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The cassette grew hotter beneath my palms.

There was no one in the room to tell me that I was being ungrateful, or to remind me that I’d chosen this life, and that it was a good life, so I said the wish aloud.

“Please.” My voice broke against the quiet. “Let me do it over.”

The cassette burned beneath my hands as somewhere, far away, music began to play.

2

Lorrie

Saturday — August 11, 1984

For several seconds, I didn’t move when I woke. I stayed beneath the cool floral sheets with my eyes closed, listening to the faint crackle behind Steve Perry’s voice and waiting for the familiar morning roll call of complaints.

My right hip usually made itself known first, then my lower back, followed by my left shoulder, which had started bothering me sometime around the time I’d turned forty-seven.

But this morning was different. There wasn’t any ache or stiffness. My body felt light and rested, as if someone had taken the woman I’d become, removed twenty years or so, and then handed her back with fresh batteries.

I opened my eyes, blinking at the flood of light. I knew that ceiling. It was white with a soft warp near the kitchenette from the summer humidity. In the far corner, a thumbprint of blue paint marked the plaster, left from the afternoon I’d decided the pool house should be the color of Lake Mendota at noon and then abandoned the project after my mother said it looked like a bathroom in a seafood restaurant.

The hooked rug beside the sofa, the blue milk crate holding the turntable and currently playing Journey, the cupboard door under the sink that never stayed shut unless you bumped it with your hip, and the yellow gingham curtains my mother had criticized for a year. Somehow, I was in my parents’ pool house in Maple Bluff.

Which was impossible. What was even more unbelievable was when I pushed myself up on one elbow, I did it easily. No careful bracing or shaking in my arm. The sheet slid to my waist, and I looked down at smooth, tan arms, a flat stomach, and breasts that were even perkier than I’d remembered.

“Oh my God,” I whispered.

My voice sounded young. Clearer. A little higher, with none of the morning rasp I’d acquired somewhere between parent-teacher conferences and turning fifty.

I sat up and lifted both hands to the light. There were no sunspots, no veins standing up beneath the skin, no wedding rings, and not even the faint pale circle where they should have been. My hands looked younger than my daughter’s.

I slipped out of bed, the floor cool beneath my bare feet as I bent forward slowly, ready for the pull in my hamstrings, and touched my toes. Then, with the kind of private thrill that would’ve embarrassed me if anyone had been there to witness it, I laid both palms flat on the floor and laughed.

Not a polite laugh or the kind a woman gives at a dinner party when her husband’s colleague tells the same boating story for the third time. This laugh burst out of me, bright and startled, and filled the space until I had to press a hand over my mouth.

Twenty-something. I don’t know how I knew, but somehow I was in my early twenties again.

The mirror over the kitchenette sink confirmed it. Chestnut hair fell around my face in thick, sleep-tangled waves. My cheeks were smooth, my jaw was firm, and my hazel eyes looked enormous without the reading glasses I’d started leaving in every room of the house.

I touched my face with both hands. The girl in the mirror touched hers too.

The girl.

Me.

I was wearing an old black T-shirt from an Asia concert and white cotton underwear with tiny rosebuds on them, which younger Lorrie had probably thought were cute.

For one foolish, glittering minute, I forgot to be afraid as I opened the screen door and stepped outside.

The morning air smelled of chlorine, damp grass, lake water, and charcoal left from someone’s cookout the night before. The pool shone blue beside the brick patio, a single red float drifting lazily in the deep end. Beyond it, the lawn sloped toward Lake Mendota, silver under the early sun. My parents’ house stood across the grass, and my father’s Volvo sat in the driveway beside my white Rabbit convertible.

The Rabbit. I’d loved that ridiculous car even though it had leaked, rattled, and offered roughly the same sense of security as a lawn chair with an engine, but it was a convertible, and back then that was all that mattered.

I ran down the lawn before I could think better of it. My feet skimmed through the dew. My legs stretched strong and sure beneath me, carrying me toward the old oak tree near the lake. I touched the bark with one hand and turned back, laughing as my hair flew behind me and the hem of the T-shirt slapped my thighs. By the time I reached the pool house, my heart was beating fast, but it wasn’t frightening and I wasn’t even out of breath. Everything was just working. Joyfully, outrageously working.

I stood there with the sliding doors open as the turntable inside crackled, and the happiness drained slowly enough for me to feel each inch of its leaving.

This wasn’t a dream. Dreams didn’t smell like chlorine and wet grass, they didn’t have old Tab cans beside the sink, a pair of white Keds under the chair, and a Princess phone on the small table near the door with its cord coiled and tangled from pulling it all over the one room space.