“You don’t have to make the mistakes I make,” he said at last.
“Do you really think Davey’s the . . . the way he is because his mother had a drink while she was pregnant with him?”
“I think she had more than just one, but yes, that’s the reason why. It’s called fetal alcohol syndrome.”
“You’re making it up. You sound like Rimae. She keeps telling me not to party too, but she drinks. She owns a bar! And she knows I hang out with Kevin.”
“She wants you to be better,” Sam said helplessly. “I want to make sure you never have a baby like Davey—”
“It’s not Davey’s fault!” she said.
“Bethica, that’s the whole point! It isn’t his fault! It isn’t a disease, it isn’t genetic, it isn’t anything but alcohol passing through the placental barrier and damaging developing cells so they can never be repaired. There isn’t any cure for Davey or thousands like him—”
She was staring at him, eyes wide. “You’re nuts.”
He wasn’t nuts, but he was preaching. And preaching, he well knew, only turned people off. It certainly hadn’t impressed Rimae.
“Bethica, look. Promise me you won’t go to that party tonight. That’s all. Don’t tell me you won’t drink for the rest of your life. Just don’t go tonight.”
“You’re nuts,” she repeated. And turned, and ran away, leaving him standing.
Now what?” he muttered. “I can’t do anything right on this Leap.” Out of habit, as much as anything else, he added, "Now what do I do, Al?”
Beats me, kid,” came a familiar voice from behind him. He spun around and caught himself on the trunk of a tree. There, standing in the doorway to the cabin, cigar in one hand and handlink in the other, familiar in snap-brim fedora and loud suspenders, stood Al, looking inexpressibly weary.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
He was barely able to contain himself until he got into the cabin, out of sight of witnesses. “Where have you been?” he burst out, torn between relief and outrage at having been abandoned. “I’ve been waiting for you for days. I thought something might have—” and then he got a good look at his friend, and his own feelings went into a skid. “Al? What’s wrong?”
Al shook his head, raised one hand in a waving-away gesture. A puff of smoke hung in the air around Al’s head, a smoggy halo from the ever-present cigar. “Never mind.” He looked around appraisingly. “I like what you’ve done with the place.. . . What have you done with the place?”
"I cleaned up a little.” Sam wanted to ask a dozen questions, and Al wouldn’t meet his eyes. After elaborately surveying the living room, Al inspected the kitchen, stuck his head in the bedroom and bathroom, came back out again and made a great show of examining the handlink.
The silence between them stretched. Sam watched, bewildered, not sure what to say.
At last he fell back on business. “So, uh, has Ziggy figured out what I’m supposed to do on this Leap?”
Al’s lips compressed, as if he was biting back a sharp retort, and he jabbed at the buttons on the handlink. “There’s a girl—”
“Bethica.”
Al’s head jerked up and his eyes burned. “Already figured it out, have you?”
“No.” Something was wrong, badly wrong.
Al continued, “It seems we were right all along about the wreck. She’s going to go to that party up on the mountain tonight. On her way home she gets into a car wreck and ends up spending the rest of her life in a wheelchair.”
“So much for theory.” After all that time spent trying to figure out what he was supposed to change—“Does Ziggy have any suggestions about what I’m supposed to do?”
“You seem to be doing just fine as it is.”
Sam had had enough. “Al, what’s wrong?”
Al opened his mouth to answer and shut it again, shaking his head. “Nothing. It’s nothing.”
“Like hell it’s nothing. You disappear for three days and when you come back you’re snapping like a dog with a sore paw—”
“Colorful. Real colorful.”
“You’re ticked off at me for some reason, and I don’t even know why.”
Al sighed. “Okay, okay. It’s not your fault. You can’t help it.”
“Help what?”
“Changing things.”
Sam felt like a fish yanked out of water, his mouth gaping. “Al, I hate to remind you, but I’m supposed to change things. That’s the whole point. It has been for years. So why are you all of a sudden so upset about it?”
“You never even think about it,” Al burst out. “You blip around from one life to another, bim, bam, fix something here, change something there, and you never even think about the consequences—”
This was so blatantly unfair that Sam would have taken a swing at the other man if he’d had any hope of connecting. “I never think about the consequences? What are you talking about? I spend every minute of my life thinking about
consequences! Consequences are all I’ve got!”
“And now they’re my consequences!”
“Yours? What do you have to do with it?”
1 don’t know! You’re the genius, you figure it out!”
There was another pause while Sam tried to figure out how the conversation had gotten so completely out of hand and Al chewed ferociously on his cigar.
“I don’t understand,” Sam said at last. “I’m sorry, Al, I don’t understand.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what I did.”
"I guess you don’t.” Al looked at the handlink again. "Ziggy says the accident happens late at night, when she’s her way home. If she doesn’t go to that party, that should take care of it.”
He was still angry, but his body language and tone conveyed clearly that he was setting aside his personal feelings order to
