On a Dark Wing Read online

Nate had me feeling anxious, something I never thought could happen. Even though he’d haunted my dreams plenty, I had to remind myself that I really didn’t know him. When he only shrugged, like that was an answer, I pushed him for more.

  “Did you read about it in the newspaper?”

  “No, it’s just that you always look sad.” He cocked his head. “Is it because of her?”

  He acted as if it was strange for someone to grieve over their dead mother, like he didn’t comprehend the concept. And how did he know how I “always” looked?

  “Well, yeah. She’s dead and I miss her. Is that so hard for you to understand?”

  “Actually I have an appreciation for death that comes from a…rather unique perspective, but I would like to hear how it’s been for you since your mother’s death.”

  “Oh, really.” I narrowed my eyes. “Give me your email and I’ll write you an essay.”

  He stared at me, like he was processing what I’d said.

  “You seem angry.”

  “Very perceptive, Sherlock.” I narrowed my eyes at him. “How I feel about my mother is personal, but you act like I’m a freak for missing her.”

  “No, quite the contrary. What you feel for your mother touches me. It has from the moment I first…heard about what happened.”

  The compassion in his eyes took me by surprise. In an instant, he completely defused me.

  “Look, everyone thinks that I have some inside track on the dead because of what my father does for a living.” I sighed. “If that’s all you’re after, you’ll be disappointed, because I’m not playing that game, not with you.”

  “This isn’t a game, Abbey. Your feelings are important to me.” When he reached for my hand, the warmth of his skin calmed me. “I’m not curious about the dead. It’s the living I want to know more about. I want to know about you. The depth of human emotion is complicated and extraordinary. It fascinates me.”

  “What? Are you writing a book?” I pulled my hand away.

  “No, it’s just that I find a mother’s love such a powerful force. How did it feel to lose that remarkable bond at such a young age?”

  “Okay, that’s it. If you want the 411 on death, you can Google it.” I got to my feet and stood over him, brushing off the back of my pants. “And please stop talking about my mother, like you knew her.”

  I went to the edge of the clearing and looked over the valley. When the sound of boots came up behind me, I felt Nate’s hand touch my hair. It surprised me that I let him do it.

  “If you want me to stop talking about her, I will. The last thing I want is to hurt you, Abbey.” He kissed the top of my head and squeezed my arm. “But I hope we can talk more. I like…being with you.”

  His soft voice and the affectionate kiss brought on my tears. I didn’t want to cry, but he’d peeled back all my defenses until I had nothing left but my soft underbelly. Talking about my mom always did that.

  I wasn’t sure I’d ever willingly open up about losing my mom. Even talking about her with Dad had been tough, but Nate made me almost want to. He’d kept me off balance—like he pulled the rug out from under me and caught me when I fell all at the same time. Maybe the dreams I had about him had made me feel like I’d known him for a long time, but something about him definitely felt familiar and safe—and strangely comforting.

  “Look, I gotta go.” I took a deep breath and wiped away my tears before I turned to face him. “My dad’s gonna be home soon.”

  “Whenever you come, I’ll be here. I promise.”

  I wanted to see him again and I had every intention of arranging that, if I could, but he jumped ahead of me with his promise.

  “How did you know what I—? Never mind.” I shook my head. “So anytime I come here—even at night—you’ll be hanging out, is that it?”

  “Yes, unless you’re afraid to come after dark.”

  “I’m not afraid. I come here all the time at night.”

  “Then, yes. I’ll be here.”

  “Okay.” I shrugged. “Guess I’ll see you…whenever.”

  I headed down the trail, looking back over my shoulder. Every time I did, Nate stared down at me, smiling. What was behind that knowing smile? That perfect boy. Why had he promised me he’d be on the ridge, whenever I wanted him to be? Eventually I lost sight of him, but I kept going, back to the cabin and my pathetic life. Being with Nate had been like watching a train wreck. It had been agonizing yet I couldn’t turn away. He’d tortured and charmed me, enough to get me totally hooked.

  But Dad would be home soon and I didn’t want him to find me gone. He’d only go looking for me and I wanted to keep Nate Holden a secret—my secret—even though I hated leaving him on that ridge. I had a bad feeling that I’d never see him again, except in the fantasies that would really be sweet torture after today.

  Trust didn’t come easy. A part of me felt like Nate had set me up. That I’d come back to the clearing and wait for him while he’d be someplace warm, laughing at my expense because that’s what most people did. They made fun of me. I was a joke, but when I thought about it, that didn’t seem like something Nate would do. At least the Nate I thought I knew from school. From everything I knew about him, he was a really good guy. He wouldn’t do that, to me or anyone.

  Yet I couldn’t help it. Good things didn’t happen to me. Why would Mr. Perfect kiss me? And why, of all things, would he talk about my mom? All of it weirded me out.

  I wanted to feel like a normal girl who had been kissed by the boy of her dreams. Why couldn’t that feeling last? But I guess I knew why. My defenses had grown a thick skin. They’d become my survival mechanism. Believing Nate had come for me felt too much like being stupid. People could be jerks, but it would kill me if Nate turned out like that. I didn’t know what to think. I just knew something didn’t feel right about him.

  After Nate had pushed me to open up about personal stuff—and the death of my mother, a taboo subject—I had doubts about how well I knew him at all. I had to know if he had been on the level, but nagging uncertainty forced me into testing his promise—and there’d be only one way to do that.

  After I left Nate, he was all I thought about the rest of the afternoon. I’d relived our kiss over and over. I felt different, like I’d crossed over a line from being a kid. I honestly had no regrets. In fact I felt great about it, but a question lingered after I’d come off the high of kissing him.

  Why did I let Nate do it?

  I didn’t even flinch or play hard to get. He was practically a stranger. Only the lofty pedestal that I’d put him on had earned him that kiss. At school, we’d never even talked, but being alone with him in the woods—on my turf—must have burned all my inhibitions. I let him kiss me because of the fantasies I’d had about him for so long, but why had he kissed me? At school, he always seemed to look through me.

  Maybe it had been more about being alone with that one special boy. I wanted him to kiss me and he did. That moment had been about me wanting to feel like a regular girl, without all the baggage that usually came with being me. So the big debate raged inside my head the rest of the day. While I pretended everything was cool with my dad, in my mind I juggled my feelings over what had happened with Nate.

  Despite him making me feel uncomfortable about my mom, I was more than ready to see him again, even though I knew Dad wouldn’t like it. I guess that’s why I decided to spend time with my father after he got back from town. He probably would have questioned my judgment over seeing a strange boy in the woods, but seeing Nate wasn’t his decision. It was mine.

  After Dad got home from town, he dumped all the good stuff on our kitchen table. He really scored on the snacks. Chips, candy, dips and pistachios—all the best food groups of snackage. He did his parental duty and warned me that tapping into that mother lode would ru
in my supper, but of course I ignored him. I had to force myself to eat every last bite of the steak and salad he’d made, just to prove him wrong. I was really stuffed, but I’d never give him the satisfaction of knowing he’d been right. It was like an unwritten rule or something.

  After we ate, Dad started a fire using all the wood he’d chopped when we weren’t speaking to each other. My eyes kept track of the clock. I had plans for later, plans I couldn’t share with him. But sitting with Dad in front of the crackling fire, I looked up to see all the photos of Mom on the wall. Wherever I turned, her eyes followed me. Each trip to the cabin, Dad would bring a new photo he’d framed. He’d surrounded us with her. Finally, I had to break the silence.

  “Can we talk…about Mom, I mean?”

  Dad did a double take. When his gaze met mine, I couldn’t read his expression, but I hadn’t missed his hesitation.

  “Yeah, sure,” he said.

  “The days after the accident are still a blur. I thought things would come to me over time, but that’s never happened.”

  “You were in the hospital, Abbey. We waited for you to get better, before we had her funeral. Sometimes it feels like it happened a lifetime ago, then other times it feels like it was yesterday.” He gazed at the family photo we had over the fireplace on the mantel, the last Christmas we spent with Mom at the cabin. “The doctors said there’d be parts of your memory that may never come back. You blamed yourself for what happened, but it wasn’t your fault. I hoped that over time you’d…”

  “I’d what, Dad? Get over it?” Despite what I’d said, I wasn’t angry. I felt empty. “Guess that didn’t happen.” For either of us, I wanted to tell him, but didn’t.

  Sometimes I wished I had a better filter for what came out of my mouth. Every time I opened it, I spewed things about me. But lately, I’d been asking myself questions about the details I couldn’t remember. I’d finally come to the realization that I needed Dad to help me. My memory had been a puzzle with missing pieces and until I found those pieces, I couldn’t move on.

  I asked the one question that only a daughter to a mortician could ask. It surprised me that I hadn’t asked it before, but truthfully it took all my courage to ask him now. I wasn’t sure I’d be ready to hear his answer or that he’d be willing to talk about it, but for some reason, I had to know.

  “Did you do the work on Mom? I know I’ve never asked before, and if you can’t talk about it, I understand.”

  He stared at me as if I’d crossed a line. I wasn’t sure he’d answer me.

  Even though he was my dad, my question felt out- of-bounds. Until now, I had always thought about mom’s death as my tragedy, but that wasn’t the whole story. Dad had gone through pure hell, too. I had been at the hospital, injured with psych doctors telling him all sorts of stuff about me. And his rock and best friend—the woman he had wanted to spend the rest of his life with—had died. He had to deal with all of that alone.

  I felt the rush of blame that normally came whenever I thought about how Mom died, but this time I wanted to see our gut-wrenching ordeal through Dad’s eyes. We’d never talked about the details of Mom’s funeral, but for some reason, it was important to me now. I had to know what it had been like for him.

  “I wasn’t sure I could.” His voice was low and quiet. “It took me a while before I made my decision, but in the end I did it, yeah.”

  I tried imagining how awful that had to have been for him, but nothing I’d experienced in my life would have helped me understand. Nothing.

  “Why did you?” I asked. “That had to be really hard.”

  “It was the last thing I could do for her.” He looked dazed and lost in his memories. Dad got that way sometimes. So did I. “And the honest to God truth was, I didn’t want anyone else…touching her.”

  We sat in silence for a long time with only the noise of the fire to fill our emptiness. I felt like an intruder on his pain.

  “That couldn’t have been easy for you. I mean, after the accident, she must have looked…” I couldn’t finish.

  “Your mom, she had cuts and bruises, but I’d seen worse. She looked like she was sleeping. Every time I looked at her, I expected her eyes to open, so yeah it was hard. The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Doctors pronounced her at the scene, said she died of head injuries. They said she probably never knew what happened.”

  They were wrong, Dad. She called my name. I heard her, I wanted to tell him, but that would have been cruel. If it helped him to believe she died without feeling it, that was okay with me. I wish I believed that, too. She’d called my name. That meant she’d been alive and knew everything that had happened.

  “Well, I don’t know how you do it—” I shook my head and gazed into the fire “—working on dead people, I mean.”

  It took him a long time to say something.

  “It’s about respect for life and the human body,” he said. “A funeral or a memorial is important. It’s not about a life ended. It’s about remembering a life lived. My family taught me that. That’s how and why I do it. I didn’t realize how important that was to me until I touched your mother for the last time.”

  I stared at my father for a long time after that, sneaking peeks when he thought I wasn’t looking. He had the quiet strength to take care of my mother after she died, doing what had to be done even though he was hurting. Hearing him talk like this, I should have found comfort in it, but I didn’t. I hated myself even more for screwing it up—for all of us. When Mom died, I lost my connection to Dad, too. It was like I’d lost them both. I mean, I’d always known how much he loved her.

  But now that it was only the two of us, I wasn’t sure how much he loved me.

  Palmer, Alaska

  The sun had already gone down by the time Tanner got home from Anchorage. For the last hour, he’d been sitting in his wheelchair, looking out his bedroom window with only one lamp burning. As he listened to the song “Not Meant to Be,” one of Abbey’s favorite songs, he thought about her. The lyrics put him into an epic tailspin, but they seemed to make her happy, so he played the song because it reminded him of her.

  He imagined her skulking through the woods on her way to see him. Sometimes she’d come to his front door, but the times he liked best was when she climbed the tree and came through his bedroom window. He knew that wasn’t going to happen tonight, but that didn’t stop him from wanting to see her. Tanner gazed at the moon, wondering where she was and what she was doing, especially when he had so much weird stuff to tell her.

  Jason’s mom had insisted on making a home-cooked meal before Tanner left Anchorage, something different than the endless pizzas he and her son had eaten while they worked behind a closed bedroom door. Unlike Jason who never really seemed interested in Tanner’s life, his mother was just the opposite. She focused completely on him and had been overly nice, the fake kind of nice that people with two healthy legs sometimes heaped on those who didn’t. Tanner kept his mouth full of meat loaf and potatoes, and did plenty of nodding. It was the longest dinner he’d ever had. By the time his mother pulled into the drive to pick him up, Tanner had never been so happy to see her. Jason and his mom were probably relieved he was leaving, too. They’d done their bit for the handicapped, enough to feel good about themselves.

  Abbey would’ve had plenty to say about Jason and his mom. With her usual slant on things, she probably would’ve had him laughing about spending two whole days in TV Land on a Left It to Cheevers rerun. She always noticed how people treated him and she said exactly what he thought before he’d even told her. She just…knew. He tried texting her again, but since she hadn’t replied to his other messages, he had to assume she didn’t get them.

  But everything was in place and ready to go. Jason had helped him upload the code and now it had turned into a waiting game. He’d have plenty to do tomorrow, watc
hing what they’d created unfold. He knew Abbey would have loved to be here when things started to roll.

  Guess he missed his best friend—and not just a little bit.

  Abbey

  Near Healy, Alaska

  I hadn’t bothered to change clothes when I went to bed. I even kept my boots on. After I kissed Dad good-night, I pretended to be tired, but in reality I was more juiced than I’d ever been. Doing something that I wasn’t supposed to had fueled my buzz. I went to my room and sat in the dark, waiting. As I listened for Dad to go to bed, I watched the seconds and minutes tick down on my nightstand clock. When the cabin got real quiet and the red digital numbers on my clock flipped to 1:15 a.m., I grabbed my jacket and my dad’s new flashlight that I had stashed in my room. I crept toward the front door, careful not to make any noise, and slipped out into the cold night air.

  The first part of the climb up the mountain had been slow. I didn’t want Dad to see the flashlight go on, so I went by feel in the dark with only the moonlight to guide me. I didn’t turn on the flashlight until I got to the lower ridge. The chilly night air fed my adrenaline. As my blood got pumping from the trek up the mountain, I wasn’t sure if my excitement had been about the exertion of the climb or imagining Nate as my reward for making the effort.

  In all my dreams, I’d never pictured him in the dark, under the powder-blue dust of the moon. It was something I really wanted to imprint on my brain.

  But as soon as I let myself believe he’d be there, I dashed my own hopes. The odds weren’t good that he’d be there at all, especially at this hour. I had to prepare for the worst. Expecting good things to happen for me was a waste of time, but try telling that to my feet. No matter how hard I tried to slow down, my heart wouldn’t let me. When I made the last turn, heading for the upper ridge, I searched the tree line above me, praying to spot him looking down like he’d done before.

  I knew Dad wouldn’t approve. The influence Nate Holden had over me was unnerving and exhilarating at the same time. As I got close to the clearing, I saw something that made me turn off the flashlight. I crept nearer to the break in the trees and peered through the shadows. A dim glow flickered through the evergreens. When I saw a fire burning in the pit, I held my breath and looked for him.