Dear Edward: A Novel (28 page)

2:12
P.M.

Because the co-pilot is holding the stick all the way back, the nose remains high and the plane has barely enough forward speed for the controls to be effective. Turbulence continues to buffet the plane, and it’s nearly impossible to keep the wings level.

The co-pilot says, “Dammit, I don’t have control of the plane. I don’t have control of the plane at all!”

“I’m taking the controls. Left seat taking over.” The pilot begins to hand-fly the plane for the first time.

“It doesn’t make sense,” the co-pilot says, slack in his seat. “I’ve been pulling back on the stick since we went on manual.”

“What?” The pilot’s eyes widen. “You’ve been pulling back on the stick—no!” He pushes the stick forward, but it’s too late to correct. The plane’s nose is pitched up, and it’s descending at a 40-degree angle. The stall warning continues to sound.

“We’ve lost control of the plane!”

“We’ve totally lost control…”

When the plane lurches, Florida thinks of the television cartoons where a vehicle is balanced on the edge of a cliff, and then the wind shifts, or a tiny bird lands on the hood, and the vehicle plummets. She wonders why that moment, when animated, is considered funny.

She places her warm hand over Linda’s cold one, so they are gripping the armrest together.

“Hold it together, baby,” she says. “We can do this.”

“Okay,” Linda whispers.

Florida is startled to see a stranger on the other side of Linda, staring at them with a panicked face. The blue scarf has dropped and an Indian woman has appeared. She doesn’t speak, just stares at the two of them as if waiting to be told her fate.

Florida can sense the rumblings of a scream in this woman and wants to avoid it. “I’m Florida,” she says. “And this is Linda. We’re here to help each other.”

The woman nods. She’s probably fifty-five. She says in a soft voice, “I overslept. I woke up thinking I must be in the wrong place. On the wrong plane.”

“We’re on our way to Los Angeles,” Linda says.

“Los Angeles,” the woman says. “Los Angeles is correct. Thank God.”

She turns and looks out the window. There’s nothing to see but a bank of gray clouds. She looks back at the two women. “But?” she says.

The question is vast.

“We don’t know,” Florida says.

“We don’t know anything,” Linda says.

The plane is now falling fast. With its nose pitched 15 degrees up and a forward speed of 100 knots, it is descending at a rate of 10,000 feet per minute, at an angle of 41.5 degrees. Though the pitot tubes are now fully functional, the forward airspeed is so low—below 60 knots—that the angle-of-attack inputs are no longer accepted as valid, and the stall-warning horn temporarily stops.

The two pilots discuss, incredibly, whether they are in fact climbing or descending, before agreeing that they are descending. As the plane approaches 10,000 feet, the nose remains high.

“Climb, climb!”

Veronica, strapped to her seat, tries to stand. The plane is at an angle she’s never experienced before. She wishes she were back in the bathroom with Mark, her body coiled around his.
What have those idiots in the cockpit done?
She has an urge to reach toward her passengers, to try to calm, to assist.

Mark is sliding out of his chair—his seatbelt was loose, and now it’s gripping him not at the waist but under his armpits. He’s looking at what must be the ceiling. He thinks about Jax and their last stupid argument. He realizes that he wasn’t done. He’s not done.

Jane sinks into herself; she cups her hands over her face. The shaking of the plane means there’s no way to move her body back to her family, so she joins them inside her mind. She imagines she’s sitting on Bruce’s lap. She can feel his legs beneath hers. She looks into his eyes, because there are no words left for them to share. Then she kisses her boys, kisses and kisses and kisses them the way Eddie kissed her as a baby.

As the plane nears 2,000 feet, the aircraft’s sensors detect the fast-approaching surface and trigger a new alarm. There’s no time left to build up speed by pushing the plane’s nose forward into a dive.

The pilot: “This can’t be happening!”

“But what’s happening?”

“Ten degrees of pitch…”

Exactly 1.4 seconds later, the cockpit voice recorder stops.

Bruce thinks about his math, the six years on a problem he has not yet managed to perfectly express, much less solve. He has an entire duffel bag full of his journals and notes packed into the hold of this plane. He can picture the page where he had a breakthrough last August; he can remember the bottle of Malbec he opened for himself and Jane that night. He’d thought that the breakthrough meant he was closer than he actually was. He should have known better. He had stepped into a clearing, and mistaken it for the edge of the forest.

That knowledge had set in over the following months and had been compounded by the announcement that he hadn’t been awarded tenure. This setback plus the failure had crushed him, though he’d tried to hide that from his wife. He’d asked himself:
Why do you care so much?
The answer came immediately:
because of the boys
. He wanted the boys to see him labor—which they had—but then achieve something of note. He wanted them to be proud of him. He wanted to have done something worthy of their pride.

The plane is plummeting. He holds his boys’ hands in his own and thinks:
I need more time
.

Dear Edward,

My name is Lyle. I used to be a volunteer paramedic in Greeley, Colorado. I was part of the team that was closest to Flight 2977’s crash site. I was working at ShopRite when the call came in. I’m a butcher by trade—I come from a long line of butchers. I was cutting up a chicken, thinking it was a little too tough to make good eating. Funny what details get stuck in your mind.

That was my last day at ShopRite. Last day as a paramedic too. I couldn’t go to work afterward. One doc said I was depressed; another called it PTSD. I feel lame even mentioning it, after what you must’ve been through. But if I tell you my story, then there’s no point in leaving stuff out. So, I suffered some and eventually decided to move away, even though my family had been in northern Colorado for as long as time. We even predated Columbus. I live in Texas now—I need big open spaces, even though the ones here are drier, less green. I’m still a butcher.

I’m writing to you because I can’t shake the memory of that day. You rise up out of my dreams, shouting like you did from your place in the wreckage. If you’ve already stopped reading, if you’ve torn me—I mean, this letter—up, I totally understand. I wish I could do the same.

There were only four volunteer paramedics in our town, though of course the size of the crash meant the call went out wider, to more districts. But we were the closest and the first to report to the scene. I came in my car. Olivia and Bob were in the ambulance. There was another guy, and for the life of me I can’t remember his name. The fire truck, a fancy one that cost so much money the county had been fighting over the purchase for years, was on our heels. The chief was thrilled, no doubt, at the chance to really use the thing.

When we got there, it was like driving up to a Hollywood movie set. To see a section of a plane lying in the middle of a dairy field I’ve driven by hundreds of times looked about as horrifying as seeing a whale beached there. My first thought was,
We’ve got to get it back up in the air
. That seemed like as reasonable a goal as any.

Before this, the most serious emergency I’d reported to was a heart attack suffered by an old guy in his bed. His wife called 911, we showed up, and he survived. We’d taken a training course but nothing that touched anything like this. Olivia was super. She yelled at us to break into separate quadrants. She told us to look for people to help. I went to the far left, near the tail, which had splintered off from the rest of the plane. I climbed over cracked metal and puddle-jumped seats and unrecognizable objects for at least an hour. Coughing because of the smoke. I could hear other people yell, “Hello, hello?” I hoped my colleagues were having better luck than I was.

I was trying to figure out how to quit in an acceptable way—basically hightail it back to my car—when I heard you….

Edward does everything he can to avoid the memory of the crash, but sometimes it comes over him like a sickness, and once it begins, there’s no escape. It descends in the darkest hour of a sleepless night. Occasionally, it sneaks in when he catches his breath a certain way, or when a loud noise makes his heart sputter.

Without warning, the plane tips downward inside him.

He grips his father’s hand and Jordan’s. They make a rope with their arms, and Eddie stares at the rope as the overhead compartments bang open, and bags fall through the air. He’s not sure if the plane is pointing up, or down.

“I love you, boys,” Bruce says, in a fierce voice. “I want to be here with you. I love you.”

“I love you too,” Eddie says.

“I love you,” Jordan says.

It’s unclear whether they can hear each other, over the hissing, the cannons of sound around them. Maybe a door is open somewhere. Maybe up is down.

“Jane!” Bruce shouts, into the din.

The people around Eddie make noises he’s never heard before, and will never hear again. There is a deafening crack, like the world has split in two. He sees teardrops on his arm. Are they his, or Jordan’s?

The noise is so loud, the pressure on his face, on his skin, so great he can’t keep his eyes open. He, and everyone, falls.

…I didn’t believe your voice at first, Edward. I was certain I was hearing things. But the same sentence rang out, over and over, and I moved toward it, as if it were a magnet.

“I’m here!”

“I’m here!”

I pulled aside a metal sheet; it felt like opening a door, and there you were, furious, as if offended at the wait. You made eye contact with me, and shouted: “I’m here!”

I stared at you, this tiny boy with a seatbelt still around your waist, until you yelled again. Then I stepped forward and picked you up, and you held me around the neck, and I felt like you were saving me in the same moment that I was saving you.

We walked back toward the others, while you repeated, quieter now, but with the same level of insistence: I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.

June 2019

Edward and Shay drive across the country with the windows down on the Acura, a second-hand car they bought with Jax’s money.

Edward has used the money to execute most of the ideas he’d dreamed up that night in the basement. It will pay for Shay’s and Mahira’s college and post-graduate educations—Mahira has been gifted the amount through a charity that supports the education of girls of color, so she doesn’t know it came from Edward. Lacey, it turned out, had great administrative skills from her work at the hospital and was very helpful at coming up with creative covers for distributing the funds. She’d liaised with Principal Arundhi’s botany club, passing the money on to them with the caveat that the principal never know where it came from. The club had designed and built a freestanding greenhouse where they could hold their meetings and showcase their personal collections, including the preeminent assemblage of ferns on the East Coast. Lacey had also founded a small charity devoted to survivors of tragedies, in order to make gifts to other people Edward designated, including Gary and the whale-conservation fund that employed him, Lolly Stillman, the nun, and the three children whose photograph Shay is never without.

The Acura’s air-conditioning system is temperamental, so they try not to use it even though it’s often ninety degrees outside. They take highways and drive fast. Shay’s hair—brown again—blows back from her face, and when she drives and it’s her turn to choose the music, they listen to hip-hop. She often beatboxes along, which makes Edward cackle with laughter. When he’s behind the wheel, he’s less consistent. He chooses according to his mood: sometimes a podcast, sometimes Bach, sometimes no music at all.

High school graduation was two weeks earlier, under a white tent on top of a hill. Principal Arundhi had handed out the diplomas, and Mrs. Cox and Dr. Mike had attended, as had Lacey, John, and Besa. Edward had stopped being a patient of Dr. Mike’s six months earlier, and he’d been surprised by how happy he was to see the therapist. Mrs. Cox’s graduation gift was a copy of her son’s newly published book of poetry, and both Edward and Shay grinned widely when the wrapping paper was pulled off. “Harrison is very talented,” Mrs. Cox said, holding up the book so everyone could see the cover. “He won the Walt Whitman Award, which is
quite
prestigious.”

Afterward, when Principal Arundhi was finished with his official responsibilities, they had gone out to a fancy dinner with a lot of wine for all the adults except Mrs. Cox, who drank martinis. Dr. Mike and Principal Arundhi had a long conversation about a particular baseball series that had been important to both of them when they were kids. Mrs. Cox misheard them talking about the Mets and told everyone what she had seen at the Met that season. Edward and Shay were allowed a glass of wine each, due to the special occasion.

During dessert, Edward had surprised himself and everyone present by lurching up out of his chair, holding his glass. The collected faces had turned toward him, and just the sight of each familiar person had moved a piece of furniture inside him. He said, “I wanted to say thank you. To each of you. Thank you so much.” There was a pause, and Shay raised her glass and then everyone else did too and it was possible that they were all crying a little. John looked at Lacey and said, “We did it.” Lacey, her eyes shining with tears, laughed and said, “I guess we did.” When Lacey leaned forward and kissed her husband, Edward sank into his chair, and everyone at the table applauded.

In Colorado, Shay and Edward drive to the hotel closest to the site and check in. The hotel receptionist gives them a look, like,
Aren’t you a little young?
They have ID, but the receptionist shrugs, and they don’t need to produce it. Edward and Shay had fought the grown-ups for weeks about taking this trip.

“Just wait a year or two,” Besa had said. “Why does it have to be now?
Sólo tienes dieciocho
.”

Lacey said, “You think eighteen is old, but it’s actually not. You need more experience driving, for a trip this ambitious.”

Edward said, “I need to go before college, and I need to go alone with Shay.” He didn’t have a better reason to provide. He simply knew that this was something he had to do and this was when he had to do it. He and Shay will attend college together in the fall. As Shay predicted, Edward got into every school he applied to, but he’d applied to the same colleges as Shay, so he waited until she chose one that had accepted her, and then he enrolled there as well.

Besa had agreed to the trip only after Shay promised to respond to every single phone call and text from her mother. Besa also installed a tracking app on Shay’s phone. “In case you get lost,” she said. “So I can come find you.”

They swim in the indoor pool. They have adjoining rooms and play gin rummy on Edward’s queen-sized bed. They eat at the diner next to the hotel. The next morning, before the sun is fully over the horizon, they climb into the Acura and drive the twelve minutes to the site. Edward feels nauseous as they make their way there. This trip was his decision, and yet he feels like he had no choice. He wonders if returning to a place he had miraculously once escaped is a good idea. What if he doesn’t get out the second time? He’s had nightmares in which the ground takes a good look at him, shakes its shaggy head, and swallows him whole.

There’s a small dirt parking lot next to the site. The sky is lined with pink and yellow; the sun is still working its way up. No one else is here. They’d planned their visit for a Tuesday, because Shay had found in her research that the fewest people visit the site on Tuesdays.

“We don’t want anyone recognizing you,” she said. They’d both read an article online about the memorial and how it had made the young sculptor famous, and the article had mentioned that any boy between the ages of fourteen and thirty who visited the site was approached and asked if he was Edward Adler.

A low wooden fence separates the parking area from the meadow. Edward climbs out of the car. The air tastes clean, and he gulps a few breaths. Ahead of him, in the center of the field, is the sculpture. A flock of 191 silver sparrows in the shape of a plane, taking to the air.

“It’s beautiful,” Shay whispers.

They walk together across the field. Tall grass swishes against their shins; they’re wearing shorts and sweatshirts. When Edward reaches the tail of the bird-plane, he stops and looks up. The silver birds stretch away from him. The lowest ones are within his reach. The sculpture is smaller in person than it had looked in photos. It spans the length of a small Cessna, not a commercial airplane.

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.