She thought about that.
Then she put her head on my arm, the one that wasn’t holding her mother, and she said, “I already knew,” and went to sleep, and I looked out the window at the clouds and let myself, quietly, in the dark, feel like a person again.
When we landed in Carolina, Captain Shaw walked us off the plane himself.
He carried Cora’s bag himself, the whole length of the jet bridge, and I let him, because I understood that carrying it was something he needed to do, a small weight he could take off me after eleven years of being able to do nothing at all.
At the end of the bridge he shook my hand, and then he did not let go of it, and he said, “I’m going to call my son tonight. Will you let me give him your number? Eleven years, Ethan. He’s been carrying a thank-you around for eleven years with nowhere to put it.”
