Dear Edward

by Ann Napolitano

  You’re probably wondering why I’ve sent you this letter. Since my father died, I’ve made myself write something every day. I want to make things, not just study them. Ideally, I write a poem, but on the hard days I write correspondence. And today I wrote to you, to connect the living dots between me, my mother, my father, and yourself.

  Regards,

  Harrison Cox

  “Will you tell Mrs. Cox that her son wrote you?” Shay says when she’s read it too.

  Edward shakes his head. This letter belongs in a different category, one shared by the school secretary who told him about feeding alligators as a girl or Edward’s lab partner telling him that he wants to be an opera singer when he grows up. These are secrets, confessions, and therefore sacred. He will hold them to his chest.

  Edward is staring into the duffel bag, his eyes bleary, when Shay says, “Stop. We have to stop. We’ve read way more than ten letters.”

  Edward notices that her fingertips are ink-stained, as he helps her to her feet. He feels older, or heavier, than he did when he entered the garage, and Shay looks changed too, in a way he wouldn’t be able to describe. They walk together out of the room and carry all the words they’ve ingested into the dark night.

  * * *

  —

  “I didn’t think you’d last this long,” Mrs. Tuhane says to Edward’s reflection in the mirror.

  Edward has just sat down on the weight-lifting bench. Her words startle him, because to his recollection, this is the first thing the coach has ever said to him that’s not a directive. He wishes Shay were here to translate, because although he’d like to be able to respond to this comment properly, he has no idea what the coach is talking about.

  “Um, at what?” he says.

  “I thought you’d quit, run crying back to the principal about this being too hard. I would have bet money you were headed for study hall within two weeks of entering this room.”

  Edward shakes his head, still confused. “But isn’t this mandatory?”

  Mrs. Tuhane slides a small metal plate onto either end of the bar Edward is about to press. “I’m giving you a compliment, kid. You’ve been at it for months. You’re tougher than I thought. And you’re getting stronger.”

  Edward looks at his skinny frame in the mirror.

  She seems to read his mind and scowls. “It doesn’t matter if you can see the muscles. I don’t give a damn what you can see. You’ve rewired your brain. You can bench a hundred pounds. You’re objectively stronger. Now, stop wasting time.”

  Edward lies back on the bench and wraps his hands around the bar. Before school, he’d read a handful of letters that he’d smuggled into the basement. One was from an elderly woman in Detroit, who said one of her twenty-seven grandchildren had died on the flight and that he had always secretly been her favorite. She’d been wondering if all the passengers on that plane had simply been too good, in one way or another, for this earth. She wondered what Edward thought about this theory.

  “Press,” Mrs. Tuhane says, and he lifts the bar up.

  Another letter was from a woman who claimed to have kissed Edward on the cheek outside the NTSB hearing in Washington, though he can’t remember anyone kissing him that day. Another was from a mother who said she regretted how critical she had been of her daughter. I told her that she should stop eating carbs, or that her hair was unflattering. Now I think, why did I care how she looked? Then there was a stretch of letters that contained what felt like inappropriate demands.

  Please don’t waste a minute, don’t waste this gift you’ve been given.

  Make sure you live a meaningful life.

  Live every day in the memory of those who died.

  These are Edward’s least favorite kinds of letters—the ones that tell him how to live his own life.

  “Besides,” Mrs. Tuhane says, “your metabolism is a burning furnace at your age. I predict that if you keep lifting with this regularity, you’ll gain twenty pounds of muscle your senior year. Bring it down now, slow.”

  Edward lowers the bar to his chest. He thinks of himself three years from now, with a wider chest and thicker limbs. He thinks of the unopened letters in the duffel bags—his name etched on each one—and lifts the bar up and down until all of him aches.

  * * *

  —

  During dinner, Edward notices that his aunt and uncle seem withdrawn. He doesn’t know where Lacey keeps her sleeping pills, but Edward has the desire to go find the bottle and flush them down the toilet. You have to earn sleep, he wants to tell her. Even though he knows he didn’t earn it; the letters gave him sleep as a gift.

  His unspoken allegiance is to John, who looks distracted and checks his phone twice during the meal, a habit Lacey hates. His wife narrows her eyes and focuses on Edward while telling them that she had a slow day at work, which meant she got to spend an extra hour holding babies in the nursery.

  “Have you ever smelled a newborn?” she says to Edward.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You’ll have to come to the hospital with me one day to smell one. It’s indescribably wonderful.”

  I have too many letters to read, he thinks, and leans his weight imperceptibly toward his uncle. If Lacey is strong now and cloaked in the mantle of his mother’s bravery, where does that leave her husband and nephew?

  “It’s true,” John says with intensity, several beats too late, “about the newborn smell.”

  Edward and Lacey look at him, and an expression of alarm crosses John’s face. Edward, who is sensitive to yearning and mixed-up time zones, is able to chart the three of them in this strange moment. Lacey is staring at her husband as if he’d accidentally hit her. As if he’d said something she’d hoped with all her heart that he would say a few years earlier—when holding their baby in her arms was her deepest desire—but that this version of herself no longer needs, and so she experiences the statement as a betrayal. John, lost and panicked, gazes at Lacey and Edward, thinking, Dear God, have I messed everything up? And Edward, living inside the correspondence in the garage, which means living inside questions and a deafening desire for answers, feels every atom of their shared vulnerability and wonders if any of them will be okay.

  * * *

  —

  When Edward leaves the house after dinner, he finds Besa waiting for him in the driveway.

  “Oh. Hi?” he says.

  “I would like to know what you and my daughter are up to.”

  It’s cold, but neither of them is wearing a winter coat. “We’ve had a lot of homework lately,” he says, and shivers.

  “Don’t insult my intelligence, mi amor.” Besa has always called him mi amor, but Edward has sensed a slight dimming in her warmth toward him in the last year. He now towers over her, and annoyance flickers across her face when she cranes her neck to look at him. Shay said to him once that her mother loved all children but distrusted men. And Edward is uncomfortably aware that he now looks like a young man.

  He tries to make his features appear trustworthy. “You should ask Shay, Besa.”

  She regards him from beneath her eyebrows. “You know I already have. Would I be coming to you first?”

  Edward sighs. Lying to Besa is unthinkable. She demands truth with every line of her face. He tries to come up with something that at least feels true. “We’re working on a project. We’re trying to help people.”

  She glares at him, an expression that makes her look so much like her daughter that Edward almost smiles.

  “In the middle of the night? You think I don’t hear you two scurrying around?”

  “Oh,” Edward says. “Well, the project—”

  “Are you and Shay having sex?”

  The look on his face must be answer enough, because Besa’s face softens with relief. She leans forward and presses her hand against his che
ek. “I’m sorry, pobrecito. I didn’t mean to give you a heart attack. I have my fears, but of course I was wrong.”

  Edward is unable to speak, and his face feels like it’s burning up. Besa laughs and takes his arm. She leads him toward her house. “I’m glad you’re working on a project. It’s for school, I assume? Shay needs to keep her grades up in order to get a scholarship. A project for extra credit would be wonderful. We don’t need to mention any of this to Shay, do we?”

  “No,” Edward croaks, as she deposits him inside her house.

  He has to stand at the bottom of the stairs for a few minutes, trying to manage his heart rate and temperature, before he’s able to enter Shay’s room. He’s relieved to see that she’s at her desk, with her back to him.

  “Just finishing one,” she says, without turning.

  He sits down on her bed to wait. When she turns, she hands him a large envelope. She says, “Are you okay? You look sunburned.”

  “I’m fine. How many responses are in here?”

  “Just one today.”

  We can’t ignore the letters from or about little kids, she’d said the morning after they opened the first duffel bag. They’d agreed that she would compose and type responses, which Edward would then sign. Shay had started with the second letter they’d read, from the dad asking Edward to write specific messages to his three children. She had written and rewritten those three letters over the course of several days. I can’t make a mistake, she’d said. This is important. I need to say the perfect thing.

  Edward pulls the new letter out of the envelope and scans the page. She’s written to a nun in South Carolina, who said the beauty of Edward’s salvation kept her from leaving the church.

  “I know it’s not a kid, but the nun seems sweet,” Shay says. “And she’s extremely old. Is that okay with you?”

  “You’re in charge of who gets written back.”

  “The nun claimed that she knew you were truly saved by God because of how your hair looked in the photos of you from the hospital.”

  “My hair?”

  “Apparently Jesus had dark, shiny hair that looked wet, like he had just been anointed. And your hair looked like that too.”

  “My hair looked wet? That’s gross.”

  “She believes it proved that God had anointed you and thereby saved you from death.”

  Edward almost laughs at this, but can’t muster the effort to force the sound up his throat and out his mouth.

  “I’m going to skip school tomorrow,” he says. “Lacey’s going to the hospital all day for some training thing and I need to get through the rest of the letters. I feel like I can’t breathe half the time.”

  “Fine, I will too.”

  He’d expected this and is prepared. “If we both skip, it will seem too obvious. We might get caught. I barely have any absences, so I can definitely get away with it if I’m alone. Besides, you need to keep your grades up.” He blushes when he says this, remembering Besa’s accusation in the driveway.

  Shay’s dimple deepens in her cheek, rarely a good sign. The fact that he has planned an escape on his own—even a tiny one—rankles her.

  Edward meets her gaze. He has no choice. He has nothing against school at this point, but it’s a waste of time. Time he should spend reading; each letter feels like a page in a book that he won’t fully understand until he reaches the end. It feels imperative—in a way nothing else in his life has—that he read every word. The attention he brings to the letters seems to be changing him; Edward can feel strands inside himself gathering, trying to find a shape in which he will be able to meet the eyes of the people in the photographs.

  2:04 P.M.

  The plane is two-thirds of the way to Los Angeles. The passengers’ consciousness reaches forward, searching the final stretch of tunnel for a glimmer of light. Shoulders loosen and headaches fade, because more onboard hours lie behind them than ahead. Hope returns with thoughts of logistics, car-service pickups, and whom to text the moment the wheels touch the ground.

  Jane looks up from her screen.

  She’s just rewritten a scene in which two robots get into a fight, and the only pleasure she has been able to salvage is changing the gender of both robots to female. Girl power, she thinks in disgust. She’d pictured the robots as herself and Lacey. Sisters, which means they love each other straight to the bone but have spent their lives circling each other, testing the air between them with jabs. Jane is the seventh credited writer to work on this script; it’s only by personalizing the writing that she can endure it.

  The cockpit door opens, and Jane has a clear view into the darkened space. A flash of windshield and a panel of blinking lights punctuated with levers, the shoulder of the co-pilot. The pilot, a gray-haired man with a salt-and-pepper mustache, smiles at Veronica, says a few words Jane can’t hear, and then steps into the bathroom. The door pulls shut behind him.

  Jane returns to her computer screen, writes three lines of dialogue, erases them, and tries again. She’s getting somewhere, she thinks. She glances up then, because a spiky cry has filled the air. Jane cranes around. She thinks: A baby? Mine? Then: Don’t be ridiculous; they’re not babies anymore. They don’t need me like that.

  “Is there a doctor on the plane?” This issues in the same pitched voice, and even though passengers are now standing and Veronica is in the aisle, Jane is able to see that it’s the nurse, wearing her whites. She’s hunched over the old man beside her. He looks terrible, or not terrible exactly, but wrong. His skin seems to have gone rubbery—his eyes are closed, and he’s whiter than the wall of the plane.

  Jane’s hands are off her computer; without thinking she presses on her birthmark. She presses hard, as if it’s a button that will reverse the clock, even if only by a few minutes.

  “Shit,” Mark says.

  He’s backed up slightly, so he’s halfway into Jane’s seat area. They’re both half-standing now, peering through the cluster of people at the agitated nurse, who is holding the old man’s wrist as if it’s a musical instrument she can’t figure out how to play.

  “He looks bad, doesn’t he?” Mark says.

  Veronica’s voice comes over the loudspeaker: smooth, calm. “Two things, ladies and gentlemen. First, please notice that the fasten-seatbelt sign is on. We’re anticipating turbulence, so kindly stay in your seats. Second, if there is a doctor on the plane, could he or she please report to first class?”

  Jane thinks, I want to go to the boys. She has the image of rushing into the back of the plane, past the ill man and the nurse, giving her space over to Mark, who seems to want to reverse as far away from the scene as possible anyway.

  A stocky redheaded woman appears with a gray backpack. She takes the old man’s wrist from the nurse and puts her other hand to the side of the old man’s neck. She waits, as if for news.

  “Doctor?” Veronica murmurs.

  Everybody in first class is watching. The nurse, with nothing left to hold on to, looks bereft.

  Finally, the redheaded woman lays the arm across the old man’s chest. She stands up. She speaks quietly to Veronica, but her voice carries.

  “He’s dead.”

  “Dead?” Veronica gasps the word. “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Jane reaches for the seat back in front of her, because she’s lost her balance. There is a dead man across the aisle. The only other dead bodies she’s seen were her parents, but that was two decades ago, and she had been prepared by terrible diagnoses and then visible declines. Their dead bodies had been in coffins. Her mother had been wearing her favorite pink lipstick, lying with her hands folded on her waist.

  It takes a moment for Jane to realize that Mark has grabbed a seat in the opposite direction and Veronica has gone wavy in front of her. There is another spiky cry, but the nurse is in her seat, as silent as a stone. The old man is slumpe
d in his chair.

  “Turbulence,” someone calls, and Jane is, for a split second, appreciative that what is happening isn’t inside her body, because if this shaking, pitching, and blurring were taking place solely within her own skin, that would mean something had gone terribly wrong.

  January 2016

  Edward pretends to go to school in the morning. He eats breakfast with his aunt and uncle. He uses the upstairs bathroom, so he can check to see if his uncle slept in the nursery. The sheets are rumpled, and a fat novel—Last of the Breed, by Louis L’Amour—sits on the bed stand. Edward blinks at the scene, and for a moment the bed and the letters and the lake outside the clear-paned window all feel the same, like a row of books on a shelf. Formed with equal weight and density. Why should one of these items make him happy, or unhappy? They are neutral. Beds are made to be slept in. Letters to be read. I’m either becoming Zen or more depressed, he thinks.

  He waits on the sidewalk for Shay, as usual. He waves at Besa, and they walk together down the block. Shay has her haughty face on and says little during their walk, but he knows that she’ll cover for him at school.

  “Thank you,” he says, when they reach the corner.

  “You have to show me everything you read, obviously.”

  “Obviously.”

  He watches her walk forward. He waits until she’s successfully crossed two sides of the intersection, and then he enters the forest that lines the back of the houses on their block. He knows John and Lacey are leaving the house now, and he can arrive home unnoticed by this route.

  When you visited us when you were little, you and Jordan played back there, his aunt had said once, of the forest. You thought it was wonderful, because you’d never been in proper woods before. Edward has no memory of this, but as he picks his way over tree roots, he tries to imagine himself and Jordan as boys, running loops around the fat tree trunks. Jordan is in the lead, and Eddie follows, laughing. The two boys examine a bug in the dirt, then find two big sticks and pretend they’re swords.