Someone was knocking. This was not only weird, it was suspicious. Edgar ran through the extremely limited possibilities of Devi, Jimmy and Tess, factored in that none of those people had called him, and concluded that none of the people he actually knew were at the door. He called across the house for Johnny, just in case. The last time someone had knocked on the door, it had been an elaborate practical joke and Edgar wasn’t looking to fall for it twice. Johnny answered with loud curse from the basement, so he wasn’t the one waiting outside to give Edgar a heart attack either. The knocking continued, and so, armed with the poker from the fireplace they never used, Edgar opened the door.
“Sorry,” he said to the plain-looking couple standing on the stoop, “we gave at the office.”
The man stuck his foot in Edgar’s door as he closed it, though he looked mortified that he’d done it a second later.
“We didn’t think you had an office.”
The couple, a man and a woman, had to be in their 50’s and didn’t look like the type of people who would enjoy letting a pack of flamboyant dead people invade their heads.
“Uh, yeah. Sorry. We don’t sign anything at home, though. So thanks, but sorry, okay?” Edgar tried to close the door again, but the woman looked as though she might cry if he turned his back.
“Edgar? Hang on, wait.”
Because he really needed people specifically coming after him again.
“You’re not even supposed to be here, okay?” Edgar said, trying to be sympathetic. “I really would just like to be left alone, you can talk to me if you come see us, okay?”
“We know we’re not supposed to be here, but we just had to see. It seemed safe now.”
“Safe? What are you talking about?” Suddenly the people before him did not seem so out of place with the usual Homicides audiences.
“It’s been a long time, we thought surely you’d have found what you were looking for by now.”
Edgar shifted the fire poker in his hand, a little less willing to use it than he had been before seeing the people on his porch.
“Who… are you?”
“We didn’t think you’d remember. You always said you would forget if-”
“I always what? Do I know you?”
The couple - both in glasses, the man tall and thin and the woman with a large nose - tried to stare the answer into him. When Edgar backed away, the woman spoke up.
“We’re your parents.”
The fire poker clanged against the floorboards as Edgar stared at the couple in horror.
“You can’t… I don’t have any!” Edgar protested. “I just started up one day, by myself! This isn’t funny. Get off of my porch.”
“Edgar no, really. We just wanted to see if you’d found whoever you were looking for.”
“Goodbye.”
“The boy with the keys, Edgar, did you find him?”
Once more, Edgar re-opened the door.
“The who?”
“The boy with the keys and the black eyes?” the woman asked cautiously.
“I… yes.”
“You used to talk about it, Edgar, we were there. You were so young. Always saying you had to find someone. You drew pictures! A boy with dark hair! He was holding keys, and you said over and over that you had to find him. Always that you had to find him.”
“Okay, this is kind of sick. You both need to-”
“Look at us and say we’re lying!” the man said.
When Edgar gave them an honest once-over, the man was iffy, but he had a hard time denying the woman’s nose. With hypothetical acceptance of these people as his parents, though, a new problem arose.
“What the hell were you doing?” he asked. “Where the fuck have you been? You just leave some kid alone in a magic house where no one can see him because he draws pictures? Did you come back to collect on your share of ‘I’m a fake dead guy’ money or something?”
“Edgar, we’re not even from this world. This place, with the songs in your head? It’s not ours – it’s not yours, but you said they told you he was here, and you’d find him here. We had to let you go.”
“So wait, now I’ve been abandoned to a parallel dimension because I drew pictures? Excellent.”
“Did you find him, Edgar?”
Perhaps because he could sense when his entrance would be most dramatic, Johnny appeared behind Edgar just then.
“Are you breaking shit or something? What are you doing up here?” he asked, kicking the fire poker at Edgar’s feet. He stood for several seconds, apparently waiting for answer. He noticed uncharacteristically late that Edgar had the door open. “And who the fuck are you talking to?”
The woman (his mother?), gasped when she looked at Johnny and clapped her hands over her mouth. The man was clearly trying to hold back a strong reaction as well. Edgar motioned toward them, but was unable to find words to explain who they were. Instead, he turned it around.
“This is Johnny.”
Edgar’s ‘mother’ managed to mumble about Johnny’s hair, and the dark around his eyes, but she could not take her eyes off of the key on Johnny’s neck. It was no longer the key to Hell, but simply Edgar’s house key, and yet it had the woman’s undivided attention.
“He looks just like…,” she managed, before covering her mouth again.
“Oookay, this is awkward,” Johnny hinted, elbowing Edgar.
“Sorry, sorry, they just sort of popped out of nowhere, and now they’re my parents, and-”
“What the fuck is this, door to door adoption? “ Johnny scowled in disgust, but quickly addressed the visitors with a sly grin. “Hang on, I have one for you, let me see if I can track her down.”
“Don’t you dare,” Edgar warned.
“What, they really did adopt you?”
“No, I … don’t think they needed to.”
Edgar’s mother reached out her hand, which Johnny took after some hesitation and introduced herself with a perfectly normal name that Edgar forgot moments after he heard it.
“I’m glad to see that you exist,” she said softly. Edgar’s father was also eager to shake Johnny’s hand, and seemed like he wanted to hug him, but stopped when Johnny resisted being pulled forward. Edgar felt Johnny flinch, and saw him check the visitor’s eyes before he calmed.
“Yeeah,” Johnny said slowly,” existing is pretty neat.” He obviously did not trust the people before him, but found them compelling in some way.
“We didn’t want to leave you here,” Edgar’s mother said quickly. “Please understand. You begged us! You wouldn’t eat, you wouldn’t do anything but talk about finding him, draw pictures, or write things about him. When you were told there was somewhere else you had to be, you talked only about coming here. The only way we were ever going to make you happy was to send you here.”
“So you left me here alone? Do you have any idea how-? When he- Dammit.”
Behind Edgar, Johnny picked up the fire poker.
“Do we need this? Are they wearing contacts or something?”
“No, I just-“
Edgar’s parents tried to apologize at the same time. Edgar heard no words, only the sounds of two grown adults begging and trying not to cry. He wanted to be angry with them for leaving him alone and invisible. He’d spent years by himself, no one speaking to him, no one noticing. No one had touched him for years before he met Johnny and the others. He remembered how often his skin had burned and how being too close to people who knew him used to shut his brain down, and now he knew who had to blame for it.
Unfortunately, they were the same people who had assured that he was able to find Johnny.
“We’re sorry,” his mother said again. “You sounded like you’d be happy here…”
“I am happy here, but… did you have to send me here by myself?”
“And what?” Johnny said. “Be the only guy with parents?”
“You have no parents?” Edgar’s father asked.
Johnny shrugged and shook his head. Edgar looked at him, then back to his parents on the porch.
“Do you want to come in? I think this might take a while.”
The visitors looked at the house in awe as Edgar steered them into the living room. He tried to apologize for the mess, but the parents he still was not sure he had weren’t listening to him.
“My god, it’s the same. I thought it just looked similar outside, but it’s the same…” His mother’s eyes darted to every decoration in the room, every strange piece of furniture and every bit of graffiti that Johnny had left on the wall.
“What’s the same?” Edgar asked.
“This house, my God, the house!” she said, her voice still full of wonder. “This is the same house we live in.”
Johnny stayed back, near the doorway, fire poker still in hand. Edgar saw him raise an eyebrow, but they said nothing to each other. Edgar sighed, knowing that what he was about to say would have to be mocked relentlessly later but that he wouldn’t feel right without offering.
“Do you want anything? Something to drink?”
Predictably, Johnny snickered. Perhaps just as predictably, Edgar’s mother asked for some water.
Johnny followed him to the kitchen.
“What?” Edgar asked. “Not going to stand there and menace them after all?”
“Are they real people?”
“What?”
“Edgar, come on, think! What have we put up with? A guy who is the Anti-Christ, kids with black holes for eyes, clone children and possessed fangirls. Alien parents, Edgar, seriously.”
“Well then I guess I invited them in and I’m sorry if we both get eaten when we go back out there.” Edgar finished filling some glasses with water and turned to go back to the living room.
“You’re not getting killed by some sick fuck pretending to be your parents,” Johnny said, blocking the doorway. He flexed his fingers around the fire poker. “They make one wrong move and I’m running them through with this.”
“Your paranoia is simultaneously creepy and charming. Thanks, though. There is a sad probability that you’re right. Just make sure you’re right first, okay?”
Johnny appeared satisfied with that reaction, but still wouldn’t let Edgar through.
“Johnny, move.”
“Are you going to be okay?”
“Yeah.”
“I mean if they really are.”
“Aliens?”
“Your parents.”
Edgar stared at Johnny and watched him attempt to minimize the amount of concern he showed on his face.
“It’s kind of a sad world I live in,” Edgar said with a sigh. “It’s really sad that people who could be genetically linked to me are scarier than alien invaders and the Anti-Christ. Do you ever just wake up some days and think, ‘This is fucked up.’?”
“Every day.”
“Come on, let me through.”
Johnny stepped aside, and followed Edgar back into the other room, fire poker still in hand.
Edgar apologized to his visitors for taking so long, though they almost hadn’t noticed. When Edgar offered a glass, the woman claiming to be his mother took his hand too. He flinched as though he’d been pricked and had to send a glance at Johnny to signal that he was fine.
He wasn’t sure what to say to her, and being looked at adoringly was not actually as pleasant as he had once imagined it would be.
“Um, look, not that I don’t-”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said sadly. “I was just… well.”
She took several drinks of her water and attempted to say positive things about the decorating in the house before her husband rolled his eyes, and elbowed her gently in the ribs. She looked at him with actual offense, not the mocking kind Edgar was used to seeing from Johnny. He pulled a wallet out of his pocket, passed it in front of his wife’s eyes for a moment, and then tossed it to Edgar, who tried not to react as though it was a bomb.
“What is this?” he asked.
“Just open it.”
“I don’t need-”
“Open it, Edgar.”
Edgar opened the worn brown leather, fully expecting poison darts or some kind of Jack-In-The-Box mechanism, but instead saw a driver’s license carrying his last name.
“Flip that part over,” his father said, flapping his hand.
Behind the spot for an ID were plastic sleeves for photos, and while some of them looked like any and every baby, the last few were unmistakably the same face Edgar used to see in the mirror ten years prior.
His expression must have betrayed his alarm because Johnny was leaning over his shoulder almost immediately.
“Cute isn’t he?” Edgar’s mother said proudly.
Johnny looked like he may vomit directly into Edgar’s lap. He raised his eyebrows and gave the woman a sneer that he had clearly meant to be an indulgent smile. “Lovely,” he said. His tone was nothing short of acidic and Edgar was unsure if the insult was directed at him or his mother.
“Are these real?” Edgar asked. It was a dumb question, mostly because he knew the answer would be ‘yes’ no matter who they were, aliens or otherwise.
“Of course they’re real,” Edgar’s mother said.
“But why leave me here alone?”
Edgar’s mother looked desperate. “I already told you, we didn’t want to, but we couldn’t all go! They would only take you, and you wanted to come so badly.”
“And you listened to a ten-year-old.”
Edgar’s father nodded toward Johnny. “You wanted to find him.”
“And you trusted me?”
“You found him, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, but-”
“We wanted to make sure you were okay.”
Edgar slammed the wallet shut on a picture of a little boy half-smiling during a birthday party. “I’m okay!” he shouted. “I’m fine! I’m alive, I’m happy, I found him, but why do you come back after all that? Why, what, fifteen years later? I could have used you – either of you – for all the shit I went through!”
Edgar’s parents clearly had not been expecting this reaction, and judging from Johnny’s breathing, he hadn’t either.
“This is the first time we’ve been allowed to see you…”
“Who didn’t let you?” Johnny asked. Edgar sighed, happy he didn’t have to ask it.
“They told us they work ‘upstairs’,” Edgar’s father said. “That they’d accidentally put Edgar in the wrong place, in the wrong world do to whatever he was supposed to be doing. So they said they could move him, but only him.” He shrugged. “They didn’t have enough power to move some old people, I guess.”
Johnny raised an eyebrow at ‘old people,’ but stayed silent.
“And it took them this long to let you?” Edgar asked miserably.
His parents nodded.
“We tried, over and over, but they kept saying it wasn’t safe,” his mother explained. “They only told us you were alive. They finally decided you were safe to visit after all this time. We didn’t know what to expect.”
“I don’t think I can deal with this. I’m sorry, but, can you come back later or something?”
The couple exchanged worried glances, and then looked back to Edgar. His father shook his head. “We only have today, they can’t keep us here.”
“You have just today to hear about what happened to me?”
“We were just going to say hello,” his mother said, clutching her water glass desperately. “Just come by, look at you, tell you we loved you, and see if you’d found the bo- him. That’s all. But-”
“But what?”
“But just looking at you! I can’t just walk away when I have a whole day to know who my son is and find out what he was missing so much that he couldn’t even stay in my world. I want to know what my world did not have, and what this one has done to you.”
Edgar had a hard time keeping his head out of his hands and trying to render himself invisible. He gave a long sigh and turned to Johnny, who was still surveying the situation and trying to be subtle about being armed.
“Nny, do I believe this?”
“Am I reading your mind, or making a judgment call?”
“Whichever.”
“Sure. And if they’re aliens, at least they have a good cover story and some nice photo editing skills.”
“Okay,” Edgar said to his parents. “If you’ve only got today, then we should get started.”
The couple smiled widely and moved to take Edgar’s hands or hug him or something, but he was already across the room and stepping into another.
“Come on,” he called from the living room.
He watched them follow curiously after him, and saw his mother give Johnny an odd stare. When they stood in front of him, with Johnny watching silently from the stairs, he made an exaggerated ‘ta-da’ motion and launched into his recap of his life.
“This is the spot where I first remember being conscious. It’s also the spot where I freaked out and started running around the house in a panic, causing me to get this great scar on my head here,” he cleared some hair away from his temple, “from running into a doorknob.”
Edgar’s mother was clearly alarmed, but Johnny, perched behind her on the steps, was grinning. Edgar quickly darted to the stairs and proceeded to climb the staircase, motioning his parents to follow.
“Several hours and probably significant blood loss later, I crawled up these stairs – ‘scuse me, Johnny – and managed to drag myself into the only room with a bed! This one!” He knocked the door open as best he could, revealing the room that he and Johnny shared and had decorated far beyond capacity. His parents muttered something about it being their room, but never made a full sentence.
“I have no idea how long I slept here! It could have been days!” Edgar exclaimed. He wasn’t sure if he was angry or excited or just felt like seeing how much mocking these people could take, but he was very sure that he could still see Johnny deeply enjoying the spectacle. “All I dreamed about was him! Some kid I had to find that I didn’t even know!”
“Edgar…” his mother said softly.
“Wait, we’re not done. You’ll love this part. Do you know what I did when I woke up? I went to school. And I kept going to school. Every. Single. Day. I went to school on weekends!”
Johnny laughed at him from the stairs.
“Edgar, we had no way of-”
“And then I started to notice that I was not just shamefully unpopular, but in fact completely invisible to anyone and everyone unless they really needed someone to blame or do an errand. Six or so years of this go by and no one on the planet can see me, no one can touch me, and no one can hear me. And then!” Edgar started back down the stairs, where Johnny still sat at the bottom. “Then one day I’m going down the hall and I see him.”
Johnny waved, and Edgar’s father, in a daze, waved back.
“And I think, ‘Holy shit! That’s that kid I was looking for!’” Edgar exclaimed, motioning dramatically to Johnny. His tone was almost out of control and the more he talked, the faster he talked, the more mocking it became. “And I talked to him, and it broke my brain a little, but then he comes to visit and he is all over everything and he breaks my blender and I tell him that I am supposed to make him happy.”
Johnny nodded, as though taking notes, and Edgar’s parents proceeded slowly down the stairs.
“I have no idea how to do this,” Edgar continued, “because I have only the slightest idea why I even want to do this, but it doesn’t matter! Now we’re best friends and he lives here because I can’t let him live in the school, where he was before with our weird friends, who you should meet, definitely.”
“You have other friends?” Edgar’s mother asked.
For a moment, his glee at showing these people what he had gone through faltered, and he was almost annoyed that even his parents had pegged him as a kid with no friends.
“Yeees, and they’ll be happy to see you later. In the meantime,” Edgar slid over to the keyboard against the wall and slammed a few notes of his own song,” I’m over here, playing a tune and Johnny says, ‘Edgar, do you play?’ and then, so everyone can finally see us, we pretend to be musical dead people in the cafeteria! This really works a lot better than you think it would and we are incredibly popular because in this world that you are not in but I am, music just sits in everyone’s head all the time! But if invisible kids make it? BAM!”
Edgar’s mother flinched and in the same moment, Edgar let the words escape from him.
“And then we were magical, and then he was incredible, and I told him that, and he said it was fine and I had – look, right there!” He pointed enthusiastically to the end of the couch. “I had my first real kiss right there! I did a lot of other really good things there, and then the Anti-Christ came by-”
Edgar’s parents took a step forward.
“-and he says some terrible stuff and then there’s songs and everything’s wonderful and then up there, on that same bed where I went to sleep because I was bleeding from that doorknob, Johnny died! And it was horrible and I was miserable and I wanted to die too, and then he came back but then he was crazy and didn’t remember anything! I haven’t mentioned that he used to be a homicidal maniac bent on using what was left of my mutilated body to paint a wall, have I? Well, that should be in there somewhere.”
“Edgar, please, stop.”
“This is what happened. I thought you wanted to know.”
“Yes, but not like-”
“And then we were
fine and it was perfect but we had to find some abandoned child by
the side of the road who turned out to be some sort of cosmic cloned
love child of Johnny and everyone we know probably plus some people
we don’t! Or maybe just me! Then I get stalked by a woman with a
monster in her head, but the Johnny girl kid, who is in love with me
and wants me to be her dad at the same time, grows up fast enough to
take the monster out of the stalker and put it into Johnny who now
has a monster filtered into our CLOSET holding his body together! I
also like to watch bad old movies, I like pomegranate, and I just
recently learned to drive.”
Johnny applauded softly from the stairs. Edgar panted softly, his body either running on terror, anger or both. When he thought he’d stunned them into silence, Edgar’s mother burst into tears and flung herself against him, wrapping her arms around his neck.
---
“Come home with us.”
“Are you kidding? How long did I just spend telling you two how happy I am with Johnny and you-”
“He can come too.”
Edgar looked at Johnny, who looked stunned and then slowly slid into anger.
“I can’t.”
“You found what you came for, come home and let us have you around again.”
“I can’t. I can’t take him out of this world any more than I can take you two out of yours. He belongs here and I belong here.”
“How can you choose between-”
“How did you? Look, I appreciate what you did. Being with Johnny is more important to me than anything, and I’m glad you let me, but I don’t even know you. I can’t leave a place where I’m happy and settled and have friends to go… I can’t, okay?”