Dear Edward(42)

“Yes, ma’am. The gentleman’s car is not far away.” He has already pulled out into the road, and as they ease away from the building, and the people, something eases inside of Edward, and he’s afraid he might cry. He’d rather not cry in front of this fancy old woman, who is now carefully removing her gloves and smiling at him.

“I have three boys,” Louisa says. “I can picture all of them at your age, sitting beside you there. They made a motley crew. I had them sewn up in blazers and ties, even though they wanted to wear jeans like yours. I should have let them. They looked like angry little CEOs, like their father.”

“Thank you so much for your help,” John says. “I had no idea …”

She waves her hand, and rings sparkle from the fingers. “It’s my pleasure. Once we get you to your car, you can make a proper escape.” She turns her attention to Edward, as if he’s a lock she is going to unpick. He has the thought that it’s not polite, the way she’s looking at him.

“You were wise to skip the hearing, young man. It was a circus, and you would have become the main attraction.”

Edward pulls a seatbelt across his waist, but the receiving end is buried in the seat beside him and it won’t click. “Ma’am,” he says. “Is this seatbelt broken?”

“You don’t need a belt,” John says. “We’re only going a few blocks.”

“I need a belt,” he says.

Louisa reaches across him and releases the end of the seatbelt. He buckles it with a hard click. Edward gives her a grateful nod.

The car turns left and then right. Every street is one-way.

“I don’t think I knew what to expect,” John says. “It … it didn’t occur to me that so many family members would be there.”

Louisa gives a small smile. “My ex-husband was one of the passengers. Crispin Cox—perhaps you’ve heard of him? We’ve been divorced for, oh, let’s see … nearly forty years.”

Edward lays his hand over his seatbelt, to make sure it’s doing its job. In his fully alert state, the world looks exactly as dangerous as it is.

“Your ex-husband spoke at my college,” John says. “Many years ago.”

“Crispin was an asshole,” Louisa says. “He had cancer, but he would have beaten it and gone on to be an asshole for many more years.”

“You didn’t like him?” Edward says.

“Well,” she says, “it was more complicated than like or dislike. But I did hate him, most days of the week.”

“I see our car.” John leans forward in the direction of their car, which they’re inching toward. The sidewalk looks normal now, peopled only by men and women on their way somewhere, who have no interest in or knowledge of Edward Adler.

“I didn’t hate my family,” Edward says.

Louisa looks at him appraisingly. Her eyes are a vivid blue. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she says. “It would have been much easier for you if you did, don’t you think?”

John leans across Edward to open the car door, and then they are standing in the air, peering through the open window at the woman.

“It was a pleasure to meet you, Edward Adler. I believe I will keep in touch, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” he says.

She waves her ring-laden hand, the window glides up, and the Bentley maneuvers away.

When they return to New Jersey, everything feels different. The air seems to have changed in Edward’s absence; it’s thicker and has a faintly sour taste. The milk Lacey hands him every morning is unpleasantly cold. Edward finds himself newly aware of germs, and he smells food—in case it’s rancid, or overripe, or spoiled—before he puts it in his mouth. He’s relieved to be back in Shay’s room, but the sleeping bag feels like it shrank, and an inner tag irritates his scar when he rolls over in the night. Jordan’s clothes no longer smell of him or of the cardboard boxes they lived in for months. They smell instead like Lacey’s floral laundry detergent.

When Edward notices that the clicking in his head is gone too, he spends hours testing the new silence. He tilts his head slowly from side to side, jumps up and down, even thinks about his mother, but nothing elicits the familiar clicks. He wonders if the simultaneous departure of several symptoms—any trace of a fugue state, the flat sheet inside him, the clicking—could itself be considered a symptom.

Even Shay’s face seems to have changed in the few days he was away, and she’s acquired a couple of new, unreadable looks. Occasionally, out of nowhere, in the middle of lunch or at their lockers, she’ll give him a look, and he’ll say, “I’m sorry.”

“Stop that,” she says each time. “Don’t apologize; you didn’t do anything wrong.” But Edward knows she’s still disappointed in him for not going inside the NTSB hearing. When he’d told her the first night back, her cheeks had flushed, and she’d said, “But that was going to be so interesting.”

He follows her down the school hallways and finds himself startling several times a day, when a door slams or the loudspeaker buzzes on. School is louder than he remembered, and one afternoon when a boy yells, “Fuck you!” right next to his ear and then gives him a look like, Calm down, dude, I wasn’t talking to you, Edward has to stumble into the next empty classroom and find a chair.