Veronica sways down the first-class aisle. “Beverage?” She speaks in a singsong whisper, so as not to awaken the sleepers. She makes eye contact with everyone who’s conscious, because eye contact is a crucial ingredient in ensuring that first-class passengers feel special, like they got their money’s worth.
She gives Mark a quick glance, though, and no more. The woman seated beside him asks for a bottle of water.
“Of course.”
She turns to check on the old man and his nurse. The vibe in this row has been off-putting since the flight began. The man clearly has that kind of over-the-top wealth that’s led him to expect service from everyone he encounters. Veronica saw his nurse crying earlier and slipped her an extra bag of roasted nuts while he was in the bathroom.
There have been many occasions when Veronica’s been treated like a second-class citizen, so she understands the bad taste it puts in your mouth. She knows roasted nuts won’t erase that taste, but she hopes the gesture tells the woman that she’s not alone. Veronica has had her ass pinched and slapped too many times to count. The same goes for men telling her to smile, as if the arrangement of her features, or her mood, is any of their damn business. She’s had guys casually lean into her as they pass her in the aisle, so their hard penis presses against her hip. She’s regularly referred to as “sweetheart,” “darling,” and “baby.” She’s paid the same salary as Luis, even though she’s the chief flight attendant and he’s only been in the industry for six months. She’s been leered at by men floating in a sea of vodka tonics, and she’s had her work—which she excels at—criticized by men who seem to be simply looking for a sport to pass the time.
Veronica knows how to handle these situations, of course. Not allowing men to diminish her, shining her light straight at them, is perhaps her greatest gift. She feels for women who seem unskilled in this particular art. The nurse is clearly one of those women.
Veronica straightens her skirt as she returns to the galley kitchen. She’s a little off-balance—it’s not like her to dwell on the unpleasant aspects of her job. She needs to get back on her game. But when she closes her eyes to regroup, she sees Mark’s. They have the sheen of dark blue velvet, filled with shimmer and shine. His eyes startled her in the bathroom. Perhaps it’s that unexpected beauty that has her shaken. She’d thought she was offering her beauty to him; she hadn’t anticipated receiving any in return.
* * *
—
Crispin is filled with a sensation he can’t identify, one he hasn’t experienced in decades. Since childhood, perhaps. The feeling flickers through him, like candlelight bouncing off walls. The light travels down twisting dark hallways inside him.
Crispin grew up in a small house in Maine, the middle of thirteen children. There were no hallways in his childhood home. Two steps and you were in the kitchen; two more steps, the bathroom; two more steps, the main room. Crispin slept in a small bedroom with his five brothers. The oldest boy was a religious bully who regularly tackled Crispin to the floor, then perched on top of him and read the Bible aloud. Crispin, his cheek pressed against the rough floor, muttered swear words in return. He spoke quietly enough that his mother couldn’t hear but loudly enough to make his brother’s ears go red. That was the memory he returned to, in the rare moments when he thought of his own youth. Pinned against the wooden floor, spitting curses while his brother furiously preached.
Where are these hallways? They’re rough, dusty, belonging to a house inferior to any Crispin has inhabited as an adult. He had always hired decorators, and he married women with inherent style. Crispin had never been able to create anything beautiful himself, but he knew beauty when he saw it. His hallways had lush wallpaper and wainscoting. They were well lit with fancy sconces and chandeliers.
The candlelight and rough interior keep bringing him back to Maine, before his family had a television, when they all sat around the radio in the evening, listening to Jack Benny and the news. Crispin always scooted closest to the radio; the smooth voice vibrating through the speaker was the only hint he had of life outside his town, his neighborhood, his snowy state, and he wanted out. He’d wanted out from the moment he could string the words together. Most of his brothers and sisters would marry their high school sweethearts and work at the local factory. The brother who sat on him started a landscaping business. Crispin knew a trap when he saw it, though. He found, applied for, and won a scholarship to boarding school. He moved out of the house at the age of fourteen and never went back.
The light wavers; perhaps the person holding it is tired. The steps slow. The rush seems to be over. There is a crushing feeling, which puts Crispin back on the floor, his brother’s weight grinding him down.
* * *
—
Florida surveys the rows around her. People are settling down, clocking out. The airplane is humming at a deeper frequency, as if it too has moved into some kind of REM sleep. Florida feels herself expand into the quiet. Her attention spreads out, and she allows herself—her thoughts, her feelings—to unpack. She wonders if Bobby has figured out that she’s gone farther than a baby shower in New York City. She threw her cellphone into a garbage can at the airport. She’s not scared of him, but his intensity is formidable, and she’d rather not leave an easy trail. She’d married a man hot with potential, who made her scream with joy in bed, but she’d ended up living with a stranger, a man she couldn’t predict. It was her lack of judgment that disturbs her the most.
She had screwed up, not him. It made her sad that her vast experience, even her marathon dances with men, hadn’t left her any the wiser. She had long nursed a theory that she improved with every incarnation. She remained human, and flawed, but she was more evolved. She knew what was what. She knew what mattered. She knew, at a deeper level each time, that what mattered was love. But love was what she had misread, mistaken, and misplaced in this life. Florida glances at the sleeping women beside her. The woman with the blue scarf and the expensive shoes. Linda, her blond hair swept over her face, her mouth slightly open. She looks like a little girl. A little girl having a baby of her own.
Florida pictures herself rollerblading down the twisty boardwalk. She doesn’t have a plan for her new life, but she has possibilities. She can join a band. Creating music with other people always nourishes her, and she needs nourishment. She could read tarot cards. She’s not a great card reader, but she’s good, and customers always walk away from her readings with satisfaction and insight. She pays real attention to the person who sits across from her, and real attention is hard to come by. Florida looks deep into their eyes and finds their inevitable goodness. Sometimes that goodness is a pebble; sometimes it’s fireworks.
More intangible, and yet the foundation of her California plan, is to love. Not men specifically. She will not marry again. She refuses to bicker, or ride moody silences, or eat broccoli because he likes broccoli and wants her to do the same. She will quite simply love everyone who crosses her path, starting with the girl beside her. She will act as a mama to Linda, who badly needs one, and a grandmother to her baby.
When Linda told her that her boyfriend was a scientist who studied whales, Florida had a rare glimpse into her own future. She nearly always traffics in her past, but occasionally she has a vision that stretches forward, like the steel cables of a suspension bridge, toward a land she hasn’t yet touched. She pictures herself, Linda, and Gary on a boat in the middle of a gusty ocean. A low horizon and whitecaps are visible in every direction. They’re wearing bright-yellow slickers and rain hats. They stand side by side, pressed against the railing, staring in the same direction. There is a whale fifty yards from the boat. It breaches the surface, sprays water at the sky, and dives back down again. The three humans gaze at the spot where it disappeared, in a state of perfect wonder. They wait, and don’t mind waiting. Moments later, as if to reward them, the animal of impossible size and beauty leaps into the air.
<
br /> January 2016
The ripping of the envelope sounds violent in the quiet garage. The sheet of paper is white, thick; Shay unfolds it carefully.
Dear Edward,
I hope you are well and are recovering from your injuries. God has certainly blessed you with your life.
My daughter, Nancy, was on the flight with you. She was our only child, and her death cratered her papa and myself. She was grown—forty-three years old, but grown makes no difference in my heart. She was still my baby, my redheaded girl.
She was a doctor—a brilliant physician—but her hobby was photography. I want to ask you for something. I want to ask you to please take photographs for her. She took pictures of everything: her nursing staff, her cat, Beezus (who lives with Papa and me now; that cat is as devastated as we are), buildings, nature, you name it. It was her passion.
It will heal my heart to know you are taking photos for her. That the camera wasn’t put down but passed on. I hope it’s not asking too much, but I figure everyone takes pictures occasionally, right? I am simply asking you to do so with more deliberation.
I wish you well, Edward. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Jeanette Louis
Shay looks up from the letter, her eyes wide. “The doctor in the folder.”
Cratered, Edward thinks.
“Another one?” she whispers.
This one is on gray stationery, from the husband of a woman on the plane. Her death left him alone with their three children. He asks Edward to please write to each of the children, telling them that he met their mother during the flight. I know you probably didn’t meet her. Who gets to know strangers on a flight? But my kids won’t know that. They’ll believe you. Please tell them that she told you how much she loved them and that she knew they would be okay. In the letter to Charlie, add that his mom wanted him to keep reading. Tell the little one to keep her sweetness. And tell Connor that she wouldn’t want him to drop out of the science competition.
There’s a photo with the letter. Shay holds it up. Three black kids standing in height order. The two older boys wear striped sweaters, and the littlest one, a girl, wears a matching striped dress. They’re smiling for the camera.
“Mierda,” Shay says.
Edward wraps his hands around his skull, as if palming a basketball, fingers spread. His head is pulsing.
“A few more, and then we stop for tonight,” Shay says. Edward knows that she wants to keep reading in the hope that they can end on a better note. Whatever that might mean.
The next letter is from a mom whose daughter died on the flight. Her daughter’s dream was to honor her Chinese heritage by walking the Great Wall of China. Please, Edward, find it in your heart to fulfill this dream for my daughter.
It turns out that almost all the letters ask Edward for something. The next letter requests that he write a novel. The one after that implores him to move to London, hopefully into an apartment overlooking St. James’s Park. A mother whose son had aspired to be a stand-up comedian wants Edward to open a comedy club in their small Wisconsin town and name it after the dead young man.
Shay’s face looks how Edward imagines his own does: stricken. He thinks, Can we bear this? He has to force his voice out of his throat. “How many letters do you think there are?”
“If the other bag is full of them too, then hundreds.” Shay is still holding the photograph of the three kids in matching outfits. “Why didn’t they email you? Why did they write real letters?”
“Because John gave me that obscure email address. It’s all numbers and hyphens. So no stranger could find me that way.”
“Do you want to tell him or Lacey that we found these?”
Edward tightens his fingers on his skull. He says, “Do you think they’re all like this?”
Buy a camera. Write letters to children who lost their mother. Go to China, England, Wisconsin.
“I hope not,” Shay says into the darkness.
When Edward finally makes his way to the basement, it’s three in the morning. He moves mechanically through brushing his teeth, switching off lights, climbing under the sheets. He closes his eyes out of a sense of duty and routine. He no longer has any hope of sleep; he lost hope days earlier. But as soon as his eyes are closed, something is different. The darkness inside him has taken on a new shade; there’s a richness to it. It’s slippery, like velvet. Edward can barely keep his feet under him; he’s sliding toward sleep like a child downhill on a sled. He hasn’t experienced this feeling since his family died, and it’s accompanied by an explosion of relief. He thinks, the thought blurred: the letters. It has to be the letters; nothing else has changed. It doesn’t make sense, but he’s too tired to care. He’s too relieved to care. He sleeps, and he can feel, as he disappears, his cells buzzing in celebration.
His dreams that night feel like actual experiences. Edward climbs a mountain on the other side of the world and then skypes with a victim’s family from the top. Then he’s balanced on a mossy rock, throwing a stranger’s ashes into a stream in Oregon. He swims in an Olympic-size pool to try to beat a specific record. He sweats through the sheets, several times over. He sees himself bent in prayer, a position he has never taken in his life.
* * *
—
Edward wanders from class to class the next day, not hearing anything anyone says to him. More than once, Shay has to take him by the elbow and change the direction he’s walking. He lets her do so but thinks, It makes no difference if I sit in English or social studies.
They wait only fifteen minutes after all the bedroom lights have been extinguished before crossing the lawn to the garage that night.
When they’re inside, Edward unlocks the duffel bag. Shay says, “I think we should have rules.”
“Rules?”
“Maybe we should only read ten letters a night, or for an hour or something like that. They’re…intense. And I think once we read a letter we should take it. We have to leave the bags here, obviously, but I can stuff them to make them look full, once we’ve read a bunch. I want to log the letters, and then we can respond to them if we decide to.”
“You don’t think John will notice?”
“He never opened any of these letters. My guess is that he was going to leave them in the bags forever. Or maybe give them to you when you were older?”
Edward has stopped listening. His arm is already plunged deep into the bag. He pinches his fingers around an envelope, pulls it out.
Dear Edward,
Sunrise was at 4:55 A.M. today, and I haven’t seen Linda or Betsy for a week. There have been no spottings of a baby blue whale worldwide for over a year. It’s possible that my colleague and I are following the last blue whales to ever live, and that is a sobering thought. Maybe that’s why I didn’t get off the boat after the last trip. I’m supposed to take a break—hand my notes to another scientist to keep up while I see movies and eat burgers. But I didn’t want to. And if I’m really honest, I worry that if I take my eyes off these girls, they might disappear for good. Which is, I know, stupid. But I’ve let my life onshore die off since my Linda died, so the only place I’m even possibly of use is out here.
Anyway, Edward, I hope you’re well. I appreciate having someone to write letters to. Best wishes, sincerely,
Gary
“Oh, that’s nice,” Shay says, clearly relieved. “Hi, Gary.”
“Hi, Gary,” Edward says.
The next letter asks him to visit a home in Alabama, to hug the bedridden mother of a man on the plane. Edward tries to imagine bending over the bed of a frail, dying stranger and gathering her in his arms. When he finishes the letter, he hands it to Shay. She brought a notebook to the garage to take notes and then compile all the requests into a spreadsheet.
The following two letters ask Edward to take on the vocation
of the deceased: He should become a nurse, and then a violinist. A woman asks him to pray for her husband every night before bed. This letter is accompanied by hand-copied psalms, which he assumes he is also supposed to read before bed.
“You can’t do this many things,” Shay says.
“Maybe I can?” In the middle of every single letter, Edward thinks: I have to do that. I have to play the violin. I have to smile more. I have to learn to fish. At the end of each letter, he feels like he’s already failed.
Dear Edward,
My mother met you recently in Washington. Apparently she gave you and your uncle a ride to your car. She’d wanted my brothers or me to come to the hearing with her, but we all said we were busy. I think we’re just programmed to say no to her now, no matter what the question is, as punishment for the perceived crimes of our childhood.
My youngest brother is in rehab, so he was legitimately busy. What was I doing that afternoon? Reading William Blake. I’m torturing my mother by making her pay for my second PhD in poetry. I tell her that it’s her fault, since she gives talks all the time about how vital the arts are, even though she really means as a hobby for rich people, not as a vocation for her own children.
When I read poetry, I forget about both of my parents, and that’s what I tried to do on the afternoon of the hearing. I try to forget about the crash, try to forget that I come from two ruinous human beings. But it has bothered me, the idea that I should have been in that car when you got in, because I should have accompanied my elderly mother to that kind of event. Also, I know you are the last person to have seen my father alive, assuming you walked by his seat or saw him in his wheelchair in the airport. There is some poetry in the idea of sharing your presence.
Dear Edward Page 22
