"Nobody died," Vivian agreed wetly. "They're just nine. They were this big." There was a pause that Monica understood to be Vivian holding her thumb and forefinger approximately two inches apart, nine years and two hundred miles away. "I have the apartment ready. I have the good sheets on the pullout and I have already warned Mrs. Abernathy downstairs that there will be shrieking."
"There will definitely be shrieking," Monica said. "Sanaa has been practicing."
"I heard her practicing from here," Vivian said. "Put them on."
Monica handed the phone to Sanaa, who delivered a forty-five-second monologue about the bows, the dresses, the airplane, and the cake, in that order, without pausing for breath. Zola took the phone next and said, "Hi, Auntie. We're coming. I packed the shell." The shell was a small pink conch from a beach trip two summers ago that Zola carried everywhere and that Sanaa pretended to find embarrassing but had once cried over when it went missing for an afternoon. Vivian told Zola the shell would have the window seat of the guest room. Zola said, "Good," and handed the phone back, and that was the whole conversation, and it was perfect.
The cake had been ordered a week ago from a bakery in Charlotte that Monica trusted the way she trusted her own hands. Vanilla with strawberry filling, white frosting, and in careful blue script across the top: "Happy 9th Birthday Sanaa & Zola β Love, Mom." Monica had picked it up the evening before and driven it herself to the airport cargo office of Meridian Air, where a kind young man with a name tag that said DEVON had filled out the service note in block letters while Monica stood over his shoulder like a woman defusing a bomb.
"Serve at 4:41 p.m.," she had said. "Not 4:40. Not 4:45. Four forty-one. That's when they were born."
Devon had written SERVE AT 4:41 PM β BIRTHDAY β TWINS TURNING 9 and underlined it three times. "We'll take care of them," he had said, and Monica had believed him, because believing him was the only way she was going to get through the next twenty-four hours.
Because here was the thing nobody said out loud: this was the first time the girls had ever flown alone.
Monica was an ER nurse. She had held the hands of strangers through the worst nights of their lives. She had told a mother that her son was going to be fine and meant it, and told another mother that her daughter was not, and meant that too. She was not a woman who fell apart. But the plan β Vivian's plan, hatched over the phone in March β had been for the twins to fly down to Atlanta for the first week of summer, just the two of them, "an adventure, Monica, they'll talk about it forever," and Monica had agreed, because Vivian was right and because the girls had been incandescent at the idea, and now it was the morning of, and the adventure was real, and Monica's hands were shaking as she zipped their little matching suitcases.
"You have everything?" she asked for the fourth time, in the car. "Toothbrushes? The shell?"
"Shell," Zola confirmed, patting her backpack.
"Snacks, books, the card for Auntie," Sanaa recited. "Mommy, are you going to cry at the airport?"
"I am absolutely not going to cry at the airport," Monica said, with the firmness of a woman lying to a child and to herself simultaneously.
"You cried at the grocery store when they played that song," Sanaa pointed out.
"That was a very good song."
"It was the toothpaste commercial song, Mommy."
"It was still a good song."
Zola reached over from her booster seat and put her small hand on Monica's arm, high up near the shoulder, where she could feel the steadiness or the lack of it. "It's okay if you cry," Zola said. "We'll still go."
Monica had to pull into the short-term parking and sit for a full minute with the engine off before she trusted herself to speak. Then she got out, and got the girls out, and they walked into Charlotte Douglas International Airport holding hands β Sanaa in the middle, swinging their joined hands, Zola on Monica's left, quiet, taking everything in with those dark, cataloging eyes.
Security took forty minutes. Monica used every one of them. She retied a bow. She bought overpriced juice. She made the girls memorize Vivian's phone number one more time, though they had known it since they were six. She told Sanaa not to talk to strangers unless they had a Meridian badge, and told Zola to stay with Sanaa, and told them both that the flight attendants knew about the cake, and that at 4:41 something special would happen, and that she loved them more than the sky, which was the biggest thing Sanaa could think of, and so it had become their unit of measurement.
"More than the sky," Sanaa repeated solemnly.