Dear Edward(14)

The bathroom lighting is terrible. Her skin looks yellow in the small mirror. And what was she thinking, wearing all white for a day of travel? She sticks her tongue out at the reflection and sees the scar from when she got it pierced at the age of thirteen. Another terrible decision. Linda had done it simply because a girl she admired had gone goth. Within two days, her tongue had swelled so badly that she was having trouble breathing, and her stepmother had to drive her to the ER. The incident delighted her stepmother, who henceforth liked to insert the memory into unrelated conversations. “You almost lost your tongue, you know. Then where would you have been? You’d have had even less chance of landing a man.”

“I landed Gary,” she says, to the mirror and her stepmother.

But she secretly shares her stepmother’s skepticism, and always has. She worries that the only reason she and Gary have lasted an entire eleven months is because they’ve been long distance, and now that distance is about to disappear. They’d visited each other, sure, the most recent visit being six weeks earlier, but visits were short and therefore sweet. There wasn’t time over a long weekend for crankiness or bad moods or long-held insecurities to arise. Day-to-day life in the same location would reveal all of Linda’s flaws.

They’d met at a wedding—Gary had gone to college with the bride; she had once dated the groom—and ended up servicing each other’s acute loneliness later that night. Linda had assumed it to be a one-night stand, but Gary texted her the following day on his way back to California. They’d chatted by phone and text over the next few weeks. When he told her that he studied whales, she’d felt a surge of annoyance and almost hung up. She thought he was making fun of her lack of education; he had a PhD, and she’d never even gone to college. He obviously thought she was so dumb he could claim to have a fantastical job and she wouldn’t know better. More than that, the lie felt barbed, specifically tailored to take her down. She’d been obsessed with whales as a child. Posters of the giant mammals had covered her bedroom walls, and most of her treasured books had concerned sea life. It felt like Gary was mocking both the twenty-five-year-old and twelve-year-old versions of herself.

“You mean you’re unemployed,” she’d said, in her meanest voice.

“I’m emailing you information on my program.”

They were still on the phone when she opened the link and saw video clips of bearded men in windbreakers on a boat in the middle of the ocean. She saw that one of the men was a sunburned Gary. The next clip showed a whale’s hump passing the ship. Then classrooms and cubbies stacked with scuba gear, which is when she closed her laptop and started to cough.

When the coughing ended, Gary said, “Linda?”

“I had something in my throat,” she said.

Linda assumed she and Gary were just friends, because she felt none of the obsessive worry she normally experienced when she was interested in a man. Her day improved after she spoke to him, and he provoked the hiccuppy giggle she’d tried to suppress her entire life. Hideous, her stepmother had once muttered, when Linda laughed in front of her. They’ve never talked about children; Linda has no idea how Gary feels about having one. He had a crummy childhood; he’d said that he would rather kill himself than go through that again. Her secret hope is that they can make a life, together, that will heal the broken paths behind them. When I’m with you, I feel fixed, he told her once, and though she wasn’t able to utter the words at the time, she felt the same way with him.

There’s a loud buzz, and the speaker in the ceiling announces the commencement of the beverage-cart service. Linda is aware, suddenly, of being thirsty.

“Hello?” The bathroom knob rattles, and a man’s voice says, “You okay in there?”

“Yes!” Linda says, and grips the test in her hand like a spear. A pink plus sign wavers in the middle of the white. “Yes!” She slides the bolt open and lurches into the aisle.





July 2013

When Edward arrives at the house, he’s shown to the nursery. John had moved the crib to the attic and replaced it with a single bed with a dark-blue bedspread. The bookshelf, filled with cardboard books that babies can safely chew on, remains. The walls and curtains are light pink, because Lacey had been convinced, each time she got pregnant, that it would be a girl. A rocking chair sits beside the window.

The boy and his uncle stand in the doorway for a moment. John looks confused, like he’s forgotten why they’re there. Edward wonders if he can turn and shuffle away without the man noticing.

This isn’t my room, he thinks. It can’t be.

John says, “Would you like to see the lake?”

He walks toward the window, so Edward follows on his crutches.

West Milford was built on the edge of a seven-mile lake. During the town’s heyday in the late 1800s, three enormous steamboats operated on the water, carrying visitors from trains to one of the many resorts. With the advent of airplanes, tourism changed. People still came to Greenwood Lake, but it was only families from New Jersey and New York, many of whom bought summer homes there. John’s parents had met as eight-year-olds playing beside the lake, and both had summered there throughout their childhood. It was a safe town, though most suburban towns were safer then. Kids ran free, skidding into the house only for meals and bedtime, lake-wet and suntanned.

In the 1970s, the lake lost its widespread appeal. If families could afford a summer house, they bought at the New Jersey shore or on Long Island. The hotels didn’t do enough business to stay open. John and Lacey bought a house there shortly after getting married in 2002, because they could afford a nicer place in West Milford than closer to the city, because there were enough businesses to support John’s IT work, and because the lake reminded Lacey of Canada. They have a nice view from the second floor of the house. The nursery looks out over the vast, flat water, as does John and Lacey’s bedroom.