Dear Edward(71)

When I read poetry, I forget about both of my parents, and that’s what I tried to do on the afternoon of the hearing. I try to forget about the crash, try to forget that I come from two ruinous human beings. But it has bothered me, the idea that I should have been in that car when you got in, because I should have accompanied my elderly mother to that kind of event. Also, I know you are the last person to have seen my father alive, assuming you walked by his seat or saw him in his wheelchair in the airport. There is some poetry in the idea of sharing your presence.

You’re probably wondering why I’ve sent you this letter. Since my father died, I’ve made myself write something every day. I want to make things, not just study them. Ideally, I write a poem, but on the hard days I write correspondence. And today I wrote to you, to connect the living dots between me, my mother, my father, and yourself.

Regards,

Harrison Cox

“Will you tell Mrs. Cox that her son wrote you?” Shay says when she’s read it too.

Edward shakes his head. This letter belongs in a different category, one shared by the school secretary who told him about feeding alligators as a girl or Edward’s lab partner telling him that he wants to be an opera singer when he grows up. These are secrets, confessions, and therefore sacred. He will hold them to his chest.

Edward is staring into the duffel bag, his eyes bleary, when Shay says, “Stop. We have to stop. We’ve read way more than ten letters.”

Edward notices that her fingertips are ink-stained, as he helps her to her feet. He feels older, or heavier, than he did when he entered the garage, and Shay looks changed too, in a way he wouldn’t be able to describe. They walk together out of the room and carry all the words they’ve ingested into the dark night.

“I didn’t think you’d last this long,” Mrs. Tuhane says to Edward’s reflection in the mirror.

Edward has just sat down on the weight-lifting bench. Her words startle him, because to his recollection, this is the first thing the coach has ever said to him that’s not a directive. He wishes Shay were here to translate, because although he’d like to be able to respond to this comment properly, he has no idea what the coach is talking about.

“Um, at what?” he says.

“I thought you’d quit, run crying back to the principal about this being too hard. I would have bet money you were headed for study hall within two weeks of entering this room.”

Edward shakes his head, still confused. “But isn’t this mandatory?”

Mrs. Tuhane slides a small metal plate onto either end of the bar Edward is about to press. “I’m giving you a compliment, kid. You’ve been at it for months. You’re tougher than I thought. And you’re getting stronger.”

Edward looks at his skinny frame in the mirror.

She seems to read his mind and scowls. “It doesn’t matter if you can see the muscles. I don’t give a damn what you can see. You’ve rewired your brain. You can bench a hundred pounds. You’re objectively stronger. Now, stop wasting time.”

Edward lies back on the bench and wraps his hands around the bar. Before school, he’d read a handful of letters that he’d smuggled into the basement. One was from an elderly woman in Detroit, who said one of her twenty-seven grandchildren had died on the flight and that he had always secretly been her favorite. She’d been wondering if all the passengers on that plane had simply been too good, in one way or another, for this earth. She wondered what Edward thought about this theory.

“Press,” Mrs. Tuhane says, and he lifts the bar up.

Another letter was from a woman who claimed to have kissed Edward on the cheek outside the NTSB hearing in Washington, though he can’t remember anyone kissing him that day. Another was from a mother who said she regretted how critical she had been of her daughter. I told her that she should stop eating carbs, or that her hair was unflattering. Now I think, why did I care how she looked? Then there was a stretch of letters that contained what felt like inappropriate demands.

Please don’t waste a minute, don’t waste this gift you’ve been given.

Make sure you live a meaningful life.

Live every day in the memory of those who died.

These are Edward’s least favorite kinds of letters—the ones that tell him how to live his own life.

“Besides,” Mrs. Tuhane says, “your metabolism is a burning furnace at your age. I predict that if you keep lifting with this regularity, you’ll gain twenty pounds of muscle your senior year. Bring it down now, slow.”

Edward lowers the bar to his chest. He thinks of himself three years from now, with a wider chest and thicker limbs. He thinks of the unopened letters in the duffel bags—his name etched on each one—and lifts the bar up and down until all of him aches.

During dinner, Edward notices that his aunt and uncle seem withdrawn. He doesn’t know where Lacey keeps her sleeping pills, but Edward has the desire to go find the bottle and flush them down the toilet. You have to earn sleep, he wants to tell her. Even though he knows he didn’t earn it; the letters gave him sleep as a gift.

His unspoken allegiance is to John, who looks distracted and checks his phone twice during the meal, a habit Lacey hates. His wife narrows her eyes and focuses on Edward while telling them that she had a slow day at work, which meant she got to spend an extra hour holding babies in the nursery.