Chapter 4: The Gate
Jackson airport was smaller than Micah had imagined, and louder.
Not airplane loud — people loud. Rolling suitcases clattered over tile. A baby announced its opinions to the whole terminal. Announcements bloomed overhead and dissolved before he could catch them, and everywhere smelled of coffee and cleaning fluid, which made him think of his mother.
Tanya walked him in carrying his backpack herself, though he had offered twice, her hospital ID still clipped to her bag from the morning shift she had swapped away. At the Meridian Air check-in desk, the agent smiled the tired smile of a woman near the end of her day.
"Evening, folks. Chicago?"
"Yes, ma'am," Micah said. "Flight 417."
"First time flying alone, hon?" The agent's eyes flicked kindly over his jacket, his folder with the printout, his mother's hand resting light on his shoulder. "We'll take good care of you. Seat 23A — window. Somebody up there likes you."
"Window," Tanya repeated, and squeezed his shoulder. "You hear that? Somebody up there likes you."
Security took longer than he expected — shoes off, pockets emptied, the little green notebook passing through the scanner in its plastic bag while an officer glanced at it and waved it on. Micah re-zipped his jacket on the other side and checked the pocket twice. Still there. Still flat against his ribs.
At Gate 6, the waiting area filled slowly. Businessmen with shining shoes argued softly into phones. Micah found a seat by the window, and through the glass, for the first time in his life, a real airliner at rest — white and blue, Meridian Air written along its side in letters taller than he was, rain beading on its wings.
His aircraft. His actual aircraft.
He took out the notebook before he knew he was doing it and wrote: Gate 6. She is bigger than the simulator. Quieter, too. Then he felt foolish and pleased at the same time, like a boy caught talking to a horse before a race.
"You're in my light."
The voice came from his left, dry as paper. Micah looked up into the face of a man in his early fifties, silver-haired, with a coat folded over his arm that plainly cost more than everything Micah owned. The man's gaze travelled slowly from Micah's thrift-store jacket to his patched jeans to the notebook, and something in it dismissed all three at once.
"Sorry, sir," Micah said, and stood, though the light in a public gate belonged to nobody.
The man took the seat Micah had left without thanks, set down a leather briefcase, and turned his attention to his phone. On his wrist, a watch caught the fluorescents and threw them back. A woman beside him, scrolling her own phone, murmured, "Richard," without looking up, the way people say a name as a warning they no longer expect to work.
Richard Vane, Micah would learn later. In that moment he was only a chill in the air, a closed door of a man, and Micah moved down the row with his backpack and sat where the light was worse, telling himself it did not matter.
It mattered a little. He could admit that in the notebook if nowhere else.
He watched the other passengers instead, the way Joe had taught him to watch a cockpit — for patterns. A young mother bouncing twins. An old man in a veteran's cap who nodded at Micah. A girl about his age, maybe older, with braids and a bright yellow backpack, arguing cheerfully with a vending machine that had eaten her dollar. She kicked it, once, scientifically, and two snack bars fell. She held one up in triumph to nobody in particular.
"Gate 6, Meridian Air Flight 417 to Chicago O'Hare," the loudspeaker said at last, warm and crackling. "We will begin boarding shortly. Please have your boarding passes ready."
Micah's heart went up into his throat like a small, wild elevator.
Tanya was not allowed past the gate, so they made the goodbye brief and fierce instead. She straightened his collar. She checked his zipper. She put both hands flat on his chest, over the jacket, over the notebook, as if she could press courage in through the cloth.
"You call Denise when you land. You call me before — well." She stopped. Thursday's surgery sat between them unsaid. "You just enjoy that window, you hear me? Clouds, baby. You tell me about the clouds."
"I will, Mama."
"You listen first. Then you speak clear."
"I know."
"I know you know." Her eyes shone, and she refused them. "That's why I'm not scared. Much."
Then the agent was calling priority boarding, and Richard Vane rose with his coat and his briefcase and walked past Micah without a glance, into the jet bridge, into first class, where the seats were wide and the world, Micah supposed, was softer.
Micah waited for his row to be called, ticket damp in his careful hand, and rehearsed being nobody special at thirty-eight thousand feet.