Page 31

It is the morning after Leo’s pointless day trip to Hobart and the tragedy of the missed Lion King concert.

A thunderstorm has caused flash flooding, power lines to come down, and, to the joy of parents throughout the suburbs, the cancellation of all Saturday morning outdoor sports.

Oli is at a friend’s place down the road.

Bridie lies under a blanket on the couch in the living room, white-faced with purple smudges under her eyes, her earbuds in, the television on. The leftover makeup under her eyes gives the impression that she’s a teenager who has been out clubbing rather than an eleven-year-old hungover from all the adrenaline and excitement of playing Zazu.

Leo used the unexpected gift of time to catch up on work and now he’s having coffee and croissants with Neve, while the rain falls steadily and the wind howls.

He watches Neve putting jam on her croissant. His wife wears pajama pants—she says they are not pajama pants, but they sure look like pajama pants, and she wears them to bed, so it seems conclusive—and an old blue school hoodie that once belonged to Oli but is too small for him, and, of course, her Cartier watch.

He met Neve at a party and it was her watch that first caught his eye. Rectangular face, eighteen-carat white gold, covered in white diamonds.

“That is a really beautiful watch,” he’d said without thinking. Normally he agonized over the appropriate opening line for so long the moment passed.

“Thank you,” said Neve, before she was Neve and when instead she was a moderately drunk pretty girl sitting precariously on a stool at a high table. She wore crooked glasses with smudged lenses, a red slip dress with a fraying neckline, and Birkenstocks. (Leo’s mother loves Neve, but she does not love her shoes.)

She held up her wrist so that Leo could look more closely at the watch and said, “It was a twenty-first birthday present from my mum.”

One strap of her dress had fallen off her shoulder, which was mesmerizing. Now it drives him mad when a bra strap slithers to her elbow. He keeps adjusting her bras. She seems to have no understanding of how the tightening mechanisms work.

After they introduced themselves and determined how they knew the party host, she put her hand on his arm and said, “What’s worrying you?”

He tried to tell her that he wasn’t worried about anything, it wasjust something about his face—he suffers from “resting worried face”—but she insisted, so he admitted he was worried he might have accidentally parked illegally and he couldn’t afford a parking ticket right now; he was worried he couldn’t remember the host’s mother’s name and he’d been introduced to her many times before; he was worried Neve was about to fall off her stool, could she please stop rocking back and forth like that? And finally he was worried that she might not be able to see properly through those glasses and could he please fix them for her?

He cleaned her glasses with his handkerchief and straightened the frame and when she put them back on she said it was a beautiful miracle. She discreetly determined the host’s mother’s name for him, enabling him to smoothly say, “Hello, Irene!” just in the nick of time, and they went for a walk to double-check the parking sign. Basically they laid down a template for the entirety of their future relationship. His role is to straighten and adjust, mitigate risk and worry, hers is to mollify and soothe, to unwind his wound-up self.

Their first kiss was under the parking sign, which he had, as he suspected, misread. The ticket was already there, under his windshield wiper, so he didn’t move it and he didn’t care.

As they walked back to the party through the narrow inner-city streets in the moonlight, she mentioned that it was the anniversary of her mother’s death. She’d died when Neve was six. That was very sad, but also confusing, because wasn’t the watch a twenty-first birthday present from her mother? But then Neve explained that on her twenty-first birthday, she had opened her car door when she had arrived home after a family birthday dinner, and there, right on the asphalt, was this pretty gold watch, as if it had been placed neatly there for her to find.

Neve picked it up, tilted her face to the stars, and said, “Thanks, Mum.”

Leo was already half in love with her by then, so he didn’t say, Are you crazy ? Do you know how much that watch is worth ? You should have handed it in to the police!

He’s not sure if she knows how much it’s worth now. She has zero interest in brand names. She’s a staunch atheist, has no superstitions, no patience for activities like meditation or yoga, but she truly believed, and still believes, that her watch was not someone’s valuable lost property but a gift from her dead mother. She wears it every day, an incongruous gleam of designer luxury for someone who dresses purely for comfort and economy, who avoids wearing shoes wherever possible.

Sometimes he looks up at the stars himself and thanks Neve’s mother for the Cartier watch that brought them together.

Also, now he has had children and lost a parent, he kind of gets it. He and his sisters are always asking their deceased father to help them find parking spots. They send photos of amazing car spots on the family WhatsApp captioned: Thanks, Dad! Just the other day a miraculous spot appeared directly outside the building Leo needed to be in, as wondrous and valuable as a Cartier watch. A parent’s love is surely strong enough to occasionally crash through the barrier dividing heaven and earth.

“So this strange thing happened on yesterday’s flight,” says Leo.

“What’s that?” Neve looks at him. There is a smudge of butter on the lens of her glasses.

He tells her the story while he cleans her glasses, and she is into it—not frightened, she does not really believe in psychics, she thinks most of them are probably scammers—but she’s fascinated to hear what the lady said and how the passengers reacted, and she’s so focused on Leo that unfortunately, without her glasses, she’s unable to see the child standing in the doorway, listening to every word, which is why they both jump out of their skins when Bridie says, in a heartbreaking, terror-trembled tiny voice: “Is Daddy going to die?”