Chapter 6

What the actual? The tendons in Sue O’Sullivan’s neck scream as she twists her head too fast to see what the crazy lady is doing now.

“Ow.” She faces the front again.

Sue is an emergency room nurse, a mother of five adult sons, and a grandmother of three beautiful little girls and four beautiful little boys. She is the sort of person who regularly says, “Heard it all, seen it all” because she has heard and seen it all, but this is the first time a stranger on a plane has calmly informed her she only has three years to live.

She wouldn’t have lasted long in her line of work if she took words to heart. She deals with angry, violent, distressed, drunk, high, and psychotic people every day. They spit terrible insults at her, along with the occasional sexually charged death threat. Water off a duck’s back. Sticks and stones.

She is, however, feeling the most foolish desire to run after this lady and demand another prediction, please. A nicer prediction.

Sue’s plan is to retire at sixty-six, not to die at sixty-six.

She and Max have never left Australia before. Sue hasn’t seen it all. She hasn’t seen a damned thing! A whole planet of castles and cathedrals, paintings and sculptures, mountains and oceans waits to be seen and admired by Sue and Max O’Sullivan. They’re feeling especially positive right now about their future travel prospects because if they can so successfully drive a camper van around Tasmania, why not drive one around France? Why not Italy ? They can drive on the wrong side of the road! They’re pretty sure they can!

And now she hears there will be no trip because she is very shortly going to get very sick with pancreatic cancer.

The bad one. They’re all bad, but that one is really bad. Hard to catch early. Outcomes are not great.

It’s not true, of course, but it’s a chilling reminder that people with plans get sick. Specialists hand out cruel diagnoses every single day. Things that happen to other people can also happen to her.

“I think she’s doing predictions for the whole plane,” says the man in the aisle seat beside her. He turns to face Sue and she meets his eyes for the first time. It’s as though she has suddenly become a real person to him. He’s been an annoying seatmate up until now: wriggling and jiggling like a toddler, tapping his fingers on his thighs, avoiding all eye contact and making it very clear he is very important and very late (yes, Mr. Important Man, we’re all late!) and therefore not up for achat.

“Should we call a flight attendant?” Sue asks him, always best to keep Mr. Important Men feeling important by asking for their opinions.

“Maybe?” says the man, at the same time as Max says irritably, “Just ignore her.”

Max is spinning his phone in rapid circles against his armrest. He’ll crack the screen in a moment. All very well for him. He’s been given decades to live. It’s Sue and this twitchy guy who are apparently living on borrowed time.

Sue looks for her favorite flight attendant, a stunning glossy-haired young woman called Allegra (Sue always reads name tags) who had chatted charmingly with them during the delay. She’d prefer to catch Allegra’s eye than push the call button like an entitled “Karen.”

She hears, “I expect cardiac arrest. Age ninety-one.”

Sue twists farther to look, but she’s not tall enough to see properly.

“I expect Alzheimer’s. Age eighty-nine.”

The lady’s tone is increasing in confidence and volume with each prediction.

Fragments of mildly bemused conversation become audible over the roar of the plane. Nobody sounds too worried.

“She’s got Alzheimer’s?”

“She was saying something about urine before.”

“Maybe needs the bathroom?”

The lady’s voice again, almost triumphant: “I expect drug-induced death. Age thirty-seven.”

“I’m twenty-seven, not thirty-seven.”

“Bro. She’s not saying your age. She’s saying that’s when you’ll die of a drug overdose.”

Sue unbuckles her seat belt.

“Sit down.” Max pulls her sleeve as she stands up and faces the back of the plane. She brushes him away and hops onto her seat on her knees. The advantages of being of small stature.

“The seat-belt light is on,” says Max.

“It is not!” She looks down the length of the plane, noting those passengers with whom she and Max chatted in Hobart. There’s the pregnant woman who had to take off her shoes going through security, poor thing. Sue helped her out. It’s the woman’s first, she’s feeling great except for heartburn, doesn’t know the gender. From the way she’s carrying the baby, all out in front, Sue predicts a boy. (She has an unblemished record on gender predictions.)

Farther back in the exit row is the very tall, lanky young man who is not a basketballer. Sue’s boys all got that same awkward, sheepish look when they suddenly shot up: I don’t know how I got all the way up here! Sue chatted with him and the big, military-looking guy with the buzz cut in the news agency. She assumed at first they were father and son, but soon worked out that they were not. As Max pointed out, not all tall people are related.

She can’t see the poor young mother with the baby and toddler, but wow, they sure did hear that baby! Oh, wait, there’s the sweet young girl who shook so badly when she was checking her bag she dropped her phone twice. Max picked it up for her, both times, and it didn’t take Sue long to learn the poor child was terrified of flying and this was her first solo trip. Her name is Kayla. Sue knows a middle-aged Kayla who runs a rescue shelter, and told Kayla all about her, which gave Kayla the opportunity to show Sue photos of the puppy she got for her eighteenth birthday, so hopefully that distracted her.

The person in the middle seat directly behind Sue, whose brutally hard kneecaps have been intermittently digging into her lower back, doesn’t see Sue. His attention is on the lady as she says to him, “I expect unintentional injury. Age seventy-nine.”

The man’s eyebrows pop. “You’re injured?”

“Cause of death, age of death, as I think I’ve said, multiple times now.”

Sue can’t help but smile at her restrained tone. It’s the tone of a professional woman with a job to do, dealing with people who don’t listen. Sue knows the feeling.

She had not noticed the lady at the airport, but now she observes her as if she were triaging a patient who presented in the ER. Eyes clear but sunken, lips dry and chapped. Dehydrated? Sue would guess she is in her early seventies. Young for dementia, but it’s a possibility. Not agitated, violent, restless, or confused. Nothing to indicate substance abuse. She looks ordinary and familiar and nice, like someone Sue would know from aqua aerobics or the local shops. Her blouse is beautiful. White with small green feathers. It’s the sort of blouse that would appeal to Sue if she saw it on a rack, although she probably couldn’t afford it. If they’d been seated together Sue would have complimented her on it.

“I expect.” The lady points at a frowny fortyish woman wearing one of those wildly colored sequined caftan-type tops. She looks more like a fortune teller than the lady. “Pneumonia. Age ninety-four.”

Sue feels resentful. Why does caftan woman get ninety-four? She doesn’t look especially healthy. Sue would put good money on hypertension.

The lady moves farther down the aisle and Sue can no longer hear her over the roar of the plane.

Caftan woman looks up at Sue. “Do we know what that was all about?”

“She’s predicting deaths,” explains Sue.

“Oh, good for me. What about you?”

Sue pretends not to hear. She sits back down and refastens her seat belt. The man behind her is digging his knees even harder into her lower back. She can hear him saying, “So, wait, she’s saying I’m living until I’m seventy-five? Is that what she said? Or was it seventy-nine?” As if he doesn’t want to miss any extra years he’s owed.

“You know she’s talking gibberish, right?” Max puts his hand on Sue’s thigh. “Don’t get your knickers in a knot.” His hand feels too heavy. “She does not have access to our health records. Unless she’s a cyber hacker, of course. Always a possibility these days.” He laughs hollowly.

“Well, she might be a psychic,” says Sue. “Or think she’s one.”

“You don’t believe in psychics.”

“How do you know?” says Sue, just to be difficult. Max often blissfully assumes their politics, memories, food and television preferences will align, and mostly they do, but not always! They’re different people!

“Have you ever been to one? No. You have not.”

“I have, actually,” says Sue. “I had my cards read. We all did it for Jane’s fiftieth.”

“Well, did those cards say anything about you getting…whatever she said?” asks Max. He doesn’t want to say the word “cancer.” Whenever he hears of a serious diagnosis, the first involuntary expression to cross his face is pure revulsion. Fear disguised as disgust.

“No,” says Sue. It was more than ten years ago. The tarot card reader sorrowfully predicted that Sue’s husband would have an affair with a short Italian woman in the next year. Sue never told Max. She didn’t want to put any ideas in his head. She just upped the sex, kept him busy. Just in case. He’d seemed pleased. She may well have changed their destinies.

“There you go then,” says Max.

“Well, I’m sure there are good and bad psychics,” says Sue. “It’s not an exact science.”

Max bangs his phone on his armrest. “It’s not a science at all!”

“Okay, keep your hat on.”

Suddenly she gets it: Max is trying to convince her not to be upset because he’s upset. Her husband is a self-employed plumber, the most practical of men. He can fix and build anything, from a cubbyhouse to a cake to a grandchild’s “working model of the digestive system” due the next day, but he cannot bear it when there is something to worry about but nothing to be done, no way to fix it.

He’s secretly worried the lady actually does know something about their future. Max’s feelings always manifest as something different, like the way pain in the neck, jaw, or shoulder can mean a heart attack. It’s been this way from the moment they met forty years ago, when a fair-haired, big-shouldered boy marched up to her at a church youth group and brusquely asked if she’d like to see a movie with him, please. To this day, she doesn’t know why she said yes, because it seemed like someone was holding a gun to his head, his expression was so unfriendly. It wasn’t until she said yes that his whole face transformed. “Really?” He smiled like a loon, revealing the famous O’Sullivan dimples he would pass on to all five of their sons and two of their grandchildren. “ Really? I thought for sure you’d say no.” She was a goner from the moment she saw those dimples.

“No one can see the future,” frets Max.

Oncologists can, thinks Sue. Oncologists, neurologists, cardiologists, hematologists. All those damned “ologists.” They’re the fortune tellers. They don’t read your cards, they read your blood tests, your scans, your genetic tests, and see terrible things in your future.

“I’m not dying at sixty-six, darling.” She pulls the in-flight magazine from the seat pocket in front of her and points at the advertisement on the back page. “We’ll be swanning about Europe.”

“Exactly.” Max’s shoulders drop. “Poor old girl is unhinged.” He holds his phone over the magazine and snaps a photo of the river cruise ad. “One of those cruises might be fun. We could work that into the itinerary.”

He leans forward to address the man sitting next to Sue. “Not worried about your ‘workplace accident,’ I hope, mate? Don’t believe in psychics, do you?”

“Not really,” says the man. “But I guess I might take extra care at work next year. I turn forty-three in November.”

“Do you have a dangerous job?” asks Sue.

“Civil engineer.”

“Better keep that hard hat on then,” says Max.

“Oh, well, I’m mostly at my computer, but yeah, sure, might be a good idea to—” He cups his hands over his head and pretends to duck from a flying object.

“Sorry we haven’t introduced ourselves,” says Sue. “I’m Sue, and this is Max.”

“Leo.” The man leans across Sue to shake Max’s hand.

There is silence for a moment. Leo plucks at the fabric of his pants. Max clasps his hands over his stomach. A bit too much good eating and good wine in Tasmania. Lots of salads on the menu this week. Sue traces the letters of the alphabet in the air with her right foot. She tore a ligament in her ankle many years ago and tries to keep up her strengthening exercises whenever she remembers.

Now Leo turns sideways to face Sue formally, as if they’re at a fancy dinner party and he’s now addressing the guest to his left. He has lovely green eyes. Sue stops her ankle exercises and smiles. She feels maternal toward him as well as a mild attraction. It’s disconcerting how often that happens these days.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been good company,” he says. “I’ve missed my daughter’s school musical because of the delay.”

“Oh, no, ” says Sue. “That’s bad luck.” She pats his arm. Forgets the attraction and goes full-on grandma. She’s had him all wrong. He’s not Mr. Important Man, he’s a stressed young dad. “How old is she?”

Before he can answer, a troubled youthful voice rises over the plane’s hum. “Wait, you expect what ?”

“Okay, so I think we definitely need to—” begins Sue, but Max and Leo are already reaching for their call bells.