Ken Grimwood - Replay

She’d died of a heart attack when she was thirty-nine. In October 1988.

"What day?" Jeff asked.

"The eighteenth. Same day it happened to you, but at 1:15."

"Nine minutes later." He grinned. "You’ve seen the future. More of it than I have."

That almost brought a smile to her lips. "It was a dull nine minutes," she said. "Except for dying."

"Where were you when you woke up?"

"In the rec room of my parents' house. The television was on, a rerun of My Little Margie. I was fourteen."

"Jesus, what did you—Were they home?"

"My mother was out shopping. My father was still at work. I spent an hour walking around the house in a daze, looking at the clothes in my closet, flipping through the diary that I’d lost when I went to college … looking at myself in the mirror. I couldn’t stop crying. I still thought I was dead, and this was some bizarre way God had of giving me one last glimpse of my time on earth. I was terrified of the front door; I really believed that if I walked through it I’d be in Heaven, or Hell, or Limbo, or whatever."

"You were Catholic?"

"No, my mind was just swirling with all these vague images and fears. Oblivion, that’s a better word; that was what I really expected to find when I went outside. Mist, nothingness … just death. Then my mother came home, walked in through that door I was so frightened of. I thought she was some kind of disguised apparition come to drag me off to doom, and I started screaming.

"It took her a long time to quiet me down. She called the family doctor, he came over, gave me an injection—Demerol, probably—and I passed out. When I woke up again my father was there, standing over the bed, looking very worried, and I guess that was when I first began to realize I wasn’t really dead. He didn’t want me to get up, but I went running downstairs and opened the front door, walked out in the yard in my nightgown … and of course everything was perfectly normal. The neighborhood was just the way I’d remembered it. The dog from next door came bounding over and started licking my hand, and for some reason that set me off crying again.

"I stayed home from school for the next week, lay around my room pretending to be sick, and just thought … Tried at first to figure out what had happened, but it didn’t take me long to decide that was a hopeless task. Then, as the days went on and nothing changed, I started trying to figure out what I was going to do.

"Remember, I didn’t have the options you did; I was only fourteen, still living at home, still in junior high school. I couldn’t bet on any horse races or move to Paris. I was stuck."

"That must have been horrible," Jeff said sympathetically.

"It was, but somehow I managed. I had no choice. I became … I forced myself to become a young girl again, tried to forget everything I’d been through in my first life: college, marriage … children."

She paused, looked down at the floor. Jeff thought of Gretchen, and reached out to put his hand on Pamela’s shoulder. She shrank from his touch, and he withdrew the gesture.

"Anyway," she went on, "after a few weeks—a couple of months—that first existence seemed to recede in my mind, as if it had been a long dream. I went back to school, started learning everything all over again, as if I’d never studied any of it before. I became very shy, bookish; totally unlike the way I’d been the first time. Never went out on dates, stopped hanging around with the crowd of kids I’d known. I couldn’t stand having these memories, or visions, of the adults my friends would become in the years ahead. I wanted to blank all that out, pretend to myself that I didn’t have that kind of awareness."

"Did you ever … tell anyone?"

She took a sip of beer, nodded. "Right after the screaming episode when I first came back, my parents sent me to a psychiatrist. After a few sessions I thought I could trust her, so I started trying to explain what I’d been through. She’d smile and make little encouraging sounds and act very understanding, but I knew she thought it was all a fantasy. Of course that’s what I wanted to believe, too … so that’s what it became. Until I told her about the Kennedy thing a week before it happened.

"That unnerved her completely. She got very angry and refused to see me any more. She couldn’t deal with the fact that I’d described the assassination in such detail, that this fantasy of mine had suddenly become a reality in the most awful, devastating way imaginable."

Pamela looked at Jeff for a moment, silent. "It scared me, too," she went on. "Not just that I’d known he was going to be shot, but because I was so sure that Lee Harvey Oswald was the one who’d done it. I’d never heard of this Nelson Bennett person—of course, I had no idea you’d gone to Dallas and interfered the way you did—and after that my whole sense of reality changed. It was as if one minute I seemed to know everything about the future, and then all of a sudden I knew absolutely nothing. I was in a different world, with different rules. Anything might happen—my parents might die, there could be a nuclear war … or, at the simplest level, I could become an entirely different person than the one I’d been, or maybe imagined myself to have been. "I went to Columbia instead of Bard, majored in biology, then went on to med school. It was tough going. I’d never cared much for science before; my whole training had been in art the first time around. But, by the same token, that made it far more interesting, because I wasn’t just repeating something I’d studied before. I was learning an entire new field, a new world, to go with my new existence.

"I didn’t have much time for socializing, but during my residency at Columbia Presbyterian I met a young orthopedist who … well, he didn’t really remind me of my first husband, but he had a similar intensity, the same sort of drive. Only this time it was something we had in common, a shared devotion to medicine. Before, I’d hardly even known what my husband did every day, and he’d just assumed I wouldn’t care about it, so he never discussed his legal work with me. But with David—that was the orthopedist—it was just the opposite. We could talk about everything."

Jeff gave her an inquisitive look. "You don’t mean—"

"No, no; I never told him what had happened to me. He would’ve thought I was insane. I was still trying to put it out of my own mind. I wanted to bury all those memories and pretend they’d never happened.

"David and I got married as soon as I’d finished my residency. He was from Chicago, and we moved back there; he went into private practice, and I worked in the intensive care unit at Children’s Memorial Hospital. After having lost my own children irretrievably—well, you know what that’s like—I kept putting off having another, but in the meantime I had a whole hospital full of surrogate sons and daughters, and they needed me so desperately, they … Anyway, it was an extremely rewarding career. I was doing exactly the sort of thing I’d dreamed of when I was a frustrated housewife in New Rochelle: using my mind, making a positive difference in the world, saving lives…" Her voice trailed off. She cleared her throat and closed her eyes. "And then you died," Jeff said gently.

"Yes. I died, again. And was fourteen years old again, and totally helpless to change a goddamned thing."

He wanted to tell her how thoroughly he understood, that he knew the deepest hurt had been her knowledge that the sick and dying children she had tended were then destined to go through their suffering once more, her efforts to help them having been obliterated; but no words were needed. The pain was all there on her face, and he was the only person on earth who could comprehend the depth of her loss.