Dear Edward
Page 30
Edward turns in a circle. Other than the memorial, there is no sign of destruction. Green grass spreads in every direction. He can see the road they drove on to get here, their car, and a wide expanse of pastel sky. There is so much sky, he feels like his proportions are off, as if most of the world is built into the horizon.
“Edward,” Shay says. He sees that she is near the front of the sculpture, where the birds point upward into the air. There is a metal stake with a plaque. He stays where he is. He knows the facts: the date, the flight number, the accounting of lives lost.
The article they’d read had included a photograph taken the day the sculpture was unveiled. A group of perhaps fifty people encircled the birds. The families of the victims stood with their heads tipped back, watching, as the canvas covering the metal sculpture was tugged free. The people were all colors and ages. The only person not looking up was a curly-haired toddler, on her hands and knees, investigating the grass.
Edward spent a lot of time studying that photograph. He paid careful attention to the faces, looking for a woman who might be Benjamin Stillman’s grandmother, looking for a man who might be in the midst of a search for Florida, in her new life and body. Edward looked for a poet who might be Harrison.
“Let’s go sit on the hill,” Edward says now.
Shay had checked the surrounding area on Google maps and found a slight hill about fifty yards past the memorial, which looked like a good place to rest. If other people do visit the site today, it’s unlikely they will come anywhere near that spot.
When they get there Edward sits down, hard, because his legs have gone weak. He feels strange, but he expected to feel strange. After all, he’d half-expected this field to open up and swallow him in order to rectify an earlier error. Edward is aware, as if from a clock buried deep inside him, of a particular nanosecond that occurred six years earlier right above his head. The fleeting final moment when the plane was still a plane, and the people on it were still alive.
Only Edward had bridged that nanosecond, and here he is, again. Taller than his brother and father, able to bench-press his own body weight, with his mother’s eyes. He’s created a circle, created a whole, by coming here. When he leaves, he can carry this full circle—everything this moment and this place contains—in his arms.
Edward closes his eyes. He is the boy buckled into a plane seat, gripping his brother and father, and he is the young man sitting on the ground that plane crashed into. Eddie, and Edward.
When he opens his eyes, he realizes that the photograph he’d studied had been from this angle. Perhaps the photographer had stood on this hill, armed with a telephoto lens. Edward was unable, in the end, to identify a single person in the photograph. He knew what their loved one looked like, but he didn’t know them. Did the red-haired doctor have red-haired parents? He didn’t know. There were a handful of older women with brown skin—which one was related to the soldier? How many of the people in the scene had written him a letter?
The field waves with grass and shimmers with the people who died that day and their family members, who came to gaze at silver birds that reflect the light like perfectly polished spoons. Edward thinks, Madame Victory was right: I’m not special. I’m not chosen.
From beside him, propped up on her elbows, Shay says, “You were lucky.”
He gives her a look, because she has finished his thought for him.
She says, her voice catching, “I mean, I was lucky too. I’m so lucky it was you.”
Edward’s instinct is to shrug this off, but he knows better now and stops himself. Shay carries the presence of Edward, the same way Edward carries the loss of his brother. He knows the loss of Jordan will remain with him forever, even as Edward slowly leaves his parents behind. He was supposed to grow up and leave his mom and dad, after all, just like he will leave John and Lacey in the fall when he goes to college. That is part of the natural order. Edward wasn’t supposed to leave Jordan, though. They were meant to age together. That loss continues to be spiked with pain; it will never be soothed. And he can see, objectively, that Shay’s life without him would have been woven with different moments, friends or lack of friends, different fights with Besa, different books and different struggles.
As if she’s heard his thoughts again, Shay says, “I might have kept planning to run away, without ever leaving. I never would have written to those children.” She looks up at the sky. “I would have been so much less.”
Shay is this Shay because of him. And he is alive—not just surviving, but alive—because of her. He wonders if the scientists who tend to the Large Hadron Collider are hoping to discover not only what happens in the air between two people but how that pressurized air changes those people inside their skin. He hears the science teacher say, The air between us is not empty space.
The air feels gentle against Edward’s cheeks now; the tiny silver birds point at the sky. He and Shay regard the scene together. At a certain point, he looks at Shay and finds her already looking at him. The dimple is deep in her cheek.
“What is it?” he says.
She doesn’t speak, but the undercurrent—the unspoken conversation that flows endlessly between them—is loud. Shay is the girl wearing pajamas with pink clouds on them the first time he entered her room, and she is the woman who will give birth to their daughter ten years from now, and she is this young woman, her face wide open, offering him everything.
Edward hears his brother’s voice inside him. Jordan tells him not to waste any time. Not to waste any love. He watches Shay lean in his direction, and when she kisses him, she blots out the entire sky.
For Dan Wilde, for everything
Acknowledgments
One of the biggest surprises, and joys, of parenthood has been observing the profound, generous love between my sons. The two brothers in this novel are not similar to my boys, but the love between them is entirely inspired by the relationship between my children. Thank you, Malachy and Hendrix, for showing me more shades of love than I knew existed.
There were two actual plane crashes that inspired this novel. The first was the 2010 crash of Afriqiyah Airways Flight 771, which had only one survivor, a nine-year-old Dutch boy. It was my worry about that little boy’s path out of tragedy that compelled me to find a way forward for Edward. The second was the crash of Air France Flight 447, about which I found Jeff Wise’s 2011 Popular Mechanics article entitled “What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447” to be invaluable. I could not have written the details of the scenes in the cockpit in my novel were it not for Wise’s expert reporting. I encourage anyone interested in the intersection of aviation, technology, and psychology to read his work, especially his most recent book, The Taking of MH370. In Dear Edward, I have also drawn from the true black-box recording from Air France Flight 447 to write some of the dialogue of the pilots in my novel. My goal here was to accurately and respectfully portray their human experience. To the real people who have inspired my fictional work—Ruben van Assouw, Pierre-Cédric Bonin, Marc Dubois, David Robert, and all the passengers aboard Afriqiyah Airways Flight 771 and Air France Flight 447—I hope I have honored you. When I tried to reimagine these plane journeys and crashes, my compassion for you and your loved ones only grew. I hope that compassion is reflected in the story of the fictional Flight 2977.
For legal advice on “who gets what” when a plane crashes, I thank the expert counsel of Alicia Butler. If I’ve made any errors in that department, they are my own. Many thanks to my friend Abbey Mather for connecting me with Alicia. I am grateful to Frank Fair for educating me about the military. Robert Zimmermann provided invaluable information on planes and piloting. He answered all my questions at the beginning of the writing process and helped correct my mistakes at the end. Any remaining pilot-related errors are definitely mine.
My agent, Julie Barer, is deeply wonderful, and I am grateful to have her in my life. I thank he
r and everyone at The Book Group for their help and support. Jenny Meyer, Caspian Dennis, Nicole Cunningham, and Heidi Gall deserve special thanks.
Whitney Frick loves this book as much as I do, and guided me through an editing process that turned out to be a joy. I am so glad to have her as my editor. Susan Kamil is brilliant, and I’m grateful to have had the chance to work with her. Thanks also to Clio Seraphim for her work on the novel. And I couldn’t be happier that the book is in the hands of Venetia Butterfield at Viking Penguin in the UK.
Brettne Bloom and Courtney Sullivan believe in me and my work no matter what, which is a huge gift, and I love them. Stacey Bosworth and Libby Fearnley fall in this same camp, and have my equal gratitude. I am lucky to have many fierce, awesome women in my life.
My parents have always supported me, and I am fortunate to be their daughter. No one has done more for me than Cathy and Jim Napolitano. My niece, Annie, asked me to thank her in my book, so: thanks, Annie! And Katie too.
I love working at One Story (subscribe to One Story!) because of the people. I am thankful for Maribeth Batcha, Lena Valencia, and Patrick Ryan. I was one of the hundreds of people who loved Adina Talve-Goodman. She should have written many books, and beamed from many book jackets, so I wanted to put her name here. I miss you, Adina.
Helen Ellis, Hannah Tinti, and I are a three-legged stool. We’ve been reading one another’s work since 1996, and it’s their voices I hear in my head when I revise. Everything would be different, and less, without them in my life.
ALSO BY ANN NAPOLITANO
A Good Hard Look
Within Arm’s Reach
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ANN NAPOLITANO is the author of the novels A Good Hard Look and Within Arm’s Reach. She is also the associate editor of One Story literary magazine. She received an MFA from New York University; she has taught fiction writing for Brooklyn College’s MFA program, New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies, and Gotham Writers Workshop. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.
Twitter: @napolitanoann
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