Chapter 5: Five Hours Is a Long Time
The attendant — not Diane this time, a younger one named Priya according to her name tag — walked to 7A with the patience of someone who had been trained for exactly this.
"Yes, ma'am?"
"I want to be moved," the woman said.
"I want a different seat.
First class, if there's availability."
"I'm sorry, ma'am.
This flight doesn't have a first-class cabin."
"Then business."
"We don't have a business section on this aircraft either."
The woman's jaw tightened.
"Then I want the seat behind me.
The aisle seat.
I don't want to be next to anyone."
Priya glanced back down the cabin.
"That seat is occupied, ma'am."
"Then the one in front."
"Also occupied.
We have a full flight today."
A pause.
"Then I want a different flight attendant assigned to my row.
I don't want that woman—" she gestured toward the galley where Diane had disappeared "—coming anywhere near me."
Priya kept her expression neutral.
"I can note your preference, ma'am.
Is there anything else I can get you?"
"A complaint form."
"Of course." Priya reached into the seat pocket of the empty jump seat across the aisle and produced a folded form without missing a beat.
"Here you are."
The woman snatched it.
I watched none of this directly.
I was looking at the back of Emma's head, her dark hair fanned out against the headrest, her breathing slow and even.
But I heard every word.
The cabin was quiet enough that most people did.
The man — Judge Calloway, though I hadn't thought of him that way yet — had his reading glasses on and was making notes in the margin of what looked like a legal brief.
He turned a page.
Thirty minutes passed.
Then an hour.
Emma woke slowly, the way she always did — not all at once, but in stages, her fingers moving first, then her head turning, then her eyes opening and finding the window before they found me.
She looked at the clouds for a long moment.
"Mama," she said.
"I'm right here."
"Are we still in the sky?"
"We still are."
She pressed her palm flat to the glass again.
"Good," she said.
I felt something loosen in my chest that I hadn't realized was tight.
Two rows ahead, the woman in 7A had filled out the complaint form and was now on her second.
She was writing quickly, pressing hard enough that I could hear the pen scratching from where I sat.
Judge Calloway lowered his brief.
"She's on her second form," he said, quietly, to no one in particular.
"I noticed," I said.
He glanced at me over his glasses.
"The airline receives approximately four hundred formal in-flight complaints per month," he said.
"Do you know how many result in any action against another passenger?"
I shook my head.
"Fewer than three," he said.
"And those are almost always for conduct that endangered the aircraft." He turned another page of his brief.
"Filing two complaint forms against a woman whose six-year-old fell asleep watching clouds is not going to move that number."
I almost smiled.
Emma pointed at something outside — a break in the clouds, a long flat stretch of blue.
"Mama.
Look."
"I see it, baby."
"It goes all the way."
"It does."
She kept her hand on the glass for the rest of the hour.
She didn't have a meltdown.
She didn't cry.
She watched the sky change color as the sun moved, and she named what she saw — white, then grey, then a pink she called "the good pink" — and I wrote each one down in the small notebook I kept in my bag because she liked knowing I was paying attention.
When the descent announcement came, Emma reached over and took my hand.
The woman in 7A pressed the call button one more time.
Priya appeared.
"Yes, ma'am?"
"I want to know the pilot's full name."
A beat.
"You're welcome to submit a request through the airline's customer service portal after we land, ma'am."
"I'm asking you."
"And I've answered you," Priya said pleasantly.
"Is there anything else?"
The woman said nothing.
Priya walked back to the galley.
We began to descend.
And as the wheels touched down and the cabin filled with the sound of engines reversing and passengers shifting and the ordinary noise of arrival, Emma turned to me with both hands still pressed to the window and said:
"Can we do it again?"
I hadn't cried on this flight.
Not once.
That almost broke me.
"Yes," I said.
"We can do it again."
The woman in 7A gathered her things without looking at anyone.
But as the seat belt sign clicked off and passengers began to stand, a voice came over the intercom one final time.
The captain's voice.
"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to your destination.
Before you go — on behalf of the entire crew, we'd like to say a special goodbye to Emma, who handled her very first flight like a seasoned traveler.
Emma, we hope to see you on board again soon."
The cabin clapped again.
Louder this time.
Emma looked up at the speaker above her seat with wide eyes.
"They know my name," she whispered.
"They do," I said.
She thought about this for a moment.
"I think I like flying," she said.
The woman in 7A was already in the aisle, her back to all of us, moving toward the door.
She didn't look back.
But Diane appeared from the galley, and as passengers filed past, she stopped at our row and crouched down to Emma's eye level.
"Did you like the sky?" she asked.
Emma considered this seriously.
"The clouds were bumpy," she said.
"But the blue parts were very good."
Diane smiled — not a professional smile, a real one.
"I thought so too," she said.
She stood and looked at me.
She didn't say anything.
Neither did I.
But she reached into her jacket pocket and pressed something into my hand — small, folded, warm from being carried.
I looked down.
It was Emma's drawing.
May you like
The original.
I hadn't known she'd kept it.
