Chapter 27

Eve and Dom stand at the baggage carousel at Sydney Airport surrounded by people staring grimly at their phones and occasionally looking up to scowl when there are still no bags. Nobody smiles or congratulates them like they did in Hobart. Now their wedding clothes feel like Halloween costumes and it’s not Halloween. Nobody is thinking, Aww, young love; they’re probably thinking, Euuww, stupid losers.

Eve fiddles with her new wedding ring, yawns hugely, and only remembers to cover her mouth at the last second. She is so tired she could lie down on this grimy airport floor right now and fall asleep.

Dom is quiet, staring off into the distance with blank eyes. What is he thinking about? The thing about her boyfriend, not her boyfriend, her husband, is that he can seem perfectly fine, laughing and carefree, and then, snap ! He reveals something that has been on his mind for days, even weeks. It’s always a shock. Eve is never sure if he’s acting happy, or if he forgets about whatever issue is worrying him and then remembers it. Eve can’t hide her feelings. If there’s something on her mind Dom says, “Okay, what is it?” within about five minutes.

“Excuse me?” A girl in short shorts, with a long blond fishtail ponytail and thick black eyelash extensions, sidles up close to Eve. She tips her head toward Eve and talks in a low voice without moving her lips, like they’re trying to have a secret conversation in a school assembly without the teachers noticing. “Did that psychic talk to you too?”

“The lady? I don’t think she’s a psychic,” says Eve. She speaks normally, because she is older than this girl, and married, and she is not in a school assembly.

“Shhh,” says Dom, as if she is speaking too loudly or saying something offensive.

Eve lowers her voice. “I think that lady was just—”

“You look so beautiful, by the way,” the girl interrupts, and gently puts a fingertip to the lace on Eve’s sleeve. It’s an almost childlike move, as if she can’t help herself. “That lace! I love it so much!”

“Thank you.” Eve looks down at her dress. “It’s vintage.” Oops, she sounded too show-offy. “Secondhand.”

“I love vintage wedding dresses,” sighs the girl. “That’s the kind of dress I’d choose, when I get married, but I don’t even have a boyfriend right now, so I don’t know why I’m even telling you that! Anyway, you don’t think she was a psychic?”

“Definitely not,” says Eve. “Just a little…you know.” She looks about her, just in case the lady is actually here somewhere, waiting for her bag. She whispers, “Nutty.”

Eve puts the lady into the same category of person as Junie.

Most days Junie can be found drinking a lurid green slushie while sitting on the edge of the fountain outside the medical center where Eve works as a receptionist. She addresses everyone who walks by, as if they’re old friends in the middle of a conversation. Often in her lunch break Eve sits on the edge of the fountain and chats with Junie. You never know what Junie is going to come up with next: the moon landing was fake but aliens are real; some members of the Royal Family are definitely reptiles; Junie is under CIA surveillance, so she has to be really careful what she says; it’s hard to find comfortable shoes because she has very wide feet.

“Hey, so you remind me so much of this singer, that one dating—” begins Eve.

The girl’s face lights up. “I know who you mean, everyone keeps saying I look like her! It’s flattering. But I’m just boring old Kayla Halfpenny from Hobart.”

“Kayla Halfpenny actually sounds like the name of a famous person,” says Eve. It’s kind of true. Sometimes you say things that are kind of true to be nice.

“Oh, I don’t want to be famous!” Kayla shudders. “Anyway, I’m glad you don’t think she’s a real psychic, because that lady freaked me out so much. She told me I was going to die in a car accident. I got my license on the first go! I’m a good driver! I already have a super-bad fear of flying, I don’t want to get a driving phobia now!”

“Don’t worry,” Eve reassures her. “She told me I was going to die of intimate partner homicide.”

It takes a second for Kayla to decipher the phrase, and as soon as she does, her eyes fly to Dom. Her giraffe eyelashes flutter rapidly, like she’s maybe even scared, and poor Dom goes red and takes a step backward, nearly knocking into someone. Eve feels absolutely terrible. She needs to explain that Dom is not like one of those men, he’s into word games, he sings lullabies to his dog, he plays mixed netball, he absolutely respects women!

Eve tries to fix it. “Which is impossible, so that’s how I know she’s not—”

“Are you talking about that lady?” A woman in a leopard-print jumpsuit looks up from her phone. “She woke me up to tell me I was dying of alcoholism. I said, Excuse me! Rude! ”

Their conversation is a flame that catches alight and races through the crowd. Suddenly everyone around the carousel is chatting, sharing stories of their predicted lifespans, talking about “her creepy eyes,” and the “terrifying matter-of-fact way” she predicted deaths. Some people admit to being “kind of freaked out.” Others claim to not even remember what she predicted. (Like, seriously?)

Eve notices that Kayla is now talking to the super-tall skinny guy in the blue tracksuit pants and white T-shirt, and she’s touching her hair a lot, so that’s nice, like watching a romantic movie, but Kayla is kind of short, so Eve’s not sure how sex will work, and that is a really inappropriate thing to think, Eve, stop it.

“Psychics never tell people how they’re going to die,” says a woman, maybe in her thirties, with heart-shaped sunglasses on top of her head.

Her friend, who has a ridiculous large fake flower pinned in her hair, agrees. “Exactly. They consider that totally unethical. There’s no way she’s qualified. We tried to tell that to the guy with the broken arm sitting next to us. She made him cry. He couldn’t stop, the poor thing!”

Are there qualifications for psychics?

“Where is she anyway?” says someone. “Is she here?”

“She was the last one on the plane,” says a deep voice. It’s the big strong muscly guy with the army buzz cut, who looks like he could save the world all on his own. “She was sound asleep. Probably mental health issues. We should forget what she said. It means nothing. Nothing at all.”

There is a pause, as if everybody is thinking they have to do what this man says, because he’s in charge, but then they remember he’s actually not the boss of them, and they keep talking.

“I mean, it puts things in perspective, doesn’t it? I’ve only got nine years,” says a frizzy-haired lady, fiddling with her wedding ring.

“We are definitely checking our smoke alarms when we get home,” says someone else.

“Well, the first thing I’m doing is putting a call through to my accountant,” chuckles a man who looks like an accountant himself. “I wasn’t budgeting on living until ninety-eight!”

Dom doesn’t join in the conversation, just looks agitated, even as Eve tries to send him looks to tell him it’s okay, there is nothing to worry about.

Finally the carousel begins to move and the first bag makes its proud, disheveled appearance and someone swoops in for it. The excited flurry of conversation abruptly ends. Being reunited with their luggage seems to click people back into their lives, and they leave quickly, without saying goodbye to the people with whom they’d just been conversing so animatedly.

At last there is only Eve, Dom, and the elderly couple who look way older than Eve’s grandparents. The carousel is empty. Eve begins to feel panicky. Did they do something wrong when they put on their luggage tags?

They chat, although not about the psychic, thank goodness, because Eve feels embarrassed at the thought of talking to these people about dying when surely it’s on the cards for them, like, sooner rather than later.

They want to know all about the honeymoon plans and they tell Eve and Dom they got married young too. It turns out they are both retired doctors and Eve went to their medical practice when she was a little girl and lived in that area for a few years!

“Did it have a red roof?” she checks, and the doctors say it did, and everyone is amazed. She can sort of see their relatively younger, slightly less wrinkly selves in their wrinkly old faces, although she would never have recognized them if they hadn’t told her they were the Dr. Baileys. Doctors Brian and Barbara Bailey. Eve has a memory of her mother on the phone saying in a lowered voice, “I need Dr. Barbara this time.”

“Did we cure you?” asks the lady doctor.

Eve tells them there was never anything wrong with her, she regularly faked stomachaches. As she speaks, she remembers they were both super nice, with twinkly eyes, gentle hands, and gigantic jars of jelly beans on their desks.

“You were so generous with your jelly beans!” says Eve.

Dr. Brian Bailey holds up a finger: Wait. He begins rustling around in his pocket, and she thinks, Goodness, what is he doing? And she’s about to repeat what she’d said about the jelly beans in a louder, slower voice, in case he thought she’d asked for change or a tissue or something, and next thing he holds out a bag of jelly beans! “Take two! Take three!”

Eve is starving, so she takes three.

Dr. Barbara Bailey tells Eve to make sure she drinks lots of water on her honeymoon, and to go to the toilet straight after sex, because all her patients used to come back from their honeymoons with honeymoon cystitis, so that’s embarrassing.

Finally their bags appear, all at once, and Dom quickly grabs the elderly couple’s bag from the carousel before the man can protest. Eve is wondering if they should offer to take them somewhere because surely they are too frail to be out in the world on their own—someone might knock them over—but then a gray-haired woman in skinny jeans rushes toward them, calling out, “Mum! Dad! I’m such an idiot! I was at the other terminal!”

“It’s all right, darling,” says the old lady, and the old man says, “No, no, it’s got wheels, sweetheart, I can manage,” when she tries to take the bag from her father.

The daughter is still a daughter and the mum and dad are still a mum and dad! Even though they are all three ancient! Eve finds that quite profound.

Eve and Dom head out to the back of the taxi line, and Eve is pretty sure she sees “the lady” getting into a taxi, but she doesn’t tell Dom because he’s starting to look more cheerful, more like a guy on his honeymoon.

She is not going to say or even think another thing about those three awful, inaccurate, inconceivable words. She is locking them up in three separate boxes:

—

Intimate.

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Partner.

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Homicide.