She told him the answer to his problem was simple, if he would only look beyond his fears and face it.
"The door is unlocked," she explained, her gypsy eyes glistening in the candle-lit room. The air was thick with the aroma of incense. The walls were covered with smoke-stained tapestries with images of wild animals outlined in golden-brown threads. Their growling faces stared at him, daring him to act. He turned back to the gypsy. Her eyes were deep, dark pools. Who was she? Where did she come from?
"Find it, and turn the knob," she urged. "Take your chance!"
"Chance?" he asked, putting a hand to his throbbing temple. What could she be talking about?
"A second chance," she replied. "It is yours for the taking, if you want it. It is just beyond the door."
His eyes scanned the room once more. The only door he remembered was the one at the glass storefront he had stumbled through only minutes before. He had lived on this block for seven months and thought he knew it well, but he hadn't noticed this place before tonight. A fortuneteller? Where was the liquor store where he purchased his cheap wine and cigarettes?
His thoughts were muddled. Had he finally overdosed? Was he dead? He closed his eyes and tried to retrace his steps. He had entered the store, but instead of the familiar clerk, he had found this woman who had taken his hand in hers and guided him through a green velvet curtain into a back room. There she had taken the remaining money stuffed in his soiled pocket and told him things he hadn't had the guts to face in years: vile secrets from a life gone wrong.
Her words hurt, but he couldn't ignore them. She was right; he had thrown his life away. But that was the past, he told her lamely, and the past could not be taken back.
"You are wrong," she answered. "Sometimes, not too often, time pauses. It pauses at the door."
"What door?" he asked again his frustration mounting. "There is none."
"The door is within, it is without," she replied cryptically. "It is real, it is not real. It is a door of solid oak. It is a door made of air."
He stood to leave this craziness. He tore his eyes from hers, only to come to rest on her folded hands. Her long, deep-red fingernails curved in a downward arch. They seemed to glow in the darkened room, swirling in their cuticle barriers like pools of blood.
"Go!" she whispered, pointing a finger up at him.
He turned to escape through the heavy curtain hoping to find the liquor store that sold despair to those who had the money, and go out to the rain-streaked city street, back to the empty apartment, to resume the shambles of his life.
But when he parted the drape, he faced a door. It was dark and forbidding. Its surface was carved with half moons, stars and the incantations of ancient runes. Its knob was cut crystal.
"Open it!" her distant voice commanded. "Sometimes time pauses."
He put his fingers to his lips to stop a scream, and he forced his trembling hand to grip the sparkling knob. The door opened with a sigh.
"Step through!" she urged, her voice more distant till.
He turned to see her one last time, but she was gone. Everything was gone. "Why?" he asked the air around him, but there was no reply. He stepped through the door and fell....
He awoke as a child on a cold Minnesota morning, frost on his bedroom windowpane, and the smell of hot oatmeal drifting from the kitchen, his mother rattling the morning dishes.
"Wake up, Andrew Walter!" she called, using his first two names. She meant business. He had overslept again. He would have to play tag with the school bus, in an attempt to avoid the two-mile walk through the snow that would make him late once again.
He looked at his eleven-year-old face in his bathroom mirror and realized with a grin that shaving would not be necessary on this morning. There were no facial hair and no dead-end factory job awaiting him. There were no addictions to help him make it through another grueling day. On this snow-filled morning he looked at his fading freckles and realized he had been given something, something precious, something he had not even dared to wish before the gypsy had taken his hand and the cash from his pocket.
He was being given a second chance.
He sat on his bed and thought carefully. Could this be real? He held out his hand. A silver Boy Scout ring glistened from his finger. The scars were gone. The bailing machine had yet to etch its tattoo signature. The tracks of needles he used to kill the pain were still twenty years in the future. It was the perfect hand of a young man with a lifetime ahead of him.
A second chance. The words echoed in his brain.
"Andrew Walter Benson, you get in here right now!" his mother yelled. "You'll be late again!"
Yes, he would be late again. He would have to listen to Mrs. Sutcliff's admonitions in front of the snickering class. He would have to face the anger of his father when he returned late from the fields to face his errant son with yet another failing report card.
But there was one thing he knew on this cold morning. A second chance was being given; a second chance would be used. Used to the fullest.
He stood and grabbed at his folded school clothes lying neatly at the base of the bed. "Coming, mom!" he heard his preadolescent voice yell. "I'm going as fast as I can!"
