Edgar and Lucy Read online

  He looked at the rings dangling from his finger. If there was a war between a diamond and darkness, who would win? Would a diamond cut through the blackness to open up seams of light? Or would the darkness cover the stone with a tar-like ooze, trapping the gem for another million years? Edgar was pretty sure a diamond would win—especially since aliens often used them to power their ships.

  “Here you go,” said his grandmother. She set the white saucer with its single meatball on the table.

  “Can I have my other fork?”

  From the back of the cutlery drawer, Florence found one of the tiny oyster forks the boy favored. He handed her the large fork and she, in return, gave him the little one shaped like Neptune’s trident.

  As he nibbled, he watched his grandmother drop the farfalle, his favorite, into the steaming cauldron. Her face flushed as she drowned the butterflies with the ancient wooden spoon, whose long handle looked to Edgar exactly like Pinocchio’s nose. Everything was so familiar it seemed strange, as if it were only pretending to be ordinary so as to better hide its secrets.

  The old woman was wearing slippers and the boy could see the cracked backs of her feet. Sometimes she asked him to rub Keri lotion on them after she’d had a bath. She’d settle into her armchair, wearing the shiny quilted robe embossed with swirling paramecia-like paisley, and the boy would kneel before her, the jar of Keri lotion in his hands. The moisture barely penetrated the skin, which was thick and dry like the peel of an orange. Rubbing lotion into his grandmother’s feet was like polishing a pair of shoes. But there was no repulsion. He marveled over those feet, cracked and swollen. The feet of a dinosaur. Had she once walked barefoot through a desert? Through a fire? Her hands, too, were damaged—so red they looked burned. Clearly his grandmother had been through some things, too. The writing wasn’t on her arm, though; it was on her hands, her feet.

  The room tilted, even before Edgar asked the question.

  “How did he die, Gramma?”

  Florence was certain she hadn’t heard him correctly. She pushed at some farfalle that had stuck to the bottom of the pot.

  The kitchen was warm and Edgar was under its spell, believing himself and all that he loved safe from whatever lay beyond the dark window. One could speak of terrible things, it seemed, and still not abandon safety. Somehow, the confusions and terrors of the last day distilled themselves into this:

  “Did someone kill him?”

  The words floated from the boy’s mouth without effort.

  Edgar had never asked before. He’d never wanted to know, never imagined that he could know. But at this precise moment a strange synthesis took place; from dozens of overheard conversations a single bell seemed to toll: someone had pursued his father on the bridge, someone had pushed him. The world outside the house—Edgar was an expert now—was a dangerous place. The kitchen continued to tilt until it reached a precipitous angle. His grandmother slid away from the stove. Pinocchio’s nose dripped onto the floor.

  Did someone kill him?

  Silence, for as long as you can imagine. A rosary of silence the old woman counted with a chain of memory, and the boy counted with the beats of his heart.

  “Gramma?”

  But there was no reaction. The kitchen had reached complete inversion, and Florence miraculously held her ground until a full turn had been completed and the room clicked back into place.

  “My father, I mean,” the boy said.

  Florence wondered if the child had somehow figured out that it was Frank’s birthday; why else would he be asking such questions? Suddenly the ghost was in the room—a glare off the refrigerator vexing Florence’s wits. What would he want Edgar to know? Surely, he would want the boy to know the truth.

  “Yes,” she said, nodding to herself vacantly. She spoke quietly, but loudly enough for the boy to hear. “Someone killed him.”

  Edgar made a small sound, like a pigeon.

  Florence looked into her grandson’s face. There was no turning back. “Yes,” she said again. “Yes.”

  7

  Francesco

  It wasn’t a lie. Not entirely. Even Father Reginald, in private consultation, had hinted at the word murder. According to certain theologians, the killing of one’s self was no different from a man killing his brother. Nothing brilliant here; Florence had always known that there were two Franks, and one of them—the shadow Frank, the impostor—had murdered the innocent flesh-and-blood Francesco.

  But Father Reginald had stopped short before any suggestion of innocence. He talked about moral ambiguity and permanent solutions to temporary problems. Florence resented the priest’s fancy philosophical tap dance, when all she’d wanted from him was that he locate her son’s soul, stick the black pin of it on the map of God’s mercy. But all the holy man did was drop the pin into a void, claiming it was God’s to catch. Or not. Much of what he said was clearly damning. We are stewards, not owners, of the life God has entrusted to us. It is not ours to dispose of. Though he did mention that the Lord made concessions—concessions!—for grave psychological disturbance. Such disturbance would diminish her son’s responsibility. Responsibility for what? she’d asked; to which Father Reginald had replied—rather cagily, Florence thought—that taking one’s own life was a tragic loss of hope. To abandon hope, he said, was to abandon God.

  Florence recalled how the priest had laid his shriveled hand on her own, and, no doubt thinking himself kind, had said she was welcome to have the funeral Mass at St. Margaret’s (the church where Frank had been christened, communed, confirmed, and married); he’d officiate the Mass himself, if she liked—but he needed her to know that, in his eulogy, he would not be able to refer to the everlasting glory and eternal life of the deceased. It was not hopeless, he assured her; it just wasn’t his to say. When Florence had left the rectory, a wave of vertigo overtook her, and she nearly fell in the street.

  The boy at the table was staring at her with his impossible green eyes. The boy who, with his startling little question, seemed to have toppled the floodwall Florence had built between tragedy and innocence. She had built it for herself so she could rest, for brief moments, in the sunny garden of Frank’s childhood, unassaulted by shadows. And she had built it for Edgar. Of what use would the truth be to him? A storybook father was preferable to the real McCoy, especially in Frank’s case. The floodwall was no different from Pio’s tunnel, a way to move through an element inhospitable to humans. But as the water rushed inside her now, it produced a feeling that was not altogether unpleasant.

  She suddenly had an urge to tell the little boy everything, to confide in him. The impulse was dangerously strong; she could feel the great wave of it in her chest, like a hunger that had been denied for too long. After Frank’s death, Pio had refused to speak about their son. So many times she’d tried to draw her husband into the private maze of her confusion. Perhaps he could help her find a way out; they could help each other. But whenever she’d broached the subject, Pio would shake his head and turn away, as if she were a stranger on the street trying to hand him a flyer. He’d leave the house, wander into the yard, smoke one of his horse-manure cigars—the whole time never ceasing to shake his head, as if to ward off any subsequent approach by Florence.

  As for the girl: in the first few months after it had happened, Lucy’s grief had been as great, if not greater, than Florence’s. The young widow had wept with such sickening force that she often needed to run into the bathroom to vomit. It was as if grief had impregnated her, the dark seed of it a living havoc in her belly. The two women had been closest then, almost like sisters, in those underwater weeks after Frank’s death. Florence would sit with Lucy on the porch, would hold the girl’s hand. Once, she’d kissed her daughter-in-law’s face when it had been wet with tears; had actually eaten the tears off her cheeks—a strange kind of sustenance, but that’s exactly what it had been.

  Unfortunately, the communion between the two women hadn’t lasted very long. When the first mad flush of mourning had
passed, and the faculty of speech returned to Florence, Lucy had no interest in conversation. Florence—who was ready to trade in her howls and sobs in return for a small piece of meaning—took up the mantle of Grand Inquisitor. Why had this happened? Who was to blame? What might have been done to prevent the tragedy? And, above all, there was the unresolved issue of Frank’s soul. Lucy seemed indifferent to such questions. Occasionally, there was outright hostility. “What the fuck does it matter?” Lucy had screamed at her once. “He’s not here!” A statement she’d cruelly repeated three times before retreating to her room. Lucy’s tears retreated there, as well. She began to cry selfishly, locked away, preventing Florence’s consumption of her grief. It was almost as if the girl were hoarding it. A starved Florence would stand by the door, listening—just as once (it was something for which she would never forgive herself) she had paused in the hall outside the young couple’s bedroom when she’d heard the muffled sounds of an incomprehensible passion.

  Within a year, the girl’s crying had stopped. She began to grow hard, not unlike Pio. Often she took long rides in her car and skulked in late, long after the old woman had put Edgar to bed. If the child cried in the night, it was Florence who went to the boy’s crib.

  More than once Lucy had scooped up the toddler and taken him with her in the car. The old woman would be on pins and needles until the two of them arrived home safely. When pressed for information about where they’d been, Lucy would always say the same thing. “Nowhere.” Well, Florence didn’t like the sound of that. Nowhere was no place for a child, a baby. If Lucy wanted to go nowhere, she should go by herself. Florence’s greatest fear (the one that had returned today) was that the girl would leave with the baby and not return. That the mother would steal the child. It was not too strong a word. The child belonged to all of them.

  As she regarded Edgar’s infinitely patient face at the table now, the tiny trident still in his hand, Florence felt confused. What had she told him already? Only pleasant stories of his father’s youth. She’d never spoken of Frank’s later years. For the child, she had kept Frank a child, a neat package of diverting anecdotes. If she’d sugared it up a bit, there was no harm in that. That was the privilege of memory—to edit, even to lie.

  “Why are you crossing yourself, Gramma?”

  She’d done it reflexively—and felt a prick of shame now, as if she’d been caught biting her nails. “Sometimes you do that for your thoughts,” she said casually.

  To which Edgar of course responded: “What were you thinking?”

  She had to keep her story straight. There was a certain history of Frank she’d already recorded inside the boy’s head. After her son’s death, she’d recognized exactly what Edgar was: a blank slate. He was useful to her. Through him she had reinvented not only Frank’s life, but her own. Were it not for the boy, she might have died, too. Edgar was nothing less than a second heart, to replace the one that had been ripped from inside her. There was no mad science here. The transaction was simple. Grief loves innocence, above all else. Over time, Florence’s queen-like sadness was humbled; it bowed down before the opportunity that was Edgar. She put all her chips into the child’s crib, amazed by how much she had left in her coffers to spend; and even more amazed by the extravagance of the profit. Loving Edgar had turned out to be a wise investment.

  She could never understand why the boy’s mother, or her husband for that matter, had not used the child in the same way. Used was not the right word. It wasn’t strategy, it simply happened, it was nature itself. Love streamed, no different from tears. The girl’s grief, Pio’s, had turned in on itself and made them—it had to be said—less than human. What could be simpler than loving a child? Lucy and Pio had deprived the boy, but they had also shortchanged themselves. The old woman felt this with a sadness that was torn in every direction, for all parties. How had her husband and Lucy managed to withhold what, to Florence, seemed so basic, so inalienable? Somehow grief had stripped them of their rights. After Frank’s death, the two of them were no longer citizens of the world. Nomads, head-shakers, drivers without destination, they refused to come to rest, as if under the mistaken belief that one could stake a claim in love’s ground only once. But hadn’t they seen Florence’s example, how she had set a tent on the windy hill of grief, and before long had rebuilt her home?

  Had she lied to herself? Why was her breath coming up short? She moved toward the boy, who was clutching his three-pronged fork somewhat anxiously. A little god of the sea, uncertain of his power. But Florence could feel the trident stirring the water. She noted again the rush in her chest and, for the life of her, could not locate her heart. She had no sense, suddenly, if she were heartbroken or happy; if the house she’d rebuilt on love’s hill was salvation or nothing more than a shack set on a graveyard. The waters tossed; a body thrashed in the undercurrent—Frank’s body, which had never been recovered.

  She wanted to tell the boy to put down the fork; he seemed to be pointing it right at her. Soon—she could already feel it in her throat—she would be crying out her son’s name, as if seven years had not passed since his departure. The glassy eyes of the child were unrelenting, exposing the fragility of some unspoken agreement she’d made with him—with herself. Grief and confusion were just below the surface, buried under Edgar’s loveliness. A shadow ran across the room. Florence made a small sound. And then it happened: the dead borrowed the child’s face—and there was Frank, flashing like light off a mirror.

  Save me.

  But what could she have done? She’d done everything possible. Hadn’t she?

  Suddenly the anger rose again, against her husband and Lucy, who had refused to help Florence make sense of the disaster. With a small groan, she lowered herself into a chair beside Edgar. He set down Neptune’s trident, but it was too late. She had no choice but to tell him everything.

  “It’s okay,” she said. The boy was paler than usual. She wiped her hand across his cheek to erase the last bit of ghostly residue.

  Edgar saw his grandmother’s unhappy face and regretted whatever he’d done to cause it.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  To which she responded, “Not you.”

  She grabbed his hand and held it so tightly that the boy knew he had no right to speak.

  8

  The Man in the Closet

  There was so much she wanted to say. But it wasn’t something you could say in five minutes to a priest in a box. Plus, she didn’t have the words for it, she wasn’t an educated woman. She gripped her grandson’s hand and closed her eyes. The story had been locked inside her for so long it was part of her blood now. A roaring only she could hear.

  The way Frank’s sickness had progressed so stealthily no one had seen the monster of it until it was too late. It had taken advantage of what was best in her son. So smart, so handsome. Reckless, of course, as a teenager—but even that had seemed natural. Pio had said it was as simple as a boy becoming a man, nothing to worry about. By eighteen Frank had a thuggish swagger and a voice deeper than his father’s. By twenty he’d quit the state college, claiming it was “bullshit.” By twenty-two he’d been involved in four minor car accidents and had burned through at least a dozen jobs, all of which he professed were “physically killing him.” He felt he was meant for better; said he wanted to write books! The boy was a confusing mess of ambition and laziness, arrogance and uncertainty. He slept too much, and when he was awake he was snappish, often downright belligerent. Scowling, unshaven, muttering about something, the twenty-two-year-old boy seemed, to his mother, more like an old man on the brink of senility.

  But the next year, everything changed. Frank met Lucy. The two of them walked into 21 Cressida Drive, that first day, giggling like they’d just eaten a box of feathers—and then, for years it seemed, there was nothing but laughter in the house. Love took Frank out of himself; all that mattered now was that he make the girl happy. Always a jokester, his comic timing improved with Lucy in the audience. At dinner h
e had them all in stitches. The girl—who couldn’t have been more than seventeen—seemed to give the household back its youth. Dinners were long again, as they’d been in the old days. Even Pio lingered at the table, asking for more espresso and telling his own stories to the girl, in a kind of loving competition with his suddenly gregarious and clean-shaven son. It was a happy time. Lucy was a blessing.

  But, behind Florence’s back, the girl was encouraging the boy’s old dreams. They planned to buy a motorcycle and ride from the Jersey Shore to Fisherman’s Wharf—with a backpack full of nothing but almonds and dried apricots.

  Almonds and apricots, my foot! What really kept them going, Florence realized, was shtupping and vodka. When Frank finally did buy a motorcycle, it took him exactly three days to run it into a tree. Luckily Lucy wasn’t on board at the time, and Frank had fallen off the infernal chopper before it crashed against a hundred-year-old maple and burst into flames. Frank, badly bruised but miraculously unbroken, had taken them all to see the black scar on the tree—a blurry char whose shape suggested, to Florence’s eyes anyway, a huge rat standing on its hind legs. It had filled her with dread—but Frank, standing before the seared tree trunk, had appeared elated.

  A few weeks after the crash, he was all abuzz about a trip to Peru, to some steep green mountains where people who no longer existed had built a city. Frank had shown everyone pictures. To Florence it had looked bleak, cubicles of stone with no roofs; but Frank talked about the place as if it were the Vatican. He and Lucy—newlyweds now—were going to spend some time there. “Communing with the ancients” was how he’d put it. Pipe dream after pipe dream, until a person could barely see through the smoke. One day Frank announced he was going to be a professional gambler in Atlantic City; by the next morning the plan was to write a science fiction novel about alien vampires. Lucy had stood beside her young husband as he explained the gobbledygook of a plot, saying, What great ideas he has, he really could be famous. Encouraging Frank, egging him on, when the responsible thing to do—the duty of any decent wife—would have been to gently discourage him, or at least ignore him. But what did Florence expect from a child? Lucy had too much energy, combined with a stunning ignorance concerning what one could expect from life. The girl’s youth had seemed, at first blush, like safety, a place where Frank could rest—but she’d turned out to be a wild horse upon which her son had resumed his old reckless habits.