Chapter 1 #3
My father and I moved back to America, to our old neighborhood outside Philadelphia.
My mother was buried a few miles away, in a cemetery just off the highway.
I remember the constant whoosh of traffic as they lowered her casket into the ground.
It felt so disrespectful, people driving past, going to work, listening to their radios.
I put my hands over my ears. I didn’t hear most of what the pastor said.
After everyone left, I stood there with my father, staring at the grave.
“Why do they throw dirt in there?” I asked.
“That’s just how they do it, Alfie.”
“Mom didn’t like dirt.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“Should we clean it out?”
He bit his lip and squeezed my shoulder. The wind blew. I think that was the moment I realized it was just him and me now.
?
We settled into a small Colonial--style house and I started wearing long sleeves again.
I watched television. I snacked on Scooter Pies.
Everything from Africa felt like a dream.
Someone in our church offered my father the old Baldwin piano my mother used to play, and he put it in the basement.
I spent a lot of time down there, trying to remember the hymns she had taught me.
It took some time before I repeated my “magic.” My mother’s second death was an unsettling memory, and I was in no hurry to go through something like that again. I hadn’t told anyone, not even my dad. Part of me wasn’t sure it ever really happened.
Then, a few months after we’d returned from Africa, I experienced it again.
I was on my way home from school, me and my walking buddies from the neighborhood, Stewie, Sandy, and Paul.
It was a gray afternoon, and a cold rain was falling.
We passed a small, rickety A--frame home with faded brown shutters and a muddy swath of dead leaves covering the grass.
“Witch’s house,” Sandy mumbled.
We called it that because every now and then kids in the neighborhood would spot a crouched, white--haired woman staring out through the flimsy screen door.
The legend was that one Halloween she had pulled a trick--or--treater inside, and when he came out, he was never the same.
I have no idea if the story is true. We were just kids.
Suddenly, Stewie blurted out: “Yo, Alfie, I dare you to knock on her door.”
The others joined in.
“Yeah, Alfie!” “Do it!” “Don’t be scared, Alfie!” “C’mon!”
I looked away. My mother’s death had dealt a huge blow to my confidence.
I found it hard to engage with people, especially neighbors who whispered, “They never should have gone to Africa.” I missed my mother terribly, the long, meandering conversations we had over peanut butter crackers in our kitchen, and the way she rubbed my hair after kissing me good night.
Without her, our house was unbearably silent.
At night, my father would stare at the black-and-white TV.
I would lie on the couch and cover my eyes with the back of my hands.
Sometimes my heart would begin to race and I found it hard to breathe.
I coughed and choked. My father would ask, “What’s wrong, Alfie?
” But I didn’t know myself. I just wanted to stop feeling scared all the time, worrying that another bad thing was going to happen.
That day at the witch’s house, it seemed to come to a head.
I was tired of being frightened and I didn’t want the boys calling me chicken all the way home.
So I accepted their challenge and moved slowly toward the door.
I stopped a short distance from the screen, not wanting to be snatched if the witch suddenly appeared.
“Hurry up, before she sees you!” Stewie whisper--yelled.
“Or kills you,” Sandy added.
They laughed. I quickly lost my nerve. Why had I agreed to this? I leaned forward at the waist. My entire body was trembling. I stretched toward the door, squeezed my eyes shut, and made my fist knock. Once.
Then I ran away.
I ran as fast as I can ever remember running, my feet making wide leaps over the street puddles.
Tears were streaming down my cheeks. In my mind I saw my mother’s face, lying on her deathbed, looking at me as if I were pathetic.
In the distance, I heard the cackling laughter of my three friends, and Stewie shouting, “There’s no one home, stupid!
” By then it was too late. I had shown my true colors, and they were the yellows of cowardice.
I couldn’t sleep that night. I dreaded having to face those boys again.
I so wanted to erase what happened at the witch’s house that for the first time, I considered what my mother had told me.
(This is something you’re going to be able to do the rest of your life.
Get second chances.) If that were true, I was ready to try.
I replicated what I’d done on the night my mother died. I wished the day had never happened. I tapped my thighs. I even mumbled the words “stupid, stupid,” in case I needed to repeat everything exactly.
The next morning, when I awoke, the cold, drizzly weather was the same as the day before, and when we walked to school, the boys were wearing the same clothes and none of them said anything about the incident. In class, we covered the same pages in the history book. We took the same spelling test.
I was stunned. Everything was repeating itself. I moved through the day in blinking wonderment, knowing exactly what was going to happen and watching it unfold.
Even the walk home went as it had previously gone, right up to the moment when Sandy mumbled, “Witch’s house.”
Which is when I changed the story.
“Let’s see if she’s in there,” I blurted out.
The others gaped at me.
“What’s the matter?” I said. “Are you scared?”
“No way,” Paul said.
“Nuh--uh,” Sandy said.
“I dare you,” Stewie said, crossing his arms.
I glared at him, anger and excitement mixing in my gut.
“Watch me,” I said.
Watch me? I had never uttered those words before. I was the kind of kid who didn’t want other people looking at him. Watch me? I walked steadily to the front door.
“Still dare me?” I said, looking back.
“You won’t do it,” Stewie insisted.
I took a deep breath, planted my feet, and banged. Then I banged again. Knowing she wasn’t home, I shot a glance at my disbelieving friends, then screamed, “Come out, Witch! Show your ugly face!”
That did it. Sandy, Stewie, and Paul bolted down the street, just as I had the day before. As I watched them run, I was flushed with a new sensation, one that would shape my life going forward. Knowing what’s going to happen before it happens is more than a unique power. It’s godlike.
And that is how I felt.
?
Now, at this point, Boss, you probably have questions, the kind that always come with time travel stories.
What happens if you step on a butterfly, that sort of thing?
Let me clear things up right here. I’m not a comic book hero.
I can’t wave my hand and go frolicking with dinosaurs or zap myself onto the deck of the Titanic.
Unless it happened to me, I have no way of revisiting it. I can select any moment in my own life and change it once. But after it’s changed, I’m stuck with that new version going forward.
I’m more of a duplicator, really, a reshaper of my own existence. If you interacted with me, then I can change that experience, and you’ll have no recollection of our previous encounter.
But I will.
That’s the price I pay.
Nassau
LaPorta laughed out loud.
“What?” Alfie said, glancing up from the notebook.
“For a guy who stole a couple million bucks, you sure feel sorry for yourself.”
“You think this is a joke?”
LaPorta nodded sarcastically. “Yes. I. do.”
“Can I ask you a question, then?”
“I can’t wait.”
“Why do you think I wrote all this down?”
“I don’t know, Alfred ‘Alfie’ Logan. Because you’re crazy? Because criminals often exhibit weird behavior?”
“And if I told you this notebook will prove I’m not a criminal?”
“I thought you said it was a love story. You should make up your mind.”
LaPorta glanced at his watch. It was almost noon. He popped another Life Saver into his mouth.
“Giving up smoking?” Alfie asked.
“How’d you know? Wait. Don’t tell me. You traveled back in time and saw me light up.”
Alfie sighed. “You’re not taking me seriously.”
LaPorta rolled the candy slowly over his tongue. He did wish it were a cigarette.
“Keep reading,” he said.
The Composition Book
I’ll move the story along now, Boss, because there is much to share and I don’t want to lose the point, which is to tell you of the one great love in my life, and what I’d like you to do for her after I’m gone.
For the rest of my childhood, my father and I remained in that same Colonial home with our Plymouth Road Runner in the driveway.
We rarely went anywhere. My parents used to go shopping, eat at restaurants, play gin rummy with the neighbors.
But my mother’s death had left my dad rudderless.
He worked. He came home. Now and then, when the weather was warm, he’d toss a baseball with me, but he always seemed distracted, his thoughts elsewhere.
We never spoke about Africa. But there was a photo of my mom on the table next to the couch, and I often caught my father studying it, as if he couldn’t turn away, the way someone stares at a bad medical report.
We’d stopped going to church. We no longer prayed before meals.
I think Dad felt if this was how God treated those who went around the world to spread His Good News, he’d just as soon sit things out.