She had called Vivian on Sunday, from the hospital parking lot, sitting in the car with the engine off. Vivian had answered on the second ring, breathless, mid-something, and when Monica explained β the hip, the shifts, the fourteenth β Vivian had gone quiet in the particular way she went quiet when she was rearranging her whole week in her head.
"Send them," Vivian said. "The whole week. I'll take off work."
"You can't take off work," Monica said.
"I can take off work for my girls," Vivian said, and Monica had felt her throat close, because Vivian said "my girls" the way other people said "my own," and nobody had ever corrected her, and nobody ever would. "Monica. Listen to me. You have done everything for everybody for nine years. Let me do this one thing. Let me have them for the birthday."
"The birthday's the problem," Monica said. "They'll be in the air for the minute."
There was a pause. Then Vivian said, very quietly, "Then we'll celebrate it twice. Once in the sky, once on the ground. These girls are getting two birthdays this year, and that's just how it's going to be."
Monica had sat in the parking lot and cried for exactly one minute β she timed it, because she had to go back inside β and then she had gone back inside, and Vivian had texted her a photo of the glitter letters, already bought, already spread across her dining table: ELLIS GIRLS, with two exclamation points.
She wrote, in the column: FLIGHT β CLT to ATL, the 14th, unaccompanied minors. And then she sat back and looked at the words, and the words looked back at her, and the kitchen was very quiet except for the refrigerator's hum and the television Esther had left on, some late show, laughter she could not quite hear.
Her daughters were going to fly alone, on their ninth birthday.
She cried once. It was not a sob. It was one tear, then another, landing on the notebook page, blurring the number she had written for the unaccompanied-minor fee. She wiped her face with the back of her wrist, the way she did at work when there wasn't time to be a person, and she kept writing, because the crying was finished and the math was not.
"Okay," she said out loud, to the kitchen, to nobody. "Okay."
The unaccompanied-minor fee was one hundred and fifty dollars each. She wrote it down. The tickets themselves she had bought in February, when everything was still a plan and not a crisis, a seat-sale Tuesday, the kind of fare that made her do a small victory lap around the kitchen while the twins chanted "seat sale, seat sale" like it was a holiday.
She remembered that Tuesday with a clarity that hurt. The girls had been home with a stomach bug β Sanaa dramatically, Zola stoically β and Monica had been up all night with ginger ale and thermometers, and at six in the morning the fare alert came through, and she bought the tickets standing at the kitchen counter in her robe while Sanaa, pale but rallying, narrated the purchase like a sportscaster: "She's clicking! She's typing the card number! It's GOOD!" And Zola, from the couch, hoarse, had said, "Window," which was the whole negotiation, and Sanaa had said, "Fine, you can have the window on the way back," and Zola had said, "I get the window both ways, I'm younger," and Sanaa had shrieked, and Monica had laughed until her stomach hurt, and bought the tickets, and thought: this is the year. This is the year everything is easy.
The birthday party had been the next thing she planned β the bakery on Central, the one with the real buttercream, the cake the girls had been describing since October: chocolate, with the two bows on top, one on the left and one on the right, "so people know." She had put down the deposit. She had lost the deposit. It was in the notebook, in the column, crossed out with a single neat line, because Monica did not scribble. Some numbers you boxed. Some numbers you crossed out. Both kinds counted. The girls had never flown alone. They had flown exactly twice, both times with her, both times to Atlanta, both times with Vivian waiting at the gate with a sign that said ELLIS GIRLS in glitter letters that shed all over the concourse. Vivian would be at the gate in Atlanta this time too β the airline allowed it, a gate pass for the receiving adult, Denise would confirm that later β but the middle part, the sky part, would be just the two of them and the crew.
Sanaa, born first, loud, fast, opinionated, the one who negotiated like a tiny union rep and wore her black bow on the left, on purpose, so you could tell. Zola, born four minutes later, quiet, watchful, the one who spoke last and usually ended the conversation, the bow on the right. Zola went completely silent when she was really hurt β not the ordinary quiet, the total kind, the kind where her face closed like a door β and Monica had learned, over nine years, to read that silence the way she read a monitor: carefully, and fast.