He didn’t finish. He never did, when it came to my mother.
My mother, Anna, died the night I was born. I knew it was in an ambulance, in a snowstorm, on the highway outside Larkmont. That was all I knew. My dad never talked about it. Not once in thirty-one years.
At the gate in Larkmont, while Noah went to buy me a pretzel I’d been craving for an hour, I sat by the window rubbing my belly and talking to the baby under my breath. Almost home, little one. Almost home.
An older man two seats down was reading a battered paperback. Gray hair, flannel shirt, reading glasses. When I winced at a twinge in my back, he looked up.
“How far along?” he asked kindly.
“Thirty-four weeks.”
Something flickered across his face. Concern, maybe. “Long flight for thirty-four weeks.”
“Doctor cleared me. It’s only two hours.”
He nodded slowly and went back to his book. But I noticed, when we boarded, that he’d chosen a seat ten rows behind ours, and that every time I stood up to use the bathroom, he looked up from his paperback and watched until I sat back down.
