Flashback

skies of some high valley, say up by Estes Park. There’s always the glow from the Front Range, but surrounding peaks or high foothills to the east could block out a lot of that.”

“Maybe Santa Claus will remember you want a telescope,” Dara says. She’s still looking at the sky. A police helicopter is tacking back and forth over the rooftops.

Nick shakes his head adamantly. “No. Too expensive. There are a hundred things we can use that amount of money for that are more important… if I get the overtime this fall to earn the money.”

“You will,” Dara says sadly. He knows she hates it when he works weekends and late nights, even though the union-earned overtime pay is so important to them. But this weekend—it’s Friday night —this weekend Nick is free and will spend it with her.

Wishing his former self would quit looking at the goddamned stars and would turn his head to look again at Dara in the soft light coming out through the kitchen windows and screen door—even while knowing to the second when the former-Nick will do that—Nick realized why he so often chose this particular weekend when Dara was so pregnant to revisit whenever he had a forty-eight-hour vial. There will be sex, of sorts (and very sweet in its preconjugal heavy-petting way), but that was not the reason. It was just the simplicity of their time together that particular weekend, only weeks before Val was born and things changed so much, and the fact that every summer night during this relived time, Nick will go to sleep with his head resting on Dara’s swollen breasts.

“You would have been happier as an astronomer, Nicholas.” Dara’s voice is sleepy, relaxed. It stirs Nick as it always has.

“You mean you’d be happier if I were an astronomer rather than a cop.” He sips his beer and looks for Aldebaran. A slight breeze stirs the leaves of their elms and the larger leaves of their neighbor’s linden trees. Their not-yet-brittle sound is part of the late-summer night.

“Well,” says Dara, “if you were an astronomer, we’d be living on a mountaintop somewhere, maybe in Hawaii, and far away from all this.” Nick turns…

Exactly when Nick knew he would.

… and looks at his wife and sets his large hand on her much-larger abdomen.

“I don’t think you’d want to be living on top of a volcano in Hawaii when your due date gets here, kiddo, with the closest hospital and obstetrician two miles lower and an island away.”

Nick regrets the words as soon as he’s said them. Dara’s concern about the pregnancy, after the three miscarriages, is matched or exceeded only by his own worrying.

It’ll be all right, thought the Nick floating both inside and above this moment. He faintly sensed —or imagined he sensed—his other flashback-selves thinking much the same thing at the same instant, although usually the flashback “viewer” could not register the presence of himself on previous visits. Certainly he couldn’t overhear his other flashback-self’s thoughts the way he could feel and share the then-Nick’s thoughts and emotions.

“I’m a good cop, Dara,” says Nick, embarrassed by what he said about the hospital and obstetrician, but defensive all the same. “A really good cop.”

Dara puts her small hand atop his large one on her belly. “You probably would have been a good astronomer, my Nicholas. A really good astronomer. But the stars are objects of beauty which inspire wonder…”

“Like you, sweetums,” jokes Nick, trying to derail her from what he’s sure she’s going to say.

“… which inspire wonder,” repeats Dara firmly, not wanting to joke around. “While the objects of your profession—the perps, the addicts, the witnesses, too many of the other cops, even some of the victims and lawyers and jurists—just inspire disgust and cynicism and despair. You should have realized when you got out of college that you’re too sensitive to be a cop, Nick. You enjoy surface parts of it—the irony mixed with adrenaline, I think, and some of the other cops, and being a good cop yourself—but underneath, it all eats at you like battery acid. It always will.”

Nick removes his hand and sips his beer. The helicopter has been joined by a second one and the two move across the area north of the botanic gardens in a searchlight grid pattern. The searchlights change from looking like two blind men’s white canes thrashing in the dark to an inverted, mini-version of searchlights in World War II Berlin or London. All that’s lacking, Nick thinks, is a B-17 or Heinkel bomber caught in the converging beams. The searchlights and aircraft’s navigation lights occlude the stars and the noise from the two choppers echoes from the brick homes and trees all down their street and along the alley lined with tiny, sagging, century-old garages from the 1920s.

Nick resents the machines’ intrusion. Besides taking the entire weekend off, he’s had the almost unheard-of Friday afternoon off and spent it—

—And shared it with the older Nick hovering, hearing, feeling, experiencing

—mowing the yard in the heat and clipping hedges and the drooping branches of his neighbor’s untended trees and fixing the hinges of the ancient garage’s doors and puttering around the house near Dara. She’s also had the rare Friday off—she works as an executive assistant in the assistant district attorney’s office—and she’s spent the day catching up on house stuff and baby-preparation stuff while Nick mows, fixes, mends, and generally gets in her way. He’s wearing his oldest, most comfortable chinos and short-sleeved denim shirt and the sneakers pollocked with white paint from their recent painting of what will be the baby’s room and Dara’s wearing a light blue maternity top and old capri pants, both so passed down that she’d never go out the front door with them on.

But several times that afternoon she’s come out the back door carrying a glass of cold lemonade and—once, surprisingly, perfectly—fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies for her sweaty husband.

It’s the only afternoon or evening in weeks that Nick hasn’t carried a pistol in a holster on his left hip.

Nick Bottom loves their home and neighborhood and, he knows, so does Dara. This part of the city southwest of the Denver Botanic Gardens and south of Cheesman Park consists of a mixture of tall, brick, Denver-square homes mixed with small brick bungalows like the one Nick and Dara had just barely been able to purchase four years earlier thanks to the police credit union.

The neighborhood is also relatively safe thanks to cops, since even though the area had been tipping over to gangs and crime after the first waves of the recession a decade earlier, some of the biggest foreclosed-on homes turning into crack houses and warrens for illegal immigrants from the Mideast, older cops and detectives on the DPD had begun moving into the area in the second decade of the new century. That had brought more cops with their young families, and more stability. Even in the modern era—Dara’s pregnancy year is being called the Year of Clear Vision by the new administration in Washington—an era in which almost every civilian carries a handgun, the presence of scores of cops and their families has had a calming effect on this neighborhood.

And since cops and their families have always had the bad habit—shared in a mirror-image way by the Mafia—of hanging out in their spare time almost exclusively with other cops and their families, it’s added a real sense of community to the neighborhood for Nick. This last May there were more than sixty people at Nick and Dara’s annual Memorial Day cookout and backyard croquet tournament. A patrolman named Jerry Connors, whom Nick has known for years and who shares Nick’s and Dara’s love of old movies, had digitally projected movies onto a sheet on the side of his garage on Saturday nights and half the off-duty precinct can be found there on lawn chairs in Jerry’s backyard, drinking beer and waiting for the goofs and continuity errors—like the kid extra in the background in a Mount Rushmore cafeteria scene from Hitchcock’s North by Northwest who sticks his fingers in both ears before Eva Marie Saint reaches for the semiauto in her purse to shoot Cary Grant—that Jerry loves to tell everyone about before the movies begin.

And Jerry also asks the pertinent philosophical questions for the cops and other neighbors in their lawn chairs to ponder during each film, such as—Are James Mason and his number-one spy guy, Martin Landau, gay and hot for each other, or what? I mean, listen to Landau-as-Leonard’s little speech about his woman’s intuition and Mason saying “Why, Leonard, I do believe you’re jealous”…

Nick hopes their neighborhood will be a good place for their son or daughter to grow up. (He and Dara sometimes think that they’re the only expectant parents in the city—maybe in the state or nation—who’ve repeatedly turned down the ultrasound, gene-scan, and other modern ways of knowing their kid’s gender before birth.)

“Aren’t you going to tell me your story?” says Dara.

Nick has to blink his way up and out of his I-love-my-house-and-neighborhood reverie. How many beers has