Dear Edward: A Novel (15 page)

He has fewer doctors’ appointments than the summer before, so he expands his television schedule and takes naps on the couch after lunch. A few times, presumably to make him leave the house, John takes Edward to work with him. They go into a mostly empty, cavernous office and move from one computer to the next, backing up the data onto drives. “They’re in bankruptcy,” John says, and nods at the huddle of men in the far corner, wearing wrinkled shirts and messy beards. “I set their computers up nine months ago, and they were so excited then. It’s a shame.”

Shay seems intent on making him leave the house too. A couple of days a week, after she gets home from camp, she insists they walk to the playground down the street. “You need fresh air,” she says. “There’s more to life than
General Hospital
.”

He shrugs his skepticism, but he doesn’t mind sitting on a swing beside her, listening while she tells him about something annoying that her mother, or a camper, said. He shades his eyes with his hand against the sunshine and watches toddlers dig in the sandbox with deadly serious expressions on their faces.

When eighth grade starts, they continue to visit the playground once or twice a week after school. Edward is unbothered by the resumption of school; he doesn’t mind the routine of walking from one classroom to the next. He admires the two new ferns Principal Arundhi acquired over the summer and visits the man’s office to water the plants every Wednesday afternoon. He sets the television to record
General Hospital
each day and watches it when he gets home.

It’s mid-October when the actor who plays Lucky leaves the show, and a new actor immediately takes over the role. On the swings later that afternoon, Edward tries to explain the injustice of this to Shay.

“No one acknowledged the change at all, except to run a little announcement at the bottom of the screen. All the other actors just pretended it was the same Lucky, even though it was clearly an entirely different person. The new guy weighs about twenty pounds more than the real Lucky—he barely resembles him. It made it all look so fake.”

“It’s a soap opera.” Shay kicks off the ground and swings forward. She always swings higher than he does. She pumps with her legs and never takes breaks, as if at any moment she might be judged on her form and trajectory. “Every female character on that show has had major plastic surgery. Monica can hardly move her face anymore.”

He frowns at her, and thinks,
Is that true?

“I don’t care about the new Lucky,” he says. “I’m going to stop watching the show for good.”

“The real Lucky might come back. His movie career might turn out to be a bust.”

Edward almost growls at her with irritation. “No, he won’t.”

Shay turns her head to look at him. She swings by, a gentle blur. “I’ve been meaning to ask you. Did you not want to go to the memorial this summer just because you didn’t want to fly there?”

Edward rubs at the dirt with his foot. He sways forward and back, with one foot touching the ground. “That was part of it.”

She’s surprised him with this question, and his chest aches as he considers it. He didn’t let himself think about the memorial again after the conversation with his aunt and uncle in the kitchen. He’d tried, when he walked away from the hearing, to walk away from any thoughts related to the crash. But Shay asked him a question, and the answer is that he can’t imagine entering an airport, or going through security, or buckling himself into a seat. That sequence of events feels unviable, opposed to a natural law. He could no sooner get on a plane than fly out of this playground by flapping his arms. He belongs on the ground. He has been grounded.

“The odds are impossible that anything like that could happen to you again,” Shay says. “You’d basically guarantee the safety of a plane by getting on it.”

“That’s not how that works.” He shifts his weight on the swing, and it creaks. “That’s called the gambler’s fallacy, you know.”

“The what’s what?”

“It’s when gamblers convince themselves that because they’ve been losing for a long stretch, they’re more likely to win any minute. But they’re wrong—of course. The odds of flipping heads is still fifty percent, even if you’ve flipped ten tails in a row.”

“That’s interesting.” Shay dips her head back as she arcs upward. “Because I always feel bulletproof when I’m with you, as if I’m safe by association.”

Edward barely registers what she’s said. He’s been sucker-punched by memories of his brother. This happens sometimes, and he knows he has to ride the memories out. The only way out of it is through it. He remembers Jordan above him on the top bunk, his head half-buried in his pillow. He remembers Jordan’s face when he wrote music, his brow furrowed in concentration. He sees Jordan beside him on the plane and knows that the smallest, truest reason he will never fly again is that the last airplane seat he ever sits in has to be the one beside his brother.

“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?”

—
G
EORGE
E
LIOT

11:42
A.M.

Just before lunch service, Veronica takes a short break in the front corner of the cabin, next to the kitchen. She always wishes, in this moment, for a cigarette. The yearning is strange, since she quit smoking four years earlier and doesn’t miss the sensation of smoke filling her lungs, but something about leaning her hip against the metal counter and looking out the small port window makes her desire a cigarette every single time.

She wonders how long she’ll be in L.A.—two days, three? She’s been in the air for four days now, and though she hasn’t yet received next week’s schedule, she knows she’s due a few days off. She wants to put on her new bikini and lie by the pool. She wants to drive her brother’s convertible and wreck her hair with wind.

Wind is what she misses most, up in the sky. The airplane air isn’t as bad as passengers say it is; she never likes when people spout opinions without bothering to gather the facts first. Airplanes take about 50 percent of the air collected in the outtake valves of the passenger compartment and mix it with fresh air from outside. The air is then passed through filters to be sterilized before it’s introduced to the passengers. So the air on the plane
is
clean, and not worthy of complaint, but still, Veronica can taste the effort in it.

Every time she leaves an airport, she appreciates the unpredictability of each inhale. There might be a soft gust of wind, or the smell of popcorn, or the heaviness that precedes a rainstorm. She notices nuances in the air that everyone else is immune to, with the exception of submariners, probably, and astronauts. People for whom the earth is not enough; their freedom is off the ground. Veronica enjoys the unbridled nature of the outside world in small doses, but
this
is her home. She is the fullest version of herself at thirty thousand feet.

She straightens up, runs her hands over her hips. Hers have been the only hands on her body since her breakup with Lionel. She hasn’t had sex in a month, which is a personal record. Usually she blitzes dry spells with the hot stoner on the first floor of her condo, or with her college ex-boyfriend, but she’s been too busy, or distracted, perhaps, to have made that happen. She’s aware that she’s getting lonely, though; she gets a small charge now out of brushing up against a handsome passenger. Even the finance guy in first class—too slick and hungry for her taste, normally—is pressing something inside her. She shakes her head and pulls out the massive drawer stacked with lunch trays. She loads the cart. She chooses the slowest of her walks, the one that maximizes the side to side of her hips, and heads into the cabin. She asks for every look and then throws it like a coin into the till.

The economy flight attendant appears at Bruce’s side. “We deliver special meals first,” she says.

Bruce blinks at her. “Special meals?”

Jordan lowers his tray over his lap. “It’s for me. Thank you.”

“Why do you get a special meal?” Eddie asks.

“It’s vegan,” Jordan says. “Mom ordered lunch for all of us when she booked the tickets, and I told her to enter my meal preference.” The tray the flight attendant hands him holds a pot of applesauce, a hummus sandwich, and a pile of cut carrots.

Bruce says, “You’re vegan now?”

“I’ve been vegan for a few weeks. You just haven’t noticed me avoiding the dishes you cooked with dairy.” Jordan tugs the clear wrapper off the sandwich.

The move is hard for all of us,
Bruce tells himself.
He’s just expressing himself. That’s what teenagers do. Stay calm
.

Bruce has always been the cook in the family, and when Jordan was a preschooler, the little boy showed up in the kitchen and asked to help prepare dinner. They had been partners ever since. At first, Jordan was given a butter knife, which he used to cut soft vegetables. He arranged food on plates. He tasted pasta to see if it was done, and sauces for saltiness. By the time he was ten, he was helping Bruce choose recipes. He received his own subscription to
Bon Appétit
for Hanukkah and pored over every copy, folding down the corner on recipes he wanted to try. Eddie became their taster, coming to the kitchen from the piano, or the book he was reading, to give the dish a thumbs-up. When Bruce pictured happiness, it was cooking in the kitchen beside Jordan while listening to Eddie play the piano in the next room. That scene repeated regularly and made Bruce thrum with joy. Every time, he thought,
I will not take this for granted
.

It was a year ago that Jordan had announced he was turning vegetarian for moral reasons. No more brisket, Sunday hamburgers, pasta Bolognese, steamed clams. Bruce hated the idea of one meal for Jordan and a separate meal for the rest of them, so he subscribed to the
Vegetarian Times
and cooked a meatless meal for dinner each night. Sometimes he made burgers for him, Eddie, and Jane, and a veggie burger for Jordan, or included a side dish with chorizo or pancetta—two of his favorites—which Jordan avoided. It had been hard, and Bruce had secretly hated it, but he’d made it work.

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 add 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?”