by Inmon, Shawn
Thomas looked at him, surprised, and laughed. He looked at his watch. “I’ve got to go get the little sign I had printed up from the car. I’ll be back in a minute.”
While Thomas was gone, several other people sat down. By the time he got back, seven people were scattered around the seats. Thomas looked at Dominick with raised eyebrows. Dominick flashed him a thumbs up as though he was personally responsible for the new arrivals.
Thomas carried a rectangular sign with the cover of his book on it and set it up on an easel. He turned and smiled at the people in the crowd. He nodded at the bored girl behind the cash register.
She leaned over and clicked on a small microphone. “Local author Thomas Weaver is speaking at the front of the store, for anyone who is interested.” Her tone of voice made it clear that she couldn’t imagine anyone being interested.
“Okay, okay. Well, we’ll just get started then. I’m going to do a little reading from my book, then I’ll be happy to answer any questions for you. Please excuse me if I sound a little nervous. I’m a lot more comfortable addressing a judge and jury than I am doing this.” He glanced up to see if that brought a chuckle from anyone, but he saw only expectant faces.
He picked up a copy of his book and began to read.
Thomas read for about ten minutes. He read a part of the story where a fifty-three year old man killed himself, then woke up in his fifteen year old body.
Dominick was very interested.
After he read the last paragraph, Thomas Weaver paused, took a drink of bottled water, and smiled. “That’s probably enough of listening to me read, I think. Does anyone have any questions?
The lady with the large bag, which had turned out to be her knitting raised her hand. “Yes. What happens to Timothy?”
Thomas laughed, and tapped the pile of books on the table. “That’s what these are here for. They’ll tell you exactly what happens to Timothy.”
Dominick was tempted to raise his hand and say, “I’ve got a lot of questions,” but he didn’t. Instead, he waited until everyone else had run out of things to ask, doozies like: ”Where do you get your ideas?” and “How much money did you get for writing it?” and “How much of this book really happened to you?”
Dominick was interested in that last question, but Thomas just said, “It’s all fiction. Writers are paid to make things up, right?”
I call bullshit, Thomas. No way you could “make up” so many things that mirror what has happened to me.
Thomas made one last pitch—“I’ll be happy to sign copies of the book for as long as you want to keep buying them tonight”—and the crowd gave him a polite round of applause. Several more people grabbed a copy and took it to the register to purchase it so they could get it signed.
Dominick wandered around the store, keeping an eye on Thomas, waiting for everyone else to disperse. It didn’t take long. After ten minutes, Thomas had taken his sign down and was helping the clerk restock the copies that hadn’t sold.
Dominick approached him and said, “Sorry, still got time to sign one more?”
“Of course!” Thomas said, and reached his hand out. “I suppose if I do a thousand of these, I’ll get over the thrill of signing a book, but for now, it’s still pretty cool.”
As Thomas was signing the book, Dominick leaned over and said, “How many lives is this for you?”
Chapter Fifty-Nine
The Sharpie Thomas was using to sign the book slipped, leaving a long dark trail across the dedication page. He sucked in his breath, and Dominick was surprised to see tears well in his eyes.
“Dude,” Dominick said. “You would be a terrible poker player.”
Thomas opened the book, flipped through the pages, then ran his finger down a few paragraphs. “I thought so. I didn’t put that in the book. Someone else said that to me once.” Thomas stared a long time at Dominick without saying anything.
He’s trying to estimate the chances of whether that was a lucky guess, or if I’m going through the same thing he is.
“What are you doing tomorrow?” Thomas asked.
“Teaching school, just like every day.”
“I’ve got a court appearance in the morning, but my late afternoon is free. Do you want to meet over at the batting cages by the Dairy Queen? Say, 4:30? We could hit a few balls around, and maybe talk a little.”
“Yes, that sounds great. I think we’ve got a lot to talk about.”
Thomas shook Dominick’s hand, then under his breath and to himself, he said, “After all these years, you’d think I’d be ready for something like that ...”
BY THE TIME DOMINICK got to the batting cages the next day, Thomas was already there, looking very non-lawyerly in sweat pants and a ragged Middle Falls High School sweatshirt. Dominick watched him take a few swings. Thomas was never going to be a professional baseball player. That much was obvious. Where Zack was fluid and relaxed in everything he did, his brother always seemed to have an extra motion where none was needed.
Thomas glanced over his shoulder and gave Dominick a nod. “Hope I don’t intimidate you too much with my flailing away. This is where I come to work out my frustrations. This next ball is the judge that ruled against us this morning.” He took a mighty swing, which missed the ball by half a foot.
“I hate it when the judge throws me a curveball like that.”
Thomas waited another few seconds, but no more balls came. “Guess that’s it. Your turn.”
Dominick opened the cage and slipped past Thomas into the cage. He picked up one of the bats leaning against the backdrop, put two quarters into the machine, set it for “medium” and took his stance. He stood with his legs shoulder-width apart, hands a few inches up on the bat, the bat waving just a few inches off his shoulder.
Haven’t swung at a baseball in twenty years, but it’s like riding a bike, right?
The first ball came humming at him, belt high and over the outside corner. He swung, a graceful arc that wasn’t even close to the ball.
Well, at least I didn’t fall down. Damn, I’m getting old.
After a few more misses, he finally connected on a sizzling line drive to the back of the net.
Better.
By the end of his twenty balls, he was roping shots to all fields.
“I should have known,” Thomas said from behind him. “You’re like my damn brother—good at everything you touch.”
“If you believe that, we should go bowling sometime. That will make you feel much better.”
Thomas laughed and said, “Let’s grab a Coke.”
They went inside the snack bar that was attached to the cages, picked up a couple of sodas, and sat at the corner table, as far away from anyone as they could be. They leaned slightly forward, so their voices didn’t need to carry.
“So. Same question. How many lives is this for you?”
Thomas was silent for two beats, then said, “Just my second. You?”
“Four. I’d like it to be my last, and go on to whatever’s next, but I have this terrible fear that if I die of some terrible disease as a ninety year old man, I’m just going to wake up in the same place again.”
Thomas nodded. “Yep. It’s like we’ve been given this key piece of information—that there’s something besides the void on the other side of death—but we still don’t know much. And, what you and I are getting isn’t anything like what any religion, prophet or guru ever foretold. I know this is a personal question, but did you suicide each time?”
“No. At the end of my first life, I tried to stop a boy from killing my students. He shot me, and I woke up as a nine year old.”
“Nine? Damn, that’s tough. I woke up as a fifteen year old, and that was tough enough. I can’t imagine having to be a kid all over again. So,” Thomas said, his logical mind working away, “you said, ‘at the end of your first life?’ What about the others?”
Dominick drew a deep breath. “Kind of hard to talk about with someone you just met. The last two times, I took
my own life. Things weren’t working out right, and I took the cowardly way out, hoping I could fix things if I had another chance.”
“I understand. I nearly did the same. But then I met an old woman named Emily Leon, who told me to not lose hope. For some reason, I listened to her.”
“Emily? That’s funny. That’s my wife’s name.” Dominick took a drink of his Coke, then said, “You know something? Even though neither one of us knows the answers, I feel better just finally having someone I can talk about this with. Sometimes, I think I’ll go crazy from not talking about it, but there’s too much risk.”
Thomas nodded. “I’ve had two people I could talk about this with, my friend Carrie, and my mom.”
“Are they both travelers, like us?”
“Carrie was. My mom, I actually convinced.”
“I tried that once. It didn’t go so well. That’s how I ended up driving my car off an embankment at eighty miles an hour.”
Thomas winced. “There’s a lot of ways it can turn out bad.”
“So, it feels like you’re the only person I can talk to about this, but ...”
“Sure. Go ahead.”
“My first life, I was killed by a student during a school shooting at Middle Falls. Yesterday, I saw that student again for the first time since that day. I have no idea what I’m going to do. Is he just going to march into my classroom and start shooting people again, any day now?”
“When did he do it in your first life?”
“December, 1999.”
“Fifteen months, then. We both know things don’t turn out the same from life to life. Some things are better, some worse. But, for the most part, there is a symmetry between our repeating lives. I wouldn’t think it would happen this early, but it’s possible.”
“So, what do I do, then?”
“You’ve got to be prepared.”
Chapter Sixty
Over the next few months, Dominick did what he could to be better prepared.
He hung out with Thomas Weaver often—at least once a week. They were interested in a lot of the same things, and it was a major relief to know someone you could talk to about the one aspect of your life you couldn’t talk about with anyone else. They even went bowling. Good as his word, Dominick was terrible, and Thomas beat him by thirty pins.
More often than anything, though, they met at the batting cages, got a workout swinging at pitches, then would hang out in the snack bar, swapping stories of what it was like to live multiple lives. Thomas asked if he could write Dominick’s story, too.
“My book’s selling pretty well, and the publisher is asking me if I’ve got a sequel in me. You’re the only other time traveler I know. We could call it The Death and Life of David Dellacroix, or something like that. Pretty catchy, huh?”
“Thanks, but I don’t feel the need to have my life fictionalized.”
On the way out of the batting cages that day, they stopped and looked at the new bats hanging for sale on the wall. Thomas pulled one down, took its measure, then walked to the register and bought it.
He handed it to Dominick. “Here. Early birthday present. Or, late Christmas present. Whatever. Why don’t you keep this somewhere in your classroom, just in case? Not that a bat does a lot of good against a gun, but you never know.”
Dominick loved the bat, but thought he might need something with a little more punch, so he purchased several pistols, a .22 and a .45, and started hanging out at a shooting range on the south side of town.
If I’m going to have guns, I’ve got to make sure I know how to use them.
He had a hard time explaining his new interest in guns to Emily.
The day he brought them home, he put them both in a locked gun box in his closet, and stored the ammunition on a high shelf in the garage. Still, Emily didn’t like it.
“I don’t understand why you feel the need to arm yourself like that. Has something happened that you haven’t told me about?”
Yes, but there’s no way I can tell you. I hate lying to you more than anything except being separated.
“I just want to be able to protect us if need be.”
“So, if a burglar breaks into the house in the middle of the night, you’re going to unlock that box, grab the guns, then run out to the garage for bullets?”
“Would you rather I kept it loaded in my nightstand?”
Emily gave him the look which meant that was a question so stupid, it didn’t need to be answered. And probably shouldn’t have been asked.
Dominick hated sneaking around behind her back, but he did, to some extent. He waited until nights or weekends when she had something else to attend to before he went to the range and practiced. After a few months of not being confronted with the ongoing evidence, the whole issue faded into the background and was mostly forgotten.
Dominick also did his best to prepare for an attack by stopping it before it happened.
Over the course of Freshman English, Dominick gave extra time and attention to Gerald Fleischer. Early in the year, Dominick would flinch each time Gerald walked into the classroom, anticipating the worst. By the end of the semester, nothing untoward had happened. On the last day of class, he asked Gerald to stay behind for a moment.
He was a shorter boy who obviously gave very little thought or care to his appearance. His hair was normally greasy and slicked down, and up close he smelled oddly of slightly sour milk and old soup. He rarely made eye contact, and as he approached the desk, he said, “Did I do something wrong, Mr. Davidner?”
“No, not at all. It’s been great having you in class this year. My wife and I have a house over on Periwinkle Street, and it needs painting. I was wondering if you’d be interested in helping me with it? I’m paying ten bucks an hour.”
Dominick watched the wheels turn inside Gerald’s brain. God only knows what kind of things he’s thinking about.
“Are you going to be hiring anyone else to help?”
Ah. There we go. He’s afraid that if anyone else shows up, he’ll be low man on the totem pole again, and would probably end up getting bullied, to boot.
“No, just looking for one helper. I’m going to do most of the painting, but I need someone to help me tape everything off, fill my paint bucket, things like that. It won’t be anything too tough.”
Gerald narrowed his eyes, considering.
Come on, I’m trying to help you here.
“Okay, sounds good. I’ll have to ask my parents, since they’ll have to drive me. When are you starting?”
“Next Monday.” Dominick jotted something on a piece of scrap paper. “Here’s my phone number. Why don’t you have your parents give me a call?”
THE NEXT MONDAY, GERALD’S mother pulled up to Dominick’s house in an old four-door Plymouth. She got out with Gerald and walked toward Dominick, who was already outside, getting everything ready. She approached with an old brown purse clutched in front of her like a shield.
“Mr. Davidner?”
“Yes, how do you do?”
“I’m Mrs. Fleischer. Are you sure Gerald won’t be any trouble?”
“Oh, no, not at all. He’ll be a big help. He’s always a hard worker in class.”
Mrs. Fleischer’s face twisted in a sour knot. Apparently, she did not agree with Dominick’s assessment of her son’s work ethic. “What time should I be back to pick him up?”
“Oh, we won’t work too long today. We’re just doing prep work. Maybe 2:00?”
She reached inside her purse, pulled out a wrinkled five dollar bill. “Here, this is in case you go out to lunch.”
Dominick held up his hand. “No need, Mrs. Fleischer, my wife, Emily, is making us our lunch. She’s a very good cook.”
Lightning quick, the bill disappeared back in the purse. She turned to Gerald. “I’ll be here at two.” She turned and marched to the car and drove away.
Gerald risked a rare moment of eye contact to gauge Dominick’s reaction to his mother.
Dominick smiled, slapped
him on his shoulder, and said, “Well! She seems nice,” and turned toward the paint supplies. He did not notice that Gerald moved away at his touch.
They spent the first hour laying everything out for the day, and talking. Dominick quizzed him about everything he could think of—what movies he liked, what books, what television shows. As it turned out, he never went to the movies, only read what he was assigned in school, and his parents only allowed him to watch PBS.
As they were taping the plastic over the windows, Dominick asked, “So, if you don’t read, or watch television, what do you do with your time?”
“My parents own the pawn shop over on Halliday. I spend a lot of time helping out there.”
Dominick snapped his fingers. That’s right. Fleischer Pawn. I’d never connected that before.
“If I gave you a couple of books, would that be okay with your folks?”
“Maybe. What kind of books?”
This was the closest thing to actual interest in anything that Dominick had seen all day.
“Science fiction maybe?”
Gerald grinned. “That’s probably close to the edge, but if it came from my English teacher, they’d probably let it go.”
“Good enough. I’ll grab a few from the house before you leave.”
By the time they had all the windows covered, it was lunchtime. Emily had made her special tuna sandwiches and sliced up some watermelon. They ate at a picnic table in the backyard. Emily tried to draw Gerald out, but had even less success than Dominick had.
When lunch was over, Gerald asked if he could use their bathroom, and Dominick told him where it was in the house. When he disappeared inside, Emily laid her hand on Dominick’s.
“Tough nut to crack, huh?”
“He doesn’t fit in at school. I thought I’d take a chance and see if I could figure out what makes him tick.”
I hate misleading you. As soon as I figure this out, I will never have to do it again.
By the time Mrs. Fleischer came by to pick up Gerald, they had two sides of the house prepped and ready for paint.
