Chapter 6 #3
The results repeatedly wash over me, like I am caught in the crashing and receding roll of a wave on the shore.
I’m drowning in all the information. I don’t know what half of it means, I just know they are not kind.
Reddit threads full of horror stories and ‘ask a lawyer forums’ with disclaimers and worst-case scenarios.
Someone’s blog post titled ‘What I Wish I'd Known’ that I click on with desperate hope but it makes everything worse. The internet, it turns out, is not the place to go when you need reassurance (surprise!) The internet is the place you go when you want to confirm that everything is as absolutely catastrophic as you suspect. And it is delivered in real time by strangers who want you to know they’ve been through worse.
I reach for my phone, Chandler is the first on the list of SOS phone calls.
But she doesn’t answer. She almost always answers, but unlike me she has a functioning social life and a lower threshold for staying on the couch, so she is probably out experiencing the real world while mine crumbles around me.
That or she’s in her studio, hands covered in paint, and she’s watching my name flash across the screen, but will call me back as soon as her hands are clean of the acrylic.
I call Theo back. It rings four times and goes to his voicemail, which means he’s either back inside somewhere loud or he has succumbed to the Guinness.
Finally I pull up my parent’s number, it sits on my screen waiting for me to hit call with the same judgement they’ll have when they answer.
And unlike my first two attempts, despite the time difference, I know they will.
But with that, I also know what that call will produce, it’s not comfort, not warm, unconditional ‘everything will be fine, Lou’.
They would work backwards from the issue to find the moment of irresponsibility, to find my failure. (No need, I’ve already done it.)
My search has gone from ‘can I apologize to the government’ to flights to London Heathrow, thinking maybe I save my parents the trouble. But in the split second it takes for the flight prices to return, I realize there is nothing for me in a country I don’t know.
Sitting on the floor with the letter in my hands, I think about my life here, the irreplaceable texture of it that has been quilted over the last decade and a half. What I stitched patch by patch, where I have been (slowly and sometimes even in the wrong direction) becoming who I actually am.
And that's when the tears come, not gently. They overtake my entire body, possessing every extremity and organ I have. They involve my shoulders and chest and with ugliness because I am genuinely frightened. I cry because I don’t know what to do, which is a feeling I have had before and have always found a way through, but this time the not-knowing has teeth in it and it has taken a bite.
The one thing the internet has said repeatedly, I need a lawyer, a really fucking good one.
I know exactly one lawyer and the last time we had a voluntary conversation it ended with me slamming a door in his face, and the time before that ended the same exact way.
He also (god help me) might be my only option.
I stand up and hurry past the mirror, because I know what I look like and I don’t have the emotional reserves for a confrontation with myself.
I take the letter in both hands, and walk out (run out) my front door in my pajamas and I knock on the door of 7A.
And because my body has apparently decided the act of knocking was the last bit of scotch tape holding this operation together, I completely collapse into hysterical tears as soon as my hand leaves the wood.
He opens it faster than I expected like he was awake and sensed an emergency. But maybe that’s just how severely he reacts to everything in life.
The first expression is one I know, it has greeted me in every doorway we’ve ever stood in.
The scowl isn’t fully formed across his face, but the muscle memory of hatred has it shaping into place.
But then he sees me, and suddenly it’s something else, the sharpness washed away by something I have not seen on him before and don’t have a name for yet.
“I– I need a lawyer,” I say, and my voice comes out broken, nothing like the voice I use for anything.
Not work-Lou, not coffee-shop-Lou, not fight-with-Angry-Neighbor?-Lou.
Just me, completely frightened. “I think I'm a fugitive…
or I'm about to be. The timeline is ambiguous, and the letter doesn't exactly say. Maybe it does,” I'm aware I'm not making sense. I keep going anyway because I’ve started and stopping feels worse. “I checked the mail. Which I know, I know, I should have checked it sooner, it’s my fault, I know it’s my fault—”
“Louisa.” His voice is sharp, authoritative, but surprisingly, not cruel. “I can’t understand you. Breathe.” Despite his best intention, that does it. It’s the thing that unravels me into a complete puddle of tears and strung together words.
“I, I am breathing…” (I’m not)
“You’re not.” And then, before I register what's happening, he steps back from the door and for all I imagined him to do, to yell at me, to tell me to go home, he says the two words I didn’t expect. “Come inside, whatever this is, it won't be handled in the hallway.”