Dear Edward: A Novel (13 page)

January 2014

On January 1, Edward dresses in as many layers of Jordan’s clothes as he can manage: underwear, long johns, socks, long-sleeve T-shirt, short-sleeve T-shirt, zip-up sweatshirt, woolen hat, too-big red Converse sneakers. When he enters the kitchen, Lacey and John have their backs to him. They’re standing by the window, talking in quiet voices. Quiet, but not calm.
Shoving voices,
Edward’s brain decides. Lacey’s tone shoves at John, then he, more weakly, shoves back.

“You didn’t even ask if I wanted to come to the hearing.”

“It didn’t occur to me,” John says. “Do you?”

A hard headshake. “I don’t even know if he wants to be there, really. This is about you, and it’s not healthy. Why are
you
going?”

John is leaning against the kitchen counter as if he requires the structural support. “It’s my responsibility to gather all the information, so I can protect him. I need to know what’s coming his way. If I don’t know everything—”

“You said you were protecting me. Last year.” Lacey takes a choppy breath. “Which basically meant you stopped talking to me until I agreed to stop.”

“This is different. There was no information then, no knowable reason. They didn’t know why your body wasn’t accepting the baby. There is knowable information now, though. That’s why the NTSB is holding a hearing.” He pauses, then says, “I wanted you to stop because the doctor said you might die.”

“I did stop.”

“Only because of what happened.”

“But your
protection
didn’t help me.” Lacey bites off the last word, then turns quickly and sees Edward in the doorway. Her face shifts from darkness to surprise to a fake smile.

“Goodness!” she says. “Did you sleep all right?”

The false brightness on his aunt’s face makes Edward feel terrible. He nods, even though he didn’t sleep all right. He never does, and she must know that, but she wants everything to be different in this moment, and he wants to help her.

“John,” Lacey says, “do you see how many clothes he’s wearing?”

John shudders, like a toy robot coming out of sleep mode. He plays along, but his voice isn’t full strength. “Maybe he’s going out on an expedition.”

Edward thinks:
This is the first day of a year that my parents and brother will never see
.
Don’t you know that?
He looks carefully from his aunt to his uncle and sees that they haven’t remembered. They haven’t had this thought. Which means he’s alone, skating on black ice that exists beneath only his feet.

“We actually wanted to talk to you,” John says. “Just to fill you in on some news from the lawyers.”

Lacey stands by the window, holding a hard-boiled egg; John is by the calendar on the far wall. Edward thinks,
Geometrically, in this room, I am in the middle of their argument
. He feels himself bend, like a reedy limb, under the weight.

“Would you like a piece of toast?” Lacey asks.

“No, thanks.”

“So, the lawyers,” John says. “Most of the logistics have been finalized, with the insurance companies, plural.” He grimaces. “The majority of the victims’ families will receive approximately one million dollars in recognition of their loss and suffering. You’ll receive five million, because—” He stops for a second. “You get more. It will be put in trust for you until you’re twenty-one.”

Lacey lowers the egg to the table and taps it twice. Edward watches tiny cracks spread across the shell.

“This kind of talk reminds me of the hospital,” she says. “Everything sounded absurd then too.”

“It’s a lot of money,” John says.

Edward leans away from the table, as if the money has been physically piled in front of him. He remembers the hospital too—his bright sock elevated, a deep voice filling the air, and wondering why the president of the United States thought it was a good idea to have a conversation with a boy who’d recently fallen out of the sky.

“What I recommend,” John says, “is that you put it out of your mind. You just turned thirteen.” They had marked the occasion a few weeks earlier, by eating cake. It had been a quiet celebration; no one sang the birthday song, because Edward had implored them with his eyes not to do so. If the birthday
had
to happen, it needed to be quick, and muted.

“You won’t be twenty-one for eight years, and the money isn’t even real yet. There’s another period of red tape that needs to be gone through. We just wanted you to know, in case someone mentioned it at the NTSB hearing.” John spreads low-fat butter across a piece of toast. “Not that I expect anyone to do so, but we didn’t want you to be caught unawares.”

“I don’t want it,” Edward says.

“I hear you,” Lacey says. “Do you need any help packing for D.C.?”

Shay keeps him company while he packs, though he half-regrets her presence. She wants to discuss the upcoming hearing, and he does not. He decided he wanted to go, months earlier, but he doesn’t want to think about it.
Go, not think,
some Neanderthal voice in his head repeats, whenever he starts to absorb her words.

“It’s going to be like the courtroom scene in the movie,” she says. “Where the identity of the murderer is revealed.”

“Not exactly.” Edward has all of his brother’s T-shirts laid out on the couch. He chooses two and stuffs them in the bag.

“They’re going to explain why the plane crashed, right? They have the black box, so they know everything that happened.”

I was on the plane,
he thinks. And this is the first moment that he allows himself to place himself there, in the seat, beside his brother. It’s only a flash of a thought, a fraction of a second, but it lays out the frame of the plane around him: the sky, the wing, the other passengers.

“God, I wish I could come,” she says. “You know that all those relatives will be there. Gary might be there too. Your scar is going to go crazy.” She clasps her hands. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you see some sign of your powers. You’ll be near the pieces of the plane and finding out the truth. It’s like you’re visiting the mothership.”

Dr. Mike, in their session that week, had said, “You look checked out, Edward. You do know that you don’t have to go to Washington, right?”

Edward had answered with language he knew Dr. Mike would understand: “I want to go.” Even though
want
was not the right word. All Edward knew for sure was that he’d said he would go, and so he would go.

“Pay close attention,” Shay says. “Take notes, if you can. I need to know everything so I can help you.”

Edward nods.

“No one there can hurt you,” Shay says. “No one can hurt you ever again. You already lost everything, right?”

This startles something deep inside Edward. He tries the words in his mouth. “No one can ever hurt me?”

“That’s right,” Shay says.

She claps him on the back right before he and John leave, like a colonel sending a soldier into battle. Lacey follows them out to the car, and when John goes inside for a minute, she gives Edward a tight hug.

“Wish me luck. I have a job interview today.” Lacey smiles, but the rest of her face is anxious. “I have to do something with my days at some point, right? We all have to.”

“Good luck,” he says.

“I need to feel brave, so I’m wearing your mom’s blouse. I want to get stronger, Edward. For me and for you.”

Edward hadn’t noticed, but now he sees that Lacey’s wearing a shirt with tiny roses on it, which his mom had worn to work at least once a week. The familiarity of the garment makes it difficult for him to swallow for a moment, and he experiences a flash of anger—
that’s not yours, that’s my mom’s!
But the anger dissolves almost immediately. He’s wearing his brother’s clothes, so how can he say it’s wrong for Lacey to wear her sister’s? Also, the idea that wearing the shirt gives Lacey some of his mom’s bravery is interesting. It makes Edward wonder what wearing Jordan’s clothes gives him. He hadn’t thought of it that way; the red sneakers, the parka, the pajamas, were simply a way of keeping his brother close by. Right now he’s wearing Jordan’s blue-striped sweater, and Lacey is wearing his mom’s blouse. When Lacey pulls him in for a final hug, he thinks,
Who are we?
He steps away from the hug and the tangle of
Jane, Jordan, Jane, Jordan
and almost throws himself into the car.

The ride is four hours long and consists of gray highway after gray highway.

John glances at his watch when they pass Princeton and says, “Your aunt is in her interview right now. We should think good thoughts.”

Edward shifts beneath his seatbelt, looking for a more comfortable position. “You want her to have a job?”

“I want her to be happy. And you’re doing better, right? So, she doesn’t have a reason to be home all the time.”

Edward thinks,
I’m doing better?
The question feels unanswerable, and he has a memory of his father marking up one of his writing assignments and saying:
You have to qualify your terms. What does
better
mean? Better than what?

The trees are stripped of leaves; the sky is colorless. There are a series of warnings that they’re about to leave New Jersey and then a sign that they’re in Delaware. John gives Edward the choice of which Broadway soundtrack to listen to. Edward stares at the list of options, trying to figure out which one might be the least cheesy and awful. “
Rent
?”

“Excellent decision,” John says, and they listen to impoverished young artists belt out their feelings for the rest of the drive.

They share a hotel room that night, where Edward lies in the dark and listens to his uncle snore. His body had ached during the car ride, as if gravity weighed more than it usually did. He’d hoped the sensation would stop when the car stopped, and for a while it did, but in the darkness it’s returned. Edward wriggles beneath the papery sheets. The sensation reminds him of when he left the hospital and his body hurt in a new way, because it turned out the hospital had been an exoskeleton and without it he was vulnerable. He presses his hands against his forehead, trying to match the pressure with pressure. He’s in a hotel bed, in a strange darkness, listening to a twitchy heater mixed with his uncle’s wheezes. Edward feels unmoored, like he might be anywhere in space, anywhere in time, and anywhere is terrifying. When he manages to fall asleep, his body ejects him back into consciousness, into panic:
Where am I?

In the morning, over oatmeal, John says, “I think we should have a signal, in case you want to leave in the middle of the hearing. We can leave, whenever you want.”

“A signal?” He thinks of Dr. Mike and his baseball cap.

“Maybe you could say,
It’s hot in here.
If you say that, we’ll leave.”

“What if it just
is
hot in there?”

John looks at him. “Then don’t comment on it.”

“Oh, okay. Good idea.”

The hearing is in the National Transportation Safety Board’s conference center in downtown D.C. They park several blocks away, due to closed streets. “Must be construction,” John says as they walk. When they turn onto the block, the foot traffic is thicker, and they have to navigate through a group of people.

“What do you think?” John sounds like he’s asking himself.

The hairs on Edward’s arms rise. But before he has a chance to figure out why, a man—smelling of sharp aftershave—turns to him and says in a polite voice, “May I touch your arm for a second? My wife was on the plane.”

Edward’s first thought is that the man is lying. This is a man on a sidewalk, making things up. But someone else, as if released by the man’s words, is talking to him. “Hi, Edward? I’m sorry to bother you, but I wondered if you saw my sister?” A woman is holding out her phone, with a photo of a curly-haired, smiling brunette.

“Oh,” Edward says, and his voice lilts, as if trying to make the syllable sound like an answer.

“Her name is Rolina?” the woman says.

Another phone is thrust in front of him, though from a different direction, with the image of a middle-aged Asian man. A blue-eyed, scruffy-looking guy offers a printed photograph of an old woman with white curls and an annoyed smile. “Does my mom look familiar?” he says.

Edward directs his eyes where they’re pointing. Screens, faces. He thinks,
I should respond,
but he can’t. He feels like he’s forgotten how to speak English.

He hears—the terms layered over one another—
girl, mother, cousin, buddy, boyfriend
.

Someone says, “I want to make a documentary about sole survivors. Can I interview you?”

John grabs Edward’s arm and pulls him to the right, off the sidewalk and into a dry cleaner. John turns the lock on the door. “I have a Kickstarter!” the guy calls through the glass.

“Hey!” the man behind the counter says, but he goes quiet when he sees the cameras and faces at the window. “Is one of you famous?” he says. “You must be famous. You in movies?”

Edward turns away from the window.

“Can I have your autograph for my wall?”

“I don’t think so,” Edward says.

John calls the NTSB contact, and a security officer meets them at the dry cleaner, takes them out the back door, and uses his body to shield Edward from the crowd. Hands make their way past the officer and touch his arm, his shoulder. There are more phone screens, more photos of men and women. He’s pelted with names.

Someone says, “What did it feel like to walk away from the plane?”

A lady with a strong Southern accent recites the Hail Mary, which is the only prayer Edward knows by heart. A homeless woman, who was a fixture at their local New York playground, used to shout the prayer all day long from her favorite bench. Sometimes Jordan would sneak up on Eddie while he was balancing an equation, or reading, and chant into his ear:
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Edward can remember the last time this happened, his brother singing, and how he had taken off his sneaker and thrown it at Jordan’s retreating back, both of them laughing.

A voice from behind Edward yells: “No one would give a shit about this kid if he was black. You people realize that? They think he’s the second coming only because he’s white!”