“Two.”
She’s harmless! Of course she’s harmless.
You can’t get weapons through security anymore.
And women don’t hijack planes.
Is that sexist? He hears his youngest sister: I could hijack a plane better than you, Leo.
No doubt about that.
Leo clears his throat. He is going to ask the lady if she’s okay. That is the correct, most appropriate action.
“Excuse me,” he begins, “are you—”
“Three.”
The lady turns, stretches out one arm, and points directly at the passenger seated in the window seat of her own row, a wiry fiftyish man hunched over a laptop, pounding the keyboard with two fingers.
“I expect,” says the lady. She pauses, still pointing straight at the man. It’s as though she is accusing him of something.
She expects what?
“I expect catastrophic stroke.”
The man looks up with a distracted frown and cups a hand to his ear. “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that?”
“I expect catastrophic stroke,” she says again, diffident but definite, still pointing. “Age seventy-two.”
The man’s eyes dart about. “I’m sorry, catastrophic…? I don’t…How can I help?”
The lady says nothing. She drops her arm, pivots, and turns to face Leo’s row.
The man meets Leo’s eyes across the aisle. His mouth turns downward in faux alarm to indicate Bit weird! Leo grimaces sympathetically. The man shrugs and returns to pummeling his laptop.
Leo is calm now. No need for crash-tackling. He understands dotty old ladies. She is a welcome distraction from his misery over missing the musical. He knows how to handle this.
Leo’s grandmother suffered from vascular dementia in the last years of her life and the family was advised to play along with her alternate reality wherever possible and safe. For someone as “uptight” as Leo apparently is (that word gets thrown his way a lot, thrown quite hard), he was unexpectedly flexible when it came to going along with his grandmother’s delusions.
He will play along with whatever role this lady requires. “Catastrophic stroke”: Did that mean she’d once been a doctor or a nurse? He remembers hearing about a retired doctor with dementia who spent his days diagnosing his fellow nursing-home residents. He walked around with what he thought was a prescription pad, efficiently scribbling out the same prescription for antibiotics.
“I expect,” says the lady. She points at Leo’s seatmate, Max, who is busy taking a photo out the window of the airplane.
Max turns from the window, grins, ready for a chat. “Eh? What’s that, love?”
“I expect heart disease,” says the lady. “Age eighty-four.”
Max frowns. “Heart…? Didn’t quite catch that, love. Hard to hear over the engine!” He nudges his wife for help.
Sue smiles brightly at the lady and raises her voice. “Sorry, we didn’t quite catch that?”
“Heart disease,” repeats the lady, louder this time. “Age eighty-four.”
“You’ve got heart disease?”
“No! Not me! You!”
“No problems with my ticker.” Max bangs a closed fist hard against his barrel chest.
“Age eighty-four,” says the lady. “As previously stated.”
Max gives his wife a baffled look and Sue steps in, as good wives do, to rescue husbands from confusing social situations.
“I’m so sorry,” she says. “Did you recently lose someone?”
The lady appears exasperated, but her tone is tolerant. “Cause of death. Age of death.”
That’s when it clicks for Leo. She’s not diagnosing, she’s predicting.
“ ‘Cause of death, age of death,’ ” repeats Sue carefully. She puts her hand on the buckle of her seat belt. “Okay then.”
“Holy guacamole,” says her husband.
The lady points at Sue. “I expect pancreatic cancer. Age sixty-six.”
Sue laughs uneasily. “You expect pancreatic cancer? As my cause of death? Goodness. At sixty-six? You expect that for me? No, thank you very much!”
“Don’t engage.” Max lowers his voice and taps his forehead. “She’s not quite…?”
