His girls.His beautiful, perfect girls.
‘I’m sorry, sir.But your wife and daughter were...unresponsive when we pulled them out.’
Unresponsive, the cop had said with that awful cop cadence – softening the blow of ‘charred to a crisp’ with bland syllables.
Edgar had just sat there on the curb and stared at the smoldering remains of his entire world.When he’d finally come around, he’d asked one of the firemen if anything had survived.Anything at all.As if a single unsinged scrap could erase the image seared into his retinas – the one of his baby girl laid out on a gurney, angelic in eternal slumber while the love of his life was zipped into a body bag ten feet away.
Myla and Marla.His reasons for every good thing he’d ever done.
But the cop had just reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny unicorn covered in black soot.
Myla’s figurine, and the thing she’d treasured more than gold.
The same figurine he’d kept around his neck ever since.
Later, when the shock receded enough for coherent thought, Edgar learned that the fire had begun in the basement.His workshop, where he plied his trade.The insurance investigator had deemed it an ‘accident,’ an act of God.No official cause had ever been given, just theories about a gas leak, a pilot light blowing out, a faulty wire in the lighting, an unserviced boiler.
But Edgar knew the truth, even if he never spoke it aloud.He’d wiped down those tools that morning and tossed the used rags in the bin without a second thought.
He hadn’t known.Not about the insidious nature of linseed.
Spontaneous combustion.That’s what they called it when the conditions were just right.When the chemicals from the oil oxidized and built up heat with nowhere to go.He’d seen freak headlines about it, but it was one of those things that people were too proud to think would ever happen to them.
But then it becamehisheadline, at least in his own head.
Marla had been found by the basement door, half draped over the threshold like she’d tried to beat back the inferno.But the beast had been too ravenous and had swallowed her before she could even scream.
And his Myla, his perfect angel.She’d been napping upstairs, recovering from flu.The coroner said she likely hadn’t even woken up.He said she’d just breathed in the noxious smoke and slipped away.
After that, the details got hazy.Days blurred into weeks and months into years.Life insurance was only in his name, and house insurance didn’t pay out for acts of God.He had no motivation to work, and after he’d depleted his savings on mortgage payments for the husk of a house that remained, the bank repossessed it.In less than a year, he’d lost everything.
Partner, child, house – and of course, his mind.
He took to sleeping rough after that, and waiting for the inevitable day when the bottle or exposure finally killed him.
That day had never come, but with nothing left to lose, he started breaking into houses, but not to steal.He was more intent on destroying.He’d targeted people who worked at the bank.Specific people.The woman who’d processed his foreclosure.Her manager.The branch director who’d signed the final letter.He’d gone into their homes at night and taken apart their kitchens and their living rooms with his bare hands and whatever tools he’d found in their garages.He hadn’t touched the people.Hadn’t gone near the bedrooms.Just ruined their things, because their things were still intact and his weren’t, and the injustice of that was the only feeling still strong enough to get him off the floor in the morning.
The fourth house was the one where the police were waiting.
Four years at Louisiana State Penitentiary.He’d processed in January and been assigned to a cellblock on the second tier and spent the first six weeks not speaking to anyone.The prison counsellor had come twice.Both times Edgar had sat in the plastic chair and said nothing for the full fifty minutes and the counsellor had written something on a form and left.
Edgar remembered the day that Austin Creed was brought into the big house, and his presence had created quite the stir.Edgar had never tried to get close to him, and only communicated with him directly once when their yard time overlapped.To say Edgar had been interested in him would be generous, because Edgar merely saw him as just another inmate.
Lindsey Doyle, however, was a different story.She’d arrived on his seventh week inside.
She worked corrections and she ran the vocational programme on his unit, which meant she was in the prison workshop three days a week supervising inmates who were learning to sand shelves and assemble flat-pack furniture.Edgar had been put on the programme because someone in admin had seen his background and decided he could help teach.He hadn’t wanted to help teach.He hadn’t wanted to do anything.But they’d made him go, so he went.
She'd started talking to him during breaks and commented on how good his skills were.She encouraged him to make little models they could sell in the prison gift shop.Then she'd stop by his cell.She'd asked about the furniture.About the oil finishes.About the figure around his neck – which the officials had kindly let him keep – which had then led to discussions about Marla and Myla, and once they went down that path, he couldn't stop.
Doyle soon found reasons to be wherever Edgar was.They’d talked about philosophy and what happens after prison, and Doyle had been cautiously optimistic on that front.She talked about the cruelty of surviving something that should have destroyed him, which he later learned was termed survivor’s guilt.And Doyle had said that plenty of other people are in the same position Edgar was in, and the best thing that could happen to them is that they never experience the hardship in the first place.
‘If you could look at someone who was drowning the way you drowned and pull them out before it got worse, wouldn’t that be the most merciful thing a person could do?’
Doyle never saidkill.She never had to.The architecture of the idea was all hers, but she’d built it so that he was the one who walked through the door at the end, and by the time he did, it felt like his own conclusion.That was her talent.She didn’t tell you what to think.She merely rearranged the furniture until there was only one place left to sit.
He hadn’t wanted to leave prison.That was something he’d never told anyone except Doyle.When his release date came around, he’d asked his parole officer to delay it.The parole officer had stared at him, processed the paperwork, and told him to pack his things.Nobody stayed voluntarily.It wasn’t how the system worked.
Doyle had been the one who’d convinced him to go.Not just go, but actually do something.She’d set it up, got him the job at the donation centre.Doyle had also pointed him towards a community group at the First Love Church, where he’d met twenty-plus like-minded people.Eddie Foxall, Earl Parsons, and the mother of Rose Michaels.All had shared their stories without hesitation.Julia Michaels had her own problems, but during their coffee after-sessions, she’d told Edgar all about her daughter’s issues with her ex-husband and child.
