"You did it better." A pause. "I'll handle the press. I'll get the statement drafted and send it to you before you take off. I'll call Harold back and tell him you'll call him from London. Don't call Peter. I'll handle Peter. Just get on the airplane, Naomi, and sit in your damn seat."
"That's what I've been trying to do all morning," Naomi said.
She hung up and walked back down the jet bridge and stepped aboard.
* * *
Meridian 247 pushed back from gate B23 at John F. Kennedy International Airport at 9:41 in the morning, forty-six minutes late.
Naomi sat in 2A. 2C was empty beside her. She had looked at it when she sat down, the cream leather and the small walnut console with its reading lamp, and for a moment she had thought of asking the crew to offer it to someone from premium economy, someone who would not expect it, a free upgrade, a small kindness. Then she had decided not to. Not today. Today she would let it stay empty. She thought someone ought to sit next to that empty seat for seven hours and think about it, and it might as well be her.
As the aircraft began to roll backward away from the terminal, the captain's voice came over the cabin speakers.
"Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Daniel Whitaker speaking from the flight deck." The deep, clear baritone, steady now. "First of all, I want to apologize for our delay this morning. We had a situation in the cabin before departure that needed to be resolved before we could leave, and resolving it properly took a little time. I know many of you have connections and plans, and I'm sorry for the inconvenience. We'll do everything we can to make up time across the Atlantic, and right now I'm estimating we'll arrive in London about thirty minutes behind schedule."
A pause. The engines began to spool up as the tug disconnected. The airplane shuddered faintly and began to move forward under its own power.
"I also want to say," the captain went on, and his voice changed slightly, "that on this aircraft, everyone who has a ticket has a seat. And everyone who has a seat is welcome in it. That's true in the front and it's true in the back and it's true for every one of you, no matter who you are or where you're from. If anybody on this flight ever makes you feel otherwise, I want to know about it. My crew will make sure I do." Another pause. "That's all. Sit back and relax. We'll be on our way shortly. Flight attendants, prepare for departure."
The speakers clicked off.
Behind her, in row 3, Naomi heard the old woman say something quietly to her husband, and the husband grunt in reply. Across the aisle, the man in 1F had taken his headphones off again. In row 4, the little boy had gone back to opening and closing his privacy door.
Tessa came by to check seatbelts. She stopped beside row 2 and looked at Naomi's belt, which was fastened, and then at Naomi's face, which was turned toward the window.
"Ms. Morgan," she said quietly. "Can I get you anything?"
Naomi turned from the window. "I'm fine. Thank you, Tessa."
The young woman hesitated. "That was the captain's idea," she said. "The announcement. Graham told him what you'd said in the jet bridge. About how nobody had ever made him feel like the company had his back. And the captain said, well, then I'd better say it out loud where people can hear it."
Naomi looked at her for a moment.
"Thank you for telling me that," she said.
Tessa nodded and moved on to row 3.
The aircraft taxied out past the long rows of other jets at their gates, past a British Airways 777 and a Delta A330 and an Emirates A380 sitting enormous and white at the end of the concourse. It turned onto the parallel taxiway and joined the line of departing aircraft, five or six of them, nose to tail, inching toward the runway. Naomi watched them through the window. She had watched airplanes taxi her whole life. She had watched them from the backseat of her father's car at Teterboro when she was four, and from the window of the operations center in Garden City when she was twenty-two, and from a hundred airplane windows since. It never stopped being beautiful to her. All that weight and power, all those people, all those reasons for going somewhere, lined up patiently in the gray morning, waiting for their turn.
The engines rose to a roar. The airplane turned onto the runway, straightened, paused for a moment, and then began to roll.
She felt the familiar push in her chest, the seat pressing into her back. The runway lights blurred past the window. The nose came up. The rumble of the wheels fell away suddenly into silence, and the ground dropped away beneath them, and they were flying, climbing steeply into the low gray ceiling of cloud. For a few seconds the window went white, then gray, then white again, the airplane shaking slightly in the bumps.