The children are asleep.
Paula and Matt are watching a brooding Scandi series. It feels like they’ll never finish because each night they have to rewind it after one of them falls asleep and wakes to confusing plot developments the other one can’t satisfactorily explain.
Paula looks over at Matt stretched out on the opposite couch. Sure enough, he’s sound asleep, his forearm across his forehead, his chest rising and falling.
She pauses the show, presses the link on her phone.
It’s a video of the side profile of a very upright fair-haired young woman behind the wheel of a car. The person filming is next to her in the passenger seat. It seems to be a small car. There isn’t much space between them.
The person filming says, “Why are you driving so slowly today, Kayla?”
The girl doesn’t glance sideways. Her focus is all on the road ahead.
Her hair is in a sleek low ponytail with a ruler-straight center part. Her eyelashes are long and Bambi-fake, her skin young and dewy, and she grips the steering wheel so hard her knuckles are white.
“Because yesterday I turned nineteen,” she says without turning her head.
“And why does that mean you have to drive so slowly people keep honking their horns at us?”
“Nobody is honking at us,” says the driver.
The girl filming whips the phone in front of her own face. She’s a dark-haired, dark-skinned version of the driver: exact same hairstyle and curly long eyelashes.
“They totally are,” she whispers, and returns to filming the driver. “Why are you driving like a senior citizen, Kayla? What is your totally rational explanation for this?”
The driver still doesn’t look at the camera. She checks over her shoulder to change lanes. “Three months ago, I flew to Sydney—”
You were on the flight, thinks Paula.
“Which you were really chill about.”
“I was not chill, I have a super-bad fear of flying, it’s a phobia, and this was my first time flying on my own—it was only my second time on a plane—and there was this psychic on board and she said—”
“Wait, do they offer psychics on all flights these days?”
“Shut up.” Kayla grins. “Anyway. She told me I was going to die in a car accident when I was nineteen, so I’m driving extra-extra cautious until I turn twenty. Just, like, as a precaution.”
She bites her lip, stops at a traffic light, waits a moment, and then turns to face the camera. She is very pretty. Big guileless cornflower-blue eyes.
Paula doesn’t recognize her. There are only three faces she can remember from the flight: her Scottish seatmate, the beautiful Indian flight attendant who suffered the consequences of Paula’s bad parenting, and the lady herself.
“Because I don’t want to die.” Kayla pulls a mock “dead” face: eyes crossed, tongue out, head on one side. She is adorable.
Paula has been so obsessively worried about Timmy that she has not given a thought to anyone else on the same flight who also received a scary prediction. It’s easy to be cool and rational when scary things happen to other people. She should get in touch with Kayla, tell her, sure, it’s a good idea to drive carefully, but don’t worry, there is no evidence anyone has the power to see the future.
“Why don’t you just stop driving?” asks the girl filming.
“That’s what Mum said, she’s like, Kayla, just stay off the roads altogether until you’re twenty, and I’m, like, Yeah, thanks, Mum, I’d rather be dead.”
Paula feels a throb of sympathy for the mother.
“I mean, what am I going to do? Stay home for a year? I’ve got to live my actual life, and we live in the sticks.”
“Totally. Oh, and what else happened on that flight, Kayla?”
Kayla giggles. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Once again the friend speaks into the camera. She whispers, “She got a boyfriend. Six foot six! Like a giant. A skinny giant. But a hot skinny giant. I’m jealous! Looks like a basketball player but he’s not.”
The traffic light turns green. Kayla looks straight ahead. She drives forward.
The other car appears like the sudden leaping, snarling attack of an animal.
It collides without mercy into the driver’s side of the car.
Kayla’s careful hands fly from the steering wheel.
Crash of metal against metal.
Kayla’s shoulder slams sideways toward the camera and the vision becomes choppy and blurred, as if the phone has been knocked out of its owner’s hands.
There are quick flashes: Strands of Kayla’s blond hair. The side of her face? The stitching of a seat. Someone’s flesh. Then fuzzy gray material, as if the phone has landed face down in the passenger footwell. The sound of someone’s ragged breathing.
The video stops abruptly. The screen goes black.
Matt sits up, rubbing his eyes. “What is it? What happened? What are you looking at?”
Paula can’t speak. There is no air in her lungs.
