The Timeline

19.

December 14th, 2014:

Until she had landed at the JFK Airport, Claire hadn't truly believed she would actually go to New York. She kept on thinking something would've happened that would've prevented the trip to actually happen: she kept waiting for her flight to be delayed or canceled; she kept waiting for the pilot to inform that he wasn't actually going to New York, but rather to some fuck-ass destination like an unknown island in the North of England; she kept waiting for the plane to start going down once it had finally gotten up in the air to fly; she kept waiting for the plane to crash when they were preparing to land.

None of that had happened.

Instead, the flight had been amazing, no turbulences, Claire had napped for a bit, then had ate breakfast - airplane food was still bad, but at least this time it was first-class bad - and then she had watched a movie on the back of her seat, inside of a built-in television. She had never watched a movie while being on a flight. For a short second she had wondered if she would've been able to also use WiFi on that plane, then she had taken a step back and told herself that would've been too much.

The JFK airport was the main  serving New York City, the busiest of the seven airports in the New York Airport System, the 13th busiest airport in the United States, and the busiest international air passage gateway into North America. Located in the Jamaica neighborhood of Queens, 16 miles southeast of Midtown Manhattan, the airport featured five passenger terminals and four runways, containing 130 gates in total. The terminal buildings, except for the former Tower Air terminal, were arranged in a deformed U-shaped wavy pattern around a central area containing parking, a power plant, and other airport facilities. The terminals were connected by the AirTrain system and access roads.

Claire's plane landed at Terminal 7. She should've felt cranky and tired after an 8-hours-flight; instead, she felt full of life and excitement, the feeling rising inside of her stomach like those bubbles of oxygen that would break through the surface of the ocean, growing as they went up, up, up. She was the fastest of the passengers to get up, grab for her handbag, say goodbyes and thank yous to every flight attendant that had served her, and get down from the plane. She hopped on the shuttle bus that was waiting for her and the rest of the passengers and cursed them all for being so bloody slow!

It was 9AM in New York, and people around her, inside the airport, were having breakfast among themselves. The air was full of the sweet smell of sugarcoated food, coffee and warm milk. She made her way to the baggage claim area following the instructions of a smiling guard and waited patiently for her suitcase to appear.

Harry had given her instructions for when she would've landed. First she had to get her baggage; then she had to make her way to the arrivals area where she would've been waited on by a person from Harry's trusted team (he had told her she would've recognized the person); then she would've been escorted somewhere calmer where she could've had breakfast (a real one, not an airplane one) and she would've waited for him to land.

Once having gone through the procedure of being formally admitted into the country of The United States of America, Claire followed the various directions to get to the arrival's area: she had been in big airports, but the JFK looked like it had been built and renovated to appear massive. One thing she liked about it was the fact that it had many windows and glasses to let in natural light. Seats were big, charts were bigger, ads and shops were gigantic. Everything in America, so far, seemed to be so much bigger than it was in cranky old London. And everything felt incredibly new.

Claire had a little bump to each of her steps, the contentedness she had felt once the airplane's doors had finally opened only settling more into her cells as she kept on walking. Wherever she looked and heard, she could hear American accents. She had had a whole class about American accents, and could replicate one quite well, except that she found them funny. They were so much laxer and lascivious than British ones: whereas British ones felt very aristocratic, Americans were more of a relaxed and informal shape in her mind. Her class about American accents had also explained why. Maybe she would've shared the fact with Harry, once she would've seen him, if she remembered to do so.