What Are the Odds? Eden
What Are the Odds?
Eden
“Go fish.”
Andrew’s little boy—Four—wrestles with his cards while his daughter, Neve, yawns and watches the frosted-glass door. Babysitting was not on my bingo card today. But I am, happily, because it’s giving me time to think, to assess, to plan.
This isn’t just babysitting. It’s not just helping out. This is . . . destiny.
Never mind that my heart is racing; never mind that I’m struggling to keep my focus here instead of on that horrible Christmas Eve. The night everything changed. The night I lost my sister. The night she was murdered.
I’d come to her house to drop off a present from our parents.
Our mother wasn’t feeling well and had decided not to infect everyone, so I was playing Santa, bringing the gifts to her friends and family.
Christmas in our tiny town was always an event.
Mornings with family, afternoons spent visiting friends, and for those who worshipped, going to church.
The scene I walked in on was horrifying. To this day, I get chills. The house, decorated; the wrapping paper, the bows, the music. The alarm blaring, Andrew on his knees, covered in Chloe’s blood. The scissors, on the floor, her blood dripping from their sharp blades. My screams . . .
I force the images away. I can’t go there. Not right now.
These children belong to him. I see him in their faces.
It makes me want to collapse, to rend my hair at the injustice.
But I don’t want to scare them. My mind is whirling, trying to run all the variables of what to do now that I’ve confronted him.
Helping isn’t altruistic. It’s pure, unadulterated survival instinct.
Andrew killed Chloe when she challenged him.
Chances are, given the opportunity or the impetus, he’ll eventually kill Brooklyn.
Maybe he’ll come for me, too, now that he’s seen my face, now that he knows I have found him.
And let’s not forget, there are children involved, living, breathing miniatures of what could have been.
They must be constant reminders of what he could have had. They must be in danger as well.
All I want to do is keep them safe. I have to keep them safe.
“Go fish.”
To soothe myself, I start running numbers in my head. Numbers don’t ever lie. They can’t be faked. They can only be manipulated to represent specific outcomes. There is such comfort in the roteness of it all—the uniformity.
When people say “What are the odds?” they don’t actually want to know the numerical breakdown of such things.
I, on the other hand, am very interested in these kinds of variables.
It’s what I do, variables. I’ve made a career of them.
My abilities to foresee budgetary impacts of travel loads are rewarded handsomely by my company.
And because of that, I travel a lot. See many things.
Some of the stories I could tell you . . .
“Do you have any fives?” Neve asks.
“Go fish.”
The parents are the real problem. They are apologetic, they are worried, they are exhausted. Or worse, flat-out arguing. Seeing a couple with kids, fighting, tense and furious with each other, angers me. They just don’t understand what they have. Don’t appreciate the gifts they’ve been given.
What I wouldn’t do for such a gift.
Young families are the hardest for me. I must emit some sort of “don’t get near me” pheromone, because instead of being afraid and wary of a stranger, children are attracted to me like bees to honey.
They’re like cats who always choose the one person who doesn’t like them to rub up against. Isn’t that why the witches in the fairy tales managed to capture and eat the little children?
Because they were too curious? The young ones sought out the darkness, searched willingly for the house in the forest. They got what they deserved, right?
The witch just wanted to be left alone, not reminded of what she didn’t have.
“Do you have any . . . sevens?” Four asks.
I have two, but I’m not going to tell him that. I don’t want the game to end too quickly.
“Go fish.”
The beautiful woman seated in front of me on the flight from BNA to ATL seemed perfectly nice.
The suburban book club type, a little lush, well groomed, shiny hair, in current jeans and a white button-down with a gray cashmere sweater tied around her neck.
She was sweet with the kids—a good mom. Her two children were admittedly adorable and quite well behaved.
They weren’t bothering me at all. I only noticed them because they were the last to board the plane, coming in harried and hurried.
I saw a mom and two kids and buried my nose in my book.
And then the husband started being a jerk.
He snapped at her first. His wife finally tired of his griping and snapped back.
Their whispered argument wasn’t as quiet as they thought, and I set down my book, furious.
I wanted to hit them, slap them, make them see how good they have it.
A beautiful family of means—nice clothes, healthy, enough money to travel—bound for Italy.
They have everything. They have it all. And what are they doing?
Arguing in public like ungrateful cretins.
I was about to say something, just to point out that they were not being as discreet as they thought, when the husband said something in a low growl, and all the hair on my body stood on end.
I knew that voice. With it, a rush of memories, full of sensory details I wouldn’t wish on anyone, enemy or otherwise.
Wet copper and evergreen candle in my nose.
Heart thundering. Her legs twitching, spasms moving through her flesh as the cells died, one after another.
The damn record caught in its loop, and the pool of crimson surrounding the body.
You don’t die right away; it takes your brain a few minutes to catch up to the reality of your body’s demise.
Assailed by memories, I craned my neck to see his face, but I was at too great an angle. He was looking straight ahead, fury bleeding off of him, and his wife was placating, cajoling, trying so hard.
It reminded me of my sister, trying to make her husband happy and getting rebuffed time and again. My sister, before she was killed. Before her husband murdered her.
This man’s temper, his demeanor, even the line of his shoulders . . . no.
It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be him.
I had to stop myself from hyperventilating.
There was no way. And yet . . .
I had to see him. I had to see his face.
The flight was incredibly bumpy, and the seat belt sign was on.
I’m well versed in turbulence; traveling as much as I do, the percentages dictate a bumpy flight on at least a quarter of the legs.
So I unbuckled and stood up, walked three rows forward toward the aft lav, then turned back like I was afraid of the bumps and returned to my seat, heart thudding so hard anyone paying attention could hear.
A flight attendant made an announcement about the seat belt sign remaining on and for everyone to stay in their seats, but I didn’t care that I was being scolded.
His face was different. Aged. Something about the nose was off, like it had been broken at some point. His hair was much longer, darker than I remembered, and he had a well-groomed beard.
Those eyes, though. There was no question in my mind. It was him.
My sister’s murderer, on my plane, with his new family.
So what are the odds?
Actually, the odds of boarding a plane and being seated behind the man who got away with murdering his first wife eleven years after that fact depended on any number of variables.
How often do I fly? (Regularly.) How often does he fly?
(Unknown.) How many flights does the airline have on a given day between the two cities?
(Let’s go with five.) How many people are on those flights?
(One hundred eighty, on average.) Do they have a shared geography? (Turns out, we do. How about that?)
Similar travel patterns could increase the likelihood, as would holiday travel, and about a million other undeterminable factors.
I could keep laying it out for you, but let’s say . . . annually, there’s a 1/121 chance. As a percentage, 0.826 percent.
Small. Not infinitesimal, but small.
When you extrapolate over a decade, because the cumulative probability increases, that turns into a roughly 8.26 percent chance.
Not knowing where he is, what he does for a living now, what his home airport could be, where he travels . . . The man has been a ghost, so if you want to layer in the probabilities that—
Stop.
I forced myself to focus.
The point is, the odds of seeing him on a flight aren’t zero, but they aren’t good, either.
Flying around the country hoping to bump into him is not a reasonable course of action.
I didn’t take the job with the airline with that in mind.
Not really. Not that I don’t look for him every time I board a flight.
Every time I walk into a store. Every time I enter a bar, restaurant, or concert.
Every time I go home, I drive by his parents’ house, thinking maybe he’ll be there visiting.
Eleven years of nothing. My sister, dead in the ground, and Andrew Locke out in the world, living, loving, enjoying his life. His freedom.
I don’t like that. Not at all.
When I saw him on the plane, it took every ounce of my being not to confront him then and there. I needed to play it cool. Follow and assess. Bide my time, wait for precisely the right moment. I sat there and tried to stop my heart from exploding out of my chest.
The right moment was slipping away, though. Hartsfield was too big; I could easily lose him in the crowds. There were ways to stop him, but I wanted the confrontation. I think I’ve earned the right.
So when we landed and he stood up, I did the same. When I said his name and his head snapped around to look at me and he recognized me, I felt that thrill all the way to my bones.
I’ve dreamed of the moment when I would come face-to-face with him again. I had so many things to say. I wanted to start screaming “Murderer!” at the top of my lungs, but then I would look like the crazy one.
So I tried for the simplest connection, the one that would let him know I’d found him at last, and threaten him the most. Hi, remember me. Remember her? Our sweet, darling, dead, murdered Chloe?
I wonder what he thinks when Chloe appears to him. Does he? Ever? Or is she just a part of his past, like a dead pet? One you think back on with bittersweet memories. The loss stops us in our tracks, and we must choose to move on, or we die with them.
I lost a cat once, and on every anniversary, I light a candle, look at the strangely colored old photos, and press my fingers into the ashes. It’s pretty damn powerful, the summoning of a creature’s spirit.
Does Andrew ever do that with Chloe’s memory?
Do dead wives have that kind of power? Does he remember how he used to lay his arm across her shoulders and play with her ponytail?
Or how he’d always hold the door for her, and pull out her chair, and follow her around like a puppy dog?
Does he remember when he gave her his letter jacket that night?
Does he remember what it felt like to kiss her for the first time?
The second? The tenth? The thousandth? To push himself into her pliant body?
To cry out her name in the dark? To lose himself in her?
Does he remember what it felt like to jam the scissors into her stomach? How warm and slippery it felt, the blood spraying across his hand and soaking the cuff of his jacket?
I bet he does.
I bet he dreams of it nightly.
I bet that’s why, when he saw me on the plane, he panicked. He ran because he remembers everything.
“Any fours?” Neve asks, and her brother giggles.
“Go fish.”