Epilogue: The Flight Home
The flight home was two weeks later.
Elena had stayed — Dr. Kovac had suggested it, so that he could monitor the first days of the treatment and ensure the protocol was correctly established before she traveled. The hospital had recommended a colleague who could supervise Lucia’s care during that period.
In two weeks, Lucia had changed.
Not completely — the treatment was not a complete resolution in two weeks, and Dr. Kovac had been honest about the timeline, which would be months rather than weeks. But the specific, escalating distress of the preceding six weeks had quieted. The quality of her crying had returned to the ordinary crying of a baby with ordinary complaints — hunger, tiredness, the general inconvenience of being an infant. The inflammation markers were responding. The color in her face was different.
She looked like herself. Elena had been looking at her own daughter for weeks through a filter of fear that had made everything look like a symptom, and the filter was not entirely gone — she thought it would take time for the filter to go entirely — but she could see through it, now, to the person underneath. Lucia was eleven months old and she had her mother’s stubbornness and her own specific quality of determined engagement with everything around her and she was going to be all right.
At the airport, Elena stood at the departures board and found her gate.
She thought about the gate she had stood at two weeks ago, in the other airport, with Lucia in her arms and her bag on her shoulder and the specific, dense fear of someone who is going somewhere they need to be and is not certain the going will be enough.
She thought about seat 14B and the man in 14A with his book, who had frowned when her head landed on his shoulder, who had then done the thing that no one had expected.
She had sent him a message the previous evening, through the number his assistant had given her. She had written it carefully, in the language that was not quite hers, trying to put into words something that did not quite fit in words — the gratitude that is larger than gratitude, the specific feeling of being the recipient of something that was not required and was given anyway.
He had written back: I’m glad she’s better. Take care of yourself too.
Six words. But they were the six words of someone who meant them, which made them sufficient.
Elena picked up her bag. She picked up Lucia, who grabbed a fistful of her mother’s hair with the decisive grip of someone who has identified a handhold and is using it.
“I know,” Elena said to her. “I know.”
She walked to the gate.
She was going home.
— End —
