I inhale the fresh spring air as I start my walk home from work at the grocery store. The smell of moisture hangs in the air and small patches of snow are all that remain from the late spring snowstorm we received last week. Gravel crunches beneath my feet as I step along the shoulder of the only road that reaches from one end of this small town to the other. I live in a tiny trailer with my mom on the far edge of town. The small house sits next to White Lake, the town’s namesake. For every day of my twenty-one years, we’ve lived in this piece of shit trailer. It’s dilapidated and falling apart, but it’s all we can afford, so I don’t complain. I just make the best of our situation.

Once more, I kick at the gravel alongside the paved country road that leads to the lake and our little slice of broken-down home. It’s dark out here in the dead of night, but the moon shines so brightly that you can easily see the road. I follow the shoulder, staying on the gravel so that I’m out of the way of any cars. It’s not unusual not to see a single car pass me on the walk home. It is, however, unusual to see the flashing lights of a police car.

My heart begins to pump wildly when I see the lights turning down the gravel drive that leads to our trailer, and my feet take off in a full sprint. Stumbling a few times on the rocks, I near the trailer and hear my name being called.

“Emilia!” It’s Carter, our landlord. “Emilia!” he hollers again. It’s hard to believe anyone actually owns and rents the piece of shit trailer we live in, but he’s always been good to us—and lenient when we don’t have the rent on time.

“What’s wrong?” I ask as I approach, out of breath. My eyes scan the trailer and find the front door open and flapping in the wind.

“It’s your mom,” Carter tells me, shaking his head. “When I came to collect the rent, she didn’t answer. It’s not like her, Em.” He glances behind him at his dilapidated shack of an investment property. “The window was open, so I looked inside and, uh, saw her lying on the floor.” Carter is visibly distraught as he runs a shaky hand through his silver hair and closes his eyes briefly.

Carter has always been like a grandfather to me. He’s mild mannered but tough. Tall and strong, and nothing rattles him. Until now.

A police officer strings yellow crime scene tape around a tree, and I run straight past him as he begins yelling at me to stop. I run through the front door, and there lies my beautiful mother. On the living room floor. In a pool of blood. A black handgun sits next to her.

“No, no, no!” I scream. “Mama, no…” I gasp for air as I kneel down next to her. The blood is drying in her matted hair. It sinks into my knees, and I notice the blood has started to thicken and turn into a gel-like consistency on the floor. I pull her into my lap and hold her. I hold her and scream. I scream for her. I scream for me. I scream for how unfair life has been to us.

Sheriff Wilson runs through the front door and begs me to leave her. When I don’t leave, he orders me to leave. I still don’t. I can’t leave her; she is all I have. I press my forehead to hers and cry. My tears fall in streams, landing on her face as I try to rationalize what’s happening.

“Please, you can’t leave me. Please,” I whisper against her head.

“Emilia,” Carter says quietly as he steps into the trailer. “Come on, girl; you don’t need to be in here.”

“I have to, Carter. She needs me. I need her,” I wail. This can’t be happening to us.

“Emilia, please. Come outside and talk to Sheriff Wilson. He has some questions.”

Carter tugs on my arm, and I slide on the dingy, blood-smeared linoleum floor as I try to get up. Carter wraps an arm around my shoulder and guides me out of the trailer. My khaki pants are covered in blood, and my hands are shaking so bad I have to shove them in the pockets of my sweatshirt.

“Sheriff, this is Emilia, Carrie Adams’ daughter.”

“Ms. Adams.” The sheriff nods at me with sympathy in his eyes.

My body begins to shake so badly; I can actually feel my knees knocking together. Carter holds me against him to steady me.

The sheriff sighs sympathetically. “I’m so sorry for your loss.” He cringes when he says those words. “We’re still piecing together all of the details, but it looks like suicide. The medical examiner will have to determine that, but no foul play is suspected,” he says quietly.

“We don’t own a gun,” I mumble. Where would she get a gun? She wouldn’t shoot herself and leave me alone. She told me she was actually feeling better, that the depression that used to eat her alive was finally at bay.

“Like I said, we’ll let our crime scene technicians finish up, but the scene has been compromised.” He looks at me harshly. “Mr. Wilson, I mean, Carter said there was a gun in her hand when he arrived.”

“We didn’t have a gun,” I tell him again. “We didn’t have access to a gun. We couldn’t afford a gun. We could hardly eat. That gun in there is not ours.”

Sheriff Wilson sighs and writes in his notebook.

“Do you have any other questions for her?” Carter asks. “I think she’s in shock.”

“That’ll be all for now.”

“Emilia, sit down,” Carter says as he guides me to the large oak tree in front of our trailer. My limp body makes a loud thud when I sink to the ground. My chest feels like it’s collapsing, and the air from my lungs has vanished. My limbs are stiff and I wonder if this is what it feels like to be in shock.

Time stands still as I watch police officers come and go, and I mumble answers to their questions as best as I can. Just as the morning sun begins to rise, I finally watch them wheel my mom from our trailer on a stretcher. Her body is encased in a large white plastic bag with a zipper up the front. I cry again when they put her into the back of an old county van marked “Medical Examiner,” and then they drive away. She’s gone. I’ll never see her again, hug her again, or tell her I love her again.

I wipe at the tears as I curse the disease I believe took my mom. She has suffered from debilitating depression since the day my dad left, which was the day he found out she was pregnant with me. It was three days before she graduated from high school and gave up her dreams of going to college to raise me. She’d wanted to be a nurse. She might’ve been a good one. I’ve always felt a sense of guilt that I was the reason her life fell apart and that her dreams were shattered in order to raise me. However, the reality is that I pretty much raised her. For as long as I can remember, I was the one responsible for cooking, doing the laundry, and cleaning. I never knew the woman she claimed she used to be—fun and happy-go-lucky.

While she was never the perfect mother, she did her best raising me and insisted I do well in school. I’ve always been a straight A student, something I’ve prided myself on.

I glance down the drive and can almost see her standing there. In elementary school, she’d walk the quarter of a mile to the edge of the property every morning and wait with me for the bus to pick me up. And the afternoons that she wasn’t asleep, lost in her depression, I’d find her waiting when the bus dropped me off. Those afternoons were few and far between, but I used to love seeing her waiting for me. Those were my happiest memories of her. Those days meant one thing—her depression was at bay, if only for a few hours.

Carter’s voice pulls me from my memories. “I don’t want you to go inside that trailer again, Emilia,” he says quietly as he walks toward me. He has sat next to me for the last few hours, only leaving for a few minutes when they were unrolling the caution tape that now surrounds the trailer. “They’ve given me permission to get a few items from the bedroom for you while they finish up inside. You can stay in the spare bedroom at our place. I called Eve to let her know.”

“What’re they doing in there?” I manage to ask, my voice hoarse. My body is stiff and my head rests against the rough bark of the oak tree, the cool morning air pricking at my skin.

His hands are shoved in his front pockets as he looks down at me. “Just tell me what I can get for you,” he sighs.

I quietly rattle off a small list of things, knowing they’ll all fit into one shoulder bag. Carter disappears and is beside me a few minutes later. Or maybe it was an hour. Time bleeds together right now.

He tosses my bag in the back of his pick-up truck. “Let’s go, Emilia,” he says softly.

I glance up and stare at the rusty tin trailer, lost in a state of shock and denial. This broken down thing, as much as I’ve despised it, is the only home I’ve ever known. And mixed with my grief is a sharp panic—what will happen to me and where I will go? What is my life now?

“I’m going to sit here for a while,” I mutter. “I need to be alone. I’ll be over in a bit.”

“Come straight to the house,” he says firmly. “If you’re not there in an hour, I’m coming back. And, Emilia, don’t go back inside that trailer.”

I just nod.

He hesitates before climbing into his pick-up truck and leaving, a trail of dust following his old truck down the gravel road. Within a few minutes, everyone is finally gone, leaving me sitting against this oak tree. Realization finally sets in…

I am truly alone.