Chapter 117

After we scattered Ned’s ashes, I flew back to my strange lonely new home with no idea that all those passengers were leading lives clouded and complicated by my predictions.

Grieving is hard for a task-focused person. You can never wrap things up.

One day I had a sudden memory of Auntie Pat saying to my mother, in the months after Dad died, “You need to try some kind of new activity, Mae, something you have never done before.”

Mum took up fortune-telling, which is not what Auntie Pat meant at all. She meant a hobby.

So I looked up activities at my local community center. I tried line dancing, a philosophy club, a Knitting for Beginners course. I hated them all. Why did I think I would suddenly become a dancer, a philosophy student, or a knitter? It was like I thought grief had given me a new personality. It had not.

Then I tried aqua aerobics.

I loved it. I liked exercising in water, I liked the music, I liked the energetic young instructor bouncing on the side of the pool. I told her she reminded me of the vibrant rock star Pink and she seemed pleased.

I chatted to other members of my class as we dressed afterward in the change room, and one day a woman called Mira, who I had taken against ever so slightly because the buoyancy of her breasts reminded me of Stella, and she wore high heels to aqua aerobics, which I found ridiculous, mentioned that some people got together for coffee afterward.

I must have looked horrified because she said it wasn’t compulsory, and then I felt embarrassed and explained I’d only recently lost my husband.

“Ah,” she said, and do you know what she did?

She came over and wrapped her arms around me. I hadn’t quite finished dressing. She was fully dressed and in her high heels. (I think she actually can’t walk without heels.)

She smelled of a beautiful fragrance. She said, “I know what this time is like.”

I did not know how badly I needed this.

She became my new friend.

Friends can save your life.

It was a few weeks before we realized how close we lived to each other, and of course we were amazed, although it was statistically likely seeing as we had met at a local aquatic center. I can see into her backyard from my house. She was the woman who waved at me from her back veranda the day of the flight. We can walk to each other’s homes.

Her husband had died two years before and she said she still felt angry at times about all the plans they had made that would never come to be.

We both agreed we were not “merry widows”—we would never be merry about the loss of our beautiful husbands—we were “angry widows,” and we joked about forming an Angry Widows Club. (I do not want to form a club of any sort.)

Mira said her husband had worked so hard, all his life, long hours in his own jewelry store, and she used to tell him he was a workaholic, and he would say he would rest when he retired.

She said her son was turning out to be just like his father, nothing but work work work, but her daughter-in-law, who she loved, although she wore the ugliest shoes you have ever seen, was trying to convince him to give up work for a year and move to Tasmania, and she thought he might have agreed, fingers crossed.