Angela stepped onto the plane. She turned her head first to the left, looking into the cockpit. Its door also stood open, but the small space was empty, the instruments dark.
“Hello?” Angela called, looking to the right now, expecting to see some flight attendant with perfectly applied makeup—or maybe some flight attendant and a pilot bent over a prone passenger, maybe an old man suddenly struck down by a heart attack or a stroke. Or, at the very least, passengers crowding the aisle, clutching laptops and stuffed animals brought from faraway grandparents’ homes, overtired toddlers crying, fragile old women calling out to taller men, “Could you pull my luggage down from the overhead for me? It’s that red suitcase over there….”
But the aisle of this airplane was as empty and silent as its cockpit. Angela could see all the way to the back of the plane, and not a single person stood in her view, not a single voice answered her.
Only then did Angela drop her gaze to the passenger seats. They stretched back twelve rows, with two seats per row on the left side of the aisle and one each on the right. She stepped forward, peering at all of them. Thirty-six seats on this plane, and every single one of them was full.
Each seat contained a baby.
THIRTEEN YEARS LATER
ONE
“You don’t look much like your sister,” Chip said, bouncing the basketball low against the driveway.
Jonah waited to answer until he’d darted his hand in and stolen the basketball away.
“Adopted,” he said, shooting the ball toward the backboard. But the angle was wrong, and the ball bounced off the hoop.
“Really? You or her? Or both?” Chip asked, snagging the rebound.
“Me,” Jonah said. “Just me.” Then he sneaked a glance at Chip, to see if this made a difference. It didn’t to Jonah—he’d always known he was adopted, and as far as he was concerned, it wasn’t much more of a deal than his liking mint chocolate-chip ice cream while Katherine liked orange sherbet. But sometimes other people got weird about it.
Chip had one eyebrow raised, like he was still processing the information. This gave Jonah a chance to grab the ball again.
“Hey, if you’re not, like, related by blood or anything, does that mean you could date her?” Chip asked.
Jonah almost dropped the ball.
“Yuck— no!” he said. “That’s sick!”
“Why?” Chip asked.
“Because she’s my sister! Ugh!” If Chip had asked him that question a few years ago, Jonah would have added, “And she’s got cooties!” But Jonah was in seventh grade now, and seventh graders didn’t talk about cooties. Anyhow Jonah hadn’t known Chip a few years ago—Chip had moved into the neighborhood just three months ago, in the summertime. It was kind of a new thing for Chip to come over and play basketball.
Carefully, Jonah began bouncing the ball again.
“If you think me and Katherine don’t look alike, you should see my cousin Mia,” he said.
“Why?” Chip asked. “Is she even cuter than Katherine?”
Jonah made a face.
“She’s only four years old!” he said. “And she’s Chinese. My aunt and uncle had to go to Beijing to adopt her.”
He could remember, the whole time Aunt Joan and Uncle Brad were arranging to adopt Mia—filling out the paperwork, sending away for the visas, crossing dates off calendars, and then buying new calendars to cross off new dates—his own mom and dad had spent a lot of time hugging him and exclaiming, “We were so lucky, getting you! Such a miracle!”
Katherine had been jealous.
Jonah could just picture her standing in the kitchen at age five or six, wispy blond pigtails sticking out on both sides of her head, a scowl on her face, complaining, “Weren’t you lucky to get me, too? Aren’t I a miracle?”
Mom had bent down and kissed her.
“Of course you’re a miracle too,” she said. “A big miracle. But we had nine months to know you were coming. With Jonah, we thought it would be years and years and years before we’d get a baby, and then that call came out of the blue—”
“The week before Christmas—” Dad added.
“And they said we could have him right away, and he was so cute, with his big eyes and his dimples and all that brown hair—”
“And then a year later, lovely Katherine came along—” Dad reached over and put his arm around her waist, pulling her close, until she giggled. “And we had a boy and a girl, and we were so happy because we had everything we wanted.”
Jonah’s parents could be so sappy. He didn’t have too many gripes about them—as parents went, they were pretty decent. But they told that story way too often about how excited they’d been, getting that call out of the blue, getting Jonah.
Also, if he was listing grievances, he often wished that they’d had the sense not to name him after a guy who got swallowed up by a whale. But that was kind of a minor thing.
Now he aimed carefully and sent the ball whooshing through the net. It went through cleanly—the perfect shot.
Chip flopped down onto the grass beside the driveway.
“Man,” he said. “You’re going to make the basketball team for sure.”
Jonah caught the ball as it fell through the net.
“Who says I’m trying out?”
Chip leaned forward.
“Well, aren’t you?” he asked. “You’ve got to! That’s, like, what everyone wants! The basketball players get all the chicks!”
This sounded so ridiculous coming out of Chip’s mouth that Jonah fell into the grass laughing. After a moment, Chip started laughing too. It was like being a little kid again, rolling around in the grass laughing, not caring at all about who might see you.
Jonah stopped laughing and sat up. He peered up and down the street—fortunately, nobody was around to see them. He whacked Chip on the arm.
“So,” he said. “Do you have a crush on my sister?”