Second Chance

by Chet Williamson

  ~*~

  "I remember," Tracy said on the plane back to their home in California, "I remember a night when we were seniors. It was fall. The weather was cold. Keith and Dale and I had gone out for pizza, and when we came back the rest of you tried to play a joke on us, pretended you were from the future, and then you pretended to go back, and I took your hand, and after that you were yourself again." She looked at him, and he felt pinned by her gray eyes. "Do you remember that?"

  "Yes," he said, and he did. "Very dimly. It was a long time ago."

  "Do you think the two . . . paths crossed that night? And we just didn't realize what was happening?"

  "You didn't realize," Woody said, "and the rest of us didn't remember. Because we never really knew."

  "But now we do," Tracy said, looking down, as if she could see through the clouds to the earth beneath. "We know what really happened." She sighed. "Do you know, Woody, I remember dying? I remember it like it happened in a dream, but I didn't until . . . until you came back for me." She looked at him. "What you say our life together seems like to you—that's what my dying is like for me. I can barely recall it, but I can. That night with Keith, the bomb going off, and the world full of white pain, and that's where my memory ends." When she took his hand he gripped it hard. "The memory of that world." She smiled. "Maybe I died and went to heaven."

  "No," he said. "This is real. It's earth. Whatever our other memories might be, this is reality. Now."

  They sat and watched clouds. Two people, four lives, and a death.

  ~*~

  . . . I don't know what caused it. I only know that no one, except for those of us who were there, will ever believe it. And why would they? Every bit of physical evidence we've found here in our apartment—Jesus, our apartment. Woody, it feels so good to write that!—indicates that Dale and I have been living together for seventeen years. Seventeen years! And of course it's as if I never lived with Douglas, even though, before I came to your miraculous, amazing, wonderful party, we'd been together for years. I still know him, you see, he's still in my—our—circle of friends, but we've never been lovers, and he gives no indication of anything like that ever happening. Even though I remember.

  It's so strange, but I do. I remember having lived two lives, one with Douglas, one with Dale. But I remember the one with Douglas like I remember life, and I remember the one with Dale, the one that's happening now, like I remember books I've read and reread. Only now the book is real, and I'm in it and living it and love it. Remember how I told you that I thought I could love Dale? Well, I guess I was damn well right, wasn't I? I keep waiting to wake up, for this lovely dream to end, but I haven't, and it isn't.

  I don't know what happened, or how, or why. But it happened, and it wouldn't have if you hadn't had that party. So thank you, dear Woody, for giving Dale and me a new life. My love to you, and to Tracy, and to (oh God!) the children.

  Eddie

  ~*~

  . . . we have your wedding pictures. There they were in our photo album, just as faded as the others that I remember having in real life—if that was real life. There's Judy as the Maid of Honor in a dress she remembers wearing as if it were a dream, and there I am as your best man. I remember it, but I don't remember it, if you know what I mean, and I'm sure you do. I mean, it was your wedding, right? And of course I have photos of Eddie and Dale together too, shots I took in New York when Judy and I went up there to see shows.

  What the hell is this, Woody? A parallel world? A world in which Tracy and Dale never died? I'm at a loss to find any other explanation, except for the one that we're all nuts, or in the longest continuous dream in recorded dreamery, and that's just impossible. We're back in the real world now, that much I know, whether it's the real world or some other real world.

  I realize I must sound almost as confused now as I did that night, but none of us were much in the mood for talking, and we didn't know what to say anyway. I guess the thing to do is just accept it and be grateful for it. It's just a shame we weren't able to get Keith back too . . .

  ~*~

  . . . I had that sweet white boy, Woody. I could swear I did. But I must be wrong. Because he wasn't there, was he? Damn. If only I'd held on a little harder. At least Dale and Tracy are back, nuts as it all is.

  I think we made the right decision not to tell anyone about all this. They'd call it mass hallucination, like Frank did at first. Nobody would believe it. What proof is there? Things changed. Everything changed to fit the fact that those two came back. I mean, reality changed. I've got letters from Dale, a whole shoebox full of them, written after he was supposed to have died. And he and Eddie are on my Christmas card list, in my address book, in the Iselin alumni directory, everyplace Dale couldn't have been if he really died seventeen years ago.

  I don't get this at all. I think it's really wonderful, I'm glad it happened, but I don't get it. Maybe everything we thought happened before never did. Maybe Tracy and Dale never died. But still, they think they did. Aw shit.

  Whatever happened, I just wish we could have brought back Keith too. He still died. Those clippings that I saved are still there. But now they say he was alone. Tracy, thank God, didn't die with him. But still, he's dead. That didn't change.

  ~*~

  Eight days after Woody Robinson's party, Keith Aarons sat in a car he had stolen less than a half hour before, and waited for Mrs. Naomi Weeks to come out her front door. Mrs. Naomi Weeks was the chairperson of Los Angeles Citizens for a Free Society, a group of motorists who believed that the air-quality authority had no right to require such controls as mandatory car pooling and the number of cars per family.

  Mrs. Naomi Weeks had gotten a lot of airplay and press attention lately. She had appeared on Donahue with the head of the authority, a representative of the mayor's office, and Carl Sagan, where she held that despite the deterioration of the atmosphere around Los Angeles, the rights of the individual citizen came first, and that this whole issue centered around "government intrusion into lifestyles," and that if the government allowed cars to be made and sold, it was the car owner's decision as to how many cars she could buy and how often she could drive them and how many people she wanted to be in those cars.

  Despite Carl Sagan's sincere plea, she dismissed any social responsibility whatsoever, demanding that the government concentrate on the auto makers rather than car owners. "If people are allowed to buy gas guzzlers, they will, and that's their right," she said, vowing that her group would "fight to the death" to retain their individual rights as citizens of a free country. When asked what kind of car she drove, Mrs. Naomi Weeks said that it was nobody's damn business, but admitted that she and her husband had two cars, a Buick Riviera and a Ford Taurus, and that they would drive them wherever, whenever, and with whomever they wished, and if they added to the amount of smog or even, as Doctor Sagan suggested, the depletion of the ozone layer, well, that was just too bad.

  Keith Aarons did not agree with this point of view.

  He tugged his Dodgers cap down further over his forehead, adjusted his sunglasses, and stroked his beard. It was a nice evening to be waiting for Mrs. Weeks, he thought. Except for the air, of course, befouled by Mrs. Weeks's Riviera and Taurus. Keith had stolen a Geo, so as not to compound his crime.

  The meeting of L.A. Citizens for a Free Society was at 8:00, and Keith knew that Mrs. Weeks would be driving there alone. He also knew that her husband was in La Jolla on business. At 7:30, Keith was out of the car and standing in the cover of some bushes, watching the Weeks garage. Inside, a light went on, and through the garage's narrow windows he saw Mrs. Weeks come out of the kitchen, walk around the Riviera, and get into the passenger seat.

  When the automatic garage door started to open so that Mrs. Weeks could back out, Keith squatted, rolled under into the garage, and yanked open the car door. He reached across a surprised Mrs. Weeks, hit the button that made the garage door drop again, then pulled her out of the car, and struck her on the head so that she slumped
onto the cement floor.

  There was a small carpet remnant by the kitchen door, and this he placed just in front of the left rear tire of the Riviera. Then he removed Mrs. Weeks's glasses and positioned her head on the piece of carpet so that her face filled the space between tire and floor. He pushed a lawn tractor away from the front of the car, got in, put it into drive, and quickly accelerated, making the car lurch forward two feet, feeling the back end rise and drop quickly down as the tire cleared Mrs. Weeks's head.

  Keith put the car into park, turned off the ignition, and climbed out. He efficiently felt for a pulse, found none, took the note from his pocket, and pinned it onto Mrs. Weeks's blouse. It read:

  Hope this little mishap doesn't intrude too heavily into your lifestyle.

  It was signed with what looked like a simple sketch of a hoof print.

  Chapter 12

  It did not occur to Woody that Ronald Reagan had been assassinated in 1982 until he read the phrase, "After the 1982 Reagan assassination," in a magazine article about the current Clinton administration. The words stopped Woody cold. Then he tried to remember, and slowly discovered that he knew all about it, not as something that had happened during his real life, but as that well-remembered dream that had become reality.

  He went to the bookcase, looked up Reagan in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and there found confirmation of what his memory told him, that Ronald Reagan had been fatally shot during an appearance before a National Chamber of Commerce meeting. The assassin, who had apparently been hiding behind a decorative wall panel for several days, had never been apprehended, but his identity was known, to a certain degree.

  The day of the assassination, both The New York Times and The Washington Post received letters from Pan, an environmental terrorist, claiming responsibility. Since it was the first such message received, arrived only one hour after the killing, and was postmarked two days before, it was considered genuine. All that had to be done was to find Pan.

  The problem was that in 1982 law enforcement officials had been looking for Pan for nearly ten years, and, as Woody found when he searched his memory, over ten years later, Pan had still not been found. Surely, Woody thought, he would have remembered such an event.

  But only bits and pieces lingered in Woody's mind concerning this Pan, who was known by no other name. He recalled bombings, assassinations, disasters perpetrated by this misty figure, but nothing more.

  And then the thought occurred to him that if Pan existed now, but not in the world in which he and his friends had lived previously, then he—and they—must have had something to do with it.

  The thought chilled him as he tried to make sense of it. There were four people in this world who had not been there before—Tracy and their two children (and the idea of any or all of them having anything to do with Pan was absurd), and Dale Collini. By no stretch of the imagination could Dale have been responsible for any acts of terrorism, or, for that matter, any unkindness.

  Woody closed the encyclopedia volume and leaned back in one of the leather chairs in the den. He looked out the window at the Pacific, and thought about changes. He was still living in Half Moon Bay, but further north on the beach, in a larger house he had admired but not been able to afford. But now, in this different and wonderful and frightening world, he was living there, with Tracy and Peter and Louisa, living there because he had even more money than before. Tracy's years of supporting him with her commercial art had ensured that he needed to make no compromises with his music, and, as a result, the music was stronger, more intense, more brilliant than before.

  It was only one of the remarkable changes that had occurred between Woody's other life and this one. The last few days in Half Moon Bay had been filled with marvels. First, of course, had been the reality of being a husband and father, of Peter and Louisa speaking to him so familiarly, hugging him, loving him, being annoyed with him when he "fathered," a practice he recalled only vestigially. And having Tracy by his side was a dream from which he prayed he would never awaken. Only now, after a week had passed, did he feel confident that if he let her out of his sight, she would not vanish.

  So today he sat in the den, listening to DAT tapes of his most recent albums. It made him sad to know that Ron Dewey was no longer with his group, but happy that their success had allowed Ron to form his own band. Besides, the sound of Kevin Marcus, the new keyboard man, was more in touch with the musical ideas Woody now had.

  He liked the sound. It was hotter, higher, more intense than before. Woody was surprised, thinking that the stability of his family would have made his music more mellow. But instead of softening his voice, his family life had seemed to harshen it. Funny how things changed.

  And maybe tragic. What in God's name could this Pan have to do with what had happened that night a week ago? Or over twenty years ago, if you looked at it a certain way.

  He got up and walked out onto the deck, where Tracy was sketching the shore. "Honey," he said, "what do you know about Pan?"

  She turned and looked at him, and he caught his breath as the wind billowed her hair like a cape behind her. "Pan. He wasn't there . . . where you were before?" He shook his head. "God," she said, as if stunned by the knowledge. "He's been around for years. About the time we got married," she said, taking his hand, "he started with kidnappings and murders. You remember—" she began to say, then shook her head and smiled. "You may not. But around '72 or so he killed the wife of a guy who owned a paint company in Pittsburgh. The note on her body said it was because her husband was a polluter, and it was signed with a hoof print. So the press called him Pan, I guess because Pan was an earth spirit or something."

  "And he killed Reagan."

  She nodded. "That's what everybody thinks. Supposedly it was because Reagan messed up the Clean Air Act. There was a letter from him, he always sent letters to the papers. Sends letters, I should say. He's still out there."

  "But he wasn't before, Tracy," Woody said softly, and the gentle squeeze of her hand told him that she grasped the implications.

  "How could what happened to us have any bearing on Pan?"

  "I don't know," he said. "But they say that even the smallest act can have great repercussions. Something must have happened that resulted from your and Dale's . . . survival." He thought for a moment. "If Keith had come back with us, I could almost believe that it was him."

  "Keith? Keith Pan? He couldn't have, Woody."

  "I don't know. He could be violent. At least he had the seeds of violence in him."

  "A lot of that was talk."

  "The bomb wasn't. And neither was . . ." He trailed off. "What?"

  "Well . . . you remember the ROTC jock who got beat up? I think Keith might have done it." He told her about the stockings and gloves he discovered, about the blood on Keith's sleeve.

  "It doesn't matter," Tracy said. "Keith died a long time ago."

  And Woody heard the door close again, very soft, but very clear.

  ~*~

  That evening he looked under "Terrorism" in the Encyclopedia's most recent yearbook, and found that by 1992 the Federal Bureau of Investigation's list of crimes apparently perpetrated by the individual called Pan numbered well over a hundred, from modest monkeywrenching to the most terrible mass murder and sabotage. Though there was not a single description on file, there were several names which Pan was thought to have used, but many of the bearers of those names had died in infancy, others had simply disappeared, and the rest could not be proven to have existed at all. When Woody closed the volume, he noticed his hands were trembling.

  An hour later, Woody and Tracy tucked their children into bed, and Woody thought once again that his heart would burst with the love and gratitude he felt. He sat for a while with Tracy, watching The Awful Truth on cable, then excused himself, went down to the basement studio, and called Frank McDonald.

  "Things have changed, Frank," he said.

  "You're even more famous," Frank said, his tone guarded.

  "That's no
t what I mean. You know about Pan? And Reagan?”

  “Things haven't changed that much. Clinton's still the president."

  "Don't fuck around, Frank. What did we do? Did we turn something loose here?"

  "No, Woody. We didn't do a damn thing. I've almost convinced myself that our lives before all this happened were just a dream. Because this is reality now—the world where Tracy and Dale are alive."

  "But Pan—"

  "Yeah, I know about Pan, I know about him shooting Reagan. Hell, the first thing I did when I got home was start filling in, seeing if anything major was different." He laughed hollowly. "And there was. But what the hell can I do about it? You can't trace down cause and effect on something like this."

  "Why not?" Woody said. "We're dealing with a small group of variables."

  "Crap. You're gonna trace Tracy's every last move for the past twenty-some years? Or Dale's? I mean, maybe Tracy pulled her car in front of a complete stranger back in 1970, and that was the last straw. The guy said, 'Fuck this, I'm gonna become the world's greatest environmental terrorist.' And Pan was born."

  "That's dumb."

  "Sure, it's dumb, but no dumber than you thinking you can discover why Pan wasn't in our other life but is in this one.”

  “What if it's Keith?"

  There was silence on Frank's end for a long time. "Keith didn't get back."

  "How do we know that?"

  "Because he's dead."

  "I didn't tell you this," Woody said, "but when I was waking up . . . when we came back . . . I thought I heard the door close."

  "Oh. So Keith got back early and left?" Frank's voice was edged with sarcasm. "Woody, it's not possible. Keith's dead. In this world and the other one. Old newspapers, the documentation, he's dead, Woody. He blew himself up back in '69."

  "I guess so."

  "Well, know so. Don't think about all this shit, man. I know I didn't believe it at first, but I do now. And thinking about how it happened or what it might've done is gonna do nothing but fuck you up. And I speak as one who knows. I've been fucked up for days."