Dear Edward: A Novel (17 page)

“Good.”

Edward names the next one. “Boston fern. Staghorn. Then a couple maidenhairs. A holly fern.” He squints at the plant in the corner. It’s two feet tall with strappy, leathery fronds. “That one and the one behind it are bird’s nests.”

Principal Arundhi nods affectionately in the same direction. “I’ve had the beauty in front since graduate school.”

“Button fern. The ones up on the shelf are silver brakes, and that’s a kangaroo paw.”

“Excellent. And what do they all have in common that differentiates them from other plants?”

“They’re vascular and reproduce via spores.”

The man nods, his mustache pulled taut with a smile. “Fine work. You’re a pleasure to teach.”

When Edward’s finished watering, he pulls on his backpack. Shay is waiting for him at home, to start setting up the basement. Edward shifts the straps of the backpack and draws slow breaths, willing time to slow around him.

Principal Arundhi turns from the oldest fern in the corner. “Is it four already? One other thing before you go, Edward. Mrs. Tuhane told me that you opted out of gym.”

“My leg hurt.”

“Hmm, yes. She told me about the class and what the note said. Can you hold this for a second? I want to fix its perch.”

Edward thinks,
He knows I shoved a girl.
The principal places the lemon-button fern in Edward’s hands and turns back to adjust the stand. The boy looks down at the plant. It’s bright green and about six inches tall. Its fronds are thumbnail-sized. Holding it to his chest, Edward stares directly down into the center of the fern. If a plant has a face, this is it. Edward can’t help but think that the plant is regarding him with skepticism.
I agree,
he thinks.

“What do you think about that idea? Edward?”

He realizes, just as he hears his name being spoken, that the principal has been talking for at least a minute. He looks up quickly and hands the plant back to him. “I’m sorry?”

“Weight lifting,” Principal Arundhi says, looking slightly annoyed. “During your gym period, you can lift weights in the weight room instead of joining your class. This will allow you to accommodate your injured leg and yet still get some exercise. It’s much quieter in the weight room than in the gymnasium. I myself prefer it. And we can all afford to get a bit stronger, can’t we?”

“Weight lifting?” Edward says. He has a hard time finding an association for the word at first. He pictures huge, oiled men in bikinis. His father would never have lifted weights, nor would John. Edward regards the principal, who has soft cheeks and a soft middle. Does the principal lift weights?

Then he remembers the soldier on the plane. Edward and Benjamin had introduced themselves outside the bathroom, and the soldier had appeared almost impossibly muscular. He definitely lifted weights; nobody would have ever messed with him. Benjamin must have felt safe everywhere, at his size. He would have
been
safe everywhere, except on that plane. Edward looks down at his own skinny arms and bony wrists. He feels the shape of the scar on his shin. He tries to picture himself wider, stronger, safer.

“I’ll do that,” he says, and his voice cracks. “Thank you.”

At dinner, Lacey says, “Do you have a favorite movie?”

“Me?” Edward had been staring down at his plate, trying to come up with a way to consume just enough pork chop to keep Lacey from being disappointed. His appetite has dimmed since Shay’s pronouncement. He can feel himself dimming inside, his lights going out, one by one.

You okay?
Shay had asked him at lunch today.
Don’t get weird because of this. Everything is fine. We’re fine.
He’d said,
I know,
but in truth he feels like he’s been handed notice to walk a plank and drop into shark-infested waters. Every minute, he’s inching down the wooden slab. Tonight will be his last night on her floor. Tomorrow, he jumps.

“Yes, you, silly,” Lacey says.

“What’s yours?” He says this to buy time. He doesn’t have a favorite movie. When he was little, it was
The Jungle Book
. Has he even seen a movie since the crash? He thinks,
General Hospital?

“Steel Magnolias,”
Lacey says.

“What about you?” Edward says to John. He’s comfortable with this kind of conversational bobbing and weaving; he does it with Dr. Mike every week. Every time a question makes him uncomfortable, he redirects. This week, in an effort to avoid any mention of Shay or the fact that he’s moving bedrooms, he told Mike about the book on investing that Louisa Cox’s driver had dropped off at their house that week. Included was a note on very thick cardstock that said,
There are elements of a proper education that they never teach you in school. Read this book and then write back with your organized thoughts.
This was the second book the driver had delivered since the hearing. The first was a biography of Teddy Roosevelt, which Shay and Edward had read together, stopping every page or two to make fun of how besotted the author clearly was with the burly president. But now when Shay says,
Should we do our homework?
Edward feels a wave of guilt that has nothing to do with the work assigned by his teachers but with the fact that he owes organized thoughts—on a book so boring he can’t get past the first page—to Mrs. Cox.

Dr. Mike had been amused, though, and therefore Edward won. He doesn’t always win with the therapist—Dr. Mike usually plays along for a minute and then comes up with a question that’s even closer to the bull’s-eye—but Edward is confident he can run a conversation with his aunt and uncle. They are unskilled; they have no chance.

“Blade Runner.”
John chews a bite of food and smiles slightly, as if the movie is a warm memory. “Seen it twenty-three times.”

“Goodness,” Lacey says. “That’s not something to brag about, you know.”

“Oh yeah?” John points his fork in the direction of his wife. “How many times have you seen
Steel Magnolias,
Lace?”

“That movie is a classic,” Lacey says, in a haughty tone. She turns back to Edward. “I was thinking that if you liked
Star Wars,
or another big movie, we could get you
Star Wars
bedding.”

Edward rolls the sentence through his head, trying to make sense of it. “Bedding?”

“Besa told me that you’re going to sleep on the pullout couch in the basement. I think we can make that a really special space for you down there.”

Down there.
Edward pictures the basement, which lies directly beneath them. He is near the end of the plank, and the wind is howling, and he hates himself for feeling this way. He knows he’s more upset than he should be, at least about what’s happening on the surface. He went to bed in one room; now he’ll go to bed in another. The distance between Shay’s bedroom and the basement is less than thirty yards. He will still walk to school with Shay every morning. He will still listen to her read books aloud. The surface news is bearable. But what might be below the surface, below the roiling water, distresses him.

Lacey is beaming at him from across the table. Edward puts down his fork, his appetite finished. The darkness inside him has taken over. He wonders what exactly Besa told Lacey. Did she say that Shay got her period? Or did she say something else, something Edward dreads is the actual truth: that Shay is simply sick of him, and now she has the necessary excuse to get him out of her room and, therefore, her life?

He lifts the metal objects Mrs. Tuhane tells him to lift, straightens his spine when she tells him to, and tries to decipher the strange physical-fitness language she speaks. The weight room is directly off the gym; Edward can hear kids shuffling across the shiny floor. Balls being dribbled. A whistle demanding attention.

“You’re going to squat, you’re going to deadlift, and you’re going to bench,” she says. “These are compound exercises, which means they exercise more than one muscle group at once. If you learn to bench properly, you can shove away someone who’s got a hundred pounds on you. You deadlift to your potential, you can lift a car off a trapped child.”

“Really?” Edward says. He tries to picture himself lifting a car, his face red, his arms shaking with effort. The image is ridiculous.

“Really.”

“What does the squat do?”

“The squat does everything. When you squat, you tax your entire system. You want big legs? Squat. You want big arms? You squat.”

Mrs. Tuhane always looks intense, but right now she looks like she’s channeling some great eternal truth. Benjamin Stillman must have done squats. He must have known what to do with every piece of metal in this room.

Edward squats with a wooden stick across his back, because Mrs. Tuhane says he’s pitifully weak and not ready for a bar, much less actual weights. As he sinks down, he remembers Shay staring out the window, her expression fierce.

“Adler,” Mrs. Tuhane says. “Squats don’t end at the bottom. That’s called sitting. You need to spring up with good form.”

Spring up with good form,
Edward repeats in his head, and tries to comply.

Shay reads a chapter of
The Golden Compass
out loud, and then at nine o’clock Edward stands up. He tries to think of something to say, to stop this from happening. But no answer comes, because the truth is: If Shay wants him gone, he should go. He barely heard a word she read from the book; he will have to skim the pages later to catch up. The muscles in his body ping and wobble, like hundreds of rubber bands, and he knows he’ll be sore tomorrow.

He doesn’t look at her. He says, “Okay, well, good night.”

“I hope you sleep well. See you in the morning.”

They’re both speaking a little too loud, and Edward picks up his backpack and stumbles out of the room. He’s relieved Besa is nowhere in sight. He lets himself out the front door, and then, in the middle of the walk to his aunt and uncle’s house, in the shadows—a spot he knows Shay can’t see from her window—he sinks to the ground. It’s not a choice; his body just gives up and drops.

He thinks,
I have no home now
.

The New York City apartment, with his parents and brother, was home. After the crash, his body had led him to a place on Shay’s floor, and he’d burrowed there, grown stronger there. He’d gone from sleeping near Jordan to sleeping near Shay, and that had been a comfort. His aunt and uncle’s house, looming above him in the shadows, has never felt like what he needed. Edward has tipped off the end of the plank, and he’s in the dark water, with the sharks circling.

He curls up on his side on the ground. The September night is surprisingly cold. He closes his eyes to match the dark water and the dark sky. He can’t remember crying like this, since the crash, maybe ever. His cheeks become soaked, his shoulders judder. His tears raise the level of the ocean around him. Waves climb and then crumple into whitecaps, and he wonders if he’ll see Gary or his whales.

Only when someone shakes his arm does Edward realize he’s fallen asleep.

“Oh my God, Edward! Are you hurt?” His aunt’s pale, panicked face is above him. Then her face turns away and she screams, “John! John, come! John!”

Edward thinks,
She sounds scared.

Lacey grips his shoulders. “Can you speak, Edward? Do you know where you are?”

He nods, even though the movement takes immense effort. His body feels like it’s been soldered into a solid entity. He finally gets his mouth to say, “Yes.”

Then his uncle is there too, bent over Edward. John’s wearing his old plaid pajamas. “What happened?”

“I don’t know. Look at him. Should we go to the hospital?”

“Let’s get him inside first.”

John half-lifts Edward to his feet, then puts one of the boy’s arms around his shoulders. Lacey does the same on the other side. On his feet, Edward is higher up than he remembered, and he wonders if he’s literally coming apart, with his head floating away. His only hope—as the three of them lurch forward—is that Shay is fast asleep and nowhere near her bedroom window, so she can’t see his aunt and uncle dragging what’s left of him into a house.

12:22
P.M.

People fly despite knowing that a certain percentage of airplanes crash every year. They “know” that fact yet find ways to qualify, and therefore soften, the knowledge. The most common qualification is the fact that it is statistically more dangerous to travel in a car than in an airplane. In absolute numbers, there are more than five million car accidents compared to twenty aeronautic accidents per year, so, in fact, flying
is
safer. People are also helped by etiquette; because commercial air travel is public, a kind of group confidence comes into play. People take comfort in one another’s presence. Sitting side by side, shoulder to shoulder, they believe that it is impossible for this many people to have taken a foolish risk at the same time.

The floor shudders beneath Crispin’s feet as he inches back to his seat. The round trip to the bathroom has probably taken twenty minutes. He had to rest on the toilet seat for a long time, just to summon the strength to walk back. He’d thought,
I felt fine a month ago. I felt like myself. I don’t know who the hell this guy is.

Right before the flight, Crispin’s lawyer, Samuels, who is as old as he is but so fit he decided to take up powerlifting in his seventies, called to say that Crispin was on the annual
Forbes
list of the top hundred richest individuals in America.

“Huh,” he’d said into the phone.

“Congratulations, Cox. You’re a beast.”

“Huh,” he’d said again. What he was really doing was registering that he felt nothing. He’d been on the list for twenty years, and in the top half for the last decade, ever since he sold his company, and he’d looked forward to the announcement by
Forbes
every year. Noted the date on his calendar, answered the phone with alacrity on the day. Whooped and pounded the desk with the news.

“Cox, you feeling okay? I know the docs in L.A. are going to fix you up in no time.”

“Call Ernie and tell him I want to redo my will when I get there.”

“Will do.”

“Why am I leaving everything to the kids? They hate me.”

“The Met is hoping you might think of them, obviously.”

“Fuck them.” Crispin was on the board for decades—he enjoyed the meetings, filled with New York heavy hitters and much of his social group—but he almost never walked through the rooms to look at the art. It had been a fun sparring ground for him and Louisa, since they were both involved in the institution. She had majored in art history in college and fancied herself a collector. For one stretch in the mid-nineties, she had been president of the board and had banned him from meetings.

“What’s your plan?”

Crispin holds back from saying,
I’m not sure
. He never says,
I’m not sure.
Uncertainty is weakness, and he has a policy against it. He says, “I might just dump the whole mountain on Louisa. That would really mess with her head. The damn woman has spent her life trying to get my money. I could just hand it to her on a silver platter.” This idea makes him chuckle.

There’s a pause on the other end of the phone, because Samuels is Louisa’s lawyer as well. He’s choked with professional discretion. “As you wish, Cox. I’ll alert Ernie.”

Now, as Crispin sinks gratefully into his seat, he sees the raindrops outside as his fortune, sinking to earth. This is a woebegone idea, because the money—without him attached to it—has no meaning. Just green and white paper rectangles that he spent his whole life, his whole self, socking away. He would love to mess with Louisa, but she doesn’t need the cash—wouldn’t even notice the addition in her day-to-day life. As a friend of his once put it, “You can’t eat any better than you do now.” He and Louisa both eat as well as is humanly possible.

He’s always given a crap about his money and about what it takes to get more. The numbers mattered to him until his lawyer’s phone call this morning, and if that has fallen away, what’s left? Across the aisle, this kid, who looks high as a kite, is banging away on his keyboard like every letter he hits is going to make a real difference. And maybe it will, maybe it does.

Maybe it did.

The pain is a collection of marbles now, rolling around his abdomen. As he falls asleep, he thinks,
I should have taken my kids camping when they asked
.

Bruce rubs his head—a nervous tic that he’s not sure counts as a tic, because he’s always aware when he does it—and stands up.

“Just going to say hello to your mother,” he says. “Be good.”

Eddie says, “Dad, we’re not five.”

Jordan says, “Tell her thank you for the dessert, but it had dairy in it, so I gave it to Eddie.”

Bruce sighs, because in the dream he was just having, Eddie
was
five. The little boy was sitting on his lap, on the couch, and Bruce was reading
Winnie-the-Pooh
to him. Eddie was leaning against his father’s chest, and the sensation of that weight—the complete trust and lack of inhibition with which the boy relaxed every ounce of his body into his father’s—was one of the things that made parenthood unmissable.

Bruce had read Eddie that book twelve or thirteen times, from start to finish. He knew that all children liked repetition, but Eddie more than most. Once he learned to read, he read some of
Winnie-the-Pooh
to himself almost every night in bed, and he’d watched his favorite movie,
The Jungle Book,
countless times. “At least he has good taste,” Jane used to say when Bruce worried aloud that he wasn’t reading enough
other
books. “At least he likes the classics.”

The twelve-year-old Eddie is made up of spindly limbs. His chubbiness is gone. He’s awkward in his hugs; he feels, in his father’s arms, like a sapling at risk to the elements. Putting his hands on the piano keys seems to be the repetition Eddie now craves, and he no longer needs or wants his father to read to him.

Bruce pushes the first-class curtain to one side and sees that the seat beside Jane is empty.

“Sit down,” she says. “I don’t know where he went.”

Bruce eases down next to her. “That guy doesn’t look too good,” he says, indicating the old man sleeping across the aisle.

“Apparently he’s a famous baron.”

“Baron,” he says, and smiles. “Why would he fly commercial? If I were a baron, I’d have my own plane.”

“He’s actually a hornswoggler, a bamboozler,” she says. “And that goes double for my seatmate. I can just tell.”

“How’s the script going?” Bruce tries to make sure his tone isn’t too weighted. He wants to have a conversation, not a fight. He has missed his wife from the far reaches of economy class.

She seems to sense what he’s thinking, as usual. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Again.”

She fits her hand over his and presses. Her skin is soft, and the pressure makes his mouth form a smile. He can be furious with her and still be aware that he loves her at the same time. It took years for him to be able to accept the absence of logic in their love. Frustration plus a bad mood plus a particular smile of hers equaled a shot of joy in his belly. He hopes that his boys find this same kind of unbalanced logic in their own futures. He remembers the look on Jordan’s face in the Chinese restaurant and wonders, for a fleeting moment, if it’s possible that his older son already has. But then he dismisses the thought as absurd.

“What?” Jane says. “Please think out loud.”

“We should sign Eddie up for the Colburn School in L.A.”

Jane raises her eyebrows. “Really?”

“Don’t you agree?”

“Yes, of course. I think he’s talented, and he loves the piano. But that will remove him from your curriculum.”

“Not entirely. I can still make sure he gets his math and reads history.”

“Jordan will be lonely.”

“I know. We’ll have to figure something out. Maybe he’ll like spending even more one-on-one time with his dad.”

This is a joke, but they both get it and don’t bother to smile.

Jane leans her head against his shoulder.

“Where is this guy?” Bruce says.

“He’s probably following the first-class flight attendant around. I think he’s in love.”

“Is she pretty?” He tries to picture the woman and recalls a tight bun of hair but nothing else.

Jane narrows her eyes. “You honestly haven’t noticed?”

He nods at her computer. “Are you almost done with this?” He can hear an accumulated frustration seep into his voice and is disappointed in himself. This response is so pedestrian; he wants to be better, as a husband and a man.

Jane straightens and looks at the screen. At the rows of letters lumped into words, the screenplay format of open spaces and spatterings of dialogue. “No,” she says. “But I will be by the time we land. I promise.”

Veronica has done this twice in her career. It’s nothing she makes a habit of, but she has best practices to execute. She tells Mark to go to the back left bathroom—the one most hidden from sight from the rest of the plane—in ten minutes’ time. After she sees him do this, she turns on the
FASTEN SEATBELT
sign, to keep as many people as possible in their seats. Then she flips on the overhead speakers at the highest volume, filling the air with a staticky buzz. The head of every waking passenger tips back to look at the ceiling, where the speakers reside. She switches the noise off and ducks into the bathroom.

The dimensions of the room are so small that she and Mark are pressed together immediately. The door lock turns on the fan and light, so they’re doused in fluorescence, a mirror two inches behind her head. The back of Mark’s knees are pressed into the toilet rim. It smells surprisingly fine, though; the air vents are doing their job.

“No talking,” Veronica whispers.

Mark cups the back of her head, his fingers lacing through the bun at the nape of her neck. Veronica gasps a little at her own hunger. She wants to pull the bobby pins out of her hair, but she has to return to work within six minutes or she will definitely be missed, and she must look exactly the same as when she entered the bathroom.

She shimmies her skirt up and shimmies her pantyhose down.

Mark undoes his belt.

There is a tapping noise, not on the bathroom door but from the sides of the plane, and in the back of Veronica’s mind, she thinks,
What is that?

Chip, chip, chip,
goes the knock, or the air-conditioning unit, or the loose duct, while Mark molds his lips to hers—he’s a surprisingly competent kisser—and she grabs his ass to pull him in.

And then there’s roaring in her head and she’s as red as her lipstick and coursing with everything that makes up life, and when Mark Lassio whispers in her ear,
I might need you,
she blows the words away like kisses.

Jordan nudges his brother, then leans in close. Their father is still gone.

“What?” Eddie says.

“The first-class flight attendant and a guy just went in the bathroom together.”

Eddie screws around in his seat and looks toward the back of the plane. “Why would they do that?”

Jordan’s laugh is almost a cackle. “To have sex, probably.”

Eddie looks horrified. “In the plane bathroom?”

“I don’t think anyone else noticed. She distracted everyone with that overhead noise, so no one would look.”

“Why did you look?”

“I was counting how many rows of seats were on the plane, so I was facing that way.”

Eddie contemplates this, his face serious. “Maybe he’s sick, and she went in there to help him.”

“Maybe. He looked pretty healthy, though.”

Eddie shudders. “That’s gross.”

“Well, I’m not going to go in that bathroom again, that’s for sure.” Jordan thinks of Mahira and grows hard in his pants. He lowers his tray so his brother doesn’t see.

He notices his dad headed toward them, down the aisle. He thinks of his dad and mom having sex, and the erection dims.

“Still,” Eddie says, in his careful, considered way, “it’s kind of cool to think that having sex is so great that you don’t mind doing it in a bathroom.”

Jordan nods and feels deeply grateful for the comment. Grateful that his brother is beginning to join him in the land of erotic dreams and uncomfortable underpants.

Crispin opens his eyes and doesn’t know where he is. Well, he knows he’s on a plane. That’s obvious. But to where, and when? He’s been on hundreds of flights in his life; there were entire years when he seemed to spend more days in the air, en route to meetings and conferences and lavish vacations, than he did on the ground. He could afford to buy a fleet of these planes if he wanted to, but he’d always refused to fly private. Commercial flights were one of the few places he got to sit among his customers, to observe how they thought and behaved. He’d always considered his time in the airports and on planes to be invaluable market research.

“What year is it?” he asks the woman next to him.

She’s wearing a white cardigan that’s buttoned right up to the top. “Give me your wrist,” she says. “I want to check your pulse.”

“Absolutely not. Answer my question.”

“It’s 2013.”

“I was born in 1936. That means I’m…” He shuts his eyes, but his brain refuses to make the computation. He suspects that this woman is a nurse, probably his nurse.

She takes his arm, as if she has some right to it, and places two fingers on the inside of his wrist. He lets her, because, along with the ability to subtract, his physical strength is gone.

“Thready pulse,” she says, under her breath.

He nods, or maybe he doesn’t actually nod but he nods on the inside, in agreement. He is thready. He’s threading in and out of whatever and wherever this is.

“Are you cold, Mr. Cox?”

Yes,
he thinks.
I am freezing cold. And I am no longer young. And I am alone in the sky, headed to where I do not know
.

When her seatmate returns, Jane is amused by the difference in energy between him and her husband.

The skin on Mark’s face appears chapped and ruddy, as if he’s been out for a walk in rough weather. He fidgets and clicks the end of his pen on and off. Bruce had sat quietly beside her. She’d had to look in his eyes to guess his thoughts; there were no external clues.