Clara Tanner knelt in front of her daughter, pressing the busyness of the airport out of her peripheral vision. “Lena,” she said. “Look at Mom.”
The twenty-year-old clutched her stuffed elephant, her eyes blitzing all over the place. This man. That woman. The television screen with the news playing on silent, the captions running along the bottom.
Everywhere but at Clara.
“Lena.”
Her daughter had been born with Down Syndrome. She possessed the chubbier cheeks classic of those with the mutated gene, and she was lovable, bright, and still very much a child. So much of her world had been upended in the past couple of weeks, and Clara reached way down deep for her extra reserve of patience.
“Lena, we have to get on the plane soon. I need you to look at me.”
Lena finally brought her hazel
