Dear Edward(32)

“Where are you planning to put them?” John says. “The basement would work, I guess. I just need to move some stuff around down there.”

“I was thinking of putting them upstairs, in Edward’s room.” Lacey looks at her nephew. “If that’s okay with you? It’s so dark in the basement, and I think it’s going to take some time to go through and organize.”

Edward is confused for a moment, before making sense of the request. He’s never slept in the nursery, and never will, but his aunt seems to need to believe that it belongs to him. He says, “Sure. That’s fine.”

“Maybe you’ll want to go through the boxes with me,” Lacey says. “Your personal things will be among them, of course.”

“Maybe,” Edward says. He thinks of the boxes, sitting on a truck right now, driving through the Midwest in the late afternoon. Driving in the wrong direction. The boxes were supposed to move in a straight line from New York City to Los Angeles. Instead, they made it halfway, stalled for three months, and are now headed back. Edward pictures the outside of the cardboard cubes, not the contents. He remembers them in neat piles in his New York apartment’s living room, ready to be picked up. His mother had spent weeks meticulously packing and yelled at whichever boy she caught digging through a box in search of a particular shirt or book.

Edward dims his brain in order to stop picturing the boxes, and his mother, and asks to be excused from the table. In the living room, he notices John’s tablet lying on the couch. His immediate instinct is to grab it, tuck it under his arm, and carry it over to Shay’s house. Instead, he stands motionless for a minute, looking at it. His uncle is now alone in the kitchen, filling the coffeepot for the next morning. He’s humming a show tune under his breath. John has started jogging in the mornings to ward off all the extra calories in Lacey’s food, and has downloaded several Broadway shows to accompany his runs. Now he’s liable to sing out a line from Phantom of the Opera or Hello, Dolly! while walking upstairs or pouring cereal.

“Don’t cry for me, Argentina,” he says to Edward, when the boy walks back into the kitchen.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to go on the Internet right now.” Edward stops, not sure how to proceed.

“I would agree with that statement,” John says.

“But I was wondering if it would be okay, if you would let me know, every once in a while, whatever you think I should be aware of? I thought you might be able to decide …” Edward doesn’t know how to say, I know you’re tracking the crash, and me, online, without admitting that he’d stolen his uncle’s tablet once.

John leans against the counter, his arms crossed over his chest. “You want me to keep you roughly up to date about what’s happening on the Internet in reference to you but without you having to know or see any of the specifics.”

“I guess so, yes.”

His uncle studies him for a moment, as if trying to figure out what he can handle. “I’m sure you’ve realized that because you’ve started school, and therefore reentered the public world, there will be a bunch of new photos and probably a video or two of you. I don’t expect there to be more new content, though, Edward. Not of a factual nature. People will claim to have seen you places and claim to know you, just as they have done ever since the crash, but that’s just fabrication.”

“Where do people think they’ve seen me?”

John sighs. “All over the place. One man was convinced he was hiking behind you and a yellow Labrador on the Appalachian Trail for several weeks. You’ve been swimming in Lake Placid, at one of the art museums in New York. Sightseeing in Edinburgh.”

Edward hears himself say, “Shay and I looked up Jordan on the Internet.”

John is quiet for a minute. “There’s not much on him, is there?”

“No.”

“I’ll do this,” John says. “I’ll let you know what’s out there, within limits. But I want you to understand that there can’t be information about you—that is true—that you don’t already know. Your life takes place in your skin. No one else knows a goddamn thing, and the Internet is full of cowboys and sad people making stuff up.” He pauses. “I love the Internet, or at least I used to, but it’s not where you go for the truth.”

Edward almost asks, Where do you go for the truth? But the question feels vast, unspeakable in his throat, so instead he says good night and goes next door.

There is a tree covered with pert green leaves outside the window in Dr. Mike’s office. The trunk is a uniform brown, and robust. It looks tree-ier than the trees around it, as if it were made for a movie set by able craftsmen. The idea that the tree might be fake pleases something deep inside Edward. He himself feels half plastic, cobbled together, fabricated on an hour-to-hour basis to fulfill his role as “human boy recovering from tragedy.” When he sits down in his usual chair, he watches the tree over the therapist’s shoulder.

Dr. Mike says, “When you have memories, are they from the plane or before?”

“Before.”

“List for me some things you remember. It can be anything. Snippets, whatever.”

Edward closes his eyes for a second and sees his piano composition book open on the piano. He says, “I was about to start learning a new movement on the piano. It was called ‘Scarbo,’ by Ravel.”