Chapter 96

Paula plays with her children on the living-room floor like a regular loving engaged mother. Dinner is in the slow cooker, the washing machine whirs in an industrious duet with the dishwasher. These are the precious moments that make up a life! All her thoughts are acceptable and pleasant. All her actions are normal and nonrepetitive. She is not obsessing. She is living in the present and she is not thinking about the fourth death, not at all.

“What a dee-yight-ful cup of tea.” Willow doesn’t sit, she crouches down on her haunches and purses her lips as she sips from a tiny plastic teacup: a regency matriarch in pigtails.

“Do you need more sugar, madam?” Paula’s role in these games is often unclear. Sometimes she is a fellow guest but often she’s the maid. She needs to be ready to pivot.

“Oh, yes, please, madam.” Willow holds out her cup.

Timmy commando-crawls beside them, grunting with effort like a wounded soldier. He is much more graceful in the water than on land, but he’s missing today’s lesson because he has a head cold. Paula can see snail trails of snot on the carpet. He climbs into her lap, pulls himself up by her shirt, and flattens his snotty nose in her eye.

“Thanks, Timmy.” She wipes her face.

“Mim, Mim, Mim!” Timmy babbles.

Swim. She is pretty sure he’s saying “swim.” She has not translated for Matt.

“No swimming lessons today,” says Paula.

This is proof that Timmy’s multiple secret swimming lessons donot fall under the definition of a compulsion. She does not need Dr. Donnelly. She knows what he’d say: Life is unpredictable. Timmy might drown. Timmy might not drown. You are not your thoughts. Bad things can happen. Blah blah blah. She knocks her knuckle against her front teeth.

His cold is not that bad. Just a sniffly nose. She could bundle both kids into the car right now and still make it. It might even make him feel better.

“Do you have a tummyache, darling?” Willow stands next to Paula, her little dimpled hand on Paula’s shoulder, staring into Paula’s face with motherly concern.

“We might take Timmy swimming,” says Paula. She can already feel the relief it will bring, just being in the pool.

“Not swimming again !” Willow throws both hands up in disgust.

“Mim! Mim!” Timmy claps.

Paula’s phone beeps with a message from her sister. Dr. D still practicing. Hasn’t retired! They offer telehealth. I remember you liked him. Just sayin’! Not interfering! Your life, etc. etc.

There is a link to a psychotherapist’s office: Dr. Donnelly.

It’s like her sister can read her mind.

Dr. Donnelly came into Paula’s life when she was seventeen.

She had just gotten her driver’s license, was living her best life, studying for her final exams, dating her first boyfriend, when one day she braked at a pedestrian crossing and watched as people strode in front of her car, some of them close enough to touch the hood, but they didn’t even glance her way. That’s how trusting they were. How did they know they could trust her? How did they know she would continue to keep her foot on the brake, when the accelerator was right there?

What was to stop her slamming her foot on the accelerator?

Nothing.

She could mow them all over. The little girl in a tutu holding her mother’s hand. The old man with a limp. Paula sweated and shook. Panic flooded her body.

She put the handbrake on. Not enough.

She turned the car ignition off. Not enough.

She got out of the car with her car keys. Not enough.

She locked the car.

The little girl in the tutu and the old man with the limp reached the other side of the road. She had not killed them.

She saw the person in the car behind her looking at her curiously. She raised a hand in apology, jumped back in the car. That became the ritual every time she stopped at a crossing. Sometimes people honked but that didn’t matter.

It might have gone on forever. She might still be doing it now.

But one day it happened in front of her sister when she was giving her a lift. She tried so hard. She squeezed the steering wheel so tight. She told herself she wouldn’t run anyone over with Lisa in the car. But what if she did?

After she got back in the car, Lisa looked straight ahead as if her bizarre ritual had been perfectly normal. They drove for a while in silence and finally Lisa spoke up, her tone mild and nonjudgmental. “Is it because you’re scared you’ll run them over?”

Paula nodded. Just the once.

“You would never do that,” said Lisa. “I promise. I know you. You would never do that.”

But Paula didn’t believe her.

Lisa snitched to their parents. “I conveyed information,” she said. “I did not snitch.”

Up until then she’d always done her best to cover for her sister’s weirdness. “Paula is just cleaning her teeth,” she’d say when they were kids, when in fact, as their parents well knew, Paula was taking off all her clothes and putting them on again in the correct order because she’d messed up the first time around and her elaborate routine had to be followed exactly or else she couldn’t leave the room.

When her parents heard about her street-crossing ritual they insisted she go to the GP and ask for yet another referral to someone who might help. Exiting the car every time she stopped at a crossing was a dangerous, unsustainable, frightening habit.

Prior to then, there had been various therapists over the years, none of whom helped much, probably because they never got the full story. Paula excelled at secrecy.

Nobody knew that the reason for the dark shadows under her eyes when she was ten was that she had to stay up late each night reciting her twelve times tables twelve times in a row. This, for some reason, would prevent Mittens, the family cat, from being run over. She didn’t even like Mittens all that much.

Nobody knew that her refusal to touch a kitchen knife wasn’t because of that one time she cut her thumb chopping tomatoes but because she was terrified she would suddenly plunge the knife into the nearest family member’s throat.

Nobody knew that the reason she dropped Ancient History as a subject was because the teacher had a seating plan, and she had to sit next to a window on the second floor, and she could think of nothing else but throwing herself out that window, and the thought was so incessant, the only solution seemed to be to just do it. She remembers rationalizing it: It won’t necessarily kill me, just break my legs.

It was in Dr. Donnelly’s office that she first heard the term “obsessive-compulsive disorder” used as a diagnosis applicable to her,not as a lighthearted description for a tidy, uptight, germophobic person.

Dr. Donnelly was not a fan of reassurance. Unlike her sister, he promised her nothing.

He said, “Yes, it’s true, Paula, you could run those people over.”

He explained that many if not most people have thoughts like hers, but the OCD brain takes intrusive thoughts seriously. He said OCD sufferers often believe they are responsible for things they can’t control, which is probably why she thought she alone controlled her cat’s destiny. Even if she rationally knew this couldn’t be true (because if it were, why not tell people what a good job she was doing, keeping the stupid ungrateful cat alive by laboriously reciting those tables), it felt true.

He got her to do exposure therapy. All different kinds.

She had to hold the sharpest kitchen knife to her family members’ throats, for thirty seconds at a time. She had to slowly accelerate her car as close as she dared to her dad, while he gestured with his hands, closer, closer, closer, as casually as if he were just helping her park.

She had to stand in various high locations—the top level of the local shopping center, a cliff face on their favorite bushwalk—and instead of reassuring herself, You’re okay, you’re not going to jump, she had to tell herself, You might jump, you might not.

She and her family had to play a memory game with cards on which she’d written her intrusive thoughts and then match them up, to demonstrate that her thoughts were nothing special or mystical. She can still remember her sister triumphantly holding up two cards saying I might push Lisa down the stairs, thrilled to have matched up the two cards, not at all concerned that her sister thought about pushing her down the stairs.

These are not unhappy memories. There was relief because there was no more secrecy, and there were rules to follow and she likes rules. She was not ashamed or embarrassed. Nobody made her feel that way. Her family could not have been more supportive. And it worked. She saw Dr. Donnelly for two years, and she learned to live with her OCD.

But the more time that has passed, the more she has assumed thatOCD is like a childhood allergy she has outgrown. She looks at Dr. Donnelly’s name on her screen. Sees his kind face. She is too busy to make an appointment. She is a grown-up now, with two children. It’s been years. She’s fine. She knows the techniques. She could predict every word that would come out of Dr. Donnelly’s mouth. She can keep a grip on this. Why pay for information she already knows?

Her phone rings in her hand as she’s looking at her sister’s text.

“Grandma?” asks Willow hopefully.

“Not Grandma.” It’s an unknown caller. Paula removes Timmy from her lap. He whimpers and wipes irritably at his nose.

Normally she ignores unknown numbers, but it could be a lead.

After the funeral at St. David’s, where the psychic did not show up, or if she did, she managed to blend into the crowd, Paula and her new friend, the newly married Eve, had gone for coffee. They are kindred spirits: both of them are systematic and organized, compulsive (ha ha) list-makers, except Eve did hers on the Notes app on her phone while Paula did hers on a notepad. It has been enjoyable “working” with Eve on this investigative project. They had a Facebook page set up by the end of the day and have been in regular communication since then. Paula has been direct-messaging anyone who posts if it sounds like they might have genuine information. Eve is keeping an eye on the younger platforms like TikTok.

“Hello?”

The voice on the phone is cultured and confident. “Paula Binici?”

“Yes, that’s right.” Paula automatically sits up straighter, as if it’s a work call.

“My name is Suzanne. I posted something on your page about possibly knowing the identity of the psychic on your flight. You messaged me.”

“Of course.” Paula scoots over to the coffee table, grabs her notepad and pen, and sits up cross-legged behind it. “I remember. You thought she might have read your palm once, many years ago?”

“Well, possibly, I could easily be wrong, it was literally fifty years ago, so…but as soon as I saw the picture I thought of her, and I can’t even tell you why. I remember she was a sweet, very pretty little thing, with long straight brown hair and compelling eyes. Ice-blue. A kind of arctic blue.”

Paula feels a shiver as she remembers the lady’s pale blue eyes. “Kind of scary?”

“Scary? Oh, no, not at all. She was quite shy. Awkward. At first, anyway.”

“So how did she come to read your palm?”

“I was married to a farmer at the time. He, well, we, lived on a cattle station in Queensland. Enormous. Over a hundred thousand acres. She was staying in the staff quarters, I think maybe doing some kind of…research? I just remember her in my kitchen, reading my palm. I don’t even know how that came about, if I paid her or what, but I will never forget what she said. She said, ‘I see you leaving.’?”

“Leaving the cattle station?”

“I took it to mean leaving my marriage. I was very unhappy at the time.”

“And you left?”

“I did. It was the right decision for both of us. He’s happy with someone else. I own an art gallery. I think she might have said something about the art gallery too.”

“So she got it right,” says Paula. Timmy crawls over to her and lays his snot-slimy cheek on her leg. Paula holds one hand protectively over his head so he doesn’t bang it on the side of the coffee table. He closes his eyes. His cheeks are flushed. Swimming is the last thing he needs today. “Her prediction came true.”

“Sure, I guess. Technically,” says the woman, “although, to be honest, I don’t know if I would have left if she hadn’t read my palm. I was so young and stupid and I had gotten myself in this strange passive state, but she was so adamant she could see this other life for me! It was…inspiring.”

“I assume she didn’t tell you how and when you were going to die?”

“Oh, no, I wouldn’t want to know that!” The woman catches herself, and makes a “tch” sound.

“It’s fine,” Paula says. “And I think you said you couldn’t remember her name?”

“Well, that’s why I’m calling,” says Suzanne. “Just this morning I was reading an article about that charity where they auction off a box of the first cherries of the season. It said Tanya Somebody-or-other had been crowned Cherry Queen. That’s when it came to me. So funny the way the mind works.”

“Her name was Tanya?” Paula is already writing it down.

“No,” says the woman. “ Cherry. Her name was Cherry.”