What If?
Conway Dewey drove down I-95 in the far-right lane, doing ten miles an hour under the posted speed limit as cars to his left sped past him. In sync with the rhythm of the passing cars, two words preyed on his mind like a mantra: what if.
What if he hadn't pushed himself so hard the night before, working well into the early morning hours and depriving himself of much-needed sleep?
What if he hadn't left late for work the following morning?
What if he hadn't taken the interstate that day?
What if he hadn't been driving in the left lane, his foot heavy on the gas pedal?
What if he had kept his eyes on the road ahead and not looked down at the dashboard to adjust the car's heating controls?
What if he had seen that patch of black ice ahead?
What if ...?
Conway shook his head to clear his brain. His hands that tightly grabbed the steering wheel were slick with perspiration. He knew why he was being tortured with doubt. The answer was obvious: it was the first time he was taking the interstate since the accident. For several months, he had kept to the local highways and back roads, sometimes driving miles out of his way to do so. But the heavy downpour the previous evening had caused localized flooding that resulted in several street closings, and the only open route to his office was via Interstate 95.
As he neared exit seventeen, his anxiety grew. A quarter of a mile before the exit was where his SUV, which had been traveling north, struck a patch of ice, crossed the median and hit a sedan in the southbound lane. It had been a messy head-on collision with one fatality: Emanuel Cabrera, the thirty-five-year-old driver of the car Conway hit.
Cabrera had lived in New Jersey with his wife and two teenage sons. He taught high school mathematics and was heavily involved in the local Little League. He was an asset to his community, a happy, healthy man who ought to have had several more decades of life ahead of him.
Until I killed him, Conway thought, agonized by guilt.
When he passed the location of the accident, he tried to turn away but could not avert his gaze. His eyes were drawn against his will to the southbound lanes. The memory of that morning struck him with the force of a physical blow. All too clearly, he recalled the impact of metal on metal. The sound of broken glass. A car horn blaring, eventually drowned out by the ear-splitting wail of police and ambulance sirens.
If one didn't believe in miracles, one had only to look at cases of high-speed car crashes in which a person emerged unscathed from the wreckage. Conway Dewey was one of those miracles. Whether he owed his life to a superior being or the seatbelt and airbag in his Toyota Highlander, he didn't know, but he walked away from the accident without so much as a scratch. He had been extremely lucky unless one took into consideration the fact that his life from that moment on was pretty well destroyed.
Like Emanuel Cabrera, Conway had a wife; but unlike his victim, he had no children. In his late twenties, he naturally assumed he had time to wait before starting a family. He hadn't anticipated that his spouse would abandon him just when he needed her most.
"I suppose I shouldn't blame Kara," he grudgingly admitted.
For even though he had a wife he adored, there was little doubt he had been married to his job. It was not unusual for him to work sixty or more hours a week for months on end. In fact, he had been working late at home the night before the accident.
Conway was suddenly shaken from his revelry by the sight of brake lights up ahead. Confronted with heavy traffic, he swallowed hard and slowed his car to a crawl.
* * *
That evening, when he was leaving work, Conway started his car and tuned the radio to the local station for traffic conditions. Most of the roads were still closed.
Damn it! I'll have to take the interstate again.
The majority of people living along the Eastern Seaboard considered I-95 a blessing, a nearly two-thousand-mile-long route from Maine to Florida, connecting major cities such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore Washington, D.C., Richmond, Savannah and Miami. But the heavy traffic and long delays it brought dampened many commuters' spirits. As for Conway, he had hated the high-speed roadway since the accident.
With a heavy heart, he sighed and headed toward I-95. The traffic on the entrance ramp was already backed up—not surprising with so many local roads closed. Traffic was stop-and-go but mostly stop. He put a CD in his stereo, hoping the music would take his mind off his unpleasant recollections. It worked at first, but then he heard a tender ballad that reminded him of Kara.
Painful memories of the weeks immediately following the crash tormented him. His wife couldn't understand his melancholy and need for solitude. After a tearful farewell, she moved in with her sister and brother-in-law in Pennsylvania. Conway wondered if Kara would return if he were to ask her. She might. Yet his frame of mind hadn't changed, so the reconciliation would only be temporary.
Why should I put the both of us through all that heartache again?
Slowly, he crawled along, and soon his car was approaching exit seventeen, this time from the southbound lane, heading in the same direction Emanuel Cabrera had been traveling that fateful morning.
Conway's palms began to sweat, and his heartbeat quickened. Was he having an anxiety attack?
Normally, during off-peak hours when traffic was lighter, it took him only twenty minutes to drive from his office to his house. With heavy traffic, however, it could take up to two hours. Yet nearly three hours had passed since he'd gotten on I-95, and it would probably be another forty minutes before his exit came into view.
Eventually, exhausted but relieved, Conway put on his turn signal and exited the interstate. Although it was already past eight, he wasn't hungry. What he wanted—what he needed—was a drink. Because he would never consider drinking and driving, Conway always chose to frequent Andy's, a bar near his house, where he could leave his car and walk home if need be. But Andy's parking lot was under several inches of water, so the owner had decided to close the place for the night.
Conway considered the alternatives. There were several restaurants that served alcohol and an Irish pub within a mile or two of his house, but as he headed down Broad Street, he passed a new tavern on the right, less than half a mile from Andy's.
When did this place open? he wondered.
From the outside, the new establishment wasn't much to look at. It was a square box of a building with small, frosted pane windows and a wooden sign above the door that simply read DANTE'S. The interior was just as Spartan as the exterior. There was a marked absence of the usual advertisements for Guinness, Samuel Adams, Coors and Budweiser. The scarcity of furnishings and the dim lights made Conway think the place was closed.
He turned to leave, but a voice called to him, "Come in."
Then a light was turned on, and the long bar was illuminated.
"Are you open?" Conway asked doubtfully.
"Yes. What can I get for you?"
"A strawberry daiquiri."
Customarily, it was thought of as a woman's drink, Conway knew, not nearly as popular with the testosterone crowd as a cold beer or a shot of Jack Daniels, but he had never acquired a taste for hard alcohol. He much preferred the sweet-tasting fruit-flavored drinks like coladas, margaritas and daiquiris. (Still, he could do without the cherries and the paper umbrellas.)
"Haven't we met before?" the customer asked when the bartender returned with his drink.
"It's a small town," the other man replied. "Our paths probably crossed several times."
"Yeah, I guess you're right."
But Conway was unable to shake off the nagging feeling of recognition.
Dante's sole patron took a sip of his daiquiri and looked around the bar. Except for him and the bartender, the place was empty.
"Not very busy tonight, are you?" he asked.
"I like it when things are slow."
Conway raised his eyebrow and laughed.
"Why? You got something against making money?"
"Money isn't everything, Mr. Dewey."
Conway tensed.
"How did you know my name?"
"I make it my business to know all my customers' names."
"But I'm not one of your regular customers. We just met tonight."
"Actually, we met a few months ago, early on a Tuesday morning, out on I-95."
All color drained from Conway's cheeks as he finally put a name to the face: Emanuel Cabrera.
"You're dead. I was at your funeral."
That wasn't exactly the truth. He had lacked the courage to face the man's widow and fatherless boys, so he watched the service from a safe distance.
Cabrera took off his apron, giving up all pretense of being a bartender.
"I don't deny it," he confessed. "I've been dead several months now."
"You've come back to haunt me," Conway cried, his voice quivering with fear.
The revenant chuckled.
"Now why would I want to do that?"
"Because I killed you."
"I know you think my death was your fault, but it wasn't. It was an accident."
Yet not even his victim's absolution comforted Conway Dewey.
"If I hadn't been driving so fast ...."
"Don't! For centuries people have tormented themselves by wondering if circumstances had been different, would the outcome still be the same. Second guessing doesn't change anything."
"So, why have you come? Did you hope to ease my conscience?"
"Something like that," Cabrera said mysteriously.
"I take it then that this place isn't really a bar."
No sooner had the words left Conway's lips than the box-like building faded away, leaving the two men standing in an empty field surrounded by dense fog and the darkness of night.
"Whoa!" the frightened man exclaimed. "This is too much. I gotta get out of here."
"There's no need to run off," Cabrera assured him. "You're in no danger."
Conway looked somewhat relieved, but he still felt scared. After all, it wasn't every day he had a conversation with a dead man in a vanishing building.
"Okay. Go ahead and say whatever is on your mind," Conway said with grim resignation, feeling like Ebenezer Scrooge confronting the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.
"The main thing I wanted to tell you is that I don't blame you for my death. I mean it. And if it's any consolation, as much as I regret the grief my passing caused my family, I actually prefer being dead to being alive."
"I'm happy for you, then. But it's getting late, and I want to go home. I haven't eaten anything since lunch and it's already ...."
Conway raised his wrist, but the watch Kara had given him on their anniversary was no longer there.
"I must have dropped it. I hope it's in my car," he said, but as he spoke he noticed that there was no sign of either his car or the parking lot. "Hey, where am I?"
"In limbo," Cabrera replied, "or, as the Catholics prefer to call it, Purgatory."
"Couldn't we have had this conversation somewhere else?"
"No, we couldn't. All the paranormal mumbo jumbo aside, the dead can't walk the earth."
"Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Purgatory where the soul goes before moving on to heaven or hell?"
"It's not quite that simple, but you're on the right track."
Conway wondered why the fate of Emanuel Cabrera's eternal spirit would be in question. He couldn't imagine a church-going high school math teacher and Little League manager doing anything that would warrant putting his soul in jeopardy. Yet what did he really know about the man he'd killed? Cabrera could have been a pedophile, a wife-beater or even a murderer.
"How long will you have to remain here?"
"Oh, I've moved on to what you would call heaven."
As Cabrera spoke, Conway noticed a small circle of light behind him, as though from a flashlight beam in the distance. Slowly it grew in diameter.
"It's time for us to go," Cabrera announced.
"What do you mean us?"
"Us—you and me."
The light behind Cabrera continued to grow and seemed to inch closer to the two men.
"I'm not going anywhere except back home," Conway stubbornly insisted.
"You have no home to go to. Haven't you realized yet that I wasn't the only fatality in the accident?"
The words were like a blow to Conway's solar plexus.
"I walked away from the crash without a scratch."
"No. You were killed instantly. You've been in limbo ever since."
"That's impossible. I clearly remember splitting up with my wife soon after the accident. She left me and moved to Pennsylvania."
"That's a false memory. Your wife went to live with her sister and brother-in-law because she was a widow, not because you two split up."
"I went to work today. Do dead men go to work?"
"What did you do while you were there?"
"I ... I don't remember," Conway replied, suddenly feeling terribly confused.
"What you do remember is driving to work and driving home. Your soul, weighed down by guilt, sentenced itself to a never-ending commute on I-95, forever passing by the location of the accident."
Conway didn't want to believe Cabrera's ridiculous claims and didn't want to admit that he, too, was dead; but his resistance to the truth was weakening.
"I'm sure heaven is a wonderful place, but I don't want to go there yet. I want to live. I want to be with my wife, to have children someday."
The light slowly engulfed Emanuel Cabrera and stretched out toward Conway Dewey.
"Tell me, Mr. Dewey, what if you hadn't pushed yourself so hard the night before, working well into the early morning hours and depriving yourself of much-needed sleep? What if you hadn't left late for work the following morning? What if you hadn't taken the interstate that day? What if you hadn't been driving in the left lane, your foot heavy on the gas pedal? What if you had kept your eyes on the road ahead and not looked down at the dashboard to adjust the car's heating controls? What if you had seen that patch of black ice ahead?"
"Then you and I would still be alive today," Conway concluded mournfully.
"That's not true. You see, it was my time to die. If I hadn't been killed in the accident, perhaps I would have suffered a heart attack or a stroke. Either way, I'd still be here."
"And me? I suppose it was my time to die as well."
"What if," Cabrera began hesitantly. "What if it wasn't necessarily your time? What if you could go back to the morning of the accident and really walk away without a scratch?"
Conway's heart raced as hope blossomed in his chest.
"Is that possible?"
"What if you were given a second chance?"
Cabrera smiled as the light swallowed him up.
* * *
Conway was aware of a blinding light, but not the same heavenly glow that had warmed and comforted those it touched, the light that had embraced Emanuel Cabrera. This was the harsh beam of a small flashlight being shined directly in his eyes by an emergency room doctor.
"Mr. Dewey," a commanding female voice called as the light was extinguished, "can you tell me how many fingers I'm holding up?"
Conway turned his face toward the direction of the voice and replied, "Three."
"Good."
"What happened?"
"You were involved in a car accident. Although you blacked out after the crash, you seem none the worse for it."
"What about the other driver?"
"I'm sorry. There was nothing we could do for him."
"It was his time," Conway mumbled.
"Excuse me?" the physician asked.
"Nothing. I was just thinking out loud."
"I'll go tell your wife that you're all right. She's been quite anxious to see you."
A few minutes later, Kara, her face wet with tears of joy, ran to her husband and threw her arms around him.
"Don't cry. I'm fine," he assured her.
"Thank God! What if you hadn't been wearing your seat belt? What if the airbag hadn't worked properly? What if ...?"
"Hush, sweetheart. Let's not torment ourselves by wondering what if."
"I suppose you're right. What good does it do to second-guess fate, especially since we can't change what happens anyway?"
Conway took his wife in his arms and kissed her. He was grateful that in his case it had been possible to alter the course of his destiny.
Before Emanuel Cabrera returned to heaven, he had asked him, "What if you were given a second chance?"
The answer to that question was an easy one. Conway would embrace life as he now embraced his wife. He would no longer be married to his job, work sixty-hour weeks or be in a rush to get to his office or anywhere else. He would take the time to stop and smell the proverbial roses. He owed it to himself, to Kara and to whoever or whatever had decided that it was not yet his time to die.
What if I had a normal cat?
