Dear Edward: A Novel (6 page)

Edward is aware that Besa is staring at her daughter, trying to deliver a message without words. And he knows—maybe, a little bit—why he came here. To be with another kid, to have a break from the intense, watching, worried eyes of adults.

Besa says in a bright, we-will-make-this-work tone, “Have you ever been to camp, Edward?”

“This is weird,” Shay says.

Besa hurls a sigh at her daughter.

“You don’t have to talk to me,” Edward says. “Not if you don’t want to.”

“I’ll need to go to sleep soon.”

He swivels his head from side to side and locates an armchair by the window. “I could sit there for a bit.” He feels his body slowing down. He swallows. Then takes a breath. “Just for a few minutes,” he says.

Shay and her mother exchange another long look, complicated with twists and beats. Edward makes his way to the chair. He feels like he’s pushing through water. His crutches drag across the carpet.
Why would they make the carpet this fluffy?
he thinks.

Besa says, “I’ll give Lacey a call, so she knows you’re here.”

“I’m going to say again, for the record, that this is w-e-i-r-d,” Shay says.

By the time Besa leaves the room, Edward is asleep.

When he wakes, it is to white light so glaring that all he can do is blink. He doesn’t know, during the blinking, who or what or where he is. Only when he has adjusted to the light, and his brain has stopped panicking and throwing switches, does Edward see that he’s alone in Shay’s room. There’s a green blanket draped over his lap. He can feel that he’s alone in the house; the walls, the open doorway, everything suggests emptiness. He just sits there, for a long time.

When he knocks on his aunt’s front door and she opens it, he says, “Are you mad at me?”

She gives him a funny look. “I don’t think I could be mad at you,” she says. “Come inside and rest. You have a doctor’s appointment this afternoon.”

When Edward has lowered himself to the couch, Lacey helps him lift his hurt leg onto the stack of pillows on the coffee table. Something occurs to him, and he says, “Am I stopping you from going somewhere? I mean, do you have a job you’re not going to, because of me?”

She straightens the corners of the pillows around his foot. “No. I used to have a job,” she says. “But I stopped working when I got pregnant. I was on bed rest. Last year.”

“Oh.”

Lacey looks around the room, and Edward thinks,
This was her space.
There are magazines stacked on the lower level of the coffee table. The ones in his line of vision are about either pregnancy or babies. His aunt had spent her days alone in this house planning to get pregnant, or trying to stay pregnant. Edward’s head clicks, and he wishes he could get up and leave the room, the same way he left the nursery upstairs, but Shay’s at camp, his leg prickles with pain, and he has nowhere else to go.

“I’d been thinking about looking for another job. Something,” Lacey says. “I just hadn’t gotten around to it yet.” She pauses, as if to catch her breath. “Can I get you anything from the kitchen?”

“No, thank you.”

He watches a soap opera in which a woman weeps over whether or not to have an abortion while her mother wonders whether or not to leave her husband. He feels aware of the hours in a new way. He has a vague understanding of how they pile on top of each other to make days, and how seven days group together into a week. And the weeks collect until there are fifty-two, and then it is a year. The flight was on June 12. That means it must be late July now. Time is passing.

The doctor is a throat-clearer. He enters the room making the noise of a bullfrog and continues for a solid ten seconds while standing in front of Edward and Lacey. When he finally stops, he looks pleased with his performance. He says, “You’ve lost eight pounds since the event.”

Event?
Edward thinks, confused for a split second. Then he understands.

Lacey says, “That’s not good.”

The doctor repeats: “That is
not
good.”

There’s a photographic mural of a butterfly on one wall. Edward wonders if the doctor regretted the mural once it was put up. The butterfly, at that swollen size, doesn’t look beautiful. Its scale and strangeness make everyone stand as far away from it as possible.

“Buy him ice cream, candy bars, whatever he wants,” the doctor says, and issues an emphatic honking noise. “This is no time for nutrition. He’s a growing boy, and he didn’t have the weight to lose. He needs calories. Lose one more pound and I’m going to put you on an IV, Edward. That means re-hospitalization.”

In the car on the way home, his aunt says, “Please think of something you might be able to eat.”

Edward feels barren on the inside. There’s nothing alive in him. Food seems not only unnecessary but irrelevant.

Lacey pulls into the parking lot of an oversized convenience store. She turns the engine off but keeps her hands on the steering wheel. She gives Edward a look he hasn’t seen before. “Please don’t do this.” Her voice is pinched. “If Jane knew how badly I was doing at taking care of you…”

Edward says, “No, Aunt Lacey.” He scans the air for more words and sees only
convenience, store, chips, beer, sale, parking
.

She is out of the car, away from him, and he scrambles to follow.

Inside the store, she says, “We’re going to walk up and down every aisle. If the food doesn’t disgust you, put it in here.”

He looks at the stacks of chocolate bars. Crunchy, caramel-filled, nut-buttered, dark chocolate, white chocolate, milk chocolate. He chooses Jordan’s favorite: a Twix bar. Lacey’s shoulders drop slightly when he places it in the basket. Chips: ranch, barbecue, nacho cheese, dill pickle, jalapeño, salted, baked, ruffled, flat, sour cream and onion. He chooses a bag of his mother’s favorite: salt and vinegar. The next aisle is Fruit Roll-Ups, meat jerkies, and a coffee setup. Nothing goes in the basket. Then there’s a long row of cereals. Edward thinks,
Maybe without milk it would be okay
. He can’t bear the idea of food that changes form in any way. Sloshing is intolerable, and he doesn’t want anything with bubbles. Soup, stew, smoothies, and sodas are out. Ice cream melts, and that makes him uncomfortable too.

He chooses the cereal with the least colorful box. “Is this enough?” he asks his aunt.

“It’s a start.”

When they get home, she spreads the food out on the coffee table. Then she leaves the room and comes back with a plate and spoon. Edward sits on the couch and watches. His leg is throbbing, even though it’s elevated on a pillow. The muscles and tendons above his knee pulse, as if they themselves are a heart.

Lacey unwraps the Twix first. She breaks off a section and puts the piece on the plate. Then she opens the box of cereal and puts a spoonful of the O shapes on the far side. Then two potato chips.

The aunt and nephew regard the plate in silence.

“I want you to eat all of this in the next hour,” she says. “Then I’m going to replace these amounts. Understood?”

Edward nods. He switches the television on; there’s a talk show with a table full of women interrupting each other. He starts by nibbling the edge of a potato chip. When his mouth feels like sawdust, he scrapes a small amount of chocolate off the bar with his front teeth. He remembers cramming potato chips in his mouth with his brother, to see how many could fit. He remembers sitting at the dining room table with his family, the sun setting behind them, Bach playing on the stereo. Then he bites an O in half and wills himself to remember nothing, think nothing, until all that exists is a flatness—a flatness he now identifies as himself.

10:02
A.M.

The plane weighs 73.5 tons. The wingspan measures 124 feet. It is constructed of metal sheets, extrusions, castings, ingots, bolts, and wing spars. It has 367,000 individual parts and took two months to build; 280,000 pounds of thrust are required to power this bus through the sky.

Bruce peers past Eddie, out the window.

“I was about your age when I took my first flight,” he says. “We were going to a funeral for an uncle, whom I’d never met. And when I saw what the clouds looked like from the sky, I wanted to get out of the plane and dance on them.”

Eddie looks into his cup of orange juice. He seems annoyed, but it’s not real annoyance. Bruce has noticed that as Jordan becomes a more combative teenager, his younger brother tries, at moments, to project similar anger, irritation, or indignation. He’s not much good at it, though; neither his heart nor his hormones are in the right place.

“This is my third flight, Dad,” Eddie says.

This time,
Bruce thinks,
I want to understand the composition of the clouds. I want the clouds contained and understood. When did that switch happen? When did I go from wanting to dance to wanting to write dimensions down in a notebook?
He scans his adolescence: his thirteen-year-old self, a shyer version of the twelve-year-old. Each year he sank more deeply into awkwardness and silence. But there was a jolt of excitement when he realized, much later than he should have, that inside himself was a brain that aced tests easily, that he could use, really
use,
to make sense of the loud noises and strange customs and unpredictable people around him. Math was the deepest pool in sight, so he dove in. Numbers and equations led to theorems and binomials and n-dimensions and monster groups, and then, in his twenties, he began to use math to tie together pieces of the universe that no one had thought to tie together before.

He looks over his shoulder. Jordan is slowly making his way down the aisle, his head bouncing to a beat.

“You should push harder in your career,” Jane has told Bruce during fights. “Why do I need to carry us? Why is college tuition—probably three hundred and fifty thousand freaking dollars, you know—
my
responsibility while you make up mathematical constellations and hang pretty beads from them?”

Jane has no understanding of his work, but he doesn’t blame her for that. Only about seven people in his own field understand what he’s doing. That’s the way of pure math; you need a PhD in the subject to even have a hope of crawling into the specific rabbit hole that a mathematician inhabits. And an individual project—a lifetime of work—may very well appear to non-mathematicians to be pointless, a piece of exquisite but inapplicable math work. It could turn out to be extremely valuable but not until years after your death, in a field you couldn’t have dreamed into existence. Pure math is the stuff of dreams, strands of gossamer built to be thrown to smarter men in the future.

One example Bruce sometimes cites, when non-mathematicians ask about his work, is Sir William Hamilton. The Irish mathematician had a revelation while out for a walk in 1843 and carved the resulting equation into Dublin’s Broome Bridge with a penknife. That equation marked the discovery of the quaternion group, which proved useless in his lifetime but one hundred fifty years later helped to create video games. The French mathematician Pierre de Fermat’s “Little Theorem,” as it was known, served little purpose when it was developed in 1640 but became the basis of RSA encryption systems for computers in the twenty-first century.

“Why not just do normal math?” Jane said. “The kind that has actual applications. The kind that helps scientists build things.”
The kind,
she might as well have said out loud,
that makes money.

Tenure at Columbia would have solved a lot of problems. It would have kept them off this plane, in New York. Bruce sighs and checks over his shoulder again. He knows Jordan is taking his time on purpose. The boy thinks it’s good for his father to sweat a bit.

Jordan
schzoom-schzooms
and
zump-zumps
down the aisle. The music in his ears tells him to
tump-tump,
so he does that too. There is a girl with a peace sign drawn on the back of her hand, probably around his brother’s age, watching from a window seat. He offers her a wave. He wants to enjoy this brief unleashed moment. Buckled in beside his father means they’ll argue, and he’ll start thinking about L.A. and wondering what that will be like. And he’ll miss Mahira.

It had started from nothing. One day, he’d been in the deli buying a soda, and she’d given him an unhooked smile, one that told him she liked him and had liked him for some time, and he smiled back, and before he knew it, he was kissing a real live girl in real live time. Every time he went in the store and her uncle was out, they would go to the back supply room. They stood among cans of beans and boxes of toilet paper and kissed, kissed, kissed. They barely spoke. Their language was composed of smiles and welcoming looks and brushing the hair off her cheek and about twenty different kinds of kisses ranging from
hello
to
I want you (though I don’t really know what that means)
to
I want to figure out what your lips taste like
. He never would have guessed that kisses could be so variant: in speed, depth, ferocity. He could have kissed her for hours and never been bored. He saw Mahira only once outside the deli, in a Chinese restaurant; his father was with him, and her uncle with her. They had to limit their communication to smiles.

When he told her he was moving, Mahira looked away for a second, then turned back and met his lips differently. And for his final three visits to the storeroom, they shared a new kiss, one that said,
I’ll miss you,
and
I’m scared that we’re growing up,
and
I wish this could continue forever, but I know that even if you weren’t leaving, it could not
.

Jordan sighs,
tump-tump,
and says, “Excuse me.”

His father slides out so he can slide into his seat, and he is back to being a term in the equation that states Eddie + Jordan = Bruce. Jordan tips his head back and closes his eyes, the music still playing in his ears. He’s pleased that he never told anyone about Mahira. She is his alone. His secret history. He figures that the more times he opts out of security machines, the more girls he kisses, the more of himself he will own, the more of an unknown quantity he will become, and the equation, the one his father has built his life around, will no longer be true.

Directly across the aisle from the Adlers, Benjamin slides the free magazine back into the seat pocket. He tries to change his position, but there’s not a lot of room to do so. He’s uncomfortable; his side aches where the bag is taped to his skin. After surgery, the drugs were the only upside to the weeks spent in the hospital. Benjamin had never taken anything stronger than ibuprofen before, but while pumped with pain medication during the day and sleeping pills at night, he was able to exist in a delicious haze. He thought about the fight with Gavin, but his thoughts were not tethered to reality. He watched it like a play: a massive black guy circling a skinny blond white one.

This flight, the final one home, has unfortunately woken him up. He’s drug-free, and the return to sobriety makes him feel painfully aware of every niggle in his body and every thought in his head. He has flashes of panic, even reaching to his belt to see if he’s armed. How is he supposed to bear himself nonstop?

He’s being sent back to L.A. for one more operation, and then he’ll be assigned a desk job. He is no longer allowed to work in the field. He catches himself hoping, now that the drugs have cleared his system, that he will die on the next operating table. That would be better, far better, than folding himself into a desk chair every day. Besides, he is a stranger to himself now, and he’s not at all sure that this stranger deserves to live.

The clouds outside the windows are a shade darker than before. Inside the cabin feels darker too, beset with memories of soft-lipped girls, permanently sleeping mothers, shy teenage boys, and clashing fists. Florida can almost see the scenes, the missing people, the dense minutes and hours and years that sit behind each person on the plane. She inhales and lets the choked air fill her lungs. The past is the same as the present to her, as precious and as close at hand. After all, if you think about one memory for most of a day, is that not your present? Some people live in the now; some people prefer to reside in the past—either choice is valid. Florida operates her lungs, pleased by the fullness.

When Linda sits back down, Florida pats her hand. “You remind me of someone,” she says. “I’ve been trying to remember who.”

“Oh?”

“Might be one of the revolutionaries I took care of in my store in Cebu. In the Philippines. They were mostly boys, but occasionally I’d get a feisty girl who had faked her way into battle.” Florida pictures the crowded back room of that store. She sold or traded rice and beans out front and hid the wounded under blankets in the back. She held secret meetings of the Katipuneros in her bedroom late at night. The wounded or sick soldiers came straight from fighting the Spanish, but they were no more than children. They called her Tandang Sora, and she whispered the same truth in each child-soldier’s ear:
You are special. You are meant to survive, to go on and do great things
.

Florida is proud of this memory; she lived that life well. There are other lives, in which her opinion of herself isn’t so high. The one she’s sitting in right now, for instance, feels like it’s gotten away from her.

Linda stares. “When was this? I thought you said you lived in Vermont.”

“Oh, a couple hundred years ago.” Florida studies her seatmate. “There was a girl I treated for pleurisy; I think it’s her you remind me of.”

Linda looks at her like she’s crazy. Florida sighs. Sometimes she explains, sometimes she doesn’t, but this girl looks like she needs all the help she can get. “This isn’t my first life,” she says, “or my first body. I have a longer memory than most people. I can remember most of time.”

“Oh. I’ve heard of people like you.”

Florida is unfazed by Linda’s distrustful tone. Even her parents in her current life, two Filipino doctors who immigrated to Atlanta, Georgia, only to become a dry cleaner and a housewife, didn’t believe their daughter’s tales of past lives. She had been only too happy, in the middle of high school, to leave them and the South by attaching herself to a boyfriend who had a drum set and a dream of the big city.

Linda is chewing her lower lip. She’s a pretty young woman who seems to have mastered how to make herself ugly. She wears too much makeup and has an over-expressive face. Her mouth is rarely still, her eyebrows shoot up, her cheeks draw in and then push out. Her face contorts, as if it’s striving for something.

Florida pats her hand again. “You’ll be okay. You want to marry this man in California, right? So you get off the plane and you marry him, and,
voilà,
you have a new life. A new life is what you’re after, isn’t it?”

Linda says, in a small voice, “I’m not a hundred percent sure he’s going to propose.”

Florida smiles. “Sweetheart, no one is one hundred percent sure of any damn thing. If someone says they are, they’re a liar.” She shifts in her seat hard enough that the bells on her skirt jangle. Bobby used to say it sounded like she was wearing tiny alarm clocks. She’d respond:
Who am I trying to wake up around here, the birds?

Benjamin hates being strapped in this seat, mired in his own thoughts. He’s unable to do the physical movement necessary to quiet his brain. He doesn’t think about the gunfire during his last patrol; the night he was injured makes sense to him. He’d grown sloppy in the weeks following the fight with Gavin. Distracted. He’d basically stopped sleeping, which made everything worse. He was shot during patrol because his reflexes were gone, which made him an easy target. Benjamin actually saw the shooter, positioned between two branches. Looked the man in the eyes and received his bullet. That information computes. There’s nothing there for the ants to chew on.

Instead, he thinks about Gavin. Gavin was a white guy from Boston who had showed up in his platoon six months earlier. Benjamin knew by looking at him that he’d been to college and probably joined the army to piss off his parents. There were plenty of guys like that, amid the lifers like him. Gavin, if he stayed alive long enough, would do his tour and get out. Probably become an accountant—a guy who drives his kids to soccer games. He wore wire-rim glasses and had white-blond hair.

In general, Benjamin stayed away from white guys. The army, like everywhere else, segregated itself, and Benjamin preferred hanging out with people who looked like him. The truth was that no one—black, Latino, Asian, or white—was clamoring to be his friend. He knew he had a reputation for being uptight and a little scary. His grandmother, Lolly, had once told him that his “resting face” wasn’t particularly friendly.

One night, he and Gavin were both assigned latrine duty. The bathroom was disgusting; there were dark, unidentifiable stains on the walls and sticky floors. There had been talk of their platoon moving to a new location, and the uncertainty translated into a lack of motivation for this kind of work. Benjamin and Gavin walked into the room with buckets and mops and a gallon of toxic-smelling cleaning solution; they both paused just inside the doorway, and Benjamin’s jaw set. When he looked at Gavin, he saw the same determination on his face. They went at it, and after three straight hours, they had deep-cleaned the entire room.

“Motherfucker,” Gavin said at the end, covered in sweat and grime. “We fucking
did
this.”

He held his fist out to Benjamin, and Benjamin, grinning, met it with his own.

“We sure did,” he said.

They became friends that night, and it was no big deal—just nice, but nice meant something to Benjamin. They had actual conversations, mostly because Gavin asked Benjamin questions and seemed interested in the answers. Benjamin told Gavin that he barely remembered his parents and that Lolly wasn’t his
real
grandmother—she had found him in a stairwell at the age of four and taken him in. Gavin told Benjamin that his father wanted him to take over his dental practice and that teeth made Gavin queasy, so he joined the army to escape the future that had been mapped out for him before he was even born.