Dear Edward

by Ann Napolitano

  Crispin’s nurse fusses over him as he moves from the wheelchair into a first-class seat. He’s awake now, and his irritation is at full throttle. One of the worst things about being sick is that it gives people—goddamn strangers—full clearance to touch him. The nurse reaches out to wrap her hands around his thigh, to adjust his position. His thigh! His legs once strode across boardrooms, covered the squash court at the club, and carved down black diamonds at Jackson Hole. Now a woman he considers at best mediocre thinks she can gird them with her palms. He waves her off. “I don’t require assistance,” he says, “to sit down in a lousy seat.”

  Benjamin boards the plane with his head down. He flew to New York on a military aircraft, so this is his first commercial flight in over a year. He knows what to expect, though, and is uncomfortable. In 2002, he would have been automatically upgraded from economy to first class, and the entire plane would have applauded at the sight of him. Now one passenger starts to clap, then another joins in, then a few more. The clapping skips like a stone across a lake, touching down here and there, before sinking below the inky surface into quiet. The noise, while it lasts, is skittish, with undertones of embarrassment. “Thank you for your service,” a young woman whispers. The soldier lifts his hand in a soft salute and drops into his economy seat.

  The Adler family unknots near the door. Jane waves to her sons and husband, who are right in front of her, and then, shoulders bunched, hurries into first class. Bruce looks after his wife for a moment, then directs the gangly limbs of Jordan and Eddie into the back of the plane. He peers at the seat numbers they pass and calculates that they will be twenty-nine rows from Jane, who had previously promised to downgrade her ticket to sit with them. Bruce has come to realize that her promises, when related to work, mean very little. Still, he chooses to believe her every time, and thus chooses to be disappointed.

  “Which row, Dad?” Eddie says.

  “Thirty-one.”

  Passengers unpack snacks and books and tuck them into the seat pockets in front of them. The back section of the plane smells of Indian food. The home cooks, including Bruce, sniff the air and think: cumin. Jordan and Eddie argue over who gets the window seat—their father claims the aisle for legroom—until the older boy realizes they’re keeping other passengers from getting to their seats and abruptly gives in. He regrets this act of maturity the moment he sits down; he now feels trapped between his father and brother. The elation—the power—he felt after the pat-down has been squashed. He had, for a few minutes, felt like a fully realized adult. Now he feels like a dumb kid buckled into a high chair. Jordan resolves not to speak to Eddie for at least an hour, to punish him.

  “Dad,” Eddie says, “will all our stuff be in the new house when we get there?”

  Bruce wonders what Eddie is specifically worried about: his beanbag chair, his piano music, the stuffed elephant that he still sleeps with on occasion? His sons have lived in the New York apartment for their entire lives. That apartment has now been rented; if Jane is successful and they decide to stay on the West Coast, it will be sold. “Our boxes arrive next week,” Bruce says. “The house is furnished, though, so we’ll be fine until then.”

  The boy, who looks younger than his twelve years, nods at the oval window beside him. His fingertips press white against the clear plastic.

  * * *

  —

  Linda Stollen shivers in her white jeans and thin shirt. The woman seated to her right seems, impossibly, to already be asleep. She has draped a blue scarf across her face and is leaning against the window. Linda is fishing in the seat-back pocket, hoping to find a complimentary blanket, when the woman with the musical skirt steps into her row. The woman is so large that when she settles into the aisle seat, she spills over the armrest into Linda’s personal space.

  “Good morning, sweetheart,” the woman says. “I’m Florida.”

  Linda pulls her elbows in close to her sides, to avoid contact. “Like the state?”

  “Not like the state. I am the state. I’m Florida.”

  Oh my God, Linda thinks. This flight is six hours long. I’m going to have to pretend to be asleep the whole way.

  “What’s your name, darling?”

  Linda hesitates. This is an unanticipated opportunity to kick-start her new self. She plans to introduce herself to strangers in California as Belinda. It’s part of her fresh beginning: an improved version of herself, with an improved name. Belinda, she has decided, is an alluring woman who radiates confidence. Linda is an insecure housewife with fat ankles. Linda curls her tongue inside her mouth in preparation. Be-lin-da. But her mouth won’t utter the syllables. She coughs and hears herself say, “I’m getting married. I’m going to California so my boyfriend can propose. He’s going to propose.”

  “Well,” Florida says, in a mild tone, “isn’t that something.”

  “Yes,” Linda says. “Yes. I suppose it is.” This is when she realizes how tired she is and how little she slept last night. The word suppose sounds ridiculous coming out of her mouth. She wonders if this is the first time she’s ever used it in a sentence.

  Florida bends down to rearrange items in her gargantuan canvas bag. “I’ve been married a handful of times myself,” she says. “Maybe more than a handful.”

  Linda’s father has been married three times, her mother twice. Handfuls of marriages make sense to her, though she intends to marry only once. She intends to be different from everyone else in the Stollen line. To be better.

  “If you get hungry, darling, I have plenty of snacks. I refuse to touch that foul airplane food. If you can even call it food.”

  Linda’s stomach grumbles. When did she last eat a proper meal? Yesterday? She stares at her bag of chocolate candies, peeking forlornly out of the seat-back pocket. With an urgency that surprises her, she grabs the bag, rips it open, and tips it into her mouth.

  “You didn’t tell me your name,” Florida says.

  She pauses between chews. “Linda.”

  The flight attendant—the same woman who welcomed them at the gate—saunters down the center aisle, checking overhead compartments and seatbelts. She seems to move to an internal soundtrack; she slows down, smiles, then changes tempo. Both men and women watch her; the swishy walk is magnetic. The flight attendant is clearly accustomed to the attention. She sticks her tongue out at a baby seated on her mother’s lap, and the infant gurgles. She pauses by Benjamin Stillman’s aisle seat, crouches down, and whispers in his ear: “I’ve been alerted to your medical issue, because I’m the chief attendant on this flight. If you need any assistance at any point, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

  The soldier is startled; he’d been staring out the window at the mix of grays on the horizon. Planes, runways, the distant jagged city, a highway, whizzing cars. He meets her eyes—realizing, as he does so, that he has avoided all eye contact for days, maybe even weeks. Her eyes are honey-colored; they go deep, and are nice to look into. Benjamin nods, shaken, and forces himself to turn away. “Thank you.”

  In first class, Mark Lassio has arranged his seat area with precision. His laptop, a mystery novel, and a bottle of water are in the seat-back pocket. His phone is in his hand; his shoes are off and tucked beneath the seat. His briefcase, laid flat in the overhead compartment, contains office paperwork, his three best pens, caffeine pills, and a bag of almonds. He’s on his way to California to close a major deal, one he’s been working on for months. He glances over his shoulder, trying to appear casual. He’s never been good at casual, though. He’s a man who looks best in a three-thousand-dollar suit. He peers at the curtain that separates first class and economy with the same intensity he brings to his workouts, his romantic dinners, and his business presentations. His nickname at the office is the Hammer.

  The flight attendant draws his attention for obvious reasons, but there’s more to it than sheer beauty. She’s that magic, shimmery age
—he guesses twenty-seven—when a woman has one foot in youth and one in adulthood. She is somehow both a smooth-skinned sixteen-year-old girl and a knowing forty-year-old woman in the same infinite, blooming moment. And this particular woman is alive like a house on fire. Mark hasn’t seen anyone this packed with cells and genes and biology in a long time, perhaps ever. She’s full of the same stuff as the rest of them, but she’s turned everything on.

  When the flight attendant finally steps into first class, Mark has the urge to unbuckle his seatbelt, grab her left hand with his right, wrap his other arm around her waist, and start to salsa. He doesn’t know how to salsa, but he’s pretty sure that physical contact with her would resolve the issue. She is a Broadway musical made flesh, whereas he, he realizes suddenly, is running on nothing but alcohol fumes and pretzels. He looks down at his hands, abruptly deflated. The idea of clasping her waist and starting to dance is not impossible to him. He’s done that kind of thing before; his therapist calls them “flare-ups.” He hasn’t had a flare-up in months, though. He’s sworn them off.

  When he looks back up, the flight attendant is at the front of the plane, poised to announce the safety instructions. Just to keep her in their eyeline, many passengers lean into the aisle, surprised to find themselves paying attention for the first time in years.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” her voice curves through the air, “my name is Veronica, and I am the chief flight attendant. You can find me in first class, and my colleagues Ellen and Luis”—she gestures at a dimmer version of herself (lighter-brown hair, paler skin) and a bald, short man—“will be in economy. On behalf of the captain and the entire crew, welcome aboard. At this time, I ask that you please make sure your seat backs and tray tables are in their full upright position. Also, as of this moment, any electronic equipment must be turned off. We appreciate your cooperation.”

  Mark obediently powers off his phone. Usually he just tucks it in his pocket. He feels the sonorous welling in his chest that accompanies doing something for someone else.

  Jane Adler, sitting beside him, watches the enraptured passengers with amusement. She was, she figures, actively cute for a few years in her twenties, which was when she met Bruce, but she’s never come close to wielding Veronica’s brand of sex appeal. The flight attendant is now showing the passengers how to buckle a seatbelt, and the Wall Street guy is acting like he’s never heard of a seatbelt before, much less how to operate one.

  “There are several emergency exits on this aircraft,” Veronica tells them. “Please take a few moments now to locate the one nearest to you. If we need to evacuate the aircraft, floor-level lighting will illuminate and guide you toward the exits. Doors can be opened by moving the handle in the direction of the arrow. Each door is equipped with an inflatable slide, which may also be detached and used as a life raft.”

  Jane knows that her husband, somewhere behind her, has already mapped out the exits and chosen which one to push the boys toward in case of an emergency. She can also sense his dismissive eye roll during the comment about inflatable slides. Bruce processes the world—and decides what’s true—based on numbers, and statistically no one has ever survived a plane crash by using an inflatable slide. They are simply a fairy tale intended to give passengers a false sense of control. Bruce has no use for fairy tales, but most people seem to like them.

  Crispin wonders why he never married a woman with a body like this flight attendant’s. None of his wives had an ass to speak of. Maybe skinny girls are a young man’s game, he thinks, and it takes years to appreciate the value of a cushion in your bed. He’s not attracted to this woman; she’s the age of a couple of his grandchildren, and he has no more fire in his loins. The very idea of two people writhing around in a bed seems like a distasteful joke. It’s a joke he spent a lot of time cracking himself, of course, when he was a younger man. He realizes—gripping the arms of his chair as hot pain blinks on and off in his midsection—that all the major chapters in his personal life started and ended on wrinkled bedsheets. All the wives, the would-be wives, the ex-wives, negotiated their terms in the bedroom.

  I get the kids.

  We’ll be married in June at the country club.

  I’ll keep the summer house.

  Pay my bills, or I’ll tell your wife.

  He peers at Veronica, who is now explaining how a life vest can be inflated by blowing through a straw. Maybe if the women I chose had a little more heft, he thinks, they would have stuck around longer.

  “We remind you,” the flight attendant says, with a slow smile, “that this is a nonsmoking flight. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask one of our crew members. On behalf of Trinity Airlines, I”—she lingers on the word, sending it out like a soap bubble into the air—“wish you an enjoyable flight.”

  Veronica steps out of view then, and, without a focal point, the passengers pick up books or magazines. Some close their eyes. The vents hiss louder. Partly because the sound comes from above, and partly because it is combined with blasts of icy air, the hiss makes people uncomfortable.

  Jane Adler pulls her sweater tighter to fight off the cold and nestles into her guilt for not finishing the script before this flight. She hates to fly, and now she has to fly apart from her family. It’s punishment, she thinks. For my laziness, for my avoidance, for my taking on this crazy assignment in the first place. She had written for a television series in New York for so long, partly because it involved no travel. But here she is, taking another chance, another job, and another plane ride.

  She follows her thoughts down a familiar path; when she’s anxious, she replays moments from her life, perhaps to convince herself that she has a history. She has created memories, which means she will create more. She and her sister run on a flat Canadian beach; she silently, amicably, splits the newspaper with her father at the kitchen table; she pees in a public park after drinking too much champagne at a college formal; she watches Bruce, his face wrinkled in thought on a street corner in the West Village; she gives birth to her youngest son without drugs, in a hot tub, amazed at the bovine noises rising from her lungs. There’s the stack of her seven favorite novels that she’s been curating since childhood, and her best friend, Tilly, and the dress she wears to all important meetings because it makes her feel both pulled together and thin. The way her grandmother puckered her lips, and blew air kisses, and sang greetings: Hello, hello!

  Jane tills through the inane and the meaningful, trying to distract herself from both where she is and where she’s going. Her fingers automatically find the spot below her collarbone where her comet-shaped birthmark lives, and she presses down. This has been a habit since childhood. She presses as if to make a connection with her real, true self. She presses until it hurts.

  Crispin Cox looks out the window. The doctors in New York—the best doctors in New York, and doesn’t that mean the world?—assured him that it was worth undergoing treatment at a specialized hospital in L.A. They know this cancer inside out, the New York doctors told him. We’ll get you on the drug trial. There was a light in the doctors’ eyes that Crispin recognized. They didn’t want him to die, to be beaten, because that would mean that they, one day, would be beaten too. When you’re great, you fight. You don’t go down. You burn like a motherfucking fire. Crispin had nodded, because of course he was going to beat this ridiculous disease. Of course this wasn’t going to take him down. But a month ago, he’d caught a virus that both sapped his energy and soaked him with worry. A new voice entered his head, one that forecast doom and made him question his prior confidence. The virus passed, but the anxiety didn’t. He’d barely left his apartment since then. When his doctor called to make a final preflight appointment to do more blood work, Crispin said he was too busy. The truth was that he was scared the blood work would reflect the way he now felt. His only concession to this new, unwelcome unease was hiring a nurse for the flight. He didn’t like the idea of being
alone in the sky.

  Bruce Adler looks at his boys; their faces are unreadable. He has the familiar thought that he is too old and out of touch to decipher them. A few days earlier, while waiting for a table at their favorite Chinese restaurant, Bruce watched Jordan notice a girl his age walk in with her family. The two teens regarded each other for a moment, heads tipped to the side, and then Jordan’s face opened—it might as well have split in half—with a grin. He offered this stranger what looked like everything: his joy, his love, his brain, his complete attention. He gave that girl a face that Bruce, who has studied his son every single day of his life, had never seen. Never even knew existed.

  Benjamin shifts in his cramped seat. He wishes he were in the cockpit, behind the sealed door. Pilots speak like military men, in a scripted code, with brisk precision. A few minutes of listening to them prepare for takeoff would allow his chest to unclench. He doesn’t like the combination of chitchat and snores going on around him. There’s a messiness to how civilians behave that bothers him. The white lady next to him smells of eggs, and she’s asked him twice whether he was in Iraq or “that other place.”

  Linda finds herself engaged in a strange and exhausting abdominal exercise as she tries to steer away from the wide mass of Florida without touching the sleeping passenger on her other side. She feels like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. She wishes—her obliques engaged—that she had bought more chocolate. She thinks, In California, with Gary, I will eat more, and she’s cheered by the thought. She’s dieted since the age of twelve; she never considered lifting that yoke until this moment. Thinness has always seemed essential to her, but what if it’s not? She tries to imagine herself as voluptuous, sexy.

  Florida is singing again but from so deep within her chest, and at such a low volume, that the noise comes out like a hum. Around her, as if cued by the sound, the plane’s engine thrums to life. The entry door is vacuum-sealed shut. The aircraft shudders and lurches, while Florida murmurs. She is a fountain of melodies, dousing everyone in her vicinity. Linda grips her hands in her lap. Jordan and Eddie, despite their silent feud, touch shoulders for comfort as the plane builds speed. The passengers holding books or magazines aren’t actually reading anymore. Those with their eyes closed aren’t sleeping. Everyone is conscious, as the plane lifts off the ground.