Chia had complained to Hester that the caps made them both look like meshbacks.
-Don’t be racist, Chia.
-I’m not.
-Classist, then.
-It’s a matter of aesthetics.
And now in the overheated cab, her one bag beside her on the seat, she felt guilt at this deception, her mother sleeping there be- 15 hind those darkened windows matted with frost, under the weight of her thirty-five years and the flowered duvet Chia had bought at Nordstrom’s. When Chia had been small, her mother had worn her hair in a long braid, its tip skewered with turquoise and abalone and carved bits of bone, like the magical tail of some mythical animal, swaying there for Chia to grab. And the house looked sad, too, as if it regretted her leaving, white paint peeling from the underlying gray of ninety-year-old cedar clapboards. Chia shivered. What if she never came back?
“Where to?” the driver said, a black man in a puffy nylon jacket and a flat plaid cap.
“SeaTac,” Chia said, and pushed her shoulders back into the seat.
Pulling out past the old Lexus the neighbors kept up on concrete blocks in the driveway.
Airports were spooky places, early in the morning. There was a hollowness that could settle on you there, something sad and empty. Corridors and people moving away down them. Standing in line behind people she’d never seen before and would never see again. Her bag over her shoulder and her passport and ticket in her hand. She wanted another cup of coffee. There was one back in her room, in the Espressomatic. Which she should’ve emptied and cleaned, because now it would go moldy while she was away.
“Yes?” The man behind the counter wore a striped shirt, a tie with the Air Magellan logo repeated down it diagonally, and a green jade labret stud. Chia wondered what his lower lip looked like when he took it out. She never would, she decided, if she had one of those. She handed him her ticket. He sighed and removed them from the folder, letting her know that she should’ve done that herself.
She watched him run a scanner over her ticket.
“Air Magellan one-oh-five to Narita, economy return.”
“That’s right,” Chia said, trying to be helpful. He didn’t seem to appreciate that. “Travel document.”
Chia handed him her passport. He looked at it as though he’d never seen one before, sighed, and plugged it into a slot in the top of his counter. The slot had beat-up aluminum lips, and someone had covered these with transparent tape, peeling now and dirty. The man was looking at a monitor Chia couldn’t see. Maybe he was going to tell her she couldn’t go. She thought about the coffee in her Espressomatic. It would still be warm.
“Twenty-three D,” he said, as a boarding-pass spooled from a different slot. He pulled her passport out and handed it to her, along with her ticket and the boarding pass. “Gate fifty-two, blue concourse. Checking anything?”
“Passengers who’ve cleared security may be subject to noninvasive DNA sampling,” he said, the words all run together because he was only saying it because it was the law that he had to.
She put her passport and ticket away in the special pocket inside her parka. She kept the boarding pass in her hand. She went looking for the blue concourse. She had to go downstairs to find it, and take one of those trains that was like an elevator that ran sideways. Half an hour later she was through security, looking at the seals they’d put on the zippers of her carry-on. They looked like rings of rubbery red candy. She hadn’t expected them to do that; she’d thought she could find a pay-station in the departure lounge, link up, and give the club an update. They never sealed her carry-on when she went to Vancouver to stay with her uncle, but that wasn’t really international, not since the Agreement.
She was riding a rubber sidewalk toward Gate 52 when she saw the blue light flashing, up ahead. Soldiers there, and a little barncade. The soldiers were lining people up as they came off the sidewalk. They wore fatigues and didn’t seem to be much older than the guys at her last school.