* * *
The handset was heavier than it looked. Curtis would remember that. A beige plastic thing with a push-to-talk bar on the side, warm from Marisol's hand, its coiled cord bouncing gently against the edge of the podium.
He had given presentations to rooms of three hundred people. He had stood on a stage at the Gaylord Rockies Convention Center under a spotlight and walked a ballroom full of building engineers through the lifecycle cost analysis of variable refrigerant flow systems without a single note. He had never in his life been afraid of a microphone.
He pressed the bar. The speakers in the ceiling woke with a soft electric breath that everyone in the gate area heard.
"Good morning," he said. His voice came back to him from the ceiling, enormous and strange. "Uh. Folks. My name is Curtis. I'm a passenger on this flight. The captain has asked me to explain the delay." He swallowed. "There was a misunderstanding in the terminal this morning. A security situation. And the captain was briefly detained while it was being sorted out, and I want to apologize, on behalf of everyone involved, for the inconvenience to..."
A hand came down over his. Not hard. Just a big warm hand closing over the handset and his fingers together, and the push-to-talk bar releasing under the pressure of it, so that the speakers in the ceiling went quiet.
Captain Hale did not take the handset. He only held it there, with Curtis's hand inside his, for a moment, and leaned in a little, and spoke so low that only Curtis and perhaps his mother could hear.
"There was a misunderstanding," the captain repeated. "The captain was detained. Mr. Lindqvist, I've been flying airplanes for thirty-one years. I've read a lot of incident reports. I know what the passive voice is for." He let go. "Try again."
Curtis looked down at the handset.
He thought, for one long cowardly second, about handing it back. About saying, I don't have to do this, you can't make me, I've already talked to the police. He thought about walking down the concourse and renting a car and driving to Seattle, sixteen hours, alone, with nothing but the radio. He thought about Pete and the Ridgeline account. He thought about all the stories he had ever told, at all the bars, at his own wedding, and how every one of them had been built the same way, with the facts in order and the shape coming out right.
Then he looked at his mother, in the wheelchair, with his father in her lap and her purse on top of his father, her hand resting on the gray mended strap.
He pressed the bar.
"I shoved him," he said.