The reporter’s words “believed to have died” hit Jools so hard that she felt herself go weak and had to sit down before she collapsed. She ended up perched on the very edge of their coffee table in front of the TV, cupping a hand over her mouth, totally focused on what she was witnessing in front of her. G sat down next to her. He placed a supportive arm around his wife’s shoulders, pulling her into him in a reassuring embrace.
“My God, Jools, this is terrible . . . but there is a positive. We don’t know if the kids were even on that bus, let alone injured. Several buses run that route every day. The odds are that it’s not their bus.” G was trying to placate Jools, but deep down he wasn’t confident that what he just said was true. All he could do was hope and pray that Cait and Dec were okay.
The camera then panned right and focused on the bus in the background: a red double-decker tourist bus with a large multicolored lightning flash down the side, sitting at an odd angle on the shoulder of a busy road. Its front was crumpled in, and sticking out from where the front of the bus should have been was a mangled car, looking like a parasite. Flashing blue lights on the top of a police van eerily reflecting off the dark tinted windows of the bus added an urgency to the mayhem that Jools and G were viewing on the TV, transfixed. What appeared to be dazed passengers were wandering about, luggage in hand, some being comforted by the locals, who by this stage were standing around in the background like a crowd at a football match.
“We’ve got to ring them. Maybe they’ve got reception on either WhatsApp or the phone network,” said G.
“Absolutely. Please, let’s ring right now.” Jools was starting to come to grips with the accident and thinking more clearly than she had been a few minutes ago.
Neither Cait nor Dec picked up.
“Jools, the fact that we can’t get through doesn’t mean the worst. If they’re out of the towns and in the middle of the countryside then it’s highly likely that they won’t have reception. Or they might’nt even have their phones on.”
“G, I think you should also ring the Department of Foreign Affairs. Maybe they know something,” said Jools. The cloud of concern and worry about their children’s safety and welfare was still present, weighing down on her shoulders like a threat from the devil himself. Regardless, Jools was now starting to respond rationally and take decisive action.
“Great idea, Jools. I’ll also register our details with them so they can contact us whenever they have news.”
“God I hope they’re all right . . . please,” Jools whispered to her inner self, to her God, and to her maternal ancestors.
“Attention. Lao Airlines Flight Five-thirteen to Siem Reap is now ready for boarding through gate three. Please have your boarding pass and passport ready and make your way to the departure lounge.” The clipped English version of the same airline departure message played in a thousand airports around the world echoed over the loudspeakers around the cavernous antechamber, making it difficult to hear clearly without concentrating.
“That’s us, sis,” said Dec as he picked up his daypack and threw it over his shoulder, patting his top shirt pocket more out of reflex than concern to confirm that his boarding pass and passport were still safely zipped away, ready to access when required.
“Yep, time to go,” replied Cait, copying Dec’s movements, following behind him as he weaved his way through the crowd to the departure gates 150 meters away.
“Hey Dec, I really need to thank you for listening to me in Pakse and not treating me like an idiot,” said Cait as she absentmindedly flipped through the dog-eared Lao Airlines in-flight magazine.
“Dear sister, you didn’t leave me much choice. I seem to remember you refusing to catch that bus, in no uncertain terms.”
“Yeah, I know it must’ve seemed like, so weird, but there was a reason. I can tell you now. I didn’t want to say anything before because I felt you’d think it too over the top and melodramatic.” Cait paused momentarily to collect her thoughts, then continued.
“Remember my dream that I told you about? The last one where I saw a bus crash?”
“Yeah, you were pretty freaked out about that one.”
“Well, there’s more to it than that . . . for starters, it wasn’t a dream. In fact, it was nothing like a dream. Dec, it was a vision, a really terrible vision, where people were injured and two people were killed.”
“That’s really sick, Cait. Sounds more like a nightmare to me.”
“Dec, I know the difference. The vision was real. I was actually there, watching it all happen. The cops, the ambulances, the dead bodies, the local people standing around looking like sightseers.”
Cait paused again, laboring over the crux of her dialogue.
“Dec, one of those dead people was you. You didn’t survive the bus crash.”
Dec was stunned. Gobsmacked. His face changed chameleonlike from a happy kid on an adventure to someone who looked as if they’d just had a premonition of their own death.
“Oh that’s really shit, are you for real?” Dec said with a tremor in his voice that was hidden by the white noise of the jet engines invading the cabin.
“Yes Dec, that’s what I saw in my vision. Go figure. Then when that same bus—the one in my vision, the red bus with the lightning flash down the side—was parked at the bus station, I knew it was for real. I couldn’t let you board that bus. You were going to be killed.”
Dec was stupefied, his jaw dropped open so wide that when Cait lifted her head to look him in the eye, she found herself gazing at his tonsils instead.
Cait had now said her bit and had no desire to labor the point, so she abruptly changed the topic, and in a more upbeat tone chirped, “Hey little bro, wasn’t it great that Dad managed to get me on the same flight back to Australia that you’d already booked?”
She gave him a happy smile that she hoped would snap Dec out of his maudlin state and continued as if nothing untoward had just transpired. “And he even managed to get us seats next to each other!”
Then adding in a more humorous tone, almost as an afterthought, “But this time in cattle class, bro, down the back with the great unwashed and all the other backpackers and the screaming kids traveling back from holidays.
“You know I told Dad that now I’ve flown business class in the pointy end there’s no going back, but it seemed to fall on deaf ears. Can’t understand why!”
“Yeah, that really sucks, Cait. Ha ha.”
Dec and Cait were at Siem Reap International Airport, sitting down at Burger King in the food hall. On the way out they had each decided to grab a beer, a double cheeseburger and some fries, then jump onto the free Wi-Fi, as they needed to work out the lay of the land, and of course check Facebook.
“Dec, can you connect to Wi-Fi? It’s not happening on my phone. The little circle is spinning but that’s it. Looks like the phone’s connected though.”
“Yeah, same with me, sis. Must be down. Typical Asia. Maybe it’ll be okay in a few minutes or so.
“Hey, this burger’s good. Just like home,” said Dec, stuffing a fistful of fries into his already overfull mouth.
“Dec pleeeease, do you reckon you could possibly fit any more food into that trap of yours?” Cait started idly flipping through her phone and noticed five missed calls from G and one from Jools, plus two texts:
Hi kids. When you get this can you please contact us immediately. We need to talk to you.
Need to touch base. Contact us as soon as you get this text. Thanks.
“Hey Dec, have you seen the texts from Mum and Dad? Sounds pretty important. We need to ring them. Hope everything’s all right.”
“Mmm. Yep,” said Dec, speaking in a muffled tone through a mouthful of food.
“Oh for Christ’s sake, Dec, stop being such a pig. This isn’t the Last Supper, you know.”
Dec swallowed his mouthful in one huge gulp, his face distorting as the huge bolus of food worked its way down his esophagus, then took a long swig of his beer and burped,
looking very satisfied with himself.
“Yeah, sure thing. We’ll jump on the Wi-Fi at the hotel and WhatsApp them,” said Dec.
The original plan of action was to catch a tuk-tuk for five dollars and head straight to the 4.5-star Royal Crown Hotel and Spa, located slap-bang in the middle of town. This hotel certainly was a step up from the el cheapo backpacker digs that they would have normally booked had they been paying for it themselves. The accommodation was a gift from G and Jools and had been prebooked and already paid for. G had managed to get a last-minute deal on the web, and at $88 USD per night including breakfast for the two of them it was a bargain, so all the kids had to do was check in, grab their complimentary cocktails, and find their way to the swimming pool.
Well, that was the plan.
Dec had done some research in Vientiane before Cait had arrived and he sussed out that all the nighttime action in Siem Reap seemed to happen in and around Pub Street, which was just on the other side of the meandering Siem Reap River, about a five hundred meter stagger away, depending on how many beers had been consumed during the night’s festivities. Or so he reckoned.
How good is that? Dec had said to himself when he found out about party central.
But first they had to ring home and see what all the kerfuffle was about. Then they’d be free to take a stroll across the river to visit party central tonight and move on to Angkor Wat tomorrow.
Yes, should be a hoot, Dec thought to himself in the tuk-tuk on the way to their hotel.
“Go figure. We get these messages to ring home urgently, then no one answers. Can’t be that important,” said Dec as he put his phone down. Cait tried on her phone as well, but with the same result.
“Well we tried to contact them, didn’t we, sis? Now, let’s not get distracted any further. It’s free cocktail time,” Dec said enthusiastically, grabbing the drink list that was sitting next to the mandatory bottle of icy cold water sitting on the small table between their reclining daybeds. They had chosen a spot in the sun well away from the few other guests scattered around the pool and had already laid out their towels. They were about to kick back and chill with a drink in hand that had fruit dangling off the top of the glass, complete with a tiny multicolored paper umbrella stuck into a maraschino cherry that was obviously meant to somehow keep the sun off the drink.
“What’s your poison, sis? I’m going to have, ah . . . maybe . . . no . . . yes, I know, I know . . .”
“Dec, you’re like a kid in a candy shop. Make up your mind before they run out of alcohol. And order me a mojito while you’re at it, will you?”
By this stage a long-suffering waiter in a white polo shirt with the name of the hotel embroidered on the front, freshly ironed white shorts with a crease running down each leg, and a pair of white running shoes with odd socks was standing patiently at the end of their day loungers, waiting for an order.
“Yes!” Dec exclaimed, almost in a eureka moment, “I’ll have a mai tai.”
“Say Hello, Wave Goodbye” started playing on Cait’s phone—her new personalized ringtone that she had recently set up because it reminded her of Rishi, her murdered lover back home; it had been their favorite song.
“Oh my God—Cait, Dec, you’re alive!” G and Jools were on speakerphone together, a sound of ultimate jubilation, relief, and concern in their voices, all rolled into one. Cait also put her phone on speaker and placed it on the table between them so they could both hear their parents. Luckily they were sitting far enough away from other people so they weren’t disturbing anyone.
“Yeah. What’s up?” said Dec.
“The bus crash. You survived. Are you both okay?” said Jools and G, almost in unison as if they were singing a duet.
Cait felt like the world had momentarily stopped turning. She was suddenly frozen in time, divorced from everyone and everything around her. Jools’s words were running around her brain at a million miles an hour, looking for a place to park themselves.
“Mum, what bus crash?” stammered Cait.
“Cait, the one over there that happened earlier today. The one where the red double-decker bus from Pakse to Siem Reap crashed. It’s all over the news here. That was your bus, wasn’t it? We’ve been frantic as we haven’t been able to contact you. Are both of you all right?”
“Mum, we changed plans at the last minute. We flew here today instead. We weren’t on that bus.”
“Oh Cait, Dec, I don’t know what to say,” said Jools, tears of joy, relief, and happiness flooding down her cheeks as if someone had switched on a tap in her tear ducts. Jools was too overcome with emotion to talk, so G filled the void.
“Caitie and Dec, you have no idea how worried we were. We were beside ourselves, and then when we couldn’t get through to either of you, we started thinking the worst.”
“Yeah, well, we had our phones switched off all day until we arrived here in Siem Reap,” replied Cait.
Dec was unusually silent. He had gone into shock, almost in sympathy with his parents, except for an entirely different reason. Instead he was totally floored, a whirlwind of confusing thoughts racing around inside his head in rapid-fire succession. He was having great difficulty finding a point of focus as the realization started to sink in that Cait had actually saved his life. Her dream—no, her vision—had proven correct.
How in the hell did she know?
“Mum, Dad, I think Cait saved my life.” Dec managed to utter a few monosyllabic words.
“Sorry Dec, what’d you say?” queried G.
Dec managed to regain some composure, and like painting a picture from a past memory, proceeded to fill his parents in on how Cait had totally freaked out when she saw their bus in Pakse the day before they were due to catch a similar bus to Siem Reap today.
“Cait just refused point-blank to take the bus. I was a bit pissed off, but to shut her up I managed to get us on a Lao Airlines flight today. And that’s when she told me on the plane why she wouldn’t catch the bus. Because in the crash in her dreams I was killed.
“And now you’re telling me that the bus crash was real.” Dec’s voice wavered, as he felt himself about to crack. “The one that Cait saw.”
Dec became overwhelmed with a wave of emotion and paused momentarily to allow his confused thoughts to settle, giving him needed time to process the logic of what he had just heard.
“I don’t know how she knew it, but Cait saved my life. It’s, like, so weird.” Dec tore his eyes away from Cait’s phone and looked across at his sister, seeing her in a totally different light. It was almost as if she was radiating a soft luminescence. She caught his eye, and Dec mouthed the words, “Thank you, sis.”
Cait gave him a smile that silently voiced a thousand words.
“Mum, it’s true. I saw the crash before it happened. I was there at the scene of the accident, watching it as if it was a movie on a screen. But really, I wasn’t there!” Jools sensed that Cait was confused but chose not to intervene, as she recognized it as important to her daughter’s healing process to encourage her to continue purging her thoughts and emotions, bringing them out in the open so she could then move on without the vestige of past events dragging her back into the dark abyss that was all sadness, disappointment, and regret.
“I saw Dec’s body, lying on the road. He was dead, Mum, dead! I couldn’t let him on that bus.”
Cait buried her face deeply in both her hands and started sobbing, her shoulders heaving with emotion as she let out the all pent-up emotion that had been building for months. The accident was simply the catalyst that finally brought everything together and to the surface.
A poignant silence seemingly lasting an hour, but really for only thirty seconds or so, hung in the air before Jools spoke again.
“The Gift’s chosen you, Cait. There’s no going back now. Welcome to the Otherworld.”
G and Dec just listened quietly and let the moment ride. It was as if a magical healing presence had taken over. Dec looked tenderly at his sister and so
mehow she was different. She had stopped sobbing and appeared resigned, happy, glowing almost, with a radiance that outshone the bright sun, as if she had just managed to shrug off a huge burden that had been hanging over her like the sword of Damocles.
G could feel it even though there was seven thousand kilometers between them. He conjured up a vision of his daughter which was as clear as if she was standing in front of him: My Caitie has just had an epiphany. She’s turned the corner and is starting to heal.
“See you next week, guys,” said G, purposefully breaking the spell of the moment. “We want heaps of photos of Angkor Wat, okay.”
Cait was back in her bedroom, sitting cross-legged on the floor engrossed in her mind map, transfixed. The longer she concentrated on what was in front of her the more she began to realize it was a totally different map than before.
The past is a strange place. They do things differently there. Cait was reminded of one of her father’s more quoted sayings.
This mind map’s so past tense.
Instead of being just a confusing jumble of two-dimensional spaghetti lines running higgledy-piggledy all over the place, now Cait’s mind map had a depth to it. The more she relaxed and let her mind wander of its own accord, the more the lines lifted off the page and became a hologram, with the colored interconnecting lines layered on top of each other, resembling three-dimensional contour lines on a topography map.
“Show me the way,” Cait murmured to herself, calling to her ancestors to help her invoke The Gift. “Let’s see what this is really all about.” She was currently on a steep learning curve and not really sure how to summon or use her newfound powers of insight and perception, so it was trial and error at present.
Since Asia, Cait was like a woman possessed: focused, intense, alert. She had cast off the aura of someone who was defeated and now she was out there, ready to take on the world. Her experiences in Laos had flipped her perception of reality totally on its head and replaced it with a reinvigorated sense of purpose.
The Cait Lennox Box Set Page 40
