HalfWorlder #Wattys2017

Chapter 1-The universe conspires against me

"I don't see why you're going."

Mom turned her back to me like she would our old dog when he'd misbehave. Ignore that dog for any length of time and he'd tuck his tail and whine for forgiveness. But I was no dog. We could argue about this all morning, but I was going to school. No matter what. At the very least, I was going to finish my junior year with my butt in a chair in a classroom, not parked in the old recliner in the living room waiting for another phone call.

'You've already got an A in Latin." Mom interrupted my thoughts. "He said you could exempt the final."

"I know, mom, but I want to go. I've got to get out of this house." Sucking in a quick breath, I tried to inflate my lungs. Instead, they felt like popped balloons. We were doing a better than average job of using up all the oxygen in the house, even with only the two of us home. "I know you're worried, but everything's going to be fine." 

I said it as much to myself as to her.

She pinched the bridge of her nose and wiped at her eyes, finally turning to me. "How is everything going to be fine, Gil? Your father's been missing for two days."

There. She said it. Someone finally said it. Out loud.

Watching her face cloud over like a summer storm, even fake eating my cereal no longer appealed to me. Still, I continued pushing it around in my bowl making little hills of soggy mini-wheats. "I don't know, but it has to be. It just has to be. Otherwise, I don't know what we'll do."

It was as close to an admission of fear as I'd come since the call came from Palenque two days ago, when we'd learned dad and his grad student had gone missing at the Temple dig. When everything normal, even having an archaeologist for a father, crashed into abnormal, making a wreck of what I thought a storybook life.

I pushed the bowl away and went to stand with mom at the sink. I wanted to be strong for her, but a knot of fear was growing inside me too. One I could barely ignore anymore.

"I just can't take another minute in this house. Everything reminds me of him. You can understand that?"

I twisted the silver ring on my finger that dad and I unearthed together last year, but the reminder was too much. I pulled it off and stuffed it in my pocket. I wished I could do the same thing with my emotions, except I needed a deeper place for those. Staying numb was the only thing keeping me sane.

Mom took my face in her hands, looking closely at me. She brushed the bluish circles forming under my eyes with her fingertips. "You're not sleeping," she stated, transitioning in three seconds from terrified wife to mother. "You're still having nightmares?"

It was a harmless enough question, but the truth would only make her more uneasy. She hated when I had nightmares. I thumbed the ring, now in my pocket. Bad habits were hard to break. "No." I pulled at it harder and attempted a fake laugh, one I didn't think she bought. "Unless you want to count my defective alarm clock. It went crazy this morning and started to smoke. That was kind of a nightmare. It's been on the fritz for days though."

At least it was an ounce of truth, weird as it was.

She sniffed the air then, the acrid smell barely perceptible, and narrowed her eyes at me. "Wait, your alarm clock?"

"Yeah, you should have seen the red numbers spinning before it went—"

"Policía Palenque!" The digital voice of our caller ID struggled to pronounce the Mexican police station investigating the disappearances. My stomach sank. Not now. My butt wasn't even parked in the recliner. More than anything, I realized I didn't ever want to take that call. I didn't want to hear if dad and Elaine had been found. I didn't want to learn dad would be coming home in a body bag. Dad was probably coming home in a body bag! My heart thumped and the electric voice warbled, almost in response