Dear Edward

by Ann Napolitano

  Edward dims his brain in order to stop picturing the boxes, and his mother, and asks to be excused from the table. In the living room, he notices John’s tablet lying on the couch. His immediate instinct is to grab it, tuck it under his arm, and carry it over to Shay’s house. Instead, he stands motionless for a minute, looking at it. His uncle is now alone in the kitchen, filling the coffeepot for the next morning. He’s humming a show tune under his breath. John has started jogging in the mornings to ward off all the extra calories in Lacey’s food, and has downloaded several Broadway shows to accompany his runs. Now he’s liable to sing out a line from Phantom of the Opera or Hello, Dolly! while walking upstairs or pouring cereal.

  “Don’t cry for me, Argentina,” he says to Edward, when the boy walks back into the kitchen.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to go on the Internet right now.” Edward stops, not sure how to proceed.

  “I would agree with that statement,” John says.

  “But I was wondering if it would be okay, if you would let me know, every once in a while, whatever you think I should be aware of? I thought you might be able to decide…” Edward doesn’t know how to say, I know you’re tracking the crash, and me, online, without admitting that he’d stolen his uncle’s tablet once.

  John leans against the counter, his arms crossed over his chest. “You want me to keep you roughly up to date about what’s happening on the Internet in reference to you but without you having to know or see any of the specifics.”

  “I guess so, yes.”

  His uncle studies him for a moment, as if trying to figure out what he can handle. “I’m sure you’ve realized that because you’ve started school, and therefore reentered the public world, there will be a bunch of new photos and probably a video or two of you. I don’t expect there to be more new content, though, Edward. Not of a factual nature. People will claim to have seen you places and claim to know you, just as they have done ever since the crash, but that’s just fabrication.”

  “Where do people think they’ve seen me?”

  John sighs. “All over the place. One man was convinced he was hiking behind you and a yellow Labrador on the Appalachian Trail for several weeks. You’ve been swimming in Lake Placid, at one of the art museums in New York. Sightseeing in Edinburgh.”

  Edward hears himself say, “Shay and I looked up Jordan on the Internet.”

  John is quiet for a minute. “There’s not much on him, is there?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll do this,” John says. “I’ll let you know what’s out there, within limits. But I want you to understand that there can’t be information about you—that is true—that you don’t already know. Your life takes place in your skin. No one else knows a goddamn thing, and the Internet is full of cowboys and sad people making stuff up.” He pauses. “I love the Internet, or at least I used to, but it’s not where you go for the truth.”

  Edward almost asks, Where do you go for the truth? But the question feels vast, unspeakable in his throat, so instead he says good night and goes next door.

  * * *

  —

  There is a tree covered with pert green leaves outside the window in Dr. Mike’s office. The trunk is a uniform brown, and robust. It looks tree-ier than the trees around it, as if it were made for a movie set by able craftsmen. The idea that the tree might be fake pleases something deep inside Edward. He himself feels half plastic, cobbled together, fabricated on an hour-to-hour basis to fulfill his role as “human boy recovering from tragedy.” When he sits down in his usual chair, he watches the tree over the therapist’s shoulder.

  Dr. Mike says, “When you have memories, are they from the plane or before?”

  “Before.”

  “List for me some things you remember. It can be anything. Snippets, whatever.”

  Edward closes his eyes for a second and sees his music composition book open on the piano. He says, “I was about to start learning a new movement on the piano. It was called ‘Scarbo,’ by Ravel.”

  “I wasn’t aware you played the piano. Tell me about the piece.”

  Edward frowns. “I hadn’t started yet. My teacher said he wasn’t sure I was ready for it. It had really fast tremolos, a lot of octave jumps, and double-note scales in the major seconds in the right hand.”

  Edward looks down at his hands. The knuckles appear extra white under his skin. They don’t look like the same hands that practiced piano for hours every afternoon. He feels certain that if he sat down at a piano now, he wouldn’t be able to play any of the compositions he’d learned. His fingers feel different, and no music has played in his head since the crash. It’s not something he’s consciously thought about, but he realizes now that he’d been waiting for the music to return, like a dog that escaped its leash. But it hasn’t, and it won’t. It’s gone. Eddie was musical; Edward is not.

  Dr. Mike says, “So, you played seriously.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” Edward’s voice rises at the end of the sentence. Since he usually operates at a monotone in this office, the sound startles them both.

  “Don’t tell my aunt and uncle,” he says.

  “They don’t know that you play?”

  “Played. If they knew, they’ve forgotten.”

  Dr. Mike looks like he wants to say something but then stops himself.

  “I don’t like this whole thing,” Edward says.

  “What whole thing?”

  “Before was good. It’s over. Why do we have to talk about it?”

  “We don’t have to right now,” the man says. “I just don’t want you to block all the memories out. The fact that they’re good means they’re powerful. We’re building a new foundation here, and if you can let those memories in, and even, at some point, get pleasure from them, they can be bricks in the foundation. Good, solid bricks.”

  Edward sinks down in his chair and shuts his eyes.

  He can only hear Dr. Mike, not see him, from his slumped position. “Are we done for today?”

  “Yes,” Edward says, “we’re done.”

  * * *

  —

  A white rectangular truck is parked outside the house when they get home from school on Wednesday afternoon. Two burly-looking men struggle across the lawn, balancing an enormous box sideways between them. Edward reflexively turns his back on the sight.

  Shay claps her hands together and says, “I want to help unpack.”

  “I’ll help too,” Besa says, in a similarly charged voice. “Between us, we can probably get most of it done today.”

  “Oh, well, I”—Lacey looks flustered—“I guess I didn’t think about starting this afternoon?”

  Edward nods. This is the hour when he and his aunt usually watch that day’s recording of General Hospital. Luke and Laura’s son, Lucky, is missing.

  “We should take a thorough inventory,” Shay says to her mother. “Write down the contents of each box.”

  “Perfecto. Then you can decide what to do with the items,” Besa says.

  Lacey and Edward exchange a look.

  “Okay?” Lacey says.

  Lacey and Edward helplessly follow the mother and daughter inside. There are more boxes than Lacey was expecting, and they spill out of the nursery into the upstairs hall. Besa goes next door and comes back with a handful of what look like surgical scalpels.

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

  He nods but doesn’t move. He watches her cut into a box with the number 1 written in Sharpie on the side. He’d watched his mother write that number.

  “Kitchen supplies,” Shay says, and pulls a piece of paper out of the box. “Oooh, a spreadsheet.” She shakes her head with what appears to be admiration. “This is very well organized. Let’s see. Coffee cups, drinking glasses,
cutlery, dessert plates.”

  His mother’s favorite mug will be in there, the one with a red balloon on the side, from a French movie that she loved. The tall glass with the chip that Edward preferred over the others. The smaller cups that they all put beside their beds, with water for the middle of the night.

  Edward backs away. He passes his aunt, who is hovering behind the active figures of Besa and Shay. Lacey looks pale; her freckles stand out like tiny cries for help. She touches Edward’s arm and glances at him with what he thinks is apology. I might not have thought this through, he can feel her thinking.

  The flat sheet is pulling up over his insides. It starts low and rises over his abdomen, then his chest. Edward glances down at his pressed gray slacks. The buttons on his white Brooks Brothers shirt.

  “Lacey,” he says, and she startles at the sound of her name coming out of his mouth.

  Edward realizes, in that moment, how rarely he addresses her. They sit side by side on the couch each afternoon, but they rarely speak. Edward likes his aunt, but she feels more unpredictable than John, and she reminds him enough of his mother to make him want to look away. There is a certain angle, rarely caught, from which she looks 80 percent like his mom. Most of the time, though, it’s a frustrating 20 percent, a reminder only of what he’s lost. When Edward needs something, he gravitates toward his uncle.

  “Yes?” she says.

  “I’d like the clothes in the boxes, the ones that belong to me and the ones that are Jordan’s, please. I’d like to wear them, if you don’t mind.”

  “Oh.” Lacey scans him up and down, and her face changes. “You don’t…I understand. Of course.”

  “I’m on it,” Shay calls from the middle of a tower of cardboard. “I’ll find the clothes, pronto.”

  That night, Edward lies on the sleeping bag in his own plaid pajama pants and his brother’s red T-shirt. He has already put the clothes Lacey bought him into a bag; he will wear them only if he has to, every once in a while, to make his aunt happy. Otherwise, he will wear clothes that fit and suit him. Clothes already worn and that smell faintly of Jordan.

  He listens to Shay read, so exhausted that he is unable to separate himself from the experience. They’re making their way through the Harry Potter series; every night Shay reads a chapter aloud.

  “Hey,” Shay says, at the end of a paragraph.

  “Hey,” Edward says sleepily.

  “Did your scar hurt when you saw the boxes?”

  “No.”

  “Hmm.” She doesn’t look discouraged. “When you encounter something important, you’ll feel it,” she says. “I know you will.”

  Edward closes his eyes. He listens to Shay’s voice; she’s a good reader, her voice dramatic in the right places, lower when it’s more effective. Jordan used to read to him too. Not regularly, but when he came to a particularly funny or scary passage of a novel, he’d repeat it aloud. The pajamas are so soft against Edward’s skin that, when he lies perfectly still, he can pretend he’s the same boy who used to sleep in a bunk bed beneath his brother.

  * * *

  —

  One morning, his aunt says, “Was there a warm coat in those boxes?” This is how Edward finds out it’s almost winter. He goes to the closet and pulls out Jordan’s orange parka. It’s far too big for him, but the long sleeves double as mittens, and the hood covers most of his face, which he likes. He tries to avoid knowledge of the seasons passing. First fall alone, gone. First winter alone, here. His birthday, Christmas and Hanukkah—his family celebrated both, to some degree—rapidly approaching. Dr. Mike tells him that the experience of time passing without noticing is called a fugue state. “It’s common in trauma victims,” he says. “They lose track of hours, sometimes days. They live their lives, but their brains don’t seem to register the experiences. It’s like the brain doesn’t take note; it’s not paying attention.”

  “I’d like to be in a fugue state every day.”

  Dr. Mike shrugs and says, “If I could give you one that would take you through the holiday season, I would.”

  This type of kindness makes Edward want to cry, but crying doesn’t come easily to him. He has rarely cried since the hospital; his tears seem lodged in his head, unsure of which pipe to exit through. In their place is a sinus ache. He rubs the bridge of his nose now. “Can we stop?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Last week you told me that Jordan should have survived instead of you. Why do you think that?”

  Edward’s whole body groans, though no sound comes out of his mouth. Leaves on the tree outside the window, which were bright red during his last appointment, have faded and are curling up on themselves. Some have already fallen to the ground.

  Edward can feel Dr. Mike looking at him. “Because,” he says.

  “Because why?”

  Edward thinks, Why are you pushing me?

  Dr. Mike touches the rim of his cap. Edward knows now that this is not a signal; it’s just a habit. The man does it without thinking.

  He says, “I’m sorry, Edward. But I can’t let you shut down anymore. Out there, yes. But not in here.”

  I could leave, Edward thinks. But he says, in a voice that sounds annoyed, “Jordan was a real person….He knew who he was. People liked him. He was already doing things. Important things. Like he did at the airport when he opted out of the scanner. He stopped eating meat…” Edward trails off.

  “You were twelve when the plane crashed,” Dr. Mike says. “Jordan was fifteen. That’s a crucial difference in age. Was your brother opting out of security checks when he was twelve?”

  Edward thinks for a second. “No.”

  “You get to choose a lot of what you do when you’re fifteen, Edward. You’re still only twelve. Because of what you’ve survived, you’re already more interesting than your brother. People want to talk to you, don’t they?”

  This is true. Edward visits the principal’s office every Wednesday afternoon, and while he hoists an old blue watering can from one pot to the next, Principal Arundhi tells him the names and history of each plant. The short boy in his science lab told him, while they were dissecting frogs, that he wants to be an opera singer when he grows up. The school secretary, when he was submitting paperwork to the office, told him that she was born in Georgia and that she and her sister had fed two wild alligators every afternoon after school. “They liked Wonder Bread best,” she said. The girl with the locker next to his told him that she has a six-year-old sister who has never spoken out loud.

  Dr. Mike says, “They want to share something extraordinary about themselves, because you’ve experienced something extraordinary.”

  Edward doesn’t say anything in reply, because he has no response. The doctor has told him something true. He will not waste time arguing the point.

  * * *

  —

  One afternoon, Shay goes back into school to get a forgotten book, and Edward is left alone on the curb. The buses just left, and the parking lot is scattered with parked cars. It’s almost Christmas break. Edward shivers in the orange coat—it’s so large that it allows drafts from every opening. He bends over to itch his shin. The scar has reached a new stage of healing, and it’s been bothering him. It looked like a pinched mouth when he woke up this morning. He scratches it gently so as not to disturb the delicate skin.

  He hears a man’s voice say, “Hi, Edward—you don’t know me, but my name’s Gary.”

  Edward loses his balance and has to work to steady himself. Once he’s re-rooted, he sees a middle-aged man a few steps away, wearing jeans and a thick sweater.

  “My girlfriend was on the plane.” The man blinks behind his glasses. He has dirty-blond hair and a beard. “I apologize for disturbing you,” he says. “I drove here from California. I have a lot of respect for what you’ve been through.”

&nb
sp; Edward looks around. No one else is nearby.

  “I wonder if you saw my girlfriend on the plane? I think you sat near her; I studied the seating chart. Everyone talks about how you survived because of where your seat was, and Linda’s was nearby. A couple rows forward, maybe. On the other side of the aisle.”

  Edward swallows. He hears himself say, “What did she look like?”

  “She was twenty-five, white, but maybe I don’t need to say that. I had a professor once who said it was racist if you didn’t mention that white people were white, since we always describe black people as black. She was blond.” He is blinking wildly. “Wait a second, I’m an idiot.”

  He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his phone. He scrolls through it with his finger, and pushes it toward Edward with a velocity that makes the boy flinch for a second, before his eyes focus on a photograph of a blond young woman. She is smiling at the camera. She’s sitting on a park bench, wearing a sweater that looks like it’s made out of lace.

  Edward feels something twist inside him. He remembers Dr. Mike saying: When you have memories, are they from the plane, or before? He has worked hard to remember only before, but this woman’s photo makes that impossible. He does remember her. She sat a few rows ahead of them. She was on line with Jordan for the bathroom. She’d smiled at Edward while walking past their row, the same smile she has offered the camera.

  Gary seems calmer now, with the photo in his hand. “I was going to propose that day,” he says. “I was going to bring the engagement ring to the airport.”

  “I did see her,” Edward says. He tries to imagine what a grown-up would want to hear. “She looked nice. She looked excited. And happy.”

  He sees from the look on the man’s face that he has guessed correctly. “Thank you,” Gary says.

  Edward shivers, his hands buried deep in the parka’s pockets. “Did you drive all the way here to ask me that?”

  Gary nods. “They put me on leave at work, so I’ve just been sitting in my apartment, drinking Sprite, and making lists of all the questions I wanted answers to. I was driving myself crazy, and it occurred to me that you could answer one of my questions. So I got in the car.”