New Messages...and some old (freewrite)

honeydue (68)in #freewrite • 5 years ago

'You should've been there when the fucking phone rang!' she was yelling again and the boy hated it when his mom yelled. They'd been sitting in silence for the past twenty minutes, listening to the messages, each more despairing than the last and each shivered - on his own, sad corner of the couch - as they heard the girl's voice spiraling into nothing.
It wasn't the first time she'd reached out. The boy's inbox was full of messages from her and now this, thirteen messages on their answering machine, all left during a time he should have been at home, where he should've been able to pick up the phone and talk her out of it.
But he hadn't been there. Simple as that.

He'd gone out, though Ray wasn't one to go out much. In a way, that was what pissed his mom off the most, that he was supposedly a reliable kid. That she thought she could trust him, that she knew him. But the truth is, everyone needs an escape plan, one they don't tell anyone, often not even themselves. Not in the middle of the night, in front of a mirror, it's never uttered. And this was Ray's.
He would go into the woods and climb into the tallest tree - an oak, quite old by the looks of it, but very sturdy. He'd climb and climb, pushing himself when he knew he should stop until he made it to the top branch, hugging the tree for his life. And then, when he got to the very top, he would scream as loud as he could and nobody ever heard him. And that, in a way, made it okay for him to scream. Made it like he hadn't screamed at all.
And of course he couldn't tell his mother that, what would she say? How would she react if he told her he hadn't been at home to listen to his sister's hysterical messages because he was out in the woods, yelling at his own worst thoughts?
She wouldn't take it well, not when Nancy was supposed to be the one with the problems. Their mother had made it clear early on that she wouldn't stand two children like that, so Ray had had to step up in a way, to learn to be a man, even though he'd barely had time to be a boy.

_{Photo by Alexander Andrews on Unsplash}

And yet, he'd failed. He hadn't been here to listen, to hear his sister's pleas for help. Not that it was anything special, Nancy was always blowing a light, going off at the slightest issue. It was just Nancy, you know? Even all the messages filling his inbox, they hadn't worried him a bit. It was just Nancy, he'd said, reading them. Skipping ahead because really, once you'd read one message, you'd read them all. The guilt that always seemed to devour his sister was known to him as well. She wrote of endings and that maybe mother birds would be happier if they left their babies.

What would happen if a bird left its babies alone before they knew how to fly? Would they just wander off to the edge and one by one, jump to their deaths in an attempt to fly?

It was just one of the many questions that bothered Nancy and he knew what it meant - that Nancy was thinking (again) of perhaps jumping herself. Oh Nancy, but if you knew how many times I've thought the same thing myself, how many times he'd fantasized of letting go of that oak, of just spreading his wings to fly or perhaps end it all.

The difference was he'd never done it, while she had. The messages had come in a span of two hours, not long, it seems, though just long enough to end a life. Nancy had wanted to speak to her brother before going, but he never picked up. The worst part was they hadn't known. They'd sat down to listen to the messages together, him and his mom, and he'd had to watch as the horror dawned on her face, cracking her pretty features as she realized Nancy would never come home.
No, scratch that, it had been perhaps the second worst thing. The first one was that last message. Short, but just long enough.

I thought you understood.

And he thought so too, but apparently he did not.