The Unusual Second Life of Thomas Weaver

by Shawn Inmon

  Thomas took it down, set it on the counter. Hell, I should be doing more around here anyway. I’m a full-grown man, and I haven’t been exactly pulling my own weight.

  He pulled a bowl down, filled it with Raisin Bran and milk, and sat at the kitchen table.

  Maybe doing some real work will clear my mind, help me think. Just because I’m not quite strong enough to kill Michael Hollister doesn’t mean I can’t take care of him one way or another. I’ve got to think of a way. I’ve read hundreds of murder mysteries and Perry Masons. The killer always gets tripped up some way. Michael is a rookie killer, so I’m sure he made mistakes. I’ve just got to get the police to take a closer look at him somehow.

  Thomas crunched a mouthful of cereal. If I just go to the police, especially after what happened yesterday, they won’t believe me. It might even make me a suspect again.

  Thomas finished the cereal, put his bowl in the sink, and picked up the list.

  Better get started. This is gonna to take me all day, which I think is the plan.

  Thomas went to the small shed at the back of the house that held their lawn care tools. He pulled the wooden extension ladder down off the nails and headed for the gutter at the front of the house.

  He spent the entire day working, doing the work not merely well enough to cross items off the list, but well enough to withstand any maternal scrutiny. As he worked, he turned over, examined, and rejected various methods of alerting the police to Michael Hollister.

  Plant drugs on his car and then narc on him? Pretty risky. To plant drugs, one has to have some to begin with.

  Plant drugs in his food and let that take care of him? Not just risky, but what if he kills someone with his car while loaded? Isn't my whole life right now about how not to get certain people killed in avoidable car accidents?

  By the time Zack rolled the Camaro into the driveway, the gutters were done, the grass was mowed, and Thomas was dripping sweat into the front flower bed, trowel in hand.

  Zack got out of the car, peered over the top of his sunglasses and said, “Kunta Kinte, I presume.”

  Thomas wiped the sweat away, said, “Don’t be racially insensitive, Zack.”

  “Huh? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Never mind. Nothing.” Thomas went back to attacking a flat sticker bush that had taken root under a rhododendron.

  “I’ve gotta say, in a matter of months, you’ve gone from being totally anonymous to being a famous freshman. Good job. Next year, you should try being known for something other than trying to kill somebody.”

  Zack strolled by Thomas and into the house. A minute later, he reappeared, a glass of lemonade in his hand. He slid down to sit on the porch, leaned against the railing, and sighed. “Nothing better than a frosty cold beverage on a hot day, while watching my little brother sweat his ass off.”

  Thomas picked up a large clod of dirt, calculated the distance between he and Zack, then crumbled it up with a sigh. Gotta grow up some time. He settled for extending his middle finger.

  Zack smiled. “That’s a lot more effective when you’re not wearing Mom’s old lady garden gloves.”

  Thomas ignored him and went back to work. When he looked up again, Zack was gone and the shadows were growing longer across the front yard. Anne’s station wagon pulled into her spot and she got out, still wearing her scrubs, which were spattered with a brown residue. Maybe this will cheer her up a little. We really ought to appreciate her more. She goes to work and gets splashed with shit to feed us, clothe us, put a roof over our heads, and come to the principal's office when one of us almost chokes a rich kid to death. We should get off our lazy asses now and then to keep this place looking pleasant for her to come home to.

  Anne looked at the freshly mowed lawn, the huge pile of weeds, and her sunburned son. “Get the gutters done?”

  Thomas nodded.

  “You can knock off for the day, then. I’ll have a new list for you tomorrow.”

  I hate this. She’s not mad. I don’t even know if she’s worried any more. It’s like everything has been burned out of her. I wish I could talk to her.

  I wish I could talk to anyone.

  Chapter Fifty

  THE NEXT FEW days were much like that—an endless cycle of hedge trimming, porch painting, vacuuming, and polishing silver. As Thomas worked, his brain was free to work on the real problem.

  The breakthrough came four days into his internal exile, the Friday after the fateful Monday when he had failed to kill Michael Hollister. By 2 PM, he judged he was far enough ahead to take a break. His mother was at work, would not be home until at least 5:30. It was Senior Skip Day, so Zack was blowing off steam with his friends at the lake. Home, a place lacking in both bikinis and beer, would be the last place he would come.

  Thomas took a pair of Anne’s surgical gloves from under the bathroom sink. He pulled out a new spiral notebook, opened it, and printed neatly in the upper right hand corner:

  Michael Hollister

  Civics

  5/24/76

  Then he rewrote the same thing directly over the top of the first impression, pressing hard. He turned to the second page of the notebook and ran his gloved finger over the same spot. He couldn’t see anything, but there was definitely an indent there.

  He took the pencil and scratched it back and forth on the back of the notebook until it was dull. He turned back to the second page, put the pencil awkwardly in his left fist, and wrote in big blockish letters:

  Dear dum asses.

  I am the Oregon Strangler. I killed that yung girl you found at the rest stop.

  Why haven’t you caught me? Because you are dum asses.

  She was my first but she will not be my last.

  OS

  Thomas hunted through the dining room drawers for a plain white envelope and a thirteen cent stamp. He wet the stamp on a sponge and attached it to the envelope. No sense in taking chances, even if they don’t have DNA tests in 1976. They will eventually, and I don’t want to confuse the issue if they test it later. He folded the paper, stuffed it into the envelope, and looked up an address in the phone book. In the same block printing, he addressed it to "George Madison, Middle Falls Police Department, Middle Falls, Ore."

  Hmm. Not the kind of thing you just drop in our mailbox for the mail lady to pick up. Too memorable. Mom told me not to leave the house, but with any luck, I can bike down to the mail box and back in ten minutes and she’ll never be the wiser.

  It took him fifteen minutes, but she never was the wiser.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  THAT NIGHT, ANNE returned home to discover that Thomas had once again completed his daily assignments. She inspected the work with wordless disinterest, then went to the refrigerator and got a Tab. She reached into her front pocket, but it contained no Viceroys.

  Four days. She's just existing. She’s emotionally wrung out, she’s trying to cold turkey the only addiction she’s ever had, and she’s exhausted from another shit-splattering twelve-hour day at the hospital. Probably not a great time to have a life-changing conversation, but I can’t stand to see her go on like this. I can’t take her looking at me like I’m a stranger.

  Of everyone involved in this mess, she deserves the best, and has gotten the emotional equivalent of Amy's Yard Sandwich. Every time.

  Enough, come what may.

  “Mom?”

  “What, Tommy?” She sat in what had once been his dad’s chair and pulled the lever so her feet went up, then kicked off her sensible nurse’s shoes.

  “I know you’re tired, but I’d really like to talk to you.”

  “Now?”

  “Well, yeah. I want to tell you what’s really going on with me.”

  “This would be, 'What’s really going on with Tommy, version four, or five?' I’ve lost track.”

  “That's fair. I know this has been killing you, and I bet a part of you has blamed yourself." He thought he saw an eye flicker and harden. "It's not your fault one bit. Th
e problem is that the truth is too weird for anyone to believe, and I don't want to get locked up in the nut wing. So I’ve been holding back on you, and you knew, and it hurt you. Still does. This ends now, for better or worse.”

  “And why tonight?”

  “While I’ve been working this week, I’ve been thinking. All my life, I’ve let things control me. I’m not gonna do that anymore.”

  Anne cracked open the Tab, took a sip, then almost smiled. “’All your life?’ Tommy, you’re fifteen. You haven’t had a life yet.”

  “Yeah. That’s the problem in a nutshell. I’m not fifteen years old, not really."

  Anne's eyes fell a bit. "So I wasn't actually there when they got the forceps and worked you out of me? If you aren't fifteen, then just how old do you claim to be?"

  "You might want to have the guys from the hospital come with their butterfly nets and take me away, but I don’t care. I’m going to tell you the truth.”

  Anne clamped her lips against a reply, then sat up a little straighter.

  “This is going to be hard to hear and harder to tell. I just ask, please let me tell it straight through without stopping me. When I’m done, I’ll answer any questions you have, and then you can have me hauled off to the rubber room if you want. Deal?”

  Anne hesitated, then nodded. “Sure. Deal.”

  Great. Now how do I start? At the beginning, I guess.

  What the hell is the beginning?

  It's where I decide it is.

  “Mom, this is the second time I’ve lived this day. This is the second time I’ve been fifteen. Next week will be the second time I watch Zack graduate.”

  Anne’s eyes narrowed in doubt.

  “I know I look like I’m fifteen, but I’m really fifty-four years old.”

  “Oh, Tommy,” she said, shaking her head in sorrow.

  "No, really. My body is fifteen. My mind, my thinking, is fifty-four." Anne's face was compassion for a lost soul. "I’m gonna give you the short version of this. Please?"

  "I'm here. I'm silent. Mostly. Go on." The tone of resignation tore at his heart.

  "When I lived this part of my life the first time, I was a normal kid. I didn’t get in much trouble. I got okay grades. I wasn’t as good as Zack was at anything, but that was kind of okay."

  "I never thought I'd feel so nostalgic for that," she blurted. "Tommy, I'm sorry. I couldn't help that. I'll hush."

  "Mom, it's all right. You have every right. Anyway...the summer after he graduated, before he left for OSU, Zack took me to a party at the lake. It was kind of fun, but Zack drank a lot. A big rainstorm came and broke the party up. I ran to the Camaro, but Zack had passed out on the ground. When I finally got him to the car, I knew he was too drunk to be able to drive. I didn’t want us to get in trouble, though, so I put him in the passenger seat and drove home.”

  Anne had put her feet back on the ground, the Tab forgotten.

  “I didn’t really know how to drive a stick yet, but eventually I got going, and we were doing okay. Everyone else had already gone, but I found my way out from the lake and onto the highway. At first, I was driving slow, because I didn’t know how to drive. But, I was a kid, so eventually I started to go a little faster.”

  Shame touched Thomas’s cheeks. Tears filled his eyes.

  “I still didn’t know how to shift very well. When I tried to shift into fourth, I had to look down to do it. When I looked back up, there was a deer in the middle of the road.” Thomas closed his eyes, spilling tears. “I didn’t even think. I just jumped on the brakes and turned the wheel. We missed that deer, but the Camaro started rolling. When we stopped, all I could think was that I had ruined Zack’s car, and that you were going to kill both of us.”

  Thomas paused, gathered himself, looked at Anne's expression of alarm.

  “That’s when I looked for Zack. He wasn’t in his seat any more. He’d been thrown clear and he was laying on the road.”

  Anne’s hand flew to her mouth. She doesn’t believe me yet, but she feels the impact. Sorry, Mom, gotta get this off my chest.

  “He was dead, Mom. I killed Zack.” He was crying.

  “Oh, honey.” Anne shook her head, but still reached out to him. Thomas blew out a full breath, tried to get his voice under control.

  “Life just wasn’t ever any good after that. I went back to school, I even went to college myself for a while, but nothing turned out right.” He laughed slightly. “You and I ended up living together. You were old and retired, and I was dead inside. Then I did something selfish and awful and gutless.”

  He could not read whatever was in her eyes, except that it involved pain. No stopping now.

  “Finally, when I got canned from my crappy job selling cars, and couldn’t take it one more day, I swallowed a bunch of your pills–which I had filched from your meds, just to show you what sort of a wonderful character I grew up to be–and killed myself. Except I didn’t, I guess, because I went to sleep in 2016 and woke up back here on Easter Sunday, 1976. You know the rest, I guess.”

  “Do I?”

  “Oh, hell, I guess not really. But if you look back, that's about when I started to say odd things, sound different, seem weird, right?"

  "Maybe," Anne said, but her eyes showed a crack in the front of skeptical sadness.

  "See, in 2016, I knew things. I knew how people's lives had gone. One of those things was about Michael Hollister. He became a serial killer and killed twenty-seven people, before science caught up with him and they nailed him. After I killed myself and woke up back here, the first time I saw him, I thought of his future. I thought about all those people he was going to kill. I didn’t want them to die, so that’s why I’ve been trying to stop Michael ever since I got back here. As usual, though, just like the way my first life played out, I’ve totally screwed it up.”

  “Oh, Tommy, Tommy, Tommy," she sighed. "You seem to be very sure of all this."

  “That's not hard when it's true, Mom. I just wanted to make a few things right. I wanted to manage not to kill Zack. I wanted to stop Michael from killing people. I wanted to make things a little better for a few friends. So far, I haven’t made any of those things happen. Now I’m getting closer to the time I killed Zack. I’m afraid it’s going to happen again.”

  Anne’s face seemed to retreat into the fortress of nursing patience. “That’s…that’s quite a lot for me to process.”

  “I know how crazy it sounds. That’s why I’ve haven’t told you. You can agree, at least, that I would be reluctant to tell a story like this, and I might think my own mother would have a hard time buying it?”

  Anne laughed, just a bit. “I can go that far with you, at least. Is there more?”

  Hmmm. I met an angel in a church who could read minds and disappear when she wanted to. Do you want to know about that?

  “Yeah, there’s some other stuff, but I think we’ve made enough stops on the crazy train for one night, don’t you?”

  “I suppose.” Anne attempted a smile. “Tommy—”

  “You know, you stopped calling me that not too long after the accident. I’ve been Thomas a lot longer than I was ever Tommy.”

  “Okay, Thomas, I’ll do my best, even though you’ve got to understand how wrong that rings in my ears. I wish I could say I believe you. I can tell that you really believe that what you’re telling me is true. And it helps me, because you were right; it hurt me deep down that you weren't trusting me. You and Zack are all I have. I've tried hard to do the best I could, and it felt like rejection. If you are really fifty-four, you'll get that, and why it hurt. So, no matter what, I’m glad that you trusted me enough to share this with me.”

  “I do get it. Coming back now has reminded me of everything you sacrificed, how hard you worked to give us a good start. That's partly why I told you, because by God, you deserve the truth. But you don’t believe me.”

  Her eyes softened. “All right. We're being honest, full truth, no baloney. Tomm...Thomas, how can I, no matter
how much I love you? How can anyone? You know that what you're telling me sounds impossible, goes against all science. No offense, and I'm not hinting I think this is what's up, but it sounds like an LSD trip."

  "It does. A bad one, at that."

  "So is there a way you can prove it to me? Predict the future, or something?”

  Thomas shook his head. “I can sit here for hours and tell you what happened during my lifetime—who the Presidents were, what kind of stuff was invented, where we went to war—but none of it matters because you can't verify any of it, and you will never be able to. Maybe this time Carter beats Reagan in 1980, if they both even run after the mess Carter makes...who knows? As soon as I woke up here, I did things differently and everything has changed now. My first life, I never saw Dad again after he left. Not even at his funeral.”

  Anne’s eyes widened. “If this is true, you know when he’s going to die.”

  Thomas shrugged. “No. I know when he died then. That doesn’t mean he’ll die at the same time, or the same way this time. Lots of things stay the same, but a lot changes, too.”

  Anne raised her hand. “Hold on. Don’t go anywhere. It was a long shift, with lots of coffee to keep me going. I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”

  Or sneak away and call for the medics to take me away. How can I ever let her see the truth?

  Two minutes later, she was back. This time, she sat beside Thomas on the couch. “I don’t know where we go from here.”

  I do. Yes!

  “Mom, what if I could tell you something that there is no way for me to know?”

  Anne shrugged. “I don’t know. You could tell me all kinds of things that are going to happen in the future and I wouldn’t know if it was true or not. You’ve always had a good imagination. Plus, based on what you said, maybe they wouldn't happen the same way.”

  “Right. True. But, what if I could tell you something from the past, something that absolutely no one else knows?”

  “I can’t imagine what that would be.”

  A small smile lit Thomas’s face, then faded. “In 2009, your Uncle Ted died.”