The Dark Light of Day (35 page)

Jake interrupted us when he stepped back into the waiting room, escorted by a nurse wearing purple scrubs. His face was pale. He was clutching a juice box in one hand and a cookie in the other. He sat on the couch and drained the juice in one long pull. “Well, that sucked,” he said. I almost laughed.

The man who danced with the devil got woozy while giving
blood.

The nurse motioned for me. “You’re next, honey. What kind of blood you got for me? Your little girl’s got that rare O we always be
needing, so that’s what we are looking for today. But I’ll take
anything your veins will give me. Lord knows we need it
all
.”

How could I refuse a request like that?

I wasn’t at all light-headed afterward like they warned me I
could be—like Jake turned out to be—but I sat back in my reclining chair and drank my juice as the nurse instructed. The nurse came over to me with a card with four drops of blood on it. “You ain’t got that O, darlin’...you’re just standard ol’ A.” She flailed her arms when she spoke and flipped a long black braid over her shoulder. “But your tall, blonde and sexy baby daddy out there got the good stuff, so we tapped into that real good.”

“Oh, he’s not her biological father.”

“Oh? Well, since your baby girl’s got the O and you don’t, the biological baby daddy got to have it. So when you talk to him you send him on up to Miss Karla so I can put that liquid gold on tap!” Miss Karla loved her job way too much. “This biological daddy of yours got baby blues like him over there?”

“No, he has green eyes like my daughter,” I said. “It isn’t
possible for two blue- eyed parents to have a green-eyed child.” It sounded so rehearsed... probably because it was a conversation I’d had in my head a thousand times.

“Oh, sure they can. My friend Marni, her husband Brian, has got
emerald-green eyes, and both his parents got eyes as blue as the
waters of the Caribbean.”

“Then your friend Marni needs to tell her husband to check the
eye
color of the mailman because his parents are lying to him,” I
snapped. I think Miss Karla detected our conversation was much more serious than the light banter she initially thought it was.

“I ain’t making this shit up, honey. Freeman,” she shouted,
without turning around. A technician in a lab coat, who had previously been sitting in a corner absorbed in a comic book, swiveled around in his chair. “Freeman studied genetics at some fancy college up north.”

“What’s up?” he asked, pushing up the bridge of his thick black framed glasses.

“Can two blue-eyed peoples make a green-eyed baby?”

“This is dumb. I have to go.” I stood to leave, but Freeman’s
answer stopped me in my tracks.

“Yeah, it’s pretty rare, but it does happen. I’ve seen several
cases.” He turned back around to his comic.

“Mmmhmm... that’s what I thought,” Karla said, declaring
victory over my stupidity.

I thanked her and politely refused her offer to assist me to the waiting room.

“Miss?” Karla called to me.

She just couldn’t let it drop. “Yeah?”

Her volume dropped, and suddenly she was discreet. “I know it ain’t none of my business, but if you ain’t sure about who yo baby daddy is, we can do a test. Just bring that fine-ass man back in here, and I’ll do it up right.” She winked, and I knew she was trying to help. Then, she grabbed a pamphlet from a dozen different colored papers crowding the wall. “This is about blood types. Yours is easy to figure out. Your girl has O and you have A, so the daddy has to have O. It’s that simple.”

I thanked her and took the pamphlet, slowly making my way back to the waiting room as I looked at it. I wanted to get back in to see Georgia as soon as she woke up, but nurse Karla’s words
haunted me.

Was there really a chance that Jake was Georgia’s father?

More importantly, did it really matter anymore?

I slid down next to Jake. He had his head back on the cushion, but he put his arm around me and pulled me close. “You did better than I did, Bee.” He handed me a cup of coffee from the table. It was exactly what I needed.

I had one question in my head, just one little question, and I could put all of this behind me.

“Bethany?” I asked.

“Yeah, sugar?” She put down her magazine and took off her
reading glasses.

Then I asked her the question I almost didn’t want to know the answer to. There was only a small chance... was it really worth me breaking my heart all over again?

“Do you know Owen’s blood type?” I glanced at Jake as he
tensed beside me, though Bethany didn’t seem to notice.

She thought for a second.

Please be anything other than O, please not O.

“He’s either A or AB. I always get them confused. Why?”

“He’s not O?”

“Not that I know. There are no O-types in the family at all,
actually,” she said. “Why are you asking this, Abby?” She turned her attention to the hallway where I’d just come from. “What happened in there?”

Jake was as eager to hear my answer as she was. “Because,
Bethany,” I smiled and took Jake’s hands in mine, “Owen’s not
Georgia’s father,
after all.” Once I said it, he smiled, too – genuine happiness on his face.

I just smiled back and gazed into those beautiful teary pools of sapphire blue

The eyes of my daughter’s father.

GEORGIA WAS SLEEPING PEACEFULLY
in her room after a six-day stay in the hospital. We had brought her home just a few hours earlier. During the day, I’d watched Jake’s eyes darken as the sun faded into the horizon, and I knew he was preparing himself for what he needed to do.

I had no intentions of stopping him.

I sat on the seawall, my legs dangling over the edge, staring into the darkness. The sun had set hours ago. A blanket of stars lit up the sky. Jake sat next to me with his arm around my waist, holding me close. I could live in the strength of his arms.

“She’s okay,” he whispered. I had a feeling he was reassuring himself as much as he was me.

“We’re
all
going to be okay,” I said. For the first time in my
entire life, I believed it. “I need to move, though. I got a letter in the mail from the property management company. It said something about the investor deciding to use the house for himself personally. I have thirty days. I didn’t even know they could do that. I guess I should have read the lease more carefully. You want to take him out?”

“It depends,” he said, smiling down at me.

“Oh, I thought this was a ‘no questions asked’ kind-of request, but I’ll bite. What does it depend on?”

“On whether or not you want me to kill myself.” He handed me a white envelope with a cashier’s check inside for nine-thousand six-hundred dollars. “It’s all the rent money you’ve paid.”

It all clicked. “You’re the investor. You bought Nan’s house.” It wasn’t a question. “When did you do this?”

“I knew the bank had to sell it at some point so I kept an eye on
it. I made my bid before I’d even left town. Figured you’d want to
keep it no matter where we ended up going. It took those money fucks
almost a year to accept my offer, and almost as long to close the
damn thing. When it was finally mine, I had it all fixed up for you. Then, I realized you probably wouldn’t have accepted it from me as a gift after what I’d done.”

He was right. “Nope. I certainly wouldn’t have.”

“I didn’t even know about Georgia then, or I would’ve put some cool kid shit in here, too.” He kissed me on the nose and continued. “I made sure I had personal approval of the new tenants. I had only two flyers made—one they posted in the window of the office, and the other I was going to have Reggie give to you personally. You were so quick to sign the lease that I never had to go with Plan B.”

Even when he was gone, he was protecting me, looking out for
me.

“You were all I thought about, Bee, the whole time I was gone – this whole four years. When I finally worked up the courage to call Reggie a few years back to ask him about you, I was scared to death
he’d tell me you’d packed up and left town, or shacked up with
someone else... or gotten married.”

That broke my heart a little. “You thought I was with Owen.”

“It crossed my mind. Makes me sick to my fucking stomach that
I ever considered it a possibility.” He ran his fingers under my jaw
and
pulled my face to his, pressing his forehead against mine. I loved it
when he did that. “But when Reggie told me that you weren’t with anyone, that you were still living in the apartment and working at the shop, I made myself believe it was because you still needed me.
But you didn’t. You had it all sorted out long before I tried to step in
and help. Reggie never told me about Georgia though, probably
because he didn’t know how I would react. The bastard. I owe him a punch in the fucking jaw for that.” He laughed.

I didn’t know what to say about it all.

Jake continued. “I came to the conclusion that if I couldn’t be
with
you myself, I was going to at least try and give you everything I
could to make you happy, even if it was from a distance —even if I wasn’t
going to be part of it. I’m just sorry it took me so long to do it.” He
brushed his lips over mine. “Turns out you were okay without me after all.”

“I wasn’t okay, Jake,” I assured him. “I wasn’t at all.”

“That’s what I was afraid you would say.
Abby okay
is not the
same as
everyone else okay
.” Jake said. “Look at your arm. Look at my brave
fucking girl and her warrior ink.” He ran his fingers down the
artwork covering my right arm. “I know this is one of your pictures, and this
is obviously me.” He tapped the angel of death image on the
motorcycle. “And this is our quote, but what is this one?” he asked, his fingers landing on the black and gray version of “The Scar” painting.

“It’s my favorite painting. The real one is in color, but I had him do it in black and white instead. It’s a woman with a scar down the middle of her entire body.”

“But he didn’t tattoo the scar itself?”

“He didn’t need to.” I’d had the artist use one of the reddest, most jagged of my scars as the red line down the center of her.

“Wow,” Jake said. “It’s beautiful and fucking amazing, just like
you.” His eyes were darkening, but it didn’t push the crystal blue
out entirely. Both the devil and angel in him were with me that night. “I don’t know how I ever survived without you, Bee.”

I hadn’t thought of it from his side. At least I’d had Georgia. Jake
had no one. I could see how the last four years were so difficult for
him.

“I turned off my feelings the second I walked away from you on the bridge,” I told him. “But when Georgia was born, it was like she
just broke through it all. It was hard to do, but I had my baby, and
when you have a screaming three month old with colic who won’t
sleep through the night, it’s hard to get caught up in your own
bullshit. The things that happened to me in the past just started not to matter
with her around. They still hurt, and I didn’t avoid them. They just weren’t the most important things in my life anymore. She saved
me.”

“You
both
saved me,” Jake said. “As much as I can be saved.”
His tone became serious. “I need you to do something for me, baby.”

“Anything.” If he asked me, I would do it. It was that simple.

“I need you to tell me why you took those pictures, the ones of you after…”

“I took them for you,” I admitted. “I wanted you to see what he
did to me. I wanted you to be mad because I wanted you—” I
stopped just short of saying it.

“Say it Bee,” he insisted. “I need to hear it.”

“I wanted you to kill him.” The words didn’t hurt, and I wasn’t embarrassed. It was actually liberating saying aloud that I wanted Owen to die. “There’s something else, too, besides what he did to me and Georgia.”

His eyes were fully dark now. “What is it?”

“He killed Nan.”

“I need to see them, the pictures, now, and I need you to show them to me.”

“Why?”

“Because, baby, I am going to leave here tonight, and I’m going to track him down wherever he is, and I’m going to take him out of this world. I’m going to bury the pieces of him where no one will ever find them.”

I hadn’t looked at the photos since I developed them that night in the high school darkroom. I didn’t know if I could see that part of my life again. “What difference will the pictures make? You know what happened.”

“I need to see exactly what he did to you, because the more I know, the more detailed your description of your pain… the more
satisfying it will be for me when I kill him, and the more I’ll enjoy
it.”

“You want to enjoy it?” I knew right away that I was judging
him. Who was I to judge anyone? Beneath that was a curiosity within me
about what he felt when he did something like this. Jake had so
many things at war inside him. I wanted to know as much as I could about what made him tick.

“Yes, I want to get off on it, as much as possible. I know that sounds fucked up. But in order to move forward, to enjoy what we have with our family and the rest of our lives together, I need to close this chapter first. But I can’t just kill him, Bee. I need you to understand…” He tightened his fists into balls. “I need to feel him die under my hands. I need to feel it so badly.”

He pressed his lips into my neck, and a rush of heat shot right to my core.

Then, he whispered into my ear, “When this is all over, what we
have will be complete. The three of us under one roof, forever, as it
should be, with no trace left of the fucker who tried to ruin
everything for us.” His beautiful promises mixed with his warm breath on my ear made me whimper. “Not to mention, we have a lot of time to make up for, and I plan on spending a lot of that time with my head between your thighs.” He cupped his hand over my jeans between my legs and squeezed. I jumped at the sensation. “I’ve never gotten to taste that sweet pussy of yours, baby, and I think four fucking years is long enough to wait.”