6. Sara
Sara
Sofia’s flight was due into Sea-Tac just after midnight, and we’d agreed – very maturely, like two adult women who had their lives together – that she’d grab an Uber home and I’d see her in the morning.
I lasted until about nine o’clock.
That’s when I found myself standing in the craft aisle at the twenty-four-hour drugstore, holding a bottle of pink glitter glue and a sheet of poster board and feeling like an absolute idiot.
A forty-eight-year-old woman does not make an airport sign.
A forty-eight-year-old woman is dignified, restrained, emotionally regulated.
I bought the glitter.
Back at the townhouse I spread everything out on the kitchen table and got to work, the same way Sofia and I used to when we were fifteen and making signs for the boy bands we’d scream ourselves hoarse over.
Back then it had been a boy band’s name in puffy paint.
Tonight I wrote agapi mou – my love – in careful block letters and filled a heart around the words with so much pink glitter that I’d probably be finding it in the grout for months.
I held it up, checked my work, and laughed at myself. Then I grabbed my keys.
The thing was, I knew Sofia was coming home.
I knew it the way I knew the sun would come up.
But knowing something with your head and believing it with the rest of you are two very different animals, and the animal in me remembered another airport, another goodbye, a girl who’d flown to Greece for a summer and stayed gone for thirty years.
I wasn’t going to let her walk through those doors and have no one waiting on the other side.
International arrivals at Sea-Tac after midnight is a strange, hushed place. A handful of people clustered near the barrier, holding phones and flowers and, in one case, a sleeping toddler. I found a spot at the rail, held my ridiculous glittery sign against my chest, and waited.
The doors slid open. A cluster of exhausted travelers wheeled out – not her.
They opened again. A flight crew, a man in a rumpled suit, a family speaking rapid Portuguese.
Not her. Every time the doors parted my heart lifted, and every time it wasn’t Sofia my chest cinched a little tighter, that old fear whispering its ugly little story.
She’s not coming. She stayed. You should have known better.
The doors opened, and there she was.
Sofia looked wrecked in the way you only can after twenty-some hours of travel, her hair escaping its knot, a crease pressed into one cheek from sleeping against the window, her enormous purse sliding off her shoulder.
She was, without question, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life.
She scanned the crowd, and then her eyes landed on me, and on the sign, and her whole face broke open.
I did not, in that moment, care that I was a grown woman in an airport at half past midnight.
I dropped the sign and I ran, and she dropped her bag and caught me, and then we were just holding on, her arms crushing me, my face buried in her neck where she smelled like airplane and lavender and home.
“You came,” she said into my hair.
“Of course I came.” My voice cracked and I didn’t bother hiding it. “Did you really think I’d let you take an Uber?”
She pulled back just far enough to look at me, her thumbs wiping under my eyes – I hadn’t even noticed I was crying – and she gave me that impish smile, the one I’d have followed anywhere at fifteen and would follow anywhere now.
“You’re going to get glitter all over baggage claim,” she said.
“Worth it.” I kissed her, right there in front of the man with the flowers and the family and the sleeping toddler, and she kissed me back like she’d been waiting thirty years to come home to me.
Which, I suppose, she had.