second chances: a novel
Excerpt from Second Chances:
As he crept back to the porch, where a bench and wicker table sat, Bill began to understand. He wasn’t so much in a place as in a time. And he was sure he knew when, as surely as he knew his own name. This was May of 1987, the month and year that their only daughter, Christine disappeared.
A photo album lay open on the wicker table. The details on the Polaroid photos were easy to make, even from a distance and at an angle. His new eyes saw with the crystalline clarity of God himself, though he knew that even at this comparatively young age he needed spectacles for seeing up close.
Christine’s shining face beneath the weave of a soft tiara and golden hair, her bare shoulders cream-white as the mother of pearl dress she wore.
He fell into the chair, unable to breathe, unable to touch, as if the photo album was radioactive. As if his daughter might step out of the photograph and speak to him. Accuse him. Why didn’t you help me, Daddy? He hadn’t seen that face in so long. He could not have been prepared for the punch-in-the-gut pain such a vision gave him.
Carefully, he turned the pages, watched her radiant face change with the people who posed with her, some whose names he’d long forgotten. Her eyes full of happiness as she posed with her new husband, Richard. With Bill – and how young he looked. With Glenna.
I’ll call her. The thought was a shot of electricity to the brain that froze the page mid turn. Jesus, what if it were possible? Maybe the telephone wouldn’t work in this dead world. But what if he could hear her voice again? What if this time he could cipher whatever he’d missed when she was alive? And here was another blow to the guts. He could saveher. And in saving her, save his wife and himself.
He abandoned the photos, made for the telephone in the kitchen, which took him a beat to find, because it wasn’t where it used to be. Nor was it the cordless he was accustomed to. Because cordless phones wouldn’t come for years. And those silly mobile computers that Dale kept in his back pocket? Decades.
The rotary phone hung on the wall next to the refrigerator, with a flower-print notebook and pen hanging on a tack.
Trivial details he’d lost were now flooding his system and threatening to bring the whole thing down. The mat face of the refrigerator tacked with magnets from Bryan’s IGA, “Small-town Folk; Small town Value”. An open house flyer for First State Bank of Harveyville dated May 18th 1985, which he knew was outdated even now, but so was Christine’s drawing of Mom, Dad, herself and a German Shepherd named Wolf who used to guard Chrissie like a mother bear.
His eyes were like dams holding back rivers. Lungs worked as if he’d run across time to get here. Bill snatched the drawing off the refrigerator, letting the magnet clap to the floor.
He held the drawing to his nose and breathed in the long-dead aroma of colored pencil and paper, which he told himself he could smell over the grit of dust, home, and history and everything else that flooded his youthful senses, even though the drawing was already old.
Had Glenna really kept this all these years? Chrissie couldn’t have been more than eight when she’d drawn it, when she was still buoyant and happy. This had been one of her first really good ones that confirmed to both mother and father – who was admittedly slow to see – that their only child was no mere scribbler.
Other drawings had come and gone as Chrissie’s interests changed, but this one had remained, maybe because of its subject.
His lungs hitched, vision blurred, blending faded colors and smooth, careful lines into a smear of something clumsy and childlike, as if his tears could push back the clock and make Chrissie younger still.
“Oh sweetheart.” He’d ignored this little piece of art for so many years and couldn’t even recall when Glenna had taken it down. Had she ever? Was it still buried somewhere in the detritus of his Widower’s Purgatory of a home? No, it wasn’t. It had been destroyed when his basement flooded in ‘07, along with everything else that had belonged to his former life. This wasn’t even the same refrigerator. This one would die one hot summer day and send him on an emergency run to Sears; would outlive Glenna by one month.
God, how could he have let himself be so blind and indifferent for so many years? He’d made mistakes with Glenna and Chrissie, neglect being the worst. He told this younger, stupider version of himself, Never again. Because if you had known what was coming, you miserable son of a bitch, you would never, ever have let this slip by you.
But he could still fix all that. Fix everything. Tell Chrissie to stay home on that fateful night in June. Or tell Richard, “Listen, you pampered, half-assed Italian twit, you don’t let her out of your sight, do you hear me?”
Surely this was why he’d been sent here. This was no Heaven. This was a second chance. A chance to make things right. A chance for Chrissie to live.
