Rollback

"I’m going to miss him," Sarah said, standing next to him by the sink.

He glanced briefly at the mirror above the basin, showing his own youthful reflection, and her aged one. "Me, too," he said, very softly.

"Sarah," said Pam, as they stood at the door to Bill’s condominium apartment, "thank you for coming." Don’s sister-in-law was a thin woman in her late seventies, short, with high cheek-bones. She looked at Don and scowled. She probably recognized the distinctive Halifax features, including the large nose and high forehead, but not the specific face. "I’m sorry…?"

"Pam, it’s me. It’s Don."

"Oh, right. The rollback. I — I didn’t imagine…" She stopped. "You look good."

"Thanks. Look, how are you holding up?"

Pam was clearly frazzled, but she said, "I’m okay."

"Where’s Alex?"

"In the den. We’re trying to find Bill’s lawyer’s name."

Sarah said, "I’ll go help Alex." And she made her way further into the apartment.

Don looked at Pam. "Poor Bill," he said, having nothing better to offer.

"There’s so much to do," said Pam, sounding overwhelmed. "A notice on the Star’s website. Organizing the… the funeral."

"It’ll all get taken care of," said Don. "Don’t worry." He gestured toward the living room, and led Pam further into her own home. "Do you need a drink?"

"I’ve already got one going." She lowered herself into an amorphous fluorescent-green chair with a tubular metal frame; his brother’s taste in furniture had always been more avant-garde than his own. Don found another, matching chair.

Pam’s drink — amber colored, with ice — was on a table by her chair. She took a sip.

"God, look at you."

Don felt uncomfortable, and he shifted his gaze to look out the fifth-floor window, taller, more-expensive condo towers filling most of the view. "I didn’t ask for it," he said.

"I know. I know. But my Bill — if he’d had a rollback, why…"

He’d still be alive, Don thought. Yes, I know.

"You were… you were…" Pam was shaking her head back and forth. She stopped speaking with her thought uncompleted.

"What?" asked Don.

She looked away. The living-room walls were lined with bookcases; Pam and Bill even had bookshelves built-in above the door lintels. "Nothing."

"No, tell me," he said.

She turned back to him, and the anger and betrayal were apparent on her face.

"You’re older than Bill," she said.

"By fifteen months, yes."

"But now you’re going to be around for decades!"

He nodded. "Yes?"

"You were the older brother," she said, as if resenting that it had to be spelled out.

"You were supposed to go first."

All Saints’ Kingsway Anglican Church had been the church of Don’s childhood, remembered now more for the Boy Scout meetings he’d attended there than for anything the minister had said. Don hadn’t been in the building for — well, the phrase that came to his mind, no doubt because of his current surroundings, was "for God knows how long," although he didn’t in fact believe in a God who kept track of such minutiae.

The coffin was closed, which was just as well. People had always said that Don and Bill looked a lot alike, but Don had no desire to have the comparison — and the contrast — highlighted. Indeed, since Bill had never had a weight problem, Don looked more like Bill had at twenty-five than he himself had at that age. He was the only one in the room who had known Bill back then, and—

No. No, wait! Over there, talking to Pam, could that be- ?

It was. Mike Braeden. God, Don hadn’t seen him since high school. But there was no mistaking that broad, round face, with the close-together eyes and the one continuous eyebrow; even wrinkled and sagging, it was still obviously him.

Mike had been in Bill’s year, but Don had known him, too. One of only four boys on a block mostly populated by girls, Mike — Mikey, as he’d been known back then, or Mick, as he’d styled himself briefly during his early teens — had been a mainstay of street-hockey games, and had belonged to the same Scout troop that had met here.

"That’s Mike Braeden," Don said to Sarah, pointing. "An old friend."

She smiled indulgently. "Go over and say hello."

He scuttled sideways between two rows of pews. When he got to Mike, Don found he was doing what one does at funerals, sharing a little remembrance of the dearly departed with the next of kin. "Old Bill, he loved his maple syrup," Mike was saying, and Pam nodded vigorously, as if they’d reached agreement on a nanotech-test-ban treaty. "And none of that fake stuff for him, if you please," Mike continued. "It had to be the real thing, and—"

And he stopped, frozen, as motionless as Bill himself doubtless was in his silk-lined box. "My… God," Mike managed after a few moments. "My God. Sorry, son, you took my breath away. You’re the spitting image of Bill." He narrowed his beady eyes and drew his one eyebrow, now thundercloud gray, into a knot. "Who… who are you?"

"Mikey," Don said, "it’s me. Don Halifax."

"No, it—" But then he stopped again. "My God, it— you do look like Donny, but…"

"I’ve had a rollback," Don said.

"How could you—"