Dear Edward(91)

Florida can sense the rumblings of a scream in this woman and wants to avoid it. “I’m Florida,” she says. “And this is Linda. We’re here to help each other.”

The woman nods. She’s probably fifty-five. She says in a soft voice, “I overslept. I woke up thinking I must be in the wrong place. On the wrong plane.”

“We’re on our way to Los Angeles,” Linda says.

“Los Angeles,” the woman says. “Los Angeles is correct. Thank God.”

She turns and looks out the window. There’s nothing to see but a bank of gray clouds. She looks back at the two women. “But?” she says.

The question is vast.

“We don’t know,” Florida says.

“We don’t know anything,” Linda says.

The plane is now falling fast. With its nose pitched 15 degrees up and a forward speed of 100 knots, it is descending at a rate of 10,000 feet per minute, at an angle of 41.5 degrees. Though the pitot tubes are now fully functional, the forward airspeed is so low—below 60 knots—that the angle-of-attack inputs are no longer accepted as valid, and the stall-warning horn temporarily stops.

The two pilots discuss, incredibly, whether they are in fact climbing or descending, before agreeing that they are descending. As the plane approaches 10,000 feet, the nose remains high.

“Climb, climb!”

Veronica, strapped to her seat, tries to stand. The plane is at an angle she’s never experienced before. She wishes she were back in the bathroom with Mark, her body coiled around his. What have those idiots in the cockpit done? She has an urge to reach toward her passengers, to try to calm, to assist.

Mark is sliding out of his chair—his seatbelt was loose, and now it’s gripping him not at the waist but under his armpits. He’s looking at what must be the ceiling. He thinks about Jax and their last stupid argument. He realizes that he wasn’t done. He’s not done.

Jane sinks into herself; she cups her hands over her face. The shaking of the plane means there’s no way to move her body back to her family, so she joins them inside her mind. She imagines she’s sitting on Bruce’s lap. She can feel his legs beneath hers. She looks into his eyes, because there are no words left for them to share. Then she kisses her boys, kisses and kisses and kisses them the way Eddie kissed her as a baby.

As the plane nears 2,000 feet, the aircraft’s sensors detect the fast-approaching surface and trigger a new alarm. There’s no time left to build up speed by pushing the plane’s nose forward into a dive.

The pilot: “This can’t be happening!”

“But what’s happening?”

“Ten degrees of pitch …”

Exactly 1.4 seconds later, the cockpit voice recorder stops.

Bruce thinks about his math, the six years on a problem he has not yet managed to perfectly express, much less solve. He has an entire duffel bag full of his journals and notes packed into the hold of this plane. He can picture the page where he had a breakthrough last August; he can remember the bottle of Malbec he opened for himself and Jane that night. He’d thought that the breakthrough meant he was closer than he actually was. He should have known better. He had stepped into a clearing, and mistaken it for the edge of the forest.

That knowledge had set in over the following months and had been compounded by the announcement that he hadn’t been awarded tenure. This setback plus the failure had crushed him, though he’d tried to hide that from his wife. He’d asked himself: Why do you care so much? The answer came immediately: because of the boys. He wanted the boys to see him labor—which they had—but then achieve something of note. He wanted them to be proud of him. He wanted to have done something worthy of their pride.

The plane is plummeting. He holds his boys’ hands in his own and thinks: I need more time.

Dear Edward,

My name is Lyle. I used to be a volunteer paramedic in Greeley, Colorado. I was part of the team that was closest to Flight 2977’s crash site. I was working at ShopRite when the call came in. I’m a butcher by trade—I come from a long line of butchers. I was cutting up a chicken, thinking it was a little too tough to make good eating. Funny what details get stuck in your mind.

That was my last day at ShopRite. Last day as a paramedic too. I couldn’t go to work afterward. One doc said I was depressed; another called it PTSD. I feel lame even mentioning it, after what you must’ve been through. But if I tell you my story, then there’s no point in leaving stuff out. So, I suffered some and eventually decided to move away, even though my family had been in northern Colorado for as long as time. We even predated Columbus. I live in Texas now—I need big open spaces, even though the ones here are drier, less green. I’m still a butcher.

I’m writing to you because I can’t shake the memory of that day. You rise up out of my dreams, shouting like you did from your place in the wreckage. If you’ve already stopped reading, if you’ve torn me—I mean, this letter—up, I totally understand. I wish I could do the same.

There were only four volunteer paramedics in our town, though of course the size of the crash meant the call went out wider, to more districts. But we were the closest and the first to report to the scene. I came in my car. Olivia and Bob were in the ambulance. There was another guy, and for the life of me I can’t remember his name. The fire truck, a fancy one that cost so much money the county had been fighting over the purchase for years, was on our heels. The chief was thrilled, no doubt, at the chance to really use the thing.