Dear Edward(47)

“Yes,” Linda says.

“Well, I’m going to L.A. to do that.”

“You’re married, though, aren’t you?”

Linda is looking at Florida’s hand, so she looks at it too. There’s a plain silver band on her left ring finger. She’d thought about taking it off, but she likes the ring, and she also doubts she’d be able to get it over her knuckle. She was thinner when she and Bobby married.

“I left,” she says. “Before it got bad, though. I’ve had enough lifetimes to know to trust my gut. I left while he still felt affection for me. We were just on different paths.”

Linda is quiet for a moment. “You mean he didn’t want to rollerblade on the twisty sidewalk by the beach?”

Florida is surprised by the laughter that erupts out of her. The people seated around them are probably startled too; she’s never been quiet in her mirth. Heads turn, ahead of them and across the aisle. Somehow, the woman on the other side of Linda continues to sleep. Florida is cackling now, bent over. Picturing Bobby at his worktable with his raft of blueprints in front of him. Each one detailing a survival plan in case of a different catastrophe: the collapse of the dollar, limited water supply due to global warming, an extreme weather event, a populist uprising that overthrows the government, and a fascist police state, among others. He had thirteen detailed plans, notated with complicated if/then scenarios.

“That’s right,” Florida says, wheezing. “He doesn’t want to rollerblade, and I do.”

And this seems like as great a truth as any for why she left him. She regards the girl next to her with a new respect. Perhaps she has some wisdom in her, after all.

Another truth is that those blueprints had changed over the course of their marriage. In the beginning, those plans were shaped to save everyone, or at least their friends and like-minded allies, but as the years passed in Vermont and they grew more and more isolated, the plans were revised—subtly at first, and then brazenly—to save only them. Or even, she came to suspect, just him.

“I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” Linda says.

Florida smiles at the girl. “Everything ends,” she says. “That’s nothing to be sad about. What matters is what starts in that moment.”

“This moment?”

“That’s right.”

Mark walks up and down the aisle a couple of times after using the bathroom. Sitting next to the lady who’s typing in a plodding way, her forehead scrunched up, is stressing him out. He has the desire to fist-bump the soldier when the huge man passes him on the way back to his seat, but he worries that the gesture would seem racist somehow. He gives him a nod instead. He wonders if the guy thinks he looks down on him because he’s a soldier and probably less educated than him. He doesn’t, though, at all. He can tell this guy can handle himself; he looks like a pro. And Mark is a pro too. Crispin Cox was, for damn sure, during his prime. These men are his brethren. Race and class have nothing to do with it. Do you know your shit? Are you deeply competent? Can you kick ass? Then ride with me, brothers.

He’s back in first class again. He almost sits down but decides to do another lap. That lady with the kids and the white-haired husband is not an ass-kicker. She’s a worrier, not a warrior. She’s a mom, and she’s sapping his powers. Mark stops halfway down the aisle and closes his eyes. He tries to sense Veronica’s location.

“Everything all right?” he hears her say from beside him.

“Oh, yes.” And it is. He took a caffeine pill right before he left his seat, and he feels good. Great, actually.

She’s looking at him in that wise, I-can-read-your-thoughts way some women have, so he decides, What the hell, I’ll say them out loud. He speaks in a low voice, though, so no one else can hear. “I’d like to kiss you more than anything else on earth.”

A pause follows. The air conditioners hum, and someone loudly opens a bag of chips and someone else emits a high-pitched sneeze, and in that pause, Mark is aware that this could go very, very badly. She could look at him with disgust, insist he return to his seat immediately, report him for sexual harassment, even sue.

But then she says, in her own low tone, “We’re not on earth, sir.”

Pyrotechnics detonate inside him. He says, “Even better.”





June 2015

Two years after the crash, the physical therapist and the throat-clearing doctor give Edward’s health the all clear, which means he has no choice but to attend summer camp with Shay. He finds that the counselors—kids only a couple of years older than him—don’t care whether he runs bases, so he becomes the camp scorekeeper. He sits on the bleachers, in the shade, and keeps track of runs. Arts and crafts turn out to be surprisingly enjoyable; there’s something calming about sitting next to Shay in front of an assortment of glue sticks, pipe cleaners, markers, and googly eyes, with the freedom to create something ugly.

Edward is alarmed, though, by how the doctor’s all clear makes the air loosen around him. By the end of eighth grade, teachers expect him to do his homework and speak up in class discussions. Lacey assigns him household chores for the first time—washing the dishes and doing his own laundry—and on the nights she stays late at the hospital, he heats up a frozen pizza in the oven for himself and John. Besa asks Edward to carry heavy groceries from her car, and sometimes she gives him a skeptical look that seems to ask, Do you still need to be with my daughter all the time? The grown-ups are collectively nudging Edward in the back and giving him the side-eye. Their body language says: The crisis is over. You need to move on, so we can move on with our lives.