Hands Of Time [The End]

Once again I found myself pausing outside a room in my own house, heart pounding, mind racing, arguing with myself what to do. I had to know the truth, I couldn’t just stand there, I had to open the door. I took a deep breath, swallowed hard, and firmly grabbed hold of the doorknob. I softly counted to myself, “one, two”, and then swung the door open upon the next number, “THREE”! My eyes must have been as wide as saucers as I scanned the room for intruders, my head swiftly moving from one side of the room to the other. After a couple rapid visual sweeps across the room I actually started to breathe again. From where I was standing it appeared that there was no one up in the attic. I looked at my wrist and simultaneously moved my right foot forward, noticing that there was no wire. As I moved unrestrictedly and easily into the attic I realized that I was now in the environment that I so earnestly desired, and struggled so desperately to be in last night. Everything was now calm and quiet; there were no intruders, no actors for the morning performance. I momentarily stood there breathing in the silence and again trying to decipher what exactly had taken place here a mere twelve hours ago. It all still seemed so real to me and so fresh in my mind’s eye. But then as I looked around for one last time, looking for any sign of life or movement [but finding none], I broke the solemn silence of the attic by declaring to myself, “it was only a bad dream”. As I started to turn myself in the direction of the door, to finally give the call for last curtain, that the play was officially over, my eye caught sight of something that caused me to pause. Hold that curtain! Sitting on the old couch was a thin black, hard-covered book, it seemed to be pleading with me to come over and look at it. I felt a nervous tension come over me as I started to walk in the direction of the book, the kind of tension a person has who senses that a well kept secret of theirs was about to fall into the wrong hands. When I finally reached center-stage I stood before the couch and looked down at the dusty book sitting on the worn out cushions. I bent over slightly and picked up the book from its padded resting-place and then substituted my own rear end down in its stead. As I sat on what used to have been my parent’s old couch I rested the book in my lap, just looking at it in deep contemplation. What was the meaning of all of this? In my lap sat my grade eleven high school yearbook. It had been many numerous years since I had leafed through its old pages. As I opened its stiff cover I knew what I was looking for even though I was reluctant to find it. My fingers intuitively began to flip the book’s stiff pages, passing over faces of friends, acquaintances, and even enemies of years long gone by. Then my fingers began to slow their pace as they approached their desired objective. My hands sat still, slightly trembling, when my eyes beheld a face all too familiar to me. I knew what her name was; all too well, but still checked the corresponding name that matched her picture, all the while tears began welling up within my eyes. It was her; it was the young woman who stood before this very spot last night. The girl so troubled with all the grief and hardship of last nights tragedy! I increasingly began to understand what happened last night, what the whole attic performance really meant. One last piece had to be placed in the puzzle for the picture to clearly portray its meaning. I flipped in the book to search for the young man. After a couple pages I was confronted with the young face of the boy who had been intruding in my attic the night before. As I looked at his face I squeezed my eyes shut in anguish, the agony of the truth piercing into my inner most being. A face, in whose image, I had seen a multitude of times before, but not for many long years. I pulled my face away from his so as not to be any longer reminded of the reality of last nights encounter. As my eyes left the book they pointed towards the lonely corner in which the young man stood last night, it looked somehow different; the mirror was now missing. I set the book down on the couch and quickly walked over to the corner to investigate the scene. When I reached the corner of the room I discovered the source of the noise that brought me up to the attic in the first place. The mirror had fallen from the wall and now lay unbroken on the floor. My heart again pounded as I picked up the mirror so as to replace it in its old spot. At first my concentration was directed primarily on the task at hand, getting the mirror back onto the wall. After a little bit of struggle and a few readjustments I finally accomplished my goal and the mirror was firmly anchored back into its old place. It was at this dreadful moment that my focus switched from reattaching the mirror to the wall, to the actual mirror itself. It was also at this very same time that I realized that the night before had not been a miserable dream after all, but was as real as life itself. I stood in the lonely corner of my attic staring into the mirror and the reflection of the young man stared back at me. It had not been a dream. The last piece of the puzzle fell into place, everything “clicked”, everything now made sense. As I stared at the face in the mirror, all I could keep asking myself was “what have I done?”
As I sat at the dinner table that evening, I looked at my four beautiful children and thanked God for each and every one of them. Our supper table had six chairs around it, all of them filled with an occupant. When we bought our kitchen table the sales person threw in an extra chair, ‘just in case one got broken’, an added bonus. For convenience sake we had kept this chair in the corner of the kitchen, in case we had an extra mouth to feed. This evening as we sat, eating and talking, our youngest turned his head and asked me, “Dad, why do we have one extra chair that’s empty?” As I looked into his young, inquisitive eyes I thought I was going to explode. Emotions from deep inside my heart strained and struggled to break loose. How would I tell him that the chair was meant for the “unwanted” child? How could I tell my children of the sibling they would never meet, of memories that were never given the chance to materialize? How could I tell them of the child, who now would be an adult? As I looked at my children and remembered all the phases of their childhood, all the things we did, I simultaneously thought of my eldest child and his/her non-life, all the things that could have been and were not. I fought the back the tears like a mighty dam against a torrent of bashing waves against its walls. As I sat in the defence seat, speechless, no answer coming forth from my lips, my wife suddenly broke the uncomfortable silence with a message sent from above. “We reserve that seat for our most special guest, it reminds us that Jesus is always with us, even when we sit to eat.”
My wife gave us all her usual wonderful smile, not really knowing what her simple answer had accomplished in my heart. A single tear escaped from each of my eyes. One was a tear of regret for the past that I could never change, the other a tear of infinite gratitude for the One who had given me a new start in life, and had forever changed my future. As I stared across the table into my wife’s face, I noticed myself rubbing my wrist where time held me in its grasp, and nevertheless smiled the smile that only a pardoned man could.




Dale Callahan