by Inmon, Shawn
On the way out of Madison, he stopped and looked at a few different rooms that were for rent. None of them had the charm of the blanket fort, but they also all had blessedly normal landlords, not creeper overlords who thought their houses were their own fiefdoms.
My only regret is that I’ll never make the Mantle of Fame.
The last one he looked at was a bit farther away from the UW, and so was also a bit cheaper. He put down the first month’s rent, and told the landlord he’d be back to move in soon.
With a light heart, convinced he was doing the right thing, he told Gene Crow that he would be moving out at the end of September.
Everything is falling into place.
Chapter Forty-One
There is a certain irony in the fact that, quite often, just as we believe everything is falling into place, everything has already started to fall apart. And so it was for Dominick Davidner.
He put in his two weeks at the service station, gathered up his few items from the Crow Manse—no more, really, than he had packed in the day he had moved in—and drove to Madison. He stopped at a small jewelry store in a strip mall on the outskirts of town and made a purchase, then went straight to his new room, unpacked his clothes and his books, and cast about for something to do.
Feels strange to be here, just a few minutes away from Emily, and not being with her. I know she needs her space, though.
Dominick invested his time in going around town and putting in job applications at gas stations, garages, and car dealerships—anywhere that needed someone who could work on engines. After half a dozen stops, nothing looked promising.
Gonna need to find something pretty quick. The savings account is dwindling. In those time travel movies, they always make it easy—go bet on a big sporting event, or buy a stock that’s gonna skyrocket. Problem is, I was never much of a sports fan, and I don’t have the sports almanac that Michael J. Fox did. I have no idea what stock to invest in, circa 1978, either. I guess Microsoft will be a great investment when it goes public, but I’m not even sure when that is. I guess I should have paid more attention to these things.
Finally, Dominick had waited until he could wait no more. He drove to Emily’s new place, knocked on the door, and asked for her. When she appeared at the front door, she smiled and was happy to see him. She led him upstairs to her room. She had obviously been studying, as a book was open on the desk, and a small, goose-necked desk lamp was turned on.
Dominick took the scene in, then said, “Studying, huh?”
“Yes, Sherlock. What was your first clue? The fact that I’m a college student, or the pile of textbooks open on my desk?”
He smiled. “Funny girl. You are such a funny girl.”
Dominick lifted Emily off the ground and backed her up until he dropped her on the bed. He kneeled down on both knees in front of her and put his head in her lap.
“I’ve missed you, Em.”
“Missed you, too, Nicky. It will be a little crazy for a while. My course load is a lot heavier now, which means a lot more studying, plus I’ve got to find a part time job waitressing or something. But, it will settle down soon enough. We’ll figure it out.”
“I’ve had a lot of time to think about things, these past few weeks, and I want to tell you part of what I’ve figured out.”
“Okay,” she said, stroking his face. “Or, we could always, you know ...” she jerked her head toward the fluffy pillows at the head of the bed.
“Yes, that would be good, too, but I really want to tell you this.”
She smirked. “Must be pretty damn important for you to pass up such a good offer. Okay, fire away. I’m listening.”
“I really hated being apart from you. I wandered around town, kinda lost. I hung out with Mel and Sandy a little, but it’s not the same without you there.”
“That’s because I am so wonderful.” Emily giggled, and ran her hands up under his shirt.
Dominick pushed them down.
“You are trying to distract me, but I am strong.” Dominick smiled, the smile that always made Emily want to jump on him.
He grew serious. “I have to tell you. I quit my job at the station.”
Emily looked puzzled. “Why?”
Dominick held a hand up. “Also, I gave my notice to Gene Crow and moved out.”
“What? Where are you going? Are you moving back to California?”
“Em, I could never leave you. I moved up here. I’ve got a room about two miles from here.”
“Oh.” That single syllable that Emily used for so many things. “Oh.”
Dominick got halfway up, fished in his pocket for a little blue box and got back down on one knee in front of Emily, whose hand flew to her mouth.
“Oh!”
Dominick opened the small box. There was a ring was inside. It was a diamond ring in the same way a Hot Wheels is a car.
Emily’s eyes filled with tears, spilled over, and ran down her face.
Tears are good. Come on, Emily, just say ‘Yes,’ and the rest of our life is set.
Instead, she shook her head, and said, “You just don’t listen to me, Dominick.”
Dominick was stunned, and rocked back on his heels. His mouth dropped open.
She sniffed back more tears, and said, “You really don’t listen,” as if he hadn’t been listening the first time she said it. “Why did I break up with Burke? Because he was moving us along too fast, and I wasn’t ready for it, so I let him go. That was less than six months ago. Do you think my life has changed that much in just six months?”
Dominick shut his mouth, closed the box, and slipped it back into his pocket.
Emily swiped the tears away from her eyes. “Oh, Dominick, I really do love you. You’re so special to me, but I can’t do this anymore.”
“Em, I’m sorry. I thought this was a good thing. I just want us to be together.”
Emily shook her head so violently that one of her tears flew off and landed on Dominick’s cheek. He reached up and touched it gently.
“I can’t do this anymore. It all hurts too much. First, Burke, now you. I need to just be alone.”
“Wait. What?” Dominick froze. “What are you saying?” He tasted a coppery fear in his mouth.
Emily wiped more tears away, calm now. “I’m saying, ‘No, Dominick, I won’t marry you.’ I’m nineteen years old. I don’t even know who I am yet—“
“You know who you are better than anyone I’ve ever met, Emily.”
“—and I don’t know when I will know. I was afraid of this from the beginning. I knew better. Melody told me that you had been following us around, before you ‘accidentally’ met us at the bowling alley. I really should have known better, but I liked you Dominick, and eventually, I loved you. But, now I see.” Even quieter, she said, “Now I know.” She shook her head. “No more. I’m so sorry, Dominick, but I just can’t do it.”
Dominick sat down flat on her floor. Now, his tears were coming, hot and fast.
“Wait, Em. I get it now. I do. Let’s just forget this happened. I’ll give up my place here and move back to Sheboygan. Whatever it takes. Please, just don’t say we’re done.”
She shook her head.
Dominick came to a snap decision.
“I can’t believe I’m going to tell you this, Em, but I feel like I have to. This isn’t our first lifetime together.”
Emily winced as though she was in pain. “What?”
Dominick kept his voice calm. If his story was going to be insane, he wanted to sound as rational as he could.
“We’ve known each other before. In another lifetime. We were married, and we were happy.” Dominick laughed bitterly. “I can’t believe you don’t remember any of this. We were both teachers. We owned a little house with a white picket fence around it, as cliché as that sounds. It’s so hard that you don’t you remember any of this.”
Emily’s hand was at her mouth again. She shook her head and began to back away.
“And then ... and then, I was ki
lled, and I woke up back in my nine year old body.”
”Dominick, stop!”
“Please, just let me finish. It’s important.”
Emily edged toward her desk. She put her hand on her pink princess phone.
Dominick spoke louder and faster. “Everything I’ve done since I opened my eyes back here was to try and give us a chance to find what we already had—our life together.”
Emily took the phone out of the cradle, and when she spoke, a note of hysteria crept into her voice. “You don’t get it. There is no ‘we’ anymore. We’re done. I can’t take this craziness any more. I don’t want to see you again, Dominick. Get out, or I’m going to call the police.”
Dominick took one step toward her, but Emily flinched away in fear.
Dominick froze. Oh my God, what have I done? She’s afraid of me. He turned and ran from her room.
Chapter Forty-Two
Dominick stumbled out of Emily’s room, and down the stairs. He passed one of her roommates before he got to the front door. She stared at him, open mouthed, but he didn’t care. He climbed into his car and started it. The low rumble, the menacing growl, was there, but he didn’t hear it. His blood was pounding in his ears.
He slowly leaned forward and laid his head against the steering wheel. Tears dripped off his face and into his lap. Numbly, he shifted into drive and pulled away from the curb. He had no destination. He felt as though he might never have another destination ever again.
He drove through Madison and got on a highway headed west.
Okay. I blew it. She’s right. I wasn’t paying attention. I was so single-mindedly focused on recreating what we had, that I didn’t read the situation right in front of me. This would have been fine for me. I’m a middle-aged man, but she’s not. She’s a young girl. She needs to live.
Dominick drove blindly, only keeping the car on the road and in his lane subconsciously.
She’ll change her mind, though. Right?
He thought back to the stricken look on Emily’s face when he had pulled out the ring. Or worse, the fear on her face when he had stepped toward her.
No. She won’t. Time to stop fooling myself. That’s what got me into this mess. So, what now, then?
Dominick drove blindly on, mile after mile, until darkness fell. He reached down and turned his headlights on. His gas tank still read half full. He pushed on, doing his best to blank everything from his mind, failing time and again
Up ahead, the road curved to the left, then onto a bridge that crossed a river, maybe fifty feet below. He pushed down on the accelerator. His speed ticked up to 65, 70, 75. The growl of the engine increased in volume and pitch.
When the road turned left, Dominick held the Chevelle in a straight line. The tires left the pavement, hit dirt and gravel, shimmied a little, but held their trajectory.
A moment later, the car shot off the embankment and all four wheels left the ground. Dominick never took his foot off the accelerator, even when the RPMs went above the redline.
The headlights cut through the darkness at a sharply downward angle, reflecting the gray water below. The car hit the water nose first, slamming Dominick into the steering wheel and windshield with horrific force.
Chapter Forty-Three
“Oh. Dominick, no,” Carrie said. “That’s not the answer. That’s never the answer!”
Carrie had killed herself a dozen times when she was on Earth, doing exactly what Dominick was doing: resetting, hoping for a better result. The irony of scolding Dominick for the same thing she had done so many times did not occur to her.
She spoke so vehemently that Maruna actually took her eyes off her pyxis for a moment.
“Sorry,” Carrie mumbled, then returned her attention to the car driving off a cliff and plunging into a river. She backed it up, let it roll forward, backed it up, let it roll forward. After she did that half a dozen times, she saw that nothing was changing. As she had done when Dominick had nearly killed Mr. Bratski, she reached into the image and pinched a bit of it away.
It played out the same.
She pinched out more, and more, and more, but the scene never changed. Each time, the car left the road, jumped down the embankment, and Dominick was recycled.
She was so focused on trying to change what was happening, that she didn’t notice both Bertellia and Margenta, standing over her shoulder watching her.
Chapter Forty-Four
Dominick opened his eyes with a gasp. He was staring into Connie’s brown eyes.
Her lower lip trembled. “Bubby okay?”
Dominick let his head fall back onto the carpet with a thud and sighed.
I’ve got to start thinking things through.
Part Three
Chapter Forty-Five
The next ten years were not easy for Dominick.
When he woke up back in his nine year old body again, he felt overwhelming anger toward Emily.
I thought we were soul mates, but no soul mate would ever act that way. And, I thought we were meant to be, but I must have been wrong. And, I thought you would always love me, no matter what.
Time, as it almost always does, brought perspective. When he was away from her intoxicating presence, he was able to see that year he spent in Sheboygan more clearly. He saw the clarity of the messages Emily had been sending him, and he finally got perspective on what his actions had looked like to her.
And now, here I am again, a fifty year old man who acted like a teenager, stuck in the body of a nine year old boy.
He was a more veteran time traveler this time around, though, and he knew what to expect. He didn’t fight back and bloody Sam’s nose. He and his friends never even ran into Billy Stitts while they were walking around town, so he never hurt him and put him into the hospital. He did encourage his dad to work on the Dodge Town out in the garage, but he just did that to have something to do, and to clear out room for the small engine repair that he knew he and his dad would start again.
Even though they got the Dodge on the road, he was never tempted to take it for a joyride, and so he never killed Mr. Bratski’s roses, or, very nearly, Mr. Bratski himself. He did remember Mr. and Mrs. Bratski kindly from his previous life, though, and mowed their lawn for free every summer.
The ten years that it took to get back to where he had been before he drove his car into the lake dragged inexorably. His second pass through that decade had the attraction of nostalgia, but that evaporated on a third trip through. Even the thrill of seeing his family again was muted by knowing that he had essentially handed himself a ten year prison sentence, just to get back to where he had been,
He was a quieter, less boisterous boy this trip through his life. He had begun to feel, to a certain extent, that his life’s energy was ebbing. He used the many long hours to turn the year he had spent in Wisconsin over and over in his mind. The more he compared those months with Emily to the happy years they had spent as husband and wife, the clearer it had become. He had gambled everything on the innate attraction that he felt toward Emily, and the fact that she would feel it to the same extent, no matter that the circumstances were so different from their initial meeting.
In his first life, Dominick and Emily had met when he had left his job teaching in Oakland and accepted the position in Middle Falls. They were both in their late twenties and ready to look for a life partner.
In Sheboygan, Dominick had done everything he could to cut in line and get ahead of the game. Meanwhile, Emily, gently at first, finally with force, had told him she wasn’t ready. He could see that clearly now, but with that clarity, came a new problem. If it had seemed an eternity to wait until he had graduated from high school, it would be even worse to try and wait until they had met organically. That meant a nine year slog through elementary, junior high, and high school, then four years of college, and he would still have to wait another four or five years to meet her again. It felt like an eternity stretching out in front of him.
But the pain of Emily’s rej
ection was still fresh in his mind and heart, despite the years he had now spent in this third life. So he was resolved to keep his head down, pass the time as best he could, and be prepared for the chance to rebuild the bridge to Emily properly when the time came.
And as it always does, the time passed.
Those early years, he was limited by his age and size, and he watched the same television shows with his family, fixed the same lawnmower engines, and generally treaded water.
He got the same good grades he had gotten previously, and graduated again with a 3.93 GPA. He could have gotten a 4.0, but he didn’t want to attract attention to himself, and take that honor away from someone else who deserved it. His only real goal was to get good enough grades and participate in enough activities that he could get some scholarships and get accepted into Cabrillo College in Santa Cruz.
Of course, in this life, he didn’t make the drive north to watch The Turtles graduate from Hartfield Academy. If he had shown up, no one there would have known him. Dying and living again multiple times had shown him the transiency of relationships, if nothing else.
He spent the summer after graduating high school fixing lawnmowers and saving his money. Even with his scholarships, college was going to be expensive.
Through it all, the boredom and the repetitiveness, Emily never left his mind or his heart. Even though he had no intention on setting off across the country to see her, he still felt the strong need to make sure she was still there.
He subscribed to the Sheboygan Depression early in his junior year and read each new issue cover to cover, even though the news was almost a week old by the time it reached him. That didn’t matter. He just scanned for any mention of Emily’s name. In two years of reading it, he had never seen it.
On the Fourth of July, while Laura was cooking fried chicken and making potato salad for an outdoor supper before the fireworks, Dominick slipped away from the house.
