"More than the sky," Zola whispered.
At the security line, the goodbye happened the way Monica had rehearsed it in her head a hundred times and nothing like the way she had rehearsed it at all. She knelt down β the pink dresses, the black bows, left and right, the rule unbroken β and she held their faces in her hands, one in each palm, the way she had held them in the hospital nine years ago.
"Be brave," she said. "Be kind. Stay together."
"We're always together," Sanaa said, as if this were the most obvious thing in the world.
Zola said nothing. She just looked at her mother with those eyes, and then she leaned forward and pressed her forehead hard against Monica's forehead, and held it there for three full seconds, and Monica understood that this was Zola's whole heart, delivered without words, because words were for smaller feelings.
Then a Meridian gate agent named Priya β young, kind-eyed, with a lanyard full of pins β crouched down and introduced herself, and took one small hand in each of hers, and the girls walked with her toward the security belt, and they turned at the last second, both of them, and waved, and Sanaa shouted, "Love you more than the sky, Mommy!" and Zola mouthed it, and then they were gone around the corner, and Monica stood there holding it together with everything she had.
She made it forty feet toward the parking garage.
Forty feet, past the Hudson News and the smell of coffee, and then her knees did something unreliable and she sat down hard on a bench next to a man eating a breakfast burrito, and she cried the way she had not cried in years β not the neat, professional tears of the ER, but the full, gasping, shoulders-shaking kind, the kind that scared the burrito man into offering her a napkin. She took it. She cried into a stranger's napkin at the Charlotte airport while her nine-year-old daughters walked down a jet bridge without her, and she thought, this is what it feels like, this is the actual texture of letting them go, and it feels like being unzipped.
Her phone buzzed. A text from Priya, the gate agent: "They're doing great. Sanaa is telling everyone in line about the cake. Zola is holding the shell. We've got them."
Monica cried harder, but differently now. She texted back: "Thank you," and then, because she was a nurse and precision mattered, "4:41. Please."
"4:41," Priya texted back. "I promise."
Priya walked the twins down the jet bridge herself, past the line of boarding passengers, and she did it the way good people do hard things β lightly, as if it were nothing. She told them the airplane was the color of the sky on the inside, which was true if you squinted. She told Sanaa that the window seat was the best seat for important thoughts, and told Zola that the aisle seat was the best seat for watching everything, and both girls accepted these rulings as the obvious wisdom they were.
"Sanaa won the window in the car," Zola explained to Priya, in the tone of a historian recording an established fact. "She said 'shotgun' first, but for seats. We made it a rule."
"It was a fair contest," Sanaa confirmed. "I was faster."
"She was faster," Zola agreed, without rancor. This was the twins' whole jurisprudence in miniature: Sanaa won the races, Zola kept the records, and neither of them questioned the system.
At the aircraft door, Dana Brooks was waiting.
Dana Brooks was forty-four years old and had been flying for nineteen years, and she had a reputation among the Meridian crews as the one who read every service note on every flight, the one who remembered the unaccompanied minors' names and the nervous flyers' seat numbers and the exact way the diabetic gentleman in 14B took his coffee. She had been a teenager once who was afraid of everything, and she had never forgotten the flight attendant who had knelt beside her seat on a turbulent approach into Denver and said, "I've done this ten thousand times, and I'm right here," and she had spent nineteen years trying to be that woman for someone else.
The service note for flight 612 had been in her packet that morning, paper-clipped to the manifest, underlined three times in a young man's earnest block letters: SERVE AT 4:41 PM β BIRTHDAY β TWINS TURNING 9. Galley. Cake: "Happy 9th Birthday Sanaa & Zola β Love, Mom."
Dana had stood in the crew room and read it twice, and something had happened in her chest β a small, warm, precise unfolding, like a napkin being smoothed flat. She had gone to the galley before boarding and lifted the corner of the cake box, and seen the blue script, and the neat white frosting, and she had thought of her own mother, dead six years now, who had once driven forty miles in a thunderstorm to deliver a birthday cake to Dana's college dorm, and she had stood there in the galley of an empty airplane and pressed her fingers to her eyes for exactly five seconds, because boarding was in ten minutes and Dana Brooks did not cry where passengers could see her.