Murphy's Law

Two Hours After

A paramedic looks me over behind the front desk, probably because I can barely keep my feet under me. Probably also because of the glazed look I must have in my eyes. Natasha looms over me, her eyes swollen and red like it's pollen on the air, not something else.

The paramedic gives me a conditional all clear.

"He can't just stand outside. He's on the verge of heatstroke," she says to Natasha and an overseeing police officer. I'm invisible. I'm not there at all, except as an unwelcome distraction.

"Heather's coming," I say, but it doesn't sound like my voice coming out of me. It belongs to somebody further away.

Natasha nods. She sucks in a shaky breath, still nodding. "Come with me."

I avoid looking at the people in uniform. If I don't look at them, I won't see the expressions washing over their tired faces. I won't see how overwhelmed they are, how they don't know what to say to me at all.

Natasha grabs a bottle of water from the front desk before leading me slowly down the familiar hall I've walked a thousand times, a million times. Natasha fumbles with her keys in front of a door. The jangle of them just exaggerates the shaking of her hands. She finds the key and unlocks the door and lets me into my mother's office.

"Natasha?" I say, before she can shut the door again behind her.

She purses her lips, keeping herself from crying again. I almost can't do it. I almost can't ask her.

"Is she...?" I ask. 

She shakes her head, reaching up to brush the tears out of her eyes before they can fall again.

"I'm so sorry, Tim." Then, the door closes and I'm alone.

"Should he really be left alone right now?" Natasha asks outside the door.

"We have a lot of witnesses to question and not enough man power," an officer replies, "his guardian is on her way."

What he means is that the police force of Murphy is stretched too thin to babysit.

I drop into the office chair behind the desk. I swivel round and round until the dizziness of spinning is worse than the dizziness of waiting. My head spins. It doesn't feel real. I can't feel anything except for a tingle in my skin.

I stop spinning, but the room keeps going. The picture of me on the desk wavers in my vision. Why that one? My grade six school picture. I got a suspension and missed the first picture day, and the day before retakes, Jeremy Sheridan chipped my left eye tooth.

So, there I am, smiling my broken smile. My hair is too long, falling into my eyes in the black waves. Blue-eyed, unlike my mother.

Why? Why that picture?

My chest tightens because I can't ask. There's no one to answer and the wave hits. I'm drowning. There's water in my lungs. I can move, but it does nothing. There's no surface to break. There's just nothing and nothing and nothing.

I scramble up, gripping the desk to hold myself steady. I stumble to the window, wrenching it open so I can breathe.

It comes too fast, too shallow, but air comes.

I'll be the last one in here before it's cleared out, probably. It's not evidence, but the inn will need a new manager.

I swallow hard. If I swallow hard enough, maybe my heart won't sit so high up in my throat.

They will need a new manager.

The panic changes. It's different. Do I really want some random person coming in, seeing my stupid grade six photo?

I tug at desk drawers, pawing through bits and pieces of my mother's daily life.

Paperwork, thank you cards, more paperwork, pens, erasers, and paperclips.

Envelopes. I almost pass over them, but the names scrawled across them aren't hers. A neat envelope is addressed Steve Olbrish at 113 Westview Road. The name by itself makes my fingers twitch, tempted to tear it open. Steve Olbrish. My father, a man so far away I've only ever seen him in old yearbook photos. A man who lives somewhere in the city with a wife and a daughter, even though the address doesn't read Calgary at all. It's for Murphy, on Westview where there's nothing residential.

I fumble for the next envelope, my name written across the front. The holly in the stamp gives it away as a Christmas card, with a return address from Sudbury, Ontario printed on a sticker. My grandparents. Fredrick and Marie Brown.

A new wave of panic washes over me. The cops asked about family. My grandparents, on the other side of the country, they can't just have me, can they? They can't just whisk me off to another province because they're related by blood. They abandoned us. They let my mom go it alone as a pregnant sixteen-year-old.

Just when climbing out the window crosses my mind, the door cracks open.

Heather Sukolsky stands in the doorway. Heather is so many of the things my mother isn't—wasn't. Her cheeks, her chin, everything is made of angles. Her hair is normally sleek, so blonde it's almost white, but her long manicured fingers raked it into short, sharp spikes. Her precise makeup smudged, lines collect in the corners of her puffy red eyes. The afternoon's made her look older than she is.

"Will I have to go live with my grandparents?" It sounds more like croaking than talking. I don't mean for that to be the first thing out of my mouth, but it is.

Heather makes a noise like she might start crying, but she doesn't.

"No, no, no. Of course not, kid," Heather says, "I promised I'd look out for you and I don't break my promises." She forces a heartbroken smile. 

She is a sturdy pillar of a woman. For a second, there is less uncertainty because Heather says so. The police said she was my guardian, not just an emergency contact. 

"Let's go." Heather tilts her head. What comes after this is inevitable, unavoidable. I stand, leaden and slow but it has to be done.

I shove the envelopes into my pocket. 

a/n yaaaay Wattpad's working again. Now that updates seem to be less tumultuous, I'm hoping to update every Wednesday and Friday.