Dear Edward: A Novel (26 page)

2:09
P.M.

The pilot raises his voice for the first time. “Check your speed!”

The plane is climbing at a blistering rate of seven thousand feet per minute. While it’s gaining altitude, it’s losing speed, until it’s crawling along at only 93 knots, a speed more typical of a small Cessna than an airliner.

The pilot: “Pay attention to your speed. Pay attention to your speed.”

The co-pilot: “Okay, okay, I’m descending.”

Pilot: “Stabilize.”

Thanks to the effects of the anti-icing system, one of the pitot tubes begins to work again. The cockpit displays once again show valid speed information.

“Here we go, we’re descending.”

“Gently.”

“Yes.”

The co-pilot eases the backward pressure on the stick, and the plane gains speed as its climb becomes more shallow. It accelerates to 223 knots. The stall warning falls silent. For a moment, the pilots are in control. But they’re not communicating well, so the pilot doesn’t know that they’re a hair’s breadth away from total disaster, and the co-pilot doesn’t know that if he never again pulled back on the stick, everything would be fine, and they would land in Los Angeles on schedule.

Mark can’t see Veronica. He is in his seat, fumbling for the loose buckle. Jane is making a funny breathing noise next to him.

“It’s just turbulence.” His voice comes out choppy, knocked around his throat by the jerks of the plane. “Planes never crash because of turbulence. I read that somewhere.”

“I know,” she says. “I just wish I were back with my family.”

Mark remembers being on the plane with Jax and his mother: nine years old, sharing candy bars with his brother, fighting the urge to kick the seat in front of him. Always a struggle to be still.

“I’m a writer,” Jane says. “I have a habit, I guess, where I see all the possibilities in a situation. No matter what, there’s always at least one that’s terrifying.”

“Don’t do that,” he says. “Focus on what’s in front of you.”

But his own attention is split between hoping to see Veronica’s face, and the deal he’s been prepping for in L.A. He’s come up with a closing strategy that’s complex and imbued with a shade of caution, and therefore not his usual style. He can feel his skills sharpening and his capacity growing with each heartbeat. With this deal, he’ll prove his colleagues wrong for thinking he couldn’t work at the highest level without cocaine. He’ll prove the press wrong for thinking he was a flash in the pan. If men like Cox are leaving the world stage, he’s ready to take over. And then Veronica will fuck him; every woman alive will want to fuck him. This—this turbulence, the dead hero across the aisle—none of this can stop him. He cannot be stopped.

May 2016

Out of nowhere, Shay will whisper in Edward’s ear, “Seven million dollars,” while they’re at the grocery store or trying on sneakers at the mall. Each time, he makes a face and says, “Not yet.” The check is stored in the original envelope from Jax and is safely underneath Edward’s bed with the other letters. After school each afternoon, he either lifts weights in the gym or runs a loop around the lake with Shay. If the weather is mild, they end their run at the playground and sit on the swings until their breath returns to normal. Edward does his math homework every day—a first—because a new math teacher had been hired midyear, and the work is finally both challenging and interesting. Deep inside a difficult problem, Edward can sense his father looking over his shoulder, offering strategies.

Edward doesn’t know what he’s waiting for, until it arrives in the mail. It’s one of the Friday letters John brings home from the post office. Edward takes it from his uncle in the front hallway and opens it. He normally waits until he’s alone with Shay, but something about the slant of the writing on the envelope makes him slide open the flap, even though it’s almost dinnertime and John’s standing right in front of him.

Dear Edward,

You should know that Jax talked about you often. The idea of you made him happy. You freed him when he sent you the money. It was important to Jax that it be yours. I have the letter you sent him asking if he was sure, if he wanted it back. He never wanted it back.

He got really into big-wave surfing, so we moved near a famous break point in California last year. He loved it, but he died three months ago. He wiped out on a wave and then disappeared. They found him a couple hours later, with his board leash trapped under some rocks.

The lawyer told me there might be a problem depositing the original check because of Jax’s death, so I’ve enclosed a new check for the same amount. Please don’t write back and say you’re sorry, because there’s nothing to be sorry for. This was not a tragedy. Dying on your couch watching TV by yourself is a tragedy. Dying while doing something you love with every part of your body is magic. I wish you magic, Edward.

Tahiti

Edward looks up from the letter.

“Are you crying?” John says, and at the same moment Shay walks through the front door and Edward says to her, “Jax is dead.”

Shay puts her hands over her mouth. “No. What happened?”

John says, “What’s going on?”

“Hold on.” Edward goes downstairs and gets the first letter from Jax. He hands it to his uncle, who reads it. Then he hands him Tahiti’s letter and the new check.

When John has studied all three, he walks toward the kitchen, and the teenagers follow. Lacey is cooking at the stove. She has earbuds in and is humming. She removes them when they all troop in. The atmosphere in the house has changed since Edward confronted his uncle in the garage. They’re all on the same page, even if that page is in the middle of an ongoing story with an uncertain end. There has been a softening between Lacey and John. A few days earlier, Edward had overheard his aunt call his uncle “Bear” and watched John blush with happiness.

“You won’t believe this,” John says to her now.

He fills her in, and she punctuates each piece of paper she’s handed with a small “Oh my.”

They gather around the kitchen table. The two letters and the check are now on the table, and because of their shapes and location they look like two placemats and a napkin.

“You told me the details once,” Edward says. “Am I right that each victim’s family got one million dollars from insurance and that I’ll get five million when I turn twenty-one?”

“That’s correct,” John says.

“So Benjamin Stillman’s grandmother got one million dollars, for instance.”

Lacey scrunches up her face at the name—she hasn’t memorized the roster of the plane like the other three have—but doesn’t say anything.

Edward has been working with his uncle to complete the information in the folder. The collaboration had been John’s idea. He’d approached Edward one afternoon and said, “I’ve been thinking about what you said in the garage. I think we should finish documenting everyone on the plane, to make sure everyone is—as you said—
seen
. I like that idea very much.” He gave his nephew a shy look. “Would you help me finish the job?”

Edward told John everything he knew about the passengers on the flight. About the red-haired doctor going into first class to help someone. About his conversation with Benjamin. About the woman with the bells on her skirt, and Gary’s girlfriend. Even about Mark and Veronica sharing a bathroom. While Edward talked, John took notes and added the information to the back of the relevant photos.

When John wrote the description onto the reverse of Florida’s photograph, he’d said, “You know, I was in touch with her husband, and he told me that Florida believed in reincarnation, believed that she’d already had hundreds of lives. The husband—I believe his name was Bobby—sold his house after the crash and bought a camper, and now he’s driving around the country looking for her in her new incarnation.”

Edward’s first thought had been that if they could find a photograph of Florida in her new body, they could add that photo to the folder too. Then he shook his head, and when he looked at his uncle, he saw that John was thinking the exact same thing. They shared their new smile—one that had emerged when they started working together—which confirmed their mutual craziness and the fact that they didn’t care.

John says, “Lolly Stillman got a million dollars, yes. Why do you ask?”

The four of them are standing shoulder to shoulder, looking down at the correspondence, the check, the arrival and exit of Jax Lassio. Edward feels his shoulders soften with relief at having handed over another secret to his aunt and uncle. He no longer has any interest in secrets.

Before bed, Edward sprays the fern and checks the soil, adding a tablespoon of new dirt from the bag underneath the table. Principal Arundhi had told him that he wanted Edward to keep the kangaroo paw forever. “Ferns aren’t meant to be bounced around,” he’d said, with a mournful tug on his mustache. “You’ve cared for him long enough that you’re now his home.”

Edward brushes his teeth, flosses, puts on the sweatpants he wears as pajamas. He checks the fern one last time before climbing into bed. In the slow motion of these movements, an idea arrives in his head, fully formed. He could use Jax’s money to give Principal Arundhi several truly rare and expensive ferns, to refill his collection. The idea makes Edward smile into his pillow.

The letter from Tahiti had saddened him, but it had also been a relief. It felt like a piece of punctuation in a run-on sentence. Edward can move forward. The truth was that he’d always been uncomfortable with the money from Jax, mostly because it made no sense. Jax must have known that Edward had been given insurance money after the crash; he must have known that Edward didn’t need money. After the crash, it was perhaps the last thing Edward did need. But Jax had chosen to give it to him anyway. Maybe Edward can give it away in the same spirit? Just give it away simply because, and to whom, it feels right?

Ferns for Principal Arundhi feel right. Maybe Edward could even arrange for a greenhouse to be built behind the man’s house and filled with plants. Edward starts to smile and finds that he is already smiling. It occurs to him that Mrs. Cox, in particular, would think this was pure insanity. She believed that money was a building block to create more money, a tool to be utilized in building a life of prosperity. She believed in philanthropy—giving to specific, prestigious entities like museums—but she would never condone this kind of frivolity. And, though he would never criticize her directly, Edward knows from the delight bubbling through him that he, and this frivolity, are on the right track.

Who else can he give to? Who else feels right, even if it doesn’t make sense? Edward could give to the people who suffered from the crash but weren’t compensated by the airline and insurance company. He could pay for Shay’s college tuition, which Besa can’t afford. Mahira’s too. He could give Gary money for his whale research—Gary wasn’t Linda’s spouse, so he never received a check. He would like to give Benjamin’s grandmother money, even though she received an insurance payment. She could give the amount away however
she
saw fit.

He can hear Shay’s voice say:
Don’t forget
about
my nun and the three kids in the second letter we read
.

Who else? What else?

His body grows heavy on the mattress; his eyes are closing. He’s falling asleep. His last thought is that he has to find a way for the gifts to be anonymous and untraceable to him. Otherwise, he is an asshole.

2:10
P.M.

The plane has climbed to 2,512 feet above its initial altitude, and although it’s still ascending at a dangerously high rate, it is flying within its acceptable envelope. But the co-pilot once again increases his backward pressure on the stick, raising the nose of the plane and bleeding off speed. None of the pilots who later study Flight 2977’s black-box recording can believe that a trained pilot repeated the mistake at this point. But he did.

The stall alarm sounds.

“Pay attention,” the pilot says.

“Okay.”

Maybe the pilots ignore the alarm because they believe it’s impossible for them to stall the airplane. It’s not an entirely unreasonable idea. This is a fly-by-wire plane; the control inputs are fed directly to a computer, which in turn commands actuators that move the rudder, elevator, ailerons, and flaps. The vast majority of the time, the computer operates within what’s known as “normal law,” which means that the computer will not enact any control movements that would cause the plane to leave its flight envelope. The flight-control computer under normal law will not allow an aircraft to stall.

But once the computer loses its airspeed data, it disconnects the autopilot and switches from normal law to “alternate law,” a regimen with far fewer restrictions on what a pilot can do. In alternate law, pilots can stall an airplane. And the co-pilot, by pulling back on the stick, is doing exactly that.

“What’s happening?” the old lady next to Benjamin asks him. “What in the world is going on?”

She looks up at him with wide eyes. Her left hand is gripping his arm, a fact he doesn’t think she’s aware of.

“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.