Dear Edward

by Ann Napolitano

  Vegan, though, was something else altogether. He says, “No egg or dairy? No cheese at all?”

  “I should have gone vegan right away,” Jordan says. “It was morally weak of me. Cows on dairy farms are horribly abused. They’re impregnated using artificial insemination over and over again, and then their calves are torn away from them. And they’re genetically manipulated to produce ten times as much milk as they’re supposed to, so they spend their lives bloated and in agonizing pain. They die much earlier than they would normally.” He shakes his head. “It’s awful.”

  “Ew,” Eddie says.

  “And you don’t even want to hear about what happens to chickens.”

  “That’s correct,” Bruce says. “I do not.”

  Jordan narrows his eyes, as if assessing the man beside him. “Would you describe yourself as a moral coward?”

  Bruce hesitates, taken aback. He can hear his wife whisper: This was your doing. You said you wanted the boys to be critical thinkers.

  Eddie knocks his brother’s shoulder with his own. “Don’t be mean to Dad.”

  “I’m not being mean.”

  “Jordan’s correct,” Bruce says. “The facts are on his side. As a society, we treat animals terribly.”

  “And,” Jordan says, “you should note that humans are the only species that drinks the breast milk of another mammal. You’ve never seen a kitten drinking goat’s milk, right? It’s kind of gross that we drink cows’ breast milk, when you think about it.”

  Bruce rubs his eyes with his hands. What will I cook? he thinks. Almost all of his vegetarian recipes rely on cheese or cream. He feels a heavy weight spread across his chest. He had seen a photograph of the kitchen in the California house, shining stainless steel and double the size of the kitchen in their New York apartment. He’d been looking forward to cooking there. He’d thought that a week of their favorite recipes, filling the new house with familiar smells, would help them all feel at home.

  “I’m not saying you have to be vegan,” Jordan says, perhaps picking up on his father’s melancholy. “If you want to continue to make animals suffer unnecessarily, be my guest.”

  “Thank you,” Bruce says. “Thanks a lot.”

  * * *

  —

  Linda regrets ordering the lunch tray as it lowers in front of her. The chicken sandwich blasts its chicken smell up her nose; no matter how she twists her head, she can’t escape it. The carrot sticks are depressingly orange and bendy. The only thing she’s pleased about is the cold can of Coke.

  Florida, next to her, is eating a sandwich that she took out of her capacious bag. It smells delicious. She hums while she eats and flips through a ladies’ fashion magazine.

  “Sweetheart,” Florida says, “you sound like a tire losing air. You need to calm down. Can you eat something?”

  “No,” Linda says. “I can’t.”

  “It’s early days in this situation.” Florida waves a hand at her midsection. “Anything can happen, so I wouldn’t start getting upset about not being able to pay for college yet.”

  Linda’s chest tightens. She’s yet to make more than twenty-six thousand dollars a year. She was planning to look for work in California, but is it fair to take on a job when she’s pregnant? Something else occurs to her. She says, “I’m not supposed to be around that much radiation.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m an X-ray technician.”

  Florida’s face changes, and she pats the girl’s hand. “Ah,” she says. “Marie was a dear friend. What a firebrand she was. I lived two doors down from her.”

  Linda blinks. “Marie?”

  “Curie. She discovered radiation with her husband? Surely you’ve heard of her, in your field.”

  “Oh God,” Linda says. She thinks she might laugh, but that flash of amusement is swallowed by the muck of her anxiety. She is poor and jobless and has sworn off taking money from her father, and she’s been saturated with radiation her entire career. Her baby will probably be born glowing like a flashlight.

  “Of course, Marie died from the stuff. But she carried it around in her pockets and kept it in the nightstand table. Not a good idea, as it turned out.”

  It’s raining outside the window. Linda wishes she were outside in the storm, away from this woman’s curly straw of personal history, in the teeming wetness, where she could wash off the radiation and the film and the sonar of the last five years. She wants to be clean.

  * * *

  —

  Benjamin waits on line at the bathroom. He was hoping to avoid using the airplane facilities—he’d drunk as little as possible since waking, with the plan of waiting to pee until California. Although, if he’s honest with himself, he’s done this every day since the surgery. He’s permanently parched, to the point of dehydration. He hates to look at the bag stuck to his side. He hates to unscrew the top and do the awkward maneuver required to pour the contents into the toilet. He used to be the strongest man in the room, any room. Now he carries his insides on his outside, and his skin can no longer contain his organs. Everything’s seeping out.

  Benjamin feels someone join the line behind him. “Hey, man,” a male voice says.

  Benjamin looks over his shoulder and sees a rich white guy in a button-down shirt. “Hey,” he says, in a tone that discourages further conversation.

  But the guy is rolling his neck, eyes half closed, apparently unable, or unwilling, to read cues. He says, “I can’t take all this sitting still.”

  “Sure.”

  “I could use the first-class bathroom, but I needed the walk.”

  Benjamin doesn’t respond to this, just wonders if the guy knows that he sounds like a prick.

  “Excuse me, gentlemen,” Veronica says, and turns sideways to move past them. She pauses mid-step, left hip cocked like a gun, and says to Benjamin, “You all right with this? If you need my help, just let me know.”

  “I’m fine,” he says.

  She nods and keeps rolling down the aisle.

  “You know her?” the white dude says, and his voice cracks mid-sentence. When he looks after the flight attendant, his expression reminds Benjamin of the wolf in one of the Sunday-morning cartoons he used to watch as a kid. His eyes are bugging out, and he’s staring at her as if he’s starving and she’s transmogrified into a whole ham.

  Jesus crap, Benjamin thinks, I wish I wanted her. And he knows, in that moment, with the plane rocking gently beneath him and rain spilling against the windows, that if he had to choose between the flight attendant and this guy next to him, he’d choose the guy. He’d been telling himself it was just Gavin, an aberration, possibly a mental break, but the truth goes past Gavin, back at least as far as military boarding school when he was aware that he was glad there were no girls around. Girls had made him feel vaguely sad for as long as he could remember, and this flight attendant, with her boom-boom ass, makes him feel positively desolate.

  “No,” he says. “I don’t know her.”

  “Your turn,” the guy says, and points at the VACANT sign above the bathroom door.

  “You can go first.”

  “You sure? You don’t have to tell me twice.” And now he turns sideways, to get by Benjamin. In the process their shoulders touch for a second, and Benjamin registers the jolt that runs through him. The jolt makes him think, Fuck this, and the this includes this Wall Street–looking dude, and Gavin, and the bag taped to his side, and the next operation, and this idea that he’s supposed to go on feeling sad and following the same rules he’s been following ever since Lolly dropped him off at military school. Fuck, he thinks—feeling a new jolt, one that comes from deep inside—this.

  * * *

  —

  Florida takes the last bite of her sandwich and rolls the cellophane wrap into a tiny ball.

  “The trick is to ad
d a little turmeric to the meat,” she says, when she notices Linda looking.

  “Is that a spice?”

  The cellophane in her hand is from her kitchen in Vermont, as are the turkey and tomatoes. She stood in front of the kitchen sink, her favorite spot in the house, where the light streamed in the window and you could see the mountains at the end of the yard, and sliced that tomato. Bobby had passed through the room twice while she constructed the sandwich. He knew she was leaving but not for how long. She’d told him she was going to a wedding shower for a girlfriend in the East Village. The shower was real, and Florida had been invited. But she had a one-way plane ticket to Los Angeles in the bottom of her hiking boots in the back of her closet.

  “Yes, it’s a spice.” Florida puts the small ball into her purse. “I’m going to California for the sunshine,” she says, waving her hand at the window. “I like to think that this rain is clearing the path for blue skies.”

  “Why are you going there? For a vacation?”

  Florida shrugs.

  “You know people there?”

  “I have a couple old friends I can look up. I’ve never been, is the real thing, and there aren’t that many places that’s true of. I want to rollerblade on that twisty sidewalk that goes along the beach, you know the one you always see in movies?”

  “Yes,” Linda says.

  “Well, I’m going to L.A. to do that.”

  “You’re married, though, aren’t you?”

  Linda is looking at Florida’s hand, so she looks at it too. There’s a plain silver band on her left ring finger. She’d thought about taking it off, but she likes the ring, and she also doubts she’d be able to get it over her knuckle. She was thinner when she and Bobby married.

  “I left,” she says. “Before it got bad, though. I’ve had enough lifetimes to know to trust my gut. I left while he still felt affection for me. We were just on different paths.”

  Linda is quiet for a moment. “You mean he didn’t want to rollerblade on the twisty sidewalk by the beach?”

  Florida is surprised by the laughter that erupts out of her. The people seated around them are probably startled too; she’s never been quiet in her mirth. Heads turn, ahead of them and across the aisle. Somehow, the woman on the other side of Linda continues to sleep. Florida is cackling now, bent over. Picturing Bobby at his worktable with his raft of blueprints in front of him. Each one detailing a survival plan in case of a different catastrophe: the collapse of the dollar, limited water supply due to global warming, an extreme weather event, a populist uprising that overthrows the government, and a fascist police state, among others. He had thirteen detailed plans, notated with complicated if/then scenarios.

  “That’s right,” Florida says, wheezing. “He doesn’t want to rollerblade, and I do.”

  And this seems like as great a truth as any for why she left him. She regards the girl next to her with a new respect. Perhaps she has some wisdom in her, after all.

  Another truth is that those blueprints had changed over the course of their marriage. In the beginning, those plans were shaped to save everyone, or at least their friends and like-minded allies, but as the years passed in Vermont and they grew more and more isolated, the plans were revised—subtly at first, and then brazenly—to save only them. Or even, she came to suspect, just him.

  “I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” Linda says.

  Florida smiles at the girl. “Everything ends,” she says. “That’s nothing to be sad about. What matters is what starts in that moment.”

  “This moment?”

  “That’s right.”

  * * *

  —

  Mark walks up and down the aisle a couple of times after using the bathroom. Sitting next to the lady who’s typing in a plodding way, her forehead scrunched up, is stressing him out. He has the desire to fist-bump the soldier when the huge man passes him on the way back to his seat, but he worries that the gesture would seem racist somehow. He gives him a nod instead. He wonders if the guy thinks he looks down on him because he’s a soldier and probably less educated than him. He doesn’t, though, at all. He can tell this guy can handle himself; he looks like a pro. And Mark is a pro too. Crispin Cox was, for damn sure, during his prime. These men are his brethren. Race and class have nothing to do with it. Do you know your shit? Are you deeply competent? Can you kick ass? Then ride with me, brothers.

  He’s back in first class again. He almost sits down but decides to do another lap. That lady with the kids and the white-haired husband is not an ass-kicker. She’s a worrier, not a warrior. She’s a mom, and she’s sapping his powers. Mark stops halfway down the aisle and closes his eyes. He tries to sense Veronica’s location.

  “Everything all right?” he hears her say from beside him.

  “Oh, yes.” And it is. He took a caffeine pill right before he left his seat, and he feels good. Great, actually.

  She’s looking at him in that wise, I-can-read-your-thoughts way some women have, so he decides, What the hell, I’ll say them out loud. He speaks in a low voice, though, so no one else can hear. “I’d like to kiss you more than anything else on earth.”

  A pause follows. The air conditioners hum, and someone loudly opens a bag of chips and someone else emits a high-pitched sneeze, and in that pause, Mark is aware that this could go very, very badly. She could look at him with disgust, insist he return to his seat immediately, report him for sexual harassment, even sue.

  But then she says, in her own low tone, “We’re not on earth, sir.”

  Pyrotechnics detonate inside him. He says, “Even better.”

  June 2015

  Two years after the crash, the physical therapist and the throat-clearing doctor give Edward’s health the all clear, which means he has no choice but to attend summer camp with Shay. He finds that the counselors—kids only a couple of years older than him—don’t care whether he runs bases, so he becomes the camp scorekeeper. He sits on the bleachers, in the shade, and keeps track of runs. Arts and crafts turn out to be surprisingly enjoyable; there’s something calming about sitting next to Shay in front of an assortment of glue sticks, pipe cleaners, markers, and googly eyes, with the freedom to create something ugly.

  Edward is alarmed, though, by how the doctor’s all clear makes the air loosen around him. By the end of eighth grade, teachers expect him to do his homework and speak up in class discussions. Lacey assigns him household chores for the first time—washing the dishes and doing his own laundry—and on the nights she stays late at the hospital, he heats up a frozen pizza in the oven for himself and John. Besa asks Edward to carry heavy groceries from her car, and sometimes she gives him a skeptical look that seems to ask, Do you still need to be with my daughter all the time? The grown-ups are collectively nudging Edward in the back and giving him the side-eye. Their body language says: The crisis is over. You need to move on, so we can move on with our lives.

  But how can the crisis be over when he still struggles to sleep, and has to wear his brother’s wardrobe in order to feel intact, and will never see his family again? So, when Lacey asks him, with eagerness in her eyes, Is camp fun? Do you like it? he has to hide his irritation. No, I don’t like camp, he thinks. His main sensation is relief that this new experience is not unbearable. Edward finds himself avoiding his aunt, and spending more time than usual at Shay’s house. He understands the adults’ desire for him to just be healed—how could they really understand what he’s been through? But he feels like Lacey should know better.

  When the summer ends, his aunt becomes visibly excited about him starting high school, which is completely mystifying, because Edward can’t see any real difference from middle school. He and Shay still go to the same building, with the same principal. They simply take classes on the top two floors instead of the bottom. The only change that feels significant, to Edward, is that he’s no longer exempt from gym c
lass. He’d enjoyed spending that period in study hall, reading or doodling in a notebook.

  The massive high school gym is in the back corner of the fourth floor—Edward finds the teacher in her office, right before the first class, and says, “I can’t run that fast, and I lose my balance sometimes. I think it’s best if I sit on the bleachers and watch. I could keep score for you. Or operate your stopwatch, if you want. Time kids, or whatever.”

  The gym teacher, a squat woman named Mrs. Tuhane with short brown hair and a whistle around her neck, doesn’t even glance up from her clipboard. “This isn’t a team, son—it’s gym class. You won’t be the only kid out there falling over. You have five minutes, and then your bippie better be on that yellow line, wearing the proper attire.”

  “But—”

  “No buts.”

  After changing clothes, he finds Shay waiting for him outside the locker room. “I think we’re starting a basketball unit,” she says. “Have you ever played basketball?”

  Edward and his brother sometimes shot baskets at the local playground. He shakes his head. “My father didn’t think much of organized sports.”

  “Maybe you’ll find that you like it. I like knocking the ball out of assholes’ hands. That’s legal in basketball, you know. It’s in the rules.” She gives him a sideways look. “You might find that you’re good at sports.”

  “It’s unlikely.”

  Shay shrugs.

  Edward’s legs are cold in his gym shorts. He’s growing so fast that his arms and legs ache all the time. He doesn’t want to be here. He says, “Stop expecting me to have hidden powers, okay? I’m not a freaking wizard.”

  “I don’t expect that anymore.”

  He looks at her and knows it’s true. The Harry Potter series is in the distant past, and that possibility—that childishness—is behind them. They’re growing up. Edward—in his stretching body—is a disappointment to her, and to himself. He braces himself for a wave of sadness and is surprised by anger. When his voice comes out, it’s mean. “I can promise you I won’t be any good at basketball.”