Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [151]
In another universe you’re hit by a car in the parking lot outside your high school graduation ceremony, your leg is fractured in twelve places, and you limp for the rest of your life. You grow alienated and sarcastic, cannot hold down a job, and become a druggie and a drunk. Your best friend is whoever happens to be sitting on the next bar stool.
Or.
Your second-grade teacher decides to run off to Alaska to be a bush pilot; your class is taken over by Miss Bermeister, who lives and breathes teaching and who picks you out as her pet project—the effect she has on your life is profound. She instills a confidence and an enthusiasm for scholarship that propels you into higher education and, from there, into the ministry. You marry an ex-nun, remain childless throughout your life, and die of old age working in Africa in a save-the-children venture.
Or this.
Which really happened to my father. You’re twelve, and one of your acquaintances shows up with his dad’s revolver, which he’s swiped from his old man’s closet and which he swears is unloaded. He laughs, and before you can duck or even blink, he points it at your head and pulls the trigger.
The hammer falls on an empty chamber.
He points the pistol at your best friend. This time the pistol goes off with a loud crack. A bullet pulverizes your best friend’s skull. You go on to live a long life—your friend wastes away in a curtained-off room and expires at twenty-six.
It all ends in death. Nobody gets out alive.
After all is said and done, a hundred years after you’re dead does the length of your time here really make the tiniest bit of difference?
Is a life with 5,110 sunsets better than one with 27,000 sunsets? Or 40,000? And anyway—how many of those sunsets can you remember when you’re on your way to paradise? Fifteen? Twenty? I can ask the questions, but I can’t furnish the answers.
When all is said and done, perhaps fewer years are better years.
In one life I’m a man with a skull full of pudding.
In another I’ve survived the narrowest escape possible, have become the centerpiece in dozens of newspaper and magazine articles—a man who’s come back from the brink.
I had stumbled through a lot of crossroads in my life, and except for our divorce and the way Lorie left me, which I’m not certain I didn’t deserve, I lived a fairly decent life. It started with a father and a mother who loved me in the best way they knew how and ended with me loving my girls in the best way I knew how. Wasn’t that as good as it could get? For anybody?
EPILOGUE
These days I don’t get too worked up about things. Trouble washes over me like a warm and gentle tide. I do what I can to keep in a good frame of mind and try not to let outside events I cannot control frazzle me. I soak up love and sunshine where I find it. I shrug off aches and Arctic blasts.
It feels like afternoon. I no longer live by clocks, so I have no idea what time it is. I am sitting in a low chair staring out the window, my eyes refusing to focus. Sunbeams streaming through the window warming my arm and leg. I am luxuriating in one of the simplest pleasures on the planet. Sunshine. Warmth. Vitamin D free for the taking.
After a while a woman enters the room and speaks softly to me, kisses my cheek, strokes my mussed hair with a gentleness reserved for newborns, puppies, and the rest of those helpless souls most people overlook.
Without turning, I know who it is—from her scent and from the lovely sound of her voice.
Stephanie. Glued to me for the rest of her life by legal and moral obligations. Poor baby.
She picks up my cold, limp hand, pats it between her palms, and holds it for a while. Later, I sense rather than see she is moving across the room to my father, speaking in a normal tone of voice as if he might actually reply, just as she has spoken to me. As if I might actually reply.
My father says exactly what