Chapter 35

The first liquid notes of a soulful cover of “Can’t Help Falling in Love” trickle through the church, and all the wedding guests turn to see the tiny flower girl standing in the vestibule, illuminated by the molten light of a perfect April afternoon.

You would not believe this was the same sticky whiny child who threw up over a flight attendant eight days ago. Willow’s face is creamy with self-satisfaction because she knows she looks like a princess. She wears a crown of white flowers in her hair, a royal-blue sash, and a full tulle skirt. She holds a basket of rose petals over one arm.

She walks slowly and deliberately down the aisle. She has been told not to rush and she has taken this instruction to heart. Every few steps she stops, pauses, smiles demurely, before taking a handful of petals and letting them fall one by one to the ground in front of her like she’s trickling sand through her fingers.

“We’re going to be here all day,” says Matt in Paula’s ear, glowing with pride, handsome in his best suit, with a blue tie to complement the wedding “color palette.” He holds Timmy, who is dressed in a miniature little white dress shirt and blue bow tie and has one arm curled possessively around his dad’s neck.

Willow is followed by three bridesmaids in slinky royal-blue dresses, with spaghetti straps, updos, spray tans, but who cares about them, Paula will only drag her eyes away from the flower girl for the bride. And here she comes, her little sister, luminous, radiant, perfect in every way, even though she didn’t choose the dress Paula preferred, which would have looked even more perfect. Paula’s face is already aching from smiling so hard. She watches their dad pat Lisa’s hand in the crook of his arm and remembers her own wedding five years ago (no color palette, Paula has never been as fashionable as her sister), and she thinks about Willow walking down the aisle one day in twenty years or so, on Matt’s similarly crooked arm, and in scuttles the thought, before she can stomp on it: Will there be a toast at Willow’s wedding for the bride’s little brother who so sadly, tragically drowned when he was just seven years old?

She sees the sorrow dragged like claw-marks down the lady’s face.

As if in anticipation of Paula’s future pain.

Where does Paula know her from? Where, where, where? And will it help if she works it out? It feels like it should come to her at any moment, the way a missing word or name appears like magic when you give up and stop thinking about it, but she is Paula, so she never stops thinking about it.

She has told no one about what happened. Not even Matt when he arrived last night. “Put it right out of your mind,” said her Scottish seatmate, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to do that, but she was determined to keep the awful prediction a secret so as not to cast any shadow over her sister’s wedding. She knows the worried glances that would be shared, not because her family would be worried about the prediction itself, but because they’d be worried about Paula’s reaction to it. She is meant to monitor her stress levels the way a fair-skinned person should monitor the UV index.

Willow, nearly at the front of the church, catches sight of her parents, and her face lights up with delight and surprise, as if she’d forgotten they’d also be in attendance.

Matt turns to say something to Paula’s mum and Timmy chooses that moment to leap without warning from Matt’s arms into hers, with absolute confidence his mother will catch him, which she does.

—

Later, at the wedding reception, speeches and toasts done, Matt on the dance floor with Willow, Timmy asleep in his stroller, Paula chats to a random cousin of the groom who is starting her own personally customized jewelry business.

“My clairvoyant says it’s a good idea,” she says as she shows Paula photos of her (dreadful) creations on her phone. “I never make a significant life decision without first consulting her.”

Well, Paula is on her second glass of champagne and she doesn’t drink much these days. She’s out of practice. Her head is happily swimming and it is physically impossible not to share the story of what happened on the plane.

The random cousin listens. She purses her lips.

“You think I should be worried?” asks Paula.

“Well, sometimes they mean things metaphorically.”

“How do you metaphorically drown?”

The cousin doesn’t know.

And then it turns out that the person on the other side of Paula has been eavesdropping the whole time and next thing everyone at the table is weighing in on the story, and regrettably, Matt first learns of the prediction when a drunken bridesmaid throws her arms around him (hussy) and tells him she is so, so sorry about Timmy.

He is justifiably annoyed that Paula hasn’t told him this story earlier and that so many other people know before him. She doesn’t have a good answer.

Matt wants to know why Paula was talking to this lady in the first place.

“I wasn’t talking to her!” says Paula. “I told her I didn’t want my fortune told.”

“So you were talking to her.” He is a lawyer too. When they argue they look for holes.

Paula tries to explain that it happened so fast, she was trapped in her seat, what was she meant to do?

“Where were the flight attendants?” asks Matt.

“Well, where were you ?” says Paula, which doesn’t even make sense because it had always been agreed that she would go ahead to Sydney a week before the wedding so there would be time if Willow’s dress needed alterations.

“Anyway, it’s nothing to worry about,” says Matt, already snapping out of his bad mood. He is good at that. “We shouldn’t…make a thing of it.”

“I’m not.” Irritation swells. He means “you” shouldn’t make a thing of it.

“What’s this nonsense I hear about Timmy?” It’s her dad. Bushy gray eyebrows forming a V shape.

Paula sees herself, at seventeen, holding the sharpest kitchen knife to his neck in a sweat-slicked hand, while the spaghetti sauce simmered on the stove.

“Bit closer,” said her dad.

“Trust the science,” said her mum.

“My turn next,” said her sister.

Just another wholesome family memory.