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."
I took a swallow, finding the beer very tasty despite the early hour. "Not bad." I told her, drinking some more.
"Okay," She said. "Enough preliminaries. Let's talk."
I set my bottle down on the coffee table, struck by the strangeness of drinking a beer while still dressed in the clothes I'd slept in, my baggy sweats and a T-shirt. Tracy too was still dressed in her customary long T-shirt, this one with the University's logo on the front. Her legs were crossed Indian style on the couch, her eyes looking expectantly at me. I still had no idea what I was going to tell her, how much I should tell her.
"Why don't we start," I told her. "With what you DO know and what you think is going on here. Tell me that."
"Why do you want to hear that?" She asked.
"I just want to see how this whole thing looks to someone close to me."
She thought for a second and then nodded, taking another sip of beer. "Fair enough." She told me. "Here's what I know. I know that the day you told me about the accident I was scheduled to be in the first time, your personality underwent a radical change. One day you were immature little Billy, the next day you were hugging on me, telling me you loved me, and you weren't sure of the exact date. You got into a fight with a huge bully at school, something completely out of character for you, and you put him in the hospital. You came home that day and caught us smoking pot in the living room and you reamed us for it, the same way an adult would, but also different somehow. You also made Cindy's asshole boyfriend back down, and let me tell you, he doesn't back down too often.
"So I'm forced to conclude that whatever happened to you, happened on that day. Am I right?"
I nodded. "Yes. That was the first day."
"That night you came to my room and told me that creepy-ass story about the car accident. You gave me exact details, exact, about what would happen, who would be in the car, etc. You told me things you had absolutely no right knowing and they turned out to be true.
"About the same time you completely lost all of your shyness. One day I was wondering if my little brother was EVER going to get himself laid and the next day you're suddenly a male slut, bagging everything left and right and apparently, if my information was correct, doing a very good job of it.
"You also developed a sudden interest in the stock market and in finding a job. Your grades improved overnight. And I even heard that you put a few teachers in their places."
"Okay." I nodded, surprised at the amount of information Tracy possessed. Again I was forced to wonder just how much my parents knew or suspected. "So tell me, what do you think all of this means?"
"Well obviously something very strange happened to you on that first day." She offered.
"Such as?"
"I think you had some sort of well, psychic flash. I think you had some sort of Scrooge type experience while you slept that night. Something that showed you what the future was going to be like and was realistic enough that you were unable to simply discount it as a dream. That doesn't explain everything of course, but I think that's something like what happened to you. I don't know how such a thing is possible, or why you were chosen to have this knowledge, but somehow, you were shown the future, including my death, and you were able to stop certain things and start others. Am I close?"
"Kind of." I said, taking another sip, surprised to find that the bottle was now empty. I leaned forward and grabbed another one, opening it up with the bottle opener. "You are somewhat on track here but the truth is actually a little stranger than that."
"So what IS the truth?" She asked, grabbing a fresh beer of her own. "Like I said before Bill, I think I have a right to this information."
"And you do Tracy," I agreed. "You really do and I think that maybe with both of our minds working on some of the problems that have cropped up here, maybe something can be done. But there is one thing."
"What's that?"
"If I tell you what I know, what happened to me, you can never tell anyone else. NEVER. If you were to do that and word about what happened got to the wrong people the consequences could be disastrous. Mostly for me, but also for our family. There are people in the world that would literally kill in order to possess the information that I have. Do you understand that?"