Page 37 of The Most Unusual Haunting of Edgar Lovejoy

“So I didn’t think much of it. Then sometimes I’d make a comment based on something I’d seen, assuming it was common knowledge, and Mom or Dad would act confused. Once, I asked why Mr. Clark—you remember him, Eddie? Dickhead with the greasy mustache?”

Edgar sure did. The second-grade teacher had taught through terror, choosing a few people each lesson to make an example of.

“I asked why he wasn’t teaching at our school anymore, and Mama and Dad were like, ‘What do you mean? He’s still your teacher.’ But then a couple months later, he disappeared, remember?”

“Yeah,” Allie said. “He molested a student. The school didn’t want to fire him publicly because it would come out that they’d hired someone without due diligence, but then it came out anyway. It was a huge scandal.”

“Right. So when that came out—I assume; I wasn’t old enough to know what that even meant—Mom came to me all horrified that he’d molested me. She thought that’s why I’d known he might get fired. When really, he’d just touched my hand giving me back a quiz or something.”

Edgar couldn’t look away from Poe. How had he missed this?

“At the time, it confused me, because I still didn’t get what was happening or that it wasn’t something that happened to other people.

I think maybe when you’re that age, you don’t really experience time the same as when you’re older and everything’s settled in.

Time seemed unclear to me then, so it took me a while to understand that what I was seeing wasn’t happening in the present.

Lots of times, if it was strangers I touched, I’d never see them again. So I never knew what I’d seen.”

“When do you think you really knew for sure what was happening?” Allie asked.

Poe’s eyes darted to Edgar’s and then quickly away. “Um. I dunno if you wanna know.”

“What? Of course we want to know,” Allie insisted. The baby yawned hugely, less insistent.

But it was Edgar that Poe was facing. Even as he heard himself say, “Tell us,” his stomach flipped. Like his body knew what Poe was going to say before it heard him.

“One night,” Poe said, voice a bit rough, “Antoine and Cameron were sleeping over.”

Edgar swallowed, willing his body to regulate itself.

“We were all sleeping out in the living room by the air conditioner, and we’d watched Blood Mansion before going to bed.

I was scared of the big mirror over the mantel because of the way the lady comes out of there in the movie.

Anyway, I was huddled close to you and Antoine because I was freaked.

And that night, I had a dream where, uh, a boy drowned.

And just at the end, right before I woke up, I realized it was Antoine. ”

Poe was hugging himself. “Eddie, I swear I didn’t know. I didn’t know it was real or that it would happen soon. I hardly even remembered it a few minutes after I woke up. Mama started making pancakes, and I just—”

His fists and jaw were clenched.

“Then that day—the day he—I had a strange sense of déjà vu the whole time and didn’t know why. But when it happened. When he was slipping under.” Poe choked on his words. “I realized it was his shirt. The striped one. It was in my dream. All of a sudden, it was exactly the moment from my dream.”

Outside, a man was yelling, and a bus passed by. Inside, no one moved or made a sound.

Then a noise escaped Poe. A strangled sound that had once been a sob before it had been twisted by years of guilt into a plea.

“I didn’t know,” he begged, voice gone as small as a little boy.

“I swear. Please, please , believe me. If I’d known it was real, I would have stopped him.

I wouldn’t have let him go in the water; please, you guys, you have to believe me.

” He put his head in his hands. “Fuck, I’m so sorry.

I’m so damn sorry. It’s my fault, I know that, but it was an accident. ”

Allie handed the baby to Edgar and knelt next to Poe. She wrapped her arms around him carefully. He jerked away.

“I’m not gonna touch you. Just your jacket. Okay?”

Poe slumped, the effort he’d been putting into staying remote and on guard only revealed when he let it go. Allie hugged him tight. Then she pulled back and looked at him.

“It’s not your fault,” she said fiercely.

Poe looked at Edgar then, and there was something familiar in his eyes.

He’d seen flashes of it for years and years, but it had been hidden behind bravado, aggression, and a biting sense of humor.

But now those had been stripped away, and Edgar could identify the emotion at the core: shame.

Shame and the desire for an absolution he didn’t think he deserved.

Fuck .

Edgar’s mind was reeling from Poe’s revelations, but although he had a million questions, there was one thing more important than all the rest.

“It wasn’t your fault, Poe.”

“ Obviously ,” Allie vehemently agreed. “He’s exactly right.”

“Because it was mine.”

“Uh, nope, pause. Disregard. He is not exactly right.” She took the baby back from Edgar as if his wrongness might infect them.

“What the hell is wrong with both of you? Antoine drowned. It was a horrible, tragic thing, but it was an accident. Everyone said it was an accident. There was nothing any of us could’ve done. ”

Jamie put a hand on Edgar’s lower back. It was a steady pressure that said, I’m here if you need me.

Edgar squeezed his eyes shut. Apparently this was the evening for the baring of family secrets.

“I liked him. Had a crush on him.”

“Duh,” said Poe, as Allie snorted.

“You knew?” Edgar asked.

“You used to watch him all the time. You’d smile like a huge goon whenever you saw him,” Poe said.

Apparently someone was feeling better.

Edgar scowled. “Yeah, well, I was trying not to do precisely that when he fucking drowned.”

Poe’s eyes darkened, and Allie looked horrified.

“I realized I was staring at him. I didn’t want him to know, so I turned my back on him. When I turned back around, he was too far away and the mud was too—” He swallowed hard. “If I’d just looked a minute sooner, I would’ve had time to get to him.”

“Oh my god. Why are both my siblings such complete and total cabbages?” Allie bemoaned to the baby. “What am I gonna do with them?”

The baby made a strange face. Then they grinned a gummy grin, and an unpleasant smell wafted through the room.

“I couldn’t agree more, frankly,” Allie said.

“Not it!” Poe said instantly.

“Dude, you just told me you see the future, including people’s deaths. You think I’m letting you touch my baby ? Gimme the diaper bag.”

Poe passed it to her and turned to Edgar. “It’s not your fault, dude.”

“Not yours,” Edgar replied. Then, “That was his birthday.”

Confused looks.

“The night he and Cam stayed over and we watched Blood Mansion . It was Antoine’s thirteenth birthday.”

“Oh, right,” Allie said. “He got those new sneakers, and he was so excited.”

“He was wearing them tonight. Same outfit he died in.”

Silence fell over the room once more, but this time, it was lighter, easier. Edgar looked at Allie, then at Poe, then at the nameless baby who might inherit any number of supernatural abilities but who was, at this moment, bare-assed and blinking gummily up at Edgar. He smiled back.

“Is anyone else hungry?” Allie asked sheepishly. “I feel bad interjecting something so mundane into the conversation, but—”

“I’m famished, actually,” Jamie said.

“I could eat,” said Poe.

Edgar could too. “Do you have anything, Al?”

Allie gestured vaguely toward the kitchen and said, “Use whatever you find to concoct something edible.”

“I’ll do it,” Poe said, standing. “I’ve been working in a restaurant lately.”

“Was that a genuine sharing of information about your life?” Allie asked.

Poe stuck his tongue out at her and went to the kitchen.

“You know,” Allie said as he rummaged through the cupboards. “Now that we know about the whole touching issue, you don’t have to wear that thing inside anymore.”

Poe tugged his leather jacket closer and looked at Allie as if she’d suggested removing his skin. Then he shrugged, shoulders almost to his ears.

“Yeah, okay,” he said.

He peeled off the garment, draped it over the back of a barstool, and started pulling ingredients from the refrigerator.

His arms were lean and toned against his black T-shirt.

Scars crisscrossed his arms like a child’s game of tic-tac-toe.

He held himself as if he’d brutally punish anyone who asked about them.

Soon, Poe handed around bowls of pasta with lentils, feta, and capers, grumbling about Allie not having any fresh herbs.

“Grow some, then,” she said.

Poe’s childish, nonsensical comeback—“I’ll grow you”—gave way to chewing and then murmurs of appreciation.

“Honestly, when you said you’d cook, I was expecting nothing,” Allie said. “But this is damn good.”

“Agreed,” said Edgar.

“I don’t know you well enough yet to have expected nothing from you,” Jamie said lightly, giving a thumbs-up to the food.

Poe winked at that.

Edgar didn’t know if he liked the idea of Jamie and Poe being friends. God knew what trouble Poe would get Jamie involved in. Then he reminded himself that his brother wasn’t a child anymore, and Jamie could certainly take care of themself.

“Can I just go back to the previous topic for a minute?” Allie asked.

Poe rolled his eyes. “I suppose it was too much to expect that I might drop the whole seeing the future thing and hope there would be no follow-up questions.”

Allie said, “Because, okay, I suspected the ghost thing just a little bit, but—”

“Wait, you suspected?” Edgar demanded. “What? Why? How come you never said anything?”

“How’d you know?” Poe grumbled at the same time.

“Er, I mean, I didn’t know know,” Allie said.

“But you never talked about seeing them until someone else did. And when you were little, you always wanted to do whatever Edgar and I did. So occasionally I wondered if you didn’t see them but didn’t wanna feel left out.

And I suspected, a little, that was why you left.

Because maybe it was easier if you didn’t have to keep up the act. ”

Poe shoved food into his mouth so he couldn’t answer.

“But what I don’t get,” Allie said. She looked at Poe, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes. She looked at Edgar, and he could see how close she was to tears. “Is why you didn’t tell us.”

Poe shook his head.

“We were all so close,” she went on. “We told each other everything. I thought.” Her voice broke. “If you’d just said something—”

Poe sighed and looked at her. “Allie. I was a freak even in a family of freaks. And I couldn’t tell you because you’d ask me to use it.”

She stopped with her fork halfway to her mouth. “What?”

Poe rolled his eyes. “Sure, maybe not right away. Maybe you’d promise me it would never happen. But at some point, there comes a time when everyone thinks they’d be better off knowing what’s gonna happen.”

He looked haunted. How many people had promised him they’d never ask, and how many of them had smashed that promise to smithereens?

“And if by some miracle neither of you ever asked me, then I’d end up seeing it anyway. By accident or in a dream. Or in some weird fucking freak way that I haven’t even experienced yet because who the hell knows what I am.”

The hand holding Poe’s fork shook, and he put it down.

“If I wasn’t here. If I wasn’t around you. I thought it was less likely that I’d see your—”

“Futures,” Allie finished for him.

“Deaths,” Edgar corrected, the penny finally dropping. “You were afraid you’d see our deaths. That’s why you left.”

Poe nodded miserably. “Please don’t make me,” he said.

His voice was colored with fear and exhaustion and something that hurt Edgar in ways he didn’t understand.

“No one’s gonna make you do anything,” Edgar said fiercely.

He didn’t care how long Poe had been gone for, he would destroy anyone who pushed him to do anything he didn’t want to do.

“Except cook more often,” Allie said. “Cuz this is seriously good.”

Poe ducked his head at her praise.

“Yeah, uh, cool. I…enjoy it.”

Jamie caught Edgar’s glance and raised an eyebrow, as if to say, Poe unsarcastically expressed enjoyment?!

Allie took another bite and eyed Poe with respect. None of them had ever been very good at expressing emotion; they’d never learned to. But Edgar thought maybe that could change. After all, it had already started to change for him, being in a relationship with Jamie.

“Well, don’t just sit there,” Allie said, wiping at her eyes. “Tell us what the hell you’ve been up to the past six years, you enormous freak.”

Looking around the table, a genuine smile that Edgar realized he hadn’t seen in years quirked his brother’s lips.

As if assessing the level of their interest and deeming it sufficient, he leaned in, eyes shining with six years of stories.

Edgar felt something that had been tightly coiled in his belly all these years relax and go to sleep.

“Okay,” Poe said, raising his eyebrows. He began to talk and didn’t stop until they were all hungry again.