The Boy Who Crossed the Hangar First
The hangar
I want to tell you what it is like, in case you have never been to one.
It is a giant, open building, with a concrete floor that has been swept clean and painted lines where the planes would park.
The big doors at the far end stand open, and the afternoon pours in white. There are bleachers, and folding chairs, and a rope line strung across the middle on metal stands, and behind the rope line there are a few hundred people who have not slept right in six months.
There are little flags everywhere. Somebody hands them out at the door. There are balloons tied to strollers and wrists. There are grandmothers in folding chairs and wives in their good clothes and little kids in flag T-shirts who cannot hold still. There are babies who have never met their fathers.
I wore my navy blouse, the nice one, and my hair down because Ryan likes it down. I had June on my hip in a white top with pink flowers, her sandals kicking against my leg. Mason stood right next to me at the front of the rope in his navy T-shirt, holding the sign flat so it would not bend.
I took the day off. We got there at eleven because I could not stand being in the house anymore. By noon we had been standing at the rope for an hour. Mason had asked me what time it was eleven times. June had eaten an entire bag of Goldfish crackers and was working on my car keys.
I kept looking back at the doors behind us. The ones we had come in.
Courtney was not there.
At twelve-fifteen somebody near the front said the plane was down. A cheer went up and then it got quiet again, because now we had to wait for them to turn in their weapons and do all the things soldiers do before they are allowed to be people again.
At one o’clock Courtney was still not there.
Mason did not ask about her. That was the thing that got me. He did not ask once. He just held his sign under his arm and looked at the bright open end of the hangar like they were going to come around the corner any second, which they were not, and then they did.
One twenty-two
A roar went up at the far end, and then there they were.
They marched in a column, in their OCP uniforms, in step, faces straight ahead. The noise in that hangar was something I cannot describe. It was a few hundred people yelling and crying and clapping all at once, and it bounced off the metal ceiling and came back down twice as loud.
I could not find Ryan. I looked and looked. They all looked the same, the same uniforms and the same haircuts and the same packs, and my eyes were already wet and I could not see straight.
“There,” Mason said. He was not yelling. He said it quiet, like he was telling me a secret. “Third row. On the end.”
He was right. Third row, on the end. My husband, thinner than when he left, with his jaw set and his eyes moving across the crowd, looking for us.
They halted. They faced the crowd. A colonel stepped up to a microphone and said some words, and I am sure they were good words, but I did not hear a single one. I was watching Ryan’s eyes go row by row through the crowd, and then they reached the front, and they found me, and then they found Mason, and his face broke.
The colonel said something about how the families had served too. Then he said the words everybody was waiting for. He released them.
The rope dropped, and the whole crowd surged.
I had thought about this moment for six months. I had thought about running to Ryan, and kissing him, and putting June in his arms for the first time in half her life. I had thought about it so many times that I could see it with my eyes closed.
I put my hand on Mason’s back instead.
“Go,” I said. “You first.”
He looked up at me. Just for a second.
“Go on,” I said. “He’s yours. Go.”
And he went.
He ran across that hangar floor with his sign held out in both hands, his sneakers slapping on the concrete, his buzz cut just like his dad’s, and the sign shaking so hard you could not read a word of it.
He ran past a grandpa in glasses and a woman with a little flag and a little girl with a balloon, and he did not slow down at all.
Ryan dropped to one knee on the concrete and opened his arms.
Mason hit him so hard they both nearly went over. The sign crumpled between them. Ryan wrapped both arms around his son and put his face in the boy’s neck and did not move.
I stood at the front of the crowd with June on my hip, crying, smiling so hard my face hurt, and let them have it. All of it. As long as they needed.
June pointed and said, “Da.” She had not said it in months.