBaron scream against the blacktop, she kicks off her remaining shoe and scrambles into the bushes, grabs the baby and carries him to the side of the road.

  Lucy doesn’t cry out as she sees t
he LeBaron moving away at breathtaking speed. She’s still certain Frank will turn around. For one second, as she sees the car swerve, she utters a breathless sound of relief. But as the car crosses into the wrong lane just before the bridge, her voice corrects itself.

  Edgar lifts his head at his mother’s cry, a huge sound that consumes his entire attention. He doesn’t see the car hurtling toward the first low guardrail.

  Only Lucy watches Pio’s LeBaron smash against the metal posts; watches how the metal spins the car around so that Frank, horribly, is facing her as he flies backwards off the edge of the Earth—the car floating for an impossibly long moment before thudding down the slope.

  “Frankie.”

  She’s running now with the baby in her arms.

  She’s standing at the edge of the bridge, oblivious to the stopped cars. All she can see is a golden rectangle: the roof of the LeBaron bobbing on the surface of the water. She moves past the fractured rail, trying to find her footing on the slope. She needs to get down onto the rocks, make her way to the water. Why is someone grabbing her arm?

  “Stop. You’re going to fall.”

  And she does fall.

  But not far enough.

  Only a few feet, onto a wide flat stone like a balcony, from which she has a perfect view. A final flash of gold, and then the car is gone, the water closing seamlessly around it.

  Only air is coming from her mouth, like in the dreams she had as a child.

  There are voices on the bridge, shouting.

  On the stone, where she’s fallen with her leg awkwardly splayed behind her, there’s blood. She doesn’t feel the pain of the broken bone; nor does she recognize the bird-cry of the child.

  She looks around at the overlit landscape. Trees, stones, water—all of it projected, it seems, onto a huge curved screen. What has just happened could not have happened. She looks at the baby still in her arms—his white skin burning. She can’t pass out or she’ll drop him.

  “Hand him to me,” someone says. “Miss. Up here! Hand him to me.”

  No. She clutches the baby, and slowly—painfully now—slides back from the edge of the rock. Her position is precarious.

  “Don’t move. We’ll help you.”

  She presses her back against a large concrete pillar and tries to breathe. Her mind fills with spiders.

  She looks at Edgar and then holds him up to a man reaching down from the bridge.

  Hands are touching her now, like pulleys, lifting her body from the stone balcony. She keeps her eyes on the river, which she realizes is a road on which Frank is still driving.

  All rivers lead to the sea.

  At the thought her body goes limp, and her mind black.

  Entry #3

  The question now, as always, is whether to stay in the dark consciousness of the girl; or to travel underneath the water with the boy, who will continue to breathe for several minutes more; or to coil like smoke inside the screaming lungs of the child.

  It’s possible, of course, to be all places at once. Or to be nowhere at all, in the empty splendor outside of human affairs.

  To accept the rules of tragedy, or to usurp them.

  She’s tempted to stay with the boy, the one who dies. But since this tale is for the living, she’ll return to the girl—whose blackout hints at the absolute, without compromising what is most human: the desire to forget.

  BOOK FOUR

  BETRAYAL

  The heart changes, and it is our worst sorrow.

  —MARCEL PROUST

  25

  Holes

  Lucy brushes the ash from her sweatshirt and tries to breathe. Though she’s destroyed Frank’s letter, his intentions remain.

  Your mother and I are gone now.

  She looks at herself in Florence’s mirror. The light from the window is unforgiving and shows the deepening lines around her eyes and mouth. She isn’t sure if she’s more furious at Frank for wanting to kill her or for having left her behind to grow old, alone.

  We were your parents, Frank and Lucy Fini.

  For years, she’s told herself that if she’d stayed in the LeBaron, she and Frank would now be living a new life somewhere; that he’d killed himself only because she’d spurned him.

  But surely she wasn’t that stupid; she must have known where they were heading. That there was no life past that bridge. Frank clearly knew it, and had no qualms about taking her with him. She thinks of the holes he made in the yard, a few weeks before he died. Everything seems meaningless.

  Still, she needs to pull herself together. She needs to go downstairs, give the kid some food, give him his pill. Part of her thinks to get a shovel from the garage and take it to the yard. See what she can find. Pretend there’s a story, when she knows there are only holes.

  * * *

  The green truck was parked in the same lot behind the supermarket. In the glove compartment was everything that was needed to change Edgar’s bandage: gauze and sterilized cotton, a pair of little silver scissors; there were individually wrapped packets of alcohol-soaked pads; antibacterial ointment; white surgical tape. When the man asked Edgar to give him his hand, he reminded the boy that he’d been married to a nurse. Edgar noticed the man used the past tense a lot when referring to other people.

  “I’m just going to cut this old bandage off,” he said. “You can look away if you want.”

  Edgar did.

  Maybe this was a bad idea. Being married to a nurse didn’t make you a doctor. It didn’t even make you a nurse.

  “Hold still,” the man said.

  “My mother usually changes it,” Edgar lied.

  “But you said she was pretty busy, right?”

  Edgar could feel the tips of the tiny scissors moving against his skin. He closed his eyes. “We had a fire at our house,” he said.

  “Is that right?”

  “Some of our stuff got black,” Edgar rambled on. “My grandmother’s stuff. It got burned. But that doesn’t mean we have to throw it out.”

  He was more talkative than usual. It was partially nervousness, and partially the Percocet—which not only made Edgar’s thoughts turn in funny ways, but also made these thoughts slip from his mouth before he could think to stop them. “Even the head can be glued back on,” he said, thinking of the Virgin.

  He stopped speaking when he felt the bandage slip from his finger.

  “Oooh,” the man said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. You just—you really did a number on yourself, huh?”

  “Is it all there?”

  “Yes,” the man laughed. “It’s all there.”

  Edgar asked if he should look, and the man said it was probably better not to. “But don’t worry, buddy. I’ve seen worse.”

  The boy kept his face turned away as the man cleaned the finger, applied the ointment. Out the window a small band of litter—two plastic bags, a Styrofoam cup, and a candy wrapper—raced toward a chain-link fence. Edgar knew that these things were garbage, but at the same time he could feel their tiny breathless souls.

  “All done,” the man said.

  Edgar turned. A fresh white bandage was secured with a generous cross-hatching of surgical tape.

  “You have to clean it every day,” the man said. “That’s very important. I’ve always got the kit here if you need it.”

  Edgar tapped his bundled finger gently against the dashboard. Amazingly, there was still no pain. Those little pink pills worked like magic.

  “Did you want to go for a drive now?” The man had begun to tap his fingers, too—softly against the steering wheel. “Or I could take you home.” It was important the boy know that he had some choice in the matter.

  Edgar glanced at the dark caverns of the loading docks. He was feeling sleepy again and when he spoke it was barely more than a whisper. “Your name is Jack?”

  “No,” the man said, smiling. “That’s my dog’s name.”

  Edgar sniffed, picking up the scent again. “Oh yeah.”

/>   “But if you want, you could call me that, too.”

  “What?”

  “Same as the dog.”

  Edgar blushed. “I just made a mistake.”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” the man said.

  “But it’s not your name, you said.”

  “Sometimes it is. I mean, it could be. I wouldn’t mind having a nickname. Do you have a nickname?”

  Edgar shook his head. Sometimes the boys at school called him milk-face or mayonnaise or Snow White.

  “I could make one up for you,” the man said.

  “I don’t know,” said Edgar. “Like what?”

  The man tried to keep his breathing calm, his voice steady.

  “I could call you, I don’t know, like maybe Kevin, or … yeah, Kevin’s a cool name, huh?”

  Edgar shrugged.

  “Or maybe just Kev, for short. Hey, Kev. That’s not bad. What do you think?” The man tapped his fingers faster against the steering wheel. “Unless you like your real name better?”

  Edgar looked down and grimaced. “I don’t love it.”

  * * *

  “Edgar!” Lucy called from the front door.

  Sometimes, when he was in a mood, he hid behind a bush. She directed her voice toward the Heftis’ large hydrangea. “Edgar, I know you can hear me.”

  The porch steps were covered with yellow birch leaves, and the ones still on the tree quivered like a flock of nervous parakeets.

  “If you’re hungry, we’ll order some Chinese! Come inside and look at the menu.”

  She fussed with the duct tape on the door, which still hadn’t been repaired. Maybe she’d give that Will-yummy, the fireman, a call. His crew had broken the damn thing; the least he could do was come back and fix it. Not that she wanted a man around the house—but there was a lot to do.

  In the living room, she picked up the bottle of Edgar’s Percocet and shook it—taking some comfort in the fact that there was still a fair amount left. She might need one later. Who knew what she’d find in the yard?

  * * *

  Frank had dug the holes in the spring, when Florence’s garden was full of irises and tulips and lilies. Now, on the first day of October, Lucy stood before pale chrysanthemums and limp asters, some loose-petaled orange roses. The delicate impatiens, zapped by last night’s frost, looked like a patch of fried calamari.