"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."
"Has it ever occurred to you," she asked, "that this might not be your first trip back to 1982 and beyond?"
"What?"
"Didn't think of that, did you?" she smiled. "You were fated to meet the old man on that day, the day before you came back. What was it you said to him when he asked what your greatest wish was?"
"To be fifteen again, knowing what I know now," I answered, not quite getting her.
"Suppose you hadn't answered that way," she suggested. "Suppose you'd simply answered, "to be fifteen again", leaving out the last part. That's a perfectly natural response to that question under those circumstances, wouldn't you say? In fact, adding the last part is a little bit strange if you think about it. So suppose you did just say, "fifteen again". Boom, you would've found yourself a teenager again with no idea of your former life, with no knowledge of your future mistakes or my impending death."
Another shiver went up my spine as I considered this. It was a frightening thing she was suggesting.
"You would have caused absolutely zero stress to the system," Tracy went on, "and you simply would have continued along as before; marrying Lisa, grieving for me, having Becky, getting divorced; until eventually you would have come to the convalescent home and the old man again with nothing changed. You would have responded the same way and been sent right back again, starting over. For all we know, you might've been doing the same seventeen year stretch of your life over and over again for the past ten thousand years."
Frightening became staggering as I envisioned my poor self endlessly living through the same events, some of them quite tragic, over and over again without memory of it each time. Was such a thing possible? Of course it was. At least as possible as Mr. Li sending me back in the first place.
"Wow," I said softly. "But why would this time have been different?"
"Maybe there are little things that fate can't control," she answered. "Maybe some part of you was aware of what was happening, some part buried deep in your subconscious and it caused that little add-on to slip out at the moment of truth. The cycle gets broken. You could also have wished for world peace or a million bucks or something like that. Thankfully for me, if that's what the case is, you didn't. You added, "knowing what I know now". That's what made everything possible. You get to move on past 1999 now."
"That's a truly bizarre and terrifying thought," I told her, trying to shake off the feelings that this discussion had given me. Leave it to Tracy to make you think that you might be ten or twenty thousand years old and had barely escaped from some eternal feedback look in the time-space continuum by the addition of five little words on the end of a sentence. "Well, if it's true and I'm free at last, at least I'll finally get to see how all the Y2K crap is going to come out."
She looked at me strangely. "Y2K?"
"It's not important," I said. "Just be sure to keep your computer system updated come the late nineties."
She seemed about to say something else but didn't. We watched the butterflies again.
"Where are Mom and Dad anyway?" she asked me. "Dad usually comes to check on me fifty or sixty times a day."
I gave a sour look. "They're uh…, in their bedroom."
"In their bedroom? Doing what?"
I gave her the look that one gives someone when they've asked an incredibly stupid question. "Well I don't know Tracy, they didn't clear their itinerary with me. But the door is closed."
A comical expression of disgust came across her face. "Oh my God, you mean…," she shook her head violently. "I'm not gonna think about this. I'm changing the subject. How's Nina?"
I grinned, amused by her discomfort. "Nina's fine except for being trapped at home by an aunt. As a matter of fact I wanted to talk to you about that very subject."