Dear Edward

by Ann Napolitano

  “It’s turbulence, ma’am. It happens.”

  The plane gives two hops, a sound like hard suitcases being slammed against the ground. Benjamin whistles slightly, under his breath. He thinks, I do not want to die with this old white lady hanging on my arm. Please, God.

  “I have fourteen children,” she says.

  “Fourteen?”

  She’s happy to have surprised him. “Well, only nine are still alive.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Do you have a mother?” she asks.

  Bam. The plane hops again. “No, ma’am. I don’t.”

  “Oh.” She looks disappointed.

  He glances at the family across the aisle. Little Eddie looks terrified, gripping his brother’s hand. Benjamin feels a small localized softening inside him, and thinks, Poor kid. The thought almost makes him tear up, and he realizes that his sympathy extends beyond the child across the aisle, back in time to himself, when he was Eddie’s age. Poor kid.

  He says, “A family that big must have been a lot of work.”

  “It was. You’re a man, so you’ll never know work that hard. It’s reserved solely for the women.”

  The plane skitters sideways, and he thinks, We’re off course.

  “My oldest daughter is picking me up at the airport. I’m going to live with her. I have a plan.”

  “It’s good to have a plan.”

  “This is going to be my retirement,” she says. “I’m going to put my feet up, read magazines, and drink gin and tonics.” She purses her lips. “I could use one now.”

  Benjamin glances again at the family across the aisle. He thinks of Gavin, eyes smiling behind his glasses. He thinks of resigning from the army, folding his uniform into a trunk and locking it shut. He thinks of fitting together puzzle pieces at the kitchen table with Lolly. Kissing a man behind the 7-Eleven down the street.

  At school and at camp he woke to: Boots on the ground, soldier! He had one commanding officer who liked to mix things up by entering the barracks predawn and shouting: Where’s the enemy?

  These had been his wake-up calls, his alarm clocks, his calls to action for most of his life. Where is the enemy? he wonders. He feels a great sadness. This old lady’s idea of putting her feet up is anathema to him. He will stay alert. He will keep his boots on the ground.

  July 2016

  The summer before tenth grade, Edward and Shay are counselors at the town’s day camp. Edward is put in charge of the oldest group of campers, and on the first morning he stands in front of a cluster of twelve-year-old boys. He’s about to introduce himself and call attendance, when something inside him judders.

  He looks at one boy, and then another. He meets their eyes, one set brown under a mop of hair, one set blue. About half of the boys have arranged their hair to hide their faces, but Edward looks past these carefully arranged curtains. Their eyes hold something. He doesn’t know what it is, but he can’t look away.

  “My mom said you were in a plane crash,” one boy says.

  “Yes, I was.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  “Yes. It hurt a lot.”

  The boys laugh at this. Edward realizes that these boys are the same age he was when he crashed. He was broken open when he was twelve, but there’s something broken open in these boys’ eyes too.

  “Is something wrong?” a boy asks.

  “No. Get in height order.”

  They bustle into motion, bumping each other with their backpacks. He doesn’t need them in height order. He’s just buying time. He watches them shuffle and duck into place.

  Is it the age?

  Is it the moment in time right before you leave childhood?

  He swims with them that afternoon. If he could have kept them out of the lake, he would have, but swimming is a nonnegotiable part of the camp schedule. He lectures them on safety before they enter the water. “No roughhousing. Focus on your stroke. You know who your buddy is, right? Keep an eye on him and no one else. We’ll swim to the yellow buoy and back. No detours, no distractions. You hear me?”

  Within fifty yards he’s confident that all the campers are capable swimmers, which is a relief, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be an accident or mistake. He powers past the boys on the flanks, checking their faces to make sure they’re not struggling. The boys pivot their wet heads toward him and smile.

  That night he says to Shay, “I think I want to be a teacher. Seventh-grade math, probably.”

  She laughs, then notices his expression. “You’re serious?”

  “I think so.”

  “So many kids with braces and acne,” she says. “Everyone is a mess at that age. Do you remember my stupid bangs?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Why would you want to spend your life with twelve-year-olds?”

  “Maybe I can help them. When I was twelve, you watched me. You had a notepad just for writing down what you noticed, remember? Maybe everyone needs that kind of attention at that age. I could get a notepad.”

  She considers him, the dimple deep in her cheek.

  He thinks, She’s still carrying that notepad.

  * * *

  —

  Edward spends the next weekend helping John turn the nursery into a home office. The single bed and rocking chair have been donated, and they paint the walls the specific shade of off-white that Lacey selected. John and Edward mumble expletives while trying to force an Ikea desk into shape with hex keys and various screws and bolts. Behind them, Lacey pushes the green armchair from one corner of the room to the other, trying to get a feel for which position promotes the best feng shui. When a corner is finally chosen, the bookcase, packed with Westerns, is set carefully beside it.

  The garage was cleaned out a few weeks earlier. The letters have all been collated; the ones Edward wants to keep are stored beneath his bed in the basement. John closed the P.O. box in town, and all mail now comes to the house. Cleaning out this room is the last step.

  They’re exhausted and sweaty when the room is done, but Edward, John, and Lacey bunch in the doorway. They regard the new space with amazement, as if it is a total surprise, and not the result of their labor.

  * * *

  —

  On a Friday evening near the end of the summer, Shay and Edward walk down to the lake after dinner. The teenagers settle, cross-legged, onto the soft grass. They’re in sight of where Edward swims every day with his campers. It’s a particularly beautiful summer evening, and the lake shines like a coin under the setting sun.

  “Two weeks until school,” Shay says.

  Edward studies the shimmering lake, with trees darkening behind it. “The first day I got here,” he says, “John brought me up to the nursery and showed me this lake out the window. And then I didn’t see it again for a long time, because I never went upstairs. But I remember him saying that we might go swimming in the lake when I felt better, and how that felt about as likely as going to the moon.”

  Shay wraps her arms around her knees. “You were so weak and skinny back then, you could hardly walk to the end of the block.”

  “I swam in the lake almost every day this summer.” Edward feels no sense of accomplishment at this. Just wonder at left turns and moonscapes in his life. Tarot-card readers, heartbreaking letters, a new friendship with his uncle, lake swims. It’s all equally unexpected.

  “I didn’t tell my mother we were coming down here.” Shay lies back onto the grass.

  “She wouldn’t care.”

  “I care.”

  Edward smiles at the fact that Shay doesn’t want to share any life experiences—big or small—with her mother. Life continues to be a tug of war between the two women, a battle Edward doesn’t understand but enjoys watching. His brother had shared a tension with their father too. Had Edward simply been too young to engag
e in this primordial battle? He can only imagine turning toward his mom and dad, embracing them. He missed the chance to experience a more complicated relationship, and right now he feels another sting of loss.

  “I don’t know what temperature the air is,” Shay says, “but this is the perfect temperature.”

  Edward puts his hand out, to assess the air himself, and decides she’s right. He lies down on the soft grass. “Shay?” he says.

  “Yes?”

  He can’t see her. He’s looking up at the dimming sky. “I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  He laughs, because they’ve never said this out loud before, and that strikes him as ridiculous. He knows that he’s always loved her, and will always love her, even if another plane crashes or a car hits her or she has a heart attack or he gets cancer or an aneurysm ruptures their brains or global warming evaporates the water supply and causes them to join resource militias until they die of hunger or thirst.

  “I’m really tired,” Shay says.

  “Me too, because of that dumb race. I canoed those kids for three hours.”

  “Is canoed a word?”

  “Not sure. But I canoed them.”

  They’re both quiet for a while. Maybe Edward dozes off, though he feels highly aware of his surroundings. He can sense the geometry of the lake—both its surface area and depth—and the moon, which is pinned halfway to the horizon. He can feel the loss of his brother, as if that loss has the solidity of one of the trees behind him. Edward breathes in, and when he exhales, he can feel his molecules travel into the air around him. Maybe I am a little asleep, he thinks. He’s aware of Shay beside him. Her molecules are mixing with his; he’s not just himself; he’s made up of her too. Which means he’s composed of everyone he’s ever touched, everyone he’s ever shaken hands with, hugged, or high-fived. That means he has molecules inside him from his parents and Jordan and everyone else on that plane.

  The letters always referred to the weight he had to carry, and he’d thought of it that way himself: He had to carry the burden of so many lost lives. He had to make it up to the people who died. It was him pulling 191 dead people, like a fallen parachute, in his wake. But if the passengers are part of his makeup, and all time and people are interconnected, then the people on the plane exist, just as he exists. The present is infinite, and Flight 2977 flies on, far above him, hidden by clouds.

  He told John the truth in the garage, that he would never leave anyone behind, but now that idea has expanded. He sits beside his brother on the plane, and lies on the ground beside Shay. Jordan argues with their dad about harming animals, and he kisses the fifteen-year-old Mahira, and the older Mahira loves him from behind the deli counter, right now.

  “Shay?” he says.

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “I used to have this crazy idea…” He pauses. “And I guess I still do, that as long as I stay on the ground, the plane will stay in the sky. It’ll keep flying on its normal route to Los Angeles, and I’m its counterweight. They’re all alive up there, as long as I’m alive down here.”

  “The twelve-year-old you is up there too?”

  Eddie, he thinks, and nods.

  “I can see that,” she says, her voice sleepy. “That makes sense.”

  He grins, his eyes still closed, because Shay can see it too. He pictures his mother pressing a finger against her comet-shaped birthmark, in her first-class seat. His dad, making the surprised expression he made when he thought about his math problem. Edward pictures himself, in the future, teaching twelve-year-olds in Principal Arundhi’s school and trying to convince them that they’re okay. Future-Edward is wearing a handsome tweed blazer, and he’s telling the kids to help others when they need help, and to accept help when they need it themselves.

  Edward remembers watching Madame Victory double over with laughter, her face shining with what looks like joy. He hears her say to him, Nobody chose you for anything. He hears the camper’s question: Did it hurt? He can feel Shay’s fingers in his own. Moonlight beams through his eyelids and he can see, as if it’s the lake in front of him, the pain and loss he’s been swimming in for years. In the moonlight, though, the pain is revealed to be love. The emotions are entwined; they are the two sides of the same gleaming coin.

  He and Shay walk home slowly that night. They weave around fat trees and cross quiet roads. When they reach their street, Edward stops in front of his aunt and uncle’s house. He looks up at the window of the room that was supposed to be a nursery, but never was, and never will be. He can remember standing at that window, held up by crutches, etched with pain. He moves his gaze higher, where—beyond his field of vision—a young boy sits in a plane, with no idea what’s about to happen.

  2:11 P.M.

  The co-pilot says, “I’m in TOGA, right?”

  TOGA is an acronym for Take Off, Go Around. When a plane is taking off or aborting a landing—“going around”—it must gain both speed and altitude as efficiently as possible. Pilots are trained to increase engine speed to the TOGA level and raise the nose to a certain pitch angle at this critical phase of flight.

  The co-pilot wants to increase speed and climb away from danger, but he’s not at sea level; he’s in the far thinner air of 37,500 feet. The engines generate less thrust here, and the wings generate less lift. Raising the nose to a certain angle of pitch does not result in the same angle of climb but far less. Indeed, it can—and will—result in a descent.

  While the co-pilot’s behavior is irrational, it is not inexplicable. Intense psychological stress tends to shut down the part of the brain responsible for innovative, creative thought. When frazzled, people tend to revert to the familiar and the well rehearsed. Though pilots are required to practice hand-flying their aircraft during all phases of flight as part of recurrent training, in their daily routine they do most of their hand-flying at low altitude—while taking off, landing, and maneuvering. It’s not surprising, then, that the co-pilot reverts to flying the plane as if it were close to the ground, even though this response is ill-suited to the situation.

  The plane now reaches its maximum altitude. With engines at full power, the nose pitched upward at an angle of 18 degrees, it moves horizontally for an instant and then begins to sink back toward the ground.

  The pilot: “What the hell is happening? I don’t understand what’s happening!”

  * * *

  —

  Linda says, “I need to use the bathroom.”

  Florida says, “Are you crazy, girl? You’re not getting up from that seat.”

  “The doctor just went to first class and came back.” Linda shuffles her feet in the three spare inches of room she has to move. She knows she sounds like a petulant toddler. She feels like one. When the plane shudders, the bells on Florida’s skirt ring like an alarm. Linda is uncomfortable in her seat, the belt is pinching her side, and she feels like she might have a blister on the back of her heel. She’s trapped, and the motion of the plane makes no sense. She’s never been in turbulence this bad. She wants to call Gary and ask him if he’s ever been on a flight this rough.

  Florida fixes her with a look. “That lady went up there because someone died.”

  “That’s not true. Why would you say that?”

  “She came back too quick to have saved anyone. When she got up there, she saw there was nothing left to fix.”

  Linda wriggles, trying to find comfort. This is crazy talk, too crazy to even engage with. No one died on this airplane; that just didn’t happen. There’s no way she’s trapped on this flying metal bullet with a dead person. There’s no way her baby’s earliest history includes this.

  She’s going to complain when she lands. To whom she’s not sure, as she would never want to disrespect the pilots. Someone, though, has made a mistake, and now she’s pregnant and alone, listening to a chorus of tiny bells.

  Decemb
er 2016

  Edward has one particular exchange with Dr. Mike that will replay regularly in his head for the rest of his life. It doesn’t happen during a normal appointment. They run into each other at the interstate shopping center on a Saturday.

  Edward and Shay had walked there that morning because Shay had an appointment to dye her hair bright pink, in order to irritate Besa. “You should remember me like this,” Shay said to Edward, right before she went into the salon, and Edward had taken her seriously. The teenage girl in front of him was five and a half feet tall, with the lean body of a runner. She was wearing jeans and a snowboarding jacket, even though she’d never snowboarded or skied in her life. Her straight brown hair was chin-length. Shay looked like the woman she would become, with kind eyes that turned fierce if someone crossed her. She rarely wore her glasses, because she preferred contacts. And her dimple was still the barometer Edward used to assess her mood.

  “Got it?” Shay said.

  “Got it.”

  “Okay, well, here goes nothing.”

  Ninety minutes into the hair appointment, with at least another hour remaining, Edward is wandering around the stores when he sees Dr. Mike. They smile at each other in surprise, and Edward notices that he’s now taller than the therapist by several inches. Edward accepts when Dr. Mike offers to buy him a tea or coffee.

  After ordering their drinks, they stand by the window in the fancy coffee shop. Perhaps because of the unexpected meeting, or perhaps because Edward turned sixteen a few days earlier and the age—which his brother never reached—feels uncomfortable, he makes a confession. “I feel like I should be over it by now,” he says. “Everyone else has forgotten about the flight. Mostly, anyway. But I feel like I still think about it all the time.”

  Dr. Mike stirs his coffee for a long minute. People straggle past the window. Three bearded men in a row are hunched over, reading their phones. A pregnant woman walks slowly next to a toddler with an Afro. Edward feels his heart beat in his chest, feels the warmth of the tea seep through the cup into the skin of his hand.