Dear Edward: A Novel (12 page)

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.”

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.”

Edward thinks,
That makes sense
.

“I’m not sure if this is rude to ask.” Gary blinks rapidly again. “But I wonder if you’re okay.”

People have asked Edward if he’s okay ever since he woke up in the hospital, and the question has always bothered him. Lacey, the nurses, the doctors, and his teachers—all asked it with expectation in their voices. He could see, baked into the words, their desire for him to say yes. Edward is surprised to find that he doesn’t mind the question now, coming from this stranger in the parking lot. He can tell that Gary doesn’t want a particular answer; all he’s expecting is the truth, which is probably what frees Edward to give it.

“Not really,” he says. He pauses, then asks, “Are you okay?”

Gary gives him a measured look, and says, “No.”

They’re both quiet for a moment in the freezing air.

The man says, “The thing is, I never thought I’d have a normal life on land, and get married, until I met Linda. I didn’t want any of that until I met her.”

He closes his eyes for a second, and Edward sees the lines of pain on Gary’s face; they’re the same lines—carved by loss—that engrave Edward’s whole self, and the boy shudders in recognition.

“I’m glad to have spoken to you, though. This, right now, is the best I’ve felt in months.” Gary nods, as if in agreement with himself. “I appreciate your time, Edward.” He turns and begins to walk away.

“Wait,” Edward says.

The man stops and turns.

“Are you going to drive back to California right now?”

“Yes,” Gary says. “I study whales—they’re waiting for me.”

The whales are waiting for him,
Edward thinks, and it’s weeks before that sentence strikes him as strange. He watches the man duck into his car and drive away. When Shay comes outside, they walk home together.

Edward thinks,
I will tell her about this later
. And he will. But during the walk home, his scar pulses, and the frozen air is sticky in his throat. He thinks of blond ladies and whales and he worries that if he tried to find words, he might dissolve into syllables, into the air particles, into the very cold around him.

11:16
A.M.

The solid gray sky grows heavier and starts to spit rain. The water is light, colorless, tapping the exterior of the plane. Wipers are activated in the cockpit, and the small oval windows that line the vehicle are washed. Rain is inconsequential to a commercial aircraft, but the fact that precipitation is beating the windows at full altitude means today’s rain clouds are unusually high and dense. Clouds usually float at 2,000 to 15,000 feet. Planes fly at 30,000 to 40,000. Outer space begins at 300,000.

Passengers turn their attention to the weather. The raindrops and gloomy sky make some people feel sleepy, and they close the books they’ve been struggling with. They give their chairs a hard look, as if hoping to discover a magic button that might turn the narrow, unforgiving seat into something resembling their bed at home.

Benjamin closes his eyes and stops fighting the memory. This feels like giving up, and he hates to give up, but he’s both exhausted and six-cups-of-coffee awake, and there’s nowhere else to send his mind. The family across the aisle has gone silent; the father’s asleep.

It was quiet for an entire month before the fight, which meant everyone in camp was bored out of their skulls. Weapons had been cleaned and recleaned; video games were played at all hours; guys even looked forward to midnight patrol, just to have something to do. There were rumors of an Afghan attack, but it never happened, and Benjamin had found himself standing at the edge of camp, staring into the woods, confusing trees with men. When there was wind, the branches waved like arms, and he grabbed at his weapon.

He and Gavin and another white boy, whom everyone called Jersey, were on the late-afternoon patrol. There had been more rumors that day, this time about three groups joining forces for an ambush. The mess had run out of fruit and vegetables and the delivery wouldn’t arrive until the next morning, and Benjamin felt like he was composed of gummy cornflakes, oatmeal, and hamburgers. His tongue felt funny in his mouth.

“Stop sighing,” Gavin said. “You’re making me nervous.”

“I’m not sighing.” Benjamin was surprised by the comment, as if Gavin had told him he’d been picking his nose.

“Shut the fuck up,” Jersey said. He was the kind of guy who never knew what to say and had figured out that
shut the fuck up
was a safe choice. He repeated it in varying tones depending on the occasion: sincere, ironic, angry. This time, he sounded bored.

“You
were
sighing,” Gavin said. “All day you’ve been sighing. When we were brushing our teeth this morning, you were sighing into the mirror.”

Benjamin stopped walking. He gave Gavin the look that he knew, from experience, scared the shit out of almost everyone. He’d learned it from Lolly; he’d seen her giving it to Crazy Luther on the corner. He had never seen the look on his own face, but he knew it was mean and full of threat. It was a look that ended conversations.

“I did not sigh.”

Jersey whistled, the second of his three stock responses. His complete I-just-want-to-get-to-the-end-of-this-tour-alive repertoire was:
shut the fuck up,
a low whistle, and
motherfucker.

Gavin didn’t look intimidated. He said, “You sighed.”

Benjamin and Gavin stared each other down, the word
sighed
in the air like a bubble in a cartoon strip. Benjamin would have staked everything on the fact that he had not sighed. If he’d ever sighed, and he’s not sure he ever had, it would have been in private.

“What did you say?” he said.

“Hey, motherfuckers,” Jersey said, in a placating tone.

“I said you sighed. Maybe you were sad.” Gavin kicked at the dirt. It hadn’t rained in weeks. They’d been besieged by dry peace. “It’s fucking sad out here, after all.”

Benjamin felt his insides flood, like a bad engine, with hot red steam. He lunged at Gavin, grabbed him by the shirt, and threw him. The soldier went a fair distance and then rolled to a stop. His glasses were no longer on his face. Gavin clambered up, dropped into a sprinter’s stance, and came at Benjamin. He moved like a small locomotive. He hit Benjamin in his midsection and knocked the wind out of him.

Benjamin sucked the air, incredulous. He moved outside himself. He thought, in some distant part of his brain, that he might be dreaming. In the dream, he lurched at Gavin, lifted him up, and then shoved him to the ground. There was a sound when Gavin’s head hit the dirt.

In the distance now, Jersey was shouting, “Motherfuckers! Get your asses over here—Stillman’s gonna kill Gavin!”

Benjamin dove as if he were a baseball player aiming for home plate. He pressed Gavin to the dry earth. He stared him down and tried to come up with words. Words that would intimidate him, get him to apologize. Get him to admit that Benjamin had never sighed, would never, ever sigh.

He stared at Gavin’s blue eyes and freshly shaven chin, and the red warmth inside him rolled over into something new. Something powerful, something he had no control over. It felt like an internal wall had exploded into pebbles and rocks of every size. Each rock was a desire; he was a beach of itchy, terrible needs. He wanted fresh salads and nice sneakers and an end to this constant fear of death, and he wanted to touch Gavin’s cheek to see how soft it was. He could do that. He heard the trample of boots shaking the ground as soldiers approached. Benjamin leaned forward; he was only inches from Gavin’s face.

If the guys hadn’t pulled Benjamin off Gavin at that moment, he would have done something weird. He knew it, and from the look on his face, Gavin knew it too. Benjamin got up quickly, forced his features into a forbidding expression, and took off. He hid in the forest for hours, shaking. When he crept into his bunk after midnight, he heard someone whisper through the dark tent:
faggot
. Two weeks later, sleep-starved, marching a few steps behind the rest of his patrol, he was shot in the side.

The man across the aisle is talking to Crispin, which is an unwelcome development.

“I read your book,” the guy says. “Even saw you speak when you toured for it. You came to my college. You were a rock star, sir.”

Crispin nods. It’s amazing to him, in this body, that he used to tour the country and shout passionately from stages about hiring the right people, cutting dead weight, keeping a growing business light on its feet. There was a time when he used to have to cross picket lines to get to those speeches. Men and women pumped posterboards up and down that said things like:
People Before Profit
and
Another World Is Possible
and
Human Need, Not Corporate Greed
. Total claptrap, obviously. They were imbeciles incapable of seeing the big picture. Louisa used to delight in sending him slanderous press clippings in the mail.
Dear Asshole,
she would start every note.

This kid is staring him down with a look Crispin recognizes—hell, a look he invented. It says,
I’m hungry, desperate, and smarter than you are, so get out of my way
. That look exhausts him now; it punctures another hole in his leaky tire.

“How many ex-wives you got?” Crispin asks.

The kid’s eyes darken. “One. I know you have four.”

“Try to keep it at one,” he says. “One good one. Four gets expensive. Try to figure your shit out sooner rather than later.” He coughs, then lowers his voice. “I’m alone on this plane with a goddamn nurse.”

The kid looks confused and then a little sympathetic. It’s occurred to him that Crispin might be senile.

“You look like you’re doing okay,” the kid says, an obvious fucking lie.

Crispin returns the lie, even though he wants to close his eyes and rest. He’s still competitive and doesn’t want this punk kid thinking he’s past everything. “You look like you’re doing okay with that stewardess.”

The kid’s eyes light up like a Christmas tree; Crispin has rung the right bell. “You think so?”

Crispin nods. “Play your cards right, she could be ex-wife number two.”

The kid laughs, and the sound is surprisingly familiar. It’s the sound Crispin used to hear when he opened the door to his house after twelve hours at work. Peals of delight or conquest coming from the kitchen, the bedrooms, the playroom. One child or another would realize Daddy was home and throw himself at him. Soon he’d have all of them pinned to the floor, a mess of limbs and bare feet and bellies, and the laughter would be orchestral, every note of joy hit simultaneously. The
Dear Asshole
notes from Louisa had come later, when the house was silent every night, when he lived alone with a new wife.

Jordan watches his brother. Eddie is pressing his hand against the rain-splattered window, holding it there for a while, then pulling it away. He repeats this motion, over and over. Jordan looks at his watch. His father gave it to him for his thirteenth birthday, and it has several small squares filled with different measurements, including one that registers hundredths of seconds. Jordan times his brother for three minutes.

“What the hell?” he says.

His father is asleep in his seat. If he’d been awake, he would have complained about Jordan’s use of language. Bruce has told the boys that he doesn’t mind cursing, if it’s used to good effect. Jane had once walked into a lecture on the subject in which Bruce was saying, “If you are furious, and you’ve exhausted your reasoned argument but still want to get a powerful emotion across, then you might say,
Fuck you
. What I object to is the use of these impactful words as fillers, such as when people say,
What the fuck are you doing?
That’s lazy. How is
fuck
helping that particular sentence?” Jane had coughed in the doorway and said, “I’m sorry, it’s okay to say
fuck you
?”

Eddie looks startled. He drops his hands to his lap. “What,” he says.

“How did you do that?”

“Do what?”

“You held your hand to the pane for exactly twenty seconds, then pulled it away for ten. And then you repeated that over and over, exactly, never off by a second. It was never twenty-one or eleven.”

“Huh,” Eddie says. “I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking about it, just doing it.”

Jordan regards his brother, who looks tired. Neither of them has slept well for weeks. They’ve never been to California before and, barring a few educational vacations to Civil War battlefields and other historical sites, have never slept anywhere other than their bunk bed in their New York City bedroom.

“Must have something to do with playing the piano.”

Eddie gives a small smile. The piano is the excuse, or the example, Jordan often reaches for, probably because it bothers him that he’s not musical. His little brother, he knows, hears music during every waking hour. All of the music Jordan has composed is bombastic and irritable—railing at his own lack of aptitude. He’d been even more annoyed when he realized his father knew what he was doing. Bruce said one afternoon, looking over Jordan’s shoulder while he was writing a composition, “All motivators are valid if they produce good work, son. And frustration can be a powerful motivator.”

What he realizes now, for the first time, is that none of his compositions are any good at all. He thinks,
Eddie’s the one with the talent. I’m the one with the anger
.

“Your eyes look weird and shiny,” Eddie says.

“Screw you,” Jordan says.

“Hey,” Bruce says, rearing from his seat, out of sleep, like a startled walrus. “Hey, what’s going on here?”

The brothers are still looking at each other. Jordan’s insides turn peaceful. The change is abrupt but welcome. He wants, suddenly, to lean forward and whisper all the details about his relationship with Mahira into Eddie’s ear. He’s wanted to do this for weeks; he’s never kept a secret from his brother until now, and this is a secret that has shaped his daily life and mapped his thoughts. But somehow, from the first kiss, the secret has acted as a wedge. It’s created space between him and Eddie where none has ever existed.

Jordan wants to cup his hands around Eddie’s ear and start talking, but he doesn’t open his mouth. He and his brother pull apart, and he knows the division, however slight, hurts them both. They’re two toddlers rolling around on the rug, then two boys shape-shifting into men. One amorphous mass, then two boulders on opposite sides of the room.

“Oh, Dad,” Eddie says, and he sounds sympathetic, as if soothing a child who could never possibly understand, “we’re fine.”