She found me odd. “So you’re saying you really don’t want to be a math teacher?”
“That’s what she’s saying, Mum,” sighed Jack.
“But what else can you do with a math degree, Clever Clogs?” That’s what she called me. I called her Mrs. Murphy. I said I’d find something to do with my math degree.
I don’t know if Jack loved me more than God, but I know he loved me. I still have the cards and notes he wrote during that time, in which he told me I was “his girl” and he was “keeping me forever” and “his heart belonged to me.” His handwriting was beautiful. His spelling was not the best.
After my mother died I found a drawer full of notes my parents had exchanged from when they first met. I still have them too. There are notes about how excited they were about their upcoming wedding and then the arrival of the new baby (me). There are apologies for unspecified misdemeanors: I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Some are suggestive. Even raunchy. I will protect their privacy by not repeating them here.
Some are sad, because they had both wanted more children but never got them. Dad wrote, It doesn’t matter, we already hit the jackpot first time round.
To be clear: He meant me. I was their jackpot.
Jack wanted four children: two girls and two boys.
He said their names would be Harry, Henry, Helen, and Hope. I don’t remember why all their initials had to be H. He just found that funny. I laughed along although I didn’t really get it.
I will be honest: I think if I’d had the capacity to look deep into my heart back then, I would have found that I didn’t actually want any children, let alone four of them, but I had no idea it was possible or permitted for a woman to feel that way. Everyone wanted children. I just assumed Jack would make children fun and bearable, in the same way he made parties fun and bearable.
My dad carefully dated each of his notes. My mother drew tiny love hearts all around the borders of hers. It seems like theirs was a happy marriage, perhaps the perfect marriage, but obviously I don’t have all the data. There is a lot I never knew and can never know.
Marriage is a mysterious institution, even from the inside.
Sometimes it can feel like a softly furnished minimum-security prison.
That was my experience anyway.
Chapter 78
It’s an icy gray Sunday in Hobart and Paula sits in the driver’s seat of her car, parked a short walk from St. David’s Cathedral, and considers going home and giving this spot to someone more deserving, like someone who actually knew Drs. Barbara and Brian Bailey, and is attending their joint funeral to mourn their deaths and celebrate their long lives, and not for her own strange, selfish reasons.
She is early. The funeral doesn’t start for another twenty minutes, although she can already see people walking along the footpath with that somber well-dressed look that says funeral, not celebration. Paula is wearing an old work suit.
Matt has the kids. He thinks she’s meeting a friend for coffee. Not worth explaining her rationale in being here. He refuses to talk about Timmy’s prediction. He says there is nothing to talk about because he doesn’t believe it. Her husband’s dogged refusal to have even one word spoken about the psychic in his presence is, frankly, almost as strange as her own behavior. It’s like he thinks talking about it will make it come true, which makes him just as superstitious and weird as her.
Of course, he didn’t notice she was overdressed for coffee.
Paula had no interaction with the elderly doctors on the flight, although they boarded early together as they belonged to the special category of “Passengers with small children or anyone requiring assistance.” She thinks the old man may have smiled at her children.
She slides her stockinged feet back and forth in her sensible kitten heels and yawns. She was up till four a.m. last night trawling through psychic websites, looking for the lady, looking for that damned familiar yet strange face. No luck.
When she covers her mouth with her hand she smells chlorine. Timmy is now enrolled at three different swim schools. He does six lessons a week, all of which require her to get in the pool with him, because he is a baby. Timmy is happy. He loves every opportunity to get in the pool. Willow only does one swimming class a week and she’s happy to go to the pool center childcare, thank goodness. On the two days Willow is at preschool, Paula takes Timmy for two lessons: one at ten a.m., one at two p.m. He sleeps so well.
Her thoughts spool endlessly: Where will it happen? Pool? River? Ocean? How will it happen? How can I stop it? How can I prepare?
The only time her mind is truly at rest is when she’s in the pool with Timmy, watching him effortlessly “self-rescue,” watching him not drown, watching him float so peacefully, so confidently, his face dreamy, as if he’s back in the womb.
“Wow, he’s a true water baby!” people say, and Paula says, “He sure is!”
Paula picks up her phone and calls her sister.
“Just hold on a sec,” says Lisa. Paula waits while she yells her order at a McDonald’s drive-thru, changing her mind, umming and ahhing. She is surely driving the poor order-taker mad.
Paula rests her head against the window. She can just see the entrance to the cathedral from where she is parked. Strangely, this is the second time she has been to a double funeral at this church. Last year she went to support a friend, a work colleague who had lost both her parents in a car accident. It was another driver’s fault, just like in the case of the young girl from the flight.
That was a desperately sad funeral and Paula nearly made herself sick trying to hold it together, imagining the stares. Why is she crying, she never even met them! Surely she won’t feel like that today, when the two doctors are so much older and died of natural causes.
“How are you?” says her sister, with her mouth full, presumably of fries.
“How could you be eating fries at this time of the day?” asks Paula.
“Why not?” says her sister. “Life is short, and I don’t need to fit into a wedding dress anymore. What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” lies Paula.
“You never do nothing,” says Lisa suspiciously.
“Are you driving?” asks Paula, imagining her sister distracted by her fries and Paula on the phone.
“It’s fine, I’ve pulled over,” says Lisa. “Everything okay?”
“I was just thinking,” says Paula.
“Oh, dear,” says her sister.
It bursts out of her. “I was just thinking that if Timmy drowns when he’s seven I’ll be too old to have another baby and Willow will be an only child.”
“He won’t, I promise you. This is really terrible, it’s upsetting how this is affecting you, Paulie.”
