Hazel Hart is in a state of shock. Her life has taken a hard turn from it's path of contentment. She's pregnant. Her boyfriend, the father, is AWOL. Where is he and what will she do now?
Part II
What happens after Hazel finds her boyfriend’s apartment ransacked seems like a blur.
Somewhere during the accumulation of all her emotions bubbling to the surface and blubbering them out, she calls the police. She feels utterly sick. She doesn’t touch a thing, just sits out in the hallway with her head buried in her knees. The neighboring apartment residents hear her sobs carry down the stairwell and investigate, someone calls the landlord in concern.
She wants to call her father because he usually approaches these sorts of situations in a calm and collected manner, gives her a big hug, and tells her everything will be fine. She also doesn’t want to call him, because she has the feeling that everything is not fine and this is just another thing to get him worked up, despite that professional-tier calm façade.
She thought the police would come quickly but it feels like so much time has passed already for the urgency at hand. No sirens are even heard in the distance. It’s just an awful, quiet, Saturday night.
She hates sitting there, feeling helpless. She just wants to find Erik and make sure they are unharmed.
She takes some more deep breaths to try and ease her anxiety about the whole thing, but how can she even hope for a good outcome when the apartment looks like a tornado had blown through it?
She is in the midst of spacing out when the landlord arrives. He takes a look at her and asks, “You’re the girlfriend?”
Hazel’s eyelids flutter in many rapid blinks, coming back from the bog of her thoughts, and she regards him; responds softly, “Yes.”
“I’ve gotten noise complaints about you from the unit below before,” he smirks knowingly, causing her cheeks to redden. The smirk quickly fades and then he says, “You interrupted my bowling night.”
She pulls herself up with a growing anger and a matching frown to go with it. She didn’t ask him to even be there! The landlord ignores her disapproving glare, and walks inside, flips on the light to see the full damage, “Yeesh, this is a mess.”
Hazel’s fingers twitch, angrier by the second the way this man is casually strolling through the apartment and appraising it like he is taking a stroll in the art museum. He doesn't look the sort to enjoy actual art though.
“So, are you going to take anything that he left behind?” he asks, kicking away a stray book from his path.
“Excuse me?”
“I can’t have all your guy’s stuff laying around here when I show the apartment,” the landlord explains, picking up one of Erik’s shirts and it causes Hazel to react in a feral manner.
“What the Hells are you talking about?” she growls, yanking it out of his hand and holding it to her chest, the familiar scent of Erik’s cologne wafts upward and causes her to tear up involuntarily, “Don’t touch anything. The police need this as evidence!”
Speaking of which, where are they?
“What in the Hells are you talking about, sweetheart? The police ain’t coming.”
She wipes her eye, so confused–her heart sinking, “What?”
“They contacted me after you jumped the gun reporting a crime in my building. Your guy, he and his sister wasn’t from Kashmire were they? Immigration Authority came this afternoon and took him away–said something about their residency being expired for years. He’s probably deported, planted on a plane back to wherever they came from.”
Erik had mentioned once that he needed to apply for permanent residency but she couldn’t imagine he’d forgotten to do something so important. It wasn’t like the region was super tight on allowing foreigners to live there, either.
The narrative suddenly rearranges from her first thoughts and pieces together…the strewn clothing, the books–it wasn’t an attack, he was trying to hastily pack and didn’t have enough room to take everything with him, which was already not that much–just what could be stuffed into a small suitcase and backpack. He probably had his phone taken away or isn’t in a place where he can get service, and therefore no way to tell her…
A small, hopeless gasp of ‘no’ escapes her lips before she crumples once more.
The landlord reminds her if she doesn’t move out the stuff left in the apartment, he’s throwing it into the garbage dump for vagrants to pick through.
There is no sympathy in his voice, as he leaves her sitting in the middle of the room.
She doesn’t know what to do.
How can she contact Erik to figure this all out?
In addition to all this chaos, there’s still the fact she’s pregnant and the father is going to be on the other side of the world!
And he still doesn’t know.
At some point, emotionally exhausted, Hazel crawls into the bottom bunk that she and Erik had spent many cramped nights cuddling together in. She doesn’t like how big and empty it feels, but the blankets, the pillow…they still smell like him. There’s a long, dark, strand of hair still attached to the pillowcase and she holds in a sob as she plucks it from the cloth and winds it around her fingertip tightly until her skin turns red but for the stark peachy lines underneath where it squeezes.
She eventually loosens it but keeps it coiled there, feeling a bit unhinged as if it’s the only piece of Erik she has near enough to hold. It’s an anchor keeping her from dissolving into a complete loss of hope.
A wave of nausea hits Hazel like a truck and she shoots up, nearly hitting her forehead on one of the bars holding the top bunk’s mattress aloft. With only the focus of not retching all over on her mind, she hastily rolls out from the bed, nearly trips on one of the overturned chairs as she beelines for the apartment bathroom and collapses to her knees in front of the toilet just in time.
As she holds the seat, she blinks blearily and wonders why the apartment is such a mess and where Erik is before spying his hair strand wrapped loosely around her finger and the events of last night come flooding back.
Nothing is normal, and her sight blurs at remembering that Erik isn’t there anymore. It occurs to her she is rather hungry because she only had bread for dinner. Her stomach rumbles ferociously, demanding food or threatening more sickness.
She chokes on a sob before flushing and managing to pull herself up and rummage through Erik’s fridge for any kind of sustenance. Luckily she finds some leftovers stashed inside and wastes no time reheating it.
Plumbobs, she feels as messy as the apartment. It was as if Erik was the piece in her puzzle tower that if pulled made the entire world come crashing down around her. She waits for the leftovers to cool and heaves a disheartened sigh, trying to get her thoughts in order.
She is pregnant
Erik is gone
His stuff is going to get thrown out
She needs to get what she can picked up and saved
Then try to find him
But how?
She pulls out her phone and finds the battery is nearly dead. She doesn't have her charger with her. She sees a lot of missed calls but none are from Erik. Just various sisters from her scholarship house.
Shit, they were probably worried and if they were worried then someone probably called Adagio looking for her if her father was worried…
Hazel jumps with a yelp as the phone buzzes in her hand, she nearly drops it but catches it before it hits the floor and holds it up to her ear, “H…hello?”
There’s a relieved sigh, “Hazel, what’s going on? Your house mother told me you never came back to the scholarship house last night and weren’t answering your phone. Where are you?”
Hazel’s throat tightens at hearing her father’s voice, “I…”
“Are you all right?” he notices her distress in the one syllable.
She doesn’t know how to answer without bursting into tears, which will only worry him more.
She takes in a breath, trying to steady her voice, and it ends up coming out a whisper, “I’m at Erik’s.”
“What’s happened? Are you hurt?”
She shakes her head, “I don’t…” her voice betrays her and wavers, “He’s gone.”
After she says it, she breaks down into sobs and her ears are ringing while her father asks more questions she can’t even hear, and then her phone shuts off. Dead. Fuck. He’s going to think she’s in trouble with such an abrupt end to the conversation.
She swears and pulls herself up, feels another wave of nausea, and has to stop and deal with it.
She feels so gross and has so many problems swimming in her mind that she’s paralyzed with decision fatigue on how to go about resolving any. Her best course of action is just to stay put because Adagio surely is coming to see her. If she moves and he can’t find her, he might send the whole SCIA searching for her and they probably have better things to do.
She begins to wash counters, as well as pile clothing and books together to help sort them for better packing. She’s almost put the apartment back together–the task not being hard, as it’s a small space–when she hears loud, rapid, knocking which only could be her father.
She opens the door to find him staring back with wild-eyed relief that transforms into full-on concern.
“Sorry, my phone ran out of charge,” she says and hugs herself.
Adagio has never been to Erik’s apartment before, she’s never told him the address but doesn’t doubt Erik had given it to her father, as a way to gain his trust and start to make up for his part in a kidnapping plot when she was sixteen. She doesn’t blame her father for not trusting Erik fully but wishes he would let the past go, after all, Erik had much more of a reason to not trust Adagio.
She receives a strong hug from her father in response, “Strawberry, I’m so sorry.”
She wonders briefly how he knows what has happened, but she stopped asking herself that ever since she discovered his real career. Her father just knows things. He is in intelligence, not just that–he’s at the top of intelligence–he has access or ways to go about accessing any and all information he wants, so probably looked up recent happenings involving Erik. He always did his research.
“Can we get them back?” she asks, with only a sliver of hope. Because her Dad could almost do anything in her mind. Surely he could pull some strings, have words with the bureau, or something.
“Yes. It will take some time though–it’s a breach of regional law that he and Elenoire overstayed on a visa without renewing it.”
“Are you sure he didn’t apply for citizenship? Could the paperwork just be delayed in a queue somewhere?”
“I’ll have to investigate, but that punishment is no entry for at least three years before re-application.”
Hazel feels more of her world fall apart, another piece of it shatter. She didn’t have time like that. She needs Erik there, now, but can’t explain to her father at this moment why she is so desperate!
“Is there any way to reverse it?”
He hesitates, then answers, “I don’t know, yet.”
She frowns against his shoulder because he always has answers.
This is a first.
“Well, could you please help me take care of his things? The landlord said he would throw everything out into the dumpster if it’s still here in a few days.”
“Of course,” Adagio agrees. Erik never moved in with boxes or anything but Adagio manages to find boxes–somewhere. Likely in the alley, discarded ones from the other apartment residences.
Adagio coughs, “So is that bunk bed comfortable?”
“I’m not talking about that right now,” Hazel’s cheeks sear with embarrassment, not believing that this of all times is when her Dad picks to try and bring up the subject. He never wanted to hear anything pertaining to her and Erik and how they conducted their relationship. ‘Out of sight and out of mind’ was Adagio’s philosophy and it had worked well so far.
Hazel feels her stomach clench and terror engulfs her–she wouldn't be able to keep all aspects of it out of sight forever.
‘Please don’t get sick, please don’t get sick,’ she wills, repeating silently to herself. She had felt this sick for a few days already, at first thinking she was food poisoned. She stops stacking clothes into the box and closes her eyes, trying to get it to pass.
“What’s the matter?” her father asks, noticing her change in pace and movement, the way she shuts her eyes and breathes deeply.
“Nothing…I…I’m just really sad,” it was only three-quarters of the truth but Hazel had no problem with lying somewhat. Adagio was seasoned at omitting details. Hazel had learned it was easier to navigate conversations with him, doing the same. Like father, like daughter.
Though, both had promised to be honest and more open about communicating. Maybe life was just full of broken promises.
“What about his mother?” Hazel asks.
“What about Mia?” his brow furrows.
“Well, wouldn’t she be overstaying her visa too? Wouldn’t the Immigration Authority deport her?”
It terrified Hazel if that were the case. To have Mia Denholm running free and anywhere near Erik made Hazel’s stomach churn more than it already had from morning sickness.
“That’s different, she’s serving out time for a crime. She can’t apply for citizenship once that’s over. She will be deported to Ruskslovia as soon as she steps foot outside the corrections facility. If she is ever deemed suitable to leave.”
They silently pack away Erik and Noire’s meager belongings.
Something about this whole situation seems off, as she eyes the room–remembering how torn apart it was. It makes sense that it was a mess if Erik and Noire had been hastily figuring out what to take with them in a short time under the daunting watch of the immigration authority.
....but why would the TV have been shoved to the side, the chairs turned over?
She narrows her eyes.
And what would she do? Not even Hazel knows the lengths she would go to for Erik Denholm, but she has to do something, or else she might as well go mad.
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