Dear Edward

by Ann Napolitano

  * * *

  —

  Edward sits on John’s tablet by accident one evening. It’s on the couch, covered by a blanket. Edward pulls it free and sees his reflection in the black screen. His uncle is at a meeting, and his aunt is in bed. His face looks older, and more true, as if this dark mirror sees the grayness within him. The face looking back at Edward wouldn’t be out of place as a villain in a movie: serious to the point of malevolent.

  His parents wouldn’t allow him or Jordan to have a cellphone—the boys had texting pagers so that Bruce and Jane could reach them in case of an emergency. His parents both had tablets, though, which they let the boys use for educational games.

  Edward presses the ON button.

  A four-digit passcode screen appears.

  Am I going to do this? he thinks, with genuine curiosity. Yes.

  He tries to approach the task the way his father would. His father talked about numeracy with such affection—as if the numbers were a collection of odd characters in the local bar—that when Edward fills his brain with numbers, he finds it to be a warm space. As he puzzles through the possible digits, he feels like he’s using the DNA he shares with his father.

  He types in Lacey’s birth year: 1974. The screen shakes its refusal. He tries John’s birth year: 1972. No. There is only one attempt left before it locks and an email is sent to John, checking if he has indeed been struggling with his own device.

  Edward lays the tablet down. He regards it for a minute. Numbers are never random, his father would say. They like patterns and meaning.

  Edward picks up the tablet again and types in the flight number: 2977.

  The screen clears.

  A wave of fear surges through Edward, and he stands up from the couch. He leaves the house, pushes through the muggy night air, and climbs the steps to Shay’s house and Shay’s bedroom. When he clatters into her room, she’s at her desk. He hands the tablet to her as if it’s a grenade without a pin.

  She accepts it with appropriate gravity. Edward leans over her shoulder and types in the passcode.

  They both watch the home page appear. In the lower-right corner, there is a red circle with the words Plane Tree beneath it.

  She looks at him, and he nods. She clicks on the symbol, and a list of links appears:

  relatives of victims

  edward twitter

  edward facebook

  edward google alerts

  notes

  She says in a low voice, “Where did you get this?”

  “It’s John’s.”

  The dimple in her cheek deepens with her frown. “Look,” she says. “I can look up one of these things and read it, and tell you what it says. You don’t have to look yourself. I wouldn’t want to, if I were you.”

  Edward crosses the room and sinks down on her bed. In all his visits to this room, he’s never sat on the mattress before. It’s soft and creaks lightly under his weight. He wishes he could lie down, close his eyes, and sleep. But sleep, even in this room, is hard to come by. Edward spends every night reaching for unconsciousness as if it were a rock in the middle of a river, while a fierce current pulls him away. His fingertips sometimes brush the rock, and he manages a nap. Never a full night’s rest.

  He whispers, “Is there information about Jordan?”

  He can see only the side of Shay’s face. She taps at the screen. “John’s created PDFs with links,” she says. “There’s a Facebook page that was created about Jordan after the crash. By a couple girls, it looks like. I don’t think they knew him. There’s a photo.”

  “I want to see.”

  She holds the screen up. There is Jordan, beaming in his bright-orange parka. He’s outside the deli near their house. His hair is standing almost completely upright.

  “I took that picture,” Edward says.

  Shay lowers the screen. “He’s mentioned in the lists of people who died on the plane and as your brother,” she says. “Online and in the newspaper articles about the crash. That’s it.” She takes a breath.

  “What?” Edward says, and an unlikely stripe of hope crosses his chest.

  “I just clicked on the Google search for your name, and there are over a hundred and twenty thousand results, Edward. One hundred and twenty thousand.”

  “Okay.” He doesn’t know what else to say.

  “Jordan only has forty-three thousand results.”

  “Turn it off,” Edward says. “Please.”

  She closes the case, and he’s grateful for her immediate response. He knew there were people outside the house keeping watch for him; it hadn’t occurred to him that the same might be true online, inside every phone, tablet, and computer.

  He and Shay get ready for bed, taking turns in the bathroom. Edward’s green toothbrush sits in a glass next to her blue one on the side of the sink.

  When he comes out, she’s already unfurled the navy sleeping bag in the middle of the floor. Edward folds down onto it, favoring his damaged leg. “I’ll need to wake up early,” he says. “To get the iPad back before John notices.”

  “Would he be mad if he knew?”

  Edward considers this. “I don’t think so.”

  “Do you think he and Lacey mind that you sleep here?”

  He answers without thinking. “Lacey does.”

  Shay nods and takes off her glasses, which makes her face look different—bleary and vulnerable. It’s the only moment of the day when she doesn’t look confident, and it’s a moment Edward watches for every evening. Before she can turn out the light, he says, “Where’s your father?”

  Shay reaches out for her glasses, but then her hand drops, and she looks in Edward’s direction. It’s clear that she can’t see him, beyond a blurred shape and a collection of colors.

  “My father,” she says, and the two words sound awkward in her mouth. “He took off when I was two. I’ve never heard from him. My mom thinks he has a new family, somewhere out West.”

  Colorado, Edward thinks, because that is now the West to him. The white walls of the hospital, the lady on crutches, the swimming sensation in his brain. Maybe Shay’s father saw the plane fall out of the sky. He took off, Shay said, while Edward’s family descended.

  Shay says, “If he didn’t want us, then I don’t want him.”

  “He must be crazy,” Edward says. “To leave you guys.”

  “My mom said he only married her to piss off his own mother, who didn’t want him to marry a Mexican.”

  Edward watches Shay’s clouded face, hoping for more words, explanations, answers—something to fill the ever-emerging craters that make him up. But Shay switches the light off, and he’s left alone in the darkness and quiet.

  10:17 A.M.

  There is a monotony to time in the air. Consistent air quality and temperature, limited collection of sounds, circumscribed range of motion for the passengers. Some people thrive within these restrictions and relax in the sky in a way they rarely do at home. They have powered down their phones and packed their computers in their luggage; they delight in being unreachable, and read novels, or giggle at sitcoms on the in-seat monitor. But certain driven individuals, who can’t conceive of taking a break, hate being disconnected from their life on the ground and find their anxiety amplified.

  Jane squeezes past Mark. There’s extra legroom in first class, so he doesn’t have to stand up, but she feels like he ought to, out of politeness. As it is now, she has to trail her bottom directly in front of his face. When she’s upright and in the aisle, she glances back and sees that his attention is fixed on the computer screen. This man, who’s basically been in heat over the flight attendant since boarding the plane, hasn’t even glanced up.

  Jesus, she thinks. I have the sexual allure of a grapefruit.

  She walks up the aisle and through the red curtain that separates
first from economy. Every seat is full, and the passengers in this section all look mildly uncomfortable. Jane gives her birthmark a quick press. She wonders if it’s possible to fly in first class and not feel guilty. Does her seatmate feel guilty? She decides probably not.

  “Mom!” Eddie cries, and her eyes trace the sound to her three boys. One white-headed, two with curly handfuls of hair sticking out in every direction.

  She waves to Eddie, and just like every time she sees him after an absence, she remembers him as a colicky baby, wailing in her arms, heaving sobs in his crib, being bounced on Bruce’s shoulder. He barely slept those first three months, and that was the darkest time in Jane’s life. She was hormonal, with leaking breasts, and she was failing, every single minute of every single day. She was failing to provide significant comfort to her baby, and she was failing to be the mother that Jordan had always known. The three-year-old gazed at her nursing nightgown and uncombed hair with a combination of fear and sadness. She was also keenly aware that she was failing herself—she’d always believed that she could kick the butt of any situation, and this proved she couldn’t. She was not the woman she’d thought she was, nor the one she’d planned to be.

  Her adult life had been a smooth trajectory until that point. She had decided what she’d wanted and gotten it, from stories published in a literary magazine, to Bruce, to a high-paying job writing for a television show, to her first baby boy, whom she’d strapped to her chest and carried throughout her days. Now she sat paralyzed on the couch, milk-stained, unable to sleep or rest or think, because of the unstoppable, strangled cries of an infant. But when Eddie did stop crying, he became a sweet, smiling baby, who crawled around the apartment after his brother. He snuggled more than Jordan had. Jane’s depression was broken for good when she woke up laughing one morning because her baby was on top of her, dive-bombing her cheek with openmouthed infant kisses. Mwah, mwah, mwah.

  Jordan always drew the eye. As the older brother, he was faster, stronger, first in most things, but Eddie and Jordan operated as a team. Eddie was the one who calmed his brother down when he got angry that something wasn’t going his way. Eddie loved to play the piano, so Jordan wrote compositions for him to perform. Eddie built Lego cities that stretched from the kitchen to the front door, guaranteeing that his parents would swear and rub bruised feet while walking to the bathroom in the middle of the night. When the Lego obsession started, Jordan checked architecture books out of the library in order to help his brother plan ever more elaborate metropolises. When Jordan started defying Bruce in small ways, like sneaking out of the apartment when he was supposed to be studying, or coming home from the museum ten or fifteen minutes later than arranged, Eddie went along as his partner in crime. When they were “caught” by the doorman or by Bruce himself, Eddie always immediately said, “I’m sorry, Dad,” in his sweetest little-boy voice, which cut Bruce’s anger off at the knees. Jane liked to think that Eddie’s early rage and tears had emptied him out and he was going to coast, smiling, into adulthood, in the wake of Jordan’s more turbulent boat.

  “How are you guys doing?” she asks when she reaches their row. The three heads tip back to look at her, all sharing the same serious expression.

  “You’re going to get much better food in first class,” Jordan says. “Can you save us your dessert?”

  “Definitely.” She smiles at the boys; she’s a little scared to look at Bruce. It’s hard to know how long he’ll hold a grudge about her not getting her work done in time to sit with them.

  “Any aliens in your script yet?” Eddie asks.

  “No.”

  “Submarines?”

  “No.”

  “Mutant monkeys?”

  “Yes. There are several of those.”

  “Maybe your mother will write a love story,” Bruce says.

  This is his way of pressing down on her birthmark. She has a movie she’s been wanting to write for a decade—a quiet, dialogue-driven piece that takes place during a single hour—but she keeps putting it off for these lucrative rewrite jobs. She feels a pang for that movie now. She pictures the fictional couple, about to kiss for the first time—a moment that won’t exist until she writes it—and shakes her head. The man, with his arms wrapped around his beloved, turns his head and looks at Jane. Please hurry, his eyes say. Time is running out.

  The PA system buzzes overhead, and a voice says, “This is your captain speaking. We’ll be flying through a small rainstorm for the next twenty minutes, so there may be some light turbulence. We ask that passengers return to their seats until I turn off the fasten-seatbelt sign.”

  Eddie crosses his arms and turns toward the window. Jane knows, without seeing, that his eyes are wet with sudden tears. This move has been stressful for all of them, and he would have preferred to sit with his mother during the flight.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” she says, to his narrow shoulders. “I’ll come back and visit in a few minutes.”

  “Dessert,” Jordan says. “When lunch comes, don’t forget to save your dessert.”

  She and Jordan perform an elaborate handshake they’ve been working on; it takes five seconds to complete, and part of the routine is keeping a straight face. No smiling allowed. He nods at her, pleased, when it’s finished. She’s relieved, as she is every time it’s over; the handshake feels like a test that allows her to stay part of his inner circle. The problem is that she’s retested at regular intervals, and one misstep might leave her stranded by the side of the road.

  On her way back to her seat, she passes the large woman with bells stitched into her skirt. They both have to walk sideways to fit past each other in the narrow aisle, and it’s impossible for them not to touch. For a second they are nose to nose, then their shoulders brush. The bells ring lightly below their waists.

  “I like your skirt,” Jane says. She knows like is the wrong word, but she’s not sure what the right word is. She’s embarrassed to find herself blushing.

  The woman looks Jane up and down, surveys her buttoned cardigan and jeans, her chin-length hair. “Thank you,” she says. “I saw you with your boys over there. They’re adorable.”

  Jane smiles. “They used to be adorable. I don’t know what they are now.”

  “Well, they look adorable to me.”

  “Thanks so much.”

  The conversation is clearly over, but Jane hesitates before walking away. In that moment of hesitation, she is about to say something more, but she can’t think of a suitable line. Even when she’s buckled back into her seat, she feels like she’s still standing on that strip of orange rug, searching for words. People pay me to write dialogue, she thinks. I’m a terrible fraud.

  * * *

  —

  Benjamin watches the two women sway in the aisle. They’re about six feet ahead of him. He can’t hear their words, but he watches the mother’s cheeks turn pink. He had overheard her conversation with the white-haired dad and two boys across from him. Nuclear families like theirs—white ones with a mom and a dad and two kids—always look like museum exhibits to him. When they speak, it sounds staged, as if they’re reciting the script all happy families are handed at conception. He’d seen the youngest boy tear up when his mom walked away, and Benjamin hadn’t been able to stop himself from thinking: Are you for real? She’s just going back to her seat.

  He knows the statistics, knows that these types of families exist, but he rarely saw them where he came from. And in the army, most of the soldiers came from circumstances that were less than ideal. No one talked about how happy their home life had been; Benjamin’s story wasn’t great, but he’d heard way worse. He had a sergeant once who liked to ask his men: Who put that gun in your hand? You or your daddy?

  The two women separate, and the Filipino lady’s skirt jingles as she passes him. The dad across the aisle lays his hand on the older son’s arm, and the boy laughs. Benjamin tries to id
entify what he’s observing, and the word he comes up with is ease. They are at ease with each other. No one is on guard; there is no wariness or reserve. He can tell that the father has never beaten these boys. If violence is a stone thrown into a still pond, Benjamin has become adept at spotting the ripples, and there are none here.

  Gavin grew up in a family like this one. That’s why he was so loose with his friendship and his knock-knock jokes. His father was a dentist, who probably had soft hands and a nervous smile. Benjamin pictures a nice mom, the kind who bakes cookies and buys the most expensive tires for her station wagon. He can’t help but think: I would have liked to meet them.

  * * *

  —

  Florida watches the tired-looking mother walk away from her. She’d wanted to give her a hug, or at least a quick shoulder rub. The lady’s whole being screams out to be touched. She’s one of those people who live way too much in their heads and are too invested in their careful plans. Florida has seen her husband, the brainy Jewish guy, and she imagines they have semi-regular decent sex but don’t spend a lot of time cuddling or making out. It’s her belief that people sealed up that tight can often benefit from some medicinal loosening. They have no idea how to unzip their own boundaries; they need them removed on their behalf. If she had any mushrooms on her, she would have slipped them into the woman’s purse.

  The plane gives a single judder as she lowers into her seat.

  “What’s up, pussycat?” she says, at the same time reflecting that she wouldn’t offer this girl any drugs. Linda’s uptight too, but in a disheveled way. Her wires are crossed and split and her energy flow is a mess. Psychedelics would just loosen her death grip on normalcy, and seconds later she’d be screaming, naked, in the street.

  Linda turns from the window and stares at Florida with wide eyes. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” she says. “But I don’t have anyone else to tell, and I have to say it out loud.”

  “All right.”