I was keeping hold of all of the details as I experienced them. I was committing them all to memory. I was going to store up everything I could. I was going to savor all of the moments as I saved them for the future.
Because here’s the thing: Death does come for everything. But Death can also be bargained with, if you know how to strike a deal. Death likes to hear true stories, and I traded my own to save my mother’s life. Old Black Suit had warned me that if I did so, I wouldn’t be able to tell him my story when he eventually came to claim me. I’d nodded, acknowledging that I understood, and handed my story over to him anyway.
But there was something in our deal that the man in the black suit hadn’t considered: the fact that all of us lead more than one life in our lifetimes. The fact that, in the years to come, I would become someone different from the seventeen-year-old who had struck a bargain with him at the bottom of a ravine to save the life of his mother.
I’d have other life stories to tell him later. And when he realized that, if that bothered him—if he was insulted by being manipulated—I’d sympathize with him, of course. Because no one likes being manipulated. But maybe he’d also enjoy the fact that I’d had enough foresight to think of it in the first place.
After school sometimes, Jarrod and I would go to Mosquito Lake, the first place I’d taken him when he came back to Temperance, when he came back to help me remember myself, and we’d look out at the small gray waves, rocking and rocking. Beneath those waves was an old coal-mining village, with a schoolhouse and a church, and the tiny houses of the workers who used to live there. You’d never imagine all of that was down there if you didn’t already know about it. The past is like that, really. If you don’t know it, it’s hard to imagine what’s come before you.
The future, I’d started to think, was kind of like that too. Hard to imagine, because we don’t know it. And even though I could know the future if I wanted to, just by closing my eyes and willing it, I’d made a decision not to look into mine too often. I wanted to be just here, in this life of mine, to live it just like anyone.
We’d sit on the railing or on one of the flat rocks down near the water, looking out at the rocking waves, talking about our past, talking about our future, our hands linked together. Between us, we had the present, and we were not surprised at all to be happy with that, to be happy with now, to be happy with nothing more than now.
Acknowledgments
This book owes a lot to the people who have shaped my life from the beginning. It’s for my grandparents—John and Sophia Leeper, Donald and Bernice Barzak—and it’s for my parents, Donald and Joyce Barzak. It’s for my brothers, Donald and Stephen, and my sister-in-law, Darlene. And it’s for my nieces and nephew, Justin, Valerie, and Jenna. My family has always been an incredibly important part of my life, reaching backward and forward, providing me with a story to live within, and this is just one of the stories I’ve made out of the many stories I’ve been told by them, and out of the ones that we are still telling.
I would also like to thank Richard Bowes, who read far too many drafts of this book before I was finished with it, and my agent, Barry Goldblatt, whose encouragement kept me working on it through even more drafts. Carter Smith unknowingly revived my faith in this material while he was turning my first novel, One for Sorrow, into the film Jamie Marks Is Dead, which shares the same setting. I could not have brought the novel to its final form without the perspicacious vision of my editor, Melanie Cecka, and there might have been a great many mistakes within without the wonderful team of copy editors at Knopf, who spent so much time going through these pages with me. Thank you also to my instructors and classmates at Chatham University, where I worked on this book in one of its earliest incarnations, and to Mary Rickert, who never fails to give me the right perspective on things.
And finally, thank you to Tony Romandetti, who believes in me even when I’ve lost hope.
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