If I Could Turn Back Time (11 page)

Then, as if reading my mind, he took a cigarette out of the pack and lit it with his old gold lighter. I’d thrown that thing away when he died. Never wanted to see it again.

Now it almost looked like an old friend.

Almost.

I watched him take a long drag and hold it in for a moment before blowing it out, bluish smoke surrounding us both. I hated it. “How come you keep smoking, even though you know it’s terrible for your health? Even though you know it’s
dangerous
.”

He didn’t hesitate. “Because it is a stupid choice I made a long time ago and at this point it makes no difference.”

“But it
does
!” Something like hope surged in me. Did I have the chance to get him to stop right here and right now? If I did, could I save his life? Was
that
why I was here? “If you’d stop and get into shape, you could live a long and happy life.”

He shook his head, and I could tell by the resignation in that small movement that there was no way he was going to change one damn thing. “It takes years to reverse the damage,” he said, and I thought he sounded regretful. “I know that. Don’t you?” Yes, I did. Unfortunately. “I don’t have that kind of time.”

He was right.

Tears filled my eyes immediately, and burned like they were acid. He was giving a nod to his own death sentence. Did he
know
? Had he already had pangs that indicated he was on his way out? “Why are you saying that?” I asked, verging on an ugly echo of hysteria. “You’re not even fifty years old!”

“Ramie.” He sat up and reached for my hand. His was cool. A little rough. “Is this really what you want to talk about right now?”

“Yes. This is about the most important thing we possibly
could
talk about.” Obviously. “Isn’t it?”

He looked me in the eye for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t think so. Sometimes things are written in the stars. And we don’t like them. You know, when I started smoking, it was prescribed as an antidote to stress?”

Stupid stupid stupid medical community. How had minds trained in any sort of health care
ever
thought it made good sense to draw smoke into your lungs?
Lucky Strike will calm your nerves
.
Doctors prescribe a good smoke after a bad day.
Did those same doctors think it a good idea for a person to remain inside a burning building? “I know, but we’ve known for a long time that wasn’t true. It’s all bad.”

“You just need to sleep,” he said.

I frowned and rewound that, but it didn’t make sense. Was he sending me to my room for having an uncomfortable conversation? “What?”

“I said it didn’t stop me.”

“Oh.” I tried to rewind our words again, but they were gone and I knew what he was saying mattered more anyway. “Why not?”

He shrugged, but his gaze was penetrating. “Dumb, isn’t it? I heard the news, same as you, about the dangers of smoking, but I kept doing it. I made a choice. I kept making that choice for many decades, always thinking I’d quit
later
.”

But you didn’t and then you died from it!
I wanted to say. But I couldn’t. You can’t look your loved one in the face and predict his impending death. “So you’re saying you will willingly do this until the day you die?” I asked angrily, but tears slipped down my cheeks, because there was so much more grief in me than anger.

“Yes,” he said simply. “Me and many, many others who should know better and do better. Maddening, isn’t it?” It would have been a good time to punctuate his question with a puff on the cigarette and I was glad he didn’t.

“Yes,” I said, my voice hard with the knowledge that my mother was going to be widowed, that I was going to work my way through school by myself, that my father wouldn’t be there to walk me down the aisle, though it didn’t seem likely I’d get there anyway. “It’s very maddening. And seriously selfish.”

He sighed. “This is not the time for me to sit here and lie to you, though, is it? To say I’ll stop and then have you surprised all over again by the truth?”

Given that the truth was he was going to die, I supposed he was right. But still,
he
didn’t know that he would die so early, so this was a bullheaded position to take when his daughter was sitting before him, crying, begging him to live.

“Why can’t you even just
try
?”

A long quiet stretched between us.

“You know.”

“What if something happens to you?” I asked carefully.

“None of us gets out alive.”

I frowned. “I know, but we don’t all have to die at fifty.”

He stubbed the cigarette out. Even though I hated it, the tiny crunch of the burned leaves in the ashtray was nostalgic. I watched as all the tiny orange bits of flame extinguished, then looked at him.

“What do you really want to talk about?” he asked.

I sank back against the edge of the couch and felt tears come back to my eyes, fast and hot. I wiped awkwardly with the back of my hand. “I don’t know. Something so messed up is going on and I don’t know why or how to explain it. I don’t know what to do.”

“There are a lot of times in life when you’re not going to know what to do,” he said. “We never outgrow that. What you need to remember is that, at those times especially, you need to slow down and just put one foot in front of the other. There’s no faster route to madness than to try and take everything in at once and figure out your whole path in life from one blind vantage point.”

I gave a dry laugh, without a touch of humor. “I kind of feel like I’m there right now.”

“You can always change the future,” he said. “Always. Given enough lead time,” he added, probably anticipating my retort. “I’m not so sure about the past.” He met my eyes and gave a soft laugh. “Many have tried and failed.”

We’d see about that.

We sat together in an uneasy silence.

“Do you believe there’s a heaven?” I asked at last. I don’t think we’d ever really talked about this before and I wanted to know his feelings on things like this if he really did have to go.

Once again, he stopped to consider before speaking. He reached, reflexively, for the cigarette pack in his pocket but stopped and drew his hand away. “Yes.”

“And…?”

“And that’s one hell of a relief, eh?” He gave a genuine laugh, but I didn’t join in.

I’d been expecting more. Something philosophical, maybe. Some key to everything that was happening right now, even something I could read into as the reason for it all. But that one single word—that yes, he believed in heaven—was an immeasurable comfort to me.

“Listen to me,” Dad went on gently. “You’re looking for answers. We all are. That’s what we do in life, we try and find our way through every stage, day after day, year after year, and we look to others for guidance. It’s natural. But the thing is, when you come down to it, the answers are all inside of you.”

The tears came on full-force. “That scares me,” I said brokenly. “I don’t feel like a grown-up and I don’t know if I ever will at this point.” He let that slide, even though it must have sounded childish coming from my eighteen-year-old mouth. “I’m scared of being entirely in charge of my own destiny. What if I do it wrong? A bad marriage, no kids, too many kids, the wrong job, the wrong career … so many things can go wrong!”

“That depends how you define
wrong
. You learn something from all of that. Remember that yappy little dog we had when you were in fourth grade? The one that bit you?”

I reached up to my lip, where a faint scar still remained. “Oh, god. It was third grade. Binky. That horrible little rat. That’s a perfect example of what I’m saying—what was the point of having Binky at all when all he did was spend one miserable month pooping all over the place and then bit me so I had to get twelve stitches and a facial scar that would disfigure me forever?”

He laughed. “Disfigure.”

“Okay, maybe not
disfigure
, but it’s there!”

“Be that,” he said, raising an eyebrow, “as it may, what happened when we gave Binky to Aunt Pat?”

“I’m pretty sure he destroyed her house.”

“That’s her lesson.” Dad smiled. “What happened
here
?”

I shrugged. “We adopted Bailey, who we should have gotten in the first place! See? Binky
was
a mistake.”

I could tell he was itching for a cigarette. I was annoying him, but I was right!

“When we went to the shelter and got Bailey, what did we learn about her?”

“That her horrible previous family had given her up because she got too big. Once she wasn’t a cute little puppy anymore, they didn’t want her. Jerks.”

He nodded, too patiently. “And she’d been in the shelter for how long?”

I thought about it. “A few days. Three, maybe?”

“Right. So you see my point?”

“No.”

“If we hadn’t gotten Binky first, we never would have ended up having Bailey.”

I wasn’t so sure. “Or we could have just waited and gotten Bailey in the first place, and then we would have saved all the trouble of the Binky Month.”

He shook his head. “You were not waiting one more day to get a dog, much less a month and three days. Everything on our path led us to that day, to that shelter, and to that dog. And so it will be with all the Binkys of your life, whether they are bad jobs, nasty bosses, even, god forbid, a dud husband. Whatever happens, as long as you’re doing your best and putting one foot in front of the other, you will live your destiny.”

“Are you sure?
Really sure?
” My voice sounded small, embarrassingly childlike.

“As sure as I’m sitting here.” He patted my head. “This is one thing I know to be the truth.”

I was crying again—or had I never stopped?—and reached over to hug him. “I miss you so much, Daddy.”

“I’m right here.”

“I know, but … I don’t want you to ever go away.”

“I never will,” he reassured me. “I’ll always be here when you need me.”

It was eerie how wrong he was about that. In less than two years he’d be gone forever, and he had no idea.

*   *   *

AFTER TALKING WITH
my dad, I made a cup of hot raspberry herbal tea and took it up to my room. It was a cool night for May, and my windows were open, blowing in the glorious scent of viburnum and magnolia. The magnolia tree had gotten out of control, growing up taller than the roof of the house, and when the wind blew, it scratched on the screen like fingernails. It was really creepy, but when it bloomed it made all of that worth it.

I went to my bookshelf and pulled out a book.
Illusions
by Richard Bach. I hadn’t thought about it for years but as a teenager I remembered thinking it was incredibly profound. I stood and flipped through it for a moment, then creaked into the old canopy bed, and snuggled down comfortably against the pillows.

Crickets chirped outside, and in the distance I could hear the Henley family laughing on their porch. That was the sound of summer to me. They had a straight-up legitimate screen porch—one season—and they spent virtually every summer night out there, playing cards, drinking, and telling anecdotes, whatever. Sometimes my parents went over and I could hear my father’s booming laugh rising over the trees and floating down to where I lay in the dark in my bed, safe and sound in the knowledge that my parents were just a few steps away if I needed them.

It has to be said, I have never slept as well again in my life as I did as a teenager. No great tragedy had yet befallen me, nothing weighed heavily on my mind or conscience. My body was light and efficient and worked all day and slept all night. I was looking forward to that tonight. Many times I’d cited my wonderful memories of reading well into the summer night, then waking up and picking the book up off the bed next to me and starting where I’d left off, no cares or responsibilities in the world.

The little brass reading light next to my bed was really misnamed. My thirty-eight-year-old eyes couldn’t have stood the strain, but my eighteen-year-old eyes had no problem. I wished
that
were something I could take back with me.

Then again, I had no guarantee I was
going
back. And, naturally, that thought was constantly with me. It was hard to just let go and enjoy the fantasy a little bit, because I was always aware that this was an unknown phenomenon and it could end, abruptly, at any moment.

Or not at all.

I’d
wanted
to talk to my dad about it, but I knew it would have just been alarming to him. Not the death part, I never would have mentioned that at all, but that I believed myself to be a time traveler. What is a sane person supposed to say to someone who announces something like that?

I opened the book and started to read, hoping to let go of the spirographic circles that were going around and around in my brain like madness in print.

I don’t know how long I was reading when I came to the passage that struck me:

You seek problems because you need their gifts.

Wasn’t that basically what my father had just been telling me? And here it was again, in black-and-white. There was a message there, I knew it. Or at least I
hoped
it. Though I wasn’t generally superstitious, I did tend to take signs seriously.

So … extrapolating from that … maybe the whole reason I was here
was
to dig deeper into some of the mistakes I thought I’d made in the first part of my life. Because obviously I hadn’t learned
enough
from them to keep me from wondering.

Maybe now I needed to really dive into this part of my life and see what I could do with it.
Live
it, breathe it, really commit to it as much as my logical mind would let me, and see what happened.

Maybe I could even change some of the things that continued to haunt me into adulthood.

It seemed as good a plan as any at this point.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The next morning I was lying in bed reading when the phone on the bedside table trilled, scaring me half to death.

But I had reached over to answer it before I even had time to think about what I was doing. Funny how reflexes work to cut through all thought processes.