Dear Edward: A Novel (7 page)

Gavin was friends with everyone, so his friendship with Benjamin was a small part of his military life, but it was a significant part of Benjamin’s. Gavin liked to smoke pot—there were weeks of no activity on base, and in times of boredom, the captain looked the other way on things like marijuana and video games—and when he smoked, he told the kind of knock-knock jokes usually favored by nine-year-olds. Benjamin never smoked, but he made sure he was around when Gavin did, and he laughed hysterically while the other guys groaned.

The first-class flight attendant walks by his seat and gives him a smile.
Boom chicka boom
. Benjamin can hear her soundtrack so clearly she might as well be carrying a speaker on each hip. In his neighborhood, she’d have a line of men following her down the street, dancing to that beat.

He glances around at the rows of civilians with their untucked shirts, beer bellies, and pointless chitchat. The flight attendant is neat, pulled together, and in uniform, which he appreciates. The mess of everyone else’s appearance, and of their non-military lives, confuses him.
Pull yourself together,
he wants to tell the old lady next to him and the rumpled dad across the aisle. How hard is it to tuck in your shirt, straighten your posture, lose ten pounds?

Benjamin clenches his jaw. He’s not made to sit still. If he could only take a short break to run sprints, do push-ups, or even just stride someplace with a sense of purpose. He touches his side now, checking that the bag is in place, that he’s still contained by his own body.

July 2013

That night, when John and Lacey go upstairs, Edward is finally able to unfurl—his sadness, his blankness—into the empty living room. He’s not tired; he feels terrible and awake the same way he did ten hours earlier.
I must be missing hormones,
he thinks.
Something to do with the word “endocrine.”
There is a cycle that normal people ride: They wake up with the light, rub their eyes, get hungry, eat cereal, go about their days, and then, with sunset, begin to wind down. They eat again, watch TV, yawn, and climb into bed.

Edward sits in the middle of the couch, wired and surrounded by shadows. He hears the upstairs sink run, and the toilet flush; John is getting ready for bed. Edward had told himself that he wouldn’t do this again, but nonetheless he stands up, leaves the house, and hitches his way across the lawn.

When Besa opens the door, he says, “I’m sorry.”

“Nonsense,” Besa says. “We’ll just have to find something more comfortable for you to rest on than a chair.” She leads him up the stairs.

Shay is wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants this time. Her hair is in a ponytail. She nods when she sees him. “I was thinking about you at camp today,” she says. “I’m glad you came over.”

“You are?” His voice squeaks with relief. This means she won’t send him away.

Besa has disappeared; they are alone in the lamplit room. Edward sinks down in the chair. He balances his crutches carefully against the bookshelf beside him.

“I don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier.” Shay is on her knees on her bed. She looks excited. Edward identifies this emotion as if it’s an answer on a test.
That’s a nimbus cloud. That’s the pancreas. That’s excitement.
He feels around inside himself and touches the four corners of his flatness.

“You’ve read
Harry Potter,
right?”

He nods. Jordan was given the series as a birthday gift and then had the idea to take the books out of the library as well, so he and his brother could read them at the same time. They lay in their bunks for hours, for several weeks on end, mowing through one book after another. Jordan would call out from the top bunk:
Holy cow,
Eddie, are you on page 202 yet?
The brothers had long conversations about whether Snape was in fact a bad person. They had once, after splitting a nearly full gallon of apple juice at the kitchen table, gotten into an argument so intense—Jordan insisting that Snape was the key, even the genesis, of all the evil in the books, Eddie saying he was essentially good—that their father had to send them to opposite ends of the apartment until they calmed down. “No more sugar!” Bruce had yelled. “And what the hell is a snape?”

Shay bounces lightly on the mattress and studies Edward. Her gaze makes him uncomfortable.

“I’m going to blow your mind,” she says. “Are you ready?”

The sinkhole inside him grows deeper, and he can taste weariness in his mouth. “I guess so?”

“You’re just like Harry Potter.”

He looks at her, not sure what to say.

“Okay, listen. As a child, Harry survived a terrible attack that no one should have been able to survive, right?”

Edward can see that an answer is expected of him. “Right.”

“Voldemort killed Harry’s parents but couldn’t kill him, even though he was a baby. Nobody understood how it was possible. And the fact that he survived scared a lot of people—it freaked them out.” She blinks behind her glasses. “I heard a doctor on TV say that there was a zero percent chance of survival from your plane crash.”

Edward swallows. Like a dutiful student, he follows her train of thought. Voldemort equals plane crash. Dead parents equal dead parents. Harry equals him.

“My uncle said they think I survived because of where my seat was in relation to the fuselage and because it ejected out of the wreckage….”

Shay shakes her head.

Edward stares at the girl: her glasses, her one dimple, her determined expression.

“Do you have any scars from your injuries?”

He does. He has a horrible one extending down the middle of his left shin. He pulls up his pant leg. The line is jagged, pink, and raised.

“That’s disgusting,” Shay says, sounding delighted. “So you have a scar like Harry Potter too.
And
you were taken in by your aunt and uncle. Also, remember how Aunt Petunia was jealous of her sister being a witch? Lacey was totally jealous of your mom. My mom made me go and sit with Lacey when she was on bed rest last year, and she used to brag about your mom’s achievements, but in a sad voice.”

There is a dark window behind Edward’s head, and he can feel the silence on the lawn and streets. When cars pass, they creep by, as if afraid they might hit a child or a deer. He feels faintly nauseous, considering her words. Or maybe it’s her excitement that’s making him seasick, as if he’s stepped onto a rocking boat. Either way, he knows he won’t be able to eat in the morning.

“You probably have special powers. You must be magic, to survive that crash.”

“No,” Edward says, without hesitation.

“Harry didn’t know he had special powers either,” Shay says. “He lived in a cupboard under the stairs at the Dursleys’ house for eleven years before he found out.” She looks at the clock on her nightstand. “I have to go to sleep in three minutes in order to get eight hours’ sleep. And I need eight hours. Are you going to sleep here or go home?”

“Here,” Edward says. “If that’s okay.”

The light is off before he finishes the sentence.

Edward’s therapist is a skinny man named Dr. Mike. Dr. Mike wears a baseball cap and has an ornate clock on his desk, which is decorated with gold and silver flowers. Edward studies the clock hands when there’s a lull in the conversation. The timepiece seems to operate by its own system of measurement. This is his fifth visit to this office, and the clock freezes for entire moments, then leaps forward to catch up with the surrounding world.

“Anything new?” Dr. Mike says.

“No,” Edward says. “Well. My aunt and uncle are upset because I’m losing weight.”

“Are you upset about it?”

Edward shrugs. “No?” He doesn’t like these sessions. The doctor seems like a nice enough man, but his job is to excavate Edward’s brain, and Edward’s job is to fend him off, because his brain is too sore and tender to withstand even the lightest touch. The job is exhausting.

When the silence has gone on too long, he says, “I know I need to eat.”

Dr. Mike moves a pen from one side of his desk to the other. “My wife is pregnant, and her physician told her that physiologically and medically speaking, there are three different kinds of humans: men, women, and pregnant women. I think the same idea applies to you, Edward. There are grown-ups, children, and then you. You don’t feel like a kid anymore, right?”

Edward nods.

“But you won’t be an adult for years. You’re something else, and we need to figure out what you are, so we can figure out how to help you. My wife needs extra folic acid, more sleep, and has a higher volume of blood in her body than she did before she was pregnant. Your head clicks, you don’t like food, and you’ve found a way to dull your brain to protect yourself.”

“My next-door neighbor thinks I’m magic. She thinks I’m like Harry Potter.”

Dr. Mike touches the brim of his hat, a gesture Edward remembers as being a signal in baseball to slide, or run to another base, or tag a player out. He can’t remember what the sign means, and for a second he panics, as if he’s about to let his entire team down.

“That’s interesting.”

Right away, Edward regrets sharing what Shay said. His new friend—he guesses Shay is a friend; he sleeps in her room every night, what else can he call her?—would not approve. The idea sounded ridiculous in the air, and Shay is not ridiculous.

He uses what energy he has left to try to change the subject. “Why does your wife have extra blood?”

Dr. Mike regards him from beneath the brim of the cap. “Why can’t you bear the texture of bananas, even though you loved them before?”

“I don’t know.”

“Exactly.”

Edward wonders if Dr. Mike has some kind of unusual baldness on the top of his head—there is hair around the side of his head, below the cap—or perhaps a terrible scar that requires the hat. He wonders if it would be rude of him to ask.

He says, “Am I supposed to tell you what I am?”

“No,” Dr. Mike says. “We’ll figure that out together.”

When night falls, Edward dims further with the sky. The flatness inside him becomes a cloak, and so he feels no reaction, and no sense of responsibility, as he hobbles out the front door of the house, down the steps, across the lawn, and up the neighboring stairs.

Besa opens the door, but this time doesn’t step aside to let him pass.

Edward looks up at her. Besa is short, with wide hips and thick dark eyebrows. She works from home, translating novels from Spanish to English. John’s nickname for Besa is
Spitfire
. He told Edward that Besa’s husband left when Shay was a toddler. Edward said,
He left?

He moved away,
John said.
He isn’t part of their family anymore.

This had made Edward think of all the ways of leaving: through doors, windows, in cars, on bikes, trains, boats, planes. Leaving was different than what his family had done. Leaving was a choice.

“Edward,
mi amor
.”

He squints at Besa. “Yes?”

“I want you to know that I’m happy you like Shay. She’s never really had any friends. Politeness bores her, the same as it does me. I try to get her to say the things a young girl is supposed to say, but…” She sighs. “My heart is not in it. She never liked dolls. She always ends up insulting people. She used to get in fistfights with other girls. I’ve left her to her books probably more than I should have. She’s been lonely.”

Edward says, “I like her.” Even though
like
has nothing to do with it. Shay feels like oxygen to him. He doesn’t
like
oxygen; he requires it.

Besa moves to the side. “I just want to make sure you don’t feel grateful to
us
. You’ve been a blessing already. I knew from day one that you would help your aunt. Poor Lacey was making herself sick, trying to have a baby. Now she has someone to care for.”

Edward almost shakes his head, disagrees, but then doesn’t bother. He feels like his arrival did the opposite of helping his aunt; his arrival interrupted Lacey, and now she’s struggling beside him. Sometimes his aunt looks as gray in the face as he feels, and sometimes he can see her anger at John as clearly as lightning bolts across a room. Other times, she clings to her husband after he comes home from work, like a small child to a parent. Edward is a mess, so he recognizes Lacey. And he recognizes that he’s part of her mess.

He pictures the nursery, with its baby books and rocking chair. His body had jerked backward when he’d entered on the first day. He’d wanted to leave immediately, somehow knowing that those four walls couldn’t bear both Lacey’s grief and his own. Children who were never born, and parents no longer alive. He follows Besa up the stairs, with the sensation that he’s being followed by more ghosts than he can personally account for.

His mornings start on the couch with a plate, which includes saltine crackers now. John added them to the plate one afternoon, and they have become the most tolerable food. Salt with a collapsing layer of cracker. Minimal amount of chewing necessary. After the first morning plate, he and Lacey leave for his physical-therapy appointment. In between appointments, his aunt walks up and down the stairs with baskets of laundry. She gives him a second plate of food at lunchtime and then sits with him to watch one of the afternoon soap operas. It’s centered on a hospital, and Lacey tells him that she and his mother watched the same show every day when they were teenagers. “So you’ve been watching these actors your whole life?” Edward says, amazed.

“On and off. Your mother was head-over-heels in love with Luke.” Lacey points at a bald, tired-looking man wearing a single earring. The love of his life, Laura, who is shown in flashbacks to be dewy and beautiful, is now sad-looking and plump.

“It’s not the best commercial for the passage of time,” his aunt says.

The soap moves slowly and doubles back to repeat itself often, which feels like the right pace to Edward. Characters sum up their problems and then fumble the solutions. Most of the scenes take place either in the rooms of the hospital or, for some reason, on the town dock. Edward and Lacey watch in silence, with a seriousness that would have amused Edward back when he was a normal boy.

When John comes home after work, Edward looks for lightning bolts from his aunt. John always wears an apprehensive expression when he enters the room, which Edward can tell irritates Lacey, even on her better days. After dinner, Lacey goes upstairs, and it’s John’s turn to sit beside Edward. He punches at his tablet or computer. He is rarely without a screen in front of him.

Edward holds another plate on his lap and counts in his head, like he did while playing the piano, to measure the time between bites. He’s been able to eat only by changing the reasons. He used to eat because he was hungry, or because he loved a specific food. Now he eats to stay out of the hospital and to keep from worrying his aunt and uncle. He handles a saltine by the corner, and the metronome beats:
one and two and three and four
.

He’s halfway through the contents of the plate when the flatness inside him pulls back, like a sheet on a bed, and he suddenly knows that his uncle’s activity on the tablet has to do with the flight. Edward looks sideways, but, as always, John has the screen tipped away from his nephew.

“What are you doing on there?” Edward asks.

John’s movements are usually slow; he appears to be paying only half-attention most of the time. But this is a direct question from his nephew, who hardly speaks and has perhaps not asked a single non-survival-related question of him since he woke up in the Colorado hospital. John sits up straight, and that throws off his balance. As a result, the tablet ricochets out of his hands and onto the floor.