Who Belongs Here
The alarm was set for 4:50, but Naomi Morgan was awake at 4:31, the way she had been awake before almost every alarm of her adult life. She lay still for a moment in the gray dark of the apartment and listened to the city. Even at that hour Manhattan had a sound, a low and constant breathing made of garbage trucks and distant sirens and the hiss of the radiator under the window. She had lived on the twenty-second floor for almost three years and she still could not decide whether she found the sound comforting or whether she simply no longer noticed it.
She swung her legs out of bed and switched off the alarm before it could go off. Then she sat on the edge of the mattress with her phone in her hand and did what she always did first, which was to open the operations dashboard.
Two hundred and eleven aircraft. Fourteen hundred daily departures, give or take, spread over four hubs and a long tail of smaller stations. At 4:33 in the morning, Eastern time, most of the network was asleep on the ground. A few red-eyes were still inbound from the West Coast. Three transatlantic arrivals were already on the ground in London and Paris and Dublin, their crews long since gone to hotels. The board showed green almost everywhere. There was a mechanical delay in Denver, an aircraft waiting on a replacement fuel pump that had been promised by six. There was weather building over the Gulf that would probably make the afternoon in Houston miserable. There was nothing that needed her.
Nothing ever needed her at 4:33. That was the point of having built a company that worked. She looked anyway.
Meridian Air had been her father's airline before it was hers, and before it was an airline at all it had been two secondhand turboprops and a hangar lease in Teterboro, New Jersey, and a man named Thomas Morgan who could fix anything with an engine and was too stubborn to believe that he could not also run a business. He had flown cargo first, mail contracts and medical supplies and once, memorably, a crate of live lobsters that had escaped somewhere over Connecticut. Then he had flown charters. Then, in a decade that Naomi remembered mostly as the sound of her father on the phone in the kitchen after midnight, he had flown scheduled passenger service to six cities that larger airlines had decided were not worth the trouble. By the time she was in high school, there were Meridian jets with the dark blue tail and the thin gold line painted along the fuselage at airports up and down the East Coast. By the time she finished business school, there were Meridian jets in London.
He had died twenty-six months ago, of a heart attack, in the parking lot of the maintenance base in Newark. He had been sixty-three years old and he had been on his way to look at a landing gear actuator that one of the night mechanics had called him about, because he had never stopped being the kind of owner that mechanics called at night.
Naomi had been twenty-nine. She had been the airline's director of network planning at the time, which was a real job that she had earned, but which was not the job of running the company. The will had left her his controlling stake. The board had given her the title of chair and chief executive in a vote that was unanimous on paper and that had felt, from inside the room, like something much less certain. She remembered the faces. She remembered Harold Kessler, who had sat on the Meridian board for eleven years and had been her father's friend for longer than that, leaning back in his chair and saying, kindly enough, that of course they all wanted to honor Tom's wishes, and of course Naomi was extremely capable, and of course there would need to be a transition plan.
There had not been a transition plan. There had been Naomi, and there had been work.
She put the phone face down on the nightstand and went to shower.
* * *
By 5:15 she was dressed. She stood in front of the long mirror in the bedroom and looked at herself with the same appraising attention she gave to a route map.
The suit was cream, almost the color of unbleached linen, tailored close through the shoulders and waist. Single-breasted blazer, structured lapels, horn buttons she had chosen herself from a card of samples because the tailor's first choice had been gold and she had thought gold buttons were trying too hard. The trousers were straight-legged and fell cleanly to the instep. Under the blazer she wore a high-necked blouse in a deep mulberry silk, sleeveless, draped softly at the collar so that the color sat against her throat like a shadow of wine. She had chosen the blouse the night before and had then lain awake for ten minutes wondering whether it was too much for a plane, and had decided that it was not, and had decided also that she was allowed to wonder about clothes, because her father had worn the same three sport coats for twenty years and the board had never once mentioned it.