At the Signature check-in desk at Terminal Four, the attendant at the entrance was a young woman she had never seen before, with a precise ponytail and a name badge that said AMARA. She looked up as Naomi came around the frosted glass partition, and smiled, and said, "Good morning. Welcome to Signature. Where are you flying with us today?"
Naomi told her.
Her seat was 2A. When she boarded, the cabin was half full. The purser was a man she did not know, older, with a gray mustache and a gentle Irish accent, and he welcomed her aboard the way he welcomed everyone, with exactly the same words, and did not look twice at her boarding pass.
In 2C, already seated, was a girl of about eleven.
She was small and thin and very solemn, with her hair in two neat puffs tied with yellow ribbons, and she was holding a stuffed giraffe on her lap and staring out across the cabin toward the window with an expression of fierce, silent longing. Beside her, in the aisle, a flight attendant was bending down and speaking to her in a low voice, and Naomi caught the words unaccompanied minor and your auntie will be waiting at the gate in London. The girl nodded without taking her eyes off the window.
Naomi stopped in the aisle beside row 2. She looked at the girl. She looked at the window.
"Hi," she said. "I think I'm sitting next to you."
The girl looked up at her. Her eyes went over Naomi's face, and her braids, which were in cornrows again, sweeping back into long box braids, and her earrings, the long gold links with the slender oval drops. She looked for about a second.
"I like your earrings," the girl said.
"Thank you. My father gave them to me." Naomi glanced at the window again. "Have you flown before?"
The girl shook her head. "First time. I'm going to live with my auntie in London. She's a doctor."
"That's exciting."
"I wanted the window," the girl said. Then, quickly, as though she had said something she should not have: "But it's okay. The lady at the desk said it was already taken."
Naomi looked at her for a moment longer. Then she smiled.
"It was taken," she said. "By me. But I've flown a lot. And I've seen the ocean from up there more times than I can count. Would you like to trade?"
The girl stared at her. "Really?"
"Really. If it's all right with the crew." She looked at the flight attendant, who was watching, and who nodded. "It's all right."
The girl scrambled out of 2C with the giraffe under her arm and stood in the aisle while Naomi moved her bag. Then she climbed into 2A, into the wide cream leather seat by the window, and put her hands flat on the armrests, and looked out through the oval window at the bright March morning, at the wing of the next airplane over, at the ground crew in their orange vests, at the long line of jets waiting on the taxiway in the distance, and her solemn little face changed completely.
"Thank you," she breathed, without looking away from the window.
"You're welcome," Naomi said.
She sat down in 2C and fastened her belt. Beside her, the girl had pressed her nose almost to the window, the giraffe held up beside her so that it could see too.
"Is it mine?" the girl asked. "The seat? Just for today?"
Naomi thought about that for a moment. She thought about a cabin in Atlanta in the middle of the night, and a small woman with a bucket coming up the aisle, and a twelve-year-old boy in a wide leather seat at the very front with his eyes closed, pretending he was flying to Paris. She thought about the women at the bottom of the stairs, waiting with their buckets while the last passengers finished their drinks. She thought about a woman in a teal jacket standing in a doorway with a camel coat held against her chest, trying to find the first word of something, and about a letter in a bedside drawer in Greenwich, and about a baby that was being born, about now, somewhere in London.
"It's yours," she said. "As long as you're sitting in it, it's yours. Nobody can tell you otherwise."
The girl looked at her, very seriously, as though deciding whether to believe it. Then she nodded once, firmly, and turned back to the window.
The forward door closed. The engines began to turn. Somewhere ahead of them, behind the walnut paneling of the forward bulkhead, a captain whose name Naomi did not know was running through a checklist, and in a windowless room on Long Island a dispatcher was watching a small green line on a screen, and all over the world, at that moment, thousands of people were sitting down in seats that they had paid for and fastening their belts and looking out of windows, going somewhere.
The airplane began to move.