The park was one that I'd once taken my daughter Becky to when she was young. Did I stop there out of nostalgia? Did I stop there because I remembered it was a good park to take kids too? I honestly don't know. I don't remember the vision of Becky coming to my consciousness at all in the decision to stop there. Thinking of Becky always made unpleasant feelings of guilt and loss to surface so my mind worked hard to keep those thoughts suppressed.
But whatever the reason, Laura, Jason, and I soon found ourselves sitting at one of the picnic tables beside the playground area. Ten or so kids of various ages and sizes were playing on the monkey bars, on the swings, on the slides, while their parents, mothers only for the most part, sat at benches or tables and kept an eye upon them.
The kids chowed down their chicken nuggets and french fries. They slurped their orange sodas dry. Finally Laura headed off to play on the jungle gym with the other kids. I carried Jason over to the swings and installed him in the baby swing. His little fists gripped the chain tightly but his face was all smiles as I began to push him in ever increasing arcs.
Then it happened.
"Swing me Mommy, swing me!" A girlish voice demanded from behind me.
I froze, waves of gooseflesh traveling up and down my entire body. I felt myself go clammy. I knew that voice, knew it well. It had been more than fifteen years since I'd last heard it. I had fought hard to keep it out of my conscious thought. But I never doubted for an instant, even before I turned around to look, that the voice was Becky.
I let my head pivot on my shoulders until I was looking at the little girl. She was about three years old, her dark hair tied into pigtails that bounced up and down as she skipped towards the swings. She was wearing a pair of blue jean overalls and sandals. It was Becky, no doubt about it, none whatsoever. Her face was slightly different than it had been, different in only the subtlest ways, ways that probably reflected the difference in paternity. But she had the same brown eyes, the same brown hair, the same upturned nose that she'd inherited from her mother. I was inundated with stark feelings of merging realities, with a horrid sense of deja vu unlike anything I'd ever experienced before.
This feeling was intensified when I saw Lisa coming up behind her. She looked exactly the same as she had when I'd last seen her. Exactly. She was wearing a light summer dress that came to her knees. It was white with blue patterns upon it. I remembered that dress, had seen Lisa wearing it many times when we'd switched off Becky according to our custody arrangement.
Becky came running up at full speed and jumped onto the swing next to mine, one of the big-kid swings, landing on her stomach. Her feet came up off the ground and her forward momentum set her swinging in that position. She didn't even notice the man next to her, staring at her, not breathing as he did so, his mouth agape in surprise. Was her name still Becky? I knew that it was, I simply knew it.
Lisa noticed me staring at her daughter and quickened her approach, her eyes looking at me suspiciously. Parents do not like to see complete strangers looking at their children in that manner. I forced my mouth closed, forced myself to commence breathing once again, forced my eyes off of the small child, forced a pleasant, non-threatening smile onto my face. My hands returned to Jason's swing, picked up the task of keeping him in motion. Lisa continued her approach, keeping a wary eye upon me, keeping her distance in case I proved to be dangerous.
I looked at her, keeping my smile upon my face. "Hi," I greeted.
"Hi," she said carefully.
"Sorry I was staring," I told her. "Your little girl there looks and sounds just like my niece. It kind of startled me for a moment when I saw her since she lives kinda far away."
This seemed to put Lisa's mind at ease a little. "That's okay," she said, "no harm done."
"Wouldn't dream of it," I assured her, giving Jason another push and trying to keep my eyes off of the little girl swinging back and forth next to me. "The resemblance was kind of startling at first. I guess I'll have to tell little Belinda she's got a twin in Spokane."
Lisa smiled for the first time as Becky climbed off the swing and then held her arms out to Lisa to be picked up, "swing me mommy, swing me!" she demanded again.
Lisa dutifully picked her up and placed her on the swing in the proper fashion. Becky grasped the chains and her mother began swinging her up and down, her rhythm matching that I was setting with Jason. As she pushed I noticed that there was one thing different about Lisa, one feature that hadn't been there the last time I'd seen her. This Lisa was wearing a wedding ring.
"Higher mommy, higher!" she demanded, giggling.
"If I swing you any higher Little Beck," Lisa replied, "you're going to go catapulting across the park."
I felt another chill as I heard Lisa use the nickname we'd routinely called Becky. I suppressed any outward display of how weird I was feeling.
"How old is yours?" Lisa asked me as she continued to push.
"Jason here is closing in on eight months," I answered, "I have a three year old over there by the monkey bars too. And yours?"
"Just turned three," Lisa answered. "We're finally out of the terrible two's thank God."
"Yeah," I nodded with genuine sympathy, "us too, at least until Jason here gets into them."
We began to talk, the polite conversation of two parents that meet in a park. At least at first that's how it was. By the time the kids got tired of swinging, by the time Becky moved off towards the monkey bars and the jungle gym, we were conversing like old friends. I could tell that Lisa was surprised by how easy I was to talk to, by how our two personalities seemed to click to a certain degree. We moved over to one of the benches that sat next to the play area, me carrying Jason in my arms, and sat down. We talked of the rigors of child-rearing in this day and age.
"My husband and I both have to work," Lisa told me, "but child-care is SO expensive. So we try to keep our schedules as opposite as we can. We don't see each other as much as we'd like to but at least Becky doesn't spend much time in daycare."
"What does your husband do?" I asked, seemingly casually.
"He's the manager of the grocery store where I work."
I knew instantly whom she was talking about and felt another little chill. In my previous life, just as Lisa and I had started flirting with each other during my many trips to her line for sandwiches, she'd been bothered by her store manager, a man named Nick Morse who obviously wanted to date her. He'd been flirty with her ever since her initial hiring at the store but had become persistent after she'd broken her ankle in the fall. Since a relationship had seemed to be developing with me, she'd shunned his advances during this time period. It eventually got to the point, just after we'd began officially dating, that she had to threaten him with a charge of sexual harassment if he didn't back off. Back off he did. Eventually, in that life, he began to date another girl that worked in the store and married her about the time that Becky was born.
But without my presence in the picture Nick had apparently been successful in his courting of Lisa. I had not asked her name during our conversation, but I would have been willing to bet my net worth that it was Lisa Morse. The little girl, my daughter, and yet not my daughter, had to be Rebecca Morse. The fact that she was still married to him a year after my marriage with her had dissolved in divorce told me that she'd found the right person, or at least a person more right than I was. There was a twinkle in her eye when she spoke of her husband, a twinkle that I'd never seen when I had been married to her.
What did all of this mean? Lisa was now with someone she actually enjoyed being married to. I was with someone that I enjoyed being married to. This had occurred because I hadn't followed the path that I was fated to follow. I had been fated to marry her, to have Becky with her, and to be unhappy with her. She was fated to be unhappy with me. By altering fate we'd both ended up happy instead of sad. We'd both ended up finding soul mates instead of finding each other. What kind of fate had arranged for the previous pattern? What kind of fate had WANTED us to not find the person that matched? Was fate cruel, or just indifferent? Who or what had written these patterns? How much damage had been done by altering them?