Dear Edward(90)

“The doctor just went to first class and came back.” Linda shuffles her feet in the three spare inches of room she has to move. She knows she sounds like a petulant toddler. She feels like one. When the plane shudders, the bells on Florida’s skirt ring like an alarm. Linda is uncomfortable in her seat, the belt is pinching her side, and she feels like she might have a blister on the back of her heel. She’s trapped, and the motion of the plane makes no sense. She’s never been in turbulence this bad. She wants to call Gary and ask him if he’s ever been on a flight this rough.

Florida fixes her with a look. “That lady went up there because someone died.”

“That’s not true. Why would you say that?”

“She came back too quick to have saved anyone. When she got up there, she saw there was nothing left to fix.”

Linda wriggles, trying to find comfort. This is crazy talk, too crazy to even engage with. No one died on this airplane; that just didn’t happen. There’s no way she’s trapped on this flying metal bullet with a dead person. There’s no way her baby’s earliest history includes this.

She’s going to complain when she lands. To whom she’s not sure, as she would never want to disrespect the pilots. Someone, though, has made a mistake, and now she’s pregnant and alone, listening to a chorus of tiny bells.





December 2016

Edward has one particular exchange with Dr. Mike that will replay regularly in his head for the rest of his life. It doesn’t happen during a normal appointment. They run into each other at the interstate shopping center on a Saturday.

Edward and Shay had walked there that morning because Shay had an appointment to dye her hair bright pink, in order to irritate Besa. “You should remember me like this,” Shay said to Edward, right before she went into the salon, and Edward had taken her seriously. The teenage girl in front of him was five and a half feet tall, with the lean body of a runner. She was wearing jeans and a snowboarding jacket, even though she’d never snowboarded or skied in her life. Her straight brown hair was chin-length. Shay looked like the woman she would become, with kind eyes that turned fierce if someone crossed her. She rarely wore her glasses, because she preferred contacts. And her dimple was still the barometer Edward used to assess her mood.

“Got it?” Shay said.

“Got it.”

“Okay, well, here goes nothing.”

Ninety minutes into the hair appointment, with at least another hour remaining, Edward is wandering around the stores when he sees Dr. Mike. They smile at each other in surprise, and Edward notices that he’s now taller than the therapist by several inches. Edward accepts when Dr. Mike offers to buy him a tea or coffee.

After ordering their drinks, they stand by the window in the fancy coffee shop. Perhaps because of the unexpected meeting, or perhaps because Edward turned sixteen a few days earlier and the age—which his brother never reached—feels uncomfortable, he makes a confession. “I feel like I should be over it by now,” he says. “Everyone else has forgotten about the flight. Mostly, anyway. But I feel like I still think about it all the time.”

Dr. Mike stirs his coffee for a long minute. People straggle past the window. Three bearded men in a row are hunched over, reading their phones. A pregnant woman walks slowly next to a toddler with an Afro. Edward feels his heart beat in his chest, feels the warmth of the tea seep through the cup into the skin of his hand.

The man says, “What happened is baked into your bones, Edward. It lives under your skin. It’s not going away. It’s part of you and will be part of you every moment until you die. What you’ve been working on, since the first time I met you, is learning to live with that.”





2:12 P.M.

Because the co-pilot is holding the stick all the way back, the nose remains high and the plane has barely enough forward speed for the controls to be effective. Turbulence continues to buffet the plane, and it’s nearly impossible to keep the wings level.

The co-pilot says, “Dammit, I don’t have control of the plane. I don’t have control of the plane at all!”

“I’m taking the controls. Left seat taking over.” The pilot begins to hand-fly the plane for the first time.

“It doesn’t make sense,” the co-pilot says, slack in his seat. “I’ve been pulling back on the stick since we went on manual.”

“What?” The pilot’s eyes widen. “You’ve been pulling back on the stick—no!” He pushes the stick forward, but it’s too late to correct. The plane’s nose is pitched up, and it’s descending at a 40-degree angle. The stall warning continues to sound.

“We’ve lost control of the plane!”

“We’ve totally lost control …”

When the plane lurches, Florida thinks of the television cartoons where a vehicle is balanced on the edge of a cliff, and then the wind shifts, or a tiny bird lands on the hood, and the vehicle plummets. She wonders why that moment, when animated, is considered funny.

She places her warm hand over Linda’s cold one, so they are gripping the armrest together.

“Hold it together, baby,” she says. “We can do this.”

“Okay,” Linda whispers.

Florida is startled to see a stranger on the other side of Linda, staring at them with a panicked face. The blue scarf has dropped and an Indian woman has appeared. She doesn’t speak, just stares at the two of them as if waiting to be told her fate.