I was not positive if I was driven by frustration or my own intuition, but when Sunday finally rolled around I decided to do something brash. I know that on one level, I was extremely irritated that the weekend that I had been looking forward to a week ago had come and gone without me spending any quality time with my favorite females. I was feeling impetuous and decided to see just how far I could push the safety net. I threw myself on the mercy of Hannah’s promise to stop me if I set my foot wrong. So I picked up the phone and dialed Haley’s number instead of Hannah’s.
The phone rang more than once, which was a good indication that Haley had not placed a ‘block’ on my number. In case you are not aware, if you are blocked by someone using their cell phone to avoid you, when you place the call it will immediately dump you into the voicemail system without ever giving you the ring tone, or it might possibly ring one single time before going to voice mail depending on the service provider of whoever it is that you are trying to call. After three rings, about enough time for someone to look at the caller ID and then press the reject button, the call went to Haley’s voice mail and her welcome message played to me. As I listened to her voice, I realized that I had a good grip on what I wanted to leave as a message.
“Haley, this is Skip. Let me start out by saying that if I did ANYTHING at all to upset you, then I am very truly sorry. I would never do anything to upset you. I am deeply in love with Hannah and I know that the two of you come as a package deal. That being said, I was really enjoying the fact that you and I seemed to be getting close to each other. I grew up as an only child and it felt really good for the two of us to be getting along so well. I crave having a sister’s love.
“Literally overnight, Hannah has become the center of my universe. I need her every bit as much as I need oxygen to breathe and sustain my life. But I also need YOU, Haley. You can call me a greedy bastard if you want to, but it doesn’t change the fact that I WANT IT ALL. Hannah told me that your main impetus for putting distance between the two of us had something to do with Hannah’s ‘master dream’. You told her that you were fixing to cause a disaster and you were trying to keep it from happening. I believe that IF you were taking the wrong path that Hannah would know it and stop you before you could do something wrong. Those were the same instructions that she gave to me.
“The one thing that I know for certain, babe, is that the three of us CANNOT go on like this. I am absolutely positive that we are currently on the road to ruin. Only God in Heaven above knows the number of days that we have been blessed with to live on this earth. But you and I cannot spend the next 60, 70, or however many years we have remaining to us being apart like this. Sweetheart, please come over and see me. We can work this out. Let Hannah guide you. I need you, Haley. Please!”
In retrospect, maybe I should have ended the voice mail with a ‘goodbye’ before I hung up, but I didn’t. In less than three minutes, my phone began ringing but the caller ID said ‘Hannah Fletcher’ on it instead of ‘Haley Fletcher’. I immediately had a feeling of dread, but I swiped up on the green icon to accept the call irregardless. There was no way in hell that I wasn’t going to answer her. If I was in for a butt chewing, then so be it. Hannah wanted to me act without overthinking things and that was exactly what I had done.
“What the fuck, Skip?”
“I guess that I screwed the pooch then, huh?”
“I don’t know just yet. I know that you left her a voice mail though. We were sitting together watching a rerun of ‘Night Court’ on the TV when Haley’s phone rang. I was just a tiny bit surprised that you were calling her phone instead of mine, but I knew that you must have had a good reason for calling her phone, so I thought nothing of it, seriously. A commercial break had just started when her phone chimed for the voice mail, so she didn’t hesitate to check it.
“As she was listening to you, her face slowly drained of color and her eyes got damp. I’m pretty sure that she got to the end of it before she jumped up off of the couch and ran to her room. She slammed the door and locked me out again. She has the phone with her, so I can’t listen to the voice mail. But she is in her room crying her eyes out with another total meltdown. So before I can resume damage control, I need to know exactly what you said!”
“Fuck me! Okay, so best as I can remember…”
I did the best that I could to remember exactly everything that I had told Haley in my message. It is crazy that I had just said all of these things less than five minutes ago, and yet I was struggling to replay them from memory without leaving anything unsaid because you never know what minor detail would be the key piece of information. Just as I was wrapping up my recitation to Hannah, my phone chimed indicating that I had received a new text message from someone. Checking the notification, it was from Haley.
‘Please do not answer your phone when I call you. Please send me directly to your voice mail because I am not strong enough to hear your voice without breaking down again. I will call you in about two minutes. Hopefully I will have enough composure by then to respond to you. Don’t answer my call!’
I reread the text message a second time, this time out loud to Hannah. Hannah asked me to call her back after I listened to Haley’s response and I promised her that I would. True to her word, my phone rang at the appointed time with Haley’s caller ID displayed. I promptly rejected the call just as she had requested. After about four or five minutes, I was rewarded with a notification chime that I had received a new voice mail message. I opened it up and played it, my heart melting from the sound of Haley’s voice alone. When it finished playing, I had to select the option to replay it all over again because I had focused on the sound of her voice without carefully listening to the words of the message that she sent.
“Hey Skip. I am going to start out by telling you that you did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG. Everything that has been going on for the past week is entirely my own fault. I would be lying if I told you that it has nothing at all to do with you because obviously it does. But I am the one who is at fault here and not you. So please, no more apologies. I am sorry for putting that weight on your shoulders by my actions. I didn’t think far enough ahead to realize that you would blame yourself for our issues even though you are completely innocent.
“Something that you said at the beginning of your message hit home just like an arrow straight through my heart. I grew up with a sister, but no brothers so I allowed myself to drop all of my guards and protections. Just like you, something inside of me was yearning for that sibling connection. But since you were an only child, you were probably feeling the effect doubled or tripled over what I started feeling when I realized that you were soon to be a permanent fixture in our lives.
“You and I got off to a very rocky start, though. Didn’t we?” Haley chuckled to herself before continuing, “I woke up in my bed that morning, hung over and without any clue as to how I got home. The last memory that I had before waking up was having dinner at the restaurant. So I staggered into Hannah’s bedroom to ask her if she had picked me up and brought me home. I certainly wasn’t expecting to find my innocent little baby sister naked in her bed with a naked man holding her close. Short of having 5 gallons of ice water pored over your head, best cure for a hangover ever! I was instantly alert and firing on all 8 cylinders!”
She laughed out loud for a moment before she could go on, “I’m really glad that my first reaction was not to go for Hannah’s side-table. In case she hasn’t told you, she keeps a Sig Sauer model P238 in there. Daddy bought it for her as an eighteenth birthday present, so it hasn’t been there long enough for me to remember that it was there in the heat of the moment. Just on an unrelated side note, Daddy bought me a Colt Mustang on my eighteenth birthday too. They both use the same ammunition or so I am told. I made Daddy hold onto mine until I decide exactly what I want to do with it. I don’t do guns in case you have not figured it out yet.
“I listened very carefully to what you said about letting Hannah be a guide to both of us. You’re absolutely correct about that. Her dream was just a totally abstract idea to me until you showed up and all of her predictions of what would happen suddenly started to come true, one right after another and in perfect sequence! I have to confess that in the beginning I believed her dream to be a total farce for a long, long time. Years and years had passed without a single sign coming true, so I came close to teasing her about it on several occasions. Especially on those mornings when she would meet me at the dining table for breakfast and blurt out that she had had the dream again the previous night as she slept.
“It is too late tonight to dive into anything of that nature and my emotions are still not strong enough to handle anything right away. But I promise to work very hard on ending this alienation between us. Please be patient with me. It is going to take some time for me to get my courage back. You’re probably not going to believe this, but I am going to say it anyway. I am missing you every bit as much as you say that you are missing me. I am hurting too, so I promise that I will try and fix this. Good night and sweet dreams little brother.”
After listening to the message that second time, I immediately called back Hannah to share the information. She wanted to know if I would be okay with letting her hear it for herself or was it too personal for me to share? I told her that I had no secrets at all from her if she was going to someday be my wife. I was doing everything in my power to not make any mistakes because both Hannah and Haley are just that important to me. My cell phone gives me the ability to forward messages like this to other people in my contact list. So I activated that command and sent her a copy.
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