"Oh?" she said, hobbling over and sitting down, unclipping her cane and putting it aside. It slid down the length of the chair and clattered to the cement loudly. She gave it an irritated look and then chose to ignore it. She reached for her glass and spotted the fly. Her face wrinkled in disgust. "Gross," she declared.
"I'll get you some fresh water," I offered, standing up and picking up the glass.
"I'd rather have one of those beers," she told me.
"Have this one." I slid mine across the table to her. By the time I returned from the kitchen with a fresh one for myself, half of it was already empty. By the time I finished telling her about the wedding and my conversation with Anita, it was completely empty.
She burped in an unladylike way. "So you actually gave her back the coil wire you took?" she asked me wonderingly. "Why did you do that?"
"I don't know," I said. "I don't even know why I kept the thing in the first place. Some impulse."
"Impulse huh?" she smiled cynically. "I think you just like to be dramatic."
I didn't dispute that this might be the reason. We sat in silence for a minute or two, watching the butterflies attacking Mom's roses.
"So will you be ready to go back to school in September?" I enquired.
"I'm going whether I'm ready or not," she said firmly, with determination. "I need to get back on track if I'm going to get my undergraduate degree in three years."
I nodded. "That's what Nina's intending to do too. I'm gonna give it a shot, after all, most of the general Ed classes should be pretty easy, but I'll also be working. If it's too much, I'll drop back on the pace a little."
"Not me," Tracy said. "Full steam ahead for me. I plan to take the BAR exam in 1989, 1990 at the latest."
I shrugged. "I wouldn't worry. Corporate America will still be there whenever you finish."
She looked at me for a moment, her face serious. She picked up her beer bottle as if to take a drink and then saw it was empty. She set it back down. I was about to go get her another when she said, "I'm going to change my focus off of business and corporate law."
"To what?"
She sighed. "I've had a lot of time to think while I've been recuperating from this. More time than I've ever wanted. What the hell else is there to do? I've been thinking about fate and consequences and free will and drunk cab drivers." She shook her head angrily. "And it's the drunk cab driver that keeps coming back to me. He was out there driving a goddam cab after two DUIs. He was licensed both by the State of Nevada and the State of California to do that. For what he did to me he's getting ninety days in jail. Ninety fucking days Bill! What kind of shit is that?"
"It's just life, fate, the American way?" I answered. "Whatever you want to call it. I'm just glad you lived through it, that you're still here to bitch about the injustice of it."
"Fuck that," she said. "Fuck fate and fuck everything. That asshole should NOT have been driving anything, especially not a taxi. Our system allowed this to happen and it's wrong. It's wrong!"
"Yes," I agreed, "it is."
"So I'm going to focus on criminal law," she said. "I want to try and put some of these assholes in jail. I want to do everything I can to try to stop things like this, or worse things, things like what was SUPPOSED to be, from happening time and time again. Not just drunk driving, although that will have special attention from me, but every other crime that's under-treated by the system, that's allowed to perpetuate itself because of apathy."
I felt a chill going up my spine as she spoke. She was talking about becoming a victim's rights advocate. Did she realize this? There were ramifications here, serious ones. I took a long drink of my beer. "That's uh…, very uh…, noble Trace," I managed to say.
"I've had a life-changing experience," she said softly. "I'm still alive when I should be dead, even after having the accident I was fated to have." She looked at me. "I can see that some of the thoughts I've been having about fate are occurring to you too."
She did realize the ramifications. No slouch was my sister. "Sometimes," I said, "this whole thing just scares the crap out of me. Before I came back I was pretty much an atheist. I didn't believe in anything. But now, I'm forced to concede that SOMETHING is at work behind the scenes here. I don't know if it's the Christian God, or Allah, or Buddha, or something that nobody has even conceived of before, but there is a definite power at work here."
She nodded. "I know what you mean. When I decided to go into criminal law and to fight for victims, when I actually DECIDED that, it was almost like I felt something click, like I felt some gears that had been out of alignment sliding back in. I imagine I'll be doing whatever it was that Mom and Dad were supposed to do but didn't, or won't be I should say. I feel like things are, if not exactly RIGHT, at least copacetic. The accident has happened and as a result of it someone is getting involved in victim's rights. The stress on the system is releived."
"So you should be reasonably safe?" I asked.
She chuckled a little. "I still won't be getting into any cars with drunk drivers if it's all the same to you, but yeah, I feel like I'm safe."
We watched the butterflies for a few minutes, me finishing off my beer.
"What about Mike?" I asked her. "He's on a completely different path, so am I for that matter. Anita is back where she should be, Nina is still going to be an emergency room doc, albeit a decidedly less bitchy one, so there's no great stress on the system in those cases. But what about Mike and I?"
She thought for a moment. "Well, like I told you before, I believe that fate is nodal, which means that the longer the insult to it has gone on, the more likely it is that it will be tolerated. I think the evidence we've seen so far seems to confirm that theory. From what you've told me, Mike is completely off of his former track. He doesn't even smoke grass anymore. Like you said, he's matured to the point that he's no longer capable of making the mistake that led to his former life. He's graduated from school, he's signed up for college classes, he has a job, he has a girlfriend. Fate has apparently accepted the new Mike and allowed for him. It probably would have done the same in my case eventually but I was a much stronger stress to the system and stumbled into the right set of circumstances. Fate seized the chance to correct things. The accident relieved the stress on the system as well as it could without actually killing me."
"And me?" I asked. "What about me? I must've stressed the shit out of the system. I'm not in the career I'm supposed to be in, I'm not marrying the person I'm supposed to, I'm not having the child I'm supposed to, and, if all goes well, I will be much wealthier than I'm supposed to be. How does all that fit in?"
She rubbed her ribcage a little, massaging away the tenderness that still plagued her from the accident. "You're a special case," she said.
"How so?"
"You've never had any inclinations at all to stray back onto your previous path, have you?"
"No," I said. "None."
"No strange urges to go to paramedic school, to major in history in college, to dump Nina and go find, what was her name?"
"Lisa," I answered. "And no, nothing like that."
She nodded thoughtfully. "I believe that you probably stressed the system so badly and so rapidly just by the mere fact that you came back to 1982 with your knowledge intact, that it was forced to simply accept your presence. In effect, it simply gave up on trying to divert you since it was basically hopeless. It could try to divert the other paths that you intersected, but not you. It wouldn't be possible for you to deliberately make all of the same twists and turns along your way, particularly when the consequences were unpleasant."
"That makes sense," I told her, marveling at her insight into this metaphysical subject. "It makes a lot of sense."