miami, florida
august 2005
Fat drops of rain splashed the steamy tarmac. Through the floor-to- ceiling airport windows, thunderheads loomed above the lush landscape.
Now boarding. Flight 1107 to Buenos Aires.
Rachel hurried through the loose crowd toward the announcement. Her connecting flight from JFK had been delayed. She navigated around passengers at a neighboring gate, where a young mother corralled her toddler as she rushed by. The gate agent repeated his announcement in Spanish. When she dug into her tote bag for her boarding pass, her hand brushed the silk binding of her blanket and a wave of relief washed over her.
She reached the gate and scrambled to open her passport, then paused, momentarily distracted by her own photo. Her closed smile, dark hair just past her shoulders. She smoothed her thumb over the surface of the image. This little blue booklet could validate her identity to anyone in the world, but it held no answers as to who she really was.
Attention passengers, please move quickly to your seats once on board. We’re going to try to get out ahead of this storm.
Maybe the plane would crash. Maybe this was the bargain she was making with God for challenging the official version of the truth without having complete certainty.
She let out a shaky breath and surrendered her boarding pass to the gate agent.
“Have a nice flight, Miss Sprague.”
Here name sounded forced, a staked claim. Outside the window, the asphalt darkened with each new drop. She wondered what she would find if this plane landed in Argentina and who her biological father was if she and Mat didn’t share the same father. Perhaps he’d been a member of the junta. Perhaps her life had begun under the vilest circumstances imaginable. She shut her eyes tightly. Rachel needed to get closer to that place. It was going to hurt, but it was the most necessary thing she’d ever done in her life.
She closed her passport and reached down to touch her blanket again, rubbing its fabric between her fingers for comfort. Raindrops pelted the roof of the jet bridge. Rachel stepped carefully along the thin carpet of its metal floor, aware of the distant ground below, of the predicament of being suspended only tenuously above the earth’s shifting surface, and of moving forward anyway.