Page 17 of The Most Unusual Haunting of Edgar Lovejoy

Edgar

Edgar : Dude, please don’t ignore Allie’s texts. She gets really worried and then she asks me to text you. So this is me, texting you. Are you doing okay? Could you please text A back?

Edgar : But if you’re not doing okay, you can tell us that too.

Edgar : Poe? ARE you ok?

8:49 p.m.

Edgar : If something’s wrong I can help. Well, I can try.

8:54 p.m.

Edgar : You used to text me back, dude. What did I do, I don’t get it? If you tell me why you’re pissed I could at least apologize.

11:06 p.m.

Edgar : Remember the time we got Stu Mandeville to give us beers during Mardi Gras and we were so amped but then it turned out beer is disgusting?

12:21 a.m.

Edgar : Remember how we used to tell each other everything?

12:58 a.m.

Edgar : Night bro. I hope you’re okay. I love you.

***

Allie handed Edgar the bowl of batter and the spatula and collapsed onto the barstool in slow motion, hand on her belly. “I’m gonna need you to make these, actually.”

“How’s the—what fruit or household object is it this week?”

Allie had an app on her phone that told her the size of her fetus as compared to inanimate objects, and it amused her deeply. “It’s the size of a cauliflower, and believe me, it fucking feels like I’ve got one lodged in there.”

Edgar melted butter in Allie’s cast iron pan, the same one their mother had used to make pancakes. The batter sizzled as it hit the pan, heat holding it together.

After their mother died, Edgar had worried that the pancakes would never taste the same again.

She’d always said there was a special ingredient in there, and he’d never thought to watch and see what it was.

Then Allie had slid a plate of pancakes in front of him and Poe one day, and they had tasted exactly like their mother’s.

Years later, when he’d told Allie how glad he was that she knew the secret ingredient, her face had gone soft.

Aw, Edgar, she’d told him. The secret ingredient she meant was love.

These are straight off the back of the box.

But Edgar was pretty sure that wasn’t the whole truth, because he’d made the recipe off the back of the box himself, and they hadn’t tasted like his mom’s or Allie’s.

Still, he watched the bubbles like Allie had taught him and flipped the pancakes when they were a perfect golden brown. He loved the smell of them on the griddle and the sweet scent of syrup hitting their warm, buttery surface.

When he set them in front of Allie, she inhaled the steam with closed eyes.

“Damn, I love pancakes,” she said. “The baby loves pancakes too.”

“Any movement on the name front?”

Allie spoke through a huge bite. “No. Names are weird.”

Edgar snorted. “Tell me about it.”

“Whatever. Edgar’s a dream compared to being a girl named Allan.”

They exchanged speaking looks.

“Come on, you have to have some ideas.”

“It’s a lot of fucking pressure to choose a name for another person without ever having met them,” Allie insisted.

“Yeah. You should probably just leave them nameless until they can decide. I’ll call them Lovejoy until then.”

“Maybe we can just call them ‘It,’ like the Stephen King book,” Allie mused. “Or Pennywise. Do you think their teachers would call CPS if I named them Pennywise? Penny for short.”

Edgar didn’t dignify that with a response.

“God, they’re gonna be in school one day,” Allie said. “They’re gonna have a personality and things that annoy them and stuff they love. And it’ll be on me to not crush their fragile little spirit. Fuuuuck.”

Allie shoved another bite of pancake in her mouth.

“On me too,” Edgar added. “I’m here, Al. You know I’m gonna be here for you and little Lovejoy, right?”

Allie frowned, then started to cry. She waved Edgar off.

“I know, thanks. That’s so nice. Ignore my face.” She wiped at her eyes. At a certain point in her pregnancy, Allie’s emotions had begun to overflow and leak out her eyes—at least, that’s how she’d described it when it happened the first time and Edgar, concerned, had wrapped her in his arms.

“You’re the best brother, you know that?”

“Well, I’m the one who stayed,” Edgar said.

You’re my favorite Lovejoy , Antoine had whispered in his ear, the sweet scent of apples on his breath, before wading deeper into the bayou.

“What if I’m making a huge mistake?” Allie’s voice was softer, more uncertain than he’d heard it since the night she showed up at his apartment with a positive pregnancy test.

“It’s not too late,” Edgar offered. “Adoption.”

“I know. I just can’t stand the thought of…

what if they do see ghosts and they grow up with some normie family who makes them feel insane?

Can you imagine how much worse it would all have been if we’d grown up with only Dad?

How long do you think we would’ve lasted before we believed him that we were actually crazy? ”

Their father’s voice still lived in Edgar’s head and spoke to him sometimes in the aftermath of an encounter when he was shaking and terrified: Coward. There’s nothing fucking there. You look like a fool. Weak. Pathetic.

“I talked to Cameron the other day,” Allie said.

Edgar’s heart started pounding. Cameron’s parents had sent her to a science boarding school in Atlanta for her final year of high school, and she’d gone to college and medical school in Boston after that.

She and Allie had always stayed in touch, but Edgar had only seen her a few times, when she’d visited for the holidays or her parents’ birthdays.

She’d always been warm to him, but he’d never been able to enjoy seeing her because all he could think was, It’s my fault your brother died, and you should hate me.

“She sends her love. She’s also back for a while. She’s doing her residency here.”

Edgar’s stomach leapt with excitement because he loved Cameron, then crashed at the realization that his squirmy guilt might mean he would be a nervous wreck any time he saw her.

“Wow,” was all Edgar could manage.

After they ate, soporific with pancakes and heat, they collapsed onto Allie’s bed.

“Do you ever talk to Lincoln?” Edgar asked.

“Absolutely not. If I’d known how quickly he’d bounce when he heard about the baby, I would’ve gotten knocked up sooner.”

“You’re not worried he might, I dunno, want custody later or something?”

Allie snorted. “No. He’s terrified of me now. I told him if he changes his mind down the line, I can command ghosts to haunt him.”

Edgar grinned. “So what’s the freak meter at today?”

Even though Allie saw ghosts just like Edgar did, her emotional and physical reactions to it were different.

Allie sighed, settling into the mattress. “It’s at a four today, but it was pushing seven yesterday.”

“You see something?”

She nodded. “I dunno, man. There are so many things you’re entirely responsible for when you have a baby.

They don’t know anything about the world or life.

They don’t know how to do anything. I’ll be filtering how they experience and understand the world and keeping them alive.

But on the other hand, I have zero control over their brain, their feelings.

Everything that makes them them is just a huge mystery.

So even if they inherit…you know, is that the biggest thing that will affect their life? Probably not.”

Edgar frowned. “It’s the biggest thing that affects my life,” he said.

Allie was quiet, but they both knew her thoughts on the matter. That his problem wasn’t seeing ghosts but rather his reaction to seeing ghosts.

“Yeah. I know.”

Eight months ago, a knock on the door woke Edgar at midnight, and when he’d peered through the peephole, he’d seen a positive pregnancy test held up in front of his sister’s shocked face.

He’d wrapped her in a blanket on the couch, put the pregnancy test in a plastic bag, in case for some reason she wanted it later, and made her a cup of tea.

“Do you know if you want to have the baby?” he’d asked, and she’d said she didn’t know.

There were all the usual things to consider, but there was, of course, an added complication: knowing what she knew about their family and the likelihood that her kid would be able to see ghosts, did she want to bring them into the world?

They’d talked until the sun rose, by which time her answer was no. She’d scheduled an abortion, and Edgar had planned to take her. She’d had one two years previously and knew it was a great option for her.

But then she’d changed her mind. She’d been talking to their aunt and mentioned the burden that she wanted to protect her child from.

Only Alaitheia had said, You think of this as a burden?

For me, it is my greatest gift. And that perspective had changed everything for Allie.

Not just about any future children but about her own experience with ghosts.

Edgar had always been envious of Allie. Her encounters were less startling than Edgar’s.

For Allie, ghosts faded into visibility rather than bursting in.

They were less detailed. But also unlike Edgar, Allie experienced the apparitions as having a clear desire—a reason for being there.

And that distinction meant that she felt more empathy toward them and less fear.

When Allie told Edgar she’d decided to keep the baby, he had also sent up a silent promise: that if this new Lovejoy experienced ghosts the way he did, he would do everything he could to help prepare them so that they would never feel the terror that he lived with every day.

“Do you remember Poe’s first time?” Allie asked.

Edgar groaned. “Oh, man, that little punk. He was so casual about it.”

“Right?” Allie went on to speak in her Poe voice. “‘ This is what you’re scared of?’” She grinned. “What a dick. If my kid is that much of a dick at age nine, can you please adopt it?”

“Absolutely not. I dislike children.”

“I know.” Allie reached for his hand and gave it a squeeze. “And even so, you’re still gonna help out. You’re such a gem. Hmm,” she mused. “Uncle Edgar. I like the sound of that.”