The coach was keeping pace with a young couple strolling down the sidewalk. His arm was around her slender waist, and she leaned a dark head on his shoulder. He recognized his younger self, and his wife. No, not his wife, not then. His fiancee. How elegant it had once felt to say that word, how wealthy.He savored it.
Something struck him as slightly odd, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it. He pushed the uneasiness out of his mind when he realized he could hear them talking. He remembered the conversation,even, from so very long ago. Funny. It hadn't seemed important, back then. Hadn't seemed like a turning point.
"Honey," she said, "I wouldn't mind working. In fact, I'd love it. You could go to school full-time, then,and be done that much sooner. I think it's the only way we're ever going to get what we want. Mike, I love you. I hate to see you work all day, and then try to study all night. And you know it's making your grades suffer."
The voice of reason. Patient, encouraging. God,how he'd wished for a cigarette, but he'd already given those up for her. No more cigarettes, or pickled eggs, and he'd quit wearing suspenders.
But he didn't want to quit being a cop.
He'd started taking the night school classes to impress her. Gonna be a lawyer, he'd told her. Lied to her, might as well admit it. He'd taken just enough law classes to find out how slippery a subject it was.Justice, that was what he wanted to learn about. And Ed's could teach him more about justice in one righteous bust than any of his night school teachers. He remembered all this. This was the night when he'd told her that he was going to lay out of school, for just one semester, to catch up with himself, so when they got married in a month, he'd have time free to honeymoon with her. Only he'd known then that he was never going back, that he was telling her a lie.
He watched himself lie to her, watched her accept it. Knew he could lean down and shout the truth out,and that his younger self would have to utter it, tell her that he really wanted to be a cop, that he didn't think it was a lowlife job that kept him in permanent contact with lowlife people. He could have made that younger self explain to her just what it meant to him.
He listened to her reply.
"Well. As long as it's not forever. It just scares me so, sometimes, knowing you're out there being a target for every wacko in the city. As long as you're happy, though, I suppose it's okay. And you will go back to school next fall, right?"
Stepovich heard what his younger self had never heard. The lie in her voice. It wasn't okay with her. Never would be. But she had believed it was only temporary, she'd believed she was marrying a future lawyer, not a blue suit and a duty weapon.
"We believed in each other's lies," he told the Coachman.
The Coachman nodded. "Don't we all."
"I could tell her the truth," Stepovich said slowly."I could tell her right now, and it would change everything. Maybe she wouldn't marry me."
"Maybe you'd go to school full time and become a lawyer. You had the brains for it."
"But not the stomach," Stepovich said slowly. He dragged in another painful breath. "This isn't a dream, is it?"
The Coachman turned, and looked at him for a longtime. "It's your choice," he said quietly at last. "This could be a dream. Or it could be a place where you climb back into your skin, and take a different path."
Stepovich could feel a chill seeping through his blood. He lifted a hand to his shoulder, almost remembered. Somewhere in the night, a slow anger tapped a tambourine."Am I dying?" he asked.
"Dying? No. Not dying, but… you're not dying."
"And if I were, would I get another chance?"The Coachman shook his head slowly. "This is it.You picked this choice place, and I can offer you but one."
"What do you suggest?"
For a moment, it seemed the Coachman winced,but all he said was, "I make no suggestions. Decide."
Stepovich watched them kissing, the young cop and his fiancee. But the man thought he was kissing a cop's wife, and the woman thought she was kissing a Future lawyer. They'd both be wrong. He still had a chance, right now, to step down from the coach and walk a different path, one that led away from the pains of quarrels and divorce. Maybe it would lead to no marriage at all. Maybe he'd learn to like being a lawyer. But there were no guarantees.Then it hit like a whip: No guarantees there'd be a Laurie or a Jeffrey; that's what he was giving up, as well as everything else. That kiss they were sharing,that might be their last. He'd be sweeping away the joys with the pains. Did he want to chance that? Wiping out all those past pains, that was one thing. Giving up the picnics and family dinner in exchange fora life that might be worse, okay; but what if it meant the children never came to be?
A vague notion came to him that there was another thing he'd be undoing as well. He closed his hand on a weapon that wasn't there, groped after a deed he couldn't remember. But it had been important. And somehow it had kept Laurie safe. Funny, how foggy it was all getting. Not just his thoughts, but the night around him. Funny, how the horses plodded on, but they never passed the couple kissing under the street lamp.
"Drive on," he finally said. "Drive on." He leaned back into his pain.
One of the gypsies, the big one, is tapping a tambourine.He says, "So, you are taking all three of them back, then?"
The Coachman nods.
"What about the girl? Doesn't she get a choice?"
"No," says the Coachman. "Not yet, not here, not from me."
"And the old woman?"
"She made all of her choices long ago."
The big gypsy nods. He looks a bit like an owl, the way he stares. The Coachman drives on.
Soon he reaches a place where there is a soft glow of starlight, which is quickly joined by a half moon, waxing,and he feels sorrow. The journey is nearing its end. Only for a short time longer will he sit on this box and feel the horses talk to him through the reins. He has come many lifetimes tonight, but the journey still seems short. The thought takes him that he could turn now, and bring them all to another place-a place where this coach would remain real. Perhaps they would blink in the sunshine and thank him. Perhaps they would not. It doesn't matter; he knows he will not do it.
The sun is rising ahead of him, red and thick behind layers of clouds, and in the glow, the horses begin to fade and the feeling of motion to decrease. Now he sees the faint outline of walls around him, and he pulls on the reins and the horses slow. When they have stopped, they are gone,as are we all, and the reins are no more than a twist of a scarf's fabric tangled in his fingers.
I spent a lifetime in Hell last year,
I'm not sure when I got back.
The plaster statues are running in place.
And some are beginning to crack.
One wears a smile, one wears a frown;
They both seem fools to me.
The game isn't over 'til one of them's lost,
You never know who it will be.
"TELLERS OF TALES"
Durand felt like he was opening his eyes, though he couldn't remember closing them. It was like a play resuming, a crowded set cluttered with furniture and people just starting to stir. Madam Moria was already setting upright an ugly little table that had gotten tipped over. She set her ruined kettle atop it, and glared at him when she caught him staring at her. With a sigh and a wheeze, she sank back into her chair as if she'd never left it. Durand belatedly realized that he was leaning against a tapes tried wall,clutching his bleeding arm.
He watched Daniel rise slowly, look around at the old woman's apartment, and bow to the Coachman,who sniffed. "Don't bow to me you, you gypsy, you."Daniel smiled faintly, and turned to his brothers. Raymond was leaning against Csucskari, who still held the bloody knife.