Dear Edward(51)
You okay? Shay had asked him at lunch today. Don’t get weird because of this. Everything is fine. We’re fine. He’d said, I know, but in truth he feels like he’s been handed notice to walk a plank and drop into shark-infested waters. Every minute, he’s inching down the wooden slab. Tonight will be his last night on her floor. Tomorrow, he jumps.
“Yes, you, silly,” Lacey says.
“What’s yours?” He says this to buy time. He doesn’t have a favorite movie. When he was little, it was The Jungle Book. Has he even seen a movie since the crash? He thinks, General Hospital?
“Steel Magnolias,” Lacey says.
“What about you?” Edward says to John. He’s comfortable with this kind of conversational bobbing and weaving; he does it with Dr. Mike every week. Every time a question makes him uncomfortable, he redirects. This week, in an effort to avoid any mention of Shay or the fact that he’s moving bedrooms, he told Mike about the book on investing that Louisa Cox’s driver had dropped off at their house that week. Included was a note on very thick cardstock that said, There are elements of a proper education that they never teach you in school. Read this book and then write back with your organized thoughts. This was the second book the driver had delivered since the hearing. The first was a biography of Teddy Roosevelt, which Shay and Edward had read together, stopping every page or two to make fun of how besotted the author clearly was with the burly president. But now when Shay says, Should we do our homework? Edward feels a wave of guilt that has nothing to do with the work assigned by his teachers but with the fact that he owes organized thoughts—on a book so boring he can’t get past the first page—to Mrs. Cox.
Dr. Mike had been amused, though, and therefore Edward won. He doesn’t always win with the therapist—Dr. Mike usually plays along for a minute and then comes up with a question that’s even closer to the bull’s-eye—but Edward is confident he can run a conversation with his aunt and uncle. They are unskilled; they have no chance.
“Blade Runner.” John chews a bite of food and smiles slightly, as if the movie is a warm memory. “Seen it twenty-three times.”
“Goodness,” Lacey says. “That’s not something to brag about, you know.”
“Oh yeah?” John points his fork in the direction of his wife. “How many times have you seen Steel Magnolias, Lace?”
“That movie is a classic,” Lacey says, in a haughty tone. She turns back to Edward. “I was thinking that if you liked Star Wars, or another big movie, we could get you Star Wars bedding.”
Edward rolls the sentence through his head, trying to make sense of it. “Bedding?”
“Besa told me that you’re going to sleep on the pullout couch in the basement. I think we can make that a really special space for you down there.”
Down there. Edward pictures the basement, which lies directly beneath them. He is near the end of the plank, and the wind is howling, and he hates himself for feeling this way. He knows he’s more upset than he should be, at least about what’s happening on the surface. He went to bed in one room; now he’ll go to bed in another. The distance between Shay’s bedroom and the basement is less than thirty yards. He will still walk to school with Shay every morning. He will still listen to her read books aloud. The surface news is bearable. But what might be below the surface, below the roiling water, distresses him.
Lacey is beaming at him from across the table. Edward puts down his fork, his appetite finished. The darkness inside him has taken over. He wonders what exactly Besa told Lacey. Did she say that Shay got her period? Or did she say something else, something Edward dreads is the actual truth: that Shay is simply sick of him, and now she has the necessary excuse to get him out of her room and, therefore, her life?
He lifts the metal objects Mrs. Tuhane tells him to lift, straightens his spine when she tells him to, and tries to decipher the strange physical-fitness language she speaks. The weight room is directly off the gym; Edward can hear kids shuffling across the shiny floor. Balls being dribbled. A whistle demanding attention.
“You’re going to squat, you’re going to deadlift, and you’re going to bench,” she says. “These are compound exercises, which means they exercise more than one muscle group at once. If you learn to bench properly, you can shove away someone who’s got a hundred pounds on you. You deadlift to your potential, you can lift a car off a trapped child.”
“Really?” Edward says. He tries to picture himself lifting a car, his face red, his arms shaking with effort. The image is ridiculous.
“Really.”
“What does the squat do?”
“The squat does everything. When you squat, you tax your entire system. You want big legs? Squat. You want big arms? You squat.”
Mrs. Tuhane always looks intense, but right now she looks like she’s channeling some great eternal truth. Benjamin Stillman must have done squats. He must have known what to do with every piece of metal in this room.
Edward squats with a wooden stick across his back, because Mrs. Tuhane says he’s pitifully weak and not ready for a bar, much less actual weights. As he sinks down, he remembers Shay staring out the window, her expression fierce.
“Adler,” Mrs. Tuhane says. “Squats don’t end at the bottom. That’s called sitting. You need to spring up with good form.”