Page 90 of Driftwood Daffodil

“Yeah.”

“Do you ever miss mom?”

His dark eyes snapped over to mine. “Why are you asking about mom?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “I just think about her sometimes.”

And hear her screams at night. I’d never forget the sound of her blood dripping down the cupboard door. Each drop echoed through my ears, but it was the silence behind them that was the loudest.

“Don’t you think about her?” Did he remember what she looked like? Because I couldn’t. Her smile faded more every day.

“Sometimes,” Atlas looked back out at the yard and whispered, “But I try not to.”

Confusion tipped my head to the side, “Dad says memories are all we have.”

He nudged me with his shoulder, “My memories aren’t the same as yours, Little Man.”

“Because you weren’t there that day?”

“Because ‘she’ wasn’t supposed to be there that day.”

My brows knit. “Who was supposed to be there?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Atlas grumbled in response.

I watched the line in his forehead deepen and opened my mouth to ask if he was okay, but Atlas cut me off before I could say anything.

“Come on. We better go inside,” Atlas tipped his chin at a beam of light in the yard. “Before Saul starts chopping down trees.”

“I don’t want to go inside,” I huffed and crossed my arms. “I hate dad.”

“No, you don’t.” Atlas said. “But you’ll hate me one day.” …

I never did findout what Atlas meant by that. Then again I was only ten. But that look on his face never went away. He changed shortly after that. He got angry and distant. Every time Atlas would walk in the room, I’d silently hope that he would smile at me like he used to.

He never did. Because of that I spent the last three months of his life avoiding him. And now, I’d give anything to see that look on his face.

My gaze trickled over the pond in the distance.

The trees around it had gotten bigger, taller and more full. It kind of pissed me off knowing that Atlas’s death had no effect on them. They flourished while I died a little. Everything out here had changed. The shed Atlas helped me build for a clubhouse was gone.

The fountain in the middle of the yard where he taught me how to ride a bike was replaced with a new one, and the garden my mother started never grew back. All the flowers dried out and wilted away. Now it was just another patch of meaningless grass.

It was funny how the world quieted down during certain moments. I could hear the soft rustle of leaves in the night breeze, and feel the hum of Romeo’s music in the room below me, but everything else was silent. As if there was a void in this place. There was no voice in the distance calling my name, or footsteps echoing down the hall.

There was just me, the lightning bugs, and the aching betrayal burning through my chest.

It wasn’t the fact that I kissed Novalee that was picking at the back of my brain. It was that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t wash the sweet taste of her out of my mouth, or erase the image of her big hazel eyes from my mind. That spark of fear glimmering across her face haunted my thoughts.

“Fear…” I sat up as realization smacked me in the face.

There was genuine fear in her expression.

I accused her of being scared, but she really was. Novalee was terrified.

Why? What was different? We argued, I laughed when she got in trouble, and I threatened to kill her. That was all pretty normal. There was one thing that wasn’t.

My brow rose, “The kiss.”

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