The phone rings. I rush to answer, longing to hear my daughter’s sweet voice. When she left for college, it felt like standing on an ocean pier sending her off to the new world. My finger, sticky from eating a cinnamon bun, presses the green button on the iPhone. I hear a heavy, raspy exhalation.
“This is Detective Anderson. There’s been an incident at the university. We need you to come to Arizona immediately.”
The phone hits the table. My legs give out, and I collapse to the floor, on the verge of vomiting. As much as I wish I hadn’t answered the phone, I lift the receiver; it’s as heavy as a 20-pound dumbbell.
I scream. “What happened?”
“On the way back to your daughter’s dorm, her roommate’s boyfriend waited in the woods with a gun.”
“Please, please don’t say another word.”
My daughter had told me her roommate’s boyfriend was stalking her, he thought she was an influencer. I can hear our laughter. A sharp pain twists my gut, as though my intestines are being ripped out, and I bend into my cramps. My eyes lock onto my chipped pink nail polish, a striking contrast to the confusion scrambling around me.
The detective asks, “Do you want me to call back later?”
I want him never to have called at all. My fingers are trembling.
“No, tell me now.” I say gasping for breath.
His gruff voice muffles words together.
“The boyfriend fired his gun. I’m very sorry.”
I think that’s what he said, but maybe not.
Edna Schneider’s work has been published in The Whisky Blot, Grande Dame, and the Jewish Literary Journal, as well as in professional journals. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Emerson College in Dramatic Arts and a master’s degree from LIU in Speech-Language Pathology.