By the time they called my group to board, my son was already crying. It started the moment I stepped off the worn carpet of the terminal and onto the narrow jet bridge, that metal tunnel that smelled faintly like coffee and cold air. Somewhere down the line, a flight attendant was greeting passengers with that practiced cheerfulness, but all I could really hear was Ethan’s thin, panicked wail against my shoulder.
I shifted him higher on my hip, pressed my cheek to his warm forehead, and whispered, “It’s okay, baby.
We’re almost there. Just a little bit longer.”
The line crept forward in little shuffles.
A man in a baseball cap checked his watch for the third time. A woman in a navy blazer sighed dramatically, as if the entire world existed to test her patience.
Ethan kicked his small socked feet against my ribs and started crying harder, the sound bouncing off the metal walls.
“Sorry,” I murmured to no one and everyone at once. Two months earlier, I still believed the worst thing that could happen to me had already happened. My husband, David, had left the house one rainy afternoon, keys jingling on his finger, saying, “Back in an hour.
Don’t let my chili burn.” An hour passed.
Then two. Then three.
The knock at the door came with a uniform behind it and a voice that tried to be gentle and clinical at the same time. They used words like “collision” and “impact,” and I remember thinking how strangely tidy those words were for something that could explode your entire life.
After that, time didn’t move in days and weeks.
It moved in paperwork and quiet. There were insurance calls and casseroles, statements and condolences. His jacket stayed hanging on the peg by the door.
His coffee mug stayed in the sink, just the way he’d left it.
His work chair in the corner of our small kitchen became… empty space. A hollow spot the whole house leaned around.
I was six months pregnant at the time. Our son kicked as the doctor told me that stress would be bad for the baby, as if stress were a light switch I could flip off.
“You’ll be okay,” people said, their eyes already sliding away, because no one knows what to do with grief that hasn’t settled into something neat and quiet.
They didn’t see the bills. They didn’t see me standing at the kitchen counter with a calculator and a cold cup of coffee at two in the morning, trying to make numbers behave. After Ethan was born, joy and sadness lived side by side in the same tiny apartment.
I would hold him at night, his soft breath warm against my neck, and think, You are the reason I get up in the morning.
And then, just as quickly, I’d look at the empty space on the other side of the bed and think, And you are the reason it hurts so much that he’s not here. I talked to Ethan like he could remember.
“Your dad loved airplanes,” I whispered one night as the TV flickered quietly in the background. “He used to say the best part of a trip was the takeoff.
That feeling when the ground lets go.”
The funny thing about losing someone is that the world doesn’t stop sending you mail.
The electric company still wants their money. The landlord still expects the rent on the first of the month, no matter how broken your heart is. I learned to stretch every dollar like it was elastic.
Coupons.
Discount stores. Free clinics.
Government forms with tiny print and long lines. I took on freelance work stuffing envelopes at night.
I babysat on weekends with Ethan napping in his carrier next to me.
I sold two of my nicer coats online and told myself spring was coming anyway. When my mother called from Florida and said, “Honey, come stay with me for a week. Just you and the baby.
Let me help,” I stared at the phone for a long moment before answering.
“I can’t afford the ticket, Mom.”
“Use my card,” she said immediately. “No.
I can’t do that. I need to prove I can do this.”
There was a brief silence on the line.
I could picture her in her small living room, knuckles pressed to her lips, trying not to sound worried.
“Then you come when you can,” she said. “But don’t wait so long that your pride keeps you from rest.”
That night, after I put Ethan down, I opened my laptop and started looking at flights. I checked every comparison site I could find, searching for the cheapest ticket from our small city in Ohio to Orlando.
Most flights cost more than I made in a week.
Some cost more than my rent. Then, at the bottom of one page, there it was: one seat left on a budget airline, Tuesday afternoon, connecting through Charlotte.
It was barely cheaper than the others, but “barely” was the space I lived in now. I stared at the numbers.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page to discover the rest 🔎👇
