Chapter 53: Déjà Vu All Over Again

March 16, 1981 (continued)

‘Fuck Me Gently With A Chainsaw.’

Oh. My. God!

The pieces fell into place. It was unbelievable. Unthinkable.

There was no other explanation.

I looked at Angie, mind going a million miles an hour.

“‘Heathers’ was damn good, wasn’t it?” “It’s the bomb.” “Best Winona Ryder role ever.” “Totally.”

“Ang.”

She looked up at me, trying to glare but not quite managing it. “What?”

I spoke softly. Holy shit! “Ang. Winona Ryder is younger than we are. ‘Heathers’ is a 1989 movie.”

Her face turned white. “I ... uh ... um ... I ... I can ... I can ... explain...”

“Ang.” She blinked at me, trying to come up with something to say. “How can I know that?”

It finally hit her, too. “Oh, my god! You, too?! You! How?! When? Oh, my god!”

She threw herself into my arms, sobbing. I just held her, crying, too.

Finally, she broke the hug, dragged me to the bed, and collapsed. “Forget the rest. I’m still pissed at you over Max, but that doesn’t hold a candle to ... holy shit ... how can you know that?!”

“The same way you do, I imagine.”

“But...”

“Ang. I died in 2021.”

She blinked. “What?”

“I grew up, went to college, got married, had a sucky marriage, yada yada yada. Cab in New Jersey; out of control truck; boom, on my head wearing my bike in 1980 Houston.”

She clapped a hand over her mouth.

“No fucking way!”

“‘Yes way, Ted’.”

“Goddammit! Stop doing that!”

“Do you know how long I’ve wanted to do something like that and have someone not think I’m fucking nuts? Or worse, that I’m not? Wait ... you probably do know. You’re the only one that could understand that.”

She fixed me with her gaze. “You ... lived to 2021? And died, after being married? In New Jersey. What the hell were you doing in New Jersey?!”

“Interviewing for a job. IT Manager. After the pandemic.”

“What the fuck is an IT Manager?! And what do you mean, pandemic?!”

“Angie? When did you die the first go-round?”

“I um ... I think ... I mean ... did I die? I didn’t think of it that way.”

“Angie?”

“1997.”

“OK. Well, that explains a lot. I made it twenty-four more years. I explained the runaway truck. Well, sort of explained it. You?”

She turned red. “I got beaten. Um ... in ... um ... well, it’s not important. The gir ... um ... people were pounding on me. Someone had something heavy. I know they got my head a few times.” She shook her head. “I woke up at Sharon’s boyfriend’s place, half-dead - hell, maybe two-thirds dead - with a fucking splitting headache and called 911.”

“Prison?”

Her eyes got wide. “How the fuck did you know that?”

“When I grew up, we were almost never in touch. But after Frank died in 1982, you had some troubled years, then went to prison for trafficking in 1995 or so.”

She blinked. Blinked again. Her voice was tight. “F ... Frank ... d ... died ... in, in 1982? Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. We went up for the funeral. You were sixteen and sullen and bitchy. The next summer I was in Chicago for a summer program. I tried to look you up, but you were off the grid.”

“B ... but...”

“But?”

She looked at me with wide eyes. Maybe scared eyes. “Frank died in 1983. January. I ... moved down here ... in May.”

Holy shit!

“Ang, you never moved here when I grew up the first time.”

“I ... I didn’t?”

“Nope. I saw you in July 1982 and that was it. Done.”

“Steve ... God! This is insane.”

“Tell me about it!”

“It gets weirder.”

“Weirder? How?”

“I um ... Steve. I only barely got to know you the other time. I mean, just in the little time we had before your injury, this time, I knew you better than I ever did then.”

“What the hell? You moved here in May 1983? Why didn’t we get to know each other?”

“Some was my fault, some was yours. My Daddy had died and my mother ... I thought of her as my mother then ... was a slut and a whore and had rejected me to boot. I wasn’t exactly in a good place, emotionally. You tried, a little. Inviting me to D&D, trying to talk to me about computers. I’m sure I was a bitch. I couldn’t deal. And you had ... I mean ... I don’t think you knew a single girl, Steve. Except, I guess, one D&D, uh ... dungeon master ... was a girl. A college girl. But you couldn’t talk to girls at all. Except her, and only about D&D.”

“I was still doing D&D?”

“You never quit. Not through college. I don’t think after, either.”

“Debate?”

She shook her head. “Like I said, you didn’t shut me out at first, you tried, but I couldn’t reciprocate and you didn’t know what to do. And then you gave up. You were ... just ... cold. Detached. Computers and D&D. That’s it. In your room, door closed, or off at that store with the D&D people. Or at Dave Mayrink’s.”

“That’s why you kept accusing me of being cold and logical and emotionless. You thought that’s what I was turning into.” She nodded. My mind was racing. Boggling.

“After you graduated, you and Dave went to the same college. Up north somewhere. St. Louis, I think. You never came home except at breaks, you never called, never wrote. As soon as you got an apartment, even those trips stopped. And I ... I mean ... it wasn’t malicious. It’s just, um ... out of sight, out of mind. As soon as Mom and Dad and I weren’t around, we ... weren’t in your world. You were the introvert’s introvert.”

“I don’t think that I like that me very much.”

“Yeah. I didn’t either. It was hard for me, getting here, hitting my senior year — they let me count junior yeah — and knowing no one. And, I mean, you tried, but ... how can you introduce someone to your friends when you have no friends? And I don’t think you had a single friend at Memorial. So, I didn’t either. It sucked. I was depressed, lonely. My grades stunk. After while I found someone and ... it got a little better ... but, I mean, still. It sucked.”

This was fucked up. And the most fucked up part was, I could see it happening. If I hadn’t had Ms. Henry sophomore year. If I hadn’t decided, on what was a total whim, to take Debate. If I’d still been my freshman self as a senior? Then, yeah. That could’ve been me. Casual friends with the D&D gang, disconnected from everyone else.

“You left, and I didn’t have the grades to get a scholarship. Your being so distant hurt Mom and Dad, and ... um ... my relationship choices hurt them, too. This isn’t the only time I’ve had a sucky boyfriend. Just the only one you know about. No, wait, you know about my high school boyfriend. Spoiler: that was the other me. I wanted to explain why I felt like I did and just ... borrowed ... from the other me.”

I nodded “Yeah. I’ve done that a few times, when it wouldn’t be obvious. I’m not sure if I’ve done it with you or not. So, the other me? Great grades, terrible relationships, and some job I’d be great at as an introvert. Right?”

“Right. You were some programmer somewhere. Good money, no friends. D&D. You never had a girlfriend that I know of.”

“And you?”

“I tried U of H. But, stuff sucked. I um ... my boyfriend ... it was ... sometimes it was good. Sometimes it sucked. And I couldn’t pay tuition. Mom and Dad did, twice. But I failed a bunch of classes, from stress and working to help pay for our apartment. So, they stopped. After that, I tried. I did ... I did things. To get money. Things I’m ashamed of, though the worst one they tricked me into. Though, I think I always knew in the back of my mind that they were tricking me. Anyway, it never helped. And, one of those things put me in prison. In 1990. Mom and Dad were terribly ashamed. They said they never told you and that I shouldn’t either. But I don’t think you ever asked about me. Which, I mean, that’s who you were. Anyone not in front of your face might as well have not existed. Anyway, I made it seven years before the beating. It was over cigarettes.”

I took an educated guess. It had to be. Nothing else would fit the insanity of these past months. Of this day. “Your boyfriend was Max.”

Her eyes went wide. “What... how?”

“A guess, Ang. You couldn’t save him last time. He beat you, you tried to save him. He ruined your life; you tried to save him. And now that you had a second chance, you tried to save him again. Some people can’t be saved that way, Ang.”

She started crying hard. “I loved him, Steve. The good days were so good. It’s just...”

“I know. I get it. But you can’t save him. Not any more than I could have saved Candice by the time I knew her, even if I’d known what was wrong. I could’ve helped, a lot, maybe, but ... saved her? Most of the damage was done.”

“I know. Dammit. I know. I figured that out Friday.”

“Ang?”

Sniffle. “Yeah?”

“You’ve been trying to save me, too.”

She nodded hard. “Yeah. As soon as I got here, I put aside my issues — and I had a lot, suddenly being thirteen and Frank dead years early and Sharon being ... much worse. I set them aside, and I worked on being friends. Helping you to peck at your shell a little. And then you had your accident and hit your head and I thought, ‘Dammit, what now? This is going to set things all back. Or worse.’ It really scared me. But then Dad said you were OK, and I went to see you in the hospital, and you were OK. And you were, well, more... there. I thought it had shaken you out of the routine temporarily and you’d go back to it. But you didn’t, and everything changed, and I loved that. Until...”

“Until?”

“Candice. You were so ... emotional. And then, you know, she was in the hospital and it ... it just seemed like you ... turned it off. I can see I was wrong, now. A month ago I saw it, really, but by then I thought ... well, you know what I thought. And I was so fucking mad at you. Anyway ... at first, it was like, boom. ‘I love Candice, Candice is nuts, oh well, no more Candice’. You accepted that she was gone so fast, it felt ... cold. Emotionless. I didn’t see, or didn’t let myself see, how you were struggling. Not until after I’d discovered Max and then dumped Dan and ... you know how we got here.”

She took a deep breath, then went on. “I just ... I felt like I could save him.” She bit her lip and hesitated. “Plus, I mean, I had this enormous secret, and I didn’t want you to figure it out, and you’re so damn smart I thought you’d catch that something was off.”

I took her hand, squeezed it. “Ang, you’ve been giving me clues for months. I’ve just been too dense to see them.”

“Huh?”

“‘We’re not worthy’? That’s ‘Wayne’s World’. ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun’? Cyndi Lauper hasn’t released it yet. I just realized you’d said those things right now. I missed them at the time.”

“I briefly thought about it after the head injury. I mean, that you could be ... you know. You changed. And I’d had a head injury, too, when I ... changed. But you seemed ... well, like you ... and well, now, knowing, I mean ... wow. You did an incredible job of adapting and hiding things. I guess I did, too, but a lot of it for me was that no one knew who I’d been. You? You fooled everyone, even me, and I knew it was possible!”

She hesitated. “Or ... maybe I fooled myself. You know? I put my energy into trying to help you, and having some crazy new sister looking at you funny about everything you said wouldn’t help with that. I had to let it go. I’d love to claim that I said things that were clues to see if you’d react, but I was just sloppy. And you didn’t react, anyway. I guess because you missed them.”

“This ... this is ... amazing.”

“I thought I was the only one.” She sighed deeply, looking up into my eyes.

“Me, too.”

“And, whatever ... God? ... something? ... put us together.”

“I don’t know why. Or if there’s a reason.”

“Me, neither. I thought it was to fix Mom and Dad and you.”

“I thought maybe to fix you.”

“I feel like such a total idiot. I was so angry with you. Steve, you’re right. I wanted to say things we might not have recovered from.”

“We can recover from a lot. But it’d be hard.”

“We have to stay together. We have to...”

“We have to just be what we are, Ang. Brother and sister. Best of friends, or, more, maybe. Always and forever. On each other’s side. Watching each other’s back.”

“I failed, big brother. I let Max get in the way.”

“You were trying to do something good. I’ll do that, too. We just can’t let it be bigger than ... us.”

“I can’t believe how fast you can forgive me and let me off the hook for it.”

“Ang, I love you. What am I going to do, cut off my nose to spite my face?”

“What do we do, Steve?”

“Um ... big picture? How in the hell do I know? I have no more instructions than you. I think we try to live the best we can; not get locked up for being psychic or whatever, or crazy; use our extra knowledge ethically; be good people; take care of each other, our family, our friends.”

“Is that enough? We’ve been given ... I mean...”

“Yeah. But no one told us what to do. If we’re here to stop some bad thing, either we’ll just do by living, or, someone will tell us. Because ... we’re fourteen, Ang. We can’t go solving the world’s problems. Plus, if we tried, we might make it worse.”

She blushed. “I tried to solve Max’s problems, and even that made it worse.” Looking up into my eyes, she sighed. “I know the answer to this, but I have to say it, anyway. Forgive me, big brother?”

“Forgiven, little sis. I’m stunned by how this worked out — never in my wildest dreams did I even consider this as the answer — but it worked out. And no one said anything we can’t live with. Besides, I’m sure I’ll be a complete idiot at some point, and you’ll have to knock sense into me.”

I heard a noise. The garage door. “Mom! Mom’s back!”

Angie jumped. Bit her lip. “Um ... what? ... I know! Steve, get out of the house. Anywhere. Give us a few hours. I’m going to try and fix things with Mom. You should be out of the loop and clueless until we tell you.”

“As you wish.” She smiled at that. Point, Ang. “I need to place some more sports bets. You cool with that?”

“Yeah, now. Bet all you want,” she grinned, winking.

“Thanks, sis.”

“One thing, first.”

“Mmm?”

Angie wrapped her arms around my neck. “I love you, Steve. I should’ve said that a lot of times over the last month. I’ll catch up. In the meantime...” her lips found mine. And kissed. Sweet, but decidedly sexy. “ ... that’ll have to tide you over. Bye, big brother.”

She left. Eventually I remembered how to breathe. I dug out the money I needed and headed out. “Hey, Mom! Let me help you carry those in before I get going.”

“Thanks, Steve!”

I started hauling in bags of groceries. I intentionally didn’t put them away — I usually would have — to give Angie an opening.

“Where’re you headed?”

“Just out riding, Mom. It’s too nice to sit in the house all day.”

“I’m glad you’re still going out. I was a little worried that you’d sit in the house all day when we got you the computer.”