The lady unbuckles her seat belt and stands.
She is a lady about to get something down from the overhead bin. Or a lady about to head to the toilet. She is of no consequence, no concern, no interest, no danger.
She bows her head and presses a fingertip to the tiny brooch pinned to her blouse.
She steps into the aisle and doesn’t move.
One person notices.
—
That person is a forty-two-year-old civil engineer with heartburn and a headache.
Leopold Vodnik, just Leo, never Leopold, to everyone except his maternal grandmother who is dead and an old university friend long gone from his life, is seated in 4C, directly across the aisle from the lady.
Theirs is the first row in the main cabin. They face a wall with a sign that declares Business Class Only past This Point. A curtain is discreetly drawn across the aisle to conceal the luxury lifestyle on offer just a short distance away.
Leo looks like he belongs in business class. He is an olive-skinned man of medium build, with a large, definite nose and a high forehead that ends abruptly in a shock of mad-professor gray-speckled dark curly hair. One of his sisters recently sent him an article about scientists discovering the gene for “uncombable hair syndrome.”
He wears a blue linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, gray chinos, and suede boots. His wife says he dresses better than her. (Not hard. Neve mostly dresses in the heedless, mismatched manner of someone who recently survived a natural disaster.)
Leo has spent the entire flight chewing antacids, massaging his forehead with his fingertips, and checking and rechecking the time.
It’s all over. He must face facts. His eleven-year-old daughter’s school musical is due to begin in five minutes. He will not be there because he is here: thirty-five thousand feet in the sky.
“Obviously I’ll be home in plenty of time for The Lion King,” he’d told his wife when he’d first raised the possibility of flying down to Hobart to take his mother to a specialist’s appointment.
“Unless your flight back is delayed,” Neve had said.
“It won’t be,” said Leo.
“Knock on wood,” said Neve, without knocking on wood.
It kind of feels like the delay is her fault. Why even mention the possibility? He is meant to be the pessimistic one in their relationship.
Who could have predicted a two-hour delay?
Neve, apparently.
Leo checks the time once more. Right now, he should be shivering in his daughter’s school hall, hissing at his teenage son to put away his phone and support his sister, exchanging good-humored banter about the arctic air-conditioning with the other parents, whispering to his wife to please remind him of Samira’s dad’s name, telling Samira’s dad they must have that beer soon, which they both know will never happen because…life.
His head pounds with remorse. The lights are going down right now. The curtains are opening right now. He leans so far forward in his seat he is virtually in the brace position.
There is no one to blame but himself. Nobody asked him to do this. His mother said, Please, Leo, don’t waste good money on a flight for just one day. His three sisters had not been grateful to him for taking on this familial duty. The opposite. They’d accused him of martyrdom on the family WhatsApp group.
But he’d had a strange strong feeling that something was not right with his mother’s health and that he should be there to hear what the specialist said.
When his dad first got sick two years ago, he’d been distracted. He’d just started at his current position and work had been all-consuming. It’s still all-consuming. He doesn’t know how to stop it from consuming him.
And then: the strident ring of his phone ripping him from sleep at five a.m. and his mother’s voice, so loud, assured, and awake. “You and your sisters need to get on a flight right now.” She the grown-up, he the mumbling, half-asleep kid. “What, Mum, what, why?” He hadn’t even properly processed the fact that his dad was seriously ill, let alone the possibility he might die, which he did, that day, while Leo and his sisters waited at the carousel for his middle sister’s bag: she’d checked a bag.
Ever since, he’s felt as though if he’d just concentrated more, if he hadn’t been so focused on his work, he might have saved his dad. He is the oldest child. The only son. He is determined to get everything right with his mother.
So much for strange strong feelings. The specialist took five minutes and charged three hundred dollars to announce that Leo’s mother was in perfect health.
Leo isn’t disappointed by his mother’s good health.
Of course not.
Look, truthfully, he is kind of annoyed by his mother’s good health. It would have been gratifying if she’d been diagnosed with something serious but curable.
Also, painless. He loves his mother very much.
“Oh, well,” Neve said when he called about the delay. At that point he’d still thought he’d make it, just a little late. He’d seen himself sprinting from the gate, line-jumping at the taxi stand—he would have broken his own moral code for his daughter! But then the plane continued to sit sullenly on the tarmac while the pilot made his infuriating intermittent “apologies, folks” messages and Leo lost his damned mind.
“There’s nothing you can do.” Neve didn’t say I told you so. She never did. That was her power move. “Bridie will understand.” He could hear Bridie in the background: “That better not be Daddy saying he’s running late.”
He has been helping Bridie rehearse for weeks. “It’s a small but significant role, Daddy,” she’d told him solemnly when she first came home with the script, and Leo had avoided Neve’s eyes because Bridie is sensitive to shared parental smiles. She is playing “Zazu” (now, right now). Zazu is “a prim, proper hornbill bird,” and the way Bridie instantly embodied the role was miraculous. She has gestures! Prim, proper gestures! She is Meryl Freaking Streep. She is that objectively good. Forget Mufasa. Forget Simba. Zazu will be the shining star of tonight’s performance. Leo fully expects Bridie to receive a standing ovation. And he is missing it.
This is the sort of mistake people regret on their deathbeds.
He exhales noisily, sits back in his seat, and clicks the buckle of his seat belt open and shut, open and shut. The woman next to him lifts her head from her magazine and Leo locks his hands together. He’s being annoying. It’s the kind of thing his fourteen-year-old son would do.
His heart jerks at the thought of his son. For months now, he’s been promising Oli they will do that beautiful national park walk they love, next Sunday, but it’s always “next Sunday” because Leo so often needs to work on weekends, and this Sunday he’ll need to catch up on everything he missed doing today, which does not, by the way, make him a “workaholic,” just a guy with a job.
His boss believes it’s important to achieve a healthy work-life balance. “Family always comes first, Leo,” she said, when Leo mentioned he’d be taking today off, but one of Leo’s key performance indicators is his “utilization rate.” This is a measure of how many billable hours he logs each week compared to how many hours he has worked. His utilization rate is always in his thoughts: it’s a buzzing mosquito he’s not allowed to kill. Sometimes he works a fourteen-hour day but only bills eight. It’s tricky. Life is tricky. He just needs to get a handle on time management. His boss, who has an interest in the topic, gives him book and podcast recommendations as well as useful tips. He’s been working for Lilith for three years now. She’s an impressive, inspirational woman in a male-dominated profession and he’s trying to learn from her the way he learned from his very first boss, who would return Leo’s drawings covered in red ink, which drove Leo crazy but ultimately made him a better engineer. Lilith recently told him the first step to improving productivity is a “comprehensive time audit,” but Leo hasn’t had time to do one.
Oli doesn’t even look disappointed anymore each time Leo says, “Maybe we’ll do the walk next weekend.” He just responds with a cynical thumbs-up like he’s dealing with a retailer’s recurring broken delivery promises.
