Epilogue: Gate 23
A year after the airport, she returned to it.
The coffee machine in Terminal B had been replaced. She noticed this the way you notice when a specific thing that has been formative is simply gone — not dramatically, just replaced with a newer model that presumably dispensed cups with better timing. She bought a coffee from it and it came out fine.
Gate 23 was the same gate.
She sat in a plastic chair and looked at the departures board, which cycled through destinations with the democratic indifference of a board that knows everyone thinks their destination is the important one. Her flight was listed: nine forty-five, nonstop, Florence.
In her bag was a book she had been meaning to read for a year. A change of clothes. Her mother’s ring, which she wore on her right hand. The last letter — the one that said this home was built so you would always have a place no one could take from you — folded in its envelope in the inside pocket, the way you carry something not because you need to consult it but because you are not ready to leave it behind.
The ticket had been purchased with a portion of her inheritance, which was a word she had spent a year becoming comfortable with. Not because the money was uncomfortable — money, she had learned, was considerably more comfortable than its absence — but because it was her mother’s, and taking it required accepting, in full, what her mother had known and prepared for and tried to protect her from, which was a large and complicated thing to hold.
She held it.
The gate attendant made an announcement. Around her, people began gathering their bags with the particular organized urgency of boarding passengers. Maya finished her coffee, which was adequate, and stood, and collected her bag, and joined the movement toward the gate.
She was not going to Europe because Europe was a prize. She was going because she had found, in the desk drawer of the house that was hers, a list her mother had made — undated, written on the back of a receipt for something Maya couldn’t identify — of places she had wanted to visit. Florence was third on the list. It had been circled twice.
Maya had decided to start there.
The gate doors opened. She handed over her boarding pass and walked through, and the jetway closed behind her like a door being gently shut, and in front of her was the particular smell of a plane about to go somewhere, and the sound of other people finding their seats, and the specific, unhurried quality of someone who is, for the first time in their life, not apologizing for the space they take up.
She found her seat.
She sat down.
She was already home — she had always been — and she was going somewhere new.
Both things were true.
Both things were hers.
— End —
