Dear Edward(78)

“I don’t know what I want to do with my life either.”

She shrugs. “Well, you don’t have to take stupid tests. I’m a normal person.”

He feels jittery, over-caffeinated, though he hasn’t had any soda. They’re in the tunnel now. He didn’t tell his aunt and uncle where he was going. It won’t have occurred to them that he’s gone any farther away than Shay’s house. After all, he never has before.

This is his first trip back to New York City. He doesn’t want to say that out loud.

Instead, he says, “The first summer, you told me that I wasn’t normal and that you weren’t either.”

“Look,” she says, “if I want to have a chance to do something great, I need a college degree.” She has the window seat, and he can see half of her face and her reflection, which looks like it belongs to a young woman, not a girl.

They take a taxi from Port Authority to the deli. The Upper East Side unfolds around Edward as they climb north in the grid of Manhattan. His family’s life was carpeted over the surrounding streets. They pass their dry cleaner, the brick-fronted library, the run-down grocery store where they bought most of their food, and then, a block farther, the fancy supermarket where his father bought meat and cheese.

They pass an antiques shop where his mother once bought a clock. She kept it on her dresser and said it reminded her of her grandmother in Canada. Then a mailbox, which Edward remembers leaning against while his father slid in his April tax checks. He remembers his dad banging the little blue door open and shut while complaining about the unfairness of having to pay for wars he didn’t believe in. “If I could designate where my money went,” his dad had said, “I’d pay my taxes with enthusiasm.”

Edward tightens his seatbelt, as if in protection against the memories.

“Do you have a plan?” Shay says. “Are we just going to meet her?”

Edward shrugs. All he knows is that he has to lay eyes on Mahira, for two reasons. First, because Jordan would want to see her. Second, because she is the only living person—other than him—who deeply, specifically, loved his brother. He lost Jordan, and she did too.

He says, “We don’t have to stay long.”

The taxi is stopped at a red light. Edward considers that he is going to visit a truth—a person—he hadn’t known existed. Mahira’s letter had opened a door inside the life he’d lived. It’s as if he’s discovered a new room off his family’s kitchen, with Jordan’s girlfriend inside. Were there other doors he’d simply never noticed? The idea is unsettling, but also compelling. He can’t recover what he knows he lost—his family—but perhaps he can recover things, people, that he didn’t know were there in the first place?

The taxi pulls over at 72nd and Lexington. Shay pays the driver, while Edward stands on the sidewalk. His face must look alarming, because her eyes widen when she joins him. “It’s going to be okay,” Shay says. “I’ll help.”

Thank you, he thinks, and watches her turn and walk through the deli door. He watches his new life walk into his old life.

The deli is rectangular and narrow, with one long row of shelves in the center. The space is clean and well lit. Edward used to buy chocolate Yoo-hoos from the refrigerator in the corner whenever he had pocket money. He came here with his dad for emergency items—toilet paper, deodorant, milk. This was where he and Jordan bought illicit candy—almost always Twix for Jordan, and Haribo gummy bears for him. It was the first place they were allowed to walk without supervision. Bruce would send them to the deli for a specific item and set the timer on his watch for fifteen minutes. Their task was to get home before the timer went off.

Edward stands just inside the door. A longing for his brother comes over him, smothering in its intensity. How can he be standing here, alone?

No one is behind the counter. There’s a boy wearing a soccer jersey standing at the rack of magazines in the corner. Edward wonders if Jordan had known this kid too. Anything is possible. Judging by his size, the kid would have been in early elementary school when they’d lived in the neighborhood. Perhaps his brother had babysat him and never told Edward about the job.

“I checked,” a girl’s voice calls from the back of the store. “That magazine didn’t come in yet. Maybe tomorrow.”

“Okay,” the boy says. “Thanks.” He skips past Edward and Shay and pushes out the front door.

Edward looks at Shay and then does a double take. She has two cans of soup balanced in one hand, a loaf of bread under her arm, and a bag of pretzels.

“What?” she whispers. “I thought we should buy something, so we don’t look weird.”

“Trust me,” he says. “We look weird.” But he’s grateful to her again, for coming, and for being nervous with him even though she can’t parse all of his specific anxieties.

He feels a shift in the air and sees a girl walk out from the back room. She sees him at the same moment and stops.

She shivers. It’s a full-bodied motion, as if she’s just climbed out of a freezing lake. “Eddie Adler?” she says.

He nods.

“You look like him.”

“I’m sorry.” But he feels pleased to be told this. No one has compared him to his brother for a long time. He studies her. Shoulder-length black hair, heart-shaped face, skin a few shades darker than Shay’s. Jordan loved you, he thinks.