“Why don’t you tell us how it works, then?” Laura asked, lifting her chin. The challenge simmered barely under the surface of her words. Tell us how it works, if you’re so smart. If you’ve got this all figured out.
Paul moved his hands loosely across the table. They were cuffed, a chain between them, clinking as he moved. “It’s pretty simple. When you die, you die. That’s it. You’re not supposed to come back and get another chance. It’s not fair on everyone else.”
“Why not?” Laura asked. “We can’t all just carry on living together? Isn’t that the miracle of modern medicine, that people don’t have to die unnecessarily?”
“But they were dead,” Paul insisted darkly. “They were dead already. They came back. That’s what’s wrong with this whole thing. If they stayed dead like they were supposed to, I wouldn’t have to do anything.”
“Paul, you have to forgive me,” Nate said. “I’m confused. Aren’t you the one who actively brought them back to life in the first place? Why did you do that, if you don’t think it’s right?”
Paul studied his hands, like he couldn’t bear to look up at their faces. “I was wrong back then,” he said. “But it’s part of my job, anyway. It’s hard not to do it. Everyone’s looking at you, waiting for you to make the call. And I don’t want to stop being an EMT. I like helping people. Especially people who can be saved. Those people – they need me. I can’t stop helping them just because there are some out there who… who cheated. Who used me to cheat.”
“Where does this all come from?” Laura asked, hearing her own voice surprisingly soft. She had this sense of Paul like he was a wounded animal. A creature in pain. It was written throughout every note of his voice. There was a deep trauma in his words, a horrible conflict between the man who wanted to do good and the one who believed that some people needed to die. “When did you start thinking that these people needed to die – at your own hands?”
“The guilt got too much for me,” he said, his face twisting a little involuntarily. He looked like he was holding back tears. It was a strangely tender look, for a man who had just killed three people and tried to beat her unconscious. “I couldn’t take it anymore. I just kept thinking about those people, walking around out there with lives they weren’t supposed to have. All the ripple effect from that. The people they could hurt, the ways they could cause other problems. It’s like… it’s like time travel.”
“Time travel?” Nate asked. Laura blinked, hearing her own surprise reflected in Nate’s voice.
“You ever watch one of those movies where they talk about how going back in time is so dangerous?” Paul asked. He tilted his head up to look at them both, his voice soft. He was a good talker. A storyteller. Laura found herself hanging on his next word, waiting for the revelation that would explain it all. “If you change just one thing, it could ripple out and change everything else. Like, if you step on a butterfly, then when you come back to your own time, you could find out the whole world has ended.”
“What you feel is that the people you resuscitated could be changing the natural order of things, just by being alive?” Laura asked, choosing her words carefully to not make it sound like she was laughing at him. “That there’s a set path the world should be on, and these people are throwing it off?”
“Right,” Paul said, and again he had that way about him – it almost made her feel like she should be girlishly happy to have understood him, to have him praise her for it. “I couldn’t let it go on. I had to put right the mistakes I made.”
“Are you one of those mistakes yourself, Paul?” Nate asked, his voice quiet. When Paul stared at him for a moment, Nate shifted, opening the closed file he’d had sitting in front of him all this time. “We didn’t find anything on your record in terms of criminal behavior. But I did find your medical records, and they’re interesting, aren’t they?”
Paul swallowed, looking down at the table as if ashamed. “You found out about the crash.”
“I haven’t seen this report,” Laura said, which was a lie, but a convenient one. “Why don’t you fill me in? Tell me about this crash.”
Paul shifted, swallowing again. “It was when I was a kid,” he said, his voice hoarse for a moment, like it was a lump in his throat he was trying to swallow down. “I was in the car with my mom.”
“She was driving?” Laura said. It wasn’t really a question, because obviously if he was a kid then he couldn’t have been the one behind the wheel. But she said it to prompt him to talk. To fill in more details.
“She wasn’t doing anything wrong,” Paul said. There was a trace of the child in his voice, a kind of railing cry against the unfairness of the world. “She was just driving. This other car came out of nowhere and hit us. It wasn’t her fault.”
“What happened then?” Laura asked.
“She died.” Paul said the two words with a kind of cut-off choking sob, like it was too hard to say more. Like he was going to carry on but couldn’t. He was still stubbornly staring at his hands, or maybe the table beyond them. So many years had passed, and he was still carrying so much grief about it. Still struggling to bear it. Laura felt, somewhere in the back of her mind, a wrenching pain on his behalf. The pain of a child losing his mother – it almost didn’t bear thinking about.
But for the rest of her, in the front of her mind, Laura knew what he’d done. The pain he had caused to other families. And no amount of sympathy would make up for that.
“What about you?” Nate asked, taking the top page out of the file and turning it around, placing it on the table in front of Paul. “What about your injuries?”
Paul nodded, but there was an almost mutinous look on his face. “You already know.”
“Tell me,” Laura said, still pretending she had no idea what he was about to reveal.
Paul made a grimace, moving his hands to his chest, like it was physically painful for him to talk about it. To admit the truth.
“I died,” he said. “But they brought me back to life. They brought me back, and not her.”
And there it was – the crux of it.
“You had all this extra time,” Laura said, leaning forward in her chair. “Why shouldn’t other people get the chance to have that, too? Why are you the only one who gets it?”
“I shouldn’t have had it,” Paul burst out, and when he looked up at them both again there were tears openly and silently streaming down his face. “It wasn’t right! I should have died with her. And all I’ve d
one with that extra time is make it worse. I kept saving them and they shouldn’t have survived either. It was Veronica who made me see. And then I saw how all of them were supposed to have died. Their time was up! You don’t get more time! You don’t!”