Dear Edward: A Novel (9 page)

He and Shay get ready for bed, taking turns in the bathroom. Edward’s green toothbrush sits in a glass next to her blue one on the side of the sink.

When he comes out, she’s already unfurled the navy sleeping bag in the middle of the floor. Edward folds down onto it, favoring his damaged leg. “I’ll need to wake up early,” he says. “To get the iPad back before John notices.”

“Would he be mad if he knew?”

Edward considers this. “I don’t think so.”

“Do you think he and Lacey mind that you sleep here?”

He answers without thinking. “Lacey does.”

Shay nods and takes off her glasses, which makes her face look different—bleary and vulnerable. It’s the only moment of the day when she doesn’t look confident, and it’s a moment Edward watches for every evening. Before she can turn out the light, he says, “Where’s your father?”

Shay reaches out for her glasses, but then her hand drops, and she looks in Edward’s direction. It’s clear that she can’t see him, beyond a blurred shape and a collection of colors.

“My father,” she says, and the two words sound awkward in her mouth. “He took off when I was two. I’ve never heard from him. My mom thinks he has a new family, somewhere out West.”

Colorado,
Edward thinks, because that is now the West to him. The white walls of the hospital, the lady on crutches, the swimming sensation in his brain. Maybe Shay’s father saw the plane fall out of the sky.
He took off,
Shay said, while Edward’s family descended.

Shay says, “If he didn’t want us, then I don’t want him.”

“He must be crazy,” Edward says. “To leave you guys.”

“My mom said he only married her to piss off his own mother, who didn’t want him to marry a Mexican.”

Edward watches Shay’s clouded face, hoping for more words, explanations, answers—something to fill the ever-emerging craters that make him up. But Shay switches the light off, and he’s left alone in the darkness and quiet.

10:17
A.M.

There is a monotony to time in the air. Consistent air quality and temperature, limited collection of sounds, circumscribed range of motion for the passengers. Some people thrive within these restrictions and relax in the sky in a way they rarely do at home. They have powered down their phones and packed their computers in their luggage; they delight in being unreachable, and read novels, or giggle at sitcoms on the in-seat monitor. But certain driven individuals, who can’t conceive of taking a break, hate being disconnected from their life on the ground and find their anxiety amplified.

Jane squeezes past Mark. There’s extra legroom in first class, so he doesn’t have to stand up, but she feels like he ought to, out of politeness. As it is now, she has to trail her bottom directly in front of his face. When she’s upright and in the aisle, she glances back and sees that his attention is fixed on the computer screen. This man, who’s basically been in heat over the flight attendant since boarding the plane, hasn’t even glanced up.

Jesus,
she thinks.
I have the sexual allure of a grapefruit
.

She walks up the aisle and through the red curtain that separates first from economy. Every seat is full, and the passengers in this section all look mildly uncomfortable. Jane gives her birthmark a quick press. She wonders if it’s possible to fly in first class and not feel guilty. Does her seatmate feel guilty? She decides probably not.

“Mom!” Eddie cries, and her eyes trace the sound to her three boys. One white-headed, two with curly handfuls of hair sticking out in every direction.

She waves to Eddie, and just like every time she sees him after an absence, she remembers him as a colicky baby, wailing in her arms, heaving sobs in his crib, being bounced on Bruce’s shoulder. He barely slept those first three months, and that was the darkest time in Jane’s life. She was hormonal, with leaking breasts, and she was failing, every single minute of every single day. She was failing to provide significant comfort to her baby, and she was failing to be the mother that Jordan had always known. The three-year-old gazed at her nursing nightgown and uncombed hair with a combination of fear and sadness. She was also keenly aware that she was failing herself—she’d always believed that she could kick the butt of any situation, and this proved she couldn’t. She was not the woman she’d thought she was, nor the one she’d planned to be.

Her adult life had been a smooth trajectory until that point.
She
had decided what she’d wanted and gotten it, from stories published in a literary magazine, to Bruce, to a high-paying job writing for a television show, to her first baby boy, whom she’d strapped to her chest and carried throughout her days. Now she sat paralyzed on the couch, milk-stained, unable to sleep or rest or think, because of the unstoppable, strangled cries of an infant. But when Eddie did stop crying, he became a sweet, smiling baby, who crawled around the apartment after his brother. He snuggled more than Jordan had. Jane’s depression was broken for good when she woke up laughing one morning because her baby was on top of her, dive-bombing her cheek with openmouthed infant kisses.
Mwah, mwah, mwah.

Jordan always drew the eye. As the older brother, he was faster, stronger, first in most things, but Eddie and Jordan operated as a team. Eddie was the one who calmed his brother down when he got angry that something wasn’t going his way. Eddie loved to play the piano, so Jordan wrote compositions for him to perform. Eddie built Lego cities that stretched from the kitchen to the front door, guaranteeing that his parents would swear and rub bruised feet while walking to the bathroom in the middle of the night. When the Lego obsession started, Jordan checked architecture books out of the library in order to help his brother plan ever more elaborate metropolises. When Jordan started defying Bruce in small ways, like sneaking out of the apartment when he was supposed to be studying, or coming home from the museum ten or fifteen minutes later than arranged, Eddie went along as his partner in crime. When they were “caught” by the doorman or by Bruce himself, Eddie always immediately said, “I’m sorry, Dad,” in his sweetest little-boy voice, which cut Bruce’s anger off at the knees. Jane liked to think that Eddie’s early rage and tears had emptied him out and he was going to coast, smiling, into adulthood, in the wake of Jordan’s more turbulent boat.

“How are you guys doing?” she asks when she reaches their row. The three heads tip back to look at her, all sharing the same serious expression.

“You’re going to get much better food in first class,” Jordan says. “Can you save us your dessert?”

“Definitely.” She smiles at the boys; she’s a little scared to look at Bruce. It’s hard to know how long he’ll hold a grudge about her not getting her work done in time to sit with them.

“Any aliens in your script yet?” Eddie asks.

“No.”

“Submarines?”

“No.”

“Mutant monkeys?”

“Yes. There are several of those.”

“Maybe your mother will write a love story,” Bruce says.

This is his way of pressing down on her birthmark. She has a movie she’s been wanting to write for a decade—a quiet, dialogue-driven piece that takes place during a single hour—but she keeps putting it off for these lucrative rewrite jobs. She feels a pang for that movie now. She pictures the fictional couple, about to kiss for the first time—a moment that won’t exist until she writes it—and shakes her head. The man, with his arms wrapped around his beloved, turns his head and looks at Jane.
Please hurry,
his eyes say.
Time is running out
.

The PA system buzzes overhead, and a voice says, “This is your captain speaking. We’ll be flying through a small rainstorm for the next twenty minutes, so there may be some light turbulence. We ask that passengers return to their seats until I turn off the fasten-seatbelt sign.”

Eddie crosses his arms and turns toward the window. Jane knows, without seeing, that his eyes are wet with sudden tears. This move has been stressful for all of them, and he would have preferred to sit with his mother during the flight.

“I’m sorry, baby,” she says, to his narrow shoulders. “I’ll come back and visit in a few minutes.”

“Dessert,” Jordan says. “When lunch comes, don’t forget to save your dessert.”

She and Jordan perform an elaborate handshake they’ve been working on; it takes five seconds to complete, and part of the routine is keeping a straight face. No smiling allowed. He nods at her, pleased, when it’s finished. She’s relieved, as she is every time it’s over; the handshake feels like a test that allows her to stay part of his inner circle. The problem is that she’s retested at regular intervals, and one misstep might leave her stranded by the side of the road.

On her way back to her seat, she passes the large woman with bells stitched into her skirt. They both have to walk sideways to fit past each other in the narrow aisle, and it’s impossible for them not to touch. For a second they are nose to nose, then their shoulders brush. The bells ring lightly below their waists.

“I like your skirt,” Jane says. She knows
like
is the wrong word, but she’s not sure what the right word is. She’s embarrassed to find herself blushing.

The woman looks Jane up and down, surveys her buttoned cardigan and jeans, her chin-length hair. “Thank you,” she says. “I saw you with your boys over there. They’re adorable.”

Jane smiles. “They used to be adorable. I don’t know what they are now.”

“Well, they look adorable to me.”

“Thanks so much.”

The conversation is clearly over, but Jane hesitates before walking away. In that moment of hesitation, she is about to say something more, but she can’t think of a suitable line. Even when she’s buckled back into her seat, she feels like she’s still standing on that strip of orange rug, searching for words.
People pay me to write dialogue,
she thinks.
I’m a terrible fraud
.

Benjamin watches the two women sway in the aisle. They’re about six feet ahead of him. He can’t hear their words, but he watches the mother’s cheeks turn pink. He had overheard her conversation with the white-haired dad and two boys across from him. Nuclear families like theirs—white ones with a mom and a dad and two kids—always look like museum exhibits to him. When they speak, it sounds staged, as if they’re reciting the script all happy families are handed at conception. He’d seen the youngest boy tear up when his mom walked away, and Benjamin hadn’t been able to stop himself from thinking:
Are you for real? She’s just going back to her seat.

He knows the statistics, knows that these types of families exist, but he rarely saw them where he came from. And in the army, most of the soldiers came from circumstances that were less than ideal. No one talked about how happy their home life had been; Benjamin’s story wasn’t great, but he’d heard way worse. He had a sergeant once who liked to ask his men:
Who put that gun in your hand? You or your daddy?

The two women separate, and the Filipino lady’s skirt jingles as she passes him. The dad across the aisle lays his hand on the older son’s arm, and the boy laughs. Benjamin tries to identify what he’s observing, and the word he comes up with is
ease
. They are at ease with each other. No one is on guard; there is no wariness or reserve. He can tell that the father has never beaten these boys. If violence is a stone thrown into a still pond, Benjamin has become adept at spotting the ripples, and there are none here.

Gavin grew up in a family like this one. That’s why he was so loose with his friendship and his knock-knock jokes. His father was a dentist, who probably had soft hands and a nervous smile. Benjamin pictures a nice mom, the kind who bakes cookies and buys the most expensive tires for her station wagon. He can’t help but think:
I would have liked to meet them
.

Florida watches the tired-looking mother walk away from her. She’d wanted to give her a hug, or at least a quick shoulder rub. The lady’s whole being screams out to be touched. She’s one of those people who live way too much in their heads and are too invested in their careful plans. Florida has seen her husband, the brainy Jewish guy, and she imagines they have semi-regular decent sex but don’t spend a lot of time cuddling or making out. It’s her belief that people sealed up that tight can often benefit from some medicinal loosening. They have no idea how to unzip their own boundaries; they need them removed on their behalf. If she had any mushrooms on her, she would have slipped them into the woman’s purse.

The plane gives a single judder as she lowers into her seat.

“What’s up, pussycat?” she says, at the same time reflecting that she wouldn’t offer
this
girl any drugs. Linda’s uptight too, but in a disheveled way. Her wires are crossed and split and her energy flow is a mess. Psychedelics would just loosen her death grip on normalcy, and seconds later she’d be screaming, naked, in the street.

Linda turns from the window and stares at Florida with wide eyes. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” she says. “But I don’t have anyone else to tell, and I have to say it out loud.”

“All right.”

“I’m pregnant.”

Florida regards the young girl. Bobby had wanted a baby. She’d had to sneak birth control in order to keep from giving him one. She’d known, by the time the subject came up in earnest, that he wanted a child not to love but to mold in his image, to follow his orders. She’d folded as much of herself to him and his vision as she could, but he viewed the small parts she held back—her thoughts, her songs, her daily walks in the woods—as a criminal lack of commitment.

To survive after the breakdown of society, the failure of the dollar, or some kind of meteorological apocalypse, Bobby believed that he needed disciples. Florida believed that once she birthed a kid or two, he would phase her out. Phase her out of her own family, out of his plans, and hence his life.

Bobby had been working for an insurance company in downtown Manhattan when the Twin Towers were hit, and it changed everything for him. He’d quit his job, sold his suits, and worked as a waiter in Brooklyn, which is where Florida met him. She was a secretary at an acupuncture clinic and sang in an all-female blues band. She was drawn to Bobby because he talked about the importance of the truth; he was bright and well read, had a sexy little ass, and could explain exactly why capitalism was evil. He pointed out that the ninety-two-year-old woman in their neighborhood was being evicted from the apartment she’d lived in for fifty years, just so a new high-rise could be built and more money be made. It was the reason neither Florida nor any of her friends could afford health insurance—the industry had nothing to do with providing healthcare; it was designed to extract the maximum amount of money from each person. It was Bobby’s verbal precision—she’d known countless handsome potheads who concluded arguments with
oh man, you know what I mean, right?
—and his fine ass that had sealed the deal.

They had shown up at Zuccotti Park together during the first week of Occupy and stayed in the park until Bloomberg—that tin-pot fascist—sent in the garbage trucks weeks later. Bobby was on several of the planning committees and was often sequestered in meetings. Florida cooked for the protesters and distributed blankets, toothbrushes, condoms, and tampons. She also joined one of the bands. This was her favorite part of that fall: so many good, hopeful, striving people, lifting their pure voices in song. She had always believed in the power of music, but now the proof was in front of her. People were changing, even shedding, their unhappy, enslaved lives to come to this park and sing about a better world. Their song was shaping their present, which created a full circle the likes of which Florida had rarely seen.

The plane gives a sharp bump, and Linda’s knuckles whiten where she’s gripping the armrest.

“I’m not ready for this,” she says.

“This,” Florida says. She thinks:
This is the subject that defines women. Having babies. Will you have them? Can you have them? Do you want to have them?