I find the ratchet and hand it to him. The transistor is belting out a little Steely Dan—Do It Again—and suddenly I’m twelve.
“You look like you took one on the chin, Rem.” He takes the bolts off the timing belt cover and removes it.
“Had a little scuffle chasing a suspect last night.”
“Give me the 22 mil.”
I find it and he uses it to turn the crank shaft to align the timing marks on the pulley with the engine pointer.
“Are the left cam shaft timing marks aligned?”
I stick my head into the engine. I know he can see these for himself, but maybe he also thinks I’m still twelve. “Yep.”
“So, did you get him?”
“Nope.” I don’t want to tell him the rest. “He’s still at large. The right timing marks are off.”
“It’s what I thought—timing belt’s jumped. We’ll have to re-align it.”
It occurs to me in a not-funny way that that’s why I’m here—to realign time. Or, rather, to make it run better.
“Funny that just one tooth off can make a car run so rough and send it out of commission.”
I stare at him. That’s it, of course. One tooth is off in my spectacular plan to fix time. Maybe I already fixed it, though. If Hassan doesn’t know Danny is the shooter, then maybe he never sends the drive by.
As for me, well…I’ll just have to watch my back. Funny, the chill of death seems to have dissipated with the sunlight.
Dad glances at me. “You okay?”
“Yep.”
“You working on any big cases?” He’s loosening the timing belt tensioner to allow slack.
“A murder case. A young woman—runaway, we think. Her parents have been searching for her for three months.” The words are out before I can snake them back, and I’m suddenly keenly aware of my father’s own fruitless search for Mikey. But he just nods as he slides the belt off the right cam shaft sprocket.
“The poor parents. It’s terrible to wonder every night where your child is. You spend all your time trying to figure out if you could have done something different, rewriting your responses, imagining a different outcome.” He loosens the timing belt tensioner to get slack, then turns the cam shaft back a tooth. “At least now they know.” He puts the belt back on and I watch in silence, my heart a fist in my chest.
I take a breath, not sure if I want to ask the question.
Frankly, not sure if I want the answer either. “Would you do things differently, Dad? Now that you know.”
He pauses for a sec, then stands as he gingerly pulls his wrench out, relaxing the tension on the old motor.
“I don’t know, son. As a father, you can’t ever give up. It’s in your bones. You can’t stop caring. The only way you survive is to hang onto hope. Otherwise, your life becomes despair.”
He bends back over the engine. “But I also believe that everything happens for a reason, and to ignore that reason and start over is to miss the lesson.”
I shake my head. “What lesson can be learned by Mikey’s death, Dad. C’mon.”
He glances over and meets my eyes. “Even in tragedy there are lessons, Rem. Everyone has something in their past they'd like to redo. It doesn't mean it should be redone. Our mistakes, our tragedies, our suffering make us better, stronger, more compassionate people. And those are lessons we learn by going through the pain, not around it.”
He leans up again, grabs a rag to wipe the wrench. Looks away. “But if I had to do it over, I might not have obsessed so long on finding the son I lost, to the detriment of the one I still had.”
A hand has pressed my chest and I can’t breathe. I nod, and also look away—
“I’m going to crank the engine over a couple times, then align the marks again. Take a look and see if all three line up.”
Somehow, I do, although my eyes are blurry. “Yep. All aligned.”