There was silence on the line as I digested this, as shivers went up and down my body. "Tracy, Jesus." I said. "Thank God I talked to you. What happened to Darren?"
She sniffed a little. "He's fine." She told me. "He pulled himself out of the car without any problems. Of course he got arrested for drunk driving but other than that he's fine." She paused. "But I wouldn't have been, would I?" She asked me, almost accused me.
"I don't think so Tracy." I told her.
"What is going on here Bill?" She demanded. "I think I deserve an explanation! Is this going to keep happening over and over until finally I die?"
"Tracy, I just don't know." I said. "All I know is that you need to be as careful as you can."
"Christ!" She told me. "You're telling me that fate has got a hard-on for me, that I'm supposed to drown in a traffic accident! How can I live a normal life if I have to worry about this all of the time? Is there any way to stop this?"
"I don't know." I said in answer to both of her questions. "I just don't know."
"Tell me what you DO know!" She yelled. "I have a goddam right to this information! Tell me!"
"Tracy, I can't."
"Why not?" She asked. "You come up with all this mystical shit, mystical shit that just happens to be true. Shit you have no business knowing and you won't tell me how you're getting this information?"
She had a point there. "Are you coming home for Thanksgiving Tracy?" I asked her.
"I don't know." She said, semi-hysterically. "Is it safe for me to fly on an airplane?"
A legitimate question. "I think so." I told her, figuring that fate wouldn't kill several hundred people just to get at my sister. "Why don't you come home then. We'll have a nice family get-together and you and I will sit down and have a talk."
"And you'll tell me what you know?"
"As much as I can." I promised, although I wasn't sure just how much 'as much as I can' encompassed.
"And in the meantime?" She asked.
"And in the meantime stay out of cars with people who have been drinking. Stay out of cars completely if you can avoid it. Fate does seem to have a hard-on for you Tracy. So don't give it an easy mark. In a way the accident that your boyfriend had…"
"He's not my boyfriend any more." She spat. "You can bet your sweet ass on that."
"Right," I said, and then continued. "As I was saying, the accident that he had leads me to believe that certain pre-conditions have to be met. I don't know this for sure so be careful with everything you do, but it seems that the factors of a car, a drunk, and water all have to be met. Just to be safe, stay away from water too. Don't go swimming."
"And if you're wrong about these pre-conditions?" She asked.
How to answer that one. If I was wrong then Tracy was probably fucked. Fate would take her at its leisure. "Let's just hope I'm not wrong Tracy." I finally said. "Come home for Thanksgiving and we'll see what we can figure out."
"All right Bill." She said. "What else can I do?"
Chapter 7
Now I've gained some understanding
Of the only world that we see
Things that I once dreamed of
Have become reality
These walls that still surround me
Still contain the same old me
Just one more who is searching for
The world that ought to be
All the same we take our chances
Laughed at by time
Tricked by circumstances
RUSH
Okay, I'm going out on a limb with this chapter. Due to the specifics of the plot at this particular junction in the story, I am not able to provide a sex scene in this installment. It simply would not work and would run counter to the characterization. I thought I would put that right out front since this is, after all, a sex-stories newsgroup. If anyone does not wish to read this chapter because of this I will understand, but be advised that if you skip this chapter you most likely will not have any idea what is going on in the next chapter if you choose to read that one. My thanks in advance to all whom will bear with me for this chapter in which much is resolved but in which nobody gets laid. I would also like to thank Tony Tiger, a frequent corespondent of mine, for providing me with the nodal and cascading theories that appear here. Putting names to what I was thinking helped me immensely.
I went with Mom and Dad to pick up Tracy at the airport on Wednesday night before Thanksgiving. For any of you that have ever been to a large metropolitan area's air terminal on such a date you can appreciate the chaos that results from having five times as many people in the building as the fire code probably allows. It was wall to wall people pushing from one place to the next, all of them dressed in winter clothing since an early snowstorm had decided to descend upon our fair city. The noise and the crowding were suffocating and Tracy's plane arrived nearly thirty minutes late.
But when we saw her walking out of the skyway towards us it made it all worthwhile. Unlike Mom and Dad, I had not realized how much I'd missed my sister until I saw her. Being younger I beat them to her and got the first hug of greeting.
Before Mom and Dad could reach us Tracy whispered in my ear. "You promised me a talk."
"Soon." I told her. "Soon."
It was nearly eleven o'clock before we got home that night and all of us went straight to bed. There would be no talk that night. The next day relatives began to pour in from other parts of Spokane and from as far away as Sandpoint, Idaho and Moses Lake in the southern part of Washington. Mom made a huge turkey dinner that we all demolished and Tracy and I took our turns in the barrel having our cheeks pinched and being told how much we'd grown. By the time all of the relatives cleared out it was nine o'clock and we were all exhausted once more.
Mom and Dad had a long-standing tradition that they shared with another couple, the male half of which was a private pilot. Each day after Thanksgiving they would pile into a rented airplane and fly to Seattle to have lunch at the space needle. It was an annual event that they'd participated in for as long as I could remember. They'd even continued to do it in my previous life after Tracy's death. They'd offered, halfheartedly I might add, to cancel it this year since Tracy only had a few days with us before she returned to Berkeley, but both Tracy and myself insisted they go.
"Bill and I can find something to do." Tracy told them, looking sharply at me.
"Yeah." I agreed. "We'll keep ourselves busy."
So it came to pass that Mom and Dad piled into their car at eight o'clock on Friday morning for the trip to the small municipal airport from which they would depart. Experience had taught both my sister and I that they would not return until at least six o'clock that evening.
Their car couldn't have been more than a mile from our suburban house before Tracy got off the couch and headed up to her old room. I gave her a puzzled look that grew more puzzled when she returned carrying a twelve pack of beer in her hands.
"Okay," She told me, slapping the beer down on the coffee table. "I scored us a twelver of this imported shit back in California and brought it all the way here for this talk." She ripped open the package, which was green and contained a brand of beer I'd never heard of; something called Steinlager. She pulled out two bottles and popped the tops with a bottle opener.
"Tracy, it's only eight in the morning." I protested. "I haven't even had breakfast yet."
She smiled. "Little brother," She said. "If you want to be successful when you go to college you'd better learn to drink beer first thing in the morning. It's a requirement." She handed one to me.
I took it, surprised to find that it was icy cold.
"Something else you learn in college." She told me, taking a huge swallow. "If you want to keep your beer cold in the absence of a refrigerator, store it outside in the cold. I put this on the roof outside my window last night. Thank God it didn't get below freezing."