Aug. 19, 2008
Tina appeared unbidden in my living room one evening, startling the hell out of me. She had done that on several occasions over the years to remind me of important events, such as going through the necessary steps to get Mom into the doctor and eventually cancer free. Nevertheless, Tina’s appearances never ceased to startle me.
Jason, an important event is approaching that you wished to have a reminder set for.
I took a moment to think about what that could be. “Let me guess… Mom’s fifty-second birthday in eight days, right?”
Tina folded her arms over her chest in that distracting way that I had never grown tired of. No, that is not the event you flagged. On August 29 at approximately seven p.m., you get fired from your job at Fleet’s Grocery.
“Oh, that’s no longer relevant.”
As a result of your termination, Tina continued, ignoring my interruption, Nell McClain walks home from work alone and vanishes. She is presumably murdered as her remains are later discovered in 2015.
“Nell McClain?”
The name rang a bell—a distant bell on the other side of a mountain range, maybe. Whatever memory it referenced had thoroughly ghosted away to nothingness.
Nell McClain, twenty-one years of age, and your former coworker at Fleet’s Grocery. She was someone important to you, I gathered. Tina held up her hands, and an image unfurled between them, much like a medieval scroll being unrolled.
For a moment, I stared blankly at Nell’s likeness: a cute young woman with hazel eyes, dirty-blond hair styled in a pixie cut, and a fetching smile. I studied the image, transfixed, for a time. Something about that smile struck me to my core.
Recognition hit me like a bolt of lightning a moment later. Through all those years and different timelines, the revelation finally came back to me: Nell had been the only person who I could even loosely consider a friend in my original timeline, a kind and caring person and probably the only one who would’ve given a damn when I was about to end my life. On occasion, I’d imagined witnessing my own funeral, had I jumped off Suicide Scarp, and seeing if anybody actually came. Probably not, I had decided. Although if anyone had, it probably would have been Nell, had she not been kidnapped. And my screwup by getting fired had caused that to happen to her.
“Wait a minute—didn’t I fix that and save Nell in an earlier timeline?”
Yes, Jason. You retained your job and gave her a ride home as originally planned, thus avoiding her abduction.
Then I can do it again. Wait… One major problem was that we no longer knew each other, so I couldn’t just roll up after her shift was over and offer her a ride. I’d seem like a creep myself. But I could figure out this dilemma.
Another thought struck me then like a second bolt of lightning, but this one was unwelcome. My nagging suspicion over the course of the past several years—that I was destined to confront the killer again—was about to become true. With that realization came a familiar tightness in my chest and shortness of breath from anxiety and fear. I’d vowed in the past to see the killer caught and brought to justice. That vow had fallen by the wayside over the past fifteen-plus years I’d lived, lost to distance, ghosting timelines and memories, and my own cowardice.
As I sat there, my thoughts swirling like a whirlwind, I tried to focus on the positive, the fact I could save another life, the life of someone special to me. And the more I thought of it, the more the idea took root until I was clinging to that possibility like a drowning man to a life preserver.
I felt the first welcome stirrings of that old, longed-for high, and with that, the fear and anxiety receded. Determination took its place, and through that cracked-open door, a rejuvenating sense of purpose followed on its heels.