Dear Edward: A Novel (8 page)

John makes a loud gasping sound and dives for it.

Something about the exaggerated noise is funny to Edward. It tickles him, and he laughs.

John stops moving, on his hands and knees, on the floor.

Edward freezes too. The laugh fizzles, doused by the cold water of guilt, shame, and confusion. He pushes the plate away. He reaches inside his brain for the sheet and pulls it back up, tight.

John is still on the floor; he shifts to a seated position. He says, “I use the iPad for work, mostly.”

“Oh.”

“Edward,” John says. “Laughing is okay. It’s good, even. You have to go back to doing all the normal human things.”

Edward’s body is sore. He almost tells John about what the therapist said, that he’s a different kind of human. He’s not a boy. He’s a bundle of cells and two eyeballs and a busted-up leg.

“I gained a pound,” he says, and is surprised by the note of triumph in his voice.

There is an evening routine too. Edward shows up in Shay’s room around nine and spends the first hour sitting in the chair by the window. At ten, they take turns brushing teeth in the bathroom, and then he unrolls a navy sleeping bag in the middle of her floor. By ten-fifteen, Shay has turned off the light.

“How was camp?” He’s in the armchair, his bad leg stretched board-straight in front of him.

“Stupid. You’re so lucky you don’t have to go.”

“I
can’t
go. I’m not exactly up to running bases.”

She looks up from the notepad in her lap. “Even if you were a thousand percent healthy, they’d let you do whatever you wanted. If you asked my mother for her car keys right now, she’d probably give them to you.”

“No, she wouldn’t.”

“Do you want to try and see?”

He tries to imagine approaching Besa with this request. He shakes his head.

Shay looks disappointed. “Well, my point is that normal kid rules don’t apply to you. Which you should be
grateful
for, because most kid rules are completely bogus and all about the grown-ups feeling like they have power over us. My camp counselor won’t even let me read during lunch. She says it’s because reading is antisocial, but I think it’s because she’s actually Joseph Goebbels.”

“Who’s that?”

“Nazi. Burned books.” Shay returns her attention to the notepad and writes a few lines.

Edward watches her write in this notepad every night. He suspects she’s taking notes on him and his potential magical powers, but he’s scared to ask if he’s right. He studies his damaged leg and waits for the scribbles to stop. He asked her about camp because he knows that’s the kind of thing people ask each other.
How was your day? How are you feeling?
But he sounded stupid asking, and she sounded annoyed answering, and he can feel this other weird conversation running underneath, in a language he can’t quite grasp. It’s something about magic, their age, her lack of friends, the curve of their emotions, the crash of the plane, and whatever she’s writing down.

When the scribbling stops, she says, “I see all your skeptical looks.”

He tries to look innocent. “What?”

“There’s no point to them. The reality is that I’m capable of seeing things that grown-ups can’t. Which means I’ll be able to see what’s inside you before anyone else does.”

The air in the room compresses, as if the electricity of the secret conversation and the real one have aligned for a moment.

The real Edward—not the one who’s always trying to deliver the “correct” line of dialogue—says, “You’re going to be disappointed when I turn out to be a normal kid.”

“It’s too late for that,” she says. “You’ll never be a normal kid.”

This sounds true, and he feels a ping of relief.

“I’m not normal either,” she says, as if answering a question he hadn’t asked.

“Great,” he says, and the wave of enthusiasm in his voice makes him blush.

She returns to the notebook, and Edward is aware that he’s breathing easier. His chest has loosened. When the clock reads ten, he gathers his crutches and hitches to the bathroom.

They are in their bed and sleeping bag, respectively, when Shay says, “I wonder how long they’re going to let you sleep here. I heard a lady in the grocery store asking my mom about it. It makes the grown-ups uncomfortable because we’re not quite teenagers and not quite kids. They might try to end it soon. They’re going to want everyone to go back to behaving”—she makes air quotes with her fingers—“in an acceptable way.”

Edward stares at her. “How do people in town know where I’m sleeping?”

“Gossip. Osmosis. Who knows?” She must notice the look on his face then, because she says, “Oh, don’t worry. You can keep sleeping here for as long as you like. I’ll fight them off. I’m good at that. I can be deeply annoying.”

An oversized envelope arrives in the mail. It’s at least two inches thick. Lacey carries it to the sofa in the living room and sinks down beside Edward on the couch. She peels off the outside of the envelope, and the paper falls heavily to the floor. She pulls out a large blue binder.

“What’s that?” Edward asks, at the same time processing the title on the front:
Personal Effects of Flight #2977 Passengers.

“Oh dear,” Lacey says.

There is a cover letter. It says that if they identify any effects belonging to the Adler family, they will send the items to them. Lacey flips the binder open to the middle, to a photograph of a gold charm bracelet with a description typed beneath it. There is a charm in the shape of the Eiffel Tower and another of a teddy bear.

“I don’t understand,” Edward says. “These
things
survived the crash? That many things?”

Lacey nods.

“They didn’t melt? Or explode?”

She taps the binder with her finger. “Do you want to look through it?”

Edward’s ears click, a staccato drumroll. “No, thank you. Not now.”

Later, he hears his aunt and uncle arguing in the kitchen. John is angry that Lacey opened the book in front of him.

“Jesus,” John says. “Our job is to protect him. Do you see how depressed he is? Dr. Mike says we need to be very, very careful.”

Lacey’s voice sharpens. “I don’t want to lie to him. I think he should be able to see the information, so he can make sense of it himself.”

Edward’s parents used to argue regularly, but this sounds different, sadder and more desperate, like John and Lacey are on the side of a mountain and underprepared in terms of both fitness and supplies. They sound keenly aware that one or both of them might lose their grip and fall at any second.

His uncle says, “Edward’s not ready to make sense of anything. It’s too soon.”

“Of course he’s not
ready
. Nobody’s ever ready for anything this hard.”

John’s voice drops, as if in an effort to change the nature of the exchange. “Lace, calm down.” A pause, and then, “You never call me Bear anymore.”

But Lacey seems unable, or unwilling, to shift gears. If anything, she sounds angrier. “I don’t need it thrown in my face that I’m doing a bad job. I don’t know anything about children, and I think he can sense that. He doesn’t even want to sleep here.”

“You just need to be careful around him. For God’s sake, that’s why we turned off the phone.”

This strikes Edward, as he realizes for the first time that he hasn’t heard a phone ring in this house since his arrival. He wonders whose calls they’re avoiding.

Lacey says, “That horrible man emailed again to say that they need DNA samples to identify the bodies. I’m supposed to call Jane’s dentist and ask for samples.”

Jane,
Edward thinks. And it is only then that he realizes his aunt lost her sibling, just like he lost his.
Jane, Jordan. Jane, Jordan.

“Forward me the email. I’ll write him back.”

“It’s
my
responsibility. She was my sister.”

Their voices stop. Either they leave the room or Edward’s ears make an executive decision to block them out.

The summer pulses on, bleary and filled with too much sunlight for Edward’s taste. He sees the throat-clearing doctor for his leg and weight, Dr. Mike for his emotions, and a physical therapist to make sure his gait returns to normal.

It occurs to Edward that no one alive knows or remembers his pre-crash walk. He doesn’t either. He remembers Jordan’s, though. His brother’s stride had always been distinctive: long and leaping. Gravity seemed to have less hold on him than on other people; Edward could remember talking to Jordan while walking down the sidewalk, and mid-sentence his brother would be in the air.
He bounds,
his mother had once said.

Edward bends his knees and bounces.

“Whoa there, tiger,” the physical therapist says. “What was that? I’d like you to focus on forward motion, please. Not elevation.”

In the afternoons, his physical-therapy homework is to walk to the end of their block and back again. The first few days, Lacey walked with him, but now she waits on the front steps, because the therapist said Edward needs to relearn balance by himself. A small crowd stands on the far side of the street. A few teenagers, a nun, and some older men and women. They look like they’re waiting for a parade.

Edward knows he’s the parade. If they say something, he doesn’t hear it. If they wave, he doesn’t see it. He never looks in their direction; he concentrates on hitching a single crutch forward, one step and then another. His ear clicks, a metronome counts, and he can hear the clocks shuttling forward in every house he passes.

Worst parade ever,
he thinks.

Edward sits on John’s tablet by accident one evening. It’s on the couch, covered by a blanket. Edward pulls it free and sees his reflection in the black screen. His uncle is at a meeting, and his aunt is in bed. His face looks older, and more true, as if this dark mirror sees the grayness within him. The face looking back at Edward wouldn’t be out of place as a villain in a movie: serious to the point of malevolent.

His parents wouldn’t allow him or Jordan to have a cellphone—the boys had texting pagers so that Bruce and Jane could reach them in case of an emergency. His parents both had tablets, though, which they let the boys use for educational games.

Edward presses the
ON
button.

A four-digit passcode screen appears.

Am I going to do this?
he thinks, with genuine curiosity.
Yes
.

He tries to approach the task the way his father would. His father talked about numeracy with such affection—as if the numbers were a collection of odd characters in the local bar—that when Edward fills his brain with numbers, he finds it to be a warm space. As he puzzles through the possible digits, he feels like he’s using the DNA he shares with his father.

He types in Lacey’s birth year: 1974. The screen shakes its refusal. He tries John’s birth year: 1972. No. There is only one attempt left before it locks and an email is sent to John, checking if he has indeed been struggling with his own device.

Edward lays the tablet down. He regards it for a minute.
Numbers are never random,
his father would say.
They like patterns and meaning.

Edward picks up the tablet again and types in the flight number: 2977.

The screen clears.

A wave of fear surges through Edward, and he stands up from the couch. He leaves the house, pushes through the muggy night air, and climbs the steps to Shay’s house and Shay’s bedroom. When he clatters into her room, she’s at her desk. He hands the tablet to her as if it’s a grenade without a pin.

She accepts it with appropriate gravity. Edward leans over her shoulder and types in the passcode.

They both watch the home page appear. In the lower-right corner, there is a red circle with the words
Plane Tree
beneath it.

She looks at him, and he nods. She clicks on the symbol, and a list of links appears:

She says in a low voice, “Where did you get this?”

“It’s John’s.”

The dimple in her cheek deepens with her frown. “Look,” she says. “I can look up one of these things and read it, and tell you what it says. You don’t have to look yourself. I wouldn’t want to, if I were you.”

Edward crosses the room and sinks down on her bed. In all his visits to this room, he’s never sat on the mattress before. It’s soft and creaks lightly under his weight. He wishes he could lie down, close his eyes, and sleep. But sleep, even in this room, is hard to come by. Edward spends every night reaching for unconsciousness as if it were a rock in the middle of a river, while a fierce current pulls him away. His fingertips sometimes brush the rock, and he manages a nap. Never a full night’s rest.

He whispers, “Is there information about Jordan?”

He can see only the side of Shay’s face. She taps at the screen. “John’s created PDFs with links,” she says. “There’s a Facebook page that was created about Jordan after the crash. By a couple girls, it looks like. I don’t think they knew him. There’s a photo.”

“I want to see.”

She holds the screen up. There is Jordan, beaming in his bright-orange parka. He’s outside the deli near their house. His hair is standing almost completely upright.

“I took that picture,” Edward says.

Shay lowers the screen. “He’s mentioned in the lists of people who died on the plane and as your brother,” she says. “Online and in the newspaper articles about the crash. That’s it.” She takes a breath.

“What?” Edward says, and an unlikely stripe of hope crosses his chest.

“I just clicked on the Google search for your name, and there are over a hundred and twenty thousand results, Edward. One hundred and twenty thousand.”

“Okay.” He doesn’t know what else to say.

“Jordan only has forty-three thousand results.”

“Turn it off,” Edward says. “Please.”

She closes the case, and he’s grateful for her immediate response. He knew there were people outside the house keeping watch for him; it hadn’t occurred to him that the same might be true online, inside every phone, tablet, and computer.