If I Could Turn Back Time

by Beth Harbison

  But that wasn’t possible. In my mind, it wasn’t possible. I went behind him, as scared as a kid in a graveyard on Halloween night, and touched his back. “Daddy? Are you all right?”

  But no one just fell asleep that way. No one dropped forward like that into a peaceful sleep. I knew it was too late, that he was gone.

  I didn’t know what to do.

  Anyone, even a five-year-old, would know to go to the phone and call 911, but I dithered for a moment. It felt like an hour. I was afraid to stay in the room with him. My father, whom I loved so much and who had always been the daddy teaching me to ride a bike or slipping me some cash when I was going out, my father, who had been the greatest dad there ever was, was terrifying to me.

  I went upstairs to the phone in my room and dialed the three digits, 9-1-1, with trembling fingers. It felt like the phone rang forever, and then they actually put me on hold. What if I’d been reporting an intruder in the house? Would those moments, or minutes, or hours, or whatever they actually were, have meant the difference between life and death for me as well?

  That’s what it felt like. Crazy as it sounds, knowing there was a dead body downstairs—no longer my father but “a dead body”—made me feel like a girl in a horror film, vainly trying to hide from the inevitable.

  When I was finally able to report the emergency, in an inexplicably hushed voice, I went back downstairs but didn’t go back into that room. One glance told me what I already knew: that his position hadn’t changed. It wasn’t going to. Not under his own power.

  So I went out front and sat on the cold cement front step and waited.

  It was Tanya who showed up before the emergency crews. In the confusion, I’d forgotten she was coming, but I was so glad to see her. As she came toward the door, her gait slowed, and she asked, “What are you doing out here?”

  That’s when I lost it. That’s when the numbness loosened and I burst into tears. “My f-f-father.” I gestured helplessly toward the door, but when she started to go, thinking I was ushering her in, I grabbed her arm. “He’s gone.”

  She frowned. “What do you mean, he’s gone? His car is right there! What are you talking about?”

  I sniffed. The tears felt icy on my face in the cold. “Dead,” I managed. “He’s dead. He’s … in there, but he’s dead. Oh, my god, I have to call my mother!”

  Even in the dark I could see Tanya went pale. “Dead?”

  I nodded, and then, as if timed perfectly in a play, the fire truck and ambulance and two police cars came screaming onto the street. We both stood there, watching, paralyzed, as they pulled up to the house and men in uniforms got out and came to the door.

  The rest of the night is just flashes for me. The impression that the firemen in their boots and gear looked huge inside the house, like they were dolls from a different play set from us. The police asking the questions they must ask when a person dies alone: “Do you know when he was last alive?” “Do you know if anyone called or came by?” “Was he having any problems outside the home?”

  No. No. No.

  No.

  We followed the ambulance to the hospital. It went slowly. Lights on, no siren. That’s when I learned that that means the person inside is deceased. There was paperwork to sign, questions unanswered, sadness insurmountable.

  I called my mother from the hospital pay phone. Her aunt didn’t have caller ID, so I guess when the phone rang so late at night, she thought it was more than likely a nuisance call, maybe a wrong number. So I had the additional difficulty of making her understand it was me, as I broke into her fog of sleep, before going on to tell her that her husband was dead.

  “Are you okay?” I asked idiotically.

  “No.” Of course not. Of course not. But I just needed her to be Mommy and fix everything.

  I needed her to be Mommy and him to be Daddy and I needed to go back to bed and forget this nightmare. If I was quick, if I could wake up quickly and then go back to sleep, I’d forget it all by morning.

  But I couldn’t, because it wasn’t a dream, it was my new life. It shot me out of the cannon of childhood, straight into adulthood.

  When it was all done and it was time to go, I hesitated, trapped by a strange feeling that I couldn’t leave him behind. Was he already in a drawer somewhere? Were those chilled? They must be. I hated the questions, I hated thinking about that stuff, but I couldn’t stop myself. There was so much that felt unfinished here. No, that felt wrong. Like a mistake. But it wasn’t a mistake. Even though I could feel that I was in shock, I could feel there was a shield up in me and that a lot of things were going to hit me later, I didn’t know what to do, except keep breathing and putting one foot in front of the other, and doing what I’d always done. I didn’t know anything else.

  This me with no father was someone I’d never been before.

  When Tanya and I pulled up to the house, she said, “Do you want to wait here while I go make sure everything’s locked up?”

  “Wait here?” I echoed dumbly. “Then what?”

  “We’ll go to my house. You can’t sleep here.”

  “But, we had plans. I think there’s Jiffy Pop in the cupboard.” Even to my own ears I sounded like a lunatic, but some part of me was still trying to push through and make this horrible thing go away. Be so determined to go about things as planned that I could make it all unhappen.

  “Ramie,” Tanya said quietly. “You can come back tomorrow after we get your mom from the airport, okay? Tonight you need to just come to my house and be away from this.”

  I nodded. The house probably still smelled like firemen, whatever they smelled like. Or death. Both. But wait—was he there? Had he left his body and gotten confused? He wouldn’t have left me; shouldn’t I stay here for him?

  But I pictured the reality of that; I would be afraid to go any farther in than the foyer. I didn’t want to clean up the French peanuts and baklava right now. I didn’t want to see what movie he’d been watching. I didn’t want to think about his last meal from the dishes in the sink. I didn’t want to go in and dive into a life interrupted here in the middle of the night when I was exhausted and grieving and unable to think clearly. I had the strangest sensation of being an actress in a bad play, completely unprepared to recite my lines.

  I do my thinking in the morning.

  And I did. By morning, I had suddenly bloomed into the completely capable, cold businesswoman I became for the next two decades. I cleaned all the mess that was left behind. I turned the heat up so it wouldn’t feel cold when my mom came in, and took down the anniversary card from him to her that had been on the mantel since their anniversary a week and a half before.

  From then on I was changed. I never thought about how I wanted to feel because I no longer believed there was any choice in that matter. Instead I was completely focused on what needed to be done.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  What was the point of all of this?

  What was the point of any of it?

  Was this just what going insane felt like? Had I lost my grip on sanity somehow, suddenly and without warning? Was this the result?

  It was all well and good for me to imagine or pretend this was some sort of actual time-travel experience, but that wasn’t possible. Yet neither could it be a dream, because who ever had a dream that went on and on like this, with times of sleeping and waking within it? On top of that, I couldn’t ever remember having a dream that included all the boring parts of life. The sitting around, waiting for something; turning over and going back to sleep, or waiting on the front stoop for a ride to pick me up. I’d had so many “down moments” that I couldn’t imagine this was a dream.

  If it was a real phenomenon somehow, then why wasn’t the point of it obvious?

  So it had to be insanity.

  With that in mind, I decided to push it a little.

  In the morning, I went out with my mom for her morning walk. Two miles around the neighborhood. She did it every morning, even twenty years later. I
think it is the secret to her vibrant longevity.

  Under present-day circumstances, I’m not sure I could keep up that well, but eighteen-year-old me had no problem.

  “Something weird is happening,” I said as we turned left out of our driveway.

  “Already?”

  “I mean in my life.”

  She glanced at me. “Tell me you’re not pregnant.” That was such a recurring theme in our lives back then. Not Being Pregnant. Back then, that seemed to be the worst thing that could possibly happen. I didn’t blame her for fearing that.

  I laughed. “I’m not! Good lord. I’m not sure I’ll ever be, but I can promise it won’t happen for a long, long time.”

  It was her turn to laugh. “Goodness, that’s strongly worded. I didn’t mean to imply never. Don’t wait too long or your dad and I will never get to be grandparents.”

  If this was a dream, it was so tempting to just blurt it out, to say, Dad’s never going to know it no matter what. But even in a dream I couldn’t be so final.

  So how could I put this?

  “So, like I said, something weird is happening. And I don’t know exactly how to explain it. Do things feel … normal to you lately? Like, over the past week or so?”

  She looked at me, surprised. “You feel it too? Yes.” She sighed. “I don’t know what’s gotten into him. Ever since that accident…”

  “Wait, what?”

  “Weren’t you talking about your father?”

  “What about him?”

  “His behavior seems a little off since he had that accident. I can’t put my finger on it, but he seems detached. Don’t you think?”

  Well, of course the fact that he was walking and talking at all was strange to me, so I didn’t know how to gauge whether he was suddenly different than he’d been the day before I had returned.

  “I wondered if he was having an affair,” she went on, as if speculating on a football team’s chances of making the playoffs. “But that’s completely out of character for him.”

  She didn’t ask for confirmation, but I agreed. I knew he wouldn’t have done that. “Absolutely. In fact, he just told me the other day, you mean the whole world to him.”

  I think I actually saw a pink flush light her cheeks. After all this time! That’s the way it should be. Maybe it was even worth the loss just to have had something that meant so much to both of them. “You and he mean the world to me too.” She frowned. “Still. Something’s changed. I hope he’s not ill. And that nothing happened in that accident that we don’t know about yet. Sometimes you hear stories of people who have very slow internal bleeds and you don’t know about them until it’s too late.”

  I hesitated. “Well, it’s not like Dad has the healthiest habits in the world.”

  “That’s true.”

  “But this is kind of what I was saying. Ever since that day I’ve been in a sort of déjà vu. Like, I feel like I’ve come back in time and I’m reliving this time for some reason.”

  She stopped and turned to me. “What do you mean?”

  “I was…” It felt wrong to get too specific right now. “I was older; I was having these experiences later in life, like I’d already finished college and gone into the job market, and suddenly I was back in high school, here, now. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s like something’s a dream and I don’t know which part.”

  “Maybe I’m the one going crazy,” she said, half to herself. But she seemed shaken. As I guess you would be if you were just talking to your daughter about your husband acting strangely and she told you she was a time traveler.

  “Definitely not,” I assured her, and we started walking again. “Maybe it’s the moon or sunspot activity or something. Or maybe we’re just all overtired from the end of school and the weather getting warmer, or something.” I don’t know why, but I felt like we shouldn’t continue the conversation. Dream or not, I felt like it was upsetting her too much. Damaging something. “Anyway, Mom, just know that Dad loves you more than anything else in this world. No matter what happens, ever, you have something very few people ever get.”

  She put an arm around me. “You’ll have it too, baby. Don’t you worry. It might not be with Brendan,” she cautioned—she obviously thought there was no way a high school relationship was going to become the real thing—“but it will be with the right man.”

  I snorted. “Whoever that is.”

  “He’ll show up.”

  “What if he doesn’t?”

  “He will. Maybe not in your time frame—we’re all always so impatient for the good stuff—but when the time is right, he will come to you.”

  I was going to have to hold on to that hope for a long time.

  When we got back home, my dad was in the garage, tinkering with something at the worktable, Zuzu lying at his feet. “Ahoy!” he called, and raised a hand to us. “I dropped a quarter by the couch and reached down, and look what I found under there.” He held something up and we went closer. “It’s the missing handle from the rolltop desk. Looks like the Halls’ dog might have gotten ahold of it when they were here visiting, though.” He held it at eye level and, indeed, it did seem to be covered in tiny tooth marks. “So I thought I’d sand it out a bit and stain it.”

  My mom was thrilled. “I hate to admit it, but that’s been bothering me inordinately,” she said with a laugh. “Every time I see that piece it seems lopsided because of the missing handle.”

  “Worry no more, milady. I have it solved.”

  “But, no,” I said, thinking about the handle more than about what I was saying. “We never found that. It’s still missing.”

  “Not now!” my mom said, smiling but with a slight crease in her brow. “That’s what your father is saying, he found it.”

  I looked at him, then at the handle. He had indeed. But when I was thirty-eight, it was still missing. And far from hating to admit it, my mother had told me countless times that it drove her nuts that it was missing, but she was never able to find anything close enough, even though it had become something of a life quest to look for one at every thrift shop, antique store, and flea market she happened upon.

  I didn’t remember this event, but maybe it had happened and the damn thing got lost again. It’s not like it could have that much significance; we never used the drawer because we couldn’t open it, so it wasn’t going to suddenly have a lost copy of the Declaration of Independence in it or anything.

  “You’re my hero!” my mother said to Dad, and gave him a peck on the cheek and squeezed his shoulder.

  “All in a day’s work,” he replied.

  She went in through the garage door and closed it behind her, sending everything pegged on the wall there—tennis rackets, jumper cables, and so on—into a jangle.

  “Dad,” I said when she was gone. It hadn’t worked with Mom. Maybe it would work with him. For some reason, this new wrench in the works compelled me more. “I feel like I’ve been here before.” Bad intro, I know.

  And, obviously, he didn’t pick right up on my meaning. “It sure wasn’t to clean up!” He laughed and looked around.

  I smiled. “No, I mean, in this place and time. I know this sounds crazy, believe me, you don’t have to call the guys in the white jackets or send me to Chestnut Lodge or anything; it’s just … to me, all of this feels like a dream.”

  “As the great Lewis Carroll said, Life, what is it but a dream?”

  “Okay.” I sighed. “Maybe in the greater sense, but I’m talking about right now. In my head, and maybe in reality—I believe it is in reality—I have lived way past this time. I’m thirty-eight, or I was about to be, but suddenly I’ve been thrust back into my eighteen-year-old body. My eighteen-year-old life.”

  He stopped what he was doing, and rested his hand on the workbench, still holding the drawer pull I did not yet know the final fate of. “So that’s what it feels like for you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve noticed a certain difference in you, of cour
se. It’s been an odd few days, though I guess graduating from high school forever does that to a person. You’re old and you’re young. Every time I thought you’d become very serious and very mature, for lack of a better word, you’d come up with something that sounded just like the Ramie I knew, and I thought it was all in my imagination.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No, you can’t. I’m not making much sense, I suppose. All I mean is that I sensed something was troubling you but I didn’t want to push, because the worst thing in the world you can do with someone who is struggling to regain their balance is to push them.”

  I nodded. That I understood. “And how’s your balance?”

  “A little off, kiddo. I’m a little off myself. Different situation from yours, though. We’re all on different paths, even though love keeps us together. What is it that’s troubling you the most about the way that you feel?”

  “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to act. I feel like a fool acting like…” I struggled for words, then just pointed at myself. “Like this. I’m thirty-eight, not eighteen, so how can I show up here and act like a young girl? Talk like a young girl? Every time I say cool I feel like a complete poser.”

  He laughed heartily. Which was better than looking alarmed and asking my mom to call 911, but not quite as good as taking me seriously. “Then consider it a fun game! Playacting! That’s the best we can do. If you fight it, you’re not going to learn anything.”

  “So you think I’m here to learn something?”

  “We’re all here to learn something.” He looked at me seriously then. “Sometimes we learn it in the worst possible way. Sometimes we have to face something we don’t think we can live through in order to show ourselves that we can live through hell and still come out on the other side. Do you know what I mean?”

  He could have been describing his own death. “Yes. I know what you mean.”