Page 31

One Day Before

The invitation had been emailed eight weeks before, but had only opened it the previous week as he caught up on his backlog of messages in the Sydney Airbnb he’d rented in between assignments.

Arnold King and Nancy Halyard invite you to celebrate second chances . . .

It was a wedding invitation. “Good for you, Arnold,”

he said to his laptop screen.

When had gotten his advance copy of the National Geographic article with the photo essay about ghost bicycle memorials, he’d sent it to Arnold, care of Kennedy High School, with a sticky note that said, You were right! Arnold had written him back, care of the magazine, and after that the two had kept up a steady correspondence, at first by airmail letters and then when ’s globe-trotting and lack of a permanent mailing address made that impossible, by email.

shared stories of the adventures from his photojournalism assignments, which had fallen from the skies like raindrops after the National Geographic article.

Arnold updated on his own life, more eventful than he could’ve imagined.

He’d gotten a cat named Lady and a dog named Barley, and moved in with his girlfriend, Nancy, and recently retired from teaching.

And now, here they were, getting married.

Sitting on the veranda of his rented apartment overlooking Bondi Beach, couldn’t help but feel that it was Arnold’s life that was exotic, enviable.

The wedding was in less than a week, but he had time between assignments and more airline miles than he could ever use.

He could do it.

He hadn’t been back to that town—miserably working for Ansel Fitch Photo Studio, assuming his life was over at thirty-three—since the National Geographic piece launched his career, sending him all over the world.

There was no reason to go back.

He had no family there, no particular connection save for an old dead-end job, but suddenly he felt a pull to return.

He would see Arnold again, the first time in person since they’d met near Amber Crane’s bicycle memorial.

And perhaps he would contact Amber’s family.

He’d contemplated this for years, wanting to tell them how their daughter had altered the trajectory of his life, but he’d held back, unsure if this would be comforting to them or reopen old wounds.

It was now well past the RSVP date but emailed Arnold and Nancy that he would love to come. Arnold responded immediately. “Delighted! Will you be bringing anyone?”

There was no anyone, just a parade of someones. “It’ll be just me,”

he wrote back.

Two days later, he sat in a bar at the Sydney airport, having second thoughts. His head was already fuzzy with jet lag, anticipating the sixteen-hour flight ahead of him, which was just the first leg before his connection. He sighed, loudly.

Next to him, a woman, said, “I second that emotion.”

He turned to her. She was tall, sun-burnished, eyes crinkled with smile lines. “Sorry,”

she said. “I’m a nosy parker.”

“So am I,”

said. “By profession.”

“Are you a spy?”

“Close. Photojournalist.”

“I didn’t realize they still had those.”

She gestured to her smartphone.

“It’s a dying profession.”

“Everything is, when you think about it.”

Her accent was hard to pin down, softer than Australian, maybe Kiwi, with a twang underneath.

“Where are you from?”

“Take a guess.”

Her eyes sparkled with mirth.

“I’m gonna say Australia but that you’ve lived abroad a lot.”

“Not sure whether to be flattered or insulted. From the States originally but I’ve been living outside Christchurch, New Zealand. Heading back for the first time in seven years.”

“Seven years, how very biblical.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” she said.

“And what’s bringing you back?”

asked, and hoped that she wouldn’t say boyfriend or girlfriend. Which was a ridiculous and presumptuous thing to hope, but since when had hope ever been rational?

“I’ve been invited to a party.”

“Must be some party to go halfway around the world.”

“Oh, it’s very posh. Very VIP. Very special. What about you?”

“I’m on my way to a wedding.”

“Ah, they must be good friends if you’re traveling halfway around the world.”

“Actually, I’ve met the groom once and the bride never. But he changed my life.”

“Once is all it takes.”

She paused. “Was it for the better or the worse?”

thought of his life. He had achieved his ambitions. He had raced across the Sahara on camelback in Niger. Witnessed the mourning rituals of killer whales from fifty feet away in Alaska. He had been to pockets of the world few knew existed. He’d been happy. And lonely. He loved this life. And he wanted more. Not more career success or money but something else.

“Both,”

he answered.

“What brought you to Australia?”

she asked.

“First rule of journalism is show don’t tell,”

he said, handing her his phone and opening up to the folder where he had loaded a few of his favorite shots from the trip.

She scrolled through. “Surfers,”

she said, sounding a little disappointed.

“Surfers, but particularly Aboriginal surfers. There’s a whole movement of embracing the water as a way to reclaim the ocean and reconnect to the culture after the damage of colonialism.”

She smiled and when she did, even her smile lines smiled. She kept scrolling and then stopped on a photo of stones laid out in a circle, against the stark red clay of the Australian outback.

“What’s this?”

“That’s not for the article.”

“What is it?”

“In some indigenous communities, when a person dies, there’s a period of mourning when it’s forbidden to say the name of the dead or show anything that bears the person’s likeness, so they create symbolic representation.”

He paused. “I got friendly with one of the surfers. He invited me to his family’s compound in the outback and told me about it. They call it Sorry Business.”

“So you don’t have pictures or mention the name of the deceased because it’s too painful?”

Those glorious smile lines of hers became something else, worry lines, grief. It was a different kind of beauty, but beauty, nonetheless.

“I suppose that could be part of it,”

replied. “But my friend explained that if you say the name out loud, you might pull the person back into this world. And if you do that, they can’t inhabit their next life.”

“So it’s a way of letting go?”

“I suppose so.”

She sighed. “Maybe I should try it. I don’t appear to be so good at letting go.”

“People in the West struggle with it. Maybe because it’s so final for us. We have a thick curtain between life and death. My father’s family is Filipino and in that culture, the dead linger for forty days before going to heaven. In other cultures, the ghosts never fully go away; the deceased are more on another plane of existence instead of being gone for good.”

“Are you going to do an article on Sorry Business?”

“It’s funny you should ask. I’m fascinated with things like this, the way we mark death. The way we leave things behind, seen and unseen, spoken and unspoken. I don’t mean to sound morbid, but I’ve been drawn to things like this for years. It’s not my place to write about an Aboriginal spiritual practice, but I’ve been thinking about inviting people from other cultures to collaborate on a project about mourning rituals, to photograph them, or invite others to photograph them themselves. The way we approach death in the West is so limited, so final, and I think we could stand to learn from other cultures.”

He couldn’t believe he was telling her this. Chatting with strangers in bars was a fairly normal occurrence for . Telling them about his secretly percolating idea was not.

“I think that sounds beautiful,” she said.

I think you’re beautiful, thought.

“Announcing the boarding of Qantas flight seven,”

blared the loudspeaker.

“That’s me,”

he said. He looked at her and had a ridiculous hope. “Is that you, too?”

“I wish,”

she said. “I had to book my flight last minute, so I have a layover in Singapore and another in Frankfurt.”

“Well, it was sweet while it lasted,” he said.

“Wasn’t it just,”

she replied.