Twice, page 2
✶
When I awoke the next morning, the red cape was somehow draped around me again. My eyes were blurry. I heard my father’s heavy feet enter the room.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Go sit with your mother.”
“What?”
“Go sit with your mother.”
I swallowed.
“How?”
“What do you mean how? Go sit with her. I’m going to get her medicine.”
I know this sounds impossible, Boss. I can only tell you that it happened, and that I went along with it, the way you go along with a dream, even to someplace you don’t want to go. I reached my mother’s room. The door was open. When I finally looked inside, she was sleeping under the netting, just like the day before.
Had I been older, I might have run off screaming. But as an eight-year-old boy, I just wanted to be with her, no matter how impossible it seemed. So I stood there, frozen, until my mother’s eyes opened and she saw me hovering, and she smiled and hoarsely whispered, “Well, hello, Superman.”
I must have recoiled, because it registered on her face.
“Alfie? What’s wrong?”
I couldn’t answer. My breath came in puffs.
“Alfie? Tell me.”
“Mom . . . ?” I whispered.
“Oh, no.” Her expression changed. “Alfie? Have you been here before?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And the last time, did something bad happen?”
“Yes.”
“Did I die?”
I nodded.
“And you saw that?”
“No . . . I . . . I went out to . . .”
I started crying.
“I’m sorry, Mommy.”
She took a deep breath. Her voice rose. “We don’t have much time, then, sweetheart. Listen to me.” She pulled the netting aside, leaned forward, and put my face between her hands. “This is something you’re going to be able to do the rest of your life. Get second chances. Do you understand?”
I shook my head no.
“It’s a gift. A power. Some people in our family get it. You’re blessed to be one of them. But it won’t fix everything, Alfie. The second time won’t always be better than the first.”
She squeezed my hand. “Don’t try and change everything, OK? Don’t correct every mistake. Don’t take advantage of people. Don’t use your power for money. Be careful. Do you hear me, Alfie? Alfie, are you listening?”
I felt like I was suffocating.
“Mom,” I blurted out, “are you going to die again?”
She bit her lip, then patted a space on the edge of the bed.
“Sit here, baby,” she said, forcing a smile. “Let me tell you all the things I love about you.”
✶
Now, in case you’re wondering, Boss, my mother still died that morning, this time in front of me, after listing a dozen or so things she loved about her only child. I saw her grab her arm, I heard her groan, I watched her head roll back. My father returned and found me weeping against the bed, the mosquito netting hanging over my face.
This is when I first learned the limits of my “gift”: I can’t change mortality. If someone’s time is up, it’s up. I can travel back to before the death takes place. I can alter how I experience it. But it’s still going to happen. Nothing I can do to stop it.
Can I say it was better, rewinding my mom’s departure? I don’t know. The first time, I left the house and returned motherless. The second time, I stood witness as she departed this world. You tell me.
Nassau
Alfie looked up from the pages. LaPorta was staring.
“You’ve got some imagination. I’ll give you that.”
“I didn’t imagine it,” Alfie said.
“Sure, you didn’t.”
LaPorta rocked slowly in his chair.
“It’s a weird name. ‘Alfie.’ You don’t hear it very often.”
“No.”
“Your passport says Alfred.”
“My father’s father’s name. My mother said it sounded like a British lord. She started calling me Alfie after that song.”
“What song?”
“From the ’60s. ‘What’s it all about, Alfie?’ ”
“Oh, right.”
“If I had a dollar for every time someone sang that to me—”
“You’d have as much money as you stole?”
Alfie smiled. “I didn’t steal anything.”
“Really? You immediately wired your winnings to some woman, and we picked you up the next morning at a travel agency, buying tickets to Africa.”
“So?”
“Sooo, that sounds a lot like a guy trying to run and hide from something.”
“The tickets weren’t for me.”
“Who were they for?”
“If you just let me finish this—”
“Yeah, yeah. Your alibi notebook. I know.”
LaPorta checked his phone. No message yet from the Bahamian police. He sighed. Things took forever in the islands.
“It’s from a movie, isn’t it?” LaPorta said. “That song? Alfie?”
“Yes. A movie about a playboy who gets all these women to fall in love with him, but eventually pays a price.”
“So that’s you? A playboy?”
“No. Just the guy who paid a price.”
“Well, I don’t give a crap. How’s that? When do we get to the roulette scheme?”
“I told you. It’s part of the story.”
LaPorta drummed his fingernails on the table.
“Come on then, playboy. Keep reading.”
The Composition Book
My father and I moved back to America, to our old neighborhood outside Philadelphia. My mother was buried a few miles away, in a cemetery just off the highway. I remember the constant whoosh of traffic as they lowered her casket into the ground. It felt so disrespectful, people driving past, going to work, listening to their radios. I put my hands over my ears. I didn’t hear most of what the pastor said.
After everyone left, I stood there with my father, staring at the grave.
“Why do they throw dirt in there?” I asked.
“That’s just how they do it, Alfie.”
“Mom didn’t like dirt.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“Should we clean it out?”
He bit his lip and squeezed my shoulder. The wind blew. I think that was the moment I realized it was just him and me now.
✶
We settled into a small Colonial-style house and I started wearing long sleeves again. I watched television. I snacked on Scooter Pies. Everything from Africa felt like a dream. Someone in our church offered my father the old Baldwin piano my mother used to play, and he put it in the basement. I spent a lot of time down there, trying to remember the hymns she had taught me.
It took some time before I repeated my “magic.” My mother’s second death was an unsettling memory, and I was in no hurry to go through something like that again. I hadn’t told anyone, not even my dad. Part of me wasn’t sure it ever really happened.
Then, a few months after we’d returned from Africa, I experienced it again. I was on my way home from school, me and my walking buddies from the neighborhood, Stewie, Sandy, and Paul. It was a gray afternoon, and a cold rain was falling. We passed a small, rickety A-frame home with faded brown shutters and a muddy swath of dead leaves covering the grass.
“Witch’s house,” Sandy mumbled.
We called it that because every now and then kids in the neighborhood would spot a crouched, white-haired woman staring out through the flimsy screen door. The legend was that one Halloween she had pulled a trick-or-treater inside, and when he came out, he was never the same. I have no idea if the story is true. We were just kids.
Suddenly, Stewie blurted out: “Yo, Alfie, I dare you to knock on her door.”
The others joined in.
“Yeah, Alfie!” “Do it!” “Don’t be scared, Alfie!” “C’mon!”
I looked away. My mother’s death had dealt a huge blow to my confidence. I found it hard to engage with people, especially neighbors who whispered, “They never should have gone to Africa.” I missed my mother terribly, the long, meandering conversations we had over peanut butter crackers in our kitchen, and the way she rubbed my hair after kissing me good night.
Without her, our house was unbearably silent. At night, my father would stare at the black-and-white TV. I would lie on the couch and cover my eyes with the back of my hands. Sometimes my heart would begin to race and I found it hard to breathe. I coughed and choked. My father would ask, “What’s wrong, Alfie?” But I didn’t know myself. I just wanted to stop feeling scared all the time, worrying that another bad thing was going to happen.
That day at the witch’s house, it seemed to come to a head. I was tired of being frightened and I didn’t want the boys calling me chicken all the way home. So I accepted their challenge and moved slowly toward the door. I stopped a short distance from the screen, not wanting to be snatched if the witch suddenly appeared.
“Hurry up, before she sees you!” Stewie whisper-yelled.
“Or kills you,” Sandy added.
They laughed. I quickly lost my nerve. Why had I agreed to this? I leaned forward at the waist. My entire body was trembling. I stretched toward the door, squeezed my eyes shut, and made my fist knock. Once.
Then I ran away.
I ran as fast as I can ever remember running, my feet making wide leaps over the street puddles. Tears were streaming down my cheeks. In my mind I saw my mother’s face, lying on her deathbed, looking at me as if I were pathetic. In the distance, I heard the cackling laughter of my three friends, and Stewie shouting, “There’s no one home, stupid!” By then it was too late. I had shown my true colors, and they were the yellows of cowardice.
I couldn’t sleep that night. I dreaded having to face those boys again. I so wanted to erase what happened at the witch’s house that for the first time, I considered what my mother had told me. (This is something you’re going to be able to do the rest of your life. Get second chances.) If that were true, I was ready to try.
I replicated what I’d done on the night my mother died. I wished the day had never happened. I tapped my thighs. I even mumbled the words “stupid, stupid,” in case I needed to repeat everything exactly.
The next morning, when I awoke, the cold, drizzly weather was the same as the day before, and when we walked to school, the boys were wearing the same clothes and none of them said anything about the incident. In class, we covered the same pages in the history book. We took the same spelling test.
I was stunned. Everything was repeating itself. I moved through the day in blinking wonderment, knowing exactly what was going to happen and watching it unfold.
Even the walk home went as it had previously gone, right up to the moment when Sandy mumbled, “Witch’s house.”
Which is when I changed the story.
“Let’s see if she’s in there,” I blurted out.
The others gaped at me.
“What’s the matter?” I said. “Are you scared?”
“No way,” Paul said.
“Nuh-uh,” Sandy said.
“I dare you,” Stewie said, crossing his arms.
I glared at him, anger and excitement mixing in my gut.
“Watch me,” I said.
Watch me? I had never uttered those words before. I was the kind of kid who didn’t want other people looking at him. Watch me? I walked steadily to the front door.
“Still dare me?” I said, looking back.
“You won’t do it,” Stewie insisted.
I took a deep breath, planted my feet, and banged. Then I banged again. Knowing she wasn’t home, I shot a glance at my disbelieving friends, then screamed, “Come out, Witch! Show your ugly face!”
That did it. Sandy, Stewie, and Paul bolted down the street, just as I had the day before. As I watched them run, I was flushed with a new sensation, one that would shape my life going forward. Knowing what’s going to happen before it happens is more than a unique power. It’s godlike.
And that is how I felt.
✶
Now, at this point, Boss, you probably have questions, the kind that always come with time travel stories. What happens if you step on a butterfly, that sort of thing? Let me clear things up right here. I’m not a comic book hero. I can’t wave my hand and go frolicking with dinosaurs or zap myself onto the deck of the Titanic.
Unless it happened to me, I have no way of revisiting it. I can select any moment in my own life and change it once. But after it’s changed, I’m stuck with that new version going forward.
I’m more of a duplicator, really, a reshaper of my own existence. If you interacted with me, then I can change that experience, and you’ll have no recollection of our previous encounter.
But I will.
That’s the price I pay.
Nassau
LaPorta laughed out loud.
“What?” Alfie said, glancing up from the notebook.
“For a guy who stole a couple million bucks, you sure feel sorry for yourself.”
“You think this is a joke?”
LaPorta nodded sarcastically. “Yes. I. do.”
“Can I ask you a question, then?”
“I can’t wait.”
“Why do you think I wrote all this down?”
“I don’t know, Alfred ‘Alfie’ Logan. Because you’re crazy? Because criminals often exhibit weird behavior?”
“And if I told you this notebook will prove I’m not a criminal?”
“I thought you said it was a love story. You should make up your mind.”
LaPorta glanced at his watch. It was almost noon. He popped another Life Saver into his mouth.
“Giving up smoking?” Alfie asked.
“How’d you know? Wait. Don’t tell me. You traveled back in time and saw me light up.”
Alfie sighed. “You’re not taking me seriously.”
LaPorta rolled the candy slowly over his tongue. He did wish it were a cigarette.
“Keep reading,” he said.
The Composition Book
I’ll move the story along now, Boss, because there is much to share and I don’t want to lose the point, which is to tell you of the one great love in my life, and what I’d like you to do for her after I’m gone.
For the rest of my childhood, my father and I remained in that same Colonial home with our Plymouth Road Runner in the driveway. We rarely went anywhere. My parents used to go shopping, eat at restaurants, play gin rummy with the neighbors. But my mother’s death had left my dad rudderless. He worked. He came home. Now and then, when the weather was warm, he’d toss a baseball with me, but he always seemed distracted, his thoughts elsewhere.
We never spoke about Africa. But there was a photo of my mom on the table next to the couch, and I often caught my father studying it, as if he couldn’t turn away, the way someone stares at a bad medical report. We’d stopped going to church. We no longer prayed before meals. I think Dad felt if this was how God treated those who went around the world to spread His Good News, he’d just as soon sit things out.
Looking back, I felt badly for him. It must have been hard, living alone with me, because in those days a single man with a child was pretty rare. He wasn’t exactly welcome around other married couples, but he was too old to be hanging out with the local single men, most of whom were just a few years out of high school. He largely let me do what I wanted and tolerated my banging on the basement piano. He even bought me a cheap Radio Shack microphone for singing.
But he did make one thing abundantly clear: rules. No leaving the kitchen before the dishes were washed. No exiting the bathroom unless the dirty towels were in the hamper. No television during the day. No loud music at night.
In the silent vacuum of my mother’s absence, rules were what my father used to reset his balance.
I had my own resets.
✶
My mother had been right. I was able to do anything twice. It took me a while to master the technique, like a baby Superman learning to fly. But once I got the hang of it, I began taking second chances at anything that went wrong the first go-around. What kid wouldn’t? A bad grade on a spelling test? I went back and aced it. A strikeout in a baseball game? I relived the at bat, this time knowing what pitches to expect. If I mouthed off and got punished, I repeated the encounter and kept my mouth shut the second time. Consequently, I rarely paid a price for bad behavior. And unlike most kids, I was never bruised or bloodied for more than a few seconds. As long as I could jump back in time, I could unbreak every broken bone and untwist every twisted ankle. Physical danger became a challenge. When other boys my age thought risk-taking meant looking up fart in the dictionary, I was skating into holes on the ice or jumping off the roof over our garage.
Best of all, this power enabled me to undo the embarrassments of my often-distracted personality. Once, in fourth grade, I was staring out the window, daydreaming, when the teacher asked me to “name any one of the classification of organisms.”
I froze.
“Organisms?” I said.
“Yes, Alfie. Name one.”
All I could think of was the “organ” part.
“The kind you play in church?”
The room erupted in laughter. Tommy Helms, who was nearly twice my size and a brute on the football field, blurted out, “He’s an idiot. He doesn’t even have a mother.” The teacher turned to scold him, but before she finished her sentence, I had transported myself back to the breakfast table that morning, where, over a bowl of Cocoa Puffs, I opened my science book and began memorizing.
Later that day, while I was staring out the window—deliberately this time—the teacher asked me the same question, and I turned to her slowly.
“Organisms?”
“Yes, Alfie. Name one.”
I saw Tommy Helms sneering. I waited for maximum effect. Then I stood up.
“Domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species.”
My teacher blinked. “Yes. Wow. That’s all of them. Excellent, Alfie.”
