Page 12 of Like A Daydream
She flips the light on, crosses the room to the filing cabinet next to her desk.
“With Harper they did,” she says, pulling open the top drawer. She flips through the folders until she finds what she needs.
Turning towards her parents, she holds up a stapled stack of notarized documents.
“According to these Guardianship forms,” she says, “upon the untimely death—” her voice cracks “—of Jack and Emerson, Harper legally becomes my daughter.”
Andrew
Andrew shoots up in bed, breathing heavy, sweat dripping down his back as he remembers where he is. He’s not in Raleigh anymore. No one is going to try to egg him again. He’s on a mountain in the middle of upstate New York, and no one but he, JT, and Ainsley know he’s here.
He falls back into the pillows and sighs, Roscoe shoves his nose in Andrew’s face and sniffs. His dream fades away and he scratches behind one of Roscoe’s ears.
“I’m good, dude,” he says, “just took me a minute to remember where I was.”
Roscoe sniffs him one more time, and then jumps off the bed, satisfied with his assessment.
He unplugs his phone from where it’s charging and sits up, stretching his arms over his head and listening to his shoulders pop. He had torn his rotator cuff three years into his career, and it still bothered him some days.
It had also left him with a nice scar along the front of his shoulder, the first of many. Especially since they hadn’t perfected the art of arthroscopic surgery at that point, so his whole shoulder had to be sliced open and explored.
His rotator-cuff was also one of his well-known flaws people chose to lean into when he had lost his team the Stanley Cup. Even though it had been the better part of a decade since it had happened, and he had been well past the point of recovery.
Reporters at ESPN and all of those podcast hosts would cling to anything. Anything that would give them a reason, but there wasn’t a reason for this. Bad luck happened to everyone.
It just happened to be Andrew’s turn.
At least that’s what his therapist told him two days after the game when he had called an emergency session to try to get his head back on straight. She had listened to him pour his soul out, let him process what he could, and then sat back in her chair with a thoughtful ‘hmm’, which he hated.
Bad luck happened to everyone,she had said.What mattered was if he chose to rise from the ashes or fall victim to the flames.
He tugs his t-shirt over his head, careful of his just-healed tattoo on his left collar bone, and checks the time. Noon. He’d slept a full seven hours, which was more than he’d gotten in a month. Funny what driving thirteen hours will do to a person.
Catalina:wtf, dude?
Andrew:not you, too
Catalina:is there a reason you didn’t tell me you got egged at PNC yesterday? I had to hear about it from Petrov.
Catalina:and you know he gets in trouble for texting me
Andrew:I was driving
Catalina:for thirteen hours?
Andrew:I’m at JT’s. Don’t know when I’ll be back
Catalina:shit
Andrew:don’t tell anyone
Catalina:I keep secrets, dick
Andrew:like those secret feelings you have for Mikhail?
Catalina:I hope you fall off a mountain.
Andrew:you and everyone else in North Carolina
