Page 23 of Here One Moment

Ethan hasn’t cried like this—proper salty tears sliding off his jaw—since he was a child. He didn’t know his body still possessed the ability to cry like this. It’s like he’s lost control of his bladder. He is mortified. His glasses are fogging up. His nose is running.

Guys like us don’t die young, Harvey. Guys like us get old and bald and paunchy. Guys like us peak in our fifties, standing around the barbecue in short-sleeved plaid shirts talking about cholesterol and interest rates.

“Aww, sweetie,” says the woman next to him. “You’re not going to die in a fight. They just make stuff up! None of it is true!”

She unbuckles her seat belt, stands up so fast her heart-shaped sunglasses slip back from her hair and over her eyes, and shouts, “Hey, lady, you made this guy cry!”

Which is pretty funny, and very embarrassing.

Ethan can see Harvey laughing. Somewhere in the multiverse Harvey is laughing his head off, but in this universe Ethan will never witness Harvey’s stupid silent wheezy Harvey laugh again.

And now he’s thinking of Harvey’s mum and dad, and Harvey’s grandfather, and Harvey’s hot sister, and Harvey’s cousin, and all their sad-as-fuck caved-in faces, and these are the people he should have met at Harvey’s thirtieth, not at his funeral, and if Ethan is feeling this sad, how sad must they be feeling, and it is not right, death is not right, it’s not fair, it is unbelievably painful. Harvey, mate, come back, of course I was coming to your thirtieth, I wouldn’t have missed it. It feels like he will never stop crying. He doesn’t know how to make it stop.

Ethan Chang is so very, very sorry for his loss.

Chapter 19

I have learned that I made the injured young man cry, which distresses me.

I remember him. I stood behind him in the security line at Hobart Airport.

People often become flustered at security gates, patting pockets in a panicked way, but he managed to put his phone, wallet, and keys into a tray, all while being restricted to the use of one hand. I admired his dexterity, especially after my experience with my brooch that morning.

Then when he turned and I saw him in profile—the black-framed glasses, the strong handsome line of his jaw—I got such a surprise.

I thought: Henry!

It was not Henry, of course.

Henry worked at the Hornsby Picture Theatre in the sixties, selling tickets from inside a varnished wood booth. I only ever saw the top half of him behind a pane of glass with a cutout circle. My friend Ivy and I used to go to the Saturday matinee. Two movies, a cartoon, a serial, and a newsreel for sixpence. Very good value. “Oh, no, I only need one ticket,” I said kindly, the last time I bought a movie ticket, assuming the bored young man had made a mistake. “You only got one ticket,” he said. Not as polite as Henry.

Henry smiled warmly each time he saw Ivy and me and said, “Hello again, ladies!”

We weren’t ladies. We were very little. Eleven or twelve.

Ivy would say, “Hello again, Henry!” Too loudly, in my opinion.

I would whisper, “Hello.” I was too shy to say his name out loud. Every week I would think, This time I will say Henry’s name. I never once did, and I was ashamed of that.

One of my earliest memories is my mother unpeeling my fingers from her skirt. “She’s shy.”

I knew the injured boy could not logically be Henry and yet the resemblance startled me. I wondered, could it be Henry’s son? Or grandson?

I considered saying, Excuse me, this may sound silly, but was your father’s name Henry and did he work at the Hornsby Picture Theatre in Sydney?

But then as a uniformed man nodded and beckoned for me to take my turn stepping through the metal detector, I saw a couple in the departure lounge, lining up to buy coffee, and my heart leaped with joy because I thought, There’s Bert and Jill, I haven’t seen them for solong!

I wanted to run to them, to throw my arms around them both, but again, I knew it could not possibly be them, any more than that boy could have been Henry, and yet they looked so similar I froze and stared and stared.

The man had white hair and a blue polo shirt and he looked like a big polar bear next to his wife, who was small and dark-haired, and even from a distance I could see she had the same sparkly, always-moving energy as Jill. She was doing some kind of exercise as she waited in line, standing on one leg and bobbing up and down. An ankle- or knee-strengthening exercise, perhaps, and I thought, Didn’t Jill do that exact same exercise? I watched as she wobbled and the man who looked like Bert steadied her with one tender hand, just the way Bert would have, and I knew it wasn’t Bert, it wasn’t Jill, but it was, it was, I felt that it was them.

I didn’t move until a woman behind me said impatiently, “You can go!” at the same time as the uniformed man barked, “Come on through, madam!”

It kept happening when I went to my gate. Every single person felt in some way significant to me. It began to feel eerie, as if I were part of an elaborate prank or a reality show where I was the star but didn’t know it.

It wasn’t just resemblances. There were symbols and signs. Everything meant something.

The man at the table next to me wore a patterned shirt, and when I looked closer, I saw that they were kangaroos. Gray kangaroos. I heard a man with a strong Scottish accent say to him, “Is that seat taken?”

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