Daughter of Light (13 page)

“Yes, yes.”

“I do need some things at the drugstore.”

“You were wise not to take Martin up on his offer of that toothbrush. Once you accept something from
someone like that, you’re indebted forever to him. He’ll annoy the hell out of you, and he’s not above trying to offer you more than his dental surgical instruments. I speak from experience,” she added.

“No worries there,” I told her.

“Now, Jim Lamb is obviously already smitten with you,” she continued. “He’s a nice boy, but what are his prospects? Someday he might become the headmaster? Wow, what an achievement. You’re too beautiful to settle for anything less than a really successful businessman or politician. Besides,” she said, nudging me with her shoulder, “I think you are so much more sophisticated than Jim, you wouldn’t be able to think of him as anything but a simple young man. Am I right?”

“Only time will tell,” I said.

She laughed, but I could see from the way her eyes caught the streetlight illumination that she was very unsure of me. She even looked a little afraid, I thought.

On the way back, she talked more about the city, shopping, and restaurants. She thought it might be fun for the two of us, despite the differences in our ages, to hang out a little, go to the finer restaurants where we could meet “the proper people.” I made it clear to her that I wanted to get myself established first, get a firm footing on my new life, before venturing out too much.

“How sensible you sound,” she said. “I know I’m right about you. There’s something very mature about you, something that suggests you know a lot more than most girls your age about . . . everything.”

Was I that transparent?

If so, what could I hide about myself?

The cold front Mrs. Winston had predicted was coming in quickly. I could feel a chill in the breeze, and the partly clear night sky had turned quite overcast. Dark purple clouds were puffing like flexed muscles, thickening the shadows that seemed to seep out of the darkness beyond the reach of streetlights, darkness that leaped to the right or left of car headlights. I could hear my quickened heartbeat, like distant drums. Something ominous was watching us. Of course, all Naomi Addison felt was the chill.

“It could rain tonight,” she said. “If it’s raining in the morning, I’d be happy to run you over to Dolan Plumbing Supply.”

“You’re up that early?” I asked, a little surprised.

She laughed. “Not usually, no. That’s why you won’t have trouble getting into the bathroom in the morning.” Then she stopped abruptly. She turned slowly and looked toward a line of hedges.

“What? Did you forget something?” I asked when she didn’t speak. “Naomi?”

“Nothing. I thought . . . I saw . . .”

“What?”

“A pair of eyes . . . illuminated in the darkness.”

She pressed her right hand against her breast just over her heart.

“Stupid of me,” she said. “There’s obviously nothing there. After all, what could it have been, a werewolf or something?” She laughed and started walking again.

I looked back.

Or something,
I thought,
yes.

But I walked on with her. Maybe, without her realizing it, to save her life.

I stood by my bedroom window, looking down at the street, for nearly twenty minutes before deciding to go to sleep. The night sky didn’t clear at all. Where we lived in Los Angeles, there were no streetlights, but I recalled that it was no different no matter where we had lived. Daddy always preferred the darkness, emphasizing whenever he could that the darkness was our friend.

“We exist because of the darkness,” he told me once. “All of you are daughters of darkness.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant by that back then, but I was sure now. Darkness, secrets, and anonymity were tools that helped keep us alive and safe. More than any other living thing on this earth, we fled intense scrutiny. When questions started, our skillfully orchestrated ballet of avoidance and equivocation immediately began.

Maybe that was why Ava thought I was different, why she thought I might be afraid of myself or for myself. She knew that I was never completely comfortable in the dark, or at least not as comfortable as she and Daddy were. I didn’t want to admit to being afraid of anything, ever, but I was, and “fear” wasn’t a word we
used in our family. As far as I could see, there was nothing either Daddy or Mrs. Fennel feared, and Ava was capable of facing down a stampede of elephants.

The darkness I gazed down at outside seemed to follow me to bed when I turned away from the window. The lights were not shut off yet. There was just a sliver of illumination sliding under the door. For a while, I lay there concentrating on it the way a moth was drawn to a candle. It was as if as long as it was there, I was safe, protected. Then it went off, and I was dropped into a swirling ball of darkness.

The visions I saw spinning inside it weren’t nightmares. They were irrevocable memories permanently printed inside my mind. I saw some of the men my sisters had brought home being swallowed up in Daddy’s overwhelming embrace. I saw Ava’s eyes brighten lustfully at the prospect of a new, healthy young man. I saw my boyfriend Buddy sinking deeper and deeper into the trap my love was designed to create, and I felt my ever-growing inadequacy when it came to protecting him.

Closing my eyes and pressing my face to the pillow didn’t stop the visions and the memories. They twisted and turned, slithered and slipped in under my eyelids. I thought I might burst out with screams of frustration. Would this ever end? Did this mean that Ava was absolutely right, that I couldn’t escape because all that I had been and all that I was part of were attached to my soul like some horrid umbilical cord no one could cut or tear? Gathering up all of my resolve, I fought back as hard as I could, and eventually, I fell asleep.

The lateness didn’t matter. I didn’t need as much sleep as they did. I envisioned all of them down the hallway: Mr. Brady on his back sinking into a grave of repose, snoring; Jim Lamb curled comfortably in a fetal position under his blanket, dreaming about me; and Naomi across the way fantasizing a romance with Ken Dolan. It was as if I had the power to pull their heads apart and peer into their dreams like some voyeur of other people’s imaginings, other people’s deepest secrets. That at least distracted me and became my temporary form of escape from all that haunted me.

I woke early and hurried into the bathroom to shower, as if I thought I could wash away the bleak and morbid flashbacks that had attached themselves to my subconscious. It was as if I believed I could scrub them off me as easily as I could wipe away cobwebs I had gone through during my fevered tossing and turning in the darkness of my bedroom. I tried not to make much noise, as it was early, and contrary to what Naomi had told me, she wasn’t rising. I didn’t hear a sound coming from her room, and when I gazed at her door, I could sense her still in a deep sleep embraced by her dreams.

I dressed in the clothes I had arrived in, because I hadn’t had time to shop for anything new yet. The overcast night sky hung on and hovered over the Quincy morning. The clouds were lighter but still tenaciously dulling the morning sun. After I brushed my hair and put on a little lipstick, I went down to breakfast. Jim Lamb was the only other guest dressed and eating. He rose as soon as I entered the room.

“Oh, sit, please,” I said, pulling out my own chair.

Mrs. McGruder popped in from the kitchen with a platter of thin blueberry pancakes. There was sliced mixed fruit on the table, along with a jug of maple syrup, a small pitcher of milk, and a pot of coffee on a ceramic base.

“Orange juice, dear?” she asked.

“Thank you, yes,” I said. She placed the platter of pancakes at the center of the table. “They look delicious.”

“We get the blueberries locally,” she said, and went for my juice.

Jim handed me the platter of pancakes. “How did you sleep?” he asked.

“Very well, thank you.”

“These bed frames are old, but the mattresses are very comfortable. I mean, at least mine is,” he corrected quickly. “I haven’t slept in any other.”

He must have been referring to any implication that he had slept with Naomi Addison. Of course, there might have been another woman there before she had come, I realized. The crowns of his cheeks turned a little crimson with the unintended allusion. Who could be shyer than someone who was embarrassed not only by what he had said but by what he imagined someone else might think of him?

“Yes, my bed is very comfortable,” I said.

Mrs. McGruder brought me a glass of orange juice. “Would you like tea instead of coffee, dear?”

“No, this is fine. Thank you. Is Mrs. Winston still asleep?” I asked, doubting the possibility.

“Oh, no,” Mrs. McGruder replied, smiling. “She
was up more than an hour ago and out to the fisherman’s market. She likes to be one of the first to get the freshest and the best.”

I poured some maple syrup over the pancakes I had taken. Jim moved quickly to pour me a cup of coffee.

“Thank you.”

“I wanted to offer to drive you to work this morning,” he said. “But we’d have had to get started a little earlier if we had planned on my doing that. I have a homeroom, so I have to be at school on time and—”

“Oh, don’t even think of it,” I said. “I’m really looking forward to the walk.”

“Yes, well, I know Mrs. Addison volunteered to take you shopping later, but if she’s not available for some reason, I’d be more than happy to drive you to the mall and any other shop you might want to try.”

“Thank you. I’ll keep that in mind.”

He looked nervously at his watch. “I’m so sorry to have to desert you,” he said. “But the headmistress, Mrs. Damian, stands in that hallway with a stopwatch. I like to be a few minutes early so there’s no doubt.” He leaned over to lower his voice, even though there was no one else in the dining room. “I swear, I think she transferred from some position in a women’s penitentiary.”

“I know the type,” I said, smiling.

“Do you?”

He looked at me a little more intently. Was he wondering if I had been in some girls’ detention facility? His concern brought a smile to my face.

“I meant I’ve met women like that in the school I attended.”

“Yes, I’m sure. I really have to find the opportunity to get to know you. When you settle in, that is. I know you’re pretty occupied right now.”

“We’ll find the time,” I said.

He brightened with the promise and then folded his napkin perfectly and neatly before he rose. “Well, off to the chain gang,” he said, and he ran his right forefinger across his throat.

“Don’t you like your work?”

“I love my subject, but remember, I teach—or try to teach—adolescent females, that mysterious species who laugh for almost no reason and cry for definitely no reason. Sometimes I feel as if I’m teaching extraterrestrials on a different planet.”

I smiled, recalling some of the similar complaints my junior and senior high school teachers had about the girls in their classes. Because I was so different from my classmates when it came to those hormone-driven giggles and flirtations during lectures, my teachers favored me. It wasn’t that I didn’t begin to have crushes on certain good-looking boys. I did, but funnily enough, boys, and girls, too, assumed that I came from a fanatically religious family, a family of Puritans. They thought this was why I wore no makeup and no earrings or bracelets. In their minds, it explained why I didn’t participate in clubs and games or go to dances. Surely they thought that trying to be friends with me would be a total waste of time. I could see it in their faces. To them, my whole life was a waste of time.

Not long before I had met Buddy, however, I’d become very self-conscious about my maturing figure and
my growing sexual interest in the boys I thought were good-looking. When I had admitted to Ava that this was happening to me, she had warned me about falling in love, even if it was only a teenage love.

“What’s wrong with falling in love?” I had asked her.

“Love is poison for us,” she’d told me, but she wouldn’t explain what that meant—not then, not until later, when my relationship with Buddy had developed.

“Well, have a great day,” Jim said, and he started out. He kept his eyes on me and bumped into the chair at the end of the table. Flashing an embarrassed look, he hurried along.

Mrs. McGruder, who had been watching from the kitchen doorway, laughed. “He’s a sweet boy,” she said.

“Boy” is the key word,
I thought, but smiled and nodded.

“This was wonderful, Mrs. McGruder. Thank you,” I said, taking my last sip of coffee.

“Have a successful second day,” she told me. “There’s an umbrella by the door. Maybe you should take it. It looks like we might see some of God’s tears.” She smiled. “That’s what my mother called the rain.”

“How sweet,” I said, and thought,
My father called it white blood.

I scooped up the umbrella and left the rooming house. I didn’t feel the first drops until I was a good block and a half away. Just as I paused to open the umbrella, I heard a car pull up to the curb right alongside me. I anticipated seeing Michael Thomas when I turned, but it was Liam Dolan. He inched up closer and lowered the passenger’s-side window.