“When?” Chip repeated numbly.
Jonah was thinking that maybe English wasn’t his native language, after all. Maybe he’d spent his first few months of life hearing some other language, and maybe that was why he couldn’t make Angela’s words make sense in his head.
Katherine started laughing.
“Oh, thanks,” she said sarcastically. “That makes everything as clear as mud.” She flipped her hair over her shoulder. “We already know the ‘when.’ Chip and Jonah were both adopted thirteen years ago.”
“Twelve years, ten months and, uh, four days, to be exact,” Chip said.
Angela narrowed her eyes, looking at Katherine.
“Perhaps you’d like to hear my story before you dismiss it?” Angela asked.
“Please,” Jonah said, and he was proud of himself, that he’d managed to say that much when he was feeling so jangly and strange.
Angela looked down at the table, and it occurred to Jonah that maybe she was nervous too. Nervous, talking to a couple of kids? That didn’t make sense either.
“Thirteen years ago,” Angela began softly, “I worked exactly one day at Sky Trails Airlines.”
Katherine opened her mouth, and Jonah could tell she was about to say something snarky and mean, like, “Wow—did you get fired after one day? Or were you just too lazy to go back for day two?”
Jonah glared at his sister; he pressed his thumb and forefinger together and drew them across his lips, the universal sign for Shut up! He hoped the full force of his glare plus the gesture would let her know, If you say one more nasty thing, I will throw you out. And Chip and I won’t tell you a single word that Angela says, so you won’t know a thing….
Katherine coughed.
“Um—Sky Trails?” she said weakly.
“It’s an old airline—probably none of you have heard of it, because it went out of business about ten years ago,” Angela said. “It went bankrupt, didn’t pay any of its creditors. But I still get a disability check from Sky Trails, every single month.”
Disability? Jonah thought. That was for people who couldn’t work anymore because they were too sick or, well, disabled. Angela looked as if she could run a marathon—even in those funky high heels she was wearing. And, anyhow, Jonah had had some vague notion that disability checks came from the government, not private businesses.
Angela was looking around—from Katherine to Jonah to Chip—as if she expected one of them to ask another question. No one said anything. Angela sighed.
“That one day at Sky Trails changed my life,” she said. “What I saw—well, you won’t believe me, and nobody else will back up my story. But I know what I saw. I’m not crazy!”
Oh, Jonah thought. Can people maybe get disability checks for being crazy, too?
Angela shrugged.
“I can tell by your eyes you’re already starting to doubt me,” she said in a voice that was strangely choked. Jonah wondered: why would it matter to Angela whether three kids believed her?
“But,” Angela continued, “I’m going to tell you this anyway. I think I have to.”
“Okay,” Chip said.
Angela clasped her hands together on the table, seeming to steel herself for the story ahead.
“During my one day as a gate agent at Sky Trails, an unidentified plane arrived at the airport,” Angela said. “It was an unscheduled landing, completely unexpected. Depending on who you believe, either the radar was out of order briefly while it was landing—or it just appeared. Out of nowhere.”
Jonah saw Katherine stiffen.
“I was evidently the only person who saw it appear,” Angela said. “The only person who was looking.”
“Did it disappear, too?” Katherine asked in a small voice.
Angela shot her a surprised look.
“I wasn’t planning to get to that part until later,” Angela said. “But…yes.”
“I saw something like that happen once too,” Katherine admitted. “Not a whole plane appearing and disappearing, but a person. A man.”
“So you know what it’s like,” Angela said slowly. “Knowing exactly what you saw, but thinking that it couldn’t possibly have happened like that. Second-guessing yourself. Having other people make fun of you because you won’t say, ‘Oh, I must have made a mistake.’”
“Exactly,” Katherine said, nodding eagerly.
Any second now, they’d be throwing themselves into hugs, sobbing onto each other’s shoulders, proclaiming, “Nobody understands me but you!”
“Can we get back to the story?” Chip interrupted. “That plane—was I on it? Was Jonah? Did it crash—is that why we’re listed as survivors? I’ll want to look at the records and find out where it came from, maybe talk to the pilot….”
Angela snorted.
“It didn’t crash,” she said. “But good luck finding any records. Or the pilot.”
“But—but—” Chip sputtered.
Angela’s look was sympathetic again.
“I’m willing to bet that you two were on that plane,” she said. “There were lots of babies. And if I was listed as a witness and you were listed as survivors—that’s the only thing I’ve ever witnessed where government agents got involved like that.”
“But— why were government agents involved?” Jonah asked. “A plane landed, it didn’t crash—big deal.”
Somehow, he could gloss over the whole appearing/ disappearing part of the story, just as he’d glossed over it when Katherine was telling about the vanishing man in Mr. Reardon’s office. He believed in ignoring unpleasant facts, in hopes that they’d go away.
“An unauthorized plane landed,” Angela corrected him. “That’s supposed to set off an alert for the entire airport. There’s a whole protocol to be followed in those situations that I, being new, forgot about. But when I heard the first baby crying…”
Me? Jonah thought. Was I crying?
“Wasn’t the baby with its parents?” Chip asked. “Or some adult?”
Angela looked him straight in the eye.