Part One: Before the Flight
The last forty-eight hours had not been hours in any ordinary sense.
They had been a different kind of time — the compressed, elastic time of hospitals and waiting rooms and conversations with doctors who said things carefully and then said them again in different words and whose careful repetition was its own form of alarm. Elena Vasic had been in that time for two days and she was still in it, even now, even on the plane, because the kind of fear that two days in a hospital with a sick child produces does not end when you leave the hospital. It travels with you.
Lucia was eleven months old.
She was a small baby — had been small from the beginning, born early and slight, with the specific delicacy of a premature child who has had to work for each developmental milestone. But she had worked for them, consistently, with the focused determination that Elena had recognized, even in an infant, as something characterological. Lucia was not a child who gave up on things.
The illness had begun six weeks ago as what the first doctor called a respiratory infection. The respiratory infection had not responded to the standard treatment. A second doctor had added a diagnosis — something to do with inflammation, something systemic, something that the tests had not yet fully characterized. A third doctor had looked at the cumulative test results and had said: I think you need to see someone who specializes in this. There is a pediatric specialist — he works abroad, four hours by plane. He has seen cases like this before.
That was three days ago.
Elena had spent the subsequent three days doing things she had not known she was capable of doing: she had called the specialist’s office, navigating the language barrier with the translation application on her phone; she had researched flights and found the cheapest available; she had borrowed money from her sister and from a friend at work and from her mother, who did not have much but gave what she had; she had packed a bag for herself and a bag for Lucia and had arranged for her sister to care for the apartment and the cat; and she had called the specialist’s office again to confirm the appointment and been told that there had been an administrative issue and they could not find her name and she had spent two hours resolving this through the same translation application, voice shaking.
She had slept approximately four hours across three days.
She was twenty-nine years old and she was alone — Lucia’s father had left before Lucia was born, which was a fact she had stopped narrating to herself because narrating it did not change it, and she had learned to put her energy into things that she could affect. She was alone and she had a sick baby and she was on a plane and she had spent almost everything she had on the ticket.
She sat in seat 14B with Lucia in her arms.
The man in 14A — the window seat — was already there when she arrived at the row. He had the look of someone who travels regularly: the practiced arrangement of himself in a plane seat, the specific organization of his carry-on items, the easy way he had settled into the economy space as though he had made peace with it long ago. He was perhaps fifty-five, with silver-streaked hair and the kind of face that is not conventionally handsome but that has been shaped by something — time, perhaps, or the sustained attention to things that matter — into something more interesting. He wore a simple dark sweater. He had a book in his hand that he was reading when she arrived.
He glanced up when she came into the row. He looked at Lucia. He looked at Elena. He returned to his book.
She settled in. She arranged Lucia against her chest. She put the bag under the seat in front. She buckled the seatbelt with the extension that the flight attendant had brought without being asked, which was a small kindness that Elena received with a gratitude disproportionate to its size, because when you have been running on empty for two days the small kindnesses land differently.
The plane took off.
For twenty minutes, Lucia slept against Elena’s chest with the specific, boneless heaviness of infant sleep, and Elena allowed herself to believe — the way exhausted people allow themselves to believe things that the evidence does not quite support, because the alternative is too large — that the flight would be manageable.
Then Lucia woke up.
