Dear Edward

by Ann Napolitano

  It had started from nothing. One day, he’d been in the deli buying a soda, and she’d given him an unhooked smile, one that told him she liked him and had liked him for some time, and he smiled back, and before he knew it, he was kissing a real live girl in real live time. Every time he went in the store and her uncle was out, they would go to the back supply room. They stood among cans of beans and boxes of toilet paper and kissed, kissed, kissed. They barely spoke. Their language was composed of smiles and welcoming looks and brushing the hair off her cheek and about twenty different kinds of kisses ranging from hello to I want you (though I don’t really know what that means) to I want to figure out what your lips taste like. He never would have guessed that kisses could be so variant: in speed, depth, ferocity. He could have kissed her for hours and never been bored. He saw Mahira only once outside the deli, in a Chinese restaurant; his father was with him, and her uncle with her. They had to limit their communication to smiles.

  When he told her he was moving, Mahira looked away for a second, then turned back and met his lips differently. And for his final three visits to the storeroom, they shared a new kiss, one that said, I’ll miss you, and I’m scared that we’re growing up, and I wish this could continue forever, but I know that even if you weren’t leaving, it could not.

  Jordan sighs, tump-tump, and says, “Excuse me.”

  His father slides out so he can slide into his seat, and he is back to being a term in the equation that states Eddie + Jordan = Bruce. Jordan tips his head back and closes his eyes, the music still playing in his ears. He’s pleased that he never told anyone about Mahira. She is his alone. His secret history. He figures that the more times he opts out of security machines, the more girls he kisses, the more of himself he will own, the more of an unknown quantity he will become, and the equation, the one his father has built his life around, will no longer be true.

  * * *

  —

  Directly across the aisle from the Adlers, Benjamin slides the free magazine back into the seat pocket. He tries to change his position, but there’s not a lot of room to do so. He’s uncomfortable; his side aches where the bag is taped to his skin. After surgery, the drugs were the only upside to the weeks spent in the hospital. Benjamin had never taken anything stronger than ibuprofen before, but while pumped with pain medication during the day and sleeping pills at night, he was able to exist in a delicious haze. He thought about the fight with Gavin, but his thoughts were not tethered to reality. He watched it like a play: a massive black guy circling a skinny blond white one.

  This flight, the final one home, has unfortunately woken him up. He’s drug-free, and the return to sobriety makes him feel painfully aware of every niggle in his body and every thought in his head. He has flashes of panic, even reaching to his belt to see if he’s armed. How is he supposed to bear himself nonstop?

  He’s being sent back to L.A. for one more operation, and then he’ll be assigned a desk job. He is no longer allowed to work in the field. He catches himself hoping, now that the drugs have cleared his system, that he will die on the next operating table. That would be better, far better, than folding himself into a desk chair every day. Besides, he is a stranger to himself now, and he’s not at all sure that this stranger deserves to live.

  * * *

  —

  The clouds outside the windows are a shade darker than before. Inside the cabin feels darker too, beset with memories of soft-lipped girls, permanently sleeping mothers, shy teenage boys, and clashing fists. Florida can almost see the scenes, the missing people, the dense minutes and hours and years that sit behind each person on the plane. She inhales and lets the choked air fill her lungs. The past is the same as the present to her, as precious and as close at hand. After all, if you think about one memory for most of a day, is that not your present? Some people live in the now; some people prefer to reside in the past—either choice is valid. Florida operates her lungs, pleased by the fullness.

  When Linda sits back down, Florida pats her hand. “You remind me of someone,” she says. “I’ve been trying to remember who.”

  “Oh?”

  “Might be one of the revolutionaries I took care of in my store in Cebu. In the Philippines. They were mostly boys, but occasionally I’d get a feisty girl who had faked her way into battle.” Florida pictures the crowded back room of that store. She sold or traded rice and beans out front and hid the wounded under blankets in the back. She held secret meetings of the Katipuneros in her bedroom late at night. The wounded or sick soldiers came straight from fighting the Spanish, but they were no more than children. They called her Tandang Sora, and she whispered the same truth in each child-soldier’s ear: You are special. You are meant to survive, to go on and do great things.

  Florida is proud of this memory; she lived that life well. There are other lives, in which her opinion of herself isn’t so high. The one she’s sitting in right now, for instance, feels like it’s gotten away from her.

  Linda stares. “When was this? I thought you said you lived in Vermont.”

  “Oh, a couple hundred years ago.” Florida studies her seatmate. “There was a girl I treated for pleurisy; I think it’s her you remind me of.”

  Linda looks at her like she’s crazy. Florida sighs. Sometimes she explains, sometimes she doesn’t, but this girl looks like she needs all the help she can get. “This isn’t my first life,” she says, “or my first body. I have a longer memory than most people. I can remember most of time.”

  “Oh. I’ve heard of people like you.”

  Florida is unfazed by Linda’s distrustful tone. Even her parents in her current life, two Filipino doctors who immigrated to Atlanta, Georgia, only to become a dry cleaner and a housewife, didn’t believe their daughter’s tales of past lives. She had been only too happy, in the middle of high school, to leave them and the South by attaching herself to a boyfriend who had a drum set and a dream of the big city.

  Linda is chewing her lower lip. She’s a pretty young woman who seems to have mastered how to make herself ugly. She wears too much makeup and has an over-expressive face. Her mouth is rarely still, her eyebrows shoot up, her cheeks draw in and then push out. Her face contorts, as if it’s striving for something.

  Florida pats her hand again. “You’ll be okay. You want to marry this man in California, right? So you get off the plane and you marry him, and, voilà, you have a new life. A new life is what you’re after, isn’t it?”

  Linda says, in a small voice, “I’m not a hundred percent sure he’s going to propose.”

  Florida smiles. “Sweetheart, no one is one hundred percent sure of any damn thing. If someone says they are, they’re a liar.” She shifts in her seat hard enough that the bells on her skirt jangle. Bobby used to say it sounded like she was wearing tiny alarm clocks. She’d respond: Who am I trying to wake up around here, the birds?

  * * *

  —

  Benjamin hates being strapped in this seat, mired in his own thoughts. He’s unable to do the physical movement necessary to quiet his brain. He doesn’t think about the gunfire during his last patrol; the night he was injured makes sense to him. He’d grown sloppy in the weeks following the fight with Gavin. Distracted. He’d basically stopped sleeping, which made everything worse. He was shot during patrol because his reflexes were gone, which made him an easy target. Benjamin actually saw the shooter, positioned between two branches. Looked the man in the eyes and received his bullet. That information computes. There’s nothing there for the ants to chew on.

  Instead, he thinks about Gavin. Gavin was a white guy from Boston who had showed up in his platoon six months earlier. Benjamin knew by looking at him that he’d been to college and probably joined the army to piss off his parents. There were plenty of guys like that, amid the lifers like him. Gavin, if he stayed alive long enough, would do his tour and get out. Probably become an accountant—a guy who dri
ves his kids to soccer games. He wore wire-rim glasses and had white-blond hair.

  In general, Benjamin stayed away from white guys. The army, like everywhere else, segregated itself, and Benjamin preferred hanging out with people who looked like him. The truth was that no one—black, Latino, Asian, or white—was clamoring to be his friend. He knew he had a reputation for being uptight and a little scary. His grandmother, Lolly, had once told him that his “resting face” wasn’t particularly friendly.

  One night, he and Gavin were both assigned latrine duty. The bathroom was disgusting; there were dark, unidentifiable stains on the walls and sticky floors. There had been talk of their platoon moving to a new location, and the uncertainty translated into a lack of motivation for this kind of work. Benjamin and Gavin walked into the room with buckets and mops and a gallon of toxic-smelling cleaning solution; they both paused just inside the doorway, and Benjamin’s jaw set. When he looked at Gavin, he saw the same determination on his face. They went at it, and after three straight hours, they had deep-cleaned the entire room.

  “Motherfucker,” Gavin said at the end, covered in sweat and grime. “We fucking did this.”

  He held his fist out to Benjamin, and Benjamin, grinning, met it with his own.

  “We sure did,” he said.

  They became friends that night, and it was no big deal—just nice, but nice meant something to Benjamin. They had actual conversations, mostly because Gavin asked Benjamin questions and seemed interested in the answers. Benjamin told Gavin that he barely remembered his parents and that Lolly wasn’t his real grandmother—she had found him in a stairwell at the age of four and taken him in. Gavin told Benjamin that his father wanted him to take over his dental practice and that teeth made Gavin queasy, so he joined the army to escape the future that had been mapped out for him before he was even born.

  Gavin was friends with everyone, so his friendship with Benjamin was a small part of his military life, but it was a significant part of Benjamin’s. Gavin liked to smoke pot—there were weeks of no activity on base, and in times of boredom, the captain looked the other way on things like marijuana and video games—and when he smoked, he told the kind of knock-knock jokes usually favored by nine-year-olds. Benjamin never smoked, but he made sure he was around when Gavin did, and he laughed hysterically while the other guys groaned.

  The first-class flight attendant walks by his seat and gives him a smile. Boom chicka boom. Benjamin can hear her soundtrack so clearly she might as well be carrying a speaker on each hip. In his neighborhood, she’d have a line of men following her down the street, dancing to that beat.

  He glances around at the rows of civilians with their untucked shirts, beer bellies, and pointless chitchat. The flight attendant is neat, pulled together, and in uniform, which he appreciates. The mess of everyone else’s appearance, and of their non-military lives, confuses him. Pull yourself together, he wants to tell the old lady next to him and the rumpled dad across the aisle. How hard is it to tuck in your shirt, straighten your posture, lose ten pounds?

  Benjamin clenches his jaw. He’s not made to sit still. If he could only take a short break to run sprints, do push-ups, or even just stride someplace with a sense of purpose. He touches his side now, checking that the bag is in place, that he’s still contained by his own body.

  July 2013

  That night, when John and Lacey go upstairs, Edward is finally able to unfurl—his sadness, his blankness—into the empty living room. He’s not tired; he feels terrible and awake the same way he did ten hours earlier. I must be missing hormones, he thinks. Something to do with the word “endocrine.” There is a cycle that normal people ride: They wake up with the light, rub their eyes, get hungry, eat cereal, go about their days, and then, with sunset, begin to wind down. They eat again, watch TV, yawn, and climb into bed.

  Edward sits in the middle of the couch, wired and surrounded by shadows. He hears the upstairs sink run, and the toilet flush; John is getting ready for bed. Edward had told himself that he wouldn’t do this again, but nonetheless he stands up, leaves the house, and hitches his way across the lawn.

  When Besa opens the door, he says, “I’m sorry.”

  “Nonsense,” Besa says. “We’ll just have to find something more comfortable for you to rest on than a chair.” She leads him up the stairs.

  Shay is wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants this time. Her hair is in a ponytail. She nods when she sees him. “I was thinking about you at camp today,” she says. “I’m glad you came over.”

  “You are?” His voice squeaks with relief. This means she won’t send him away.

  Besa has disappeared; they are alone in the lamplit room. Edward sinks down in the chair. He balances his crutches carefully against the bookshelf beside him.

  “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier.” Shay is on her knees on her bed. She looks excited. Edward identifies this emotion as if it’s an answer on a test. That’s a nimbus cloud. That’s the pancreas. That’s excitement. He feels around inside himself and touches the four corners of his flatness.

  “You’ve read Harry Potter, right?”

  He nods. Jordan was given the series as a birthday gift and then had the idea to take the books out of the library as well, so he and his brother could read them at the same time. They lay in their bunks for hours, for several weeks on end, mowing through one book after another. Jordan would call out from the top bunk: Holy cow, Eddie, are you on page 202 yet? The brothers had long conversations about whether Snape was in fact a bad person. They had once, after splitting a nearly full gallon of apple juice at the kitchen table, gotten into an argument so intense—Jordan insisting that Snape was the key, even the genesis, of all the evil in the books, Eddie saying he was essentially good—that their father had to send them to opposite ends of the apartment until they calmed down. “No more sugar!” Bruce had yelled. “And what the hell is a snape?”

  Shay bounces lightly on the mattress and studies Edward. Her gaze makes him uncomfortable.

  “I’m going to blow your mind,” she says. “Are you ready?”

  The sinkhole inside him grows deeper, and he can taste weariness in his mouth. “I guess so?”

  “You’re just like Harry Potter.”

  He looks at her, not sure what to say.

  “Okay, listen. As a child, Harry survived a terrible attack that no one should have been able to survive, right?”

  Edward can see that an answer is expected of him. “Right.”

  “Voldemort killed Harry’s parents but couldn’t kill him, even though he was a baby. Nobody understood how it was possible. And the fact that he survived scared a lot of people—it freaked them out.” She blinks behind her glasses. “I heard a doctor on TV say that there was a zero percent chance of survival from your plane crash.”

  Edward swallows. Like a dutiful student, he follows her train of thought. Voldemort equals plane crash. Dead parents equal dead parents. Harry equals him.

  “My uncle said they think I survived because of where my seat was in relation to the fuselage and because it ejected out of the wreckage….”

  Shay shakes her head.

  Edward stares at the girl: her glasses, her one dimple, her determined expression.

  “Do you have any scars from your injuries?”

  He does. He has a horrible one extending down the middle of his left shin. He pulls up his pant leg. The line is jagged, pink, and raised.

  “That’s disgusting,” Shay says, sounding delighted. “So you have a scar like Harry Potter too. And you were taken in by your aunt and uncle. Also, remember how Aunt Petunia was jealous of her sister being a witch? Lacey was totally jealous of your mom. My mom made me go and sit with Lacey when she was on bed rest last year, and she used to brag about your mom’s achievements, but in a sad voice.”

  There is a dark window behind Edward’s head, and h
e can feel the silence on the lawn and streets. When cars pass, they creep by, as if afraid they might hit a child or a deer. He feels faintly nauseous, considering her words. Or maybe it’s her excitement that’s making him seasick, as if he’s stepped onto a rocking boat. Either way, he knows he won’t be able to eat in the morning.

  “You probably have special powers. You must be magic, to survive that crash.”

  “No,” Edward says, without hesitation.

  “Harry didn’t know he had special powers either,” Shay says. “He lived in a cupboard under the stairs at the Dursleys’ house for eleven years before he found out.” She looks at the clock on her nightstand. “I have to go to sleep in three minutes in order to get eight hours’ sleep. And I need eight hours. Are you going to sleep here or go home?”

  “Here,” Edward says. “If that’s okay.”

  The light is off before he finishes the sentence.

  * * *

  —

  Edward’s therapist is a skinny man named Dr. Mike. Dr. Mike wears a baseball cap and has an ornate clock on his desk, which is decorated with gold and silver flowers. Edward studies the clock hands when there’s a lull in the conversation. The timepiece seems to operate by its own system of measurement. This is his fifth visit to this office, and the clock freezes for entire moments, then leaps forward to catch up with the surrounding world.

  “Anything new?” Dr. Mike says.

  “No,” Edward says. “Well. My aunt and uncle are upset because I’m losing weight.”

  “Are you upset about it?”

  Edward shrugs. “No?” He doesn’t like these sessions. The doctor seems like a nice enough man, but his job is to excavate Edward’s brain, and Edward’s job is to fend him off, because his brain is too sore and tender to withstand even the lightest touch. The job is exhausting.