All the Way Back
The seat came back so fast it hit my belly.
We were maybe four minutes off the ground. The wheels had just thumped up into the plane. The seatbelt sign was still on. The woman in 26E pressed the button on her armrest and threw her whole body back against her seat like she was diving into a swimming pool.
The top of her seatback stopped two inches from my chest.
The middle of it pressed right into the top of my stomach. Into my son.
He kicked. Hard. Right where the seat was pushing. Like he was trying to push back.
I put both hands on my belly. I tried to pull myself back into my own seat. There wasn’t anywhere to go. I was already against the back of 27E as far as I could get. My knees were jammed against her seat pocket. My feet were trapped under the seat in front of me, on top of my backpack, because there was no room anywhere else.
I couldn’t open my tray table. I couldn’t reach the bottle of water in the seat pocket. I couldn’t move my legs.
I could barely breathe.
I was thirty-four weeks and five days pregnant.
I was in a middle seat, row twenty-seven, on a five-hour flight from Phoenix to Raleigh. The last seat on the earliest flight I could get.
And six weeks before that, I’d buried my husband.
I sat there for a minute. Breathing shallow. Trying to find some way to shift that didn’t press my son harder into the seat.
The man on my left, in the window seat, was asleep already. A big guy in a Diamondbacks hoodie with his head against the window and his earbuds in. The man on my right, in the aisle seat, was older, with reading glasses on, doing a crossword in the in-flight magazine. He glanced at the seat in front of me. Then at my belly. Then he looked back at his crossword and didn’t say anything.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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