He would’ve answered the knock at his front door and signed for the package, then sliced it open with the penknife he’d begrudgingly accepted on one of his unacknowledged birthdays.

He would’ve pushed his bifocals down on his nose and read what looked like the front page of a small-town California newspaper. The Littleton Journal. Where had he heard that name before?

He would’ve read it more than once. He would’ve seen the note I sent along with it. The one that explained how this particular front page had never seen the light of day. Till now. But that it wasn’t too late. It’s never too late. There’s no statute of limitations on a story-something he used to say.

He would’ve dismissed it, of course.

At first.

Recalled my phone call and been ready to airmail it into the waste basket. But there was that blueprint. He would’ve been forced to study it-how could you not? The date and location and name clearly written there in official-looking type. He would’ve gone online. He would’ve looked up Littleton Flats. The flood. The dam. Lloyd Steiner. VA Hospital 138. He’s a journalist. He would’ve done what a journalist does. He would’ve investigated.

He wouldn’t stop investigating until he found out. One way or another.

He will get the story out.

Not under the byline of a disgraced fabulist-the polite term for me. For pathological liar. No. It will come out under the byline of a much-respected editor whose only crime was having had me as a reporter.

The engines grow louder.

I still haven’t turned around.

I will wait until they’re right there.

I grip the gun in my left pocket. Mano a mano. Duel in the desert. Every gunfight I’d ever seen on my living room TV back in Queens.

Maybe I’ll make it. You never know.

Either way, Tom Valle will be dead. Gone. Forgotten.

If not in a blaze of glory, in the pale hue of redemption. I have taken the liar out to the woodshed and I have finally set him right.

I grip the gun. I turn.

The words of something flit through my mind. Something they read at Jimmy’s funeral-I’d never forgotten it; years later I looked it up and memorized each word. An appropriate sendoff for Jimmy, and Benjy, and Eddie Bronson, for all the doomed children in this world, those who grow up and those who don’t. For everyone we can’t help mourning for.

Even me.

I am standing upon that shore. A ship at my side spreads its white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. Soon she hangs like a speck of a white cloud just where the sea and sky mingle. And just at the moment when someone at my side says “There! She’s gone!” I know there are other eyes watching the ship coming, and other voices ready to take up the glad shout, “Here she comes!”

And that is dying.

I hope it’s true.

I hope it’s true.

About the Author

JAMES SIEGEL is an award-winning executive creative director at BBDO, the New York City advertising agency. He lives on Long Island, New York.