Once and Then Again

HOW MANY LIVES HAVE YOU LIVED?A child, an adolescent, a man. A student, a cadet, a beat cop. A homicide detective, a husband, a father. And now a widower, and a father who had lost his child. So many different lives.The pain of it, the images, I don't want to see them again, but there they are: how I imagine it happened. What I imagine it was like. Putting them together, because this is what I do. I've seen it before, I know, and you always think it's going to be someone else, you never think it's going to be someone you know. You think the odds are too far against it. You tell yourself, things like demographics. Areas. But anything, can happen, anywhere. And odds are odds because things do happen to people.Isabelle is on the swing. I am pushing her. 'Isabelle' because she is, is a beautiful. It's an idyllic moment: the sun shining, her golden hair streaming back. How old would she be, in that memory? How many times had that moment occurred: me, pushing her on a swing? In my mind she is five years old, six years old. Somewhere between four and eight, maybe even ten. I can't choose an age. Her age changes, shifts in my mind, when I try to see her. How old are you? Where did you go? It's like a pain in my heart which I shut my eyes to feel more deeply. This loss, my daughter, gone.Once, and then again: to love again. How could you want something and not want it at the same time? Why was it my fate to lose everyone I love? "I lost my daughter," he says to himself, "to a homicide." Could he bring himself to love again? Would he find his daughter's killer? What new life would he create for himself? Life did go on. Once, and then again. It just kept going on and on, and he felt like he'd lived so many different lives now. Riding this mysterious journey which is fate, in his search for redemption, justice, and forgiveness Thomas McAllister finds himself being dragged into the darkness which resides in his own soul.