She did not snatch it, she would tell herself later, in the hotel room, at two in the morning. She merely took it. She took it the way you take a pen out of the hand of someone clicking it in a meeting, firmly, with a small tight smile, intending to set it down somewhere harmless. But Theo's hands were pressed on top of it, and when it moved he gripped, and when he gripped she pulled, and the elastic band snapped loose and the Velcro tore open with a long sound like ripping cloth and the folder came apart in the air between them.
Paper went everywhere.
It went across the table and into her lap and onto the floor and into the narrow gap beside the window. Drawings in colored pencil. Typed pages with a hospital letterhead. A laminated sheet with a photograph of Theo on it. A small spiral-bound notebook that struck the edge of the table and fell, face down, under Jonah's seat.
For one second there was no sound in the cabin except the engines.
And then Theo screamed.
It was not a tantrum scream. Celeste had heard plenty of those, in restaurants and airports and the homes of friends she had stopped visiting. This was something else. It came from all the way down, a raw, high, terrified sound, and it went on far longer than any breath should have allowed, and while it went on Theo was clawing at his seat belt and at the air and at the papers, trying to gather all of them at once and gathering none of them, his whole body jerking against the lap belt like something caught in a trap.
Marcus was out of his seat and on his knees in the tiny aisle, saying, "I've got it, I've got it, Theo, I've got them, I'll get every one," snatching papers off the floor with both hands, and Theo was hitting his own head with the heel of his hand, hard, once, twice, and Marcus dropped the papers and caught his wrist and held it, and the scream broke into sobbing, and the sobbing was worse.
Celeste sat with the empty blue folder in her hands.
She did not notice the cockpit curtain move. She only noticed, a moment later, that there was a man standing at the front of the cabin who had not been there before, that he had to stoop because the ceiling was too low for him, and that he was looking at her.
* * *
Captain Walter Ferris was perhaps sixty-five. He had a long, weathered face and very pale blue eyes, and he wore his uniform shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and the forearm nearest Celeste carried a faded tattoo of an eagle with a ribbon in its beak. He looked at her for what was probably three seconds. It was enough. Then he looked away from her entirely, as though she were part of the upholstery, and lowered himself, knees cracking, to the floor of the aisle beside Marcus.
"First Officer," he said.