Dear Edward(61)

“Who would write this?” Edward whispers. “How could they think it was okay to do?”

“I saw these in the beginning,” Shay says. “Online. I didn’t know you yet, obviously, and I wondered if you were writing them in the hospital.”

“I could hardly swallow,” he says, “much less set up a Twitter account.” But part of him thinks, Did I? His brain is undependable, with no fact solid enough to bear his weight. He imagines himself lying in the hospital bed, his leg in a cast, typing his feelings into an iPad.

Shay holds the flashlight between cupped hands, as if it were the contents of a prayer. She shakes her head and whispers, “We’ve gone through everything. We should go.”

Before they leave the garage, they reread the flight list—they are both trying to memorize the names—and check for new photographs in the first folder. John has added one since yesterday. It’s a photo of a red-haired woman wearing a white coat, with a stethoscope around her neck. She looks at the camera with an expression that suggests pausing for the photo was an inconvenience. Her name is written on the back: Dr. Nancy Louis. She’s survived by her parents, who have a Connecticut address.

Edward recognizes her. The memory, which is tied to so much else, makes his throat tighten.

“You knew her?” Shay says.

“No,” he says, but that no hurts, and so does the last glance he gives the doctor before putting back the folder, and heading out the door, and across the frozen lawn.

The next morning after math class, Margaret appears at his side and says, “It’s been bothering me, so I had to check. You didn’t get in trouble at all for shoving me, did you?”

Edward looks down at her. He’s grown three inches in the last six months and is constantly surprised to see the tops of his classmates’ heads when he walks down the halls. “No,” he says. “I’m really sorry. It was a mistake. I kind of freaked out; that’s why I’m not in gym class anymore.”

Then he sighs, because the football captain is approaching. He spots Edward and shows all his teeth in what Edward assumes is intended to be a smile, then puts his hand up for a mandatory high five. Edward raises his hand and slaps the kid’s palm. When he turns back to Margaret, she’s looking at him with disgust. “He’s not my friend,” Edward says.

“How many APs are you going to take when we’re juniors and seniors?”

“I don’t know.” He looks at her in surprise. “Do you already know that?”

“Seven.”

“Wow.” Edward doesn’t know what else to say. He hadn’t known there were that many AP classes on offer. He wishes he hadn’t pushed her in gym class, and he wishes he wasn’t having this confusing conversation now. He’s aware of sweat lining the back of his neck.

“There were eleven Asian people on your flight.” Margaret says this in a lower voice. “One of them lived in the same town as my auntie.”

Her words travel directly inside Edward, to the place where the flight roster is now imprinted, and where he had assumed by the spelling of certain names that eleven people were Asian. Margaret has just given him a confirmation that feels like a puzzle piece locking into place, and he’s grateful. He understands now that this was why she approached him; this is what she cares about.

“I know their names,” he says, in the same low tone she used.

He thinks for a second that Margaret’s going to demand that he recite them for her, but she nods, apparently satisfied, and walks away.





12:44 P.M.

Flight 2977 trails in the jet stream of all the aircraft that came before it. The men who strapped flapping metal wings called ornithopters to their arms, the gliders, the hot-air balloons, the aerial steam carriages, the Ezekiel Airships, and many more. All of the people on this flight were born during the age of commercial air travel, and so everyone, to some extent, takes for granted the fact that they are able to sit in the sky.

Benjamin is reluctant to sit when he leaves the bathroom. He can’t tolerate hours folded into a cramped seat. He stands near the back of the plane, out of the way. He looks at the small window to his right, at the branches of water etched on the glass. The branches fade as he watches—under his gaze, the rain stops. The sky, as if taking a breath, lightens.

He feels something shift inside him in response to the change in the sky, and he thinks, for the first time, about the reality of his life after this plane ride. Lolly will meet him in the airport. He stops there and thinks, Maybe that’s enough.

He hasn’t lived with, or near, his grandmother since he was twelve. Maybe he can turn the focus of his life to thanking her. Even if he didn’t deserve to be saved—in the hallway of the apartment building where his parents squatted or on the dry dirt of the Afghan field with blood gushing from his side—Lolly saved him when he was four years old. She fed, clothed, and bathed him. Read to him. Yelled at him, when he talked back or when he stopped talking.

He was eleven when he found out she’d gotten him a full scholarship to military school. He’d gone mute, to punish Lolly and to keep himself from crying. Lolly had seemed more offended by the silence than anything he’d done to date. She shouted at him, morning, noon, and night. “Open your mouth, child! Don’t you ghost around! If you want to be in this life, you got to speak up! I’m doing you a favor! I’m getting you out of this place!”