Dear Edward

by Ann Napolitano

  “Is something wrong with the AC?”

  “No,” the pilot says. “It’s an effect from the weather.”

  The sound of slipstream becomes louder.

  “It’s okay,” the pilot says. “Accumulation of ice crystals on the exterior of the fuselage. We’re fine. Let’s reduce speed.”

  An alarm sounds for 2.2 seconds in the cockpit, to remind them that they’re not on autopilot.

  * * *

  —

  Jordan has felt clear, for some time now, that he no longer needs his parents. He lives with them because it’s customary for kids to live at home until the age of eighteen, but he knows he could easily get a job, continue to educate himself with books, spend unsupervised hours with Mahira, and live on his own. He can picture his apartment: a light-filled, high-ceilinged studio with a loft bed. When he envisions himself living there, he’s wearing glasses and holding a cup of coffee, even though he has perfect vision and caffeine makes him sweat.

  Now he watches the doctor disappear behind the first-class curtain. He knows he and his brother and father are thinking the same thing: Is something wrong with Mom?

  “There’s a sick old man up there,” Bruce says. “It’s probably…”

  The air seems to leave his mouth sideways, and the rest of the sentence is lost as the plane hops to the right, like a stone skipping across a pond.

  The physical jolt shifts something inside Jordan, and a new truth yawns open: I do need them. I need all three of them. And while the plane hesitates, as if deciding its next move, his apartment now has a bunk bed to share with his brother and another bedroom, for his parents.

  March 2016

  Edward keeps his eyes closed for most of the bus ride into New York City. The letters have all been read and categorized by him and Shay. It’s the first Monday of spring break, and they were able to leave their houses undetected because Lacey is at work and Besa is spending the day with a cousin. Edward is rimmed with irritation, though, because he has to make this trip, because this trip is a thing at all. Edward would have bet his life that he and his brother had no secrets. And yet Jordan had kissed a girl. He had loved a girl, a stranger. Jordan had either not wanted to tell Edward or not trusted him with the truth.

  Halfway through the ride, Edward’s eyes fly open, as if they need light, the way his lungs need air. “I’m skipping that practice PSAT next weekend.”

  “Okay,” Shay says.

  “You’re going to take it?” He feels antagonistic. The bus is curling around the long entrance loop to the Lincoln Tunnel.

  “I don’t know what I want to do with my life, so yes.”

  “I don’t know what I want to do with my life either.”

  She shrugs. “Well, you don’t have to take stupid tests. I’m a normal person.”

  He feels jittery, over-caffeinated, though he hasn’t had any soda. They’re in the tunnel now. He didn’t tell his aunt and uncle where he was going. It won’t have occurred to them that he’s gone any farther away than Shay’s house. After all, he never has before.

  This is his first trip back to New York City. He doesn’t want to say that out loud.

  Instead, he says, “The first summer, you told me that I wasn’t normal and that you weren’t either.”

  “Look,” she says, “if I want to have a chance to do something great, I need a college degree.” She has the window seat, and he can see half of her face and her reflection, which looks like it belongs to a young woman, not a girl.

  They take a taxi from Port Authority to the deli. The Upper East Side unfolds around Edward as they climb north in the grid of Manhattan. His family’s life was carpeted over the surrounding streets. They pass their dry cleaner, the brick-fronted library, the run-down grocery store where they bought most of their food, and then, a block farther, the fancy supermarket where his father bought meat and cheese.

  They pass an antiques shop where his mother once bought a clock. She kept it on her dresser and said it reminded her of her grandmother in Canada. Then a mailbox, which Edward remembers leaning against while his father slid in his April tax checks. He remembers his dad banging the little blue door open and shut while complaining about the unfairness of having to pay for wars he didn’t believe in. “If I could designate where my money went,” his dad had said, “I’d pay my taxes with enthusiasm.”

  Edward tightens his seatbelt, as if in protection against the memories.

  “Do you have a plan?” Shay says. “Are we just going to meet her?”

  Edward shrugs. All he knows is that he has to lay eyes on Mahira, for two reasons. First, because Jordan would want to see her. Second, because she is the only living person—other than him—who deeply, specifically, loved his brother. He lost Jordan, and she did too.

  He says, “We don’t have to stay long.”

  The taxi is stopped at a red light. Edward considers that he is going to visit a truth—a person—he hadn’t known existed. Mahira’s letter had opened a door inside the life he’d lived. It’s as if he’s discovered a new room off his family’s kitchen, with Jordan’s girlfriend inside. Were there other doors he’d simply never noticed? The idea is unsettling, but also compelling. He can’t recover what he knows he lost—his family—but perhaps he can recover things, people, that he didn’t know were there in the first place?

  The taxi pulls over at 72nd and Lexington. Shay pays the driver, while Edward stands on the sidewalk. His face must look alarming, because her eyes widen when she joins him. “It’s going to be okay,” Shay says. “I’ll help.”

  Thank you, he thinks, and watches her turn and walk through the deli door. He watches his new life walk into his old life.

  The deli is rectangular and narrow, with one long row of shelves in the center. The space is clean and well lit. Edward used to buy chocolate Yoo-hoos from the refrigerator in the corner whenever he had pocket money. He came here with his dad for emergency items—toilet paper, deodorant, milk. This was where he and Jordan bought illicit candy—almost always Twix for Jordan, and Haribo gummy bears for him. It was the first place they were allowed to walk without supervision. Bruce would send them to the deli for a specific item and set the timer on his watch for fifteen minutes. Their task was to get home before the timer went off.

  Edward stands just inside the door. A longing for his brother comes over him, smothering in its intensity. How can he be standing here, alone?

  No one is behind the counter. There’s a boy wearing a soccer jersey standing at the rack of magazines in the corner. Edward wonders if Jordan had known this kid too. Anything is possible. Judging by his size, the kid would have been in early elementary school when they’d lived in the neighborhood. Perhaps his brother had babysat him and never told Edward about the job.

  “I checked,” a girl’s voice calls from the back of the store. “That magazine didn’t come in yet. Maybe tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” the boy says. “Thanks.” He skips past Edward and Shay and pushes out the front door.

  Edward looks at Shay and then does a double take. She has two cans of soup balanced in one hand, a loaf of bread under her arm, and a bag of pretzels.

  “What?” she whispers. “I thought we should buy something, so we don’t look weird.”

  “Trust me,” he says. “We look weird.” But he’s grateful to her again, for coming, and for being nervous with him even though she can’t parse all of his specific anxieties.

  He feels a shift in the air and sees a girl walk out from the back room. She sees him at the same moment and stops.

  She shivers. It’s a full-bodied motion, as if she’s just climbed out of a freezing lake. “Eddie Adler?” she says.

  He nods.

  “You look like him.”

  “I’m sorry.” But he feels pleased to be told this. No one has compared him to his brother for a long time. He studies her
. Shoulder-length black hair, heart-shaped face, skin a few shades darker than Shay’s. Jordan loved you, he thinks.

  “I got your letter,” he says. “I didn’t know. About you and my brother.”

  She nods, calmer; she’s reined herself in. “I figured not.” She looks at Shay. “I’m Mahira,” she says. “Can I take those items? You look uncomfortable.”

  Shay walks forward and awkwardly places the food on the counter. “I’m Edward’s friend,” she says. “Shay.”

  Mahira’s forehead wrinkles. “Edward?” she says. “I thought you went by…”

  “You can call me Eddie,” he says. “If you want.”

  The door bangs open behind them, and they turn in that direction. A man in a UPS uniform drops three large boxes on the floor. He says, “See you tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow!” Mahira calls, and the man is gone. But almost immediately the door swings open again, and a woman pushes a stroller into the deli. She talks to her baby in a low singsong voice and heads straight for the shelf with the diapers.

  Shay says, “Um, do you live here?”

  “In the apartment upstairs.” Mahira points at the ceiling. She says, “And you’re in New Jersey now. Are the aunt and uncle you live with nice? Is it okay?”

  “Yes,” Edward says. “They’re nice.”

  The woman with the stroller is at the counter now, and Shay and Edward shuffle out of the way. She shoots them a quick glance while fishing her wallet out of her bag. The look seems to say: What suspicious behavior are you teens up to?

  Edward looks at the baby in the stroller and finds the baby staring back at him. He has giant blue eyes, fat cheeks, and is completely bald. Still staring at Edward, the baby sticks most of his hand in his mouth and makes a blowing sound. He pulls his fingers out and grins.

  “You’re very cute,” Shay says, in a polite voice.

  The woman finishes paying, stuffs the package of diapers under the stroller, and shoves the baby away from them, out the jangling door.

  “Maybe I’ll close up for a few minutes so we can have an actual conversation without half the neighborhood walking in,” Mahira says. “There’s a busybody who comes at the same time every afternoon and buys a pack of gum; I think she’s reporting on me to my uncle. It would be good to avoid her.”

  She flips the sign on the door from OPEN to CLOSED and turns two heavy locks. “You’re fifteen now?” she says.

  Edward studies the locks. He wishes the door was still open. He would like escape to be an easy possibility, as opposed to an awkward challenge. He nods. “You were fifteen when you were dating my brother.”

  Dating my brother. The words sound impossible in the air.

  Mahira walks to the counter and leans against it. “You do look like him,” she says. “But your voice is different. Your eyes too.”

  Edward feels an ache that runs the length of him and he knows it’s on behalf of Jordan. His brother should be here now. If he were Jordan, he would walk up to the counter and hug her. Should he do that for his brother now?

  He glances at Shay. Shay is solid. Shay is real. She’s standing by a rack of different-flavored potato chips. She’s watching the two of them with the same face she uses while studying for a test.

  Mahira says, “Are you wearing…Was that your brother’s coat?”

  Edward looks down at the orange parka. It fits him perfectly now but is worn on the elbows and seams. Lacey has been threatening to replace it. “Yes,” he says. “I have all his clothes.”

  “Of course. That makes sense.” Her voice is level, but her eyes change, shine.

  Edward wants to make this a normal conversation, between normal people. Even though he knows that’s not possible. “You said in your letter that you’re taking a gap year?”

  Mahira nods. “I think I’m going to start at Hunter in the fall; it’s only a few blocks away, and it’s cheap. I’m a science person,” she says. “I always have been, and it’s important to my uncle that I become an engineer.”

  Edward has no idea what kind of person he is. He feels lit up with pain and somehow knows that Mahira feels the same way. Jordan stands between them, a repository of longing created by their proximity. Not a ghost, a longing. Me plus Mahira equals missing Jordan, Edward thinks. But the word missing doesn’t say enough. The name Jordan doesn’t say enough.

  The shimmering Jordan, carrying all of their loss, says to Edward: Stop talking about bullshit.

  Edward says: “How did you find out about the crash? Where were you when you found out?”

  He has been careful to collect this information from the people in his life. Edward thinks of it as plotting points on a graph, arresting the location of each person during a single moment. John saw news of the crash on Twitter almost immediately. He’d been in the middle of an IT job at a retail company, but when he saw the headline he packed up his bag and phoned Lacey from the parking lot. He wasn’t sure it was the same flight, and he stayed on the phone with Lacey while she checked her last email with her sister, the one with the information about their travel plans. Shay had been reading the third book of Anne of Green Gables on her bed when she heard the phone ring and heard her mother call out in Spanish. She and Besa had watched the crash footage on the television in the living room with the volume turned up so they could hear the reporter over Besa’s sobs. Mrs. Cox had been at the 92nd Street Y, listening to a talk on the legacy of Eleanor Roosevelt, when her chauffeur had tapped her on the arm. She’d followed him into the lobby, and he showed her the news on his phone. Dr. Mike had been in a session when the plane crashed and didn’t find out until later, when he turned on the radio in his car.

  “Oh.” Mahira turns her face, looks toward the back storage room. “I was on my way home. I always walked past a big sports bar on the corner of Eighty-third. It has televisions covering all the walls, and they’re usually tuned to two or three different games. Football, soccer, ice hockey. But”—she hesitates—“that day, all of the screens were showing one side of an airplane lying in a field. I stopped because the image was so unusual, especially for that place. I walked into the bar, which I’d never done before, and the bartender told me what had happened.” She stops talking for a second, then puts her hands out in front of her, as if about to receive something: coins, a gift, Communion? When she drops her hands again, puts them on her thighs, she says, “Back at home, at the deli, the news said that one boy had survived.”

  Edward processes this. “You would have thought it was Jordan.”

  She doesn’t respond. A new reality blossoms in Edward’s brain. Jordan is the one who survives, and instead of going home with Lacey and John from the hospital, he insists on recuperating with Mahira, in the apartment above the deli. Edward can picture him lying in a single bed, one of his legs in a cast. His face is contorted with pain, but he’s looking at Mahira. He’s going through the loss with her and finding comfort in that. When the plane crashed, he didn’t lose everything.

  “I’m sorry,” Edward says.

  “You and I were supposed to meet on a beach in California.” Mahira smiles, but the smile has effort behind it. “Do you want to hear something strange?”

  Shay, who hasn’t spoken in some time, says, “Yes, please.”

  “I’ve been going to get my tarot cards read by a woman who works a few blocks from here. She has a purple lamp in her window and a chime hung in the doorway. It’s absurd, and I don’t believe in any of it, but I can’t seem to stay away.”

  “What does she tell you?”

  Mahira’s cheeks turn a faint pink. “Part of it is fairy tales. She talks about Jordan and our love. I guess that’s why I keep going. I haven’t had anyone else to talk to about it. My uncle won’t hear his name mentioned.”

  “Jordan,” Edward says reflexively.

  “Jordan.” Mahira says the name in the same tone she used wit
h the UPS guy—deliberate, authoritative. She says his name the same way she called out the word tomorrow.

  There’s a pounding on the door, and they all jump. The silhouette of a figure is visible through the marbled glass. A fist is raised again, then dropped. The person walks away.

  Edward wonders what the tarot-card lady would talk to him about. He likes the idea of someone talking to him about his and his brother’s love. He says, “Can you tell me why you and Jordan were a secret? Why he didn’t tell me?”

  She shakes her head. “We never talked that much, to be honest. I was afraid long conversations would ruin everything, that I might say something stupid. I kept thinking I would talk soon, ask questions soon, tell him everything soon.”

  “You thought you had time,” Shay says.

  “Yes.”

  Edward thinks of the letters, all the people asking him questions, wanting to believe they could find a solution, or resolution, to their heartbreak. The lonely girl in front of him and the ache of those letters make his own chest hurt, and he hunches slightly.

  “I should reopen the store,” Mahira says.

  “No problem,” he says.

  But they stand in silence for a few more moments, before they break apart.

  * * *

  —

  When they enter the garage that night, Shay says, “Why can’t you talk to John in the house, over breakfast, like a civilized person? We don’t even know how early he comes out here in the morning. We may have to wait for hours and hours.”

  “I have to talk to him here. Away from Lacey.” Edward sits down on the footstool, which he thinks of as his footstool. The chair belongs to Shay.

  “You’ve turned bossy lately. I’m not sure if I like it.”

  Edward smiles. “You can go to sleep until he gets here.”

  “Oh, I will.” Shay wriggles around in the armchair, as if looking for the most comfortable spot. She says, “Did you almost kiss Mahira today?”