Dear Edward

by Ann Napolitano

  “Jordan did things like that,” Edward says. “That’s something he would do.”

  Shay gives a small nod. “He waved at me, and then he jumped off the car roof.”

  “Dios mío,” Besa says.

  “Oh,” Lacey says, then pauses. In a different tone, she says, “I remember. He hurt his knee….He wouldn’t tell me how, but I gave him a bag of frozen peas to put on it.”

  Edward doesn’t remember any of this. He doesn’t remember Jordan going outside without him. He doesn’t remember the frozen peas, or this girl, or his brother with a limp. There is a cracking sensation in his chest, as if small bones are breaking. Why can’t he remember?

  “He didn’t seem hurt to me,” Shay says. “A grown-up called him right after he jumped, and he went back inside.”

  She pushes back her chair and swipes her mother’s cheek with a kiss. “I have to go, Mamí. The bus will be here any second.”

  “Que tengas un buen día.”

  “Adiós,” Shay says, and then she’s gone.

  Edward takes another gulp of coffee to try to block the lump in his throat. He coughs into his napkin. He can feel Lacey’s desire for him to eat, but there’s a force field around food that he can’t seem to penetrate—the smell, the solidity of it is impossible. He returns to the couch. Lacey switches the television on, but he can’t focus on the images. He listens to the hum of Lacey and Besa’s voices in the kitchen. When he passes the door once, on the way to the bathroom, he hears his aunt say, “Instead of a baby, a twelve-year-old boy.” Edward keeps his eyes on his feet, to make sure he doesn’t fall.

  When the sky dims, and John comes home, Edward returns to the kitchen table. His uncle ruffles his hair; Lacey puts a dollop of buttery mashed potatoes on his plate and says, “Please, Edward?”

  John says something about a lawyer, and Lacey says that it seems to be a bad season for tomatoes. His uncle and aunt pass bowls of food back and forth to each other, more often than is necessary, Edward thinks.

  “I wish I liked salad,” Lacey says.

  John makes a face. “Nobody likes salad.”

  Edward can tell, without knowing how, that this exchange about salad is a standard in their marital repertoire. It’s a back-and-forth they repeat in order to recognize themselves, within their marriage and their lives. The same way John says, Lace, you okay? when he enters a room, without seeming to expect or need an answer. The way Lacey reaches up to check her hair a few times an hour. The way his aunt places the condiments in the door of the fridge, and John moves them to the top shelf.

  “Did you have to take me in?” he asks.

  Their faces turn to him. Lacey’s freckles darken. A line crosses John’s forehead.

  “I mean, is it the law, because you’re my only relatives?”

  “I don’t know if it’s the law,” Lacey says, and looks at her husband.

  “There was no question,” John says. “There was no other possible outcome. We’re your family.”

  “Yes,” Lacey says, but as her freckles lighten, Edward realizes she’s on the verge of tears. He sees John notice this too and press his hand over hers.

  “My leg hurts,” he says. “May I be excused?”

  “Of course,” John says.

  Eventually, the square of window over the couch grows dark, and then darker. John stands in the doorway of the living room and says, “It’s bedtime, kiddo. Can I help you upstairs?”

  Edward says the same thing he’s said the last two nights: “My leg…The stairs make me nervous. Would it be okay if I just stayed down here again?”

  “Sure.” Moments later, Lacey appears with blankets and a pillow and murmurs good night into his ear. Edward listens to their footsteps on the stairs, and then their bedroom door clicks shut. He stands up, walks to the front door, opens it, and hobbles outside.

  He crosses the lawn and his aunt and uncle’s driveway. He’s slow in his movements. It’s ten o’clock. The nighttime air feels soft against his cheek and makes the hairs stand up on his arms. Edward registers that the suburbs’ night sounds are very different from the city’s. Here, there is a wall of quiet set in front of warbling creatures, rustling leaves, and distant car engines. He drags across another lawn and climbs the front steps of a house that looks, in the shadows, almost identical to the one he came from.

  He knocks on the door.

  After a pause, a woman opens it. Besa squints into the darkness.

  “Edward? Are you okay?”

  He says, “Can I come in and see Shay?”

  Another pause, and a memory cracks through Edward’s mind. This is how memories appear now, like a burglar bursting through a locked door without warning. It’s a few weeks before the flight, and he and Jordan are in the elevator of their building. They’d snuck out of the apartment without their dad noticing, and they’re grinning at each other. They know that when they hit the lobby, the doorman will be shaking his head. He’ll say, Boys, your father called. Back upstairs now. But as the elevator swooped down, he and his brother played air guitar.

  Edward thinks, Jordan should have been the one to live, not me.

  Besa looks over her shoulder and calls out, “Shay, mi amor, are you decent?”

  Shay’s voice travels from upstairs. “Why?”

  Besa doesn’t answer. She leads him past the living room and up a set of stairs. Through an open doorway, he sees Shay leaning against pillows on a bed. She’s wearing pajamas with pink clouds on them and holding a book.

  “Hi,” he says.

  She straightens with a bustle of motion. She gives the same squint her mother used at the door, this time from behind glasses.

  “Um, hi?”

  “Shay,” Besa says, “maybe you can tell Edward about your day at camp.” She has her hand on Edward’s shoulder, and the sensation is both wonderful and terrible.

  “Why would I do that?” Shay says.

  Edward is aware that Besa is staring at her daughter, trying to deliver a message without words. And he knows—maybe, a little bit—why he came here. To be with another kid, to have a break from the intense, watching, worried eyes of adults.

  Besa says in a bright, we-will-make-this-work tone, “Have you ever been to camp, Edward?”

  “This is weird,” Shay says.

  Besa hurls a sigh at her daughter.

  “You don’t have to talk to me,” Edward says. “Not if you don’t want to.”

  “I’ll need to go to sleep soon.”

  He swivels his head from side to side and locates an armchair by the window. “I could sit there for a bit.” He feels his body slowing down. He swallows. Then takes a breath. “Just for a few minutes,” he says.

  Shay and her mother exchange another long look, complicated with twists and beats. Edward makes his way to the chair. He feels like he’s pushing through water. His crutches drag across the carpet. Why would they make the carpet this fluffy? he thinks.

  Besa says, “I’ll give Lacey a call, so she knows you’re here.”

  “I’m going to say again, for the record, that this is w-e-i-r-d,” Shay says.

  By the time Besa leaves the room, Edward is asleep.

  When he wakes, it is to white light so glaring that all he can do is blink. He doesn’t know, during the blinking, who or what or where he is. Only when he has adjusted to the light, and his brain has stopped panicking and throwing switches, does Edward see that he’s alone in Shay’s room. There’s a green blanket draped over his lap. He can feel that he’s alone in the house; the walls, the open doorway, everything suggests emptiness. He just sits there, for a long time.

  When he knocks on his aunt’s front door and she opens it, he says, “Are you mad at me?”

  She gives him a funny look. “I don’t think I could be mad at you,” she says. “Come inside and rest. You have a doctor’
s appointment this afternoon.”

  When Edward has lowered himself to the couch, Lacey helps him lift his hurt leg onto the stack of pillows on the coffee table. Something occurs to him, and he says, “Am I stopping you from going somewhere? I mean, do you have a job you’re not going to, because of me?”

  She straightens the corners of the pillows around his foot. “No. I used to have a job,” she says. “But I stopped working when I got pregnant. I was on bed rest. Last year.”

  “Oh.”

  Lacey looks around the room, and Edward thinks, This was her space. There are magazines stacked on the lower level of the coffee table. The ones in his line of vision are about either pregnancy or babies. His aunt had spent her days alone in this house planning to get pregnant, or trying to stay pregnant. Edward’s head clicks, and he wishes he could get up and leave the room, the same way he left the nursery upstairs, but Shay’s at camp, his leg prickles with pain, and he has nowhere else to go.

  “I’d been thinking about looking for another job. Something,” Lacey says. “I just hadn’t gotten around to it yet.” She pauses, as if to catch her breath. “Can I get you anything from the kitchen?”

  “No, thank you.”

  He watches a soap opera in which a woman weeps over whether or not to have an abortion while her mother wonders whether or not to leave her husband. He feels aware of the hours in a new way. He has a vague understanding of how they pile on top of each other to make days, and how seven days group together into a week. And the weeks collect until there are fifty-two, and then it is a year. The flight was on June 12. That means it must be late July now. Time is passing.

  * * *

  —

  The doctor is a throat-clearer. He enters the room making the noise of a bullfrog and continues for a solid ten seconds while standing in front of Edward and Lacey. When he finally stops, he looks pleased with his performance. He says, “You’ve lost eight pounds since the event.”

  Event? Edward thinks, confused for a split second. Then he understands.

  Lacey says, “That’s not good.”

  The doctor repeats: “That is not good.”

  There’s a photographic mural of a butterfly on one wall. Edward wonders if the doctor regretted the mural once it was put up. The butterfly, at that swollen size, doesn’t look beautiful. Its scale and strangeness make everyone stand as far away from it as possible.

  “Buy him ice cream, candy bars, whatever he wants,” the doctor says, and issues an emphatic honking noise. “This is no time for nutrition. He’s a growing boy, and he didn’t have the weight to lose. He needs calories. Lose one more pound and I’m going to put you on an IV, Edward. That means re-hospitalization.”

  In the car on the way home, his aunt says, “Please think of something you might be able to eat.”

  Edward feels barren on the inside. There’s nothing alive in him. Food seems not only unnecessary but irrelevant.

  Lacey pulls into the parking lot of an oversized convenience store. She turns the engine off but keeps her hands on the steering wheel. She gives Edward a look he hasn’t seen before. “Please don’t do this.” Her voice is pinched. “If Jane knew how badly I was doing at taking care of you…”

  Edward says, “No, Aunt Lacey.” He scans the air for more words and sees only convenience, store, chips, beer, sale, parking.

  She is out of the car, away from him, and he scrambles to follow.

  Inside the store, she says, “We’re going to walk up and down every aisle. If the food doesn’t disgust you, put it in here.”

  He looks at the stacks of chocolate bars. Crunchy, caramel-filled, nut-buttered, dark chocolate, white chocolate, milk chocolate. He chooses Jordan’s favorite: a Twix bar. Lacey’s shoulders drop slightly when he places it in the basket. Chips: ranch, barbecue, nacho cheese, dill pickle, jalapeño, salted, baked, ruffled, flat, sour cream and onion. He chooses a bag of his mother’s favorite: salt and vinegar. The next aisle is Fruit Roll-Ups, meat jerkies, and a coffee setup. Nothing goes in the basket. Then there’s a long row of cereals. Edward thinks, Maybe without milk it would be okay. He can’t bear the idea of food that changes form in any way. Sloshing is intolerable, and he doesn’t want anything with bubbles. Soup, stew, smoothies, and sodas are out. Ice cream melts, and that makes him uncomfortable too.

  He chooses the cereal with the least colorful box. “Is this enough?” he asks his aunt.

  “It’s a start.”

  When they get home, she spreads the food out on the coffee table. Then she leaves the room and comes back with a plate and spoon. Edward sits on the couch and watches. His leg is throbbing, even though it’s elevated on a pillow. The muscles and tendons above his knee pulse, as if they themselves are a heart.

  Lacey unwraps the Twix first. She breaks off a section and puts the piece on the plate. Then she opens the box of cereal and puts a spoonful of the O shapes on the far side. Then two potato chips.

  The aunt and nephew regard the plate in silence.

  “I want you to eat all of this in the next hour,” she says. “Then I’m going to replace these amounts. Understood?”

  Edward nods. He switches the television on; there’s a talk show with a table full of women interrupting each other. He starts by nibbling the edge of a potato chip. When his mouth feels like sawdust, he scrapes a small amount of chocolate off the bar with his front teeth. He remembers cramming potato chips in his mouth with his brother, to see how many could fit. He remembers sitting at the dining room table with his family, the sun setting behind them, Bach playing on the stereo. Then he bites an O in half and wills himself to remember nothing, think nothing, until all that exists is a flatness—a flatness he now identifies as himself.

  10:02 A.M.

  The plane weighs 73.5 tons. The wingspan measures 124 feet. It is constructed of metal sheets, extrusions, castings, ingots, bolts, and wing spars. It has 367,000 individual parts and took two months to build; 280,000 pounds of thrust are required to power this bus through the sky.

  Bruce peers past Eddie, out the window.

  “I was about your age when I took my first flight,” he says. “We were going to a funeral for an uncle, whom I’d never met. And when I saw what the clouds looked like from the sky, I wanted to get out of the plane and dance on them.”

  Eddie looks into his cup of orange juice. He seems annoyed, but it’s not real annoyance. Bruce has noticed that as Jordan becomes a more combative teenager, his younger brother tries, at moments, to project similar anger, irritation, or indignation. He’s not much good at it, though; neither his heart nor his hormones are in the right place.

  “This is my third flight, Dad,” Eddie says.

  This time, Bruce thinks, I want to understand the composition of the clouds. I want the clouds contained and understood. When did that switch happen? When did I go from wanting to dance to wanting to write dimensions down in a notebook? He scans his adolescence: his thirteen-year-old self, a shyer version of the twelve-year-old. Each year he sank more deeply into awkwardness and silence. But there was a jolt of excitement when he realized, much later than he should have, that inside himself was a brain that aced tests easily, that he could use, really use, to make sense of the loud noises and strange customs and unpredictable people around him. Math was the deepest pool in sight, so he dove in. Numbers and equations led to theorems and binomials and n-dimensions and monster groups, and then, in his twenties, he began to use math to tie together pieces of the universe that no one had thought to tie together before.

  He looks over his shoulder. Jordan is slowly making his way down the aisle, his head bouncing to a beat.

  “You should push harder in your career,” Jane has told Bruce during fights. “Why do I need to carry us? Why is college tuition—probably three hundred and fifty thousand freaking dollars, you know—my responsibility while you make up mathematical constellations and
hang pretty beads from them?”

  Jane has no understanding of his work, but he doesn’t blame her for that. Only about seven people in his own field understand what he’s doing. That’s the way of pure math; you need a PhD in the subject to even have a hope of crawling into the specific rabbit hole that a mathematician inhabits. And an individual project—a lifetime of work—may very well appear to non-mathematicians to be pointless, a piece of exquisite but inapplicable math work. It could turn out to be extremely valuable but not until years after your death, in a field you couldn’t have dreamed into existence. Pure math is the stuff of dreams, strands of gossamer built to be thrown to smarter men in the future.

  One example Bruce sometimes cites, when non-mathematicians ask about his work, is Sir William Hamilton. The Irish mathematician had a revelation while out for a walk in 1843 and carved the resulting equation into Dublin’s Broome Bridge with a penknife. That equation marked the discovery of the quaternion group, which proved useless in his lifetime but one hundred fifty years later helped to create video games. The French mathematician Pierre de Fermat’s “Little Theorem,” as it was known, served little purpose when it was developed in 1640 but became the basis of RSA encryption systems for computers in the twenty-first century.

  “Why not just do normal math?” Jane said. “The kind that has actual applications. The kind that helps scientists build things.” The kind, she might as well have said out loud, that makes money.

  Tenure at Columbia would have solved a lot of problems. It would have kept them off this plane, in New York. Bruce sighs and checks over his shoulder again. He knows Jordan is taking his time on purpose. The boy thinks it’s good for his father to sweat a bit.

  * * *

  —

  Jordan schzoom-schzooms and zump-zumps down the aisle. The music in his ears tells him to tump-tump, so he does that too. There is a girl with a peace sign drawn on the back of her hand, probably around his brother’s age, watching from a window seat. He offers her a wave. He wants to enjoy this brief unleashed moment. Buckled in beside his father means they’ll argue, and he’ll start thinking about L.A. and wondering what that will be like. And he’ll miss Mahira.