Dear Edward: A Novel (23 page)

His unspoken allegiance is to John, who looks distracted and checks his phone twice during the meal, a habit Lacey hates. His wife narrows her eyes and focuses on Edward while telling them that she had a slow day at work, which meant she got to spend an extra hour holding babies in the nursery.

“Have you ever smelled a newborn?” she says to Edward.

“I don’t think so.”

“You’ll have to come to the hospital with me one day to smell one. It’s indescribably wonderful.”

I have too many letters to read,
he thinks, and leans his weight imperceptibly toward his uncle. If Lacey is strong now and cloaked in the mantle of his mother’s bravery, where does that leave her husband and nephew?

“It’s true,” John says with intensity, several beats too late, “about the newborn smell.”

Edward and Lacey look at him, and an expression of alarm crosses John’s face. Edward, who is sensitive to yearning and mixed-up time zones, is able to chart the three of them in this strange moment. Lacey is staring at her husband as if he’d accidentally hit her. As if he’d said something she’d hoped with all her heart that he would say a few years earlier—when holding their baby in her arms was her deepest desire—but that this version of herself no longer needs, and so she experiences the statement as a betrayal. John, lost and panicked, gazes at Lacey and Edward, thinking,
Dear God, have I messed everything up?
And Edward, living inside the correspondence in the garage, which means living inside questions and a deafening desire for answers, feels every atom of their shared vulnerability and wonders if any of them will be okay.

When Edward leaves the house after dinner, he finds Besa waiting for him in the driveway.

“Oh. Hi?” he says.

“I would like to know what you and my daughter are up to.”

It’s cold, but neither of them is wearing a winter coat. “We’ve had a lot of homework lately,” he says, and shivers.

“Don’t insult my intelligence,
mi amor
.” Besa has always called him
mi amor,
but Edward has sensed a slight dimming in her warmth toward him in the last year. He now towers over her, and annoyance flickers across her face when she cranes her neck to look at him. Shay said to him once that her mother loved all children but distrusted men. And Edward is uncomfortably aware that he now looks like a young man.

He tries to make his features appear trustworthy. “You should ask Shay, Besa.”

She regards him from beneath her eyebrows. “You know I already have. Would I be coming to you first?”

Edward sighs. Lying to Besa is unthinkable. She demands truth with every line of her face. He tries to come up with something that at least feels true. “We’re working on a project. We’re trying to help people.”

She glares at him, an expression that makes her look so much like her daughter that Edward almost smiles.

“In the middle of the night? You think I don’t hear you two scurrying around?”

“Oh,” Edward says. “Well, the project—”

“Are you and Shay having sex?”

The look on his face must be answer enough, because Besa’s face softens with relief. She leans forward and presses her hand against his cheek. “I’m sorry,
pobrecito
. I didn’t mean to give you a heart attack. I have my fears, but of course I was wrong.”

Edward is unable to speak, and his face feels like it’s burning up. Besa laughs and takes his arm. She leads him toward her house. “I’m glad you’re working on a project. It’s for school, I assume? Shay needs to keep her grades up in order to get a scholarship. A project for extra credit would be wonderful. We don’t need to mention any of this to Shay, do we?”

“No,” Edward croaks, as she deposits him inside her house.

He has to stand at the bottom of the stairs for a few minutes, trying to manage his heart rate and temperature, before he’s able to enter Shay’s room. He’s relieved to see that she’s at her desk, with her back to him.

“Just finishing one,” she says, without turning.

He sits down on her bed to wait. When she turns, she hands him a large envelope. She says, “Are you okay? You look sunburned.”

“I’m fine. How many responses are in here?”

“Just one today.”

We can’t ignore the letters from or about little kids,
she’d said the morning after they opened the first duffel bag. They’d agreed that she would compose and type responses, which Edward would then sign. Shay had started with the second letter they’d read, from the dad asking Edward to write specific messages to his three children. She had written and rewritten those three letters over the course of several days.
I can’t make a mistake,
she’d said.
This is important. I need to say the perfect thing.

Edward pulls the new letter out of the envelope and scans the page. She’s written to a nun in South Carolina, who said the beauty of Edward’s salvation kept her from leaving the church.

“I know it’s not a kid, but the nun seems sweet,” Shay says. “And she’s extremely old. Is that okay with you?”

“You’re in charge of who gets written back.”

“The nun claimed that she knew you were truly saved by God because of how your hair looked in the photos of you from the hospital.”

“My hair?”

“Apparently Jesus had dark, shiny hair that looked wet, like he had just been anointed. And your hair looked like that too.”

“My hair looked wet? That’s gross.”

“She believes it proved that God had anointed you and thereby saved you from death.”

Edward almost laughs at this, but can’t muster the effort to force the sound up his throat and out his mouth.

“I’m going to skip school tomorrow,” he says. “Lacey’s going to the hospital all day for some training thing and I need to get through the rest of the letters. I feel like I can’t breathe half the time.”

“Fine, I will too.”

He’d expected this and is prepared. “If we both skip, it will seem too obvious. We might get caught. I barely have any absences, so I can definitely get away with it if I’m alone. Besides, you need to keep your grades up.” He blushes when he says this, remembering Besa’s accusation in the driveway.

Shay’s dimple deepens in her cheek, rarely a good sign. The fact that he has planned an escape on his own—even a tiny one—rankles her.

Edward meets her gaze. He has no choice. He has nothing against school at this point, but it’s a waste of time. Time he should spend reading; each letter feels like a page in a book that he won’t fully understand until he reaches the end. It feels imperative—in a way nothing else in his life has—that he read every word. The attention he brings to the letters seems to be changing him; Edward can feel strands inside himself gathering, trying to find a shape in which he will be able to meet the eyes of the people in the photographs.

2:04
P.M.

The plane is two-thirds of the way to Los Angeles. The passengers’ consciousness reaches forward, searching the final stretch of tunnel for a glimmer of light. Shoulders loosen and headaches fade, because more onboard hours lie behind them than ahead. Hope returns with thoughts of logistics, car-service pickups, and whom to text the moment the wheels touch the ground.

Jane looks up from her screen.

She’s just rewritten a scene in which two robots get into a fight, and the only pleasure she has been able to salvage is changing the gender of both robots to female.
Girl power,
she thinks in disgust. She’d pictured the robots as herself and Lacey. Sisters, which means they love each other straight to the bone but have spent their lives circling each other, testing the air between them with jabs. Jane is the seventh credited writer to work on this script; it’s only by personalizing the writing that she can endure it.

The cockpit door opens, and Jane has a clear view into the darkened space. A flash of windshield and a panel of blinking lights punctuated with levers, the shoulder of the co-pilot. The pilot, a gray-haired man with a salt-and-pepper mustache, smiles at Veronica, says a few words Jane can’t hear, and then steps into the bathroom. The door pulls shut behind him.

Jane returns to her computer screen, writes three lines of dialogue, erases them, and tries again. She’s getting somewhere, she thinks. She glances up then, because a spiky cry has filled the air. Jane cranes around. She thinks:
A baby? Mine?
Then:
Don’t be ridiculous; they’re not babies anymore
.
They don’t need me like that
.

“Is there a doctor on the plane?” This issues in the same pitched voice, and even though passengers are now standing and Veronica is in the aisle, Jane is able to see that it’s the nurse, wearing her whites. She’s hunched over the old man beside her. He looks terrible, or not terrible exactly, but wrong. His skin seems to have gone rubbery—his eyes are closed, and he’s whiter than the wall of the plane.

Jane’s hands are off her computer; without thinking she presses on her birthmark. She presses hard, as if it’s a button that will reverse the clock, even if only by a few minutes.

“Shit,” Mark says.

He’s backed up slightly, so he’s halfway into Jane’s seat area. They’re both half-standing now, peering through the cluster of people at the agitated nurse, who is holding the old man’s wrist as if it’s a musical instrument she can’t figure out how to play.

“He looks bad, doesn’t he?” Mark says.

Veronica’s voice comes over the loudspeaker: smooth, calm. “Two things, ladies and gentlemen. First, please notice that the fasten-seatbelt sign is on. We’re anticipating turbulence, so kindly stay in your seats. Second, if there is a doctor on the plane, could he or she please report to first class?”

Jane thinks,
I want to go to the boys
. She has the image of rushing into the back of the plane, past the ill man and the nurse, giving her space over to Mark, who seems to want to reverse as far away from the scene as possible anyway.

A stocky redheaded woman appears with a gray backpack. She takes the old man’s wrist from the nurse and puts her other hand to the side of the old man’s neck. She waits, as if for news.

“Doctor?” Veronica murmurs.

Everybody in first class is watching. The nurse, with nothing left to hold on to, looks bereft.

Finally, the redheaded woman lays the arm across the old man’s chest. She stands up. She speaks quietly to Veronica, but her voice carries.

“He’s dead.”

“Dead?” Veronica gasps the word. “You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

Jane reaches for the seat back in front of her, because she’s lost her balance. There is a dead man across the aisle. The only other dead bodies she’s seen were her parents, but that was two decades ago, and she had been prepared by terrible diagnoses and then visible declines. Their dead bodies had been in coffins. Her mother had been wearing her favorite pink lipstick, lying with her hands folded on her waist.

It takes a moment for Jane to realize that Mark has grabbed a seat in the opposite direction and Veronica has gone wavy in front of her. There is another spiky cry, but the nurse is in her seat, as silent as a stone. The old man is slumped in his chair.

“Turbulence,” someone calls, and Jane is, for a split second, appreciative that what is happening isn’t inside her body, because if this shaking, pitching, and blurring were taking place solely within her own skin, that would mean something had gone terribly wrong.

January 2016

Edward pretends to go to school in the morning. He eats breakfast with his aunt and uncle. He uses the upstairs bathroom, so he can check to see if his uncle slept in the nursery. The sheets are rumpled, and a fat novel—
Last of the Breed,
by Louis L’Amour—sits on the bed stand. Edward blinks at the scene, and for a moment the bed and the letters and the lake outside the clear-paned window all feel the same, like a row of books on a shelf. Formed with equal weight and density. Why should one of these items make him happy, or unhappy? They are neutral. Beds are made to be slept in. Letters to be read.
I’m either becoming Zen or more depressed,
he thinks.

He waits on the sidewalk for Shay, as usual. He waves at Besa, and they walk together down the block. Shay has her haughty face on and says little during their walk, but he knows that she’ll cover for him at school.

“Thank you,” he says, when they reach the corner.

“You have to show me everything you read, obviously.”

“Obviously.”

He watches her walk forward. He waits until she’s successfully crossed two sides of the intersection, and then he enters the forest that lines the back of the houses on their block. He knows John and Lacey are leaving the house now, and he can arrive home unnoticed by this route.

When you visited us when you were little, you and Jordan played back there,
his aunt had said once, of the forest.
You thought it was wonderful, because you’d never been in proper woods before.
Edward has no memory of this, but as he picks his way over tree roots, he tries to imagine himself and Jordan as boys, running loops around the fat tree trunks. Jordan is in the lead, and Eddie follows, laughing. The two boys examine a bug in the dirt, then find two big sticks and pretend they’re swords.

Edward stops when he reaches the hedge that backs up against the garage. He doesn’t question the sight of the boys in front of him. He feels like his imagination, perhaps fueled by the contents of the letters, has been butting up against reality lately. In his daydreams, he often sees Gary, his blond beard flecked with gray, taking notes on the deck of his research boat. In the gym a few days earlier, Edward thought he’d seen Benjamin Stillman lifting weights in the mirror. The soldier was dressed in his uniform, the same one he’d been wearing on the plane. He was deadlifting an enormous amount of weight. He’d looked real, to the extent that Edward almost dropped the dumbbell he was holding. He spun around, while Mrs. Tuhane barked, “Adler, pay attention!” But, of course, no one was there.

Edward watches Jordan, who appears to be about nine years old. This was the boy who jumped off the top of a car to impress Shay. His black hair, always untamable, shoots in several different directions. Edward has no problem recalling every plane of his brother’s face, even as his parents’ faces and voices zoom in and out of focus. He doesn’t know why Jordan remains perfectly distinct while his parents blur, but perhaps it’s because he’d always considered his brother to be part of him. They are inextricable, even now. Edward smiles because his brother is smiling at the sword in his hand.

A question appears in his mind:
What can I do for you?

Immediately, it seems strange that this didn’t occur to Edward earlier, that it took an avalanche of letters from strangers to reveal this as a possibility. Lacey had kissed his cheek
for
her sister, which surely means Edward can do something for his brother. He can look at a day—today—and think,
If Jordan were here, what would he want to do?

Edward’s not sure where to start, but he’s hungry again, so he decides to start with food. He squeezes through the hedge and checks that John and Lacey’s cars are gone before heading to the kitchen. He can eat the way his brother would choose to, which means the meal Edward carries from the kitchen to the garage is almost exactly Jordan’s last meal on the plane: carrot sticks, a small pot of applesauce, and a hummus sandwich.

When he opens the door to the garage, a voice says, “What, you didn’t bring any food for me? So rude.”

Shay is sitting cross-legged on the cement floor, next to the duffel bags. “Don’t be mad,” she says. “We won’t get in trouble, I promise. I’ll lie my pants off if I have to.”

Edward frowns, but it’s just to register his skepticism. He’s not mad.

“Besides,” she says, “we’ll get twice as much reading done together.”

He settles down beside her. “Hand me a letter.”

She unzips the second duffel bag, which they’re two-thirds of the way through. Shay’s spreadsheet is next to them, to write down the different requests.

They both read for a few minutes, then Shay says, “Don’t tell me you weren’t happy to see me.”

He says, truthfully, “I’m always happy to see you.”

He opens the folder, as if to cross-reference the letter he’d just read with a victim’s photograph. Really, he just wants to glance at the photo of Jordan. It seems possible to Edward that he’d made the decision to stay home today, to be
here,
because of Jordan. His brother would certainly have played hooky. The fully formed motivation had simply followed in the wake of the action.
What would Jordan do? What can I do for Jordan?
He is the age his brother was when he died, and Edward feels—hopes—that he’s entered his brother’s orbit in a new way.

He reads a series of letters with more demands on how he should live.
Fulfill every dream. My son was afraid to fail and so never joined a band. Don’t be afraid to take risks.

My daughter was lazy and put her dreams off because she thought she had nothing but time. Then she got on a plane to visit her sister in Los Angeles. She told me she would start working hard after her trip. Think of how much your mama must miss you, and make her proud.

I’m sorry for rambling—I’ve been in the Jack Daniel’s—but my lady was the love of my life and she was in pastry school because she had a gift for pastry. I wish you could have tried her beignets.
They were fucking fantastic.
Figure out what your gift is, Edward Adler, and then blow that shit up. You owe my lady that.

Usually, Edward experiences these kinds of letters as a crushing weight on his chest. Today, though, eating his brother’s sandwich, with Shay at his side, he feels a shot of Jordan’s crinkly, excited energy. Jordan was always looking for the opportunity to say,
Fuck no
. To defy their dad’s expectations and curfews, to opt out when everyone else was opting in. Edward never had that inclination, but he feels like he’s ingesting it with the hummus.
Fuck no?
he thinks, and it’s the first time he’s considered it as an option.
Fuck no,
to the people telling him how to live.

He pulls his phone out of his pocket and writes a text to Mrs. Cox.
I’m really sorry, but I haven’t read the investing book. I tried to, but the subject isn’t interesting to me, so I couldn’t get through it. Shay and I have really enjoyed the biographies you’ve sent, though. I hope you’re not disappointed.

When he sends the text, Edward immediately feels lighter. He’s felt guilty about his silence over the book since he received it. He pulls another letter out of the bag.

Hey, Edward,

My mother died a long time ago of depression and my brother, Mark, even though he crashed in your goddamn plane, would have died of depression eventually too. All I ever knew was that I wasn’t going to go that way, and that’s why I surf and smoke and don’t own anything that doesn’t fit inside my van. If I don’t love it, I don’t keep it.

Mark left me all his money in his will, even though we hadn’t spoken in three years, which was a kind of fuck-you to the way I’ve chosen to live my life. He wanted to saddle me with millions—after I paid off his ridiculous debts—so I would have to buy a house and a Benz and some fancy vases to fill my empty shelves. He wanted me to be like him, which just means rich and miserable and always in credit-card debt, but I’m not doing that. I’m giving the whole fuckload away. The insurance money too. Well, after I fix the back left tire on my van and buy a new board.

My girl is a Buddhist, and she’s always saying thank you to the beach and to the waves and the sunset. I used to think it was all woo-woo bullshit, but I like listening to her talk. I’ve caught myself thanking a tree once or twice. I’ve decided that even though it’s bullshit, it’s the good kind.

Anyway, she tells me to say thank you to Mark, because his death set me free all over again. Made me realize how important my chosen life is. But I think instead I’m going to say thank you to you, kid. Thank you for receiving this letter. Thank you for your life, and for being the one that was saved.

I’ve enclosed a check for the amount I got from the will and the insurance guys. I want you to have it. You can keep it, or give it away, whatever you want. I don’t care what you do. You deserve it, man, after what you’ve been through. And I got no use for it at all.

So, thank you, and peace, brother.

Jax Lassio

The postmark on the envelope says that he mailed the letter almost two years earlier, and there’s a check enclosed, made out to
Edward Adler,
for
$7,300,000.

“Uh,” Edward says.

“What?” Shay takes the letter from him. She reads quickly, and her mouth falls open.

He studies the rectangular check and the numbers written on it.

“Hold it up to the light,” Shay says. “They always do that in movies. I don’t know why.”

Edward lifts his arm. Framed by the window, it’s still a check, with the same impossible number of zeros.

“Holy shit,” Shay says. “Holy shit. Do you think it’s a joke?”

“No.” Edward flips open the folder and finds Mark Lassio’s photograph. The man’s brash grin makes him look like someone who expects to be on magazine covers. Edward remembers Mark leaving the bathroom before the flight attendant. He hadn’t been grinning, but he’d looked satisfied, as if that had been another magazine spread, as if he was where he wanted to be.
Gross,
Eddie had said to Jordan. How was it possible that Edward was now in a net that contained that man and his brother?

“You don’t even need the money,” Shay says, behind him. “This is insane.”

When the school loudspeaker summons Edward to the principal’s office the next afternoon, Edward assumes Principal Arundhi figured out that he’d skipped school. On the way through the halls, Edward looks for Shay, wanting to tell her that this was her fault; they are a package deal, so the double absence was glaringly obvious, and they have been caught.

Principal Arundhi meets him at the door. A watering can dangles from his hand at an odd angle, as if it were a cigarette, and his suit looks like it’s been slept in.

“What’s wrong?” Edward says. This has to be more than him missing school; the principal looks like a seam that’s been picked apart.

“It must be a virus. Six ferns have died in the last three days. Six. I’ve removed the affected plants.” The principal gestures to a blank stretch on the windowsill. One of the hanging pots is gone as well. “I’m hoping that will end the transmission. I see no signs of illness on the others.” He looks at Edward blankly. “All I can do is take care of the ones that remain.”

“Can I help?”

“Yes.”

Principal Arundhi looks like he’s not going to say more, as if specifics aren’t necessary, only the promise of help. Edward says, “How?”

“I’d like you to take the kangaroo paw home. I don’t know where the virus started. My home, as well as this office, might be infected. Please take him home with you just until I get everyone back in good health.”

Edward looks at the old fern in the corner, ensconced in its bright-yellow pot. It is Principal Arundhi’s oldest and favorite plant. “But what if I kill it?”

“I trust you, Edward,” the principal says. “I trust you completely.”

When Edward gets home, he sets up a station in the basement. He places the yellow pot on a card table directly beneath the window that gets the best light. Beside the fern is a bag of plant food and a spray bottle filled with room-temperature water. Edward checks the soil and mists the leaves.

Shay is hopping up and down on the other side of the basement. “I’m still trying to calm down,” she says, when he gives her a look. “Seven million dollars.”

“I know,” he says.

“I googled and it looks like you
can
deposit a check that’s two years old, as long as the money is still in the originating bank account. Will you please stop obsessing over that bush?”

“Fern,” he says. “And, no, I won’t.”

“You could buy about twelve houses in this town with that money,” she says. “Or maybe an entire island somewhere! What are you going to do?”

Edward has the check in his back pocket. He didn’t know where to put it, so keeping it on his person seemed safest. He touches the pocket now reflexively. He imagines himself surfing next to Jax, whom he pictures looking like a longhaired movie star. They pass the check back and forth in the middle of the waves.

“I can’t deal with it now.”

“I know. You can’t deal with anything until you finish the letters.” Shay sounds exasperated, and out of breath from the jumping.

“That’s right.” Edward presses the soil with his finger. He wonders if the plant knows it’s in a new location and is confused. He wonders if it misses Principal Arundhi.

Shay stays for dinner that night, and when they slide into their seats in front of plates of pork chops, broccoli, and mashed potatoes, Edward says, “I guess I should tell you guys that I’m eating vegan now.”

Lacey wrinkles her nose, as if he’s said a word she’s never heard before. “Vegan?”

Shay says, “I’ll eat his pork chop and his mashed potatoes, if you made them with milk. Don’t worry, nothing will go to waste.”

“Why the change?” John says.

Edward tells the truth. “I’m doing it for my brother.” He pauses, and it occurs to him that his aunt and uncle probably hadn’t been up to date on his brother’s eating habits. He says, “Jordan became vegan a few weeks before he died.”