Dear Edward

by Ann Napolitano

  Edward freezes for a second, and his cheeks flush. “I thought about it. For Jordan.” He takes an uneven breath. “I’m not sure what I can or should do, for him.”

  “I saw you considering it.”

  “How? What did that look like?”

  She smiles and shrugs. “I couldn’t describe it in words.”

  He meets her gaze, and there’s something new there. Edward used to think that what had happened had happened only to him, but he knows Shay has been changed, and he knows the writers of the letters have been changed too, so the ripple effects feel possibly infinite. He is on the lookout for the infinite now, in Shay’s dimple.

  There’s a pause, and she turns off the flashlight. Shay says into the darkness, “Good night.”

  She turns away from Edward and curls up in the chair. He remains upright on the stool. The air between him and Shay is charged, the atoms swollen with new possibilities. He knows—somehow—that they both imagined kissing each other. He had imagined tilting his head to the side, and leaning in. Their lips touching. He thinks of the air between him and Mahira that afternoon, the shimmering presence of his brother, the loss of what was.

  Edward’s science teacher recently told them about the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, the largest machine ever built. It’s investigating different theories of particle physics, the teacher had said. The scientists think they’re on the brink of understanding what happens in the air between two people. Why some people repel us, and others attract us, and everything in between. The air between us is not empty space.

  Edward’s entire body is aware of Shay’s body only a few feet from his own. He doesn’t try to find a comfortable position; he intends to stay awake until his uncle arrives in the garage.

  He stares into the darkness and finds himself replaying the visit to the deli. His grief for his brother is bigger at the end of this day, a fact he wouldn’t have thought possible. But Edward used to miss Jordan only for himself. It had been his terrible loss. Now he also mourns what his brother has lost. Jordan will never sit this close to a girl again, with his entire body tingling.

  The sky is purple-ribboned when John opens the garage door. He stops in the doorway and regards the scene. The tired-eyed teenage boy, and the sleeping teenage girl.

  “Good morning,” John says, in a cautious voice.

  “Hi.” Edward stands up from the stool. “Don’t worry,” he says. “Nothing’s wrong. I just wanted to tell you that I looked in your folders. I found them by accident. And then we opened the duffel bags too and read the letters.”

  John’s face registers surprise, and something else too. Maybe fear? “You opened the locks on the bags?” Then, “I was going to give them to you when you were older. I know they’re yours. It’s just that I read a few, when they first started coming, and I thought it was outrageous that people were writing letters like that to a young child.”

  “That’s what we assumed.”

  John sighs, the sound of a small boulder rolling down a hill. “Those aren’t even all of them.”

  It takes a second for this to sink in. “There are more letters?”

  “Not many. But there are a few recent ones in the back of the hall closet. They still come in now, at a slower rate. I collect them every Friday from the post office.”

  Shay shifts on the chair. When she has resettled into sleep, Edward says, “Why did you use a P.O. box?”

  “We set it up after we got that binder of personal effects in the mail. We thought it would be safer not to have mail coming straight to the house. We didn’t want you to stumble into anything we hadn’t had a chance to check out first.”

  Edward looks at his uncle. He has the thought that he’s just a person who happens to be older than him. He doesn’t know better, or more, than Edward does. John and Lacey are playing the roles they’ve been assigned: husband, wife, aunt, uncle. When Shay had pushed him to tell John and Lacey about the letters, he’d resisted because he wanted to first figure out what he wanted to do, before asking the grown-ups. Built into that was the assumption that John and Lacey would have a solid answer, a solution to the problem. But he sees now and understands that’s not the case.

  He says, “Are you and Lacey going to be okay?”

  John gives a pained smile. “She’s been frustrated with me. Understandably.” He shrugs. “When you have a long history with someone…Nothing is as linear as you think it’s going to be. Lacey and I have always mistimed getting upset when something challenging happens. I go cold at first, and she falls apart. Once she’s pulled herself together, I’m usually okay, but this time…It’s a kind of marital glitch.”

  “It’s complicated,” Edward offers, because he wants to help.

  John gestures with his hand again, this time seeming to refer to everything: the photographs, the letters, middle age, marriage. “If you live long enough, everything is complicated.”

  Edward thinks of the history that already winds, nonlinear and intricate, between himself and Shay. And the history that continues to pulsate between Mahira and his brother, even though Jordan is dead. He listens to the light rustle of Shay’s breath and says, “It would have been better, I think, if you’d showed me everything from the beginning. I think it’s important…to see everyone who died. They matter as much as you or me, and I want to remember them.”

  Edward watches his uncle consider this. “That’s interesting,” John says. “Maybe I should have shown you everything, but I didn’t feel like I could.” His uncle looks old, draped in the pastel light of dawn. “You need to understand that my biggest fear, our biggest fear…” He hesitates.

  “What?” Edward says.

  John turns his head slightly, so he’s looking at the sunrise, not his nephew. He says, “That you might, well, decide not to live. Dr. Mike said it was a real concern, and you starved yourself when you first got here, and then you collapsed outside. You were deeply depressed.”

  Edward blinks, trying to understand. “You were worried I would kill myself?”

  “We based all our decisions on preventing that. I didn’t want you around anything that might upset you further. Lacey thinks I was too hardcore about it and that by protecting you from the crash, I ended up obsessed with it.” He rubs his hands over his face. “Women are smarter than we are, you know.”

  Dr. Mike had said something to Edward once, during a session, about taking suicide off the table as an option. Edward hadn’t responded, confused by the comment. But now, with this idea in front of him, Edward can see that fear in the careful attention of Principal Arundhi, in Lacey’s sleeping pill prescription, in the new lines on John’s face. He shakes his head. “I never would have done that.”

  John shrugs, as if to say: Maybe, but I couldn’t be sure.

  The weariness in his uncle’s eyes makes Edward realize, for the first time, why John had needed to save him at all costs. His uncle—with all his will, attention, and care—had been unable to save anyone else. The babies Lacey had carried. Jane and Bruce, and his oldest nephew. And so he had been willing to wreck his own life, even his marriage, to make sure he didn’t lose the nephew who came to live in his house.

  “I wouldn’t have done that to you”—Edward looks at his uncle and then over at Shay; this applies to her too—“because I know what it’s like to be left behind.”

  He’s winded by the sentence, as if the truth has taken something from him. He feels a flash of fear, but then sees the look on his uncle’s face. John opens his arms, and Edward steps forward.

  2:08 P.M.

  The co-pilot, spooked by the alarm, or the turbulence, or by the experience of flying the plane by hand—most pilots train for manual takeoff and landings, not midair flight—makes an irrational decision. He pulls back on the side stick to put the airplane into a steep climb. The pilot, from his vantage point, doesn’t have a clear view of the co-pilot�
�s right arm, and it doesn’t occur to him that his colleague would make such an unwise decision.

  “Steady,” the pilot says.

  “Roger that.”

  Almost as soon as the co-pilot pulls up, the plane’s computer reacts. A warning chime alerts the cockpit to the fact that they’re leaving their programmed altitude. The stall warning sounds. This is a synthesized human voice that repeatedly calls out, “Stall!” in English, followed by a loud and intentionally annoying sound called a cricket. A stall is a potentially dangerous situation that can result from flying too slowly. At a critical speed, a wing suddenly becomes much less effective at generating lift, and a plane can plunge precipitously. But the pilot believes they are following the correct protocols, so he’s not overly concerned by the stall warning. The co-pilot, who is still pulling back on the side stick, is now covered with a cold sweat and breathing shallowly. He tries to hide his panic.

  * * *

  —

  The floor buckles beneath Veronica, then re-forms. “Return to your seat,” she says to the red-haired doctor. She gives the dead old man a look, then gives the nurse a kinder one. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” she says.

  She trips toward her seat, which is around the corner from first class. She falls onto the hard horizontal rectangle and tugs the strap across her chest. She pictures the white features of Crispin Cox. She considers that there is no breath in his throat, no blood coursing through his body. She’s never had anyone die on a flight before. What is the protocol? She’s read all the protocols, and for this situation, the first step is to alert the pilot. She will do so as soon as she can get to the intercom. Then, if possible, the dead body should be moved to an empty row of seats, away from other passengers. That’s not possible on this flight, which is full, but she did read that sometimes the corpse is gently placed into a closet until the flight ends. There is a closet in the back of the plane that might work, if she emptied out a few containers.

  She imagines herself and Ellen carrying the body through the entire plane to get to the closet. Her with her hands under the old man’s armpits, Ellen holding his feet. Luis waiting by the closet to help.

  The plane gives a hard cough, and the nose wavers. Veronica shifts her attention to the grumbles and clanks of this colossal machine, which she knows as intimately as her own body. She thinks, What are you trying to tell me?

  April 2016

  Edward has only two responsibilities that feel real to him now: reading new letters as they arrive, and taking care of Principal Arundhi’s fern. Edward has had the plant for nearly four months. The fern appears to be thriving, bright green and placid on its table beneath the basement window. Edward takes photos of the kangaroo paw and shows them to Principal Arundhi, to reassure him of the plant’s good health. The principal’s office looks more like an office now and less like a greenhouse. The virus had turned out to be a long, truly nasty one, which came in three waves. It has finally lost its grip on the ferns, but thirteen died in total. There is only a spattering of plants on the windowsill and the side table.

  “I have to rebuild,” the principal says. “I’m considering purchasing some orchids. Marvelous plants, orchids. Don’t you think?” He sighs, and Edward can see that his heart’s not in the rebuilding. He’s just saying the words. Principal Arundhi asks Edward to hold on to the kangaroo paw for a few more weeks, just to be safe.

  Friday is the only day of the week Edward bothers to keep track of, because that’s the day John brings home new letters, if there are any. Shay is now pen pals with the nun in South Carolina. Edward writes to Gary and asks him questions about whales. He and Shay both text with Mahira. All the children have been replied to. They have, Edward thinks, responded to the letters on the edges: the very old, and the very young. In the center are hundreds of requests that Edward has come to picture as a stretch of quicksand. He hasn’t decided what to do about them, but he knows that if he fulfills the wish of one letter, he must fulfill them all. And that, as depicted by Shay’s spreadsheet, is technically impossible. It would have him living in multiple parts of the globe, working as a doctor, a librarian, a chef, an activist, a novelist, a photographer, a classics professor, a clothing designer, a war reporter, a sommelier, and a social worker, among other careers. He would be mapping out wishes that oppose one another, in locations multiple time zones apart.

  The letter he read this morning was a very short, almost incomprehensible note from the wife of the co-pilot. In it, she tells the story of how she and her husband met in college and how sorry she is that he made a mistake in the cockpit. She ends with: My husband killed 191 people. Can you imagine what it’s like to be me?

  Out of all the letters Edward has read, this is the only one he’s certain shouldn’t have been sent. Her husband killed his family. How could she think it was okay to write and ask him for…what? Validation? Empathy? He should be angry at her, he thinks, but he’s not. She had nothing to do with what happened, and she was left behind too. Besides, whether Edward likes it or not, he can imagine what it’s like to be her. He can imagine the crush of guilt, the fractured metal airplane that must lie on this woman whenever she tries to sleep.

  He’s in the middle of the main hallway at school; he looks around at the throng of teenagers. Social studies begins in three minutes; they’re studying the French Revolution. He knows his peers in that class are hoping to ace this semester so they have a better chance of being accepted into AP History next year, not because they’re interested in history, but because the best colleges expect students to take at least three advanced placement classes. There’s an exit door at the end of the hallway, and Edward slips through it.

  He walks toward the main street, feeling the school drift, cloud-like, behind him. He feels bad that Shay will be confused, and concerned, when she realizes he’s not in social studies, and then not in school at all. But he keeps walking anyway. When he’s on the next bus into the city, he texts Mahira for the address of the tarot-card reader.

  Aren’t you supposed to be in school? she texts back.

  Yes.

  Ha. She sends the address and then adds, Remember, it’s all bullshit.

  He takes a taxi to the location, which is on a tree-lined side street on the Upper East Side. Edward climbs out of the taxi on the corner and has the thought that he’s traveled more miles in the last six months than in the prior three years combined. It’s as if he turned his brother’s age and Jordan shoved him into motion. He’s propelled now, toward what he does not exactly know.

  Edward spots the purple lamp in the window first, before he sees the street number over the door. It’s a ground-floor window in a medium-sized apartment building. There’s a small white sign with black lettering in the lower right corner of the window. The sign reads: FUTURES TOLD BY MADAME VICTORY, BUZZER 1A.

  This is bullshit, he thinks, and feels a searing hopelessness again. He stands on the far side of the street and decides, I’ll write back to the co-pilot’s wife when I get home. I’ll tell her that I understand. This decision allows Edward to move, to cross the street, climb the steps, and ring the buzzer.

  He hears a click, and pushes through the building’s two front doors. He finds himself in a lobby with a green rug and wallpaper covered with leaves. The door to his left is partly ajar. He pushes it the rest of the way open.

  “Hello?” he says. He’s in what looks like a dingy dining room. There’s a round wooden table with four chairs around it. A bureau against one wall. A tapestry against the far wall in the style of the Renaissance; it shows a unicorn on its hind legs inside a corral. Flowers decorate the air around the corral. Edward remembers watching an animated movie about a unicorn when he was very young, and becoming, for a time, obsessed with the mythical animal. Part of his obsession stemmed from the fact that his parents, who prided themselves on separating fact and fiction for the boys, seemed uncomfortable when he asked if unicorns were
real. Maybe? his mother had said. Maybe they were real, a long time ago?

  “One second, sweetheart,” a woman’s voice says. Edward hears bells and looks toward the window, where a metal wind chime is quivering. Had the woman’s voice set it off? He gets goosebumps on his arms, and then she’s in front of him.

  She’s tall—at least six feet—and has a colorful wrap around her hair. She has tan skin, brown eyes, and a generous smile. She’s wearing a bright-yellow skirt and a zipped-up hoodie sweatshirt.

  “Sit down, handsome,” she says, waving at one of the chairs. “Fifteen minutes with Madame Victory costs thirty dollars in cash, just so you are aware.”

  “Okay,” Edward says, but he hesitates before sitting down, because his body is on high alert. The chimes still ring from the corner, though less wildly now. He can’t quite decipher the message his body is sending him; he’s experiencing it as a surge of adrenaline: Be careful; danger; leave. But he sinks into the chair, anyway.

  Madame Victory sits down across the table. “Would you prefer a tarot-card or a palm reading?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She looks him in the face for the first time. He has trouble meeting her eyes but also can’t look away. The adrenaline in his body hasn’t faded. The chimes clatter as if a two-year-old were playing with them. Edward shifts in his chair, trying to find a comfortable position. She’s doing this to him; he knows that, but he doesn’t know why. His brain thinks, Do I know you? But of course he doesn’t know her.

  “Hmm,” she says. “I’d like to look at your palm. Give me your hand please, darling.”

  He extends his arm, skinny despite the weights he lifts. He’s shaking slightly. It occurs to him how intimate this is, offering your hand to another person. When she takes his hand, her skin is dry and warm.