Dear Edward(57)

Edward breathes the cold air.

“Also,” she says, in an apologetic tone, “it doesn’t help that they see you as a privileged white boy who’s going to be loaded, when you get the insurance money.”

Lucky. Edward tests the word inside his head, as if considering its weight.

“Like I said, you should ignore them.”

He feels himself darken further on the inside, a lightbulb that’s burning out. Nothing she’d said was incorrect. Maybe I’m an asshole, he thinks. None of this has occurred to him before.

That night when he finishes his neighborhood walk, Edward circles the house in the shadows. He’s thinking about the sneer on the football captain’s face, and the possibility that he might be an asshole himself, and these thoughts demand motion. There’s another thought too, one that’s been following Edward for weeks, which is now tapping him on the shoulder. Tomorrow is his fifteenth birthday. Tomorrow, he’ll turn the same age his brother was when he died. Edward rounds the four corners of the dark house, again and again. He notices the garage on one of the laps and heads over to circumnavigate that shape too.

The backyard is long, and the garage, separate from the house, is set far back. It abuts the hedge, and beyond the hedge are the woods. Edward has never gone near the garage—John and Lacey both park their cars in the driveway. He’d never given the structure any thought. Never wondered what it was used for, what was inside. He realizes that he’s limited his environments since he moved here. The kitchen, the living room, Shay’s room, the playground, school.

In the darkness now, with grass dampening his sneakers, he feels a small satisfaction at taking himself to a new place, even if it is just a garage. He walks around the building, then stops to peer through the windows. He can see only his own reflection, ghostly and serious. He wonders what his aunt and uncle keep inside, since they don’t use the space for their cars.

There’s a door on the side, and he tries the knob, expecting it to be locked. It’s not; when he twists, the door swings inward. As he steps inside, the dark room looks like an extension of the backyard. Chunky hedges, a house-like structure in the center, rectangles of varying shades of darkness, tangles of uncut charcoal-colored grass. Edward stays next to the door. His vision improves slightly, and he sees that there’s a flashlight plugged into the socket right beside him. This is John’s handiwork—every room in the house has the same feature, in case of emergency. Edward pulls out the flashlight and switches it on.

In the center of the room is a workbench, with tools hanging off hooks on the sides. The setup looks too neat to be in regular use, and Edward wonders what his uncle builds here. He tries to imagine John sanding down an old table, but the image makes no sense. Stepping closer, he sees a stack of laptops, and smiles. Of course—this isn’t for building or fixing furniture; the workbench is for constructing and deconstructing computers. He’s never seen his uncle anywhere near the garage, but John’s an early riser, so he must come here before Edward and Lacey are awake.

In the corner, there’s a faded green armchair of the kind usually owned by elderly ladies. Beside it is a bookcase. Edward points the flashlight at the shelves and sees that it’s filled with what must be the complete works of only two authors: Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. Edward double-checks, to see if there are other writers represented, but there aren’t. John comes out here and reads Westerns? For some reason, Edward is certain that all of this belongs to John, not Lacey. The house is Lacey’s; Edward knows this in his bones. This has to be where John keeps the messy odds and ends that his wife won’t allow inside.

Edward sinks down in the green armchair, to see the world from John’s seat. He’s glad he came inside, glad he found a small distraction to delay his return to the basement. He would like to delay going to sleep tonight, and therefore delay waking up fifteen. There’s a round table beside the armchair, with a stack of different-colored folders on it. By his feet are two large army-style duffel bags. Edward shifts one with his foot, and it moves easily. Whatever’s inside the bag is very light. He shines his flashlight down and sees that both duffels are locked with padlocks.

He pulls the top folder onto his lap and opens it. There’s a sheet of paper covered with John’s neat handwriting, which Edward associates with the grocery list on the kitchen counter: the nice apples, turkey breasts, soy milk, chocolate-covered almonds. But this isn’t a shopping list; it’s a list of names, and beside each name is a number and letter: 34B, 12A, 27C. Only five of the names have no accompanying numbers.

Edward’s fingertips begin to sweat against the sheet of paper.

There will be 191 names, he knows without counting. It’s the flight list. The five names without accompanying seat numbers are the two pilots and the three flight attendants. Edward scans the list, looking for his own name. It’s not there, but his brother and father and mother’s names are written in John’s neat script. His mother’s row number is different from the rest of the Adler family. You should have sat with us, Edward thinks.

There are other documents below the flight list, and some of the papers feel different than the top one, thicker in consistency. He doesn’t lift the top page, though, doesn’t look further. He sits with the folder open on his lap, the flashlight in his hand. Edward remembers sitting in the NTSB basement hallway beside his uncle and thinks: So, you’re still gathering information.