The Island(4)
“You saw a kangaroo and you didn’t wake us? Come on, Heather!” Owen grumbled from the back seat before a yawn convulsed him.
They woke Olivia and got their bags and walked dazed and bleary-eyed into the terminal building. They were three hours early for the flight. Tom had never been late for a flight in his life and he wasn’t going to start a bad habit now. The airport was deserted except for an overly made-up goth couple who apparently looked nothing like their passport photographs. When it was her turn at the X-ray machine, Heather smiled at an older female security officer.
“Goths these days, too much makeup and not nearly enough pillaging,” she said. The woman thought about it for a second and then chuckled to herself. She waved the family through.
No one confiscated the penknife. Which was lucky for Heather. Because two days later it would save her life.
2
They walked a sleepy Owen and Olivia to the gate. The flight boarded early and they were the only passengers in the business section; in fact, they were practically the only passengers on the whole plane. Tom was a nervous flier. You wouldn’t think from his professional persona that he ever got nervous, but he did. When he had first come into the massage clinic, Heather realized almost immediately that his back problems were not the result of “an old skiing injury” but tension that he was storing in his shoulders and lower back. Doctors were often the most skeptical about the benefits of a good massage, but all she had had to do was grind it out and he was 80 percent cured by the end of the first session. The fact that he kept returning for massage therapy had more to do with the connection that they had made than any “injury.”
The flight attendants began making the safety announcements.
She patted Tom’s leg and he gave her a smile.
“I’m hungry,” Owen said.
Heather fished in her backpack and offered him a granola bar. He shook his head. “Not those ones! Oh my God, Heather, you know I hate those ones!”
“We finished all the strawberry ones. This is all we have left,” Heather said.
“Forget it, then!” Owen said. He put his headphones back on, pulled up his hood, plugged his phone into the charger, and restarted his driving game.
Heather did a little meditation while the plane taxied. Everything is the path. Her tiredness was the path, Owen’s dirty look was the path, Tom’s stress was the path, Olivia’s beautiful, sleepy face was the path.
They took off just before the dawn, and the landscape from the left side of the aircraft was spectacular, the sun coming up over what seemed to be a vast red emptiness. Australia was almost as big as America but had less than a tenth of the population. A desert of ocher, red, and vermilion. Immense Saharas of iron-oxide nothingness interrupted by huge sandstone boulders that looked like grave markers for a long-extinct race of giants. She thought of Ray and his “mob” walking through that to get to the show. It beggared belief.
Her eyes were heavy. I’ll just close them for a minute, she thought.
She woke when they touched down in Melbourne. She’d been dreaming about Seattle. Snow in the woods of Schmitz Park. “Where…” she began and then remembered.
The airport was like all airports, and the city from the back of a big SUV seemed like all cities. Tom was in the front chatting with Jenny, the conference rep. Heather sat in the back next to a still dozing Olivia. Owen was awake now, buried in his book about Australian snakes, his hood pulled up, not looking out the window. At dinner parties, one of the things Tom and his Generation X friends worried about were Millennials and Generation Zers not “engaging fully with the world,” but Heather didn’t blame Owen at all for not engaging. The world had taken his lovely mother from him just before his twelfth birthday. The world had shoved a skinny stranger who was supposed to be a “new mom” into his life. What a crock.
“As per your request, I’ve put you in an Airbnb on the beach,” Jenny said, leaning around and looking at Heather. She was a young woman in her twenties, copper-haired, smiley.
“I didn’t ask for—” Heather began.
“I asked for it, sweetie,” Tom said. “So much better than the conference hotel. I checked it out online. It’s great. A home away from home.”
“Oh, sure, that’s fine,” Heather agreed, although secretly she had been looking forward to room service and a bit of pampering while Tom did his conference stuff.
They drove along the glittering Melbourne shoreline, past a lighthouse and a marina. There were palm trees and a beach and an indigo ocean.
Tom gently prodded Olivia. “This reminds me, why do you never see elephants hiding in palm trees?”
“Why?” Olivia asked sleepily.
“Because they’re very good at it.”
“No more dad jokes!” Olivia pleaded.
“I thought it was funny,” Heather whispered.
Tom chuckled, took Heather’s hand, and kissed it.
“But I wouldn’t quit doctoring to go into stand-up,” Heather added.
“Look at you, crushing my dreams,” Tom said, slapping his hand to his forehead.
“Are you enjoying Australia, Heather?” Jenny asked.
“It’s my first time ever outside of America! So, yes, it’s all very exciting,” Heather replied.