The Dark Light of Day Read online

  There was no possible way, especially because of my parents’ shitty addictions, that Nan would ever be involved in something like that. She wouldn’t even take cough syrup when she had a cold.

  I reached for the phone on the desk, but before I could get to it the sheriff put his sweaty bear paw on the receiver “Unfortunately, it’s no mistake. Your grandmother died this morning in an explosion at a known meth lab.” My mouth fell open as I stared at him. He offered nothing further. Instead, he asked me again, “Who’s your next of kin, Miss Ford? It’s not listed in your file. I know your parents aren’t in the picture, but is there an aunt or uncle we can call?”

  “No,” I said quietly. There was no one.

  “An older sibling then, or maybe a cousin?”

  I shook my head, losing myself in the slow spin of the room around me.

  Why the hell would Nan be at a meth lab?

  There was no reason, except...

  It hit me like an anvil why Nan needed the money: to pay for college. She talked about sending me all the time. I ignored her every time she brought it up. My plans for the future never reached further than the weekend. I mostly just smiled and nodded. Much of the time, I just changed the subject. I wasn’t going to college. End of story.

  Apparently, Nan had thought otherwise.

  But involving herself in meth just didn’t make sense.

  “It’s just me…and her.” My voice cracked. Inside, I was crying, screaming, raging against whatever higher power would be so cruel that it would give me a taste of normalcy then strip it all away. Outside, I was a robot.

  “How old are you, Miss Ford?” Sheriff Fletcher asked. He cracked his knuckles impatiently, like he couldn’t wait to get this over with and head to Sally’s all you can eat Saturday fish fry.

  “Seventeen,” the robot said.

  “When will you turn eighteen, honey?” Miss Morgan cooed, trying to offer me some sort of comfort.

  “Not for a while.” Ten months, actually. I had graduated a full year early. When I told Nan I wanted to drop out of high school, she’d given me the only other option she would agree to. “If you want out so bad Abby,” she’d told me, “just hurry up and graduate early.”

  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 p
lace. 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.

  Then, Nan fed me her homemade fried chicken with mashed potatoes. We had peach cobbler for dessert. She only spoke to ask me if I liked the food. I nodded. In truth, it was the best food I’d ever eaten. After that first meal, Tuesday night became Fried Chicken Night.

  Nan didn’t want answers from me. She just wanted her grandchild—her short-tempered, razor-tongued, sometimes violent, grandchild. During my entire life, nobody had wanted me on my very best day on my very best behavior.

  Nan wanted me at my worst, and sometimes, that was exactly what she got.

  I had come such a long way in my four years with Nan. After just a few short weeks without her, it was like she’d never been in my life at all.

  CHAPTER THREE

  WHEN THE PERSISTENT SHIT AT THE DOOR kept ringing the bell over and over, I was inclined to get the shotgun from the hall closet, shoot first, and ask questions later.

  “Go away!” I shouted into my pillow as I raised the comforter over my head. I didn’t know what time it was, and I didn’t care. All I knew was that it was early, and I wasn’t ready to end my hibernation just yet.

  The doorbell shit changed his style from ringing it twice in increments of thirty seconds to pressing it continuously like someone waiting impatiently for an elevator.

  That’s it, I thought. I’m getting the gun.

  I leapt from my bed, tore open the front door, and almost felt bad for the poor soul on the other side who’d be facing my wrath.

  A linebacker of a woman wearing a navy blue suit took up the majority of the doorway. I had to look up to see her face. She looked like Dan Aykroyd in drag. Her hair was thin and black with silver running through it, pulled in a tight bun at the nape of her neck. She held a file and a clipboard in her hand.

  “Abby Ford?” she asked without looking at me, her focus solely on her clipboard. Her voice was deep and vibrated through her chest when she spoke.

  “Huh?” I asked. I wiped sleep from my eyes, my rage replaced with a tired sense of confusion.

  The woman-man sighed. “You are Abby Ford—am I correct?” She tapped the tip of her pen on her board.

  “Yeah?” It came out more like a question.

  She huffed, and if I could have seen her eyes all the way up there in the sky where her head was, I’m sure I would have seen that she was rolling them. “Let’s try this again. Are you or are you not Abby Ford, the minor child who was in the care of Georgianne Ford before her passing three weeks ago?”

  “I’m almost eighteen,” I blurted, “so you can go now.”

  I moved to shut the door, but she blocked it with her foot without missing a beat. “Yes, well, you aren’t eighteen yet, and being seventeen makes you a minor. Therefore, you are currently a ward of the state of Florida, and I will be taking you into protective custody today. You’ll be placed in foster care until the day you turn eighteen.” She flipped a page on her clipboard. “Which I can see here isn’t actually for another nine months or so.”

  I had known foster care was a possibility. I just hadn’t expected Sheriff Fletcher to actually file the paperwork, and that they would show up so damn quickly. I’d also hoped that with me being so close to eighteen, no one would really give a shit.

  “May I come in, Miss Ford?” The woman-man asked.

  “No!” I moved in front of her to block the doorway. I was pretty sure I’d left some arrestable offenses on the coffee table she didn’t need to see.

  “Excuse me?” she asked, obviously not used to being defied.

  “My aunt doesn’t like strangers in the house, and you haven’t even told me your name.” I heard the lie come out of my mouth before I’d even registered what I was saying.

  “Miss Thornton,” she replied. “My name is Miss Thornton.” I wanted to take her tapping pen and stab her in the foot—the one that kept the door from closing.

  It was the first time she tore her eyes away from her paperwork and actually gave me a once over. I was still wearing my pajamas, which consisted of a long sleeved high neck t-shirt and shorts. I’m sure I had bed head and dark circles under my eyes. With all the nightmares, sleep had been no easy feat. Miss Thornton was probably wondering why I was sleeping at one o’clock on a Monday afternoon. “We have no record of
this aunt you speak of, what’s her name?”

  I glanced around the living room nervously. My eyes landed on the old quilt my Nan kept draped over the couch. The gaudy patch in the middle depicted Elvis the day he married Priscilla. They were cutting their wedding cake, her black bouffant was almost taller than the cake.

  “Priscilla,” I said when I turned back to Miss Thornton. “Priscilla… Perkins.” The double P sound would make it easier for me to remember the lie.

  “Where is this Aunt Priscilla?” She lowered her thick black glasses to the tip of her nose as she looked down at me.

  “Um…she’s on her way back from Atlanta. She had to go get the rest of her stuff so she could move in here with me.” I looked past her so we wouldn’t make eye contact. Her eyes were like little lie detectors; I could almost see the needles jumping as my heartbeat sped up and slowed down. “She’s my mother’s sister. I just met her recently actually.”

  I really needed to stop blurting shit out.

  “Okay. So, when is your mother’s sister expected?” Miss Thornton was almost huffing. She was also sweating and not just a