“Okay, that’s enough,” says Ethan. “You’re deluded, mate. We’re leaving.”
“Or maybe you didn’t, but you wanted to, didn’t you, you badly wanted to, sitting there in your room—” He uses his fist to make a crude gesture.
Ethan has never felt rage like it. Carter is contaminating this night. This perfect night.
He feels Faith’s hand on his arm, pulling him away. “Let’s go, Ethan.”
“Yeah, nice to see you, Ethan!” Carter calls after them. “Say hi to Jasmine, Ethan!”
“Don’t look back,” says Lila, and it seems like they are free, they are walking away from the bar toward Circular Quay, weaving in and out of the crowd, but then Ethan knows somehow he should turn and time slows right down, and this is it, it’s happening. Carter is coming for him, like he’s wanted to do for so long, fist clenched, elbow back, and Ethan has never been punched, guys like us don’t get into fights, will it hurt? Will he fall and crack his head? It happens, Dad, nice guys sometimes die in fights they don’t start, then white-feathers-flapping-squawking the seagull is flying straight at Carter’s murderous face, as though Carter’s head is a French fry it’s determined to steal, and the guy with the bird patrol dog says, “Oh shit!” and the dog bounds forward as Carter staggers back, thwarted.
“Run!” says Lila.
“Thanks, Harvey!” calls out Faith.
They’re running under the silver moonlight and the city lights reflect off the shimmering harbor and Ethan isn’t dead, he’s alive, he’s so amazingly, gratefully alive, and he doesn’t remember it happening but Faith seems to be holding his hand.
Chapter 117
After we scattered Ned’s ashes, I flew back to my strange lonely new home with no idea that all those passengers were leading lives clouded and complicated by my predictions.
Grieving is hard for a task-focused person. You can never wrap things up.
One day I had a sudden memory of Auntie Pat saying to my mother, in the months after Dad died, “You need to try some kind of new activity, Mae, something you have never done before.”
Mum took up fortune-telling, which is not what Auntie Pat meant at all. She meant a hobby.
So I looked up activities at my local community center. I tried line dancing, a philosophy club, a Knitting for Beginners course. I hated them all. Why did I think I would suddenly become a dancer, a philosophy student, or a knitter? It was like I thought grief had given me a new personality. It had not.
Then I tried aqua aerobics.
I loved it. I liked exercising in water, I liked the music, I liked the energetic young instructor bouncing on the side of the pool. I told her she reminded me of the vibrant rock star Pink and she seemed pleased.
I chatted to other members of my class as we dressed afterward in the change room, and one day a woman called Mira, who I had taken against ever so slightly because the buoyancy of her breasts reminded me of Stella, and she wore high heels to aqua aerobics, which I found ridiculous, mentioned that some people got together for coffee afterward.
I must have looked horrified because she said it wasn’t compulsory, and then I felt embarrassed and explained I’d only recently lost my husband.
“Ah,” she said, and do you know what she did?
She came over and wrapped her arms around me. I hadn’t quite finished dressing. She was fully dressed and in her high heels. (I think she actually can’t walk without heels.)
She smelled of a beautiful fragrance. She said, “I know what this time is like.”
I did not know how badly I needed this.
She became my new friend.
Friends can save your life.
It was a few weeks before we realized how close we lived to each other, and of course we were amazed, although it was statistically likely seeing as we had met at a local aquatic center. I can see into her backyard from my house. She was the woman who waved at me from her back veranda the day of the flight. We can walk to each other’s homes.
Her husband had died two years before and she said she still felt angry at times about all the plans they had made that would never come to be.
We both agreed we were not “merry widows”—we would never be merry about the loss of our beautiful husbands—we were “angry widows,” and we joked about forming an Angry Widows Club. (I do not want to form a club of any sort.)
Mira said her husband had worked so hard, all his life, long hours in his own jewelry store, and she used to tell him he was a workaholic, and he would say he would rest when he retired.
She said her son was turning out to be just like his father, nothing but work work work, but her daughter-in-law, who she loved, although she wore the ugliest shoes you have ever seen, was trying to convince him to give up work for a year and move to Tasmania, and she thought he might have agreed, fingers crossed.
Chapter 118
One November morning, seven months after the flight, and about a week before the anniversary of Ned’s death, as well as the deaths of Jill and Bert, someone knocked on my door.
I considered not answering it because I was not doing well that day.
You may know this and I’m sorry if you do, but there is a feeling you experience as the anniversary of the death of a loved one approaches. Your body seems to know it before you do. It is something to do, perhaps, with the weather, the flowers that bloom, a certain smell in the air, and you begin to feel a sense of anticipatory loss, almost fear, as if it’s going to happen again.
I opened the door and found myself face-to-face with a man’s torso.
I looked up. Farther up. He was a tall, muscled man with a gray buzz cut. The man who helped me with my bag on the plane. He resembled an older version of “Thor,” the fictional superhero portrayed by the astonishingly attractive Australian actor Chris Hemsworth.
His name was not Thor. He introduced himself as “Ben,” but I got the feeling it wasn’t his real name, so let’s call him Thor.
He gently told me what I’d done on the plane and seemed unsurprised when I said I had no memory of it. I pressed my hand to my mouth as he spoke. It was the same sick shame I used to feel when people told me about my drunken behavior at those rooftop parties. In spite of my shock, I never suspected Thor was lying. It all made sense. I remembered the expression on the beautiful flight attendant’s face when we landed, how she’d treated me as if I’d had some kind of medical episode. I remembered how the little boy had been staring back at me, and children rarely show an interest in me. Also, there was something so eerily familiar about what Thor described—not that I suddenly remembered my actions, but as if I could remember once dreaming them, and who else but me would talk of “cause of death” and “age of death”?
He seemed to already know everything about me: my career, the loss of Ned, even the loss of Jill and Bert. I believe he is a retired intelligence officer of some sort, although he is vague about the details.
He said he’d been following the story and was becoming increasingly concerned. He said I’d correctly predicted three deaths and now there had been a fourth.
