Dear Edward(33)

“I wasn’t aware you played the piano. Tell me about the piece.”

Edward frowns. “I hadn’t started yet. My teacher said he wasn’t sure I was ready for it. It had really fast tremolos, a lot of octave jumps, and double-note scales in the major seconds in the right hand.”

Edward looks down at his hands. The knuckles appear extra white under his skin. They don’t look like the same hands that practiced piano for hours every afternoon. He feels certain that if he sat down at a piano now, he wouldn’t be able to play any of the compositions he’d learned. His fingers feel different, and no music has played in his head since the crash. It’s not something he’s consciously thought about, but he realizes now that he’d been waiting for the music to return, like a dog that escaped its leash. But it hasn’t, and it won’t. It’s gone. Eddie was musical; Edward is not.

Dr. Mike says, “So, you played seriously.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” Edward’s voice rises at the end of the sentence. Since he usually operates at a monotone in this office, the sound startles them both.

“Don’t tell my aunt and uncle,” he says.

“They don’t know that you play?”

“Played. If they knew, they’ve forgotten.”

Dr. Mike looks like he wants to say something but then stops himself.

“I don’t like this whole thing,” Edward says.

“What whole thing?”

“Before was good. It’s over. Why do we have to talk about it?”

“We don’t have to right now,” the man says. “I just don’t want you to block all the memories out. The fact that they’re good means they’re powerful. We’re building a new foundation here, and if you can let those memories in, and even, at some point, get pleasure from them, they can be bricks in the foundation. Good, solid bricks.”

Edward sinks down in his chair and shuts his eyes.

He can only hear Dr. Mike, not see him, from his slumped position. “Are we done for today?”

“Yes,” Edward says, “we’re done.”

A white rectangular truck is parked outside the house when they get home from school on Wednesday afternoon. Two burly-looking men struggle across the lawn, balancing an enormous box sideways between them. Edward reflexively turns his back on the sight.

Shay claps her hands together and says, “I want to help unpack.”

“I’ll help too,” Besa says, in a similarly charged voice. “Between us, we can probably get most of it done today.”

“Oh, well, I”—Lacey looks flustered—“I guess I didn’t think about starting this afternoon?”

Edward nods. This is the hour when he and his aunt usually watch that day’s recording of General Hospital. Luke and Laura’s son, Lucky, is missing.

“We should take a thorough inventory,” Shay says to her mother. “Write down the contents of each box.”

“Perfecto. Then you can decide what to do with the items,” Besa says.

Lacey and Edward exchange a look.

“Okay?” Lacey says.

Lacey and Edward helplessly follow the mother and daughter inside. There are more boxes than Lacey was expecting, and they spill out of the nursery into the upstairs hall. Besa goes next door and comes back with a handful of what look like surgical scalpels.

“You don’t have to watch,” Shay says to Edward. “Not if you don’t want to.”

He nods but doesn’t move. He watches her cut into a box with the number 1 written in Sharpie on the side. He’d watched his mother write that number.

“Kitchen supplies,” Shay says, and pulls a piece of paper out of the box. “Oooh, a spreadsheet.” She shakes her head with what appears to be admiration. “This is very well organized. Let’s see. Coffee cups, drinking glasses, cutlery, dessert plates.”

His mother’s favorite mug will be in there, the one with a red balloon on the side, from a French movie that she loved. The tall glass with the chip that Edward preferred over the others. The smaller cups that they all put beside their beds, with water for the middle of the night.

Edward backs away. He passes his aunt, who is hovering behind the active figures of Besa and Shay. Lacey looks pale; her freckles stand out like tiny cries for help. She touches Edward’s arm and glances at him with what he thinks is apology. I might not have thought this through, he can feel her thinking.

The flat sheet is pulling up over his insides. It starts low and rises over his abdomen, then his chest. Edward glances down at his pressed gray slacks. The buttons on his white Brooks Brothers shirt.

“Lacey,” he says, and she startles at the sound of her name coming out of his mouth.

Edward realizes, in that moment, how rarely he addresses her. They sit side by side on the couch each afternoon, but they rarely speak. Edward likes his aunt, but she feels more unpredictable than John, and she reminds him enough of his mother to make him want to look away. There is a certain angle, rarely caught, from which she looks 80 percent like his mom. Most of the time, though, it’s a frustrating 20 percent, a reminder only of what he’s lost. When Edward needs something, he gravitates toward his uncle.

“Yes?” she says.

“I’d like the clothes in the boxes, the ones that belong to me and the ones that are Jordan’s, please. I’d like to wear them, if you don’t mind.”