Chapter 23: Building Understandings

Sunday, July 31, 1983

Sometimes I had to question whether the Universe was setting things up for us. Most likely there would never be an answer to that question. It hadn’t seen fit to give us more than a tiny clue (in the form of Laura’s wish) in the time we’d been back, which was three years now for me as of yesterday. I hadn’t even noted the anniversary until this morning.

In this case, it started at breakfast when Angie told us that Paige was feeling under the weather. She was going to bring Paige some breakfast but then wanted to meet us and hang out.

Cammie then said that she wasn’t feeling great, either. Perhaps something they’d eaten? I couldn’t think of a common food at the steakhouse that the rest of us hadn’t also eaten, but who knows?

That left Angie, Jas, and me free of Cammie and Paige exactly when Laura and I had scheduled a meeting. Thanks, universe?

Then, as I thought that, it occurred to me that Cammie was as sharp, and perhaps as devious, as I was. She knew there was a secret. She knew it involved Laura. She’d already guessed that Angie and Jasmine were both in on it. Perhaps she was simply absenting herself from things to be a good friend and respect my/our secret.

If so, thanks, Cammie.

We’d had a late and sizable breakfast, so we simply goofed off for a bit, then headed to the Student Center. Laura was already there, sitting in a quiet corner. When she saw us, her face lit up and she waved us over.

Seeing her face light up like that created some ... complicated ... feelings. It was good to see this Laura happy. At the same time, first-life me would’ve given so much to see Laura’s face light up like that for him. The situations were in no way comparable, but still.

We headed over, meeting with hugs, then sitting down. No one else was at all close, which is just how we needed it.

Laura said, “Thanks for coming, and I’m glad you’re here, Angie and Jasmine.”

“Welcome, and, me too,” said Angie.

“I’m happy to be included,” Jas said. “I mean, this has to be by far the most unusual group anywhere near here, and perhaps anywhere.”

Laura chuckled. “Unusual, yes. At least for me, I try to remind myself that I’m, well, lucky, not special.”

Angie nodded. “Me, too. We didn’t get a second chance because we were awesome people, we just got a second chance where maybe we could be awesome people.”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding.

“You two,” Jas said, pointing to me and Angie, “are awesome people, and I’m pretty damn sure you are, too,” she finished, pointing to Laura.

We all blushed and said thank yous.

“I think we should tell the stories of how all this happened,” I said. “Angie’s heard mine, and I’ve heard Angie’s, but Laura’s not really heard either one, nor has Jasmine heard much of it, and I’ve only heard a bit of Laura’s.”

“You mean how things ended, and then how they resumed?” Laura said.

“Exactly.”

“I’m game,” Laura said.

“I’ll go first,” I said. I went through the end of my marriage, the new job, the truck collision (that got a lot of comments about my luck with trucks), waking up with my bike on my head, the hospital, meeting Angie, and so forth.

Angie went next, talking about her prison beating, then waking up having been hit over the head by a would-be child rapist. She talked about calling 911, her hospital stay, social services, court proceedings, moving to Houston, struggling to make friends, and trying (with some urgency) to try to save me from becoming Iceberg Steve.

I hadn’t heard it all together in over two years, and it occurred to me that she seemed much more comfortable with what had happened. Time heals all wounds, apparently.

Laura went last. “Mine is similar, maybe. I obviously had time for some last words, but ... yeah. I went skydiving in October 2012. Beautiful day, all sunny. I’d just gotten a new job, one where I thought I could probably use some unpublished work I’d done without stepping on a patent. No one had let me try that for almost a decade. Anyway, beautiful day, and I’d done this plenty of times before.

“Only, this time the primary chute failed. No problem; that happens. I pulled the reserve and it deployed just fine. Only, after maybe thirty seconds, there was a pop and one of the lines snapped. Then another, and then another, and ... well ... too many of them, before long. Shouldn’t happen, but that’s not a lot of comfort.

“I spent a fair bit of the fall regretting my life choices, but a lot of that was...” she said, then stopped, looking like she was searching for the right words. She continued, saying, “Externally focused. I’d gotten a chance to start over, and now I wasn’t going to. I cursed both of you, only not you, and wished for a chance to get things right, knowing it would never happen, and ... well ... the ground got very big, and then ... nothing. I didn’t feel anything. I just went black.”

We all nodded. I could see how much that would suck, and how Laura might have said what she said in that circumstance.

“Waking up was a complete surprise. I woke up flat on my back, and I remembered the fall. I’d been approaching some piece of farmland — probably garlic, since I was near Gilroy — and I thought, ‘Why am I alive? Did I make a miracle landing?’

“After just a few seconds, I figured I probably wasn’t. It was bright, and sunny, which was consistent, but it was very cold, which wasn’t. I was also soaking wet, and my chest ached, and there were people looking down at me. People I recognized after a second, though my mind wasn’t working very well at all.”

We looked around.

“I only gradually figured out what happened. It was December 1979. I’d gone out on a frozen lake. I broke through the ice — which I did in my first life, too, only not then. Apparently, I hit my head coming up and was trapped under the ice until I nearly drowned. They pulled me out just in time.”

Everyone nodded.

“The thing is, I did that in December 1977 my first life, and that time I just surfaced and climbed out. Mom and Dad were furious — as they should have been — but I was fine. No rescue, no nothing.”

“Like mine,” I said. “I had the same bike accident in my first life, only a few years younger.”

“Or, sort of, like mine,” Angie said. “One of Sharon’s crazy boyfriends attacked me in my first life, but he never hit my head. But, yeah. It was close. You came back and had your injuries later in life than the first time. I didn’t live with Sharon’s crazy boyfriends until later in my first life, so while yours were later, mine was earlier. I don’t know if that means anything, but there’s not a pattern, anyway.”

Laura nodded. “The similarities are fascinating. Anyway, I’m pretty sure that whoever ... um ... was in my body up to then — she drowned, or something, and I took over. I’d already decided that, but your stories both dovetail with that.”

We both nodded.

“It bothers me,” I said, “but I didn’t ask for this and I didn’t get a vote.”

“Me, too,” Angie said.

“I asked for it, but not at that cost,” Laura said. “I don’t feel guilty, just ... weird. She went out on the ice, and she was dead before I got here and, if some conscious power did this, which I think is true, I think they picked a ‘me’ that was going to die anyway. They didn’t kill that ‘me.’ Maybe they picked this universe because all three of us were already going to die young here.”

We both nodded along with that.

Laura went on, saying, “They had me in a hospital for nearly a week, but I made a quick recovery. I went back to school and did really well. Much better than I’d been doing. I mean, junior high is ridiculously easy when you have a graduate degree and don’t completely slack off.”

Everyone chuckled at that.

“They let me skip eighth grade, which really just put me back on track — I’d been held back in fourth grade because my behavior sucked — and stuff changed. Dad was really impressed by how well I was doing. Mom was, too. He got the opportunity to move to Carbondale and took it, whereas — I think — he turned it down in my first life. I mean, one way or the other, we stayed in Indianapolis the first time, but we moved this time. I wound up in ninth grade in a much better school. When they wanted me to pick electives, I picked Debate, because it sounded like fun and I like arguing. It was fun. People genuinely seemed to like me, too. Not just Debate, but everything.”

“Some of that’s you, right?” Jas said.

“Oh, hell, yes,” she said. “I was a lousy teenager my first time through. Introverted, geeky, antisocial, all that. I hated everyone and everyone hated me. UT was supposed to fix that, and it mostly did. I had friends, and then I had a really good friend, and then, well, he wasn’t so good.”

“I apologize on his behalf,” I said.

She giggled. “Not accepted! You don’t need to, and I’d only accept it from him with a lot of conditions.”

“You go, girl!” Angie said, grinning. “I have people I feel the same way about.”

“Anyway, yes, most of it was me. I was a much better student and a much better person socially. I knew where I’d fucked up. Most likely, if we hadn’t moved, I’d still have been fine, but the move made a huge difference.”

“So, Northwestern’s coming to a close,” Angie said. “What do we do now?”

“I want to stay in touch,” Laura said. “You all know that I want to set my own course, but that’s more parallel to yours than anything else. I don’t want to pull away, I just need to be my own girl for a while longer.”

Everyone nodded. Jas said, “Of course, you do. It’s totally different. We’ve been together for years. You’ve only even known they were who they are for a month, and you don’t really know me from Eve.”

Laura chuckled a bit. “I know you more than that. You’re pretty special. Part of it’s that I feel more like I know Steve and Angie and who they’d be so close to, part of it’s knowing who Steve could be close to, and part of it is just getting to know you. I really think that if Asshole Steve had someone like you in his life, and listened to you, he would have turned out differently.”

“Which might have been worse,” Jas said, smiling softly. “Perhaps all of you needed each other now or in the future. Perhaps everyone will benefit because you three are who you are. Steve told me before that he doesn’t regret his time with his ex-wife because, without that, he wouldn’t be who he is today, and Angie’s said the same thing about the awful things she went through.”

“I don’t,” Angie said. “I don’t think I — I mean, this me, or however you put that — I don’t think I could’ve grown up right without hitting bottom, but without Mom and Dad helping me both before and after I hit bottom, I’d have just turned into a bottom-feeder.”

Laura nodded. “I don’t know what I ... no. I guess I do know what I gained. First-life Laura was too trusting, but she was also too controlling. Vengeful. When I, um, died, all I really wished for was that I’d gotten a chance to do it right. That wish was ... well, I’d rebuilt my life a lot in the previous two years before I died, and I was pissed off that it was wasted. My bad side wanted revenge. My good side didn’t want life to just hand her what she thought she deserved, she wanted a chance to do what she could’ve done.”

Jas nodded, smiling.

I said, “If that’s why we’re here, thanks, but I’m still reserving judgment. So far, no ‘horrible friends’ have turned up. The people you called out, Asshole Steve and...”

“Bitch Angie,” Angie said.

Laura smiled at that, nodding a little.

“Bitch Angie, then. They aren’t here, we are. Whether they’re learning a lesson or getting punished or just going on as they were, we don’t know and probably never will.”

Laura said, “I guess I never explained about the ‘horrible friends’ part. You — I mean he — had this group of hangers-on. I’m pretty sure they were all from college.”

“Maybe I know them, or knew them, or...?” I said.

“So ... their names were Pete Danvers, Kent Stine, and Mitchell Banks.”

I breathed a sigh of relief and noticed similar relief on Angie’s and Jasmine’s faces.

“Nope,” I said.

“I don’t know them,” Angie said.

“Me, neither,” Jas said.

“Honestly, that’s a relief,” Laura said. “Because they might not be horrible here, and I’d hate for it to be someone you knew. You’d always have to worry about whether they were someone you didn’t really know.”

“Definitely,” I said, with Angie and Jas nodding their agreement.

“Anyway, about the rest,” Laura said. “I like that, really. I mean, you two both deserve another chance, or at least I think you do. So, if I had anything to do with it, good, and if not, it’s still good.”

She continued, “I’m not really sure how often we need to call. Obviously, if we find out something big, we should probably share it. I mean, if we find another person like us, or we suddenly remember the winning lottery number, or there’s some business thing, or the world is different in some big way. I’m not used to that last part, but Steve’s convinced me that this world is different than his first world.”

“It’s different from my first world, too,” Angie said. “It’s probably different from your first world, as well — you just haven’t seen it yet.”

“I’m starting to think so,” she said. “Steve said that, in his first world, IBM never stopped people from copying the PC, so lots of companies made them. I missed it, but I think this world is going that way, and I doubt any of us changed that.”