Recursion(30)

A half mile in the distance, he sees the glow of restaurants and motel signs, Dairy Queen among them. He detects something in the left front pocket of his jeans. Slowing to a fast walk, he reaches in and pulls out a first-generation iPhone whose screensaver is a photo of Meghan crossing the finish line at a cross-country meet.

It takes four attempts to unlock it, and then he scrolls contacts until he finds Meghan, calling her as he begins to jog again.

It rings once.

Voicemail.

He calls again.

Voicemail again.

And he’s running down the broken sidewalk past a collection of old buildings that will gentrify into loft space, a coffee shop, and a distillery in the coming decade. But for now, they loom dark and abandoned.

Several hundred yards away, he sees a figure emerge from the darkness of this undeveloped area and into the well-lit outer edge of the business district.

Turquoise sweater. Ponytail.

He shouts his daughter’s name. She doesn’t look back, and he’s sprinting now, running as hard as he’s ever run in his life, screaming her name between gulps of air, even as he wonders— Is any of this real? How many times has he fantasized about this moment? Being given a shot at preventing her death…

“Meghan!” She’s fifty yards ahead of him now, and he’s close enough to see that she’s talking on her phone, oblivious.

Tires squeal somewhere behind him. He glances back at fast-approaching headlights and registers the growl of a revving engine. The restaurant Meghan never reached is in the distance, on the opposite side of the street, and now she takes a step into the road to cross.

“Meghan! Meghan! Meghan!”

Three feet into the street, she stops and looks back in Barry’s direction, the phone still held to her ear. He’s close enough now to see the pure confusion on her face, the noise of the approaching car right on his heels.

A black Mustang blurs past at sixty miles per hour, the car streaking down the middle of the street and weaving across the centerline.

And then it’s gone.

Meghan is still by the curb.

Barry reaches her, out of breath, his legs burning from the half-mile sprint.

She lowers her phone. “Dad? What are you doing?”

He looks up and down the road. It’s just the two of them standing in the yellow light of an overhanging streetlamp, no cars coming, and quiet enough to hear dead leaves scraping across the pavement.

Was that Mustang the car that hit her eleven years ago, which is also, impossibly, tonight? Did he just stop it from happening?

Meghan says, “You’re not wearing shoes.”

He hugs her fiercely, still gasping for air, but there are sobs mixing in now, and he can’t hold them back. It’s too much. Her smell. Her voice. The sheer presence of her.

“What happened?” Meghan asked. “Why are you here? Why are you crying?”

“That car…it would’ve…”

“Jesus, Dad, I’m fine.”

If this isn’t real, it’s the cruelest thing a person could ever do to him, because this doesn’t feel like some virtual-reality experience or whatever that man subjected him to. This feels real. This is living. You don’t come back from this.

He looks at her, touches her face, vital and perfect in the streetlight.

“Are you real?” he asks.

“Are you drunk?” she asks.

“No, I was…”

“What?”

“I was worried about you.”

“Why?”

“Because, because that’s what fathers do. They worry about their daughters.”

“Well, here I am.” She smiles uncomfortably, clearly and rightly questioning his sanity in this moment. “Safe and sound.”

He thinks about the night he found her, not far from where they’re standing. He had been calling her for an hour, and her phone just kept ringing before going to voicemail. It was while walking down this street that he’d seen the cracked screen of her phone lighting up where it had been dropped in the middle of the road. And then he’d found her body, broken and sprawled in the shadows beyond the sidewalk, the trauma indicating she’d been thrown a great distance after having been struck at a high rate of speed.

It’s a memory that will never leave him, but which now possesses a gray and fading quality, just like the false memory that plagued him in that Montauk diner. Has he somehow changed what happened? That can’t possibly be.

Meghan looks up at him for a long moment. Not annoyed anymore. Kind. Concerned. He keeps wiping his eyes, trying not to cry, and she seems simultaneously freaked out and moved.

She says, “It’s OK if you cry. Sarah’s dad gets emotional about everything.”

“I’m very proud of you.”

“I know.” And then, “Dad, my friends are waiting on me.”

“OK.”

“But I’ll see you later?” she asks.

“Definitely.”

“We still going to the movies this weekend? For our date?”

“Yes, of course.” He doesn’t want her to go. He could hold her in his arms for a solid week and it wouldn’t be enough. But he says, “Please be careful tonight.”

She turns away and continues walking up the street. He calls her name. She looks back.