Dear Edward

by Ann Napolitano

  “It’s 2013.”

  “I was born in 1936. That means I’m…” He shuts his eyes, but his brain refuses to make the computation. He suspects that this woman is a nurse, probably his nurse.

  She takes his arm, as if she has some right to it, and places two fingers on the inside of his wrist. He lets her, because, along with the ability to subtract, his physical strength is gone.

  “Thready pulse,” she says, under her breath.

  He nods, or maybe he doesn’t actually nod but he nods on the inside, in agreement. He is thready. He’s threading in and out of whatever and wherever this is.

  “Are you cold, Mr. Cox?”

  Yes, he thinks. I am freezing cold. And I am no longer young. And I am alone in the sky, headed to where I do not know.

  * * *

  —

  When her seatmate returns, Jane is amused by the difference in energy between him and her husband.

  The skin on Mark’s face appears chapped and ruddy, as if he’s been out for a walk in rough weather. He fidgets and clicks the end of his pen on and off. Bruce had sat quietly beside her. She’d had to look in his eyes to guess his thoughts; there were no external clues.

  “I think it’s hailing,” she says, indicating the window.

  “That’s crazy. It’s summer.”

  She nods and stares out at the gray blur of cloud and precipitation. She wonders if the weather is trying to warn her off. Turn back, it might be saying. Write your love story. Live smaller, on less. You could move near Lacey, like she’s always wanted. Raise your babies together.

  But it had turned out that Lacey wasn’t able to have babies. Jane had been surprised, each time, by how upset she was when her sister miscarried. She’d hidden her sadness from Lacey, of course, but when her sister became pregnant again, Jane felt her body flood with excitement. There would be a brand-new person in their family, and a baby for her boys to dote on. She became almost dizzy with joy at the prospect. A new baby to love. Balancing the rush of hope, though, was fear at what her sister might lose in the process.

  Jane had said into the phone: There are other ways to make a family. Do you want me to research adoption agencies, or surrogacy? But Lacey had refused to stop trying to get pregnant, and Jane certainly wasn’t going to move next door to her sister to watch her kill herself. Besides, she would hate the suburbs, the Super Bowl parties, the weird looks people would give her family for their homeschooling and dangerous opinions. Bruce would alienate people by showing up uninvited at local education meetings to debate the merits of the mass education of children.

  “Goddammit,” Mark says. “I can’t focus.”

  “It’s because it’s the middle of the flight,” Jane says. “I always get hopeless in the middle. When you still have hours in front of you and hours behind you. You feel stuck.”

  Mark turns to look at her. “That makes sense.” He clicks his pen and says, “How long have you been married?”

  She smiles with surprise. “Let’s see…sixteen years.”

  “Fuck. That’s a long time. And you never cheated?”

  What a strange conversation, Jane thinks. But perhaps people in first class are always more open with each other, because they assume they have so much in common?

  “No.”

  He shakes his head. “Fuck.”

  “Are you married?”

  “I was once, for about ten minutes.”

  “Was that a fun mistake?”

  “Ha.” The laugh is a bark. “Yeah, it kind of was. Too much cocaine, though.”

  “Ah.” Jane has never taken cocaine, never married the wrong person, never fallen for a flight attendant. She feels a pang of regret. She would not like to be this man, with his scratchy energy, but she wishes she had perhaps taken a detour or two in her own journey. She has always moved with deliberation.

  Now that Jordan seems to have his fists raised at the world, she wishes she could say to her son, I can relate. I spent one November in Seattle protesting the WTO. But she can’t. Her version of fist-raising has been to read articles in The Nation and nod emphatically. There can be merit, she thinks, in a life of messiness. She and Bruce live a tidy life. Even her greatest ambition—writing a small, personal, intimate film—is neat and tidy.

  Mark rubs his eyes and looks around, no doubt for the flight attendant.

  Jane cranes her head too, in an effort to help.

  December 2015

  Edward checks the tree outside Dr. Mike’s office. Its gray bark is traced with deep rivulets. The branches look like they’ll never grow leaves. A bird alights on a branch and almost immediately helicopters away.

  Dr. Mike says, “Can you tell me what’s going on in there? If I know what the problem is, maybe I can help.”

  Edward has stopped trying to control his thoughts, so each one is a small surprise. He hears the ornate clock on the desk tick forward and thinks, I miss Jordan more than ever.

  “Edward?” Dr. Mike says.

  “I know they want me to come here twice a week,” he says. “But I think that’s a waste of your time.”

  “You collapsed outside your aunt and uncle’s house.”

  “Three months ago. It really wasn’t a big deal.”

  “If it had been colder outside, you could have frozen to death. It is a big deal.”

  “I wouldn’t have died.”

  “How do you know?”

  Edward watches the branch, hoping the bird will corkscrew back to its spot, but the air and the tree remain still. The empty space feels appropriate, though. Edward sleeps in empty space now, alone. He walks around all day, alone, even if Shay is with him. He considers telling the therapist that even though Shay is still his friend, their deeper connection—which he’d always known was his oxygen—has been slowly dying ever since he told her to back off in the gym. Shay is so strong that when she has to, she will break free and find air elsewhere, but he knows that he’s not strong like her and that this was already his second chance. Edward understands that when whatever’s between him and Shay finally dies, what’s alive inside him will be done too.

  Dr. Mike would want Edward to tell him all this, but Edward is disinclined to talk. He keeps his eyes on the window and has the sense that the tree is watching him in return.

  * * *

  —

  John stays up every night now, until Edward is in bed in the basement. He sticks his head through the door, checks to make sure his nephew is lying under sheets on the pullout bed. “Everything okay?” John says, and Edward nods and rolls over.

  An hour later, when he’s sure his aunt and uncle are asleep, Edward gets up, pulls on sweats and his Converse—his orange parka if it’s really cold—and goes outside. He walks around the block several times, careful to stay out of view of Shay’s bedroom. He counts the houses he passes, the number of windows, the patchwork of stars overhead. He craves motion and likes the near-darkness of the night sky and the black air between the trees. Sometimes, when the numbers begin to jumble in his head, he walks with his eyes closed. He never lets himself sit or lie down, though, in case he falls asleep and freezes, thus proving the grown-ups’ fears valid.

  At some point, when something inside him has eased, he returns to the basement and the pullout bed. The basement isn’t quiet, but the noises are completely different from the noises in Shay’s room. Perhaps because he’s at the bottom of the house, the structure seems to shift and wheeze above his bed. He can hear the rasp of dry leaves through the closed windows. At least twice every night there’s a loud crack, which makes him sit upright in bed, and stare into the shadows.

  Inside, he doesn’t want darkness. He keeps the light on in the adjoining bathroom, and a diffuse glow from the streetlight travels through the high basement windows. The only positive to having his own bedroom is that he doesn’t have to be quiet in order not
to disturb Shay. He doesn’t have to pretend to sleep. He can cough, hit the mattress with his fist, talk to himself. He can roll from one side of the bed to the other. Eat a granola bar at 2:00 A.M. because his stomach is rumbling.

  He hears Mrs. Tuhane’s shrill whistle, recalls overhearing Shay—her voice spiky, excited—talking to a girl in French class about maybe going to a party this Friday down by the lake. Edward is staring through the high, narrow windows when the sky lightens and another day begins.

  * * *

  —

  Mrs. Tuhane is obsessed with what she calls “form” and has him move his right foot a centimeter, push his hips back an iota, extend his arms until they are 100 percent straight. The football captain—a stocky red-haired kid—enters the weight room during a session. He grins at the sight of Edward in a deep squat.

  “Nice look, Adler,” he says, and takes a photo with his phone. Mrs. Tuhane tells the kid off and orders him out of the room, but Edward knows it’s too late. The image has already been texted to his friends. By the end of the day, kids on the football team drop into a squat when they see Edward, their faces mocking great concentration.

  When Edward and Shay turn a corner and a shy boy with hair the color of wheat lowers into the squat position, Shay says, “You? Why are you doing this? You’re not an asshole. You’re better than this.”

  The boys goes pale, stands up, and runs away.

  Edward sits through his three afternoon classes with his notebook open and a pen in his hand, but never writes anything down. His teachers seem to be talking from a great distance. He and Shay walk home from school, and he pretends everything is normal between them. He knows Shay’s irritable because she senses something is wrong too, something beyond Edward moving out of her bedroom, but she can’t put her finger on the glitch. What’s between us is dying, he thinks. We won’t be friends for much longer.

  She says, “Did Arundhi ask to see you too?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Hmm. I think my grades dropped. He’s probably going to give me a talk about needing to do my best to get into college.”

  “No, too young. Not college.” Edward is too worn out to speak in full sentences. “Something else. My grades dropped too.”

  “Well, he wouldn’t give you that talk, because you can get into any college you want, even if your grades suck. All you have to do is write about the crash in your personal essay.”

  Edward shakes his head. He has a sudden wish for it to be the middle of the night, when he walks with his eyes shut under stars. He doesn’t want to be in daylight, itchy inside his skin, listening to Shay talk about things she knows nothing about.

  He closes his eyes for a few steps now and then has a thought that makes him open them. “How come none of the kids at school like me?”

  “What are you talking about?” Shay pauses. “Some of them like you.”

  “I’ve hardly spoken to them.” How has this not occurred to him before? He’s lived in this town for two and half years, and he’s been so relieved that most of the students leave him alone that he’s never thought to wonder why. He pictures the football captain, his awful friends, Margaret, the girls with the scented ChapStick whose lockers are near his own. Then there are the kids who never look at him—as if on principle—and turn away whenever he approaches.

  “Oh,” Shay makes a face. “They’re total idiots, and you should ignore them. They think you’re lucky. Some of them are jealous.”

  He thinks he must have misheard. “Lucky?”

  Shay gives him a sideways glance as they step onto their street. “There are three kids in our grade who have a parent in jail. A bunch are on food stamps and, you know, everyone has some sad story. But you got famous for yours.”

  Edward breathes the cold air.

  “Also,” she says, in an apologetic tone, “it doesn’t help that they see you as a privileged white boy who’s going to be loaded, when you get the insurance money.”

  Lucky. Edward tests the word inside his head, as if considering its weight.

  “Like I said, you should ignore them.”

  He feels himself darken further on the inside, a lightbulb that’s burning out. Nothing she’d said was incorrect. Maybe I’m an asshole, he thinks. None of this has occurred to him before.

  * * *

  —

  That night when he finishes his neighborhood walk, Edward circles the house in the shadows. He’s thinking about the sneer on the football captain’s face, and the possibility that he might be an asshole himself, and these thoughts demand motion. There’s another thought too, one that’s been following Edward for weeks, which is now tapping him on the shoulder. Tomorrow is his fifteenth birthday. Tomorrow, he’ll turn the same age his brother was when he died. Edward rounds the four corners of the dark house, again and again. He notices the garage on one of the laps and heads over to circumnavigate that shape too.

  The backyard is long, and the garage, separate from the house, is set far back. It abuts the hedge, and beyond the hedge are the woods. Edward has never gone near the garage—John and Lacey both park their cars in the driveway. He’d never given the structure any thought. Never wondered what it was used for, what was inside. He realizes that he’s limited his environments since he moved here. The kitchen, the living room, Shay’s room, the playground, school.

  In the darkness now, with grass dampening his sneakers, he feels a small satisfaction at taking himself to a new place, even if it is just a garage. He walks around the building, then stops to peer through the windows. He can see only his own reflection, ghostly and serious. He wonders what his aunt and uncle keep inside, since they don’t use the space for their cars.

  There’s a door on the side, and he tries the knob, expecting it to be locked. It’s not; when he twists, the door swings inward. As he steps inside, the dark room looks like an extension of the backyard. Chunky hedges, a house-like structure in the center, rectangles of varying shades of darkness, tangles of uncut charcoal-colored grass. Edward stays next to the door. His vision improves slightly, and he sees that there’s a flashlight plugged into the socket right beside him. This is John’s handiwork—every room in the house has the same feature, in case of emergency. Edward pulls out the flashlight and switches it on.

  In the center of the room is a workbench, with tools hanging off hooks on the sides. The setup looks too neat to be in regular use, and Edward wonders what his uncle builds here. He tries to imagine John sanding down an old table, but the image makes no sense. Stepping closer, he sees a stack of laptops, and smiles. Of course—this isn’t for building or fixing furniture; the workbench is for constructing and deconstructing computers. He’s never seen his uncle anywhere near the garage, but John’s an early riser, so he must come here before Edward and Lacey are awake.

  In the corner, there’s a faded green armchair of the kind usually owned by elderly ladies. Beside it is a bookcase. Edward points the flashlight at the shelves and sees that it’s filled with what must be the complete works of only two authors: Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. Edward double-checks, to see if there are other writers represented, but there aren’t. John comes out here and reads Westerns? For some reason, Edward is certain that all of this belongs to John, not Lacey. The house is Lacey’s; Edward knows this in his bones. This has to be where John keeps the messy odds and ends that his wife won’t allow inside.

  Edward sinks down in the green armchair, to see the world from John’s seat. He’s glad he came inside, glad he found a small distraction to delay his return to the basement. He would like to delay going to sleep tonight, and therefore delay waking up fifteen. There’s a round table beside the armchair, with a stack of different-colored folders on it. By his feet are two large army-style duffel bags. Edward shifts one with his foot, and it moves easily. Whatever’s inside the bag is very light. He shines his flashlight down and sees that both duffels are
locked with padlocks.

  He pulls the top folder onto his lap and opens it. There’s a sheet of paper covered with John’s neat handwriting, which Edward associates with the grocery list on the kitchen counter: the nice apples, turkey breasts, soy milk, chocolate-covered almonds. But this isn’t a shopping list; it’s a list of names, and beside each name is a number and letter: 34B, 12A, 27C. Only five of the names have no accompanying numbers.

  Edward’s fingertips begin to sweat against the sheet of paper.

  There will be 191 names, he knows without counting. It’s the flight list. The five names without accompanying seat numbers are the two pilots and the three flight attendants. Edward scans the list, looking for his own name. It’s not there, but his brother’s and father’s and mother’s names are written in John’s neat script. His mother’s row number is different from the rest of the Adler family. You should have sat with us, Edward thinks.

  There are other documents below the flight list, and some of the papers feel different than the top one, thicker in consistency. He doesn’t lift the top page, though, doesn’t look further. He sits with the folder open on his lap, the flashlight in his hand. Edward remembers sitting in the NTSB basement hallway beside his uncle and thinks: So, you’re still gathering information.

  He watches himself return the folder to the table. His body, as much as his brain, knows that he can’t do this alone. He plugs the flashlight in next to the door, and runs across the backyard in the direction of Shay’s house. He throws pebbles—the smallest he can find, for fear of waking Besa or breaking the glass—against Shay’s window until she appears, her hair wild, her glasses on.

  “What in the world?” she says, once she’s pulled the window open. Her voice is barely loud enough to reach him; she doesn’t want to wake Besa either. “Are you okay?”

  “I have something to show you,” he says back, and he feels a wave of relief when her face lights up.