"There we go," Ferris said. He got up off the floor, one hand on the back of Marcus's seat. Marcus stayed down a moment longer, his forehead nearly touching his son's knee, and then he got up too and sat, and wiped his face with the back of his wrist, quickly, as if no one would see.
Ferris turned to Celeste.
"Ma'am," he said. "Would you step to the back of the cabin with me, please."
It was not a question. She unbuckled. The two rear seats were only eight feet away, but it was the longest walk of her adult life. Ferris did not sit. He stood in the aisle with his head bent beneath the ceiling, and she sat, because there was nowhere else to be, and she found that she was looking up at him the way she had not looked up at anyone in thirty years.
"I'm going to tell you some things," Ferris said, low enough that his voice wouldn't carry over the engines, "and then I'm going to go back up front and fly this airplane. And I'd rather you didn't say anything while I'm telling you, because I don't think there's anything you could say that would help."
She said nothing.
"This aircraft is operated by Open Sky Mission Flights. That's a nonprofit. I started it nine years ago, after I retired from the Air Force. We fly kids to treatment who can't do commercial. Kids on oxygen. Kids whose immune systems can't take an airport. Kids like Theo, who can't take the noise and the lines and the security pat-down and the six hundred strangers. Their families don't pay. Dana donates her time and I donate mine and a lot of good people in this state donate their money. When we have empty seats on a mission flight, we sell them at cost to cover fuel. That's what you bought. You bought a seat on Theo's flight, to help pay for Theo's fuel." He paused. "So in a manner of speaking, you're his guest."
Celeste opened her mouth. He lifted one finger, not unkindly, and she closed it.
"That boy has flown with me three times. Twice to Boston for tests, and once just for fun, because he wanted to see what Des Moines looked like from five thousand feet and I had an afternoon. Every time, he brings that folder. His dad and his therapist made it so that when he goes somewhere he's never been and everything is loud and strange, there's one thing in his hands he knows all the way through. That's what you took from him. You didn't take a toy. You took the floor out from under his feet, at thirty-seven thousand feet, two days before somebody's going to open his chest."
He looked at her for a while.
"Now. We're about an hour and a half from Boston. If you want, I can put down in Cleveland, and you can get yourself a car or a hotel or whatever you need. I'll refund your seat. Or you can sit back here, in this seat, quietly, until we land, and leave that family alone. Those are your choices. I don't much care which one you make."
There was a long silence.