In my carry-on was a small sealed container that I had packed before it got light that morning, with the kitchen light off, because I did not want to be doing it in a bright room.
I was taking Sorcha back to the ocean.
She asked for that in the February.
In a room with a window in it. About eleven days before the end, in one sentence, with her eyes shut, in the four or five minutes a day she was properly there by then.
She did not make me promise. She never made anybody promise anything in her life. She just said it, once, and let me decide what to do with it.
PART 2
Those tickets took nearly two years to afford.
There is a coffee tin on top of our fridge with Mama’s Beach Fund written across it in my daughter’s handwriting, in four different colours, because she ran out of pen twice.
Some weeks I put in twenty dollars. Some weeks four.
Posy put coins in out of a pink purse.
Completely certain, in the way a seven-year-old is certain, that every single one of them was bringing us closer.
She counted it on the kitchen floor about eleven times over two years. She always got a different number and she was always sure about it.
When we boarded and she saw those seats, her face went up like a light.
She said: Daddy, are these really ours?
And I said: they are.
And for about ten minutes I was a man who had kept a promise to his wife.
I would like somebody to understand how few of those ten-minute stretches there have been in two years.
Then the agent came down the aisle with a tablet in his hand.
Behind him was a man in a navy suit who had arrived late, and who, according to the agent, required a seat at the front.
Required. Not requested.
That is the word he used, twice, and I have thought about it a great deal in eleven weeks.
A man can require a seat on an aircraft. Nobody had required anything of me in about eleven years and I had rather missed it.
The agent looked at my cane.
Then at my boots, which are eleven years old and which I could replace and do not want to.
Then at my daughter’s coat.
Which came from a charity shop, which she chose herself off the rail in about four seconds, and which she loves more than anything else she owns including the purse.
And I watched a decision being made. Right there, across a man’s face, in about four seconds.
Not about who had paid. About which of the people in that cabin would be the least amount of trouble.
I held up our boarding passes.
And I said: these are our seats. I paid for them.
And he gave me a stiff little smile — the one they are presumably taught, which is four parts patience and one part something else.
PART 3
