Dear Edward(17)

He knocks on the door.

After a pause, a woman opens it. Besa squints into the darkness.

“Edward? Are you okay?”

He says, “Can I come in and see Shay?”

Another pause, and a memory cracks through Edward’s mind. This is how memories appear now, like a burglar bursting through a locked door without warning. It’s a few weeks before the flight, and he and Jordan are in the elevator of their building. They’d snuck out of the apartment without their dad noticing, and they’re grinning at each other. They know that when they hit the lobby, the doorman will be shaking his head. He’ll say, Boys, your father called. Back upstairs now. But as the elevator swooped down, he and his brother played air guitar.

Edward thinks, Jordan should have been the one to live, not me.

Besa looks over her shoulder and calls out, “Shay, mi amor, are you decent?”

Shay’s voice travels from upstairs. “Why?”

Besa doesn’t answer. She leads him past the living room and up a set of stairs. Through an open doorway, he sees Shay leaning against pillows on a bed. She’s wearing pajamas with pink clouds on them and holding a book.

“Hi,” he says.

She straightens with a bustle of motion. She gives the same squint her mother used at the door, this time from behind glasses.

“Um, hi?”

“Shay,” Besa says, “maybe you can tell Edward about your day at camp.” She has her hand on Edward’s shoulder, and the sensation is both wonderful and terrible.

“Why would I do that?” Shay says.

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.”