1215 PM Mia
Trouble lay ahead of her.
The line to board the plane had stopped moving, leaving Mia stuck next to a galley where two attendants made preflight preparations.
One of them, a brunette with a silk scarf tied around her neck, opened a drawer containing a tray of foil-covered meals while her colleague poured water into small plastic cups.
Mia watched them work, gathering her belongings in front of her.
She had checked no bags. All she had was a small carry-on containing, among other items, a black dress, a leather tote that held her laptop, a paperback novel, a bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol, a charger for her phone, and an aluminum water bottle.
She wore jeans and sneakers and a long wool coat, which she presently took off and draped over her right arm.
The flight attendant who had been filling cups of water looked down the aisle. The line still hadn’t moved.
“We’ve got a luggage problem,” he said. His colleague closed the drawer containing the meals and glanced back to where he was gesturing.
There Mia saw a man struggling to squeeze a large suitcase into the overhead storage bin.
He kept turning it around, pushing it harder, but even from where she was standing Mia could see there was no way the bag was going to fit.
“These idiots,” the flight attendant in the scarf said. “I mean, honestly.”
She smiled at Mia, as if suddenly realizing she was there, then excused herself and slid by her.
Threading her way past other passengers, she eventually reached the man and tapped him gently on the shoulder.
Mia took her phone from her pocket and opened her photo app.
Before boarding began she had been looking through it, trying to find the last picture she had taken of all her friends together.
Waiting at the gate, she had told herself that if she could find one, just one, then all of this would have turned out differently.
But she hadn’t, so now she found herself scrolling, past shots of Regent’s Park and Broadway Market and her small, empty flat in Islington.
When she reached November of last year, the flight attendant had made her way back to where Mia was standing, the bag held high above her head.
She looked at her colleague and rolled her eyes. The line moved again.
By the time she settled into her seat Mia was deep in the fall of 2022.
She had seen Adam and Richie on New Jersey Transit, and Sasha in a red leotard, and Theo strumming an electric guitar, and her old apartment in Greenpoint, and Lev with his glasses on the end of his nose.
None of it was what she was looking for.
For nearly a minute her mind drifted, her thoughts loose and scattered.
Then, blinking, she opened a new text message, where she typed about to take off, see you tomorrow, and pressed send.
A moment later, a response appeared on her screen: Only if you’re up for it.
She read it a few times over, then returned to her photos without responding.
Beaches, skylines, cones topped with melting ice cream.
Rami on a blanket in Fort Greene Park, and Marco with a baby, and the empty, postapocalyptic streets of the pandemic.
Mia’s thumb swiped faster and she felt herself starting to sweat.
The trip had come together at the last minute—she kept thinking of things she hadn’t done, people she had forgotten to call.
She was next to a window, and she leaned her head against it.
On the tarmac men in uniforms drove small carts, pulling trains of luggage behind them.
Someone in a reflective orange vest directed a nearby plane to a gate.
The sky was overcast, thick with gray clouds.
Mia swiped her thumb once more and then—at last—she saw it: all of them together on a bright-green lawn.
A swimming pool sparkled in the background, and bocce balls lay at their feet.
She zoomed in on each of their faces, then looked at the geotag and date on the picture.
Amagansett. Labor Day, 2019. She exhaled and waited for some relief.
“Good afternoon to you!”
Glancing up, Mia saw a man standing over her.
He was large, well over six feet, and when he finally managed to sit down his knees brushed the seat in front of him.
He looked to be about forty-five, which was to say a year or two older than Mia, and his red hair was parted neatly on the side.
Mia smiled politely. She put away her phone and pulled the paperback novel out of her bag and read the first page.
The sentences were clean and precise and they washed over her without meaning.
She reached the bottom of the page, immediately forgetting what she had read, and went back to the beginning to start again.
“They pack us in here bloody tight, don’t they!” the man said.
Mia looked up from the book. He was smiling at her.
“Yes,” she said. “They do.”
“Can’t be too hard for you, though, being small like you are. Me, on the other hand.” The man slapped both of his knees. “Wouldn’t mind a bit more room!”
The plane pulled away from the gate. On the small screen in front of her, Mia watched as the president of Delta welcomed her aboard, and then as a diverse cast of flight attendants performed various safety demonstrations.
When they were finished, a handsome man dressed as a pilot invited her to sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight.
The plane swiveled ninety degrees. She heard the engines grow louder, and soon after that they were in the air.
Below them, the ground was laced with roads that cut through parking lots and commercial centers and past empty green patches of earth.
Mia’s ears popped. The plane began to level out, and she opened the paperback again.
“Good book?” the man asked.
“I’ve just started it.”
“I detect an American accent.”
Mia closed the novel. “Good ear,” she said.
“Going home, then?”
“No. Not really? I moved to London about six months ago.”
The man folded his fingers together. They were large, the knuckles bulbous. Toward the front of the plane, the two flight attendants from earlier began pushing a drink cart down the aisle.
“It’s my first time headed to New York, if you can believe it,” he said.
“Oh?”
“You’ve been, I gather?”
“Yes. I lived there for a long time.”
“Back to the old stomping ground, then?”
“Something like that.”
“Smashing!” He reached into a backpack and pulled out a leather-bound notebook in which he had handwritten an itinerary. “I’m there for business, but I’ve got a mind to sneak in a bit of sightseeing on the side. This is everything that I’ve got planned. What do you think?”
Mia read it over. The Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, Little Italy, Times Square, The Lion King. Handing it back to him, she said, “Yep, that looks like everything.”
The man returned the notebook to his backpack.
“Not much of a talker, are you.” He frowned, sounding puzzled if not a little hurt.
For a moment Mia felt guilty; she had hardly slept over the past five days, but the man was obviously excited, and she knew the polite thing to do would be to come up with some interesting suggestions.
But then the drink cart arrived, interrupting her thoughts.
The flight attendant in the silk scarf cleared her throat and widened her smile.
She asked the man next to Mia if he would like something to drink.
“A gin and tonic!” he said. “Bloody hell, make it two gin and tonics. One for me, and one for—?”
“Mia. It’s Mia.” She looked at the flight attendant. “Just a club soda, please.”
The flight attendant scooped ice into two cups. Rummaging around in a drawer, she found a small blue bottle of gin, then closed the drawer with her hip.
“Not too celebratory then, either,” the man said.
“I’m sorry, it’s just—”
“We need to liven you up, missy!” He emptied the gin into his cup and took a sip from it. “We’re headed to En Why See! The Big Apple! The Center of the Universe! The City That Never Sleeps! It’s not like someone’s died, now, is it?”
The flight attendant pushed the cart farther down the aisle. Mia drank from her club soda and looked at the man.
“Actually?” she said. “They have.”