Dear Edward

by Ann Napolitano

  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.

  John makes a loud gasping sound and dives for it.

  Something about the exaggerated noise is funny to Edward. It tickles h
im, 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.