I’d been suffocating, drowning in a sea of nothingness. Anna’s constant hair brained antics of jumping from one sure-fire get rich scheme to another had finally caught up with us.
Maybe with me out of the picture she could finally grow up, since I won’t be there to hold her hand.
I waved goodbye to dad as I backed out of the driveway, and like the small town father he was.
The man I vaguely remembered tucking me in at night with a teddy bear, before my mom took off with me in the middle of the night, watched until I was out of sight. It brought tears to my eyes as I watched him fade in the rearview mirror.
***
Havenhurst was a far cry from the dingy cities mom had always found for us to live in, while she looked for the next big deal or whatever it was she sought on hour many travels.
There was also something very ethereal and somehow familiar about the place. It reminded me of a place in my dreams.
I would’ve put it off as childhood memories, but that would’ve been hard, since I hadn’t been here since the age of three, and I had no real recollection of the place, other than this feeling of belonging, that was rather persistent.
The drive to school covered practically the whole town, which was no more than a few square miles on the map.
I think dad had joked that you could drive from one end to the next in ten minutes flat doing twenty.
I had yet to test that theory, but I wasn’t sure he was too far off. There was a quiet stillness about the place; a stillness that went beyond what the eyes and ears could sense.
It was almost skin deep, which sounded fanciful and more like one of my fictitious stories than anything else. But somehow the quiet spoke to me, almost like a beckoning.
Beyond that, or beneath it, was the feeling of something dark following me; yet I felt no real fear, because somehow I knew that the other would stand between me, and the darkness.
There was nothing but woods lining the main road. Tall trees some of them with thick trunks that defied logic.
Their branches spanned from one side to the next, as if reaching out for each other, so that even in the early morning hours, the light always seemed to be hidden.
It looked like every setting I’d seen in a horror flick filmed in the Midwest somewhere.
Only, if there were any cornfields around, I had yet to see them. I shook myself out of my gloomy reverie before I made myself afraid.
I was starting to spook myself, and that feeling I got when I reached the middle of the road where the trees were at their densest didn’t help.
I felt that strangeness in the wind once more, a feeling of calm and security enveloped me even as I sensed the darkness creeping up.
I guess the place was relatively safe though since my dad hadn’t issued any warnings to be careful.
So it was with mixed feelings that I drove along the straight road with no one else in sight, to my new beginning.
I didn’t turn the radio on, which was strange, because music was my constant companion. But somehow I sensed on this lonely stretch of road that it wasn’t needed.
Either that, or I needed to have my wits about me and be on the alert. A chill ran through me just then at the thought, and I shook that off as well.
I knew I could be fanciful in my imagination, always have been, but I was determined to put that all behind me starting now.
As I thought it I remembered last night’s little nocturnal adventure. He had gone farther than before, touching me in all the right places until I was ready to scream.
Then things had changed and he seemed dangerous suddenly. It wasn’t the first time I’d sensed danger in his presence, if you can call it that.
Sometimes I felt safe in his arms and others I wasn’t quite sure that he wasn’t the danger that I shouldn’t be running from instead of to him in my sleep.
I had to cut my thoughts off once again when my body started reacting to my thoughts. In the last month alone my body had gone through this metamorphosis.
Seemingly overnight I had turned into one huge hormone, with thoughts and needs that I had no real name for, other than what I read in books or heard others whispering about.
We’d never settled in any one place long enough for me to form the kind of friendships that would enable me to ask a girlfriend about such things, and there was no way I was going to ask my mom.
I was a late bloomer or so I’d heard more than once before, so maybe that could account for my new awakenings.