Live it Again (21 page)

August 12 1985

Heard from
Billy that Suzey Phillips left her husband. Too bad considering they just had
twins. Hope she finds someone that can treat her better. Billy says Calvin
Wilkinson is interested. He’s a good guy. It would be a perfect match.

January 3 1986

The entire family was together for
Christmas at our place, even Gordo! We still don’t get along but his new wife
Megan is nice. She hit it off with Cathy right away. Unfortunately they think
we should get together more often. Not going to happen. Donald’s fatter than he
should be and his wife is fatter still. At least he’s cut back on the racist
comments. Their two kids are loud and spoiled. I suggested they sleep in the
crawlspace. Cathy gave them our room.

Wish I
could help Heather out more. She’s struggling in the city to make ends meet.
Maybe someday.

February 19 1986

Saw the
little girl in my study this morning. Took her almost three years to show her
face again. Not nearly as scary as that night in the bedroom. She’s really
cute, and shy. She waved at me and vanished into thin air. I think maybe I
scared her more that night than she scared me. Hopefully she’ll stick around
next time long enough for a little chat.

July 13 1986

My second
book,
Coming Home
, hit the shelves today. Some
early reviews say it’s not as good as my first, but do I care? The advance on
this one was triple, and the royalties for number one keep rolling in.

October 29 1987

Cathy has
been bugging me about starting a family a lot more lately. Not yet time. We’re
going to the Dominican for Christmas and New Year’s. That should keep all the
baby talk to a minimum for a while longer.

March 11 1988

Dad finally
had to quit working. Even though he quit smoking two years ago, his breathing
hasn’t improved. Doctor says its mild emphysema. It will get worse.

June 21 1989

Fifteen years to the day since coming
back to live my life. Not quite halfway there yet. I’m no longer in a hurry to
meet up with old Hugh. This life is good. I love my wife and she loves me. I
like who I’ve become and I love what I do. No rush.

1992

Benjamin Nance was born on January 12 1991,
not on February 7. This didn’t trouble Hugh’s precise sense of timed events. If
anything, it proved time was not static, things did change, and not always for
the worse like he once believed. Today for example, was the dreaded day in
September from his first life when little Ben toppled down the stairs. A lot
was different now. This wasn’t even the same house, and the basement door was
locked safely at the top. He’d checked it more than once since getting up that
morning.

Hugh was a successful author, not a file
maintenance clerk at Little City Food Store. There would be no call at work in
the afternoon, because Hugh worked at home. He would spend the entire day with
his boy, and everything would be fine.

“This isn’t like you,” Cathy said as she
watched her husband plead with their son to eat his lunch.

“What’s that?” He didn’t look at her. He
was too busy picking food up off the floor.

“You getting up at six in the morning and
changing his diaper. You fed him breakfast and here you are now sitting with him
at lunch.”

“So I love my boy, what’s wrong with that?”

“Not a thing. I love seeing the two of you
together. It’s just that you’re usually locked away in your writing room at
this time of day. It’s nice.”

It was nice, he thought. He looked at his
messy young son and smiled.

You’ll be three years old when your
first sister is born, and almost eight when your brother comes along. What kind
of brother will you be? Who will you look like?

They were questions he’d asked in vain for
many, many years. Now he would finally get to see. The little boy’s face went
beet red for a few moments and his blockish blonde head shook with inner
effort.

“Oh you little rotter,” Hugh said backing
away and plugging his nose.

“Do you want me to do it?” Cathy asked. The
smell didn’t affect her, it never did.

“I’ve got it,” he said, removing Ben from
his highchair. Cathy stayed behind to clean the kitchen while Hugh changed the
diaper in their bedroom. The two walked slowly back down the steps a few
minutes later, father bent over holding his little boy’s hand, allowing him to
get some more practice on his short, chubby legs. He tightened his grip a bit
more as they passed by the cellar door at the bottom of the stairs. Hugh
glanced near the top one more time. It was locked tight.

They sat together in the living room and
flipped through the television channels. Hugh was headed for a news station,
but Ben was too quick for him. He saw a big flash of purple and wailed at his
father until they were back on PBS and Barney the Dinosaur.
All
of their
kids had loved Barney, and here he was going through it all again.

My God, it’s only the first season.

Fortunately Barney hadn’t made it to VHS
yet and once the program was over, Benjamin had to settle for the next program
they could both agree on. Hugh wasn’t a big fan of Indie racing, but the little
tot was entranced by the dozens of colorful cars speeding by on the screen, the
high-pitched buzz of their engines appealed to developing senses.

Cathy joined them an hour later, cuddling
up to her husband on the couch. Ben looked at her briefly from the floor,
shaking a fist toward the television. “Cawr voom! Cawr voom! Faas, faas, faas!”

“Yes, sweetie, the cars are fast!”

Hugh wrapped an arm around her. “You know,
he can’t go on like this forever, why don’t you go downtown and rent us a movie
for later?”

“You
never
want to watch movies,
what brought that on?”

That wasn’t quite true. Hugh loved movies,
he just didn’t enjoy watching movies over again. He’d seen almost all them
before. It was hard for him not to comment whenever they saw trailers on TV
advertising the next big blockbuster. He knew if it was good or bad before it
even hit the theatres. They didn’t go to the movies often, but Hugh was feeling
especially good today, and he wanted to share the feeling with her. “I’m taking
a weekday off from writing, how often does that happen?”

“Not often enough,” she kissed his ear and
ran her tongue across his cheek.

Hugh pulled away and rubbed the side of his
face. “Gross! Are we renting a movie or not?”

“How about a romance?”

“Sure, why not?”

My least favorite type of movie. Good
chance I won’t have seen it.

“We need a few groceries anyway. I’ll make
a list and you can go down to Little City as soon as Ben lays down for a nap.”

Hugh didn’t like the sound of that. He’d
never set a foot in Little City Food Store in the dozen or so years it had been
open, and he didn’t intend to do so today. That’s where he was the day Ben
died.

“No, no, no. The deal is
you
go
downtown for the movie and I stay home with Ben.”

“You never do the grocery shopping, what
are you? Some kind of chauvinist?”

She was kidding of course, but he was
beginning to worry, almost sorry for bringing the whole movie idea up in the
first place. “Please, Cathy, I just wanted to stay in the house all day.”

Her eyes lit up as if she’d suddenly
remembered something. “Alright then, but I know what movie were watching.”

He braced himself. “What is it?”

“Sister Act, with Whoopi Goldberg.”

A musical comedy, far worse than romance,
and
he’d seen it.

It was after five in the afternoon before
Cathy’s fourth and final client left. She prepared a quick grocery list and changed
Ben into a clean pair of pajamas. Hugh was still watching television and could
her singing one of Barney’s tunes on their way downstairs. He sat up on the
couch and started to look for the remote on the coffee table. They were at the
foot of the stairs when he glanced their way. Ben had gotten ahead of her at
the bottom, his arms whirling circles in the air.

The cellar door was wide open.

Hugh screamed and jumped off the couch. His
knee jammed into the corner of the table and he dropped with a crash. Cathy ran
ahead of Ben to check on her husband. “Are you alright?” She went to help him
up, but he pushed her away, his eyes still locked on Ben’s little body. The boy’s
attention had been diverted away from his parents. He was heading for the dark
opening in the hallway.

“No! Ben, get away from there!” The pain in
his knee was excruciating, it slowed him to a limping hobble. Ben vanished out
of sight. “NO!”

In the eternity it took to get to the
cellar doorway, Hugh tried to imagine the best outcome in a horrible situation.
The stairs weren’t as steep as they had been on the farm, perhaps Ben would
only fall a few steps. There was no pail of rusty nails at the bottom for him
to strike his head against. There was a banister running down these steps where
there hadn’t been one in the farmhouse, maybe Ben had grabbed onto it at the
last moment.

Hugh staggered into the hall and found his
son standing at the edge of the cellar stairway. There was a good foot of
doorframe and inner wall that had blocked him out of Hugh’s sight. Ben’s
fingers were gripped through the white lattice plastic of a baby gate locked
tightly into place at the top of the stairs. He shook at it like a prisoner
rattling on cage doors, desperate to see what was beyond.

“Relax, Hugh. He’s fine.” Cathy rubbed his
back. “Let me take a look at your leg.”

“Forget about my goddamned leg. What about
Ben? Why was the cellar door open? For
fucks
sake, Cathy!”

Ben started to cry and she gathered him up
in her arms. She gave Hugh a dirty look but kept her own voice down. “It stinks
down there. I opened it up while you were sleeping in the living room to air it
out a bit. Jesus, Hugh, did you have to scream like that in front of him.” She
kissed Ben’s forehead and smoothed the back of his hair down.

“I-I’m sorry, I just had this bad feeling.”

She looked down at the knee he was rubbing.
“Hope you broke it.”

Sister Act wasn’t as bad the second time
round. Ben was put to bed early in the evening and the couple had some
wonderful make up sex, the best kind. He was still feeling relief from the
tragedy that never happened, and there was a good chance the two of them would
have another go in the bedroom later on in the night.

Sooner than later.

“More popcorn?” He offered her the bowl
which consisted of little more than a few buttered un-popped kernels on the
bottom.

“I’m stuffed.” She got off the couch and
ejected the rewound tape from the VCR. Hugh watched her ass as she bent over,
her tight jeans making him instantly hard. He set the bowl aside and got up to
stand behind her. He placed his hands on her hips and pressed himself up
against her. She straightened back up and he pulled the t-shirt collar away
from her neck, kissing the soft skin up from her shoulder.

“Let’s go to bed,” he panted.

She reached down and rubbed his aching
penis. “Let’s clean up first.” She gave it one last squeeze and started for the
kitchen.

“You’re a tease.”

“It’s called foreplay.”

They rinsed out the dishes and picked the
toys off up off the floor. “Can we go now?”

She winked at him. “In a minute, let’s
check on Ben one last time.”

He followed her upstairs, limping on his
sore knee and straining hard-on. Ben’s was the small room next to theirs. The
orange glow from his Winnie the Pooh night light showed him sleeping peacefully
in his crib. A little foot kicked out from beneath a blanket, jerked a few more
times before settling back down.

“Oh, isn’t that sweet?” She whispered. “He’s
dreaming.”

“So am I,” Hugh answered, working a hand
beneath her loose shirt and cupping a large, firm breast. He worked at her
nipple with his fingers until it was rock hard.

“All right, let’s go.”

Hugh had her shirt off before they reached
the bed. He kissed her back and ran the tip of his tongue down the length of
her spine. She crawled on the mattress on all fours and he worked her pants off
with one hand, the other tugging away at his own. She slid her panties away and
lay on her side, watched him get completely naked. He could see her smiling in
the low light trickling in from the bedroom window. He wouldn’t last long. She
reached out, took his hand and pulled him down onto his back. She went on top
and rode him. He sucked on her nipples and she moaned, rode him harder.

Neither one of them lasted long, but after
a ten minute rest they went at it again.

“What time is it?” Cathy asked after they
finally finished. She sounded as tired as he felt.

Hugh looked over at the red digital readout
on the alarm clock. “Just after midnight.”

She snuggled up to him for warmth. “Can you
go check on Ben before we go to sleep? It’s cold tonight and I want to be sure
he’s covered up.”

Hugh groaned and sat up. He found his
underwear on the floor and started for the door.

“Don’t be long, lover boy,” she purred.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

Ben’s one foot was still sticking out from
under the blanket. Hugh gave his one toe a gentle squeeze before covering it
up. Cathy had been right. It
was
cold. He leaned down and kissed the
side of his head. The skin felt dry and cool. Too cool.

He quickly went back to the door and
flicked on the bedroom light. Ben’s skin was not only dry and cool…it was blue.
Hugh’s heart began to hammer.

“Hugh?” Cathy
called from the other room. “Is everything okay?”

***

Benjamin Isaac Nance had choked to death on
a piece of hard plastic. It was part of a toy carpentry set he’d gotten on his
first birthday from Uncle Gordo and Auntie Megan. An oversized red nail, two
inches long and almost half as thick. The big, rounded head of it was what got
lodged in his throat. Cathy and Hugh had thanked the couple for the gift at the
time, but they both knew it had to be put away until their son was old enough
to play with some of the smaller parts. Little kids were choking on little toys
all the time.

It had been stored in the closet floor of
bedroom. Neither parent could remember which one had stored it on the floor
instead of the upper shelf above the clothes hanger rack. Hugh didn’t accuse
Cathy, and Cathy didn’t accuse Hugh. It didn’t matter anymore. Ben was gone and
he wasn’t coming back.

They blamed themselves. While they were
fucking their brains out, their little boy was choking his life away. They
never told anyone what they were doing that night. It was something they’d have
to live with for a very long time. A secret guilt they would carry the rest of
their lives.

Hugh was alone in the house two days after
the accident. Cathy was still out at his parent’s place, too scared to come
home, too drugged up to move. He could barely move himself, unable to eat or
sleep, but he could drink.