She had flown in the night before, commercial, through O'Hare. She did that sort of thing now. Halden Beauty had given her a generous severance in February, after a polite conversation in Frances Moll's office in which both of them understood she was not coming back, and she had used part of it to buy a small house in Altoona with a porch and a dryer in the basement, and part of it to buy Open Sky a new set of tires for the Citation, which Walt had accepted with very bad grace because, he said, tires were not a check and therefore did not count. The rest she had not decided about. She was in no hurry. Wren's campaign had launched in March under Gerald Pike, and it was doing well, and Celeste had sent Wren a note that said only, You were right to wear the sunglasses. On Tuesdays and Thursdays she took Danny to the lake, or to the candy factory to watch the machines. On weekends she drove to Hanscom Field and met the mission flights.
She had done twenty-two of them by now. She had picked up a four-year-old girl on oxygen from Burlington and teenage twins from Bangor and a boy from Hartford with a brain tumor who wanted to talk about nothing but the Red Sox. Twice she had ridden in the van beside Jonah, who drove the way he did everything, too carefully, and who had stopped calling her Ms. Varga somewhere around Waltham. She had sat in a great many waiting rooms. She had fetched a great many turkey sandwiches. She had asked a great many nurses at a great many desks, politely, in a voice that made people move, whether someone could come out and tell this mother something, anything. She had told no one about any of it. Walt had been very clear.
She had asked to fly out to Des Moines for this one. Walt had said, "Why," and she had said, "Because he asked," and Walt had looked at her for a while and said, "Huh."
Theo sat on the carpet across from her with his folder open between them. He was ten now. He had grown two inches since the surgery, and his face had filled out and gained color; there was a pink line down the center of his chest, under his T-shirt, which he would show to anyone who asked and several people who didn't. He had new headphones, blue ones, with a battery that lasted forty hours. Marcus had bought two pairs.
"This is the new schedule," Theo said, holding up a page toward her without looking at her. "Airplane. Hospital. Echo. Doctor Osei. Hotel. Airplane. Home."
"Airplane, hospital, echo, Doctor Osei, hotel, airplane, home," Celeste repeated. "Got it."
"You're not on it."
"I know. I'm just on the airplane parts."
He considered this. Then he took a pencil out of the folder and, in very small careful letters, wrote CELESTE under the first airplane and under the last one. He put the schedule back in its place.
"This is About Me," he said, and held up the laminated sheet. It had been updated. Someone had drawn a neat line through I AM GOING TO BOSTON TO GET MY HEART FIXED, and beside it, in marker, Theo had written: FIXED. CHECKUP NOW.
"Check," said Celeste.