But there's hope for my sister yet I'm starting to think. She attended my birthday party five months ago and there met Brent Hartley, a colleague of Nina's and one of our family friends that we've developed. Brent had recently been utterly fucked in a divorce settlement and at times seemed on the verge of suicide. Tracy and he began chatting together and before the night was over both were smiling and being very chummy with each other. They've been dating ever since and they seem to be happy together. Who knows? Maybe something will come of it.
Mom and Dad have done well for themselves. Dad has been listening to my investment advice ever since I lived at home and as a result he was able to retire comfortably in 1990, fully five years before he retired in my previous life. Mom retired shortly after this. Their house is now paid off but they refuse to move out of it even though they could easily afford something quite nice if they wished. They love their house, have many memories attached with it and plan to die there. The longer I live in my own house, the more I understand their feelings.
What they've done instead is buy a large (and I mean LARGE) motor home which they use to tour North America with. They are often gone for months at a time, several times a year to parts as distant as you can get without leaving the continental landmass. They have taken their motor home to Alaska, to Florida, to Maine, to Arizona, and to many places in between. They are planning a trip to Cabo San Lucas later this year.
I arrange to have their place looked after while they are gone and to pay their bills in their absence. I make sure their lawn gets mowed, their Northwest Electric gets paid, and their water pipes don't freeze. I'm glad to do these tasks for them. They seem very happy in their retirement.
Jack and Mary Blackmore are still hanging in there and show no signs of stepping out anytime soon. They too have made use of my stock knowledge and are quite wealthy. Unlike my parents, their desire to move someplace very nice was stronger than their desire to stay in their house for nostalgia's sake. They live in a nice lakefront three bedroom on the shore of Lake Coeur d' Alene. When Nina and I need a babysitter it is usually they who are the first to volunteer.
Jack, Mike, and I have become frequent companions. Jack fits in with us very well and sometimes we completely forget that he is more than forty years older than we are. We all go hunting together each fall, finding the most remote airstrip we can to stage from, always spending at least a week out in the boonies somewhere, tromping around in camoflaugh gear, packing hunting rifles, drinking beer, sleeping in tents. We go fishing together several times a month on either Jack's lake or mine (usually Jack's, he's got a bitchin bass boat). We fly to Seattle for Mariners games at least four times every season. We have an annual deep-sea fishing trip that we take on a chartered boat.
Jack drinks as much beer as he always has and he's had no further heart problems. He was seventy-three years old on his last birthday but looks fifty due to frequent exercise and outdoor activities. When Viagra first came out I asked him jokingly (after several beers on the fishing boat) if he wanted me to ask Nina to write him a prescription for some.
He looked at me lecherously and said, "I certainly don't need any of THAT shit youngster. I ain't that old."
So that's how our lives have gone, how things turned out differently with pre-knowledge. I didn't change the world, just a few lives in it. Fate has seemingly accepted us, made allowances for us. We have left a wake of passage in the smooth fabric of what was supposed to be but, as I've seen, the wake has mostly closed up behind us leaving only a few ripples to mark our passage.
Only a few ripples.
On a beautiful April afternoon in 1998 I had to drive to Spokane to pick up the new fish-finder I was planning to get Jack for his birthday. Laura, who was almost three, and Jason, who was seven months, were with me since it was a day that Nina worked.
As always when I found myself in Spokane on such days, I stopped at the trauma center for a brief visit. Nina, as well as her co-workers, enjoyed seeing the kids for a few minutes and I enjoyed seeing my wife doing her job. I got the most enjoyment when we snuck in while she was in the middle of a procedure and I got to observe her at work. It was then that I could contrast the Nina that was with the Nina that should have been. It was then that I could feel how I'd thwarted fate, how I'd defied it in the control of a life.
We spent about twenty minutes in the doctor's lounge, the kids sitting on their mother's lap. Laura was babbling about something or other, using her fifty or so word vocabulary while Jason and I were munching on some chips from a dip tray that someone had brought in. Most of the crumbs from Jason's chip were tumbling down the front of Nina's scrub shirt, which was just starting to bulge outward at the abdomen from the presence of the as-yet-unnamed Megan, who was four months along in her belly.
Finally a nurse poked her head in.
"Nina," she said, "we got an ambulance three minutes out with a twenty mile an hour auto-ped. Positive loss of consciousness and repetitive questioning. Obvious tib-fib fracture too."
She sighed, "Thanks Jen," she said sourly, handing the kids over to me. "Oh well, duty calls."
We exchanged kisses and I took the kids and went outside to the ambulance bay, hanging out until the ambulance of which they'd spoken backed in.
I looked at the ambulance with nostalgia, as I always did when I found myself in such situations. It was amazing how much I remembered from my former career, how much I missed it at times. The ambulance was the 96-240.
I remembered that it was the rig with the bizarre electrical problems that sometimes caused the radios, the power windows, and the power steering to just die until you shut off the engine and started it again. The EMT that jumped out of the driver's seat was Rob Forehand, an aspiring fireman that had been my partner for a short time once. The paramedic that jumped out of the back was Jim Corgan, one of the oldest employees that we'd employed. He was number one on the seniority list and always had his choice of shifts when we bid for them. He was also cursed with a chronically sore back, a hazard of the business, and typically took off four months of every given year on work comp. I knew these two well but they had no idea who I was.
I smiled as they gave me a disinterested glance, probably figuring I was the family of a patient out for a smoke or something. They pulled their patient out of the rig. He was a street person dressed in scraggly clothes and smelling strongly of alcohol. He was strapped to a backboard, a cervical collar around his neck, two IVs plugged into his arms. They started to move him towards the entrance doors.
"Hey Rob," I said to the EMT, smiling. "Hope you get hooked up with the fire department soon."
He looked at me strangely, trying to place my face, trying to figure out if he knew me.
Before he could say anything I turned to his partner. "How you doing Jim? Good to see you. How's the back treatin' you these days?"
He gave me the same expression, finally answering, "Uh, it's okay."
"Good," I nodded, shifting Jason in my arms and grabbing Laura's hand once more. "I'll let you get back to your work."
I disappeared back to my Toyota four-runner, leaving their puzzled expressions behind me. Sometimes I just couldn't resist doing things like that.
We left the trauma center and headed for better parts of town. We picked up the fish-finder and I decided to treat my two children to some greasy fast food from a drive-through. Nina would most definitely not have approved but Jason couldn't talk yet and Laura lacked the vocabulary or the memory to rat me out.
We took our contraband to a nearby city park. Had I known something was going to happen? Had I been led there by fate for unknown reasons? Maybe. Maybe not. If so, fate does have its kind side.