Dear Edward(20)

The clouds outside the windows are a shade darker than before. Inside the cabin feels darker too, beset with memories of soft-lipped girls, permanently sleeping mothers, shy teenage boys, and clashing fists. Florida can almost see the scenes, the missing people, the dense minutes and hours and years that sit behind each person on the plane. She inhales and lets the choked air fill her lungs. The past is the same as the present to her, as precious and as close at hand. After all, if you think about one memory for most of a day, is that not your present? Some people live in the now; some people prefer to reside in the past—either choice is valid. Florida operates her lungs, pleased by the fullness.

When Linda sits back down, Florida pats her hand. “You remind me of someone,” she says. “I’ve been trying to remember who.”

“Oh?”

“Might be one of the revolutionaries I took care of in my store in Cebu. In the Philippines. They were mostly boys, but occasionally I’d get a feisty girl who had faked her way into battle.” Florida pictures the crowded back room of that store. She sold or traded rice and beans out front and hid the wounded under blankets in the back. She held secret meetings of the Katipuneros in her bedroom late at night. The wounded or sick soldiers came straight from fighting the Spanish, but they were no more than children. They called her Tandang Sora, and she whispered the same truth in each child-soldier’s ear: You are special. You are meant to survive, to go on and do great things.

Florida is proud of this memory; she lived that life well. There are other lives, in which her opinion of herself isn’t so high. The one she’s sitting in right now, for instance, feels like it’s gotten away from her.

Linda stares. “When was this? I thought you said you lived in Vermont.”

“Oh, a couple hundred years ago.” Florida studies her seatmate. “There was a girl I treated for pleurisy; I think it’s her you remind me of.”

Linda looks at her like she’s crazy. Florida sighs. Sometimes she explains, sometimes she doesn’t, but this girl looks like she needs all the help she can get. “This isn’t my first life,” she says, “or my first body. I have a longer memory than most people. I can remember most of time.”

“Oh. I’ve heard of people like you.”

Florida is unfazed by Linda’s distrustful tone. Even her parents in her current life, two Filipino doctors who immigrated to Atlanta, Georgia, only to become a dry cleaner and a housewife, didn’t believe their daughter’s tales of past lives. She had been only too happy, in the middle of high school, to leave them and the South by attaching herself to a boyfriend who had a drum set and a dream of the big city.

Linda is chewing her lower lip. She’s a pretty young woman who seems to have mastered how to make herself ugly. She wears too much makeup and has an over-expressive face. Her mouth is rarely still, her eyebrows shoot up, her cheeks draw in and then push out. Her face contorts, as if it’s striving for something.

Florida pats her hand again. “You’ll be okay. You want to marry this man in California, right? So you get off the plane and you marry him, and, voilà, you have a new life. A new life is what you’re after, isn’t it?”

Linda says, in a small voice, “I’m not a hundred percent sure he’s going to propose.”

Florida smiles. “Sweetheart, no one is one hundred percent sure of any damn thing. If someone says they are, they’re a liar.” She shifts in her seat hard enough that the bells on her skirt jangle. Bobby used to say it sounded like she was wearing tiny alarm clocks. She’d respond: Who am I trying to wake up around here, the birds?

Benjamin hates being strapped in this seat, mired in his own thoughts. He’s unable to do the physical movement necessary to quiet his brain. He doesn’t think about the gunfire during his last patrol; the night he was injured makes sense to him. He’d grown sloppy in the weeks following the fight with Gavin. Distracted. He’d basically stopped sleeping, which made everything worse. He was shot during patrol because his reflexes were gone, which made him an easy target. Benjamin actually saw the shooter, positioned between two branches. Looked the man in the eyes and received his bullet. That information computes. There’s nothing there for the ants to chew on.

Instead, he thinks about Gavin. Gavin was a white guy from Boston who had showed up in his platoon six months earlier. Benjamin knew by looking at him that he’d been to college and probably joined the army to piss off his parents. There were plenty of guys like that, amid the lifers like him. Gavin, if he stayed alive long enough, would do his tour and get out. Probably become an accountant—a guy who drives his kids to soccer games. He wore wire-rim glasses and had white-blond hair.

In general, Benjamin stayed away from white guys. The army, like everywhere else, segregated itself, and Benjamin preferred hanging out with people who looked like him. The truth was that no one—black, Latino, Asian, or white—was clamoring to be his friend. He knew he had a reputation for being uptight and a little scary. His grandmother, Lolly, had once told him that his “resting face” wasn’t particularly friendly.

One night, he and Gavin were both assigned latrine duty. The bathroom was disgusting; there were dark, unidentifiable stains on the walls and sticky floors. There had been talk of their platoon moving to a new location, and the uncertainty translated into a lack of motivation for this kind of work. Benjamin and Gavin walked into the room with buckets and mops and a gallon of toxic-smelling cleaning solution; they both paused just inside the doorway, and Benjamin’s jaw set. When he looked at Gavin, he saw the same determination on his face. They went at it, and after three straight hours, they had deep-cleaned the entire room.