Ring! The sudden sound of the telephone shoves away thoughts of any previous dreams. For a few groggy seconds, I wonder who in the world would call at 5:20am. Wait. I realize my dad had planned to go skiing this morning. Was the phone call about him?
“He left this morning…” I hear my mom say. Huh?! What’s going on? Before I can stop it, panic washes over. Is he okay?
Nothing could have happened, I tell myself. Seriously, what are the chances of something bad really happening? It's probably like that time my mother got scared when I didn't answer the phone because it was silent... right? But in that moment, there were a lot of “what ifs” rushing through my head. It’s early in the morning, before sunset. He went to sleep pretty late last night. There seemed to be a lot of worst-case scenarios. What if someone had run into him? What if he had run into someone else? What if some other freak accident that I had no way of imagining had happened? Granted, there were also many best-case scenarios, ones that were considerably more likely than the worst-case ones. It could be like the cell phone story. It could just be that he got lost. Horror movie images cross my mind. The more logical part of me tells those thoughts to go back to the stories they came from. But logic, I found, can’t win in a wrestle with frightened imagination. I get out of bed to find my mom, who’s still talking to the bus driver and is calling my dad’s cell phone.
“I’ll call him right now, hang on,” she says into one phone.
“Hey… where are you? The bus driver’s calling,” she asks to the other.
“Yeah, I’m waiting here…” comes the reply.
The moment of panic dissipates as fast as it came with the sound of his voice. I go back into my own bedroom, get back into bed.
Just had to make sure.
