1 Chapter 1
Part I
AFTER
2005
There was an uncanny, cold mist in the air surrounding him as he walked among the tombstones. As hard as it was to focus on the task of his first holiday in years, he couldn’t help but feel like he was in the wrong place- doing the wrong thing. His heavy brown boots, worn out by his daily labor in the truck yard, crunched noisily on the greyed- once white- stones that were scattered all over the hearth.
It had been two years since his first born died, and on some nights, he could still hear her soft knock against the hard wood of his mahogany bedroom door when she was too scared to sleep alone. His heart contracted painfully in his chest as his mind wondered to the memory of his daughter. The last time he had seen her, she was five years old. He clung onto the mental images of her golden-brown eyes, her red hair- just like her late mothers- and her little pale hands.
Pale hands.
That was two years ago.
She would have been seven if she had been found. Found, only because she had been taken and not killed.
Jenarius Hughes shook his head and swiped wildly at the stray tear that had begun to roll down his face.
Phoebe had gone missing and he had spent two years searching for her but the brain doctors told him he had to move on, he had to focus on his wife and his new born, or else the past would consume him more than it had already been.
He spotted the familiar rose bush, the landmark to her empty grave, and turned the roses in his hand.
The thorns stung him madly but he let himself bleed. It was a small pleasure he found himself enjoying, only to feel less guilt about having given up on her. Here he was, alone and wet from the rain, walking to the empty grave of his lost- dead- daughter.
He hadn’t just moved on, he thought as he neared the grave plot, he had let her go.
BEFORE
2003
Skip. Skip. Jump. Skip. Ju-
Phoebe Hughes crashed to the ground, her tiny hands flailing wildly as though there was something waiting in the air to be held onto. She whimpered pathetically, sorrowfully, as she stared at the cold ground. Her mind could only scold her, in the same voice her step mother used, for her stupid- stupid mistake.
“You aren’t smart enough,” she told herself. “You can’t do simple things.”
And it was true. No. It’s wasn’t supposed to be so hard. The girls were doing it just now.
She sat up clumsily and stared at her hands in fear.
They were splotched with the mud from the ground and tiny drops of blood had mixed with the dirt, creating a bloody paste; the liquid red seeped out of the cuts she had received from her fall.
Her uniform was mostly white and a light shade of blue so she couldn’t risk wiping her hands on it. She couldn’t risk dirtying herself more than she already had. Her back pack was in the hands of one of the girls playing hopscotch successfully in front of her. Jessie knew what she was doing.
Skip. Skip. Jump. Skip.
Jessie was unlike her, her mother always said, Jessie was smart.
Phoebe stood up, wobbling slightly as she got onto her feet, and searched the grounds for a faucet while she tried her hardest not to cry.
The kids barely acknowledged her as she blindly moved past them. Past the jungle gym, past the lawn where a group were hungrily eating their after-school snacks, past the teacher’s den where cheery Miss. Lark and bird face Mr. John looked to be exchanging saliva the way her parents sometimes did.
It was that thought that made her succumb to her emotions. Phoebe began to cry.
Her mother, Leane Richard Hughes, was surely going to skin her alive.
Her knees had been spared from the cuts they would have received because of her stockings but they were still dirty. She could already feel the sting on her cheek from the slap she would, no doubt, receive once she reached home.
With tears blurring her vision, she blindly moved under the wired fence of her school and began to run.
Nobody called for her because nobody really cared.
The teachers were preoccupied in smoking and exchanging saliva and the students were arguing over which superhero was the best and who would be the police in the cops and robbers’ game.
She didn’t care that she was attempting to run away, either. She needed some water to wipe her hands and she needed to calm herself down.
Phoebe was, then, only aware of her harsh breathing, aware of the dead leaves, once green now faded a bright yellow, as they broke and cracked beneath her black school shoes, aware only of the tears cascading down her puffy, chubby cheeks- that were soon to become the victims of her step mother’s palm- but never, not even for a moment, aware of the mist that spread behind her back, running along with her.
AFTER
2005
There were assortments of gift baskets strewn across the white plastic table in the Hughes kitchen. Jenarius had just come home to it.
His eyes were puffy, red and droopy from the crying he had done since the minute he woke up and checked the date.
Every October 12th was like this.
He was glad that he had walked into an empty house, he wasn’t in the mood to help feed Christopher his milk and had even less energy to listen to Leane talk about her endless problems but never once consider his.
Jenarius took a seat on one of the wooden chairs placed around the white table. It made a loud, creaking sound as he relaxed, his pressure being mercilessly exerted onto the 10-year-old piece, and his hands instinctively dug into his jean pockets for his cigarettes and lighter.
He had stopped smoking before…everything…but now he didn’t care.
Leane would scream it would give Christopher cancer, scream it would give her cancer, (never once screaming it would give him cancer), but he didn’t think anything worse could happen to him and he didn’t care.
There was a card on the table that caught his eye.
It was among the fifty to seventy cards on the table that were from his work mates or his neighbors or his family, in the South, but none of them were much like the one that he was staring at.
It was red and relatively smaller than the rest. It was for these reasons that it stood out. His empty hand, that which did not hold the cancer giver, reached out and he took hold of the card with his middle and index finger. He brought it to his face and strained his eyes to see the hand-written words.
“Mr. Jenarius Hughes,” he read it out loud, his hoarse voice breaking slightly, “thank you for this beautiful gift. Love, The Mist.”
The Mist?
What gift?
Jenarius accidentally dropped his cigarette but he couldn’t care less about where it had vanished to or if it burnt down the house.
He used both his hands to flip open the envelope.
What he found almost gave him a heart attack.
His eyes focused solely on the photo in his hand. A polaroid photograph of his daughter stared right back at him. There were those golden eyes, the red hair and those hands, but she was older. Two years older. He strained his eyes, although he could see; he knew very well that he was looking at Phoebe. His breath hitched as reality hit him and his hands began to sweat and shake almost as if triggered by his awakening.
She’s alive.
He stared in confusion and shock as the letter began to burn inward from the tip of the Polaroid to the center of the photo, to his hands that could not let go. He released it when the heat became too strong and he watched the photo burn to a pile of ash on the ground between his boots, unaware of the cigarette burning through his jeans and unaware, once again, of the mist outside.
