The Dark Light of Day (The Dark Light of Day 1)

Like it was as easy as taking in the afternoon mail.

It was tough work, but I’d done it. Nan had made me feel as if I was graduating from some Ivy League school instead of public high school in Coral Pines.

I caught my reflection in the window behind the sheriff. I was still wearing my cap and gown. It was like the happy me that was supposed to be there was mocking the pitiful me who was in her place—the me who’d just had her world ripped out from underneath her in one short conversation.

Sheriff Fletcher cleared his throat yet again. “Miss Ford, my office is required to take action to have un-emancipated minors placed in child protective services. By the time the paperwork is filed and the case is assigned a social worker, you would only have to be in the system for a few months before you become a legal adult and would no longer require their care.” He shifted in his seat, very obviously adjusting his privates under the desk. He continued. “This is a small town. We ain’t got those kinds of resources at the ready, so it’ll take a while. For now, Miss Morgan has agreed to look in on you from time to time. If you really want we can send you up north to CPS right away, but I have a feeling that’s not what you want, now is it?” It was a statement, not a question. He seemed irritated he had actual paper work to do and less concerned I’d just lost the only person who ever gave a shit about me.

He smirked and tilted his head, like he was waiting for me to thank him. Yeah, thanks for barely skimming over the tiny fact that Nan was dead. Thank you so much, sir, for kindly offering me the option of not being sent away with the afternoon mail and back into foster care hell. I would run before they came for me. I would never go back into that fucking system.

Sheriff Fletcher stood and handed me a card with Reverend Thomas’ phone number on it. “The Reverend can help make all your arrangements.” He said it matter-of-factly, as if he’d just given me a coupon for a buy one get one free at the car wash. “Sorry for your loss, Miss Ford,” he called over his shoulder as he headed out the door. The echo of his heavy-booted stomps trailed behind him as he disappeared down the hallway, whistling as he walked away.

Miss Morgan tried to pull me into an embrace. I jumped when she touched me and took a quick step back, knocking my graduation cap off of my head.

No tears, no sobbing. No praying to an imaginary God who’d forgotten about me long ago. I called on the familiar numbness to take over.

I’d been through shit like this before. I didn’t need anything but my barriers.

Nan was dead, and it was probably my fault. I knew that.

Case closed. No need to dwell on something I couldn’t change.

Right?

Miss Morgan bent down, retrieved my graduation cap from under the desk, and dusted it off with the palm of her hand. She was careful not to make contact with me as she placed it back on my head. She made no attempt at another awkward Comforting Troubled Teens 101 embrace. Instead, she studied me intently, as if she were searching for answers to questions she didn’t dare ask out loud. I imagined it included something along the lines of, What happened to you, little girl? Where do you go from here? I didn’t need her pity.

I didn’t need anything from her or anyone else.

I turned to leave.

“Abby!” Miss Morgan called out. She stopped me before I could rush out of her range. Carefully, she reached for the tassel hanging from my graduation cap and moved it from right to left.

CHAPTER TWO

THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED blended together. Day into night. A permanent dusk. A mix of daydreams and nightmares.

They call the figure that takes our loved ones from this world the angel of death, when really he’s just a corrupt errand boy who hides deep within his hood when he comes to take souls to the other side. It’s not a bad gig really. He probably doesn’t feel, doesn’t mourn.

He was more like me than I’d realized.

I envied him. To take without feeling. To deliver people from one world to the next without the surprise or shock that always seems to come with unexpected death.

Why do we call the ones we’ve lost our dearly departed? They are not departed. The word depart means “to leave”. They didn’t leave. They were abducted from this life by some soulless skeleton dressed in his mother’s house-coat who dragged them to their ends.

Nan must have left this world kicking and screaming. I know she must have called out to me as he shoved her soul into his pocket.

She needed me to save her, and instead, I may have been the very reason she died.

This was how the nightmares went night after night: Nan, drowning in a purgatory of dark water, trying to fight her way back to me and never getting any closer no matter how hard she tried. I would wake up in the middle of the night, pale-faced and dripping with sweat, a scream tearing heavily from my throat as I cried out for the only person in my life who ever wanted to save me from myself.

The memories of the days after Nan’s funeral played in my head on repeat, in blurry slow motion. I didn’t eat. I didn’t sleep. Random neighbors would come over to bring the customary ‘someone died’ casserole. They wouldn’t even knock—probably because they knew I wouldn’t answer. Finally, Irma from next door started taking my casserole deliveries and dropping them off at the church. The uneaten food was becoming too much for Nan’s old avocado-colored freezer to hold. I started locking the deadbolt on the front door, which was unheard of in our small town. I wasn’t necessarily trying to lock people out. I was trying to keep myself locked in. The more removed I was from civilization, the closer I felt to Nan.

I felt the need to punish myself, by surrounding myself in everything that was Nan. I sprayed her perfume in the air. I wore her old full-length fox fur coat, which she’d never worn and had no reason to own in such a tropical place. I napped in her old red corduroy Lazy-Boy, and I drank her favorite Scotch every night—and sometimes every morning—until the heat in my throat spread through my blood and I slipped into the oblivion I was searching for.

Nan’s home—my home—was more cottage than house. The faded pink siding was in need of a fresh coat of paint and the light gray shingles were streaked with the evidence of the daily afternoon heavy summer storms. With two bedrooms and only one bathroom, it was small by anyone’s standards. The faux wood linoleum floors and off-white cabinets hadn’t been updated since Pops built the cottage for Nan over thirty years ago.

The short gravel driveway gave way to a broken shell road, and the cottage itself sat on nothing more than a measly eighth of an acre within arms reach of Lee’s Oriental cuisine on one side and Irma’s Beauty Salon on the other. Nan never minded that the green space was so small, because she had the waters of the Coral Pines River in her backyard.

With a tumbler of Scotch in hand, I looked around the cottage Nan loved so much. Had it only been three years prior when I’d been so reluctant to call it my home? Just a few short years since I’d burst into Nan’s life with a chip on my shoulder and a tongue sharper than a drawer full of knives?

Her words, not mine.

Nan had welcomed me into her life. She was patient with me every excruciating step of the way, and she loved me without question, without exception.

When a social worker in a pantsuit three sizes too large led a thirteen year old me up the walkway to meet the grandmother I’d never known, I was beyond terrified. She was my father’s mother. What if she was just like him? What if she made me promises she never intended to keep, just as he had? I didn’t mean the promise of toys and birthday parties. I mean the promise of food, of keeping the electricity turned on. The promise that I would be safe. My father’s dirt-bag friends had leered at me every time I entered the room—the same friends who asked if I knew what a cock was, and if I knew what to do with one. At six years old, I’d told the laughing bunch to go fuck themselves. They laughed harder, and Dad got angrier.

It was two days before he untied me from the kitchen chair and threw a cold slice of pizza onto the floor at my feet.

Dad may have thought his form of discipline had taught me some sort of fucked-up lesson. The only thing it really did was make me cold and numb. He and my mother treated dishing up their drugged-out brand of parental justice the same way they took turns entering and exiting the ever-revolving doors of the state prison.

It turned out Nan was nothing like my father. She was actually excited to have me, but I could tell she was just as nervous as I was. She was cautious but loving.

When Nan had come out to greet us on the front porch that first day, she didn’t run up and hug me. She made sure not to overwhelm me with the love already written all over her face. She showed me to my room, which was entirely white—or better yet, she told me, it was blank. It sure was. White walls, white comforter and pillow, and a white writing desk and chair. “I didn’t know what you’d like, so I thought I’d let you tell me how you want to decorate your room and what you’d like in it.”

“I can have anything?” I’d asked.

“Sure sweetie, anything at all.” Nan was always careful to withdraw her outstretched hand before it found my head or my shoulder... or my arm.

My aversion to physical touch must have been in my file.

The only thing I asked Nan for that first day was a deadbolt on my bedroom door. There were no questions, no hesitations. A handyman was at the house and had installed my deadbolt within an hour. She made me a necklace for the key and told me to put it around my neck. I’d stopped using the lock a few weeks after moving in with her, but I’d never taken off the key.