Gate B0
The B concourse starts at Gate B1. I know because at three in the morning, when I heard the announcement, I walked the whole length of it to check.
I’d been stranded by a thunderstorm. My connection to Raleigh was canceled at 10:40 p.m., along with every other flight out of the hub, and the airline offered hotel vouchers to the first forty people in line and I was number fifty-three. So I did what you do: found a row of seats near a charging station in the B concourse, used my backpack as a pillow, and tried to sleep under the lights. By two the concourse was nearly empty. A floor polisher hummed somewhere. The stores were shuttered behind their metal grilles. On the TV screens, a news channel ran with the sound off.
At 3:06, the PA chimed.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. This is the final boarding call for Flight 1150, nonstop service to Wilmington, North Carolina. All remaining passengers should now be on board at Gate B0. Gate B0. Thank you.
I sat up. I want to explain why that announcement went through me like a wire.
I grew up in Wilmington. In August of 1999, when I was nine, my father flew out of this same hub, on a business trip, he said, and called us from a pay phone at the airport to tell my mother his flight home was delayed. He said he’d be on the 1150 to Wilmington in the morning. He never got on it. He never came home. The airline said he never checked in for it. The police found his rental car in the long-term lot a month later with his suitcase in the trunk. He was never found. My mother waited eleven years before she had him declared dead.
I’ve flown through this hub maybe thirty times since. There is no Flight 1150 to Wilmington now. I checked, years ago, the way you check these things. That route ended in 2003.
I got up. I left my backpack. I walked.
The concourse looked the same as it had all night, long and bright and empty, the carpet that pattern of blue squiggles every airport seems to buy in bulk. I passed B4, B3, B2, the shuttered coffee place, the restrooms. B1, at the very end, by the windows, its gate lounge empty and dark, its podium screen off.
And past B1, where the concourse should have ended in a wall of windows looking out on the tarmac, it kept going.
I don’t know how else to say it. It went on. Maybe a hundred more feet of carpet, the same squiggles, though older and more worn, the colors a little faded. The lights were a warmer yellow. The ceiling was lower. There was a bank of pay phones on the wall, the old silver kind with the steel cords. And at the end, a gate. A podium, an agent, a glowing sign. B0. 1150. WILMINGTON. FINAL CALL.
It was full.
The seats in the lounge were the old kind, molded orange plastic bolted in rows. There were people in all of them, and standing in a loose line at the jet bridge door. Men in pleated khakis and big tucked-in polo shirts. A woman with a scrunchie and a fanny pack. Teenagers with enormous headphones on a cord. A man holding a newspaper, folded, the kind nobody reads at an airport anymore. Somebody’s cell phone was the size of a brick. Above them, on a boxy TV hanging from the ceiling, a news broadcast with the sound off, and the anchors had hairstyles I hadn’t seen since I was a kid.
Nobody was talking. Nobody was moving. The line at the door just stood, the way a line stands when boarding has been paused. It smelled like old carpet and cigarette smoke, which you couldn’t smell in an airport anymore, and coffee.
The gate agent saw me and smiled. She was young, with a blazer that had big shoulder pads, and a name tag I couldn’t read. She said, “Ma’am, are you on this flight?”
I said, “I don’t know.”
She looked at her screen. A big beige monitor. “Can I have your name?”
I gave it. She typed. She frowned a little, and typed again, and then looked up and said, very gently, “I’m sorry. You’re not on this one. But you’re listed as a contact for a passenger who is. Would you like me to page him?”
I couldn’t say anything. She took that as a yes. She picked up her handset, and the PA chimed, and her voice came out over the whole impossible gate, warm and patient:
Passenger Gerald Okafor-Hale. Passenger Gerald Okafor-Hale. Your party is here to see you at Gate B0.
My father’s name.
He was in the line. Fourth from the door. I’d been looking right at him. I hadn’t known him, because he was thirty-eight, and in my memory he was a giant, and here he was just a man, a little shorter than me now, in a short-sleeved dress shirt and a tie with a pattern of little ducks. My mother bought him that tie. He had his carry-on over his shoulder and his boarding pass in his hand.
He turned around when he heard his name. He looked toward the podium. He looked at me.
He didn’t know me.
Of course he didn’t. I was nine when he left. I’m thirty-six. He looked at me with the polite, puzzled face you give a stranger who’s staring, and then he looked at the gate agent for help.
I said, “Dad.”
He kept looking at the agent. He hadn’t heard me, or he’d heard and it meant nothing. The agent said, kindly, “Sir, she’s your party.” He looked back at me. Something moved in his face, very slowly, like a man trying to remember the word for something. He took a step out of the line toward me.
And every head in that gate turned to watch him.
All at once. Every passenger in every orange seat, every one in the line. They didn’t move anything else. They just turned their heads and looked at him, with nothing in their faces at all, and he stopped. And they turned, all together, and looked at me.
The agent said, “Ma’am. He can come with you, if you’d like. But someone will have to take his seat.”
She held out a boarding pass. Old paper stock, a long ticket with a carbon copy, the kind that tore in half. 1150. WILMINGTON. Seat 14C.
I looked at it. I looked at my father, who was standing very still in the middle of the gate with the patterned carpet under his shoes and the whole flight staring at him. He didn’t look afraid. He looked tired. He looked the way he’d looked when I was little and he came home late and sat in the car in the driveway for a while before he came inside.
He shook his head. Just a little. The way you’d tell a child not to touch something on a stove.
I didn’t take it.
I want you to understand that I’ve thought about that every day since. I didn’t take it. I turned around and I walked back up the concourse past the pay phones and the yellow lights, and the carpet got newer, and the ceiling got higher, and I was in front of Gate B1, dark and empty, facing a wall of windows with the rain running down them and the tarmac lights blurred beyond.
Behind me, very faint, the PA chimed. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Flight 1150 is now closed.
I got to Raleigh at noon the next day. I drove to my mother’s house in Wilmington that weekend and didn’t tell her anything. I asked her about the tie with the ducks. She cried. She said she’d buried him with an empty casket, and had put that tie in it, because it was his favorite and she couldn’t stand to look at it.
I fly a lot for work. I haven’t been back through that hub. I route around it, even when it costs me an extra connection.
It doesn’t help. That’s why I’m writing this.
I hear it in every airport now. Not often. Once every few trips, very late, when the concourse is nearly empty and I’m half asleep in a gate lounge. A chime. And a warm, patient voice, the same voice, a gate agent’s voice from twenty-five years ago, coming out of the ceiling speakers in an airport where nobody else stirs:
Passenger Imani Okafor-Hale. Passenger Imani Okafor-Hale. Your party is still waiting at Gate B0.
Last week in Phoenix, it said something new. It said, He’s saved your seat.