Inside the box was the coil wire I'd taken from her car on the day I lured Jack and her to the house. I don't know why I kept it. I should've just thrown it away, its job done. But I hadn't. I'd taken it out of my jacket pocket and put it in my closet until the day before.
"Is that…?" she asked slowly.
"A coil wire," I confirmed.
"Then you were the one…" she stared at me, eyes wide. "You?"
I shook my head. "Not me. Fate. And only fate Anita. Enjoy your marriage. I wish you all the best. I really do."
I walked away from her with a smile on my face, leaving her to quickly shove the coil wire back into the box and hide it. Shortly after that, Dad and I left. Anita moved away from her house after returning from her honeymoon. A rental company took over management of it. I never saw her again. But I'd achieved closure to that part of my life and that was what was important.
When we got home Mom was listening to the radio and working on some paperwork. Though she'd worked at home during her absence from her job during Tracy's recuperation, she was apparently still far behind. Rarely did we see her without a sheaf of papers and computer printouts before her. She asked us about the ceremony and seemed genuinely interested in our answers. I asked where Tracy was, since I had not seen her in her room, and was told that she was in the back yard, practicing her walking.
I went upstairs and changed out of my suit, replacing it with a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. By the time I finished and emerged from my room, Mom and Dad were both missing, their bedroom door tightly shut. Like most kids I pained myself not to speculate too much on just what they were doing in there but like most adults I realized the effect that attending weddings tended to have. I was feeling such an effect myself.
I gave Nina a call, hoping we could get together for a bit but this idea was shot down the instant I got her on the phone. An aunt from Moses Lake was visiting for the day, had come specifically to see Nina and give her a late graduation gift. Nina was trapped at home for the foreseeable future. With a sigh I helped myself to one of my Dad's beers and wandered out to the back yard where Tracy was before I was forced to hear any noise drifting out of Mom and Dad's room.
Our back yard was typical for the period in which our house was built. Considerably larger than what tract houses come with today, it was landscaped with the bare essentials. There was a large lawn, an elm tree that was large enough to climb in if you wished (and that dumped an incredible amount of leaves to the ground each fall), some brick flowerbeds that my mother had rose bushes planted and growing wild in. There was a small cement patio with a cover over it. A barbecue and some simple patio furniture sat upon it. Dad had often talked about installing a swimming pool and a hot tub but had never become quite financially irresponsible enough to actually do it. A pity.
Tracy was wearing a college T-shirt and a pair of shorts. Her right leg was clamped into a set of metal braces that looked like something out of the Spanish Inquisition. A large, metal cane apparatus was attached to her right arm and helped support her weight as she ambled along. She was dripping sweat, her face running with it, her T-shirt stained with it, and her face was scrunched in a painful expression as she hobbled in what appeared to be a circular course around the old elm tree where Mike and I had once built a tree-fort thirty feet above the ground.
"How's it going Trace?" I asked her, grabbing a seat at the table and setting my beer down next to a glass of ice water that Tracy had put there. A fly had fallen into the water and was struggling weakly between two ice cubes.
"Hey," she hailed, changing course immediately and heading my way. "This hurts like hell. But not as much as when I first tried it. I'm getting better I think. But I'm ready for a break now. More than ready." She wiped sweat from her brow, moving her damp hair from her forehead. "How was the wedding?"
"Boring," I answered, "like all weddings. But I was glad to go. It's nice to see that Anita is happy. We also had a chance to have a little talk."
"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.