Dear Edward(74)

It takes a moment for Jane to realize that Mark has grabbed a seat in the opposite direction and Veronica has gone wavy in front of her. There is another spiky cry, but the nurse is in her seat, as silent as a stone. The old man is slumped in his chair.

“Turbulence,” someone calls, and Jane is, for a split second, appreciative that what is happening isn’t inside her body, because if this shaking, pitching, and blurring were taking place solely within her own skin, that would mean something had gone terribly wrong.





January 2016

Edward pretends to go to school in the morning. He eats breakfast with his aunt and uncle. He uses the upstairs bathroom, so he can check to see if his uncle slept in the nursery. The sheets are rumpled, and a fat novel—Last of the Breed, by Louis L’Amour—sits on the bed stand. Edward blinks at the scene, and for a moment the bed and the letters and the lake outside the clear-paned window all feel the same, like a row of books on a shelf. Formed with equal weight and density. Why should one of these items make him happy, or unhappy? They are neutral. Beds are made to be slept in. Letters to be read. I’m either becoming Zen or more depressed, he thinks.

He waits on the sidewalk for Shay, as usual. He waves at Besa, and they walk together down the block. Shay has her haughty face on and says little during their walk, but he knows that she’ll cover for him at school.

“Thank you,” he says, when they reach the corner.

“You have to show me everything you read, obviously.”

“Obviously.”

He watches her walk forward. He waits until she’s successfully crossed two sides of the intersection, and then he enters the forest that lines the back of the houses on their block. He knows John and Lacey are leaving the house now, and he can arrive home unnoticed by this route.

When you visited us when you were little, you and Jordan played back there, his aunt had said once, of the forest. You thought it was wonderful, because you’d never been in proper woods before. Edward has no memory of this, but as he picks his way over tree roots, he tries to imagine himself and Jordan as boys, running loops around the fat tree trunks. Jordan is in the lead, and Eddie follows, laughing. The two boys examine a bug in the dirt, then find two big sticks and pretend they’re swords.

Edward stops when he reaches the hedge that backs up against the garage. He doesn’t question the sight of the boys in front of him. He feels like his imagination, perhaps fueled by the contents of the letters, has been butting up against reality lately. In his daydreams, he often sees Gary, his blond beard flecked with gray, taking notes on the deck of his research boat. In the gym a few days earlier, Edward thought he’d seen Benjamin Stillman lifting weights in the mirror. The soldier was dressed in his uniform, the same one he’d been wearing on the plane. He was deadlifting an enormous amount of weight. He’d looked real, to the extent that Edward almost dropped the dumbbell he was holding. He spun around, while Mrs. Tuhane barked, “Adler, pay attention!” But, of course, no one was there.

Edward watches Jordan, who appears to be about nine years old. This was the boy who jumped off the top of a car to impress Shay. His black hair, always untamable, shoots in several different directions. Edward has no problem recalling every plane of his brother’s face, even as his parents’ faces and voices zoom in and out of focus. He doesn’t know why Jordan remains perfectly distinct while his parents blur, but perhaps it’s because he’d always considered his brother to be part of him. They are inextricable, even now. Edward smiles because his brother is smiling at the sword in his hand.

A question appears in his mind: What can I do for you?

Immediately, it seems strange that this didn’t occur to Edward earlier, that it took an avalanche of letters from strangers to reveal this as a possibility. Lacey had kissed his cheek for her sister, which surely means Edward can do something for his brother. He can look at a day—today—and think, If Jordan were here, what would he want to do?

Edward’s not sure where to start, but he’s hungry again, so he decides to start with food. He squeezes through the hedge and checks that John and Lacey’s cars are gone before heading to the kitchen. He can eat the way his brother would choose to, which means the meal Edward carries from the kitchen to the garage is almost exactly Jordan’s last meal on the plane: carrot sticks, a small pot of applesauce, and a hummus sandwich.

When he opens the door to the garage, a voice says, “What, you didn’t bring any food for me? So rude.”

Shay is sitting cross-legged on the cement floor, next to the duffel bags. “Don’t be mad,” she says. “We won’t get in trouble, I promise. I’ll lie my pants off if I have to.”

Edward frowns, but it’s just to register his skepticism. He’s not mad.

“Besides,” she says, “we’ll get twice as much reading done together.”

He settles down beside her. “Hand me a letter.”

She unzips the second duffel bag, which they’re two-thirds of the way through. Shay’s spreadsheet is next to them, to write down the different requests.

They both read for a few minutes, then Shay says, “Don’t tell me you weren’t happy to see me.”

He says, truthfully, “I’m always happy to see you.”

He opens the folder, as if to cross-reference the letter he’d just read with a victim’s photograph. Really, he just wants to glance at the photo of Jordan. It seems possible to Edward that he’d made the decision to stay home today, to be here, because of Jordan. His brother would certainly have played hooky. The fully formed motivation had simply followed in the wake of the action. What would Jordan do? What can I do for Jordan? He is the age his brother was when he died, and Edward feels—hopes—that he’s entered his brother’s orbit in a new way.