Blind Luck (17 page)

Dave did a quick sweep of the room. The blonde wore a bright red suit and smelled of rich tobacco that made him think of cigarillos. The Chinese man was no more than thirty, and his positioning under a halogen light that hung from a long cord revealed thinning hair.

“This is him?” the woman asked Thorrin with a dismissive gesture at Dave.

Thorrin nodded.

“Hmm.” Her sigh emphasized just how unimpressive she found him.

The slight seemed to stoke Thorrin’s competitive nature and prompted him to rub his hands together. “Shall we?”

The blonde raised her glass of wine, and Thorrin locked eyes with Dave. “This is Kevin,” he said, nodding at the Chinese man. “Tell us how much money is in Kevin’s chequing account.”

“Chequing account? I thought we agreed on taxes.”

Thorrin stood from the table and walked to a window overlooking the downtown core. Dave knew to follow. He leaned into Thorrin and spoke in a whisper. “We agreed on taxes. I can’t guess how much money is in his bank account.”

“You can and you will; or you will owe me every dollar I put on this wager.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Tell me how much money is in that man’s account, or you owe me my bet.”

The mirth was gone from Thorrin’s face and replaced by a stern focus. He walked back to the table and smiled at the blonde. “He’s worse than a kid before a school concert.”

She sighed and motioned to get on with things. Dave’s brow contorted into worry. He appraised the Chinese man, but he couldn’t visualize a number, let alone predict the truth. The situation’s magnitude became clear. He could lose thousands of dollars he had no way of paying back. He lifted his hands from the table and wiped the sweat prints with his forearm so the blonde wouldn’t see. Instinct told him to apologize, to barter some type of payback plan, but he knew it was too late to stop. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Then his thoughts wandered to the only time he’d ever seen his father cry.

It was the night before he’d started university, so he’d gone to bed early, but just after two in the morning, the sound of breaking glass had jolted him from bed. He could hear his dad swearing, and it was easy to tell the man was drunk. He stepped into the kitchen ready to tell his dad to call it a night when he saw him struggling with a lighter that he held to a line of loose-leafed paper.

“What’s going on, Dad?”

“They’re supposed to be automatic.”

“What do you have there?”

Dave reached for the paper, and as his dad lowered the lighter, his liquid eyes became clear. He’d seen his father frustrated many times, deflated even more, but something about the look in his eyes pooling with tears shook him to the core.

“Automatic,” his dad said again.

Dave looked at the paper to see the number 152,360 written so many times, there was more ink on the page than white space. Dave held the paper to eye level.

“What does this number mean?”

“It’s how much I would have made tonight if a holder hadn’t fumbled the snap on a convert. They drive eighty yards in a minute twenty to take the lead, and a fumbled convert stops me from covering the spread. There hasn’t been a fumbled convert attempt in three years.” He pointed to the paper as if he were pointing at a rare diamond. “That number would have changed my life,
our
lives.”

Dave handed him back the paper and struck the lighter for him. His dad held the paper over the fire until the edge turned orange with flame, and the two of them watched as every number on the page burned to ash.

“Do you have an answer, Dave?” Thorrin’s voice snapped Dave back into the present. He turned to the Chinese man, and for a moment the man looked like his father.

“One-hundred and fifty-two thousand, three-hundred and sixty.”

The Chinese man pushed his chair back from the table. “Did you see me downstairs?’

“I’ve never seen you before today.”

The man passed Thorrin his bank slip to prove that Dave was dead on.

“A little more impressive than he looks, isn’t he?” Thorrin smiled at the blonde, who gawked at Dave in disbelief.

The Chinese man looked at Dave like he might pounce across the table. “How could you possibly know the number? I just took out eighty dollars five minutes before I came here.”

“I guessed.”

“Then I have some lotto numbers I’d love you to take a guess on.”

Thorrin laughed and tapped the man on the hand. “Those guesses belong to me.”

The words forced Dave’s focus back to Thorrin, and it was clear from the look in his eyes that he might have been smiling, but he wasn’t joking.

Twenty-One

Dave returned from another breakfast with Grayson to find Amy on his couch reading a detective novel belonging to him that he’d never read. She lowered the book from eye level. “How was breakfast?”

“Weird.”

“Why weird?”

“It doesn’t matter. Right now, it’s your turn.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m going to prove to you that you’re not unlucky.”

“Really?”

“Oh yeah.”

“You sound determined.”

“You sound skeptical.”

“I am.”

“Well, not for long.”

He took a blindfold from his pocket and passed it to her.

“What’s this for?”

“I don’t want you to see where we’re going.”

“It’s a bit much, isn’t it?”

“You don’t have to put it on until we’re in the car.”

They drove for ten minutes before she wrapped the fabric around her eyes. “Are you sure I can’t just close my eyes?”

“You could, but I don’t trust you.”

“Don’t be cheeky.”

With the blindfold on, she heard the sound of the brakes, the rattling of parts, and the grinding of gears. She took a CD from her pocket and held it out to him. He took the CD and looked at it to see “Groovy Tunes” written in black marker across the disk. He put it in the player.

“You ever heard this song?” she asked.

Dave gave the wailing gospel singers another second. “No.”

“I’ll burn you a copy. This is the Swoops. You’ve probably heard their tracks on at least a dozen samples that are on the radio today. Only this is the real moment in time.”

She reached for the blindfold, but Dave tapped her arm. “Don’t ruin the surprise. This is part of the fun.”

“I just don’t want you to be disappointed.”

“Don’t worry about that.”

“I am, you sound confident.”

“Work with me here, will you?’

“This isn’t an argument, it’s not like I want to be right, it’s just the way we are. The way we were born.”

“The way we were born?”

“That’s right, you were born in May, weren’t you?”

“Where’d you see that?”

“I didn’t, May’s the luckiest month.”

“You know I should tape you when you start with this, because if you heard yourself I think you’d be surprised.”

“Sigmund Freud, May. Pope John Paul II, May. John Wayne, May. Walt Whitman, Browning, Emerson, May, May, May. Do you want me to continue?”

“So everyone born in May has a blessed life?”

“I was born in January. Do you want to know who was born in January?”

“A lot of failures and a lot of successes, just like the other eleven months.”

“Wrong. Do you think it’s a coincidence that Elvis Presley, Richard Nixon, Grigori Rasputin, Benedict Arnold, Martin Luther King, and Virginia Woolf were all born in the same month?”

“Yes. And I think a lot of people would argue that those people were anything but unlucky.”

“And I believe you believe what you say, which is why I know you’ll be disappointed with this surprise.”

Neither of them said a word for a while after that. As the car drove, Amy imagined a life where they were married, where she looked out the window as they drove to the cottage every weekend with two children, maybe three. In this fantasy, they had a house and a family. That’s what she wanted out of life. Every bit as intensely as some people desire wealth and others power, she wanted a family to share life with.

Those thoughts repeated themselves until the car stopped.

“We’re here,” Dave said. He pulled down her blindfold to reveal that they were in a parking lot. After adjusting to the light, Amy’s eyes focussed on a small plane at the end of a field covered in a layer of snow.

“Where are we?”

“Parachute school.”

She looked again at the field, where someone now folded a parachute, and thoughts of falling, broken bones and blood dominated.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you’re jumping out of a plane. You’re going to jump, and you’re going to be fine.”

“There’s snow on the ground.”

“They won’t let us jump if the weather’s not right.”

“I can’t jump.”

“Yeah, you can.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Look, you keep saying you believe in me, right?”

Her eyes narrowed like she hated him for using her words against her. Then a man floating to the ground fifty yards away let out a guttural scream that drew attention to how small he looked. Dave grabbed her closest hand.

“Let’s go.”

Instinct told her legs not to move, but she accepted his lead. The warmth of his hand made her want her entire body to be as warm. She concentrated on relaxation techniques while Dave signed them up for their instruction.
Two times sixteen is thirty-two, thirty-two times three is ninety-six.
But the numbers didn’t steady her breathing. The battle wasn’t against nerves or imagination; she was about to challenge a force she was convinced swayed with the gods of life and death.

The trainer looked more like a schoolteacher than someone that jumped out of planes, and as he spoke her mind waded through every negative adjective she knew.

“I am your instructor, although I prefer jump master,” he said in an accent she placed as Slavic. “You’re both doing tandem jumps, so the training isn’t long. We’re doing most of the work.” He gestured to another man with muscles that bulged from his orange diving gear. “Thirty minutes of your time is all we need, and another fifteen minutes to get you to the jump altitude of ten thousand feet. If the weather holds up, you’ll have finished your jump an hour from now.”

Amy didn’t speak for the next thirty minutes. She nodded when she had to and heard what she had to hear, but her mind could not move past ten thousand feet. Dave led her to the plane, and she struggled to control a tick in her jaw that made her head jerk.
Nothing is going to happen as long as I'm with Dave,
she told herself.
His luck will save me, his luck will save me.
She didn’t process any of the questions the instructor asked as the plane took off; she just answered on reflex. She told him her height and weight, shook her head when he asked if she had a heart condition, nodded when he told her to make sure she breathed, and panicked when he pointed to a waiver and said, “Sign here, please.”

The higher the plane rose, the harder she squeezed Dave’s hand, until they reached jump altitude. The sky looked endless, blue and dreamy that high up, as if it were its own playing field. If only fear hadn’t been numbing her body, she might have been able to enjoy the view.

Dave kissed her hand, and she held tight as she inched her way behind the jump master. A shared harness connected them, but she wished she was connected to Dave. He flashed her a wink and leapt with his jump master out of the plane, which ignited a dizziness that burned through her.

She heard the instructor say, “Don’t look down” and immediately looked out the plane door. It occurred to her that maybe it was her fate to jump to her death and end this streak of bad luck forever. She wished she wanted to fall so she could end the anxiety, but every cell in her body fought to keep her inside, where her feet could feel something beneath them.

She imagined a crowd below, taunting her. She knew a certain number of people in the world wanted something to go wrong, for her to jump too straight and piledrive her body weight; for her chute to bunch up, or for the cord to snap. Those are the stories that live on for decades.

She looked at the twelve inches or so of blue grating in the shape of diamonds that stood between her and the door, then a chip in her jump master’s harness caught her attention. This wasn’t the harness’s first job. She slid her toes forward.

“Three breaths and go,” the jump master said.

The alternating yellow and red stripes on his back made Amy think of stunt men, the collapse of lungs and suffocation.

It was impossible to see any details on the ground from that height. For all she knew, they were above water, mountains or a forest. She looked straight out into a blue sky so vibrant, it made her realize she had never really seen blue until then.

This isn’t a bad way to die
, she thought. The jump master raised a thumb, and she tipped her body weight forward until gravity took over. With her arms splayed and her face rubbery, she felt anything but graceful.

The red and yellow stripes on the jump master’s back blurred into a unified streak, until the parachute opened and tugged on her hard enough that she thought her spine was going to rip from her back. She reacted more than thought with primal screams, her fingers balled into fists, and eyes too afraid to be shut yet too disoriented to stay open. Her body dropped again. This time she saw a flash of blue sky that she was convinced was water. Up looked down and down looked up. Only the tugging helped her distinguish between falling and recoiling, then she felt a beautiful weightlessness.

“Great jump,” the instructor yelled.

She closed her eyes until they landed and wondered for a moment if she was going to throw up before her lungs filled with air.

Dave ran over and kissed her forehead. “Congratulations.”

The instructor grabbed her shoulders. “Don’t you feel alive?”

She wanted to vomit, but yes, she was very alive.

Thirty minutes later, her heart still hadn’t returned to normal as they sat across from each other in the closest diner. The place hadn’t been renovated in thirty years, but it was clean. Dave raised his pint.

“You did it.”

“I did.” Her mouth didn’t feel ready for a sip of beer.