That night, the man attempted sleep on the couch in his wife's room.  It was not the couch that made sleep impossible.  He had been sleeping there for many nights already and was used to its unwillingness to give, and the squeaks and squeals it emitted when he rolled around.  No, tonight, his thoughts kept him awake.  Or rather his decisions.  His choices.  Having too many options was a bad thing. 

Sure, it sounded like the perfect solution yesterday, when it was by no means possible.  But today, with it being a reality as far as he could tell...  Well, it complicated matters.  

He wondered if his fatigue was a factor in his inability to be shocked by what he had seen today.  

He rolled over, the couch protesting as he did so, to study his wife's face.  She was always so serene and angelic when she slept, which, at times, was in great contrast to how she was in her waking hours.  He smiled to himself, remembering all of the heated arguments they had gotten into, arguments that had raised snarls and frowns and angry looks from his wife that so quickly vanished into innocence as soon as they went to bed.  

He supposed that if he were to go ahead with his plan tomorrow, that all of those fights and bad memories would vanish as well, though he wasn't sure if that mattered or not.  The hurt was all that really mattered.  He could have lived with all the rest, and he had up until this point.  All of it just water under the bridge.  However, now he saw it as perhaps one of the advantages to what he was considering.  

How could he even consider it?  It seemed like such a poor, selfish choice.  

But every minute he spent in that room with her, listening to her labored breathing as she slept weighted his heart and pushed him closer and closer to his chance of a lifetime.  To accepting John Lennon's gift. 

                          *          *          *

The sun woke him up, and he was surprised that he had managed to fall asleep at all.  He straightened his clothes and came to stand over his wife, who still slumbered on.  

Poor thing, he thought.  She's been so worn out by this.  He reminded himself that she was not the only one, and his mind turned to his mission.  He leaned over her, careful not to wake her, and brushed his lips across hers the way he used to do to when she fell asleep in his lap on the couch after a late-night movie.  Quietly, remorsefully, he slipped away from her bedside in search of a certain man in a white suit.  

The Beatle look-alike had appeared twice before when he was not wanted, and now that he was desperately sought, it was as if he was playing hard to get.  The man checked the cafeteria and the waiting room.  He finally found him in the chapel, sitting rather comfortably at a piano, picking out a familiar tune. 

"Here I am," he sang.  "What can I do for you?  What can I do for you?"

The man studied this person before him in his white suit.  (Did he own any other clothes?)  He felt a nervousness he had never known before.  "So this thing you told me about.  I'll forget?  And she'll forget?"

"It'll be as if it never happened.  Because it won't have ever happened."  

"No tricks?"

Lennon stopped playing the piano and stared him dead in the face.  "No tricks.  You have my word."

For some reason that he couldn't explain, that felt like enough.  "Then I'm ready," he said.

Lennon laughed.  "Oh you are?"  He got up from the piano.  "Right then.  Close your eyes."  He reached out his hand.

The man stepped back, wide-eyed.  "Right here?"

John Lennon laughed again, more gently this time than the previous.  "No one will notice.  I promise."

"Will this hurt?"

"No more than you cause it to."

"What's going to happen?"

The Beatle lowered his hand.  "You will be transported back to a memory of your wife, and there you will have the option to change things."

"Which memory?"

"Your own mind will do the choosing."  He raised his hand again.  "Now are you ready?"

The man closed his eyes and nodded his head.  He felt the Beatle's hand clamp down on his forehead. 

"Wait!  I have to know.  Are you really John Lennon?" he asked hurriedly.

"Who's that?  My name's Elton John," he heard the laughing voice echo as if from far away.  He opened his eyes.  John Lennon was gone.  The man was standing in a stadium.  In the bleachers, on the home side, to be precise.  He knew where he was.  He had been here many times before.  It was his old high school football stadium.  But why was he here now?

His mind reeled.  His memories were already fleeting.  Was this a side effect?  

There were people moving everywhere, and he tried to keep his mind on his work, but what was he supposed to be doing here?  

And then he saw her.  The most beautiful girl he had ever seen, with long, dark blonde hair and a face his father had warned him about.  She wore a red sweater and a plaid skirt, and she was eating an apple while reading a book in the first row.  Who brought a book to a football game?  His mouth hung open when he realized that he was staring at his wife.  Her beauty was so familiar to him that he must have picked her out of the crowd because of it.  But when he placed her image in his head next to the woman in the hospital room, he was overcome by grief.  This beautiful young woman that he met and felt that he would be able to spend the rest of his life with was now withering away, threatening to leave him confused and lonely, and without his best friend.  

The woman looked up at him.  She must have felt his eyes staring at her.  The man blushed in spite of himself, but could not turn away.

She stared back, her two blue-black pools unwavering.  She smiled sweetly, and it was then, in another lifetime, that he had descended the stands and joined her at the bottom, asked her to dinner and a movie for the next night, and left the game with her to go get coffee.  

But not this time.  This time he stood stock-still.  He willed himself not to go to her.  This was the moment of change.  She looked disappointed.  He felt his insides writhing. 

I am ruining the best night of my life, he thought.

She gave him one last, solid look, and then turned away, shoulders slightly slumped.  A coldness began to grow in the pit of his stomach, different from the feeling that the events in the hospital caused.  He saw his whole world flash before his eyes.  

The day he surprised her with one of the cats, its head popping out of a box he had placed near the fireplace they had never used, but always planned to use, were it to ever get cold enough.

The first Thanksgiving at their new apartment, when they attempted to cook dinner and ended up eating in an Italian restaurant downtown because they forgot to take the bag of guts out of the turkey before baking it.  

Their high school prom night, when he proposed to her during the garter dance and had it announced on the loud speaker how much he loved her so that everyone could hear.

How he loved her.  His eyes flooded over with tears, the emotions, unleashed by the memories, threatened to overwhelm him. He watched as her cousin, a redheaded girl, tapped her on the shoulder.  His wife put down her book.  The red-head whispered in her ear.  His wife smiled and stood up.  She was leaving.  She was going to Rory Hill to see a band.  That was where her cousin's friends had gone that night.  

She would go out with them and then back to her own school in the next town.  And that would be the last he would see of her.  And suddenly, he felt as if he couldn't breathe.  No, it couldn't end this way.  He couldn't let it.  

She and the red-headed girl left the stands and headed for the exit.  The man bounded down the stairs, grabbing book she had forgotten, and calling her name at the top of his lungs.  Several people turned around, but not her.  Half-time started, and suddenly the area was flooded with a crowd of a hundred or more, heading for the concessions and bathrooms and payphones.  So many people he could hardly move, and he lost sight of her.  He stood there, a hazard to those trying to get by, feeling lost and alone.  They would share no coffee tonight.  Their moment, their one chance, was lost.  The world around him was already growing dark.  It was over.  He would awake in a new place, totally ignorant of what he had lost, to live his life with an empty feeling he could never explain.  

No, he wouldn't go back.  Not yet.  The darkness threatened to overtake him, but he willed himself to stay, just as he had willed himself to not go to her.  And while this resolve was stronger, he knew it wasn't strong enough.  

And then he saw her.  She had made her way back through the crowd and was coming toward him. He had to remain.  He gritted his teeth and locked his knees to fight against the darkness, but she became only a pinprick of light in his slowly collapsing tunnel vision as darkness came.