Edgewater Read Online Free PDF Page A

ambitious, and who isn’t using you for the benefit of having a boardinghouse to crash at.”
    Susannah ignored the last bit. “I guess Aunt Gigi just hasn’t had time to go to the bank these last few days to make the transfer,” she said. “That’s all. I’m sure it’s no big thing. She’ll go when it passes.”
    The BP, she meant.
    â€œGod,” I said. “I can barely hear myself think with all this noise.”
    â€œWhat noise?”
    â€œYou’re kidding me, right?” I stepped up to the counter and snapped off the radio. Then, for emphasis, I pulled the plug from the wall. “Now, that oughta do it.”
    But it didn’t do it. The stack of dishes in the sink overflowed onto the counter, competing for space with at least two weeks’ worth of
New York Post
s. We were surrounded by so much stuff that was old and broken and just waiting to be thrown away. I felt the burning need to deal with it all
right that minute
. I grabbed one of the paper bags on the windowsill and moved toward the refrigerator, a coffin of mildew and decay.
    â€œHere we go,” Susannah murmured.
    I threw her a look and got on with it. Inside the fridge were the usual suspects: green-gold hunk of cheese, congealed cartonof yogurt, milk well past the sell-by date and gone chunky, leaden-gray bar of something in a baggie, rotting head of lettuce, an onion coated in fizzy white mold, countless opened cans of soda long gone flat. My hands were like robot arms, picking and tossing.
    â€œAunt Gigi will be upset you trashed her chopped liver.”
    â€œWas that what that was? Tell her I’m saving her from E. coli.”
    Susannah shrugged. “Tell her yourself.”
    I went for the freezer, a fun house of mystery meats wrapped in foil, and I pulled back the wrapping on one, uncovering something fleshy, pink, and unidentifiable. “I bet you can’t even tell me what this is,” I said.
    â€œThat’s monkfish, from Brian’s dad,” Susannah told me. “It’s only a couple weeks old.”
    I put it back, picked up another, and peeled the foil back. “Holy shit,” I said as the package slipped from my hands to the floor.
    â€œOh, my birdies!” Susannah put down what looked like an eyedropper and stepped away from the box at the table. “I found them on a nature walk.”
    Gigi had started taking Susannah on nature walks years ago, and my sister found beauty in every bone, every carcass.
    â€œPoor little red-breasted robins,” Susannah went on. She picked the foil package up from the floor and caressed the frozen feathers. “They were dead when I found them, but I couldn’t just leave them there, and I couldn’t put them in the ground to decompose just yet. Gigi said we could put them in the freezer, just for a little while.”
    Of course that was what Gigi had said, and of course my sister had gone along with her. They shared a similar temperament. For years I’d been waiting for Susannah to change. Waiting for lightning to strike and—
poof!
—she’d be turned into the person I wanted her to be. One day, surely, she’d wake up and say, “Oh my God, Lorrie, I just realized that you’ve been completely right about this all along. This is insane. This is
unacceptable
.”
    She wasn’t ever going to, and I knew it, but still I desperately wanted her to. And every time she didn’t, it made me unspeakably sad, as if I’d lost yet another essential person.
    â€œPreserving them on ice isn’t going to save them, you know,” I told my sister. “Once something is dead, it’s dead. You and Gigi must be violating some safety code, having dead things in the freezer next to the food we’re supposed to eat.”
    â€œThe monkfish is dead,” Susannah pointed out.
    â€œI know you know the difference,” I told her.
    Susannah resealed the package