"I'll stay back here," Celeste said. Her voice sounded strange to her. Small and dry, like something left too long in a drawer.
"All right." He turned to go. Then he turned back. "One more thing. I've been flying for forty-four years. I've had an engine fire and I've had a goose come through my windscreen and I've flown into places where people were shooting at us. I don't leave that cockpit unless something's wrong in my airplane." He let that sit. "Something was wrong in my airplane."
He went forward. He stopped beside Theo and bent and said something Celeste couldn't hear, and Theo held up the spiral notebook, and Ferris took a pen from his shirt pocket and wrote something in it and handed it back. Then he ducked through the curtain and was gone.
* * *
She sat in the back of the jet for an hour and thirty-one minutes. She knew because she watched the time on her laptop, which she had left open on the seat beside her, its screen gone dark, so that whenever she pressed a key the clock in the corner lit up and Wren's face came up behind it, chin lifted, BEAUTY THAT DOESN'T ASK PERMISSION, and she would close it again.
Jonah did not come back to sit with her. She did not expect him to. Through the gap between the seats she could see the back of his head, and beyond him Marcus, who had an arm around his son, and beyond Marcus the edge of Theo's face, turned toward the window, watching the place where they had been.
The headphones charged. At some point Marcus slipped them back over the boy's ears and a tiny green light came on, and Theo's shoulders, which had been up around his ears since Des Moines, came down an inch. The humming stopped. In the new quiet, which was not really quiet, only the engines and the hiss of the air vents, Celeste could hear Marcus talking. Not to Theo. To Jonah.
"It's a valve," he was saying. "In his heart. He was born with it. They fixed it once when he was a baby, put in a patch, but he's grown. Now it's leaking, and another one's narrowing. So they've got to do both."
Jonah said something she couldn't make out.
"No, he knows. We told him everything. That's the only way with him. You can't surprise him. He's got to know everything that's going to happen, in order, or he can't—" A pause. "His therapist says the folder's like a handrail. When you're going down stairs in the dark."
Celeste looked out her own window. The overcast had broken up beneath them into white islands, and between the islands she could see land, dark with evening, scattered with lights. Somewhere down there was Lake Erie. Somewhere down there, south and east, beyond the lake, was a town in western Pennsylvania, in a valley between two steep ridges, where the river had flooded three times in a hundred years and the mills had closed and a girl named Cecilia Vargas had grown up in a narrow brick row house with a mother who worked in a hospital laundry and a brother who hummed.
She had not let herself think about that town in a very long time. But the humming had got in through some crack, and now it was all coming up, the whole place, as if it had been waiting all these years just under the surface for someone to tear the folder open.