Dear Edward: A Novel (14 page)

The security officer pulls open the door. John is in front, so he walks through first. Just before Edward enters, the officer leans close and says, “High five, buddy. It was badass, surviving that crash. Bad-ass.”

Edward meets the man’s hand with his own—because he can’t see any alternative—and ducks inside the building. The beige metal door shuts behind him. He follows his uncle and a different security guard down two empty hallways. The officer points to a row of folding chairs on the side of the hall, tells them to wait, and disappears. John and Edward sit. There are no more footsteps, so Edward listens to himself and his uncle breathe. John seems to be inhaling and exhaling with deliberate slowness, as if to calm them both down.
Shay was wrong,
Edward thinks. He could be hurt. This hurt.

“We’re safe here,” John says. “We’re in the basement. The hearing is on the third floor. We’re right around the corner from the elevator we need.” He delivers this practical information with such relief that Edward realizes information is his uncle’s favorite thing. Data, statistics, and systems keep the world straight for John.

His uncle continues: “The hearing, assuming it’s on time, starts in ten minutes. We’re not late. I was told it usually runs about an hour. Ninety minutes tops.”

Edward says, “I’m not going to the hearing.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t want to. I thought I did, but I actually don’t.”

“Edward?” John says.

The boy wants to give his uncle an explanation, but he’s not sure what to say, because if he says that something inside his body has changed, such a statement would alarm John. But it’s true. It started yesterday in the car: a stripping of the flat sheet inside him. Walking through that crowd removed the last remaining threads.
Hail Mary, full of grace
. Edward realizes that he’d never been able to picture himself inside the hearing room. Had he known all along that he wasn’t going to attend? If so, then why did he come here?

He feels newly aware, newly awake. He locates himself, like a blinking dot on a map, in this building, on this floor, on this metal chair with his hands on his knees. He’s 100 percent in Washington, District of Columbia, a state that’s not a real state. He’s sitting beside his uncle. Edward understands—the knowledge arising with a surprising casualness—the real reason he doesn’t sleep in his aunt and uncle’s house. He can’t bear to live with a mother figure, who’s not his mom, and a father figure, who’s not his dad. He had the real thing, and he lost it. Also, it’s too difficult to try to pretend to be John and Lacey’s kid, when their real kids never made it, and he’s not even a kid; he’s something else altogether.

Edward leans over and puts his forehead in his hands. He thinks, in the direction of his uncle:
I’m sorry
.

John clears his throat. “What they announce at the hearing today is public record. It will be published on the Internet and everywhere. I wanted to hear it first and take notes in case you had any questions about it. But now, if you want to leave, that’s fine.”

“You should go to the hearing,” Edward says. “I might have questions. Shay asked me to take notes, so you could do that. I can wait here. The guard is stationed at the door. I’ll be fine.”

John gazes at him with wide eyes. “Look,” he says, “your aunt thought I was wrong to bring you here, even though you said you wanted to come. I should have listened to her. I’m too stubborn.”

Edward doesn’t like how upset his uncle looks, how upset he seems at himself. He says, “The hearing is about to start. You should definitely go.”

“Would you feel better if I went to the hearing than if I didn’t?”

“Yes.”

When John leaves, Edward remains unmoving on the hard chair. He feels the plane seatbelt around his waist. His hands are cold, like they were when he pressed his palm against the wet plane window. He remembers pressing the window, then pulling his hand away. Edward feels the warmth of his brother’s body next to his. It doesn’t feel like a memory. He feels the tightness of the airplane seatbelt around his waist as he sits on the folding chair.

Edward can feel the heartbeats of the mothers, fathers, siblings, spouses, cousins, friends, and children upstairs. His body syncs up with their sadness. He’s glad he stayed in the basement. The others are beating the plane windows with their fists, and Edward is down here because he doesn’t belong with them. He belongs with the dead, the ones who didn’t show up, the ones who know everything, and nothing.

After an hour, he hears real footsteps and looks up to see his uncle striding toward him. “The hearing just ended.” John glances over his shoulder. “We should leave right away. We’re going to meet the guard by the side door. Hundreds of people showed up, too many to fit in the room.”

Edward nods, because this makes sense to him. He’d been listening to hundreds of heartbeats.

“Most of them came because they wanted to see you, which I think is outrageous.” John waves his hand, as if to sweep those people away. “Someone from the hearing has a car and driver out back. She’s going to take us to our car, so we can avoid the crowd.” He leads the way toward the doors. “I took a lot of notes,” he says, over his shoulder. “The commissioner spoke, and I took photos of the slides they presented. I’ll show them to you when we get to our car.”

Edward’s head is shaking before his uncle has finished speaking. “That’s okay. I don’t need to see them. I don’t want to hear about why the plane crashed.”

His uncle flashes him a look. But Edward feels pleased, because after not knowing
anything
for sure, he knows this answer is correct. He doesn’t want to learn any more details about the worst day of his life.

It occurs to him that maybe he came to Washington to figure out what he did want. Did he want to be part of the public drama surrounding the crash? Did he want to be swarmed on sidewalks? Did he want to be told that he’s special and chosen? Did he want the kind of answers the hearing offered? He gives something approaching a smile as he follows his uncle out the door. The answer is no, on every count, and the answer is a relief. He feels like he’s deliberately walking away from something—the plane, or the burning field where it broke apart.

They cross a sidewalk and step through the open door of a very long car. From the inside, Edward decides it’s some kind of mini-limousine. There’s a suited man in the driver’s seat. Seated across from Edward is a thin elderly woman with a white bun and a velvet dress. Her hands are folded in front of her, her chin lifted. Although it never would have occurred to Edward that a person could sit with dignity—this woman does.

“Greetings, Edward,” the woman says. “My name is Louisa Cox.”

“Hello,” Edward says.

“I’m glad we brought the Bentley, Beau,” the woman says to the driver. “Its size is an asset.”

“Yes, ma’am. The gentleman’s car is not far away.” He has already pulled out into the road, and as they ease away from the building, and the people, something eases inside of Edward, and he’s afraid he might cry. He’d rather not cry in front of this fancy old woman, who is now carefully removing her gloves and smiling at him.

“I have three boys,” Louisa says. “I can picture all of them at your age, sitting beside you there. They made a motley crew. I had them sewn up in blazers and ties, even though they wanted to wear jeans like yours. I should have let them. They looked like angry little CEOs, like their father.”

“Thank you so much for your help,” John says. “I had no idea…”

She waves her hand, and rings sparkle from the fingers. “It’s my pleasure. Once we get you to your car, you can make a proper escape.” She turns her attention to Edward, as if he’s a lock she is going to unpick. He has the thought that it’s not polite, the way she’s looking at him.

“You were wise to skip the hearing, young man. It was a circus, and you would have become the main attraction.”

Edward pulls a seatbelt across his waist, but the receiving end is buried in the seat beside him and it won’t click. “Ma’am,” he says. “Is this seatbelt broken?”

“You don’t need a belt,” John says. “We’re only going a few blocks.”

“I need a belt,” he says.

Louisa reaches across him and releases the end of the seatbelt. He buckles it with a hard
click.
Edward gives her a grateful nod.

The car turns left and then right. Every street is one-way.

“I don’t think I knew what to expect,” John says. “It…it didn’t occur to me that so many family members would be there.”

Louisa gives a small smile. “My ex-husband was one of the passengers. Crispin Cox—perhaps you’ve heard of him? We’ve been divorced for, oh, let’s see…nearly forty years.”

Edward lays his hand over his seatbelt, to make sure it’s doing its job. In his fully alert state, the world looks exactly as dangerous as it is.

“Your ex-husband spoke at my college,” John says. “Many years ago.”

“Crispin was an asshole,” Louisa says. “He had cancer, but he would have beaten it and gone on to be an asshole for many more years.”

“You didn’t like him?” Edward says.

“Well,” she says, “it was more complicated than like or dislike. But I did hate him, most days of the week.”

“I see our car.” John leans forward in the direction of their car, which they’re inching toward. The sidewalk looks normal now, peopled only by men and women on their way somewhere, who have no interest in or knowledge of Edward Adler.

“I didn’t hate my family,” Edward says.

Louisa looks at him appraisingly. Her eyes are a vivid blue. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she says. “It would have been much easier for you if you did, don’t you think?”

John leans across Edward to open the car door, and then they are standing in the air, peering through the open window at the woman.

“It was a pleasure to meet you, Edward Adler. I believe I will keep in touch, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” he says.

She waves her ring-laden hand, the window glides up, and the Bentley maneuvers away.

When they return to New Jersey, everything feels different. The air seems to have changed in Edward’s absence; it’s thicker and has a faintly sour taste. The milk Lacey hands him every morning is unpleasantly cold. Edward finds himself newly aware of germs, and he smells food—in case it’s rancid, or overripe, or spoiled—before he puts it in his mouth. He’s relieved to be back in Shay’s room, but the sleeping bag feels like it shrank, and an inner tag irritates his scar when he rolls over in the night. Jordan’s clothes no longer smell of him or of the cardboard boxes they lived in for months. They smell instead like Lacey’s floral laundry detergent.

When Edward notices that the clicking in his head is gone too, he spends hours testing the new silence. He tilts his head slowly from side to side, jumps up and down, even thinks about his mother, but nothing elicits the familiar clicks. He wonders if the simultaneous departure of several symptoms—any trace of a fugue state, the flat sheet inside him, the clicking—could itself be considered a symptom.

Even Shay’s face seems to have changed in the few days he was away, and she’s acquired a couple of new, unreadable looks. Occasionally, out of nowhere, in the middle of lunch or at their lockers, she’ll give him a look, and he’ll say, “I’m sorry.”

“Stop that,” she says each time. “Don’t apologize; you didn’t do anything wrong.” But Edward knows she’s still disappointed in him for not going inside the NTSB hearing. When he’d told her the first night back, her cheeks had flushed, and she’d said, “But that was going to be so
interesting
.”

He follows her down the school hallways and finds himself startling several times a day, when a door slams or the loudspeaker buzzes on. School is louder than he remembered, and one afternoon when a boy yells, “Fuck you!
”
right next to his ear and then gives him a look like,
Calm down, dude, I wasn’t talking to you,
Edward has to stumble into the next empty classroom and find a chair.

In late spring, a letter arrives about the one-year memorial. Several families of the victims of Flight 2977 have formed a memorial committee, and the airline has offered to cover any costs. On the date of the crash one year later, a memorial statue will be erected in Colorado, at the location of the tragedy. The land has been donated by the state. The memorial will remain on that ground forever.

A sketch of the planned tribute accompanies the letter. An artist is at work sculpting 191 birds out of metal, and the birds will be strung together in the shape of an airplane. A jet made of silver birds.

“How horrible. And beautiful,” Lacey says, looking at the picture.

She had told John and Edward, when they returned from D.C., that she’d accepted the part-time job as the volunteer coordinator for the local children’s hospital. She organizes the volunteers and makes sure there are enough people to read to sick children and hold brand-new babies. She said to Edward, with pride on her face, “I’ll be working at the real
General Hospital
now.”

Edward doesn’t tell her that he wishes she hadn’t taken the job, that it is another unwelcome change in his life. He doesn’t tell her that he’s noticed that the pregnancy magazines, which had lived under the coffee table since he’d arrived, are now gone. He doesn’t tell her that he’s noticed that she walks around the house differently, before and after work each day. She bustles from room to room, every step filled with purpose. She doesn’t watch TV with him anymore. When Edward closes his eyes and listens to her quick steps across the kitchen floor, she sounds like a stranger.

“Do you want to go to the unveiling?” John says to him.

“No.”

“Well, I have to say I’m relieved. The families will be there.” John says this with a barely concealed horror that almost makes Edward smile.

“It’s too much,” Lacey says.

Even though the matter is settled, the three of them stand still—as sunset dims the room—and gaze at the image of a cascade of birds pointed at the sky.

That summer, Edward watches television during the day while Shay is at camp. His doctor said he could go to camp too, but there was hesitation in his voice that Edward capitalized on, because he can’t imagine running bases, or gluing beads, or dodging dodgeballs. He finds that he enjoys being alone in the house. He talks to the characters during
General Hospital
: He tells Jason not to work for the gangster Sonny and tells Alan to be kinder to his daughter.