“Really?” It seemed too much to hope for.

  “There’s a direct flight from Burlington, and I’d be right there to meet you …”

  “I’m not scared.” It was a lie, but she needed to say it.

  “Good.”

  Mom hadn’t said anything about how much it cost, and she didn’t even have a job anymore. Maybe she didn’t know about the job yet, but still …

  “Gran wants you to have it for an early birthday present.” So they’d already discussed it.

  “Okay. When?”

  “As soon as we can arrange things, sweetie. Maybe next week at the earliest.”

  Next week sounded like forever, but still, it was sometime. She had to see Daddy, or what was left of him. Oh, God! Supposed she freaked out when she saw him all crippled and messed up? Maybe she shouldn’t go. Maybe if he saw her and she was all funny, he might get worse. Or just give up.

  “Birdie? Are you still there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought you wanted to come.”

  “I do. Really. It’s just—”

  “I know, sweetie. But it will be all right.”

  There she went, talking like a grown-up. “Yeah. Okay. Well—”

  “Bye, sweetie. I love you.”

  “Me too.”

  “Keep up those good prayers.”

  “Yeah. Well. Bye.” She handed the phone back to Gran, who was looking at her. Puzzled? Sad? It was hard to tell. Anyhow, she took the phone from Birdie’s outstretched hand and turned toward the window.

  Birdie didn’t wait to hear what Gran was saying to Mom. Birdie’s book was on the kitchen table. Gran had stuck in a torn-off bit of the grocery list tablet for a bookmark. Birdie picked it up and headed for her room. But before she began reading again and forgot to do it, she went to check on the Jesus shirt. It was now dry. She took it off the radiator and turned it over to the other side. With the shirt backside up, she didn’t see the bleeding heart anymore, but even the back was splotchy from the dye that had run into the water.

  I’m sorry. It’s not your fault. She wasn’t sure who she was talking to. Jesus, maybe?

  The airlines were knocking themselves out to be good to “our heroes.” They didn’t lower the price of the ticket actually, but they let Gran get a ticket for the following Saturday for the same price as if she’d booked three or more weeks in advance. Gran sort of snorted when she was telling Birdie about the exchange. “They were so almighty proud of themselves! You’d think they’d offered to send you first class on a private jet.”

  So Birdie was really going. She had to get herself ready. She wasn’t sure she was truly back to believing right, but she would begin to pray anyway. It was like life insurance. Just in case there really was a good God and He had sent Jesus to save Birdie from all her sins. When she took her Jesus shirt off the radiator, it was stiff as a board. She rolled it up to try to soften it, but it still felt scratchy on her bare skin. Never mind. It would loosen up. It was ugly now, but when she wore it under things, no one would see that she had ruined it.

  She lay awake for a long time that night. Her Jesus shirt was under her pajama top. She wanted to start praying again, but she had trouble remembering how to do it the right way. Gran had said there was no wrong way, but, Sorry, Gran, you are wrong about that. It probably comes from being a Congregationalist. Counselor Ron had warned them about liberal Christians like Congregationalists.

  Our Father, who art in heaven … Was God like a daddy, like her kind daddy, or was he more like the guy Counselor Ron talked about, like some really strict guy who had his eye out for everything you did wrong? Like someone who made Jesus die because somebody had to be punished for how awful everyone on earth was, from Adam all the way to her, Birdie, who didn’t pray right, didn’t believe right, failed her own daddy, and betrayed her best, well, her only friend?

  She could still hear Alicia’s voice full of anger and something more than anger. Have a nice life, Judas. Was it hurt? Had Birdie wounded Alicia? And forgive us our trespasses—She had asked Daddy on the walk home from church one Sunday what “trespasses” were. “Is it like you ran all over somebody else’s backyard?” That didn’t make good sense.

  Daddy had laughed. “No,” he’d said. “It means asking God to forgive the things you have done wrong. But that’s the first half. The second half says ‘Just like we forgive those who do bad things to us.’”

  “Huh?”

  Daddy had smiled and squeezed her hand. “God doesn’t want us just to love him; he wants us to love each other. And that means forgiving someone who hurts us.”

  “Oh,” she had said, as though she understood when she really hadn’t.

  But now, there was Jesus, whom she might really have hurt, and Alicia, who had lied to her and kept her from having other friends and was blaming her for everything. Well, Alicia had her favorite sweater. Not that Birdie had given it to her. “God loveth a cheerful giver.” She sure wasn’t cheerful about it, but she hadn’t tried to snatch it back. Maybe that sort of counted as forgiving Alicia for stealing it. Well, God, you can’t have everything! Birdie smiled despite herself.

  Maybe God thought it was funny, too. You never knew about God.

  She got through the week on all kinds of funny prayer and reading Opal’s story five times.

  Next to dogs, books were the best comfort. And if the dogs were only in stories or imaginary, books won.

  On Saturday one of Gran’s friends came to babysit Billy so Gran could take Birdie to the plane. He began to cry as soon as Gran put him in Mrs. Shelton’s arms. He reached his chubby arms out for Gran to take him back. Birdie’s heart gave a little twist. Poor baby. He knew awful things were happening, but he couldn’t understand them. Impulsively, she went over and took his hand and kissed it. “There, there,” she said. “Don’t cry, Billy Boy. Everything is gonna be all right.”

  She was sitting in her seat on the plane before she’d realized that she’d spoken like a stupid grown-up to her poor little brother.

  The airline people wouldn’t let Gran go past security, but they let Birdie get on the plane just after an old man in a wheelchair. The attendant helped Birdie find her seat and buckled her in. “You’re lucky to have a window seat,” she said. “It’s a beautiful day.” She put Birdie’s jacket and the little suitcase Gran had loaned her into the overhead compartment. “I’ll help you get these down when we land, don’t worry. Just sit back and enjoy the view.”

  Birdie wasn’t sure how enjoyable that would be. She didn’t even like to climb trees and look down. It would be scarier in an airplane to look down all that way.

  Before too long other people began to pile onto the plane. She hoped no one would sit next to her. She wouldn’t know what to say to a stranger. You really shouldn’t talk to strangers anyway. Good. Everyone was going somewhere else. But as soon as she thought that, a tall skinny man and a big round woman stopped right beside her seat. The man pushed Gran’s suitcase and Birdie’s jacket aside and stuffed two bulging bags into the overhead. They were so big he had to push and shove to get the lid shut.

  “Go on,” the man said, “sit down.”

  “Next to the kid? You gotta be kidding. She’ll probably throw up or something.”

  “Come off it, Eunice. She looks harmless enough. Right, kid?” He winked at Birdie.

  Birdie turned away. She wasn’t getting into that fight. She could hear them going on and on.

  He had to have the aisle for his legs. He knew the middle seat was the smallest, and still … A voice came over the loudspeaker. Until everyone was seated with their seat belts fastened, the plane could not push back from the gate. With one last humph, the woman forced herself into the seat next to Birdie. It was a good thing Birdie herself was small for her age because the woman’s thigh and bottom were all the way under Birdie’s side of the armrest.

  The woman said a bad word and pushed the armrest up so now she was practically sitting in Birdie’s lap. Birdie wasn’t going to look at the unhappy couple, and, with her seat belt fastened, she couldn’t reach her book or her diary. They were in her backpack under the seat in front of her. So there was nothing for Birdie to do but look out the window at the plane parked next to hers.

  She wondered if it was bigger or smaller. She tried to imagine who was sitting right there across from her. Maybe another scared kid. That would be nice. Then she wouldn’t feel quite so alone.

  She closed her eyes when the plane began to move. Dear Jesus, don’t let the plane crash and kill me. She meant to keep her eyes closed all the way to Washington, but she couldn’t even wait until takeoff. She squinted and watched as they rolled slowly down the field and then stopped. What was the matter? Was something broken? She leaned closer to the window and saw that they were in a line of planes. It would be forever before they even left the ground. So she left her eyes open, watching the stop and go of the planes in the line, wondering where they were all going.

  The woman next to her humphed impatiently. “Last time we’re taking this airline!” Only she stuck in a cuss word to describe the company.

  “Oh, hush,” her husband said. He must be her husband, although Daddy never talked to Mom that way.

  “I have a bad feeling about this flight,” the woman said. “I told you not to take this [another cuss] airline. They’re always crashing.”

  Birdie’s heart gave a little lurch.

  “Where did you ever get that fool idea?” the man said.

  “It was on Facebook,” she said. “A lot of people warned against …”

  “Oh, shaddup! You going to believe every stupid thing you read on social media? I ought to throw away your [cuss word] phone.”

  “I’ll show you!” The woman grabbed her purse out from under her seat. Birdie could see that she’d never turned her phone off. The attendant had told them to turn off “all electronic devices.” Sometimes when people didn’t turn off their cell phones it interfered with the pilot’s whatever. Birdie knew that for a fact, even though she had no idea where she had learned about it. Maybe the humphing woman had put it on airplane mode, but somehow Birdie doubted it.

  The woman’s elbow was jabbing into Birdie’s chest. The huge hand with rings cutting into the flesh of her fingers was shaking as she tried to find a website with the pointer finger of her right hand. See? She’d never put it in airplane mode.

  Was the woman shaking because she was scared? Birdie was surprised to see a grown person shaking like that, but that had to be it. The woman was more frightened than Birdie was. Birdie stuck her left hand under her sweater and pressed against her Jesus shirt. Her seatmates were too busy cussing and calling each other names to pay her any attention, so she left her hand there. It was almost like holding hands with Jesus.

  The plane made a turn until it was sitting on enormous white stripes painted on the tarmac. The engine roared and then began racing down the runway. With a thrill all the way to her toes, Birdie felt the huge noisy machine lift gently into the air, and then … they were flying, really flying. She pressed her nose against the glass. Below lay Lake Champlain, dotted with tiny ice houses and the pickup trucks of the ice fishermen. You guys better get off that ice! Didn’t they know it was almost April already?

  Next came the mountains across into New York and then nothing but clouds, fluffy as cotton balls. Every now and then there was a break in the clouds, and she could see lakes and hills and farmland, some brown, some smeared with patches of snow and miniature houses and barns and silos … She couldn’t have imagined such a lovely view. She wasn’t the least bit scared. She felt close to God this high with all the fleece of clouds and the beautiful world spread out below.

  And suddenly she saw something so wonderful, so amazing, so beautiful that she could hardly breathe. The shadow of the plane had fallen on the clouds below, and surrounding the shadow, like a many-colored halo, there glowed a rainbow.

  A rainbow was God’s promise to Noah that everything would be all right. She sat back against the seat. Her heart was beating fast, not with fear, but with a strange kind of excitement.

  When she could no longer feel her heart thumping hard against her chest, she turned toward the window. Once again, she was looking at farms and woodlands and tiny doll-like towns. The shadow on the cloud with its rainbow halo had disappeared. Maybe she had just imagined it. But even if it was just in her mind, she felt warm all over. Like God had sent her a secret message.

  After she saw, or maybe imagined, the rainbow halo, Birdie found that she was feeling brave, even a bit grown-up, so when the attendant came around, Birdie asked for a Coke. Mom really frowned on kids drinking pop. The attendant didn’t hesitate or wonder out loud whether Birdie’s parents would approve. She just smiled and stretched across Birdie’s two seatmates to hand Birdie a Coke with ice and a tiny bag of pretzels.

  The woman asked for gin, and the attendant said she was sorry, but they didn’t serve alcohol on these short hops. Then the woman said her favorite cuss word, banged down the armrest, and refused to take anything, even the pretzels.

  Now the woman’s big left hand was squeezing the armrest, the fingers weighted down by chunky rings. It was rude to stare, but Birdie couldn’t help studying the rings. They were all different shapes and sizes. Some were gold and others silver. One had a giant red stone and another a huge green one. Could they possibly be real? Or were they like Alicia’s Las Vegas costume—Halloween dress-up jewelry? The hand must have caught her looking because it pulled away, trembling, and went to the woman’s mouth.

  Although Birdie was feeling happy and brave, she didn’t feel brave enough to witness to the woman about Jesus and how he was always telling people to “fear not.” She was afraid the woman might say that awful cuss word about Jesus, and Birdie felt a need to protect him from insults.

  Jesus was being so kind to her right now, practically holding her hand while they sailed through the air close to heaven. Birdie had seen pictures of the sky, even photos from giant telescopes that showed exploding stars so far away that the fastest spaceships couldn’t reach them in anyone’s lifetime. God! God made all that.

  How could you not believe?

  And she’d had a … a vision of the plane surrounded by a rainbow. It didn’t matter if it was something nobody else could see. She could feel the thrill of her private vision all the way to her little toe. It had made her breathe funny. It took my breath away. She’d heard somebody, Mom, maybe, say that once about something. Now she knew what it meant. It did take your breath away—all that wonder.

  She ought to say something to the poor woman next to her. She opened her mouth to say something, but before she could form the right words, the woman jabbed her elbow into Birdie’s arm as she rooted around in her gigantic purse for something. Finally, she pulled out a brown leather container and unscrewed the top. She took great gulps of something inside.

  “How in the hell did you smuggle that on?” her husband yelped, almost knocking the container out of the woman’s hand. “Put it away! Now! You don’t want to arrive drunk!”

  “I need it,” she squeaked.

  He grabbed it from her. “Gimme the lid!”

  She fished into the purse for the lid without luck. She even stroked Birdie’s lap as though it might have fallen there. Birdie had trouble not shrinking away from the touch.

  The man grabbed the purse off his wife’s lap. There was the lid, nestled between the woman’s pant legs. He dropped her purse into his own lap, screwed the lid onto the bottle, and put it into his shirt pocket. “There,” he said. “Now just settle down so we can all get there in peace.”

  Birdie thought the woman might fight back, but she didn’t. She looked like she was about to cry as she pushed her seat back so far that the man behind her muttered something to his seatmate about blankety-blank selfish passengers.

  It didn’t seem like a good time to witness out loud, but Birdie was feeling so sorry for the woman that she wanted to do something. Maybe she could write her a note, like one from a secret pen pal. She unfastened her seat belt and slid down enough to stick out her toe and inch her backpack toward her with her foot. Then she pulled it up and felt around until she found a pencil that still had a point. She needed paper, so, reluctantly, she tore a back page out of her precious diary.

  Now what to say? She glanced over at her seatmates. The man had replaced the woman’s purse and put his seat all the way back. Birdie craned around so she could see them both. The man’s eyes weren’t quite shut, but he was staring at the ceiling, not at Birdie. There were tears glistening in the woman’s squinched-up eyes, and her makeup was streaked down her cheeks. Birdie really did have a mission here. She was sure of it. She licked the point of her pencil and began.

  Dear … friend? Friend hardly seemed the right word. Dear—She gave up and scratched out the Dear. Jesus is your friend. That was true because Jesus loved everybody, especially the “least of these,” and that awful man had made his wife feel like the very least. Jesus says Fear not. Was that enough? She felt the woman shift. It had to be enough.

  Now, where to put the message so the woman would come upon it? It would be great if she could put in into the woman’s purse, but the man had shoved it back under the seat where it belonged.

  Try as she might, at first she could think of no way to get the purse out and slip the note in it without being caught. And knowing that man, as by now she surely did, he’d be yelling at the attendant to call the police, and how, then, would Birdie explain she was putting something into the purse, not taking anything out?

  The loudspeaker warned that they would be landing in about twenty minutes, so she had to act quickly, before the couple sat up. She checked to make sure neither of them was looking her way. Then, feeling like a sneak, Birdie undid her seat belt and leaned forward. Whew! The gigantic purse lay open. She stretched until her hand was over the edge of the purse and dropped in the note.

  Just in time. The man was bringing his seat forward. Birdie sat back and quickly refastened her belt. She didn’t dare look at the man, but she was conscious of his leaning forward and pulling his wife’s purse out from under her seat and looking inside. He pulled the gilt fastener over and snapped it shut before putting the purse back in place. Then he punched the woman and told her to sit up.