Flashback

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.”