The Dark Light of Day (2 page)

Memories of my brother’s funeral four years before were waiting
there, too. I hadn’t expected to find my mother afterward, still
wearing the short-sleeved black dress she wore to the church, face-down in
the bathtub with a sawed-off at her side and what had been the
better part of her head splattered across the pink shower tile. She hadn’t wanted to leave a mess. She’d said so in the note she left, but Mom
didn’t know enough about guns to realize she had chosen the
messiest of them all from Dad’s rack.

Dad had been a disaster at the funeral for my brother. He was in the psychiatric hospital two towns over for my mother’s. He always blamed me—not just for Mason’s death, but for Mom’s too. He told me more than once I should have been with Mason on the boat that morning, and it was my fault he ended up floating in the Coral Pines River. The real reason Dad hated me is because he thought it never should’ve been his perfect, straight A-earning, scholarship-winning,
baseball captain and expert fisherman son who died that day. It
should
have been his weed-dealing, girl-chasing, fight-picking, school-
skipping degenerate of a son.

It should have been me.

In some ways, I agreed with him. If it’d been me instead of
Mason, Mom would still be alive. Dad wouldn’t be trying to drown himself
in cheap whiskey, and there would be a few more people walking around in the land of the living. I contributed nothing and took
everything. But to be fair about it, I also expected nothing from the godless world that ripped me apart at every turn.

I expected nothing, until the night I met a certain redhead with an attitude.

The night I met Abby Ford, my life changed forever.

ABBY

I KNEW SOMETHING WAS WRONG
when I walked across the stage on graduation day and was met with only the unenthusiastic slow claps from the sparse crowd. It’s not like I expected a standing ovation. I haven’t exactly played nice with my fellow classmates. I could’ve counted the number of real friends I had on one hand. Or no hands, actually. It was Nan’s usual whooping and hollering I expected to hear but was nowhere to be found.

Where was she?

An alarm went off in my head when our vice-principal, Miss
Morgan, barged into the auditorium, letting the heavy metal doors slam shut behind her. Her heels clacked in quick succession across the shiny yellow floor. With a crook of her finger in my direction, she removed me from my seat. Her gaze was focused on the floor as she led me to the principal’s office in silence.

When I entered the office, Sheriff Fletcher sat behind the
cluttered desk instead of the principal himself.

Oh shit.

I took a quick mental inventory of anything I’d done recently that would warrant the honor of his visit. There was a dime bag in the back pocket of my shorts under my gold graduation gown, but since the sheriff’s weed policy was basically
if you have it, pass it
, I wasn’t overly concerned. Although having it on school property could result in some off-colored double standard policies or laws being applied. There hadn’t been a single marijuana arrest in Coral Pines the entire time I’ve lived here. It would be just my luck to be
the very first one thrown behind bars for it. I’d also had an
unfortunate incident involving the baseball field fence and a four-wheeler I’d
borrowed—without the owner’s knowledge—but I was pretty sure there was no way for the sheriff to know it was me who caused the
damage.

“Sheriff?” I tried to act casual, but my one-word greeting
sounded like a question. Even with his lax attitude and loose interpretations of the law, I couldn’t stand the man. His family practically owned Coral Pines, so I was pretty sure Sheriff Fletcher had phoned in his police training. The only somewhat-decent member of the Fletcher family was Owen, a nice enough guy, if pretty boy man sluts were your thing.

The sheriff’s shirt was opened three buttons too many, as if to make sure that he wouldn’t be mistaken for a professional man of the law. A mass of curly black chest hair poked out of his collar and brushed the base of his throat. “Have a seat, Miss Ford.” He gestured with a fat, hairy finger to the chairs in front of the desk. Miss Morgan stood at his side with her hands folded in front of her, almost nun-like. Her tall, thin frame and high-wasted pencil skirt made her look like a giraffe next to the sheriff’s squatty physique. Her choppy, uneven bangs hung over her lashes and grazed her milky skin. Being a red-head, I was pretty damn pale; not even the death rays of the
southern Florida sun could have changed that. Somehow, she
managed to be even paler than me.

I took a seat and hoped that whatever this was would be over soon.

It had only been four years earlier, in another state at another
school, in what seemed like another life, when the principal called
me from my classroom and into the hallway to deliver the news that my father had overdosed. I’d been in foster care for over two years by
then, and I hadn’t seen him in four. But the powers that be had
thought his death was important enough to pull me from class, so I felt I
owed it to them to fake some of the sadness I knew they were
expecting from me.

What I really wanted to do was laugh at the satisfaction, at the justice of it all.

Happy couldn’t even begin to describe how I’d felt when they informed me of his death.

Nan had always said that God created man in his image. Where my father was concerned, God was either a sick, sadistic fuck or one hell of a lie people convinced themselves was the truth.

I kept that thought to myself when I was around Nan.

Dad had been at work when they found him in one of the
bathroom stalls, sitting on the toilet with his pants down around his ankles, a syringe still hanging from his pocked-up arm. I was more surprised to hear he’d actually been at work than I was to hear he’d died. At least when it happened, he was with the only thing in his life he’d ever really loved: his needle.

Dad was a real winner.

The sheriff didn’t look me in the eyes. His gaze focused
somewhere over my head, prolonging whatever news he’d come to deliver. As
time passed, each of his breaths sounded more like strained snores. I grew impatient. “Maybe, you can just tell me why I’m here,” I blurted
out.

“Sweetheart?” The word fell out of his mouth like he’d never
used it before. “Who’s your next of kin?” The blood drained from my face.
I didn’t answer him at first. I couldn’t find the words. My vision
spun like I was looking at him through a kaleidoscope.

Next of kin?
I thought.
My only kin is Nan...

“Abby!” Miss Morgan snapped her fingers in my face. I hadn’t even seen her kneeling in front of me, but there she was. Behind her,
the sheriff was sweating profusely and nervously. “Abby,” she
repeated, softer now. “Nan was in an accident.” She enunciated each word as if she was teaching an English class.

“How?” I asked. “Her truck doesn’t even run. It’s been sitting in a junkyard and hasn’t been off blocks since September,” I said, as if somehow this fact would change the truth.

“Not a car accident, sweetie.” Miss Morgan looked to be in
physical pain. “It was…an explosion.”

She squeezed my hand, but I flinched at her touch and
immediately pulled away from her grip. “What the fuck?” I whispered. My heart pounded in my ears. I felt the blood in my veins turn to acid. My skin was about to burn off of my bones.

“That’s enough of that language, young lady.” Sheriff Fletcher had the audacity to scold me. He cleared his throat. “I do realize this is a difficult situation for you, and I’m very sorry.” Yeah, right. It sure sounded like he was. “I have to ask something: did your Nan tell you she needed money for anything, by chance? Do you know if she was having any sort of financial troubles?”

I shook my head. We didn’t live like royalty by any means, but her social security check and the money she made from selling her jams at the Sunday craft market was enough to pay the mortgage
and keep me fed and clothed. “No,” I answered. “Not that I know
of.”

Sheriff Fletcher groaned. “We have reason to believe your Nan
was involved in some activities of a questionable nature.” He
scratched at his five o’clock shadow. “She was in a mobile home in the middle of the Preserve when it exploded.”

There was no way this could be happening.

They had to be wrong.

The sheriff started to talk again as Miss. Morgan sat down next to me. She reached out in another attempt to put her hands over mine. I pulled away before she could.

“Sheriff Fletcher thinks the mobile home was involved in
cooking drugs
.” Her words were as awkward as she was.

“No, that has to be a mistake.” I started to rant like my words were being tossed around in a tornado. “Nan doesn’t have anything to do with drugs. I’ll call her right now... you can see for yourself”

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.