Three Wishes

  When Lyn was in her final year at university, she had a profound, almost religious experience: She read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

  Every page brought a new epiphany. Yes! she kept thinking, as she highlighted another paragraph in fluorescent yellow and felt herself expanding with potential. It was such a relief to discover that she wasn't at the mercy of her unfortunate Kettle genes or her overly dramatic Kettle childhood. Unlike animals, she learned, human beings could choose how they responded to stimuli. She could change her programming, with a simple paradigm shift. She didn't have to be a Kettle girl! She could be whoever she wanted to be!

  Her sisters, of course, refused to be converted. "What crap," sneered Cat. "I hate those sort of books. I can't believe you're falling for it."

  "It's weird," said Gemma. "Every time I tried to read about the first habit, I just fell into the deepest sleep."

  So Lyn became a highly effective person on her own--and it worked. It worked like a charm.

  "Oh, you're so lucky!" people said of her success. Well, she wasn't lucky. She was effective. Ever since then, she had begun each day with a strong cup of coffee and a brand-new "to do" list. She had a hardbound notebook especially for the task. At the front was her "principle-centered personal mission statement" and her long-term, medium-term, and short-term goals for each of the key areas of her life: work, family, and friends.

  She loved that notebook. It gave her such a soothing sense of satisfaction as she drew a neat, sharp line through each new priority--check, check, check!

  Just recently however, she'd noticed the tiniest, quickly suppressed blip of panic whenever she began a new list. She found herself thinking unproductive thoughts like, What if it was simply physically impossible to do everything? Sometimes it felt like all the people in her life were scavengers, pecking viciously away at her flesh, wanting more, more, more.

  A friend from university had called recently, complaining that Lyn never kept in touch, and Lyn had wanted to scream at her, I have no time, don't you see, I have no time! Instead, she had done a spreadsheet and listed all her friends, categorized by importance (close friend, good friend, casual friend) with columns for dinners, lunches, coffees, "just called to see how you are" phone calls and e-mails.

  If her sisters ever discovered the existence of her "friend management system" they would be merciless.

  She looked out her office window at the dazzling expanse of turquoise water and thought about herself through the eyes of the She journalist. When she'd walked into Lyn's elegant home office with its harbor views, her lip had curled with envy. In some ways, Lyn agreed with her. She did have it all--adoring husband, gorgeous child, stimulating career--and she damn well deserved it. She worked hard, she was good at what she did--she was effective!

  But some days, like when Gemma telephoned from the bathtub, water sloshing in the background, Lyn wondered what it would be like to be a little less effective, with nothing more to worry about than when to sleep with a new boyfriend.

  And some days, like today, it felt like there was a band of pressure squeezing tightly around her skull. Talk to C. re D. Oh God.

  No paradigm shift could eliminate a good strong dose of Catholic guilt.

  The year Lyn turned twenty-two someone switched her life over to fast-forward and forgot to change it back again. That's how it felt. When people said to her, "Can you believe how fast the year has gone? Christmas again!" she replied too fervently, "I know! I can't believe it!"

  Sometimes she'd be doing something perfectly ordinary, sitting at the dinner table passing Kara the pepper and without warning, she'd feel a strange, dizzy sense of disorientation. She'd look at Michael and think, Surely it was only a few months ago that we got married! She'd look at Maddie and think, But you were a tiny baby, only a few days ago! It was as if she were being picked up and put down again in each new stage of her life like a chess piece.

  She could pinpoint the moment her life switched over to fast-forward. It was the day she got the phone call in Spain. The phone call about Gemma.

  "It's bad news," said Cat, her voice echoing hollowly down the line and Lyn said "What?" even though she heard her perfectly well, just to put it off, just to annoy Cat, because she didn't really believe it was anything bad.

  "Bad news!" Cat repeated impatiently. "It's something really, really bad."

  Lyn had spent the last ten months working in a London hotel and hating every minute of it. Now she was making up for it with eight long weeks of carefree summer travel around Europe before returning home in time for Gemma's wedding.

  Lyn had met an American boy named Hank in Barcelona. They caught the train together down the Costa Brava and stopped at a little town called Llanca. Each day lasted a lifetime. Their balcony looked right out on sparkling sea and hazy mountains capped with snowy white buildings. She and Hank weren't sleeping together yet, but it would take only couple more jugs of sangria. Sometimes as they walked through sunlit cobbled streets he'd grab her and push her up against a wall and they'd kiss until they were both breathless. Lyn felt like she was living in an Audrey Hepburn movie. It was laughably romantic.

  "What bad news?" asked Lyn calmly. She looked down at her sandy feet on the white tiles of her hotel room and admired her tanned, pink toenails. No doubt it was the bridesmaids' dresses. Gemma probably wanted them to look like fluffy meringues, or more likely, something strange, like Gothic witches or flower-power hippies.

  "Marcus is dead."

  Lyn watched her toes curl in surprise.

  "What do you mean?" she said.

  "I mean he's dead. He got hit by a car on Military Road. He died in the ambulance. Gemma was with him."

  It was like being winded. Lyn grabbed at the telephone cord.

  "It's O.K. She's fine. Well, she's not fine. Her fiance is dead. But she's fine. She's not hurt or anything."

  Lyn let out her breath. "My God. I can't believe it."

  "She says you're not to come home. She doesn't want to ruin your holiday."

  "Don't be stupid," said Lyn. "I'm coming now."

  There was the tiniest tremor in Cat's voice. "I said you probably would."

  Hank came into the room while she was calling the airline and sat by her feet on the tiled floor, dripping from his swim. He took hold of her ankle. "What's the deal?"

  "I'm going home."

  He was sitting right next to her, touching her, but already he felt like a memory. His wet hair and tanned face seemed frivolous and insubstantial.

  And that was when things switched to fast-forward.

  She caught a train to Barcelona and managed to get on a flight to Heathrow, where a man at the Qantas counter upgraded her to business class, clucking sympathetically and tap-tapping conspiratorially at his keyboard. He handed her the boarding pass with a beatific smile, as if he knew he was handing her a brand-new destiny.

  She had the window seat next to a man in black jeans and T-shirt. As they were putting their seats into an upright position for takeoff, he asked her if she was from Sydney.

  "Yes," she said in an exasperated tone, without looking at him. He was irrelevant. Didn't he see that? He was completely irrelevant.

  "Ah," he said sadly, and she was suddenly disgusted by her unnecessary rudeness.

  "I'm sorry. I'm going home for a funeral. It's been a bit stressful."

  "Of course," he said. "I'm sorry. How awful for you." He was a long, lanky man with a mop of black curly hair and serious eyes behind John Lennon glasses.

  It was his voice that did it. Maybe if he'd just had an ordinary voice, they would have spent the rest of the flight in silence. But he had "the voice." Ah, the voice, her sisters said with understanding when they heard. Not that they went for it themselves, they just recognized it on Lyn's behalf.

  Gemma would say, "The mechanic who serviced my car had that sort of voice you go on about. I gave him your number. He has a girlfriend, but he kept it just in case things didn't work out. He said it's good to hav
e a backup."

  She first heard it from her Year Eight Geography teacher. Mr. Gordon was bearded and paunchy, but he spoke about rivers and mountain ranges in a voice with an underlying sweetness. It was perfectly masculine but somehow gentler or softer than the average man's voice. It made her feel safe.

  "My sister's fiance was killed in a car accident," she explained. "They were getting married in six weeks. The invitations were just about to go out."

  He made a "tsk" sound. "That's terrible."

  Lyn came from a family of poor listeners. If you had something to say, you had to battle constant interruptions, challenges, outright boredom--get on with it--and loud triumph over any trip-ups--Ha! You just said the opposite two seconds ago!

  Michael listened to Lyn with unhurried, flattering interest. It was a brand-new experience for her. It made her eloquent.

  It was why she fell in love with him, the pure, almost physical pleasure of their conversation--listening to him and having him listen to her.

  Not that she fell in love with him immediately. There wasn't a hint of inappropriate flirtation in their first conversation. He spoke about his wife and little girl and Lyn told him about Hank. But still, it was quite an intimate conversation for two strangers. Perhaps, Lyn always thought afterward, it was the environment--that strange roaring vacuum suspended high above the planet, that peculiarly familiar feeling that you'd always been on this plane and you always would be.

  She told him how angry she felt with Marcus for dying so stupidly, so thoughtlessly, so close to the wedding--ruining her sister's life! Why wasn't the fool looking when he crossed the road?

  "You must think I'm terrible," she said to Michael, snuggled under her airline blanket, feeling a little drunk on too many liqueurs.

  "No," said Michael. "How hard is it to cross a road?"

  "Exactly."

  She told him how weirdly nervous she felt about seeing Gemma, a strange sense of resistance even as she rushed home to be with her. It felt as if Gemma had moved up to a higher, more complex level of human emotions that Lyn couldn't even hope to understand. She didn't know the rules. She didn't know the right thing to say to make it better. It was like Gemma possessed a secret, terrible knowledge that Lyn could only clumsily guess at.

  "I've always known the right thing to say. I'm good at making people feel better. But nothing is really going to make her feel better, is it? Not for a long, long time. It's not fair."

  "A friend of mine lost his little boy to leukemia," said Michael. "I was so frightened of calling him up, I got a migraine. I almost chickened out."

  "But you did it."

  "Oh yeah, I did it."

  And for a minute they both sat silently, trying out other people's pain, until Michael said, "Mmmm, I think another liqueur might be in order, don't you?"

  Eventually, they both fell asleep, waking up rumpled and sticky-mouthed to the stomach-churning aroma of airplane breakfasts and Australian sunshine streaming through the plane.

  They promised each other they'd get together for a drink sometime. He gave her his business card, and she wrote her number on the back of one of his cards.

  Lyn looked at the name on the card, as he stood in the aisle reaching easily into the overhead locker for his bags.

  "Um," she said, looking up at him from her seat. "Aren't you...someone?"

  He smiled down at her. She noticed the faintest suggestion of a dimple creasing his left cheek, like an innocent memory from his childhood. "Yup," he said. "No question about that. I am definitely someone."

  When Cat saw the card, she told Lyn that he was an up-and-coming computer genius, with stacks of money and an ex-model for a wife.

  They met for their drink about a month after the flight. Lyn arrived at the city bar with low expectations. No doubt they would find it impossible to replicate the easy intimacy of their conversation on the flight and there would be lots of awkward pauses and a sense of why did we bother?

  Instead, the conversation flowed just as seamlessly. She told him about the funeral and Gemma's strange, white face, how she didn't want to say one word about how she felt about Marcus. Not one word. And this from a girl who normally shared her innermost thoughts as casually and often as most people talked about the weather. Lyn had bought a book on the Stages of Grief to try to understand.

  He told her about taking his daughter kayaking on Middle Harbour and how his wife was renovating their house for the third time, which Michael was doing his best to understand too.

  She told him about an idea she had for home delivering gourmet breakfasts.

  He told her how he was planning to get in on the ground floor with some computer networking phenomenon they were calling the "Internet."

  When they stood up to say good-bye, Lyn thought to herself with satisfaction, Well, it just goes to show it is possible to have a friendship with an interesting, intelligent (actually rather attractive) man without that distracting sexual element.

  Next thing she knew Michael had his arms around her and they were kissing in a way that had a very distracting sexual element.

  Lyn had become the Other Woman--an event not listed on her five-year plan.

  To: Lyn

  From: Nana

  Subject: A little suggestion

  Dearest Lyn,

  I hear that you're having Christmas lunch at your place this year. Well done to you, darling. I wonder if your father and I could come too. He seems to have broken up with that little foreign girl and he is very down at the moment. He's not like himself. I hear you're planning a seafood theme. That sounds lovely. I could bring a nice leg of lamb for you. I'm not sure how your mother would feel about Frank coming, but he assures me they are on good terms these days. What do you think? How is Maddie? Gemma tells me she can sing all the words to the Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial. She is a very intelligent child. She takes after you and your sisters. With much love from Nana

  To: Nana

  From: Lyn

  Subject: Christmas Day

  Dear Nana,

  Of course you and Dad can come to Christmas lunch. The more the merrier! (I checked with Mum and she agrees that she and Dad can speak civilly to each other these days. Miracles will never cease!) You will be pleased to learn that Maddie can now sing all the words to the Pizza Hut commercial as well. She's working her way through all the major fast-food groups. Mum is horrified. Love from Lyn

  To: Cat

  From: Lyn

  Subject: The Dan Issue

  Hi Cat,

  I wish you would stop hanging up on me. We can't avoid each other for the rest of our lives. I don't know what Dan has told you but here are the facts.

  After we left the pub that Melbourne Cup Day you said kissing that boy was like kissing an ashtray and if he called you there was no way you would go out with him.

  I met Dan again by accident two days later at the Greenwood with Susi. (He thought I was you at first.) Dan asked me to go out. I said yes. I THOUGHT YOU WEREN'T INTERESTED--see above.

  I didn't tell you because we weren't talking at the time. I can't remember why. (Some fight about money on the way home in the cab from the Cup? Gemma's fault probably.)

  We went out about three times. It was only a couple of weeks before I was leaving for London. It was certainly not a relationship.

  The first time I realized you two were serious was at Marcus's funeral, which was hardly the right time to say anything.

  Then I got all distracted with Michael and next thing I knew, you and Dan were engaged and it just seemed so irrelevant and stupid.

  It was over ten years ago, Cat. I am really, really sorry that you're upset. But it meant nothing. Can we just forget about it? Can you call me? What do you want for Christmas?

  Lyn

  To: Lyn

  From: Cat

  Re: The Dan Issue

  I want something very, very expensive for Christmas.

  Cat

  Lyn looked at her computer screen and smiled. Good. Cat wa
s sounding like herself again. She drew a straight line through Talk to C. re D.

  Hopefully that was it. In a strange way, it had made her feel as if she was somehow involved in their marriage problems, as if she and Dan had cheated on Cat, which was ridiculous of course.

  It was just three dates. Three dates, a long time ago, in another world, another time. All was fair back in the early nineties. Before the AIDS prevention ads started to seem scary, not funny, before the Kettle girls started settling down.

  Lyn had a sudden, unexpectedly vivid memory of lying on Dan's bed, in his messy, boy-smelling room. "Do you like it when I do this? Seems like you do, huh? What about this?"

  Did she like it just that bit more because she knew deep down Cat had been lying when she said wasn't interested? Who wouldn't be interested? He was gorgeous. No long-term potential, of course, but very sexy.

  God, she hadn't thought about that for years. She'd better stop it, or she'd blush next time she saw the cheating bastard.

  It was later that night and Lyn stood at the bathroom mirror applying her moisturizer with upward patting motions. She looked straight ahead at her own reflection, trying to avoid the sight of Michael cleaning his teeth. It baffled her how much it annoyed her. He was just so enthusiastic about the whole procedure, sawing vigorously away at his gums, toothpaste frothing over his upper lip. For the first time it occurred to her to wonder whether it had irritated Georgina too.

  "Do you know we've been together now for as long as you and Georgina were?" she said, as he bent down, mercifully finished, to rinse his mouth.

  "Have we?" Michael dried his mouth with a towel.

  "Yes," said Lyn. "So are you going to be unfaithful to me now?" There was a harder note in her voice than she'd wanted.

  Michael put down the towel. "No," he said carefully. "No, that wasn't actually my intention."

  "Pfffff," said Lyn. "I guess it wasn't your intention to be unfaithful to Georgina either."

  Michael leaned against the bathroom door. "Is this to do with the whole Cat and Dan thing?" She didn't say anything. "Is it Kara? This morning's teenager from-hell-performance?"

  "It's nothing. It was a joke."

  "Didn't sound like one."

  Lyn put away her moisturizer and Michael's toothpaste. She walked past him into their bedroom. He snapped off the light and followed her.