“I’m selling these at the show. Jarrah hardwood and meteor iron,” he said.
“Meteor iron?”
“Yeah. From the one that came down at Wilkinkarra.”
The penknife was carved with emus and kangaroos on one side and what she took to be the Milky Way on the other. It was beautiful. She shook her head. “I can’t possibly take this! It must be worth hundreds of—”
“I’ll be lucky to get twenty bucks each. Take it. It’s fair dinkum. An exchange. The earrings for the knife. See the ring at the bottom of it? I’ve been told that if you put your keys on that and put it in the tray outside the metal detector with your phone, you can even fly with it. They just think it’s a key-fob thing.”
Ray was not to be talked out of the gift and she accepted it with good grace. She got in the Toyota, waved goodbye, and retraced her journey to the roadwork sign; this time she took the correct turn for Alice. As the town got closer, the road became more certain of itself. Houses and stores loomed out of the dark. She saw campfires with men and women gathered around them. More Indigenous people who, apparently, had all come in for the show.
The phone reacquired a GPS signal. The radio came back on. “At the next junction, take a left for Alice Springs airport,” Google Maps suddenly announced in a perky Australian accent. Heather was at the airport ten minutes later. She drove to the rental-car lot and turned the engine off. A sign said DO NOT FEED DINGOES, WILD DOGS, OR FERAL CATS above a drawing of a sad-looking dog and an indifferent cat. She made sure the doors were locked and let everyone sleep for a while longer.
“We’re here,” she said finally and gave Tom a gentle shake.
He stretched. “Oh, great. Thank you, honey. I would have driven some! You should have woken me. Any problems?”
“Not really, but there was a big kangaroo in the middle of the road,” she said, attaching the penknife to her key chain.
“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.