Al Steiner: Doing It All Over

Lisa noticed me staring at her daughter and quickened her approach, her eyes looking at me suspiciously. Parents do not like to see complete strangers looking at their children in that manner. I forced my mouth closed, forced myself to commence breathing once again, forced my eyes off of the small child, forced a pleasant, non-threatening smile onto my face. My hands returned to Jason's swing, picked up the task of keeping him in motion. Lisa continued her approach, keeping a wary eye upon me, keeping her distance in case I proved to be dangerous.

I looked at her, keeping my smile upon my face. "Hi," I greeted.

"Hi," she said carefully.

"Sorry I was staring," I told her. "Your little girl there looks and sounds just like my niece. It kind of startled me for a moment when I saw her since she lives kinda far away."

This seemed to put Lisa's mind at ease a little. "That's okay," she said, "no harm done."

"Wouldn't dream of it," I assured her, giving Jason another push and trying to keep my eyes off of the little girl swinging back and forth next to me. "The resemblance was kind of startling at first. I guess I'll have to tell little Belinda she's got a twin in Spokane."

Lisa smiled for the first time as Becky climbed off the swing and then held her arms out to Lisa to be picked up, "swing me mommy, swing me!" she demanded again.

Lisa dutifully picked her up and placed her on the swing in the proper fashion. Becky grasped the chains and her mother began swinging her up and down, her rhythm matching that I was setting with Jason. As she pushed I noticed that there was one thing different about Lisa, one feature that hadn't been there the last time I'd seen her. This Lisa was wearing a wedding ring.

"Higher mommy, higher!" she demanded, giggling.

"If I swing you any higher Little Beck," Lisa replied, "you're going to go catapulting across the park."

I felt another chill as I heard Lisa use the nickname we'd routinely called Becky. I suppressed any outward display of how weird I was feeling.

"How old is yours?" Lisa asked me as she continued to push.

"Jason here is closing in on eight months," I answered, "I have a three year old over there by the monkey bars too. And yours?"

"Just turned three," Lisa answered. "We're finally out of the terrible two's thank God."

"Yeah," I nodded with genuine sympathy, "us too, at least until Jason here gets into them."

We began to talk, the polite conversation of two parents that meet in a park. At least at first that's how it was. By the time the kids got tired of swinging, by the time Becky moved off towards the monkey bars and the jungle gym, we were conversing like old friends. I could tell that Lisa was surprised by how easy I was to talk to, by how our two personalities seemed to click to a certain degree. We moved over to one of the benches that sat next to the play area, me carrying Jason in my arms, and sat down. We talked of the rigors of child-rearing in this day and age.

"My husband and I both have to work," Lisa told me, "but child-care is SO expensive. So we try to keep our schedules as opposite as we can. We don't see each other as much as we'd like to but at least Becky doesn't spend much time in daycare."

"What does your husband do?" I asked, seemingly casually.

"He's the manager of the grocery store where I work."

I knew instantly whom she was talking about and felt another little chill. In my previous life, just as Lisa and I had started flirting with each other during my many trips to her line for sandwiches, she'd been bothered by her store manager, a man named Nick Morse who obviously wanted to date her. He'd been flirty with her ever since her initial hiring at the store but had become persistent after she'd broken her ankle in the fall. Since a relationship had seemed to be developing with me, she'd shunned his advances during this time period. It eventually got to the point, just after we'd began officially dating, that she had to threaten him with a charge of sexual harassment if he didn't back off. Back off he did. Eventually, in that life, he began to date another girl that worked in the store and married her about the time that Becky was born.

But without my presence in the picture Nick had apparently been successful in his courting of Lisa. I had not asked her name during our conversation, but I would have been willing to bet my net worth that it was Lisa Morse. The little girl, my daughter, and yet not my daughter, had to be Rebecca Morse. The fact that she was still married to him a year after my marriage with her had dissolved in divorce told me that she'd found the right person, or at least a person more right than I was. There was a twinkle in her eye when she spoke of her husband, a twinkle that I'd never seen when I had been married to her.

What did all of this mean? Lisa was now with someone she actually enjoyed being married to. I was with someone that I enjoyed being married to. This had occurred because I hadn't followed the path that I was fated to follow. I had been fated to marry her, to have Becky with her, and to be unhappy with her. She was fated to be unhappy with me. By altering fate we'd both ended up happy instead of sad. We'd both ended up finding soul mates instead of finding each other. What kind of fate had arranged for the previous pattern? What kind of fate had WANTED us to not find the person that matched? Was fate cruel, or just indifferent? Who or what had written these patterns? How much damage had been done by altering them?

I didn't know. I still don't.

I never saw Becky again. It was quite enough to know that she was simply alive.

I began searching for Mr. Li shortly after Nina and I moved back to the Spokane area. I had a thousand questions to ask him, a thousand things I wanted to know about him. How had he come by this power that he had? Why had he picked me? I also felt I owed him a large debt of gratitude for what he had done for me. I wanted to make sure that he did not end his life dying in a shitty convalescent home. I wanted to try to prevent his getting terminal cancer in the first place if I could. Depending on where the cancer had started, that was surely possible.

But Mr. Li proved impossible to track down. My source of information was Tracy, who, as a deputy DA had access to a nationwide computer network of known people. This should have done the trick. Unfortunately, I did not know enough information about Mr. Li. All I knew was his last name and his age approximated to within ten years or so.

When I'd first met Mr. Li on that fated night in 1999 I didn't know that he would have a very profound impact upon me. I'm surprised I was even able to remember his last name by the time it became apparent what he'd done. When I'd gone to bed that night Mr. Li had been nothing but a vague memory of a sad event, an event that I'd been forced to stand helpless before. Paramedics train their minds not to think about such things. If we grieved for every person that died before us, if we allowed ourselves to feel saddened by all of the human suffering we saw, we would all go mad very quickly. A paramedic's mind is accustomed to purging all information the moment it is no longer relevant.

According to Tracy's computer work there were nineteen hundred and four people with the last name of Li in the State of Washington that were between the ages of fifty and eighty. And that was only in Washington. Who was to say that Mr. Li even lived in Washington back then? My task seemed quite hopeless.

But as the years rolled closer and closer to 1999 and as my hopes of preventing Mr. Li's death from cancer decreased, I knew that I could at least keep the man out of the convalescent hospital. I could have him put up in a private home with around the clock nurses and premium medical care. Hell, I'd even spring for daily blowjobs if that's what he wanted. I was determined to see that old man die in comfort, to repay him for what he'd done for me.