Dear Edward: A Novel (16 page)

“Yes,” Linda says.

“Well, I’m going to L.A. to do that.”

“You’re married, though, aren’t you?”

Linda is looking at Florida’s hand, so she looks at it too. There’s a plain silver band on her left ring finger. She’d thought about taking it off, but she likes the ring, and she also doubts she’d be able to get it over her knuckle. She was thinner when she and Bobby married.

“I left,” she says. “Before it got bad, though. I’ve had enough lifetimes to know to trust my gut. I left while he still felt affection for me. We were just on different paths.”

Linda is quiet for a moment. “You mean he didn’t want to rollerblade on the twisty sidewalk by the beach?”

Florida is surprised by the laughter that erupts out of her. The people seated around them are probably startled too; she’s never been quiet in her mirth. Heads turn, ahead of them and across the aisle. Somehow, the woman on the other side of Linda continues to sleep. Florida is cackling now, bent over. Picturing Bobby at his worktable with his raft of blueprints in front of him. Each one detailing a survival plan in case of a different catastrophe: the collapse of the dollar, limited water supply due to global warming, an extreme weather event, a populist uprising that overthrows the government, and a fascist police state, among others. He had thirteen detailed plans, notated with complicated if/then scenarios.

“That’s right,” Florida says, wheezing. “He doesn’t want to rollerblade, and I do.”

And this seems like as great a truth as any for why she left him. She regards the girl next to her with a new respect. Perhaps she has some wisdom in her, after all.

Another truth is that those blueprints had changed over the course of their marriage. In the beginning, those plans were shaped to save everyone, or at least their friends and like-minded allies, but as the years passed in Vermont and they grew more and more isolated, the plans were revised—subtly at first, and then brazenly—to save only them. Or even, she came to suspect, just him.

“I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” Linda says.

Florida smiles at the girl. “Everything ends,” she says. “That’s nothing to be sad about. What matters is what starts in that moment.”

“This moment?”

“That’s right.”

Mark walks up and down the aisle a couple of times after using the bathroom. Sitting next to the lady who’s typing in a plodding way, her forehead scrunched up, is stressing him out. He has the desire to fist-bump the soldier when the huge man passes him on the way back to his seat, but he worries that the gesture would seem racist somehow. He gives him a nod instead. He wonders if the guy thinks he looks down on him because he’s a soldier and probably less educated than him. He doesn’t, though, at all. He can tell this guy can handle himself; he looks like a pro. And Mark is a pro too. Crispin Cox was, for damn sure, during his prime. These men are his brethren. Race and class have nothing to do with it.
Do you know your shit? Are you deeply competent? Can you kick ass? Then ride with me, brothers.

He’s back in first class again. He almost sits down but decides to do another lap. That lady with the kids and the white-haired husband is not an ass-kicker. She’s a worrier, not a warrior. She’s a mom, and she’s sapping his powers. Mark stops halfway down the aisle and closes his eyes. He tries to sense Veronica’s location.

“Everything all right?” he hears her say from beside him.

“Oh, yes.” And it is. He took a caffeine pill right before he left his seat, and he feels good. Great, actually.

She’s looking at him in that wise, I-can-read-your-thoughts way some women have, so he decides,
What the hell, I’ll say them out loud.
He speaks in a low voice, though, so no one else can hear. “I’d like to kiss you more than anything else on earth.”

A pause follows. The air conditioners hum, and someone loudly opens a bag of chips and someone else emits a high-pitched sneeze, and in that pause, Mark is aware that this could go very, very badly. She could look at him with disgust, insist he return to his seat immediately, report him for sexual harassment, even sue.

But then she says, in her own low tone, “We’re not on earth, sir.”

Pyrotechnics detonate inside him. He says, “Even better.”

June 2015

Two years after the crash, the physical therapist and the throat-clearing doctor give Edward’s health the all clear, which means he has no choice but to attend summer camp with Shay. He finds that the counselors—kids only a couple of years older than him—don’t care whether he runs bases, so he becomes the camp scorekeeper. He sits on the bleachers, in the shade, and keeps track of runs. Arts and crafts turn out to be surprisingly enjoyable; there’s something calming about sitting next to Shay in front of an assortment of glue sticks, pipe cleaners, markers, and googly eyes, with the freedom to create something ugly.

Edward is alarmed, though, by how the doctor’s all clear makes the air loosen around him. By the end of eighth grade, teachers expect him to do his homework and speak up in class discussions. Lacey assigns him household chores for the first time—washing the dishes and doing his own laundry—and on the nights she stays late at the hospital, he heats up a frozen pizza in the oven for himself and John. Besa asks Edward to carry heavy groceries from her car, and sometimes she gives him a skeptical look that seems to ask,
Do you still need to be with my daughter all the time?
The grown-ups are collectively nudging Edward in the back and giving him the side-eye. Their body language says:
The crisis is over
.
You need to move on, so we can move on with our lives.

But how can the crisis be over when he still struggles to sleep, and has to wear his brother’s wardrobe in order to feel intact, and will never see his family again? So, when Lacey asks him, with eagerness in her eyes,
Is camp fun? Do you like it?
he has to hide his irritation.
No, I don’t like camp,
he thinks. His main sensation is relief that this new experience is not unbearable. Edward finds himself avoiding his aunt, and spending more time than usual at Shay’s house. He understands the adults’ desire for him to just be healed—how could they really understand what he’s been through? But he feels like Lacey should know better.

When the summer ends, his aunt becomes visibly excited about him starting high school, which is completely mystifying, because Edward can’t see any real difference from middle school. He and Shay still go to the same building, with the same principal. They simply take classes on the top two floors instead of the bottom. The only change that feels significant, to Edward, is that he’s no longer exempt from gym class. He’d enjoyed spending that period in study hall, reading or doodling in a notebook.

The massive high school gym is in the back corner of the fourth floor—Edward finds the teacher in her office, right before the first class, and says, “I can’t run that fast, and I lose my balance sometimes. I think it’s best if I sit on the bleachers and watch. I could keep score for you. Or operate your stopwatch, if you want. Time kids, or whatever.”

The gym teacher, a squat woman named Mrs. Tuhane with short brown hair and a whistle around her neck, doesn’t even glance up from her clipboard. “This isn’t a team, son—it’s gym class. You won’t be the only kid out there falling over. You have five minutes, and then your bippie better be on that yellow line, wearing the proper attire.”

“But—”

“No buts.”

After changing clothes, he finds Shay waiting for him outside the locker room. “I think we’re starting a basketball unit,” she says. “Have you ever played basketball?”

Edward and his brother sometimes shot baskets at the local playground. He shakes his head. “My father didn’t think much of organized sports.”

“Maybe you’ll find that you like it. I like knocking the ball out of assholes’ hands. That’s legal in basketball, you know. It’s in the rules.” She gives him a sideways look. “You might find that you’re good at sports.”

“It’s unlikely.”

Shay shrugs.

Edward’s legs are cold in his gym shorts. He’s growing so fast that his arms and legs ache all the time. He doesn’t want to be here. He says, “Stop expecting me to have hidden powers, okay? I’m not a freaking wizard.”

“I don’t expect that anymore.”

He looks at her and knows it’s true. The Harry Potter series is in the distant past, and that possibility—that childishness—is behind them. They’re growing up. Edward—in his stretching body—is a disappointment to her, and to himself. He braces himself for a wave of sadness and is surprised by anger. When his voice comes out, it’s mean. “I can
promise
you I won’t be any good at basketball.”

“Jesus,” Shay says. “Fine.”

His face burning, he follows her onto the court. He stands where the other kids are standing. When the class begins, he finds the acoustics of the gymnasium excruciating. The repeated shrieks of the whistle, the slamming of the basketball to the floor, the scuffling of feet, and the thudding of bodies into his. The volume of the room, the urgency of the noise, calls up memories he tries to run away from. His heart, as he crisscrosses the court, beats inside his ears. He averts his eyes so no one will pass him the ball. Once, when it bounces into his arms, his entire body seizes. He hurls it away, as if it’s a grenade about to explode.

Twice the gym teacher yells, “Adler, you’re headed in the wrong direction! Turn around!” Edward becomes convinced that the clock on the wall has stopped, or that he’s fallen inside this hour, as if it’s a pool of quicksand, and he’ll never work himself free. Time has swallowed him whole. He will sweat and panic across this gym forever. When a kid bangs into him, Edward acts without thinking: He turns and shoves him in the chest. The kid—who Edward sees is not a him but an Asian girl named Margaret, who’d helped him find his new high school locker—falls to the floor. Mrs. Tuhane says, “Adler, get off the court right now! Take a seat!”

That night, he says to John and Lacey, “You need to write a note to get me out of gym class. Just for a few months, until I’m stronger. It’s too dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” John looks at his wife. “Have they changed gym class since we were kids?”

“I’ll fake a stomachache every time if you don’t write me a note,” he says. “I’m not doing that again.”

“Honey,” Lacey says. “Of course. We’ll write a note.”

When he enters Shay’s room that night, he stares down at his feet. He can still hear basketballs pounding the floorboards in his head when he says, “I’m sorry I was a jerk.” He registers that he sounds angry, even though he’s not; he’s just trying to speak loudly enough to be heard over the rattle of balls.

“What do you have against Margaret?”

He tries to think of a way to explain what it felt like on the basketball court, how his nerves were being lit on fire, one wick at a time. After gym class, he’d apologized to Margaret. She hadn’t said anything in response, just glowered at him and walked away.

“At least you know there won’t be any consequences for shoving her,” Shay says. “Because you’re you.”

“They wouldn’t do anything to a kid for shoving someone
one
time.”

“They most certainly would. I got suspended for punching a boy.”

Edward stares. “You were suspended? When?”

“Right before you got here. The kid’s family moved away, so he’s not at the school anymore.” Shay closes the book she’s holding. “He hummed under his breath during every class, which was profoundly irritating. I couldn’t take it.”

“So you punched him?”

“Well, I was bored before you got here, and I hate being bored. I had to entertain myself. I’ve almost run away every year since I was six. I always had a different plan, with different timing. I realized at some point that I was never going to actually run away, because it would kill my mother. But I still needed to make the plan, to distract myself.”

Edward has a memory of standing on the front stoop with Besa during one of his first weeks here. “Your mom told me that you used to hit girls sometimes, when you were little. She was thanking me for being your friend, and I assumed she was exaggerating to make me feel less bad about showing up here.”

“She wasn’t exaggerating.”

“What were you trying to distract yourself from?”

Shay makes an exasperated noise, then says, “I don’t know. My mother buying me dolls every Christmas, hoping I would play with them. Eating dinner at five-fifteen every single day. Do you know our chicken schedule? Because we have a chicken schedule. We eat fried chicken on Mondays, roasted chicken on Wednesdays, and barbecued chicken breasts on Fridays. It never varies.”

Edward feels like he’s walked into a different bedroom from the one he sleeps in every night. He remembers following Shay down the school hallway on the first day of seventh grade, watching her elbow a boy out of his way. He remembers her scowling at the people who used to watch him as if he were a parade. He can see this new version of Shay in the old one.

She shakes her hands out, the way athletes do between competitions. “Look,” she says. “I don’t want to shut up anymore. I don’t think you want me to.”

“No,” he says, even though he feels nervous. The air in the room is strange, like the still precursor to a hurricane.

“The plane crash, and you moving here, was obviously exciting,” she says. “But now…”

He nods. He knows that
now
is different, and dissatisfying. The air is loose, and there is room for boredom along with other types of chronic mild discomfort. Edward pants slightly, almost bends over and puts his hands on his knees because today has worn him out, but he has to focus, because him being irritable at the world and Shay being irritated at him are two very different things. The second is unacceptable, and yet Edward can now see small signs of her disengagement over the past few months. Sometimes Shay turns out the bedside light early, even when she’s not particularly tired. She chose to take a different elective from him at camp: Edward signed up for an additional session of arts and crafts, and she took wood shop. Once or twice she sat at a table full of other kids at lunch. He feels a trill of panic. He’s losing her.

“I’m sorry I’m boring you,” he says, and hates how whiny he sounds.

She shrugs. “This isn’t about you, Edward. For once.”

There’s danger in her expression. She looks out the window like she wants to jump and hit the pavement running. He knows that, somehow, his speaking angrily to her in the gym unleashed this. She’d been committed to taking care of him, and he’d told her to back off.

Oh God,
he thinks.
What have I done?

When she turns back toward him, her expression is fierce. “I have to tell you something.”

“You don’t have to right now,” Edward says. “Tell me tomorrow.” He has no idea what Shay’s about to say, only that he can’t bear anything more. He has a memory of watching his mom press her thumb against the birthmark below her collarbone. When Jane noticed her son watching, she’d smiled and said,
I press here when I want to turn back time
. Eight-year-old Edward had believed her and wished that he’d been born with a magical birthmark. He has the same wish now, again. Filled with dread, he wants to reverse away from this moment.

“I promised my mother I would say this, or else she said she would tell you, and that would be mortifying.”

A car on the street honks loudly, and Edward feels the sound inside his body.

“You can’t sleep in my room anymore. It’s fine, though; nothing else will change.”

His body temperature plummets; his skin is suddenly cold. “Why?”

“My mother made me promise when you showed up here, when you first started sleeping in my room, that it would stop when we stopped being kids. When I became a woman. Ugh.” Her hands are over her face. She speaks between the spread of fingers. “That’s what she calls it.”

Edward looks at the clock on her bedside table. It’s eight-seventeen. How is this day still happening? “What are you talking about?” he says. “You know I don’t understand anything.”

“I got my period.”

With the exception of the trip to D.C., Edward has walked in the darkness from his house to hers every night since he met her. “So what?” he says, but he knows this is something Besa would care about, a milestone where she would plant—has planted—her flag.

“I know you don’t want to sleep in the nursery. But there’s a pullout couch in your basement. You should sleep there. I can help you set it up. You can sleep in my room for a few more days, until the basement is ready.”

Edward blinks. He knows he has to reply, so he says, “Okay.”

“We both knew it couldn’t go on forever.”

He thinks,
I didn’t.

The next day is Wednesday, so Edward shows up at Principal Arundhi’s office after school. They circle the perimeter of the room, Edward with the blue watering can, the principal with tiny muslin bags filled with different plant foods. The bags aren’t labeled, but he knows which bag is which. For a few of the plants, the principal massages the food into the leaves and then adjusts the heat lamps situated overhead. For others, he makes careful divots in the soil with his index finger and then gently tips the contents of a bag into the holes.

Edward has learned to pour water slowly and to watch the soil color to see if it’s saturated. Dark brown is good; tar-black and muddy means he’s gone too far. He focuses on controlling his pour. His hands have an uneven tremor, because he barely slept the night before. He’d lain awake on Shay’s floor, trying to memorize the Y-shaped crack in her ceiling, trying to memorize the tiny squeaks she makes when she rolls over in her sleep.

“Can you name them, Edward?” The principal is three plants ahead of the boy. He sniffs the leaf of a plant and then tips his head to the side, as if considering the meaning of the smell.

Edward knows now that the entire room is filled not with many different types of plants, as he’d assumed on his first visit, but with various ferns. Principal Arundhi is not just an avid gardener but specifically an expert on ferns. He’s even published a book, called
Ferns of the Northeast: Including Clubmosses and Horsetails,
which is showcased on the windowsill between two large flowerpots.

Edward sets down the watering can and picks up a spray bottle from the desk. The frilly plant in front of him does best when misted with water. “This is a crocodile fern.”