A Fair Exchange

Her memory pounded in my head like a feeling trying to drag me backward in time, the remembered closeness of her embrace and the wet press of her lips on mine surprising me with its intensity.

After Rita pulled away and gazed questioningly in my eyes, I bent forward and mashed my lips against hers, giggling students piling into the surrounding bus seats to watch as we traded eight or nine kisses in rapid succession.

For a longtime my friends would shriek “Georgie Porgie puddin’ and pie, kissed the girls and made them cry” whenever Rita approached me. I liked Rita, but not enough to endure their ridicule.

But she never stopped loving me, the longing in her eyes never dimming as we aged. Although she physically matured to a beautiful woman, I was more afraid than romantically inclined toward her. Her friends often whispered of the Vodou dolls and charms that she carried in her purse and the price paid by those foolish enough to cross her.

I had a crush on the most popular girl in school and convinced myself that she would gladly be mine if only I had the courage to claim her. The first time Gretchen smiled at me as we met in passing her natural friendliness caused me to read into the encounter feelings on her part that existed only in my imagination. During the following weeks, I felt an airy lightness whenever she looked my way. At least till I discovered her boyfriend was Joey.

It seemed at the time like the worst thing that could possibly happen. But as the weeks passed, my obsession with Gretchen continued to grow till I was desperate enough to approach Rita for the first time since we traded kisses as children. She agreed to give me a Vodou love charm if I met her the Pioneer’s Cemetery on All Hallows Eve.

Meeting me at the gate, Rita intertwined her fingers in mine as we walked together through the tombstones, something defying logic transpiring when we embraced, the unexpected desire for a renewal of her kisses threatening to push Gretchen from my heart.

If only….

That night took on a life all its own in consequence, echoing through the decades like a self untimely born.

When Rita asked me “What would you do to win Gretchen’s love?” instead of kissing her I whispered “Anything,” my answer jerking her head back in anger.

A single word sealed my fate.

A moment later she coldly pulled a round box from her blouse and removed the top, the memory of her blowing its powdery contents into my face causing the prickling of fear to shudder across my skin, the desire to take my former answer back overwhelming me with almost forgotten alarm.

The powder numbed my exposed skin almost instantly. Yelling in surprise, I compounded its effects by trying to rub it from my eyes, the warm feelings I had experienced for her a few seconds before suddenly overcome by betrayal, adrenaline, and terror. Unfortunately, rubbing my eyes blurred my vision into blindness, and I cried out – “I can’t see!” as Rita tackled me with a snarl, the two of us tumbling to the ground in a tangle of flailing limbs. Easily swatting my arms away, she jerked my jeans past my hips, my hands too numb from the powder to hold onto my retreating waistband. Wordlessly stripping off my shirt, underwear, and then her dress, she straddled me, her bare buttocks clammy with the sweat of her exertion and the cold.

With a tremendous effort I pushed her off, but as I began to stand, she pulled me down and scrambled onto my stomach. Pressing my arms to the ground she hissed - “Don’t fight the rootwork – Jamie – the time for doin’ good was before midnight. It’s after midnight now.” Moments later my consciousness began to slip away, the gentle pressure of her lips on mine the last thing I remembered before succumbing to the darkness.

She kissed me too late.

When I eventually regained consciousness, the air reeked of death and decay, the terrible stench so close at hand that it seemed to emanate from my own flesh, my limbs as stiff as if my muscles and skin had calcified to bone. With tremendous effort I finally managed to open my eyes to the faint light of individual flames moving slowly through the night, a blood moon weakly illuminating the surrounding stones.

A great host bearing votive candles marched toward me, their ranks filled with bent bodies and ragged skeletons, their ghastly faces gazing in fixed torment, as if the sufferings from their final minutes on earth had followed them into death. In the far distance flames licked the trees surrounding the cemetery as the wind scattered plumes of ash around my recumbent and petrified figure.

In the terror of the moment I believed I had died and reawakened in Hell.

Within their ranks an apparition as black as a moonless night appeared, its teeth and eyes faintly glowing. “Tis a cold night to be mother naked,” it rasped with a bare-toothed grin. I cowered in fear as it brought its dark and formless visage near mine, the smell of burning Sulphur overpowering my senses.

Grasping me roughly, it pulled me to my feet as I trembled with cold and dread. Wrapping a cloak around my shivering body it asked, “Do ye know us, Jamie?” But speechless with fear, I faintly nodded my head in answer.

It gestured to follow, the rustling of the ash beneath my bare feet the only sound disturbing the spectral calm. We stopped when the pathway split into two and diverged in the gloom, one path winding away into utter blackness and the other into the distant hope of light. It asked –“Which way will ye choose?” But long I stood staring first into the darkness and then into the promise of faraway light. When it finally rasped “Want a hint?” I nodded my head. Pointing to the left it asked— “What do ye see?”

“Na-nothing,” I replied, my teeth chattering with terror and cold.

“And if ye walked into that darkness, what would ye see then?

“Da-da-don know.”

“More nothing,” it replied with a burst of ghostly laughter. Pointing to the right it asked - “What do ye see out there?”

Staring into the distance the light began to grow. “Ta-town?”

“Come see.” We began to walk again, the light growing stronger till I found myself standing in the rear hallway of my school. Pushing through the students I saw a pair of boys squaring off to fight. But when the smaller one knocked his opponent to the ground I blinked in terror and disbelief. The one standing breathlessly over Joey was me.

My future unfolded before my eyes like a movie set on fast forward, weeks passing in the blink of an eye. One moment I witnessed myself desperately fighting the meanest kid in school and in the next joining the Marines. Time passed in a rickety blur: a combat tour in Vietnam, meeting Gretchen upon my return; marriage, babies born, our children marrying and raising children of their own. My future unfolded so rapidly that the promise and majesty of love seemed inseparable from the heartbreak of its loss, the strength and power of youth separated by no more than a whisper from its own decline and death. When we finally arrived at the end, we watched an old man struggling for his final breath and I knew without a doubt that man was me.

Standing at the headstone above my grave it whispered “These are but shadows of what might be. Ye can live a life where ye know whom ye will marry before wooing her. Ye can live a life knowing every joy and sorrow ye will ever face. Ye can live a life knowing in advance the last day ye will experience on this Earth.”

Or,” he giggled as if a riddle impossible to solve. “Or,” he said with the finality of the grave.

Placing his hand softly on my shoulder he finished with surprising gentleness.

“Or … ye can enter a story that was written for ye but cannot be known. It is your fate, Jamie Faust. Which will ye choose? Ye won’t find Gretchen out there,” it said pointing to the unexplored pathway. Choose well … ye will never stand at these crossroads again.”

His remembered words echo strangely in my thoughts as I wipe the tears from my cheeks. I have no recollection of ever consciously choosing this life. Yet I have lived it just the same, the feeling persisting that I never had a choice at all.

So why return home now?

Driving across the bridge into Glenville revived long forgotten emotions. As The old general store, Madison Avenue Grill, the Royal Theater, and so many other memorable landmarks had disappeared. In their places I saw knick-knack shops and second-hand clothing stores sitting side by side with shuttered businesses that I remembered from childhood, their dingy facades marred by graffiti and time. I had not expected to feel the loss of the home from which I once left without expectation of return but driving slowly through downtown I began to grieve what I had never grieved before.

You cannot truly hate a place unless you loved it first.

But my back tingled with excitement when I saw the sign for Big Ed’s Barbershop, the original candy cane pole faded almost white and the store’s plate glass window warped with age. Walking through its open door, I smiled at the barber standing with the Glenville Times in his hands.

“Do you have time for one last trim before closing?”

“That depends,” he replied closing the paper with a snap, “do you have the scratch to buy the first round at Marty’s Place?”

“Do you promise to buy the second?”

Big Ed was taller and easily 50 pounds heavier than the barber gesturing toward one of only two chairs in the little shop. His replacement seemed friendly enough and wore a handlebar mustache and tattooed anchors on each of his large biceps – bluish green with age.

“New in town?” he asked while draping a black cloth across me and fastening it behind my neck.

“Just visiting.”

“How you do want it cut?”

“Skin on the sides, fade in back, clean up the top.”

“Ex-military?”

“Marines.”

“Nam and a lifer to boot from the look of ya.”

“Yeah. Never was a fast learner. You?”

“Navy … pleasure cruise in the Med. I thought it’d be fun to see the world but spent most of it scraping barnacles.”

We both laughed.

“I had planned to join the Marines myself and would have if not for the accident.”

“Accident?”

“My best friend was hit by a car when we were seniors in high school. Me, Joey and Marty had planned to join once we graduated … but with Joey paralyzed….”

His words rendered us both speechless. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up at the realization of who he was, the memory of his former youthful face sending a wave of fear through my guts.

As he started trimming, I broke the awkward silence, asking –“You Big Ed?” even though I knew damn well he wasn’t.

He chuckled. “When I was a boy folk called my dad Big Ed and me Little Ed. But now that Dad has passed everyone just calls me Ed. And you are?”

“Jay Eff,” I answered offering my hand, “pleased to make your acquaintance Ed.”

Setting down the electric shears he picked up his scissors and continued –“We don’t see many tourists in Glenville … visiting friends or family?”

“Neither,” I lied, I visit Glenvilles. This is number seven. I collect postcards, memorabilia, history.”

“I’ve heard of stranger hobbies.”

“Yeah … well, this is mine.”

“If you’re interested in history you’ve come to the right shop. This little town is the Philanthropic Capital of the world.”

“You don’t say.”

“Course it wasn’t always. But people here are more generous per capita earnings than any other town in the country. Joey started it after the accident.”

“Because of the accident?”

It’s difficult to explain,” he answered. “But no one believes he could have turned his life around without it. The story made more sense when Joey told it. I remember the look in his eyes, the terror of the thing.” After an uncomfortable silence, a tear slipped down his cheek. “It was the car that changed everything.”

I was a senior when that car changed Joey’s life. But no one ever got that story right. They always left the most important part out. Without it there was no life-changing accident, no small-town hero, no philanthropic capital of the world.

Like a lot of kids, Joey bullied me regularly, singling me out after school every Wednesday. He would push or punch me around or bring me to my knees by pressing his fat thumb along the radial nerve on the inside of my left forearm. It was the regularity of his torment – anticipation building the acid up in my guts till I could no longer prevent the inevitable rupture. One day when Joey cruelly squeezed my collar bone, I drove my right hand into his sternum with sufficient force that it knocked him flat.

I was every bit as surprised as he.

I had seen the echoes of that fight in my midnight vision in the cemetery, but never believed its prophetic certainty. I yelled – “You need to make a choice,” my voice sounding as alien in my ears as if independent of my thoughts.

“What did you say?” Joey demanded, his eyes narrowing with anger and concentration.

My adrenaline spiking, a fleeting vision appeared of Joey running into the pathway of a car before it was replaced by Joey’s ruddy, grimacing face as he rolled up his sleeves.

“Walk away Joey,” I pleaded, “walk away or something terrible will happen … to you.”

Something in the urgency of my voice made him pause. But once the moment passed, the glint of concern in his features vanished.

“Something terrible is going to happen alright.”

I didn’t know the first thing about fighting. But after a flurry of weakly deflected punches my fear vanished, the realization that I should have stood up to him years before more painful than the beating he was giving me in the moment. But as my arms weakened and began to droop it was more a beat down than a fight. Eventually even Joey was winded, pausing to stare angrily into the one eye that hadn’t quite swollen shut. But between ragged breaths I began to helplessly laugh – feebly at first – and then harder and harder at the absurdity of the situation.

“You think this is funny?”

I nodded my head faintly but there was no point in trying to explain. Focusing on his angry, watery eyes, I only managed to mutter, “So … you made your choice.”

“Yeah,” he answered before whispering – “You think Wednesdays were bad before? I’ll make them a thousand times worse.”

His next punch broke my nose; I felt the thick blood oozing from my nostrils and laughed out loud, my chest swelling with a euphoria I had never experienced before. A few moments later my legs collapsed, but the anger my laughter triggered had short-circuited Joey’s brain, my unexpected mockery filling him with a savage rage.

I don’t remember much after that. I vaguely remember Joey kicking me in the ribs as Rita’s voice shouted –“You’re killin’ him!” After that Joey ran out of the school and into an oncoming car.

I awoke three days later in the hospital. On the floor above my own Joey was fighting for his life. It was Little Ed who told me about it, taking an opportunity to give me a few minutes of unfriendly attention.

“This isn’t over, ass wipe,” he finished with quiet menace. But either he had changed or I had. I didn’t see the hulking brute that I had long feared – only a scared little boy pretending to be a man.

After I had stared at him sullenly for a long time he finally hissed “Did you hear me?”

“Would you like to know how you die?” I asked him abruptly in return.

The question nearly floored him, his eyes widening briefly in undisguised horror. But once he recovered his composure he growled –“I know how you’re gonna die.”

“No, you don’t,” I answered evenly. “I already know how I will die, but you will be dead and forgotten long before.”

His thin veneer of intimidation lifting, he was exposed for the little boy he really was. He wanted to leave the room, to avoid the possibility of my telling him what he did not want to know, but he also wanted to leave the room under the same terms that he had entered it, the one threatening rather than the one being threatened. But it was too late. I just looked back at him blankly till he turned and walked away, his little boy feet shuffling across the floor.

Ed’s voice abruptly snapped me back to the present, “What do ya think?” he asked, mirror in hand.

“Looks great.”

After paying him with cash I started to pull a few additional bills from my wallet. But Ed said with a wink “I was serious about you buying that first round. You might want to save some of your tip for that.”

Marty’s Place was a small hobby bar, just big enough for a couple of Foosball tables and a short row of bar stools. A couple of young guys played at a table while their beers sweated on a narrow shelf along the opposite wall. Other than them and us the place was empty.

We sat at the bar and talked with Marty – mostly about Joey – quickly finishing the first three pitchers, our consumption only flagging mid-way through the fourth. They chatted at some length and with increasing warmth about Joey’s turnaround and the many good works that he founded over the years in Glenville, but the role I had played in the accident continued its absence from their recollections.

After Joey’s recovery the myth that grew around him could not accommodate his former behavior or my consequent suffering and so it was excised from the town’s history. In their eyes at the very least I had predicted Joey’s crippling and at the very worst had mysteriously caused it to happen. It was as if the only thing that the town remembered was my threat. Walk away or something terrible will happen … to you, I had pleaded. It earned me multiple visits from the local police. They continued to harass me till the driver who hit him was located and they failed to establish any connection between us. But failure to prove my guilt did nothing to exonerate it. I heard He’s as guilty as hell spoken behind my back again and again.

On my 18th birthday I dropped out of school and joined the Marines – swearing an oath to never return. And yet there I sat drinking with the two men who helped Joey beat me unconscious, laughing at their jokes and listening to them praise the man responsible for it. But the residual anger that had built up within me over the decades and with it the desire for revenge seemed strangely absent. Instead the memory of the crossroads began to buzz in my thoughts even as I tried to remind myself of who the true victim and perpetrators really were.

A part of me wanted to confess that Joey’s crippling was a devil’s bargain made one moonlit night and at the same time castigate them for expunging my role from his story. Would Joey have turned his life around without first beating the living crap out of me? Would Glenville have built its charitable reputation without the lies told at my expense? But once two hours had passed and we had almost finished the fifth pitcher without even a passing mention of my role in the story I began to fear that I would have to bring it up myself or leave it forever unspoken.

And then something completely unexpected happened.

“You want to know why Joey ran in front of that car?” Ed suddenly asked me, Marty staring at him in alarm.

“He didn’t watch where he was going?”

Ed snorted. “Joey was running away. He had just beat a kid at Glenville High almost to death.” Exchanging a sidelong glance with Marty he clamped his mouth shut as if suddenly regretting speaking. For two or three minutes he just stared down at his empty beer glass as Marty morosely sipped on his. Finally, Ed sighed. “No one in town ever talks about that kid.”

“Why not?”

“Fear and a collective sense of shame, I s’pose. But mostly fear.”

“Fear of what?”

“After the kid got out of the hospital he changed. He started telling people their future. Not the general mumbo jumbo you get from fortune tellers, but specific, died in the wool, such and such will happen to you, on such and such a day. And whatever he said, no matter how fantastic, would happen.”

“That sounds pretty hard to believe,” I replied, especially since I knew it wasn’t true.

Ed looked truly unhappy for the first time that evening, his eyes moving slowly from his empty glass to Marty who sheepishly shrugged his shoulders. The beer had definitely taken its toll. Leaning forward he jabbed his finger accusingly at me. “I know what you’re thinkin’.”

“What am I thinkin’ – Ed?”

“That I’m tellin’ tales out of school. Listen,” he said, this time poking me in the chest with his forefinger, “ask anyone in this town. They’ll tell you the same.”

“I’ve seen some strange things in my life as well, Ed.”

“Ya think? I’m bettin’ you never saw anything like him. He only predicted when bad things would happen. Eventually even his friends were afraid to talk to him. If they saw him coming they would turn and walk the other way. I saw him empty a crowded hallway once just by clearing his throat.”

I guffawed in disbelief, but Ed just shook his head, his eyes returning unhappily to his beer glass. But once he finally lifted his gaze he asked hopefully “You want some more beer?”

“No thanks … I already had too much.

“Marty?”

“I’m good.”

Pushing his glass aside, Ed sighed a second time. “I don’t know why I feel the need to unburden myself after all these years.” Scratching his head, he finally muttered what I had come to Marty’s hoping to hear. “That kid said something to me that I’ve never shaken. Joey was in intensive care at the time,” he said as his hands shook with suppressed feeling, “we didn’t know if he would survive.” Gulping with emotion he continued - “The kid Joey beat up was in the hospital too – on the floor below Joey’s.” Too moved to speak for a moment, he stared at the ceiling to keep tears from streaming down his cheeks, his face now disfigured by shame. “Listen. I’m not proud of this. I wanted to hurt that kid – or at least to scare him real bad.” Ed looked me in the eyes, unsure if he could continue. But it didn’t matter anymore.

I looked back at him with my best Sunday smile. When I asked, “Would you like to know how you die?” – both he and Marty jerked upright on their stools.

Ed stared open mouthed as I looked blankly back. He finally whispered – “Jamie? Is that you?” and I grimly nodded. “So … so how do I die?” he asked hoarsely.

I just shrugged. “I haven’t the foggiest idea, Ed.” Marty leaned back and roared with laughter as Ed sat stunned, his wet eyes nervously moving back and forth between Marty and myself.

You don’t have any idea?” he asked incredulously.

“Of course not, Ed. I can’t tell the future. I never could.”

“Then what happened with Joey?”

“I wish I knew.”

We drank one more pitcher of beer, the two of them getting a little soppy before the night finally came to its awkward end. Ed gave me a bear hug and asked for my forgiveness with tears running from his eyes. I forgave them both.

At any rate I said the words.

But after I checked into a nearby hotel, I felt a surge of unexpected jealousy. As I left the bar, I noticed a photo collage dedicated to Joey, my jaw tightening when I recognized Rita in several pictures. I was surprised at how much discovering she loved Joey instead of me hurt.

Tears of regret stung my eyes as I remembered wakening in the graveyard with Rita’s arms wrapped tightly around my chest, both of us still naked and shivering in the predawn cold. Although relieved that I had survived my night in Hell, when Rita kissed the back of my neck I reflexively pulled away.

“You said you would do anything,” she whispered huskily.

“What the hell did you do to me?” I growled. “I thought I was going to die.” Pulling myself from her embrace I sulkily began to pick up my clothes. But even without looking directly at her I was overcome by a desire so strong that when she gently placed her hand on my shoulder, I slipped into her arms as if Gretchen had ceased to exist altogether.

In the days that followed I often recalled with longing the warmth of her grownup kisses. Rita’s features gave her a gaunt and haunting beauty – piercing green eyes spaced a little too widely above a small, sharp nose, her honey brown complexion framed by a face that was wide at the temples and narrowed to a small, pointed chin.

After making love on the dew drenched cemetery grass, I shared with her what I had experienced that night, something I never did again with anyone else. Once I finished, Rita answered softly, “I fear for you, Jamie Faust. The Lord of the Dead will exact a price and you will not be the only one to pay it.”

It would be untrue to say that my desire for Gretchen completely died that morning or was scared into submission by the visions I witnessed that night. After all, who was I kidding? Gretchen was Joey’s girl. My fear of Joey proved even greater than the specter of the dead.

Although my thoughts often returned to Rita in the following weeks, something unspoken prevented me from pursuing her. Maybe she was simply too dangerous. Or maybe I was still afraid of what my friends would think. In the final analysis, none of it really mattered. A few months after that night, I found myself at the Marine recruiting station on my 18th birthday as if I had no other option. I had run away from them both.

After my arrival in Vietnam our battalion deployed to the old imperial city of Hue. Before that our unit had seen scattered fighting in rural villages and the jungle, but nothing like what we would experience once we deployed to Hue. Every inch of street was triangulated by enemy snipers, every building cleared of the enemy paid with Marine blood. We fought for seventeen straight days, even the mundane activities of eating, sleeping and relieving ourselves fraught with unrelieved terror.

When I boarded the plane to LA a year later my midnight experience in the cemetery was no more than distant memory. But rounding the corner into the baggage claim I saw Gretchen standing there as if waiting for me. We embraced as naturally as if we had known each other for years.

I never asked why she was there – fearful that Vodou magic rather than free will was responsible. But when we kissed for the first time I felt like the luckiest fellow alive, my desire for her as vibrant in the moment as the terrible night when I said that I would do anything to win her.

Unfortunately, between that night in the cemetery and the one where Gretchen first embraced me my life had taken an unexpected turn. Invisible wounds followed me home from Viet Nam, eventually replacing Gretchen’s love of who she believed me to be with the fear of who I had become. God knows I wanted to love her the way she loved me, but my capacity for loving never truly returned. You can only go through the motions of love for so long before the pain it causes your beloved drives her to an emotional distance too great to bridge.

Ed wishes he had served in ‘Nam, but when he closes his eyes to sleep he does not see brother Marines lying still beneath bloody ponchos or a baby as it wails next to a prostrate woman who will never nurse or comfort him again. He does not see the faces of familiar and unfamiliar dead; he does not see the bodies rotting on the street corners or in the mass graves that we uncovered when the fighting in Hue finally ended. He does not endlessly fight a war in his dreams that I will never stop fighting.

When I groggily awakened the next morning in the hotel bed, I opened the business directory to look for somewhere to eat, but instead found an advertisement for Madam Marguerite’s Palm and Tarot Card readings. My skin flushed with surprise, surely the business was Rita’s, a sudden desire to see her again reawakening the feelings revived the night before. When I arrived at her place of business, a teenage girl had me sign the guest register and took the $30 payment in cash. Something in the sparkle of her eyes when she smiled reminded me of someone, but I could not bring her to mind before the girl led me to a darkened room for the reading.

“Madam Marguerite will be with you shortly.”

When Rita stepped into the room, I stood and smiled, wondering how differently I looked after fifty-five years. When she reached out with her bracelet covered arms in recognition we embraced. But when she sat with a sigh, I felt the tension in the room like a living thing. “You should not have returned, Jamie,” she whispered with hoarse emotion.

“I wanted to see you again, Rita.”

“It would be better if you left now. Staying will only hurt us both.”

“I’ve never spoken about what happened in the cemetery with anyone but you. Who can I ask for answers now if not you?”

Rita sighed again. “Answers to what?”

“What really happened that night.”

“What do you think happened?”

“I think you used Zombie medicine to deceive me.”

“And where would a teenage girl have procured that in the ‘60s? This is Minnesota, not Haiti.”

“You can buy Puffer fish anywhere – even in Minnesota.”

“Ahh…. You read the Serpent and the Rainbow. So now you think you know something about Vodou sorcery?”

“Maybe. The secret to all great magic is misdirection. We weren’t the only ones in the cemetery that night, were we? You and some friends played dress up and a little Zombie medicine made the impossible seem real. Did you arrange the events that followed as well? At the end of the fight with Joey you yelled “You’re killing him” and he ran into that car. Coincidence?”

“Do you really believe I arranged for Joey to run into its pathway? How exactly would I do that? Sprinkle a little Zombie powder on him and tell him when and where to run?”

“But you knew that’s what he would do just the same.”

Even in the gloom I saw her eyes opening wide in surprise. “Why do you think that?”

“Because I knew it too. I saw a vision of that car hitting him before the fight. Was that the drug as well? I don’t believe Vodou magic caused Joey’s accident.”

“Easier to blame me instead?”

“After Joey’s accident the entire school thought I was responsible for it. Do you have any idea how that made me feel? The accident somehow made the bully the victim and me his would-be killer. But I wasn’t responsible for his accident. I didn’t yell –‘You’re killing him.’ I warned him. Why didn’t you?”

“I think you should go, Jamie.”

“Why? I’m entitled to the truth even if you don’t think I can handle it.”

She sat silently for several moments, the pain in her expression visible even in the surrounding shadow.

“Still feeling sorry for yourself, Jamie?” she asked disparagingly. “Joey lost his legs and then died far younger than he was fated. What did you lose other than your innocence?”

Her words stabbed hard, the thought of all I have lost momentarily silenced. “Many friends.” I muttered angrily. “Both here and in ‘Nam it seems.”

“I guess you didn’t really mean it when you said you would do anything.”

“I was seventeen, Rita. I didn’t realize what I was saying. A kid makes a careless remark, turns right when he should have turned left, and then is haunted by it the rest of his life? Is life really that cruel?”

“You must think I am,” she answered, a tear gliding down her cheek. “I did not make Joey run into the path of that car.”

Leaning forward, she continued –“You weren’t the only one to see visions in the cemetery, Jamie. Would you like to know what I saw?”

Her eyes wet with unshed tears, she waited quietly for me to reply. “What did you see?” I finally whispered.

“Who I was fated to marry. Do you know who?”

Even as I replied “Joey?” I could see the answer in the tenderness of her gaze.

“You were my fate, Jamie Faust. But you loved Gretchen.”

“I never chose this life,” I answered huskily.

“Why did you fight Joey if not for her?” she asked mildly. “Joey wasn’t the only one who made a choice that day.”

“That’s not why I fought.”

“Are you sure? Would you have fought him if you had not already seen a vision of it and knew the result?”

“I don’t know,” I answered hollowly.

“Your fate was to run away that day, Jamie, just like every other confrontation with him. But this time you would have run into that car.”

My body began to tremble at her words, my breathing so shallow that I began to hyperventilate. Fight or run away. Was that really the choice?

“Where was Gretchen when Joey’s life hung in the balance at the hospital? Where was I when you returned from Vietnam? I told you that pathway would exact a price.”

“And what price did you pay?”

Her eyes, still brightly passionate stared wetly into my own without blinking for moments that seemed to drift into eternity.

“Did you feel nothing that morning when I lay with you, Jamie?”

I only realized in that moment that I had returned to Glenville because of those remembered feelings. I had sought her out in the hope of her warm embrace.

She was right. I should not have returned.

“I loved you, Jamie. I would have loved you as a cripple. Would Gretchen?”

“I don’t know,” I answered weakly, a distant figure slowly coming into focus as I belatedly realized who the young woman reminded me of as she led me to the room.

The shape of her eyes were the same as my daughter’s.

I asked weakly, “Did you and Joey have children?”

“Joey was paralyzed from the waist down.”

“Then who is the girl at the front desk?” I whispered, my voice almost breaking with suppressed emotion.

She stared at me in horror.

“Is she … is she” I stuttered … “my granddaughter?”

Half standing, she gaped at me, her face a mask of rage. “Yours? Where have ye been for the last fifty-five years? Go home to Gretchen where you belong.”

Tears began streaming helplessly down my face as I weakly gestured at her and then myself – “Daughter or son” I half whispered, half sobbed.

Leaning angrily on the table she bellowed “Mine!” before covering her face and silently weeping, her shoulders beginning to helplessly shake. “Mine,” she repeated.

But once her tears were spent, she stood sluggishly, gazing at me sadly for a few moments before slowly turning to leave. “It was a fair exchange, Jamie,” she said flatly. “She doesn’t need a grandfather and her mother doesn’t need a father. They already had both.”

Following her as she walked to the door, I reached apologetically for her hand and she paused. “I’m so sorry, Rita.” But she did not answer or face me, my hand lightly clinging to her fingertips.

“I was just a kid, Rita.”

“I know,” she answered as she reached for the doorknob with her free hand, all but her pinkie slipping from my grasp. “Please don’t come back again.” As she opened the door, I lost my grip on her last remaining finger and she stopped briefly to face me, the light from the other room momentarily illuminating her features. Her face wet with tears, the green in her eyes sparkled with unspoken hope. “If only,” she whispered, and then turned and left me and the room behind.