Splinters of Light by Herron Rachael

Author:Herron, Rachael
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty-four

After the fireworks stopped, Nora crawled out of Harrison’s bed, her limbs heavy. “I have to go home. I have to wait for her.” Harrison nodded and pressed her hand, barely waking.

At home, Nora didn’t sleep. She sat on the sofa downstairs, the television on the Home Shopping Network, the volume off. When her eyes drifted closed, she propped them open using determination born of fear. Her leg muscles cramped with disuse. She straightened and shook them, then stuck her heels under the couch cushion Ellie liked to hold against her belly. From outside came random pops and squeals followed by the occasional M-80 blast that set off car alarms and made neighborhood dogs bark.

How could she possibly go to bed? Her daughter was gone, missing. It might be her fault. No, it was her fault. Ellie had probably been right—she’d probably asked for chicken. She shouldn’t have argued with her daughter about it—oh, god, she remembered it all over again. Ellie hadn’t left because of the chicken.

Ellie had left because Nora had hit her.

Confronted with the reality of her newly untrustworthy mind, she’d hit her own daughter across the face as hard as she could.

She didn’t blame Ellie for not coming home.

The analog clock on the wall read a time, but it had been getting harder and harder to decipher it lately. Maybe she needed her contacts prescription checked. She knew what was important: it was predawn—the morning paper had just slapped against the front stoop, and cars were still using their headlights. And her daughter still wasn’t home.

Nora placed her fingertips against the blank piece of paper in her journal. Responsibility. She could write that to her daughter. Responsible women . . .

Didn’t hit their children in anger.

No, it was even worse than that. It hadn’t been anger. Nora had hit Ellie in fear.

Fear was displacing the hope. Every day less of one, more of the other. Nora couldn’t control it, she couldn’t iron it out, she couldn’t deep clean it, she couldn’t paint over it, she couldn’t make it pretty and tasteful. She couldn’t write a funny column about it. She couldn’t make it anything else but what it was, which was . . .

Even now, she was having a hard time staying on track with her thoughts. She kept thinking that she’d get up and do something useful while she was waiting, but then she needed to finish her tea, and then she got caught up in whatever the HSN girl was displaying. Even with the volume off, the whapper-icer-dicer looked interesting enough to warrant watching for a while.

Or hours. In the dark, with just the clock she couldn’t read to tell her where she was in time, Nora didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there. She was completely alone. Technically, she knew that on the other side of the globe, whole nations were awake and functioning—laughing, loving, dying—in daylight hours. But here, in her living room, it was possible it would never be light again.

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