From behind, from row 3, someone might have seen the two of them as a picture. The young woman standing, tall and still, in the warm light. The older woman seated, half-turned, pressed back into the leather, her pearls lying perfectly at her throat and her blonde chignon perfectly in place and her whole body rigid with something that had not yet decided whether it was fear or fury. It looked like a painting. It looked like one of those paintings in museums in which nothing is happening and everything is about to happen. No one in the cabin spoke. The engine of the auxiliary power unit droned on somewhere beneath them, low and constant, a sound so steady that it had become, for the moment, the only thing in the world.
Catherine's mind was moving very fast, and in no particular direction.
Ground the flight. She had said ground the flight. Nobody could say that. A passenger could not say that. A passenger could not call someone on the telephone and ground an airplane. It was absurd. It was some kind of trick, a bluff, a performance. The young woman was making a scene. She was making a scene because she did not get her way, and she was pretending to call someone, and she would turn around in a moment and say, there, I hope you're satisfied, and the flight would go on and everyone would roll their eyes and that would be that.
But the young woman did not turn around. And the voice on the phone. Catherine had not heard the words of the voice on the phone, but she had heard that there was one, a man's voice, low and quick, and she had heard the young woman say Marcus, and she had heard the way she said it. Not the way you said the name of someone you were bluffing. The way you said the name of someone who worked for you.
And then, through the confusion, slowly, like a shape coming up out of dark water, Catherine remembered the magazine.
The inflight magazine. Horizons. The beach in Portugal on the cover. She had flipped through it ten minutes ago without reading it, because it was something to do with her hands. And on the last page, as always, a letter from the chief executive. She had not read the letter. She never read the letter. But there had been a small photograph in the corner of the page, and she had not looked at it either, not really, but her eyes had passed over it, and something of it had stayed. A young woman in a navy suit. A polite, closed-mouth smile.
Catherine did not look at the young woman in the aisle. She could not. Instead, slowly, with fingers that she was surprised to find were shaking, she reached forward to the seat pocket in front of her and drew out the magazine.
It was right there. She did not even have to look for it. She opened it from the back, the way you would open it if you wanted the last page, and there it was. A Letter from Our Chair. Two columns of text that she did not read. And in the upper corner, the photograph. A young Black woman in a navy suit, her hair pulled back in a different style, smooth and sleek, not braided. Dark eyes. An oval face. A polite, closed-mouth smile.
Underneath, in small italic type: Naomi Morgan, Chair and Chief Executive Officer.
Catherine looked at the photograph. Then she looked up, very slowly, at the young woman standing in the aisle.
The braids were different. The suit was different. The smile was gone entirely. But the face was the same face. It was absolutely, unmistakably the same face. And the name. Ms. Morgan, Graham had said, you're absolutely correct. Morgan. She had heard it. She had heard it and it had meant nothing to her, because the name of the chief executive of the airline she had flown on for eleven years was not a piece of information she had ever needed to carry in her head. Why would she? It was not as though she was going to meet her.
The magazine slid off her lap and fell to the floor between her feet with a soft papery sound.
* * *
It happened in her body before it happened anywhere else.
Her eyes began to move. She could not stop them. They went from the young woman's face to the magazine on the floor to Graham standing frozen in the aisle to the window to the cockpit bulkhead to the faces in row 3, the old man and his wife, who were both staring at her now, openly, and back to the young woman's face, and around again, like a bird that had flown into a room and could not find the window. Her mouth twitched at one corner. She felt it twitch and could not stop that either. She felt something cold and wet at her hairline, at her temples, at the back of her neck under the perfect chignon, and she realized that she was sweating. She could not remember the last time she had sweated in public. She was not sure she ever had.