A series of inevitably falling dominoes.
However, I was taught God gave us free will, and although I have complicated feelings about the existence of God, I believe in free will.
That man chose to drink and drive.
He could have stopped that last domino.
I hate him for making my dreadful prediction come true.
I hate him for making me accurate.
Chapter 64
Ethan is in his bedroom with the door shut, avoiding Jasmine’s buffoon of a new boyfriend, when the text comes from Leo.
He has him saved as Leo Anxious Flight Guy.
He texts old-person style. Fully punctuated sentences.
Hi Ethan, it’s Leo here, from the Hobart flight. We shared a taxi home. I just wondered if you had seen the distressing video doing the rounds on the internet? Wondering if it’s fake?
Ethan has seen it. He nearly scrolled past it, but something made him stop. Maybe he subconsciously recognized the girl from the plane. It seems genuine. He checked and found a Tasmanian news site reporting the accident. Woman killed, another in critical condition after two-vehicle crash. He suspects Leo knows perfectly well it’s not fake.
He answers: Yes. Very bad. Reckon pure chance lady got one right?
Leo answers: Yes. Not worried yet! Remind me when you turn thirty?
Ethan answers: Oct 1. Not long! Will be watching my back! When u 43?
Leo answers: Nov12. Keep in touch, mate.
Ethan can’t seem to make himself feel properly frightened. He’s still skeptical, or at least relatively skeptical. It just feels so unlikely he and Harvey would both die young. Wouldn’t that be too much of a coincidence? Statistically unlikely?
He thinks about a long-ago statistics class where the lecturer asked students to estimate how many people in the packed hall shared the same birthday. Nobody was even close. The lecturer said everyone always gets it wrong. They wildly underestimate the likelihood because people have a tendency to put themselves at the center of the universe.
It’s called “the birthday paradox.” You think, What is the probability someone else in this room will have the same birthday as ME? You don’t think of all the possible permutations.
In fact, there is close to a one hundred percent chance that at least two people will share a birthday when there are just seventy-five people in a room.
Ethan is not the center of the universe.
Harvey’s death does not make Ethan any less or more likely to die. Ethan’s chances of dying are just the same as they always were.
So that’s maybe sobering. But still, he’s not worried.
He hears Carter’s booming voice from somewhere in the apartment and shudders.
He picks up the grip-strengthening tool his surgeon recommended he use three times a day after his cast came off, and squeezes. Five seconds on. Five seconds off.
His wrist aches.
He hasn’t been diligent enough with his exercises.
Chapter 65
Accuracy has always mattered to me. As a child I often corrected teachers when they made mistakes. I thought I was being helpful, but my teachers were rarely grateful. The opposite.
“Did I ask your opinion, Cheryl?”
I’d say, “It’s Cherry, and no you didn’t ask my opinion, but you switched the nine and the six, sir.”
It perplexed me. Didn’t they want to get it right?
Accuracy is what made me, “the Death Lady,” go “viral.”
The same thing happened on a slower, more local scale to my mother when she transformed herself from ordinary Mae Hetherington to Madame Mae, the fortune teller.
Mum refused to touch a single penny of the life insurance money. She wanted nothing to do with it. She behaved as though it was somehow ill-gotten, as if Dad had robbed a bank, not insured his life.
People behave oddly when they are grieving.
Auntie Pat arranged for the money to be deposited in a bank account for “my future.” It wasn’t a life-changing amount. Even if Mum had used the money she still would have needed to find a way to support us. I guess she made a decision at some point, but she never actually said out loud: I’m going to become a fortune teller. It just happened.
She stopped borrowing romance novels from the library. Instead she came home with piles of books about “connecting with spirits,” “accessing your occult gifts,” and “interpreting tarot.” She studied them, as though for an important exam, taking copious notes.
She transformed the closed-off back veranda of our house into her “office.” She pinned cloth over the windows and set up three soft-lit lamps.
Mum knew the power of appearances. She created a “look”: shiny scarves, jangling bracelets, and dangling earrings along with bright red lipstick and plenty of black eyeliner.
