Here One Moment

“Fate won’t be fought.”

This favorite saying of Cherry Lockwood’s mother, the fortune teller who calls herself Madame Mae, touches on The Tension Between Free Will and Destiny. Mae’s belief that everything in life is predestined contrasts with Cherry’s belief in free will. However, Moriarty uses Cherry’s first-person musings, her dialogues with her mother, and the accurate predictions of Mae and the psychic Luca to show that free will and destiny can coexist.

“Everything is caused by something else: a preceding action, event, or situation.”

A man at a party makes this statement about determinism, or the idea that everything that happens is “causally inevitable,” to describe Cherry’s mother. Another guest at the party discusses free will, something in which Cherry passionately believes. The Tension Between Free Will and Destiny is never resolved in the novel.

“All those damned ‘ologists.’ They’re the fortune tellers.”

Sue O’Sullivan is the first character to reference the motif of doctors, who represent modern-day seers in the novel. Blood tests, scans, and genetic tests can see “terrible things” in a person’s future. Sue’s take on doctors is negative because she has received one of Cherry’s frightening predictions: death from pancreatic cancer three years in the future. Cherry, who is in perfect health, also sees doctors as fortune tellers. She, however, puts a positive spin on the idea by touting the benefits of preventative care.

“I can’t make anyone do anything, Cherry, and I don’t always get it right.”

In the novel, psychics like Mae and people like Cherry, who make predictions, can be both wrong and right because of the butterfly effect. Clairvoyants might get a prediction wrong because it might cause a person to change their behavior.

“I can’t say: ‘This is definitely your future. Why? Because the moment I do, you change your behavior.’ […] So—all I can do is interpret the cards to help you see possible paths.”

The psychic Luca explains how the very act of making a prediction changes their behavior and future. This is another indirect reference to the butterfly effect. Cherry’s own predictions for the passengers on the Hobart-Sydney flight, based in math, have a similar impact. A few come true because she has based them on her understanding of statistics. Others, mostly for the main characters but also for some minor ones, do not because the characters take action to change their future.

“He says, Have faith. He keeps talking about faith.”

Luca, along with Mae, has genuine psychic abilities. Everything Luca and Mae predict for Ethan and Cherry, respectively, comes true. Their accurate foretelling supports the idea of destiny. They also support The Connection Between All People. Ethan will eventually learn that Harvey meant for him to meet Faith, his cousin, while Cherry will eventually learn that the little girl whom her mother saw coming into her life will be a girl who comes off a plane, her name beginning with the letter “B.” As presented in the novel, these seeming coincidences may be the result of paranormal forces.

In the novel, everything is not as it seems. There are red herrings, or false clues. Initially, it seems that the little girl that Mae foresees is the child whom Cherry believes she is adopting, whose name also begins with “B.” The novel also suggests that Ethan will end up with Harvey’s sister but pairs him with Faith.

“Could the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?”

Cherry already knows about the butterfly effect when a man at a party facetiously quotes the title of the academic paper that made it famous. This introduces the theory as a key element in the novel. Later Cherry compares herself to the agent of chaos, or change, represented by the butterfly in this theoretical question.

“I’m always thinking, okay, I’ll just get through this next thing, then I’ll start living.”

Sue O’Sullivan voices the reason why people often don’t live their lives fully. They are too preoccupied with the mundane necessities of life and don’t stop to live in the moment. In Sue’s case, it takes Cherry’s (mistaken) death sentence to force her to appreciate the passage of time.

“That day, on the flight from Hobart to Sydney, I was the butterfly. Actually, I was the less poetic seagull.”

In comparing herself to the “less poetic seagull,” Cherry is expressing shame about her actions on the flight. Actions can have either positive or negative consequences, just as a butterfly’s flapping wings could either set off or prevent a tornado. Here, Cherry focuses on the fear she engendered in the “victims” of her predictions. As the story unfolds, however, her predictions will do a great deal of good, helping people to avoid misfortune and teaching them to embrace their lives.

“I think my mother was wrong. Fate can be fought.”

Cherry’s pragmatic rejection of her mother’s determinism lies in the faith she places in preventative measures. Looming large among these are doctors and their ability to identify health problems and address symptoms before they become major issues. Cherry is angry at her mother for ignoring her health problems, which Cherry considers to be illogical: She, unlike her mother, does not believe in fate.

“The older you get, the less linear your memories, and the more everything seems to circle back to something else.”

Cherry makes this statement in preparation for revealing how she came to be the “Death Lady.” it can be seen as an explanation for the meandering nature of her first-person narration, which weaves back and forth between her present and her past until she finally “catches up” to the present moment.

“The belief that the probability of future events changes based on past events (assuming those events are independent) is known as the Monte Carlo fallacy, or the gambler’s fallacy.”

As an actuary, Cherry likes the idea that future events don’t actually change based on past events. She finds the idea so comforting that her favorite Monte Carlo biscuits, named after the city made famous for its casinos, makes her think of “statistical independence.” Later she will compare the fact that some of her predictions were accurate to the way people read meaning into the random actions of a roulette ball. It is the meaning that people read into Cherry’s predictions that causes them to change their behavior. Thus, while past results can’t predict future events, they can influence them.

“I was taught God gave us free will, and although I have complicated feelings about the existence of God, I believe in free will.”

Cherry defends free will, blaming the drunk driver who killed Kayla Halfpenny for making her “dreadful” prediction come true. As Stephen Hawking says in the book’s first epigraph, even people who claim everything is predestined look before crossing the street.

“I still love logic, but I understand its limitations.”

In the course of her life, Cherry has evolved from putting all her faith in logic to acknowledging that it cannot answer every question. Her experiences with genuine clairvoyance help lead her to this conclusion. She not only has experienced moments of real clairvoyance herself, but eventually will see every one of the predictions her mother made when telling Cherry’s fortune come true.

“I take after my dad, but I am also my mother’s daughter.”

Cherry has inherited her father’s love of math and her mother’s love of fortune-telling, which she meld in her career as an actuary. Cherry compares herself to her mother at various points in the story, later calling herself a “fortune teller of the business world” (420). There is a significant difference, however. Cherry’s job is to predict death so her insurance company can make calculated bets on their customers’ life spans, while her mother would never give frightening readings to her clients.

“Her boys haven’t yet discovered the awful fragility of life. They don’t yet know that the possibility of death is always there, sitting right alongside you.”

Sue O’Sullivan voices one of the hard truths about life. People have to admit that death is ever-present and can’t be predicted with complete accuracy.

“You’ve already met the love of your life.”

This is another example of a red herring. Here, Cherry’s mother seems to be talking about Jack, Cherry’s first love who died in Vietnam. When Cherry’s mother tells her future, Cherry has no memory of having met Ned Lockwood, who will be her second husband, in college. Ned, like Suzanne and Harvey, is a character that reemerges from the past to great effect.

“That’s the thing about life: both your wildest dreams and your worst nightmares can come true.”

Cherry’s use of “come true” alludes to the fact that she has previously had a terrifying premonition about losing Ned, Jill, and Bert on the same day. She goes on to wonder if that means she is psychic or merely human. This sustains The Tension Between Free Will and Destiny, which will continue to the end of the story.

“How many coincidences before you start to wonder?”

Ethan, like Cherry, experiences a reading by a true psychic. When Luca’s predictions begin to come true, Ethan questions whether they are more than coincidence—whether, perhaps, there really is a paranormal realm. The miraculous appearance of a seagull who frightens Carter and saves Ethan hints at an otherworldly element.

“Were my actions on that flight a strange version of that peculiar exercise? Was there any method to my madness?”

Cherry’s musings about why she launched into her predictions on the flight reference a quote from Hamlet. She is struggling with the disrepute she has brought to her profession and recalling details that explain how she landed on her predictions. Like the character Hamlet, she was deeply preoccupied with death when she boarded the flight.

“I am a bereaved retired actuary who suffered a mental health crisis on a flight.”

Moriarty doesn’t provide an explanation for casting Cherry’s chapters in the first-person perspective. They are not, for example, parts of a fictional memoir within the story, and, due to the detailed backstory, cannot be the statement she provides denying her psychic abilities. Those affected by her predictions wouldn’t need to know about her romantic relationships or her complicated relationship with her mother. The above quote, however, may well be part of her official statement. It follows her visit from the mysterious Thor, who urges her to issue a statement. She has also just expressed a wish to “sincerely apologize” and clarify that she isn’t a psychic.

“I wondered if my love of math and her love of the spiritual could therefore coalesce in a way far more beautiful and mysterious than my cynical belief that she used data and probability to make her predictions, no different from an actuarial table.”

This quotation is the closest the novel comes toward resolving The Tension Between Free Will and Destiny. Mae’s predictions represent destiny; Cherry’s represent free will. Here, Cherry puts math and spiritual belief on the same plane. Both might be another sense and a way to access another reality. In this sense, they coexist and are equally valid.

“And then we wondered if we were just stumbling our way toward God or enlightenment, or was that just a way of saying we didn’t know.”

Cherry has raised the possibility that prediction based on either logic or psychic abilities may be one and the same. She ends with uncertainty— “we didn’t know”—and describes how she and Ned leave their philosophical discussion to buy camp chairs. This is typical of how the novel uses humor to lighten grim or particularly poignant situations and dialogue. It also illustrates how—despite the existential and impossible questions humans face about life and the beyond—we must go about our everyday.