That was strange enough to bring me fully awake in an instant. I had a sudden bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. I looked up at Dad and saw that he was worried about this also. He was probably figuring that some girl was calling to tell me that I'd knocked her up.
"Who's the girl?" I asked Dad.
"She didn't give her name." He said. "And I've never heard her voice before."
"All right." I answered, pulling myself out of bed. I threw on a pair of sweat pants and followed Dad downstairs. "Do you mind if I use your den phone?" I asked him.
"Sure." He nodded, waving me towards the room.
I went in and picked up the phone. "I got it!" I yelled through the closed door. A second later I heard the click of the other extension being placed back in its cradle.
I took a deep breath and said into the mouthpiece, "This is Bill."
"Hi Bill." A completely unfamiliar voice said to me. "My name is Linda. Your sister wants to talk to you."
"Tracy?" I said, confused. "What…"
"Hang on a sec." Linda said. A second later I heard her voice say faintly, "It's him."
"Thanks." My sister's faint voice replied.
There was a long pause and I heard the sound of a door shutting somewhere in the room where Tracy was. I figured that was Linda leaving the room to give Tracy some privacy.
At last Tracy's loud voice said, "Bill?" Her voice sounded haunted, scared.
What had happened?
"Yeah." I answered. "What's going on Trace?"
"I had Linda call for me so that Mom or Dad wouldn't know it was me." She explained.
"That's fine." I replied quickly. "What's wrong Trace? Are you all right?"
"How did you know Bill?" She asked, demanded. "How do you know the things you know?"
"What happened Tracy?" I asked. "Tell me why you called."
"Last night." She said, "I went to a party with Darren in the city. A frat party. There was a keg of beer there and everyone, me included, got pretty drunk."
My mouth suddenly dried up as I heard this. "Go on." I said numbly.
"When it came time to leave Darren insisted he was okay to drive. He told me he wasn't really drunk and that he was okay. My judgement was pretty screwed up by the alcohol I guess and I believed him. I believed him! We walked out to the car and I had every intention of getting into it with him.
I mean he seemed fine! He was walking okay, talking okay, everything!"
"Tracy, what happened?" I asked.
"When he went to unlock the car he had trouble getting the key into the lock. Just a little bit of trouble but he couldn't quite get it to fit in there." Her voice started to break a little. "Part of me tried to ignore this. I tried to tell myself that it didn't mean anything. But I remembered what you had said to me, how you'd warned me, and at the last second I told Darren that I didn't think he should be driving."
"And then what happened?"
"We had a fight. We yelled at each other out in the parking lot and he sounded so damn reasonable that I almost got in again. But I couldn't bring myself to do it. I just couldn't! So anyway he eventually got totally pissed off and drove off without me. I caught a cab home, bitching the whole time about you and your stupid warnings, about how I was going to have to pay twenty bucks to get home when a perfectly good ride had driven off without me, shit like that."
"And?" I asked, knowing there was more or she wouldn't have called.
"I got back to the dorm safely and passed out in my bed. When I woke up this morning I was told that Darren drove his car into San Francisco Bay on his way home last night."
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.