Chapter 25

Leo waits at the Sydney domestic terminal taxi stand. He’s in a long line snaking back and forth as if for a Disneyland ride. The Lion King is over. His son just texted from the car on the way home to say the show was boring and Bridie forgot one of her lines. Brotherly loyalty.

His boss has texted twice and sent three emails. In one of them she said she hoped Leo’s mother had “recovered”; in another she said she hoped he was enjoying “his long weekend.” She also informed him that an already tight deadline had become even tighter: I know you’ll manage it, superstar! He feels the tightness of the deadline like a noose around his neck.

His seatmates, Max and Sue, had walked with Leo through the terminal and separated at the bottom of the escalators, as they had to go to the carousel to collect their bags.

“Memorable flight, eh? Don’t forget that hard hat, will you, mate?” Max had shaken Leo’s hand while Sue patted his arm and said, “Plenty more school concerts ahead of you, darling, you did the right thing taking your mum to the specialist. Don’t regret your life away.”

“Thanks, Sue.” He’d almost hugged her. She is more motherly than his mother. “Good luck with the cake!”

Max and Sue have to make a “Bluey” birthday cake for their grandson. Apparently Sue bakes, Max does “construction,” and they both decorate. They’d showed Leo some of their elaborate creations. The party kicks off at ten a.m. tomorrow! Leo is now fretting about their tight deadline in addition to his own.

He shuffles forward, wondering how much baking time the average cake requires. A guy in a high-vis vest with a whistle around his neck is wrangling the line. He says, “How many?” while holding up his fingers in a preemptive guess. “Two of you? Three?” He orders people to stand at different numbered sections. People stand at the wrong numbers and occasionally a driver leaps from his cab, yelling and gesticulating. The guy with the whistle yells back. High pressure. Leo would lose his mind.

“Excuse me?” Leo turns. It’s the young man with the sling. Also a day-tripper. They were on the same flight out of Sydney this morning. He’s memorable because of the injury.

“I think we were on the same flight.” He’s behind Leo in the line, but the line snakes back and forth so right now they’re next to each other, separated by the chain-link dividers. He’s in his twenties. Very cool-looking. Probably in web design or television production. Stylish glasses. They suit him. (Leo has 20/20 vision but sometimes wishes he needed glasses.) All his hair, of course, no doubt he takes it for granted. He looks tired. Dark shadows under bloodshot eyes. Probably out clubbing last night.

Leo knows what he wants to talk about.

“Delayed flight from Hobart,” agrees Leo.

“That lady say anything to you?” He lowers his voice on the word “lady.”

“Don’t take her seriously, dude,” says Leo, and is instantly appalled by his use of the word “dude.” Is he pretending he’s Keanu Reeves? He does, in fact, aspire to be more like Keanu Reeves. He seems very relaxed and possibly enlightened. Neve loves Keanu.

“No, I’m not,” says Cool Guy. “Just…you know, weird.” He gestures with his chin. “She’s back there.”

Leo turns. There she is at the back of the line, wheeling a small suitcase: innocuous, self-contained, sane. A grandmother who travels regularly. Not a fortune teller. Now that Leo is out of the claustrophobic airplane and back in the familiar bland world the sinisterness of her words has almost dissipated, like the way huge emotions produced by a movie or a concert fade.

He had discreetly observed her across the aisle after the flight attendant brought her back to her seat. She’d shut her eyes and had apparently fallen into a deep sleep because the landing wasn’t enough to wake her. Her closest seatmate, the man in the window seat, didn’t try to wake her either. As soon as the seat-belt sign went off he nimbly slid in front of her knees and out into the aisle. Just before Leo left the plane he glanced back to see if she’d woken yet, but her eyes were still shut as the passengers filed past, many of them giving her curious looks, but no one attempting to speak to her.

“Yeah, so she told me I was going to die in a fight when I’m thirty.”

“Don’t worry about it,” says Leo. “She told me I’m dying young too.”

The line is moving again so they are no longer parallel.

“Put it out of your mind!” says Leo over his shoulder as everyone steps forward. He’s nearly at the front of the line.

Cool Guy gives him a cool thumbs-up with his free hand. Leo wonders if it was his injury that caused the lady to choose that particular prediction for him. Did she honestly believe what she was saying? She seemed to believe it. He recalls the symbol on the lady’s brooch and how it had seemed weirdly relevant to him in some specific way: How could that be? Now he can’t even visualize it. Was it an infinity symbol?

She’s obviously too far away for him to see the tiny brooch from here. Theoretically, he could have leaned over, put on his reading glasses, and studied it when she was asleep on the plane, but he didn’t want to risk having an elderly lady open her eyes to the sight of a male passenger looming over her, staring at her chest.

The man in the high-vis vest holds up one finger.

“Just me,” agrees Leo, but then on impulse he looks back for Cool Guy. “Where you headed?”