Dear Edward

by Ann Napolitano

“I’m glad we brought the Bentley, Beau,” the woman says to the driver. “Its size is an asset.”

  “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.

  * * *

  —

  In late spring, a letter arrives about the one-year memorial. Several families of the victims of Flight 2977 have formed a memorial committee, and the airline has offered to cover any costs. On the date of the crash one year later, a memorial statue will be erected in Colorado, at the location of the tragedy. The land has been donated by the state. The memorial will remain on that ground forever.

  A sketch of the planned tribute accompanies the letter. An artist is at work sculpting 191 birds out of metal, and the birds will be strung together in the shape of an airplane. A jet made of silver birds.

  “How horrible. And beautiful,” Lacey says, looking at the picture.

  She had told John and Edward, when they returned from D.C., that she’d accepted the part-time job as the volunteer coordinator for the local children’s hospital. She organizes the volunteers and makes sure there are enough people to read to sick children and hold brand-new babies. She said to Edward, with pride on her face, “I’ll be working at the real General Hospital now.”

  Edward doesn’t tell her that he wishes she hadn’t taken the job, that it is another unwelcome change in his life. He doesn’t tell her that he’s noticed that the pregnancy magazines, which had lived under the coffee table since he’d arrived, are now gone. He doesn’t tell her that he’s noticed that she walks around the house differently, before and after work each day. She bustles from room to room, every step filled with purpose. She doesn’t watch TV with him anymore. When Edward closes his eyes and listens to her quick steps across the kitchen floor, she sounds like a stranger.

  “Do you want to go to the unveiling?” John says to him.

  “No.”

  “Well, I have to say I’m relieved. The families will be there.” John says this with a barely concealed horror that almost makes Edward smile.

  “It’s too much,” Lacey says.

  Even though the matter is settled, the three of them stand still—as sunset dims the room—and gaze at the image of a cascade of birds pointed at the sky.

  * * *

  —

  That summer, Edward watches television during the day while Shay is at camp. His doctor said he could go to camp too, but there was hesitation in his voice that Edward capitalized on, because he can’t imagine running bases, or gluing beads, or dodging dodgeballs. He finds that he enjoys being alone in the house. He talks to the characters during General Hospital: He tells Jason not to work for the gangster Sonny and tells Alan to be kinder
to his daughter.

  He has fewer doctors’ appointments than the summer before, so he expands his television schedule and takes naps on the couch after lunch. A few times, presumably to make him leave the house, John takes Edward to work with him. They go into a mostly empty, cavernous office and move from one computer to the next, backing up the data onto drives. “They’re in bankruptcy,” John says, and nods at the huddle of men in the far corner, wearing wrinkled shirts and messy beards. “I set their computers up nine months ago, and they were so excited then. It’s a shame.”

  Shay seems intent on making him leave the house too. A couple of days a week, after she gets home from camp, she insists they walk to the playground down the street. “You need fresh air,” she says. “There’s more to life than General Hospital.”

  He shrugs his skepticism, but he doesn’t mind sitting on a swing beside her, listening while she tells him about something annoying that her mother, or a camper, said. He shades his eyes with his hand against the sunshine and watches toddlers dig in the sandbox with deadly serious expressions on their faces.

  When eighth grade starts, they continue to visit the playground once or twice a week after school. Edward is unbothered by the resumption of school; he doesn’t mind the routine of walking from one classroom to the next. He admires the two new ferns Principal Arundhi acquired over the summer and visits the man’s office to water the plants every Wednesday afternoon. He sets the television to record General Hospital each day and watches it when he gets home.

  It’s mid-October when the actor who plays Lucky leaves the show, and a new actor immediately takes over the role. On the swings later that afternoon, Edward tries to explain the injustice of this to Shay.

  “No one acknowledged the change at all, except to run a little announcement at the bottom of the screen. All the other actors just pretended it was the same Lucky, even though it was clearly an entirely different person. The new guy weighs about twenty pounds more than the real Lucky—he barely resembles him. It made it all look so fake.”

  “It’s a soap opera.” Shay kicks off the ground and swings forward. She always swings higher than he does. She pumps with her legs and never takes breaks, as if at any moment she might be judged on her form and trajectory. “Every female character on that show has had major plastic surgery. Monica can hardly move her face anymore.”

  He frowns at her, and thinks, Is that true?

  “I don’t care about the new Lucky,” he says. “I’m going to stop watching the show for good.”

  “The real Lucky might come back. His movie career might turn out to be a bust.”

  Edward almost growls at her with irritation. “No, he won’t.”

  Shay turns her head to look at him. She swings by, a gentle blur. “I’ve been meaning to ask you. Did you not want to go to the memorial this summer just because you didn’t want to fly there?”

  Edward rubs at the dirt with his foot. He sways forward and back, with one foot touching the ground. “That was part of it.”

  She’s surprised him with this question, and his chest aches as he considers it. He didn’t let himself think about the memorial again after the conversation with his aunt and uncle in the kitchen. He’d tried, when he walked away from the hearing, to walk away from any thoughts related to the crash. But Shay asked him a question, and the answer is that he can’t imagine entering an airport, or going through security, or buckling himself into a seat. That sequence of events feels unviable, opposed to a natural law. He could no sooner get on a plane than fly out of this playground by flapping his arms. He belongs on the ground. He has been grounded.

  “The odds are impossible that anything like that could happen to you again,” Shay says. “You’d basically guarantee the safety of a plane by getting on it.”

  “That’s not how that works.” He shifts his weight on the swing, and it creaks. “That’s called the gambler’s fallacy, you know.”

  “The what’s what?”

  “It’s when gamblers convince themselves that because they’ve been losing for a long stretch, they’re more likely to win any minute. But they’re wrong—of course. The odds of flipping heads is still fifty percent, even if you’ve flipped ten tails in a row.”

  “That’s interesting.” Shay dips her head back as she arcs upward. “Because I always feel bulletproof when I’m with you, as if I’m safe by association.”

  Edward barely registers what she’s said. He’s been sucker-punched by memories of his brother. This happens sometimes, and he knows he has to ride the memories out. The only way out of it is through it. He remembers Jordan above him on the top bunk, his head half-buried in his pillow. He remembers Jordan’s face when he wrote music, his brow furrowed in concentration. He sees Jordan beside him on the plane and knows that the smallest, truest reason he will never fly again is that the last airplane seat he ever sits in has to be the one beside his brother.

  2.

  “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?”

  —GEORGE ELIOT

  11:42 A.M.

  Just before lunch service, Veronica takes a short break in the front corner of the cabin, next to the kitchen. She always wishes, in this moment, for a cigarette. The yearning is strange, since she quit smoking four years earlier and doesn’t miss the sensation of smoke filling her lungs, but something about leaning her hip against the metal counter and looking out the small port window makes her desire a cigarette every single time.

  She wonders how long she’ll be in L.A.—two days, three? She’s been in the air for four days now, and though she hasn’t yet received next week’s schedule, she knows she’s due a few days off. She wants to put on her new bikini and lie by the pool. She wants to drive her brother’s convertible and wreck her hair with wind.

  Wind is what she misses most, up in the sky. The airplane air isn’t as bad as passengers say it is; she never likes when people spout opinions without bothering to gather the facts first. Airplanes take about 50 percent of the air collected in the outtake valves of the passenger compartment and mix it with fresh air from outside. The air is then passed through filters to be sterilized before it’s introduced to the passengers. So the air on the plane is clean, and not worthy of complaint, but still, Veronica can taste the effort in it.

  Every time she leaves an airport, she appreciates the unpredictability of each inhale. There might be a soft gust of wind, or the smell of popcorn, or the heaviness that precedes a rainstorm. She notices nuances in the air that everyone else is immune to, with the exception of submariners, probably, and astronauts. People for whom the earth is not enough; their freedom is off the ground. Veronica enjoys the unbridled nature of the outside world in small doses, but this is her home. She is the fullest version of herself at thirty thousand feet.

  She straightens up, runs her hands over her hips. Hers have been the only hands on her body since her breakup with Lionel. She hasn’t had sex in a month, which is a personal record. Usually she blitzes dry spells with the hot stoner on the first floor of her condo, or with her college ex-boyfriend, but she’s been too busy, or distracted, perhaps, to have made that happen. She’s aware that she’s getting lonely, though; she gets a small charge now out of brushing up against a handsome passenger. Even the finance guy in first class—too slick and hungry for her taste, normally—is pressing something inside her. She shakes her head and pulls out the massive drawer stacked with lunch trays. She loads the cart. She chooses the slowest of her walks, the one that maximizes the side to side of her hips, and heads into the cabin. She asks for every look and then throws it like a coin into the till.

  * * *

  —

  The economy flight attendant appears at Bruce’s side. “We deliver special meals first,” she says.

  Bruce blinks at her. “Special meals?”

  Jordan lowers his tray over his lap. “It�
��s for me. Thank you.”

  “Why do you get a special meal?” Eddie asks.

  “It’s vegan,” Jordan says. “Mom ordered lunch for all of us when she booked the tickets, and I told her to enter my meal preference.” The tray the flight attendant hands him holds a pot of applesauce, a hummus sandwich, and a pile of cut carrots.

  Bruce says, “You’re vegan now?”

  “I’ve been vegan for a few weeks. You just haven’t noticed me avoiding the dishes you cooked with dairy.” Jordan tugs the clear wrapper off the sandwich.

  The move is hard for all of us, Bruce tells himself. He’s just expressing himself. That’s what teenagers do. Stay calm.

  Bruce has always been the cook in the family, and when Jordan was a preschooler, the little boy showed up in the kitchen and asked to help prepare dinner. They had been partners ever since. At first, Jordan was given a butter knife, which he used to cut soft vegetables. He arranged food on plates. He tasted pasta to see if it was done, and sauces for saltiness. By the time he was ten, he was helping Bruce choose recipes. He received his own subscription to Bon Appétit for Hanukkah and pored over every copy, folding down the corner on recipes he wanted to try. Eddie became their taster, coming to the kitchen from the piano, or the book he was reading, to give the dish a thumbs-up. When Bruce pictured happiness, it was cooking in the kitchen beside Jordan while listening to Eddie play the piano in the next room. That scene repeated regularly and made Bruce thrum with joy. Every time, he thought, I will not take this for granted.

  It was a year ago that Jordan had announced he was turning vegetarian for moral reasons. No more brisket, Sunday hamburgers, pasta Bolognese, steamed clams. Bruce hated the idea of one meal for Jordan and a separate meal for the rest of them, so he subscribed to the Vegetarian Times and cooked a meatless meal for dinner each night. Sometimes he made burgers for him, Eddie, and Jane, and a veggie burger for Jordan, or included a side dish with chorizo or pancetta—two of his favorites—which Jordan avoided. It had been hard, and Bruce had secretly hated it, but he’d made it work.