Dear Edward(73)

Edward almost laughs at this, but can’t muster the effort to force the sound up his throat and out his mouth.

“I’m going to skip school tomorrow,” he says. “Lacey’s going to the hospital all day for some training thing and I need to get through the rest of the letters. I feel like I can’t breathe half the time.”

“Fine, I will too.”

He’d expected this and is prepared. “If we both skip, it will seem too obvious. We might get caught. I barely have any absences, so I can definitely get away with it if I’m alone. Besides, you need to keep your grades up.” He blushes when he says this, remembering Besa’s accusation in the driveway.

Shay’s dimple deepens in her cheek, rarely a good sign. The fact that he has planned an escape on his own—even a tiny one—rankles her.

Edward meets her gaze. He has no choice. He has nothing against school at this point, but it’s a waste of time. Time he should spend reading; each letter feels like a page in a book that he won’t fully understand until he reaches the end. It feels imperative—in a way nothing else in his life has—that he read every word. The attention he brings to the letters seems to be changing him; Edward can feel strands inside himself gathering, trying to find a shape in which he will be able to meet the eyes of the people in the photographs.





2:04 P.M.

The plane is two-thirds of the way to Los Angeles. The passengers’ consciousness reaches forward, searching the final stretch of tunnel for a glimmer of light. Shoulders loosen and headaches fade, because more onboard hours lie behind them than ahead. Hope returns with thoughts of logistics, car-service pickups, and whom to text the moment the wheels touch the ground.

Jane looks up from her screen.

She’s just rewritten a scene in which two robots get into a fight, and the only pleasure she has been able to salvage is changing the gender of both robots to female. Girl power, she thinks in disgust. She’d pictured the robots as herself and Lacey. Sisters, which means they love each other straight to the bone but have spent their lives circling each other, testing the air between them with jabs. Jane is the seventh credited writer to work on this script; it’s only by personalizing the writing that she can endure it.

The cockpit door opens, and Jane has a clear view into the darkened space. A flash of windshield and a panel of blinking lights punctuated with levers, the shoulder of the co-pilot. The pilot, a gray-haired man with a salt-and-pepper mustache, smiles at Veronica, says a few words Jane can’t hear, and then steps into the bathroom. The door pulls shut behind him.

Jane returns to her computer screen, writes three lines of dialogue, erases them, and tries again. She’s getting somewhere, she thinks. She glances up then, because a spiky cry has filled the air. Jane cranes around. She thinks: A baby? Mine? Then: Don’t be ridiculous; they’re not babies anymore. They don’t need me like that.

“Is there a doctor on the plane?” This issues in the same pitched voice, and even though passengers are now standing and Veronica is in the aisle, Jane is able to see that it’s the nurse, wearing her whites. She’s hunched over the old man beside her. He looks terrible, or not terrible exactly, but wrong. His skin seems to have gone rubbery—his eyes are closed, and he’s whiter than the wall of the plane.

Jane’s hands are off her computer; without thinking she presses on her birthmark. She presses hard, as if it’s a button that will reverse the clock, even if only by a few minutes.

“Shit,” Mark says.

He’s backed up slightly, so he’s halfway into Jane’s seat area. They’re both half-standing now, peering through the cluster of people at the agitated nurse, who is holding the old man’s wrist as if it’s a musical instrument she can’t figure out how to play.

“He looks bad, doesn’t he?” Mark says.

Veronica’s voice comes over the loudspeaker: smooth, calm. “Two things, ladies and gentlemen. First, please notice that the fasten-seatbelt sign is on. We’re anticipating turbulence, so kindly stay in your seats. Second, if there is a doctor on the plane, could he or she please report to first class?”

Jane thinks, I want to go to the boys. She has the image of rushing into the back of the plane, past the ill man and the nurse, giving her space over to Mark, who seems to want to reverse as far away from the scene as possible anyway.

A stocky redheaded woman appears with a gray backpack. She takes the old man’s wrist from the nurse and puts her other hand to the side of the old man’s neck. She waits, as if for news.

“Doctor?” Veronica murmurs.

Everybody in first class is watching. The nurse, with nothing left to hold on to, looks bereft.

Finally, the redheaded woman lays the arm across the old man’s chest. She stands up. She speaks quietly to Veronica, but her voice carries.

“He’s dead.”

“Dead?” Veronica gasps the word. “You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

Jane reaches for the seat back in front of her, because she’s lost her balance. There is a dead man across the aisle. The only other dead bodies she’s seen were her parents, but that was two decades ago, and she had been prepared by terrible diagnoses and then visible declines. Their dead bodies had been in coffins. Her mother had been wearing her favorite pink lipstick, lying with her hands folded on her waist.