The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. David Wroblewski

crossed the room and paused beside the chair, and she became in that moment, and was ever after, a cautious dog, for suddenly it seemed important that she be right in this; and looking at the two of them there, one silently bawling, one slumped in graceful exhaustion, certainty unfolded in her the way morning light fills a north room. She drew her tongue along his mother’s face, just once, very deliberately, then stepped back. His mother startled awake. After a moment, she shifted the blanket and its contents and adjusted her blouse and soon enough the whispery sounds the baby had been making were replaced by other sounds Almondine recognized, equally quiet, but carrying no note of distress.

      Almondine walked back to where she had been stayed. All of this had happened in the space of a moment or two, and through the pads of her feet she could feel how her body had warmed a place on the rug. She stood for a long time looking at the two of them. Then she lay down and tucked her nose under the tip of her tail and she slept.

      Signs

      WHAT WAS THERE TO DO WITH SUCH AN INFANT CHILD BUT worry over him? Gar and Trudy worried that he would never have a voice. His doctors worried that he didn’t cough. And Almondine simply worried whenever the boy was out of her sight, though he never was for long.

      Quickly enough they discovered that no one understood a case like Edgar’s. Such children existed only in textbooks, and even those were different in a thousand particulars from this baby, whose lips worked when he wanted to nurse, whose hands paddled the air when his parents diapered him, who smelled faintly like fresh flour and tasted like the sea, who slept in their arms and woke and compared in puzzlement their faces with the ether of some distant world, silent in contentment and silent in distress.

      The doctors shone their lights into him and made their guesses. But who lived with him morning and evening? Who set their alarm to check him by moonlight? Who snuck in each morning to find a wide-eyed grub peering up from the crib, skin translucent as onion paper? The doctors made their guesses, but every day Trudy and Gar saw proof of normalcy and strangeness and drew their own conclusions. And all infants need the same simple things, pup or child, squalling or mute. They clung to that certainty: for a while, at least, it didn’t matter what in him was special and what ordinary. He was alive. What mattered was that he opened his eyes every single morning. Compared to that, silence was nothing.

      BY SEPTEMBER, TRUDY HAD had enough of waiting rooms and charts and tests, not to mention the expense and time away from the kennel. All summer she’d told herself to wait, that any day her baby would begin to cry and jabber like other children. Yet the question seemed increasingly dire. Some nights she could hardly sleep for wondering. And if medical science couldn’t supply an answer, there might be other ways to know. One evening she told Gar they needed formula and she bundled up Edgar and put him in the truck and drove to Popcorn Corners. The leaves on the trees were every shade of red and yellow, and crinkled brown discards covered the dirt of Town Line Road, swirling in the vortex of the pickup as it passed along.

      She parked in front of the rickety old grocery and sat looking at the neon OPEN sign glowing orange in the front window. The interior of the place was brightly lit but vacant save for a gray-haired old woman, cranelike, countenance ancient, sitting behind the counter. Ida Paine, the proprietor. Inside, a radio played quietly. A fiddle melody was just audible over the rustle of leaves in the night breeze. Trudy had brought the truck to a halt directly before the big plate glass window fronting the store, and Ida Paine had to know Trudy was out there, but the old woman sat like a fixture, her hands folded in her lap, a cigarette burning somewhere out of sight. If Trudy hadn’t been afraid someone would come along, she might have waited a very long time in the truck, but she took a breath and tucked Edgar into her arms and walked into the store. Then she didn’t know quite what to do. When she realized that the radio had stopped playing, she temporarily lost the ability to speak. Ida Paine looked at her from her perch. She wore oversize glasses that magnified her eyes, and behind the lenses those eyes blinked and blinked again.

      Trudy looked at Edgar, cradled in her arms, and decided that coming in had been a bad idea. She was turning to leave when Ida Paine broke the silence.

      “Let me see,” she said.

      Ida didn’t hold out her hands or come around the counter, nor was there a grandmotherly note in her voice. If anything her tone was incurious and weary, though benign. Trudy stepped forward and laid Edgar on the counter between them, where the wooden surface was worn velvety from an eternity’s caress of tin cans and pickle jars. When she let go, Edgar bicycled his legs and grasped the air as if it were made of some elastic matter none of them could feel. Ida leaned forward and examined him with dilated eyes. Two gray streams of cigarette smoke whistled from her nostrils. Then she lifted one blue-veined hand and extended a pinkie that reminded Trudy of nothing so much as the plucked wingtip of a chicken and she poked the flesh of Edgar’s thigh. His eyes widened. Tears welled in them. From his mouth came the faintest huff.

      Trudy had watched a dozen doctors prod her son, feeling hardly a tremor, but this she couldn’t bear. She reached forward, meaning to reclaim her baby.

      “Wait,” Ida said. She bent lower and tipped her head and pressed that avian pinkie into the infant’s palm. His tiny fingers spasmed closed around it. Ida Paine stood like that for what seemed hours. Trudy stopped breathing entirely. Then she let out a gasp and scooped Edgar into her arms and stepped back from the counter.

      Outside, at the four-way stop, a pair of headlights appeared. Neither Trudy nor Ida moved. The neon OPEN sign darkened and an instant later the ceiling fluorescents winked out. In the dark Trudy could make out Ida’s crone’s silhouette and her hand raised before her, considering her pinkie. The headlights resolved into a station wagon and the station wagon rolled into the dirt parking lot and paused and accelerated back onto the blacktop.

      “No,” Ida Paine grunted, with some finality.

      “Not ever?”

      “He can use his hands.”

      By then the whine of car tires had faded into the night. Orange worms of plasma began to flux and crawl in the tubes of the OPEN sign. Overhead, the ballasts hummed and the fluorescents flickered and lit. Trudy waited for some elaboration from Ida, but understood soon enough that she stood in the presence of a terse oracle indeed.

      “That it?” was all the more Ida Paine had to say. “Anything else?”

      A MONTH LATER A WOMAN came to visit. Trudy was in the kitchen fixing a late lunch while Gar tended a newly whelped litter in the kennel. When the knock came, Trudy walked to the porch, where a stout woman waited, dressed in a flowered skirt and a white blouse, her steel gray hair done up in a tightly wound permanent. She gripped her handbag and looked over her shoulder at the kennel dogs raising the alarm.

      “Hello,” the woman said with an uncertain smile. “I’m afraid you’re going to think this very inappropriate. Your dogs certainly do.” She smoothed down the front of her skirt. “My name is Louisa Wilkes,” she continued, “and I—well, the fact is, I don’t exactly know why I’m here.”

      Trudy asked her to come inside, if she didn’t mind Almondine. She didn’t mind dogs at all, Louisa Wilkes said. Not in ones and twos. Mrs. Wilkes settled on the couch and Almondine curled up in front of the bassinet where Edgar slept. Something about the prim way she walked and folded her hands when she sat made Trudy think she was a southerner, though she had no accent Trudy could detect.

      “What can I do for you?” Trudy said.

      “Well, as I said, I’m not sure. I’m here visiting my nephew and his wife—John and Eleanor Wilkes?”

      “Oh yes, of course.” Trudy said. She had thought the name Wilkes sounded familiar, but hadn’t been able to place it. “We see Eleanor in town once in a while. She and John look after one of our dogs.”

      “Yes, that was very the first thing I noticed, your dogs. Their Ben is a wonderful animal. Very bright eyes,” she said, looking at Almondine, “like this one. Same way of peering at you, too. In any case, I talked them into lending me their car for the morning so I could see the countryside.