Dear Edward(23)

He says, “Am I supposed to tell you what I am?”

“No,” Dr. Mike says. “We’ll figure that out together.”

When night falls, Edward dims further with the sky. The flatness inside him becomes a cloak, and so he feels no reaction, and no sense of responsibility, as he hobbles out the front door of the house, down the steps, across the lawn, and up the neighboring stairs.

Besa opens the door, but this time doesn’t step aside to let him pass.

Edward looks up at her. Besa is short, with wide hips and thick dark eyebrows. She works from home, translating novels from Spanish to English. John’s nickname for Besa is Spitfire. He told Edward that Besa’s husband left when Shay was a toddler. Edward said, He left?

He moved away, John said. He isn’t part of their family anymore.

This had made Edward think of all the ways of leaving: through doors, windows, in cars, on bikes, trains, boats, planes. Leaving was different than what his family had done. Leaving was a choice.

“Edward, mi amor.”

He squints at Besa. “Yes?”

“I want you to know that I’m happy you like Shay. She’s never really had any friends. Politeness bores her, the same as it does me. I try to get her to say the things a young girl is supposed to say, but …” She sighs. “My heart is not in it. She never liked dolls. She always ends up insulting people. She used to get in fistfights with other girls. I’ve left her to her books probably more than I should have. She’s been lonely.”

Edward says, “I like her.” Even though like has nothing to do with it. Shay feels like oxygen to him. He doesn’t like oxygen; he requires it.

Besa moves to the side. “I just want to make sure you don’t feel grateful to us. You’ve been a blessing already. I knew from day one that you would help your aunt. Poor Lacey was making herself sick, trying to have a baby. Now she has someone to care for.”

Edward almost shakes his head, disagrees, but then doesn’t bother. He feels like his arrival did the opposite of helping his aunt; his arrival interrupted Lacey, and now she’s struggling beside him. Sometimes his aunt looks as gray in the face as he feels, and sometimes he can see her anger at John as clearly as lightning bolts across a room. Other times, she clings to her husband after he comes home from work, like a small child to a parent. Edward is a mess, so he recognizes Lacey. And he recognizes that he’s part of her mess.

He pictures the nursery, with its baby books and rocking chair. His body had jerked backward when he’d entered on the first day. He’d wanted to leave immediately, somehow knowing that those four walls couldn’t bear both Lacey’s grief and his own. Children who were never born, and parents no longer alive. He follows Besa up the stairs, with the sensation that he’s being followed by more ghosts than he can personally account for.

His mornings start on the couch with a plate, which includes saltine crackers now. John added them to the plate one afternoon, and they have become the most tolerable food. Salt with a collapsing layer of cracker. Minimal amount of chewing necessary. After the first morning plate, he and Lacey leave for his physical-therapy appointment. In between appointments, his aunt walks up and down the stairs with baskets of laundry. She gives him a second plate of food at lunchtime and then sits with him to watch one of the afternoon soap operas. It’s centered on a hospital, and Lacey tells him that she and his mother watched the same show every day when they were teenagers. “So you’ve been watching these actors your whole life?” Edward says, amazed.

“On and off. Your mother was head-over-heels in love with Luke.” Lacey points at a bald, tired-looking man wearing a single earring. The love of his life, Laura, who is shown in flashbacks to be dewy and beautiful, is now sad-looking and plump.

“It’s not the best commercial for the passage of time,” his aunt says.

The soap moves slowly and doubles back to repeat itself often, which feels like the right pace to Edward. Characters sum up their problems and then fumble the solutions. Most of the scenes take place either in the rooms of the hospital or, for some reason, on the town dock. Edward and Lacey watch in silence, with a seriousness that would have amused Edward back when he was a normal boy.

When John comes home after work, Edward looks for lightning bolts from his aunt. John always wears an apprehensive expression when he enters the room, which Edward can tell irritates Lacey, even on her better days. After dinner, Lacey goes upstairs, and it’s John’s turn to sit beside Edward. He punches at his tablet or computer. He is rarely without a screen in front of him.

Edward holds another plate on his lap and counts in his head, like he did while playing the piano, to measure the time between bites. He’s been able to eat only by changing the reasons. He used to eat because he was hungry, or because he loved a specific food. Now he eats to stay out of the hospital and to keep from worrying his aunt and uncle. He handles a saltine by the corner, and the metronome beats: one and two and three and four.

He’s halfway through the contents of the plate when the flatness inside him pulls back, like a sheet on a bed, and he suddenly knows that his uncle’s activity on the tablet has to do with the flight. Edward looks sideways, but, as always, John has the screen tipped away from his nephew.

“What are you doing on there?” Edward asks.

John’s movements are usually slow; he appears to be paying only half-attention most of the time. But this is a direct question from his nephew, who hardly speaks and has perhaps not asked a single non-survival-related question of him since he woke up in the Colorado hospital. John sits up straight, and that throws off his balance. As a result, the tablet ricochets out of his hands and onto the floor.