Dear Edward: A Novel (4 page)

The neurologist calls Lacey and John into the hall. “The truth is,” he says, “that if ten different people went through exactly the same trauma as this child—were banged around, pitched at a tremendous velocity, and then jolted to a stop—they would all have different symptoms.” He raises his white eyebrows for emphasis. “Traumatic brain injury is invisible to most of our measuring tools, so I can’t tell you with any certainty what Edward is going through or will go through in the future.” He focuses his attention on Lacey. “Imagine I grabbed you by the shoulders and shook you as hard as I could. When I let go, you might not be technically injured—no muscles pulled, et cetera—but your body would feel the trauma. Right? That’s how it is for Edward. He may have odd symptoms over the next few months, even years. Things like depression, anxiety, panic; his senses of balance, hearing, and smell may all be affected.” The doctor glances at his watch. “Any questions?”

John and Lacey look at each other. Everything, including language, seems to have splintered and fallen apart at their feet.
Any questions?

Finally, John says, “Not right now,” and Lacey shakes her head.

The nurse wakes the boy up in the middle of the night to take his blood pressure and temperature. She says, “Are you okay?” The bald doctor always leads with, “How’s the pain?” When his aunt arrives each morning, she smooths his hair off his forehead and says, in a low whisper, “How’re you doing?”

Edward is unable to answer any of these questions. He can’t consider how he’s feeling; that door is far too dangerous to open. He tries to stay away from thoughts and emotions, as if they’re furniture he can skirt past in a room. When the nurse leaves the TV on the cartoon channel, he watches it. His mouth is always dry, and the clicking in his ear comes and goes. Sometimes he is awake but not awake, and hours go by without him noticing. He’ll have a breakfast tray across his lap, and then the light’s fading outside.

He doesn’t like his daily walk, which isn’t actually a walk, since he’s in a wheelchair. “You need a change of scenery,” the nurse with dreadlocks tells him each weekday. The weekend nurse, who has blond hair so long it almost touches her bottom, doesn’t say anything. She just loads him into the wheelchair and pushes him into the hallway.

This is where the people wait. The hall is lined with them. Sick people, also in wheelchairs, or standing weakly in doorways. The nurses try to shoo them back into their rooms. “Don’t clog the corridor,” a male nurse shouts. “This is a fire hazard. Give the boy some space.”

An old man makes the sign of the cross, and so does a dark-skinned woman with an IV in her arm. A redheaded teenager, the age of Jordan, nods at him, his eyes curious. So many eyes stare at Edward that the scene looks like a Picasso painting: hundreds of eyeballs, and then a smattering of limbs and hairstyles. An old woman reaches out to touch his hand as he passes. “God has blessed you.”

The worst are the criers. Edward tries not to look, but their sobs thunder like organ notes and suck up the available air. It feels unkind that they are shoving their emotions at him when his own sadness and fear are so vast that he has to hide from them. The tears of these strangers sting against his raw skin. His ears click and people hold handkerchiefs to their mouths and then the nurse reaches the end of the corridor and the mechanical door slides open and they are outside. He looks down at his busted legs, to avoid seeing the lethal sky.

They release Edward from the hospital when he can bear weight on the less damaged leg and therefore use crutches. His head and ribs have healed, and the bruises on his chest and legs are yellow now instead of purple. The staff gather in his room to say goodbye, and it is only then that Edward realizes he doesn’t know any of their names. They are wearing name tags on their chests, but it makes his head hurt to read. He wonders if this is another symptom. Perhaps he will never put a name with a face ever again, and the only names he will know will be the ones he knew before the crash. This thought is oddly comforting, as he shakes hands with the bald doctor and the blond nurse and the one with the dreadlocks too.

He rises out of the wheelchair at the front door of the hospital and is handed crutches. He walks slowly to the car, between Lacey and John. He’s conscious of his aunt and uncle’s presence in a new way. The last time he saw them before this was at Christmastime, when they’d met for brunch at a restaurant in Manhattan. He remembers listening to his father and uncle discuss a new computer-programming language. He’d sat between his mother and Lacey and had been so bored that he built a house using his silverware and napkin. The women had skipped from one seemingly pointless conversation to the next: neighbors, the ice cream Lacey made once a year from an elusive Canadian berry, a handsome actor on his mom’s television show.

If asked, Edward would have said that he loved his aunt and uncle, but it had always been clear that they weren’t
for
him, or Jordan. The grown-ups got together for the grown-ups. The gatherings were designed to allow his mother and aunt to share a teary hug goodbye and promise into each other’s hair:
We will see each other more often
. Edward can picture his brother across from him at that brunch, steepling his fingers and trying to weigh in on the technical conversation his dad and John were having, as if he were also a grown-up. The image of his brother is so painful that Edward’s vision cuts out entirely for a second, and he stumbles.

“Steady,” John says.

“Goodbye, Edward,” voices say.

“Good luck, Edward.”

A car door swings open in front of him. Only then does he see, on the far side of the car, across the street, a small crowd of people. He wonders dimly why they’re there. Then someone in the crowd calls Edward’s name, and others clap and wave their arms when they see that they have his attention. He studies a posterboard held by a little girl. His head aches as he absorbs the words:
Stay Strong.
The sign beside it says in block letters:
MIRACLE BOY!

“I don’t know how they found out your release date,” John says. “It wasn’t in the papers.”

Lacey rubs his arm, and since he is precariously balanced on his booted foot, this almost throws him over.

“It’s like they think I’m famous.”

“You are famous, kind of,” John says.

“Let’s leave,” Lacey says.

They climb into the car and drive past the waving, poster-bearing crowd. Edward stares at them through the window. He offers a small wave, and a man pumps the air with his fist, as if Edward’s wave was what he’d been hoping for. The clicking noise starts up inside Edward then, a reminder of the staccato beat he used to time piano notes with. He sinks back into his seat and listens to his body. He can’t remember being invaded with sounds like this ever before. Beneath the sharp clicks there is the thud—a blurrier, messier sound—of his own heart.

They drive toward a house Edward has visited sporadically over the course of his life, but always with his parents and brother. Now he’s going to live there. How is that possible? He tries to recall the name of his aunt and uncle’s town. He watches the cars and trees wash past the window. They seem to be driving too quickly, and he’s about to say something when he spots a graveyard. For the first time, he wonders what happened to the bodies.

An icy sweat coats his skin. “Please pull over.”

John swerves to the hard edge of the highway, and Edward pushes open his door, hangs his body out, and throws up onto the gray dirt. Oatmeal and orange juice. Cars hurtle past. Lacey rubs his back. He pretends, as he does every time her face isn’t directly in his line of vision, that she is his mom.

He can’t stop vomiting; his body coils up, releases.

He hears her say, “I hated when the nurses told you that you were going to be okay.” Lacey’s voice is more strident than his mother’s; she’s his aunt again.

“You’re not okay. Do you hear me, Edward? Are you listening? You are not okay. We are not okay.
This is not okay
.”

His body has paused, and he’s unsure whether the violence will continue. When he realizes he’s done, that his body is scraped clean and pulsing with emptiness, he sits up. He nods his head. And somehow, that statement and that nod loosen and break apart the air between the three of them. There is a note of relief. They have somewhere to start, even if it is the worst place imaginable.

9:05
A.M.

The spiky buildings of Manhattan can be seen out the window, the raised right arm of the Statue of Liberty, the swipe of a bridge across the river. The passengers shift in their seats, searching for positions comfortable enough to occupy for six hours in the sky. Top buttons on shirts are undone. Shoes removed. Passengers with the gift of being able to fall asleep anywhere, anytime, do so now. There’s no need for consciousness, after all. On the ground, people’s bodies are utilized, but on a plane, a person’s size, shape, and strength have no utility and are in fact an inconvenience. Everyone has to find a way to store themselves, in the most tolerable fashion possible, for the duration of the flight.

Florida peers past Linda and the sleeping woman with the blue scarf. She has a hunger to see the city before it disappears behind clouds. Different locations have different energies, and for her, New York is glittering eye shadow, Basquiat graffiti, and strangers with bold dreams. She sees herself dancing in bars, slow-walking across cacophonous streets while men hoot at her womanly goods, wringing all the life she can out of her days in that snap-crackle-pop city.

Florida lived in New York during her twenties and early thirties, but she never pictures only one period of time; she has to think of them all, layered on top of each other like a Mexican dip. She’s lived many lives, in many bodies, so her memories are oceanic—a body of water she swims regularly. She tried to count her lives once and reached thirteen before the project bored her. Some lives she entered as a walk-in, which meant she’d entered the body of someone whose soul had departed after either a physical trauma—like a car accident that left the person in a coma—or an attempted suicide. Those entries were innately exciting, and therefore her favorite kind. There was nothing like waking up in a new adult body, suffused in someone else’s aura. She was always a little disappointed when—as in her current life—she entered in the traditional manner, as a baby.

The plane climbs, and Florida finds herself remembering her most recent wedding, only seven years earlier. Two dozen friends on the piece of Vermont land she and Bobby had recently bought. The five acres were pristine then, a meadow dipping down to a stream, with a forest on the far side. They’d only just started to plan—Bobby was in charge of this, a fact Florida would later regret—and were several months from building their home. Florida’s friends had traveled up from the East Village, and there was a tent with Christmas lights and a local band. They danced in the smoky blue air to Pinoy music. Florida drank wine and shook her ass and tits and hair and sang along, her hand in her husband’s. It was one of those magic evenings when happiness shone out of every heart and face, and Florida felt knitted together by love.

The memory makes her sigh now, wedged into an airplane seat. She feels the plane rise beneath her. She glances at Linda, whose eyes are closed. She’s keenly aware of the irony. This girl is running toward a husband, while Florida is running away from one.

The plane hits thirty thousand feet, and Mark Lassio remembers something from the night before, something he’d blanked out until this moment. He was at a club, celebrating a buddy’s birthday—more a colleague than a buddy, actually—when he caught sight of an ex-girlfriend across the room. His most recent ex-girlfriend, who hated clubs, who hated to dance, who was, in fact, highly skilled at hating. She was certainly better at hating than she was at bond trading, which was her job. It was something she and Mark had had in common; they delighted in ranting to each other. After sex, they would lie in bed and take turns going off. They trashed co-workers, friends, bosses, politicians, their families, everyone. It was the best part of their relationship—there was a childlike joy to it, like flying downhill on a sled—and Mark felt a prick of true disappointment when his therapist insisted that it wasn’t healthy.

His ex had noticed him a second after he spotted her. She stood by the far wall; a crowd of people were dancing and making out between them, and the music was a collection of beats pitched at a volume designed to shake the words out of your head. He shouldn’t have been there at all; he was trying to stay clean, and he could smell the goddamn cocaine in the air. Sharp and tangy, like sliced lemon. Mark searched her face, and a question yawned open inside him.
Maybe? Could we? Did we once have?

She met his look. She had dark, almost black, eyes. She shook her head and mouthed:
No
.

He mouthed back:
Fuck you
, and started to dance, something he rarely did anymore. He was off the beat at first and had to re-jig his movements to match the thumping noise. He bounced on his toes and threw his arms over his head, and when the crowd yelled along to a refrain that he couldn’t make out, he yelled too. A guy nearby gave him a startled look, then grinned and they crashed palms in a high five.

Veronica’s voice issues from the PA, and Mark cranes to see her, but she’s not in sight. She announces that the plane has reached a sufficient altitude that approved electronic devices can be used. He pulls his laptop out of the seat-back pocket at the same moment the woman sitting next to him pulls out hers. They give each other a weak smile.

“Deadline,” she says.

“Life isn’t life without them.”

She screws up her face as if she’s actually considering his words. This annoys him.

“Hmm,” she says.

Mark wants to stop talking, but he also wants this lady to know that he’s on top of everything. He says, “You have two boys. I was on the security line with you.”

His seatmate—who’s maybe forty-five, not that much older than he is but from a totally different place, probably the suburbs, definitely the marriage-and-kids lifestyle, which is another planet from the one that he lives on—looks startled. She squints at her laptop, which has powered up. “I do.”

“I have a brother,” he says. Then he thinks,
Sure,
that makes sense. This lady looks a little like Mom, and the boys are Jax and me
. He remembers being with his family on a plane, heading to visit his grandparents. He and Jax are punching each other in the arm and splitting a Twix bar. His mom looks stressed, like this lady looks stressed, though he didn’t understand why until he grew up and started to rattle like a boiling pot about to lose its lid. His mom, quiet with thin lips, who always seemed to be turning away from him, took too many sleeping pills when Mark was eighteen and never woke up.

“I’m not sitting with them, with the boys, because I have work to do,” the woman says.

Mark takes this as a request to buzz off. He turns his attention to his own screen, which is covered with detailed graphs and tables depicting market trends, losses, and indices of change. He scans the scalp trade. He processes the S&P numbers, the CME exchange, the latest bids. He’s looking for the same thing he looks for every minute of every day: opportunities invisible to everyone but himself.

Linda slides both hands into her purse and wriggles the pregnancy test up her sleeve. She waits as long as she can before asking Florida to move.

“You have to pee?” the woman asks.

When Florida stands, her clothes chime. She steps into the aisle, and Linda sidles by. She hurries toward the bathroom and finds herself making accidental eye contact with a soldier sitting in an aisle seat.

“Hi,” Linda says, more a squeak than a word.

He lifts a massive hand in greeting, and then she is past him, feeling even more flustered than when she first stood. There’s a line for the bathroom, which she joins. In front of her, standing sideways in the aisle, is a tall, messy-haired teenager, the one she saw getting patted down earlier. He’s wearing earbuds and jiggling slightly to unheard music. When he rolls his shoulders, even though the movement is slight, its carefreeness makes something inside Linda ache. He looks a little like an ex-boyfriend, one of the early ones. She remembers running her hands through wild hair like his and then brushes the memory away, because the boy in front of her is most definitely underage. She’d observed him with the TSA officer and thought:
Why not just go through the machine?
She’d never understood people who took a stand. So what if the security machine was pointless? What was the point in making a fuss and irritating the people in charge? The airport wasn’t going to redo its security system because of the opinions of one teenage boy, after all. She couldn’t see the gain.

She fingers her sleeve and feels the crackle of the plastic wrapper. She used to hide test answers in the same spot during high school. She wonders if that piece of skin, right above the wrist on her right arm, is tired of bearing witness to her failures.

“Are you all right?” the boy in front of her asks. “Ma’am?”

“Me? Yes?” Linda wonders what her face was doing, to pull a teenager out of his own orbit. She tries to smooth her features.

“You don’t need to call me ma’am,” she says. “I’m only twenty-five.” But as the words leave her mouth she realizes that, to this boy, twenty-five is
ancient,
and definitely ma’am-worthy.

The boy smiles politely and walks into a vacated bathroom.

Twenty-five is actually very young,
she thinks, in the direction of the closed door.

When Linda was a teenager, she and her best friend decided twenty-five was the oldest acceptable age for a girl to be single. Gary is thirty-three, which is the perfect match for her age. It takes men longer than women to mature; by thirty-three, he’s slept with enough people (nine, he told her, though she assumes that number is lower than the truth) to settle down. She has slept with enough men (sixteen) to want to stop forever. Guy number nine burned her with a cigarette in the middle of an orgasm; number eleven cheated on her with the high school math teacher, who was a man; number fifteen spent their rent money on meth. Only guy thirteen had a decent job and money in the bank, but his way of showing affection was to criticize. For her birthday, he gave her makeup, and for Christmas, weight-loss pills. She broke up with him before Valentine’s Day, but she’d left that relationship second-guessing every facet of herself.

A bathroom becomes available, and Linda scoots inside. She closes and locks the door, which activates the fluorescent lighting overhead. There is only one place to stand: directly between the toilet and the tiny vanity mirror. She pulls the test out from under her sleeve. She puts the top between her teeth and gives a little tug, splitting the wrapper.

She pulls down her white pants, then her underwear, and squats over the toilet seat with her arm between her legs. She takes a deep breath and pees on what she hopes is the stick. She remembers the teenage boy telling the TSA officer that he didn’t like the pose people had to take inside the screening machine—something about it being degrading?—and wonders what he would think of
this
pose. Her thighs shake, and the plane trembles too.

In first class, Crispin Cox tries to ignore the twinges in his abdomen. Instead, he thinks of his first wife, Louisa, the one who never gave up. That’s her tagline in his head:
the one who never gives up.
They’ve been divorced for thirty-nine years, much longer than they were married, and yet every few years her lawyer contacts his lawyer with some drummed-up excuse to take more from him. More money, more stock, more real estate. Sometimes in the name of their kids, sometimes for herself. And goddammit if she doesn’t win half the time.

The nurse, next to him, says, “The doctor said that you were in stable condition, sir. But you seem to be in a fair amount of pain. Can you rank the pain on a scale of one to ten for me?”

“I’m fine,” Crispin says. “I just need another pill.”

Why does he remember Louisa so well—he could repeat verbatim their dialogue at Carlino’s that night, when she wore her hair the way he liked and a peacock-blue dress—but he can’t remember where they honeymooned, or the occupation of his youngest son, the bright, squirrelly one? His life is there, with all its characters, but clouds keep passing across the view. What he sees, what he recalls, changes every hour.

The nurse centers the pill on his open palm.

He says, “Stop looking at me like that.”

“Sir, I’m just trying to do my job.”

“Exactly,” he says. “You’re looking at me like I’m your goddamn job. I’m no one’s job—never have been, never will be. Can you get that through your thick, mulish head?”

The nurse looks down, as if her feet have suddenly caught fire and she needs to watch the flames.
Jesus, some people are so weak. Blow on them and they fall over.
He pictures Louisa again and thinks:
She never looked away when I yelled
.

The flight attendant with the world-class hips is in front of him. Where did she come from? The pain is abruptly worse. A wave crests.

“Can I help out here at all?” she asks, in a smooth voice. “Would you like a beverage, sir, or a snack?”

But the pain is stuck, the wave fixed, and he can’t speak. Next to him, the nurse is mute. She might even be crying, for Chrissakes. Crispin forces his hand into the air, hoping the gesture will make the flight attendant disappear.

“I’d love a beverage,” a man across the aisle says, and Crispin closes his eyes, the pill safely beneath his tongue.

The plane gives a gentle bounce; Veronica places her hand on a seat as she swivels. It’s quiet on the aircraft; only the overhead vents can be heard clearing their throats. The passengers are pulled into themselves; the long flight has only just begun, and they need to get used to this new space, the silver bullet in which they will spend most of the day. They resign themselves to the new normal, one by one. The prevalent question is:
How should I pass this time before my real life resumes?

Jane hides her smile while listening to her seatmate flirt when the flight attendant returns with his drink.

“Where are you from?” he asks.

“Here’s your Bloody Mary, sir.”

“Mark, please.”

“Mark.” Veronica readjusts her hips. “I’m from Kentucky,” she says. “But I live in L.A. now.”