This Dark Road to Mercy: A Novel Read Online Free

dragging across the floor, doors opening and closing, water running in the sink.
    I woke up in the morning just as it was getting to be daylight outside. The house was silent, just like it was supposed to be at that time of the morning, but something about that quiet told me it was wrong. So I wasn’t too surprised at how I found her when I opened her bedroom door.
    She was lying sideways on top of the bed like maybe she’d stood up sometime during the night and had fallen back across the bed and just stayed that way. I knew she was dead right when I opened the door. She was on her side with her knees bent up close to her and her hands under her chin. Her dark hair was covering her face, so I couldn’t tell whether her eyes were open or not, but I didn’t move it out of her face to check because I knew I didn’t want to see. I didn’t even touch her, which seems strange to think about now because I’d give anything in this world to curl up in bed beside her, be able to smell her hair on the pillowcase, feel her scratch my back through my nightgown. But instead I just stood there looking down at her and went ahead and decided that I wasn’t going to cry, not then anyway. I knew it was more important to decide what me and Ruby were going to do next.
    Ruby must’ve felt something in the house too because when I went back into our bedroom I found her sitting up in the bed like she’d been waiting on me.
    “How’s Mom?” she asked. I just stood there looking at her, trying to figure out how I was going to explain what had happened. “Is she better?”
    “No, Ruby,” I said, “she’s not.” I sat down on her bed and told her. I told her about how Mom was tired all the time and that was why she was always sleeping. And I told her that Mom’s body just couldn’t take that tiredness and that she’d finally had enough. Ruby just sat there and looked at me while I found my way through whatever it was I was saying. I can’t promise that I quite remember it myself, but I do remember telling her that now wasn’t no time to be sad. I remember telling her that there’d be plenty of time for that later, that right now we had to be tough and figure out what we were going to do next to make sure we stayed together now that we didn’t have a mama or a daddy like most kids our age.
    I asked her if she wanted to go into Mom’s bedroom to see her one more time, and I could tell she thought about it awfully hard, but in the end she decided that she didn’t want to, and I couldn’t blame her. I didn’t go back into that room again either.
    “Are you hungry?” I asked. She shook her head. “We probably should eat something anyway.” I turned to walk toward the kitchen.
    “Where you going?” Ruby asked.
    “I’m going to the kitchen,” I said. “We need to eat something.”
    “I’m not hungry.”
    “Okay,” I said, “you don’t have to eat nothing if you don’t want to.” I walked into the hallway.
    “Hold on,” Ruby said. I stopped walking and waited until she was right behind me, and then we went into the kitchen and opened the cabinets and looked for something to eat, but there wasn’t nothing there for breakfast. There wasn’t hardly no food at all. I looked around and realized that we didn’t have anything, and I saw what our house really looked like, and I knew how people would think of us when they came inside in a few hours to get Mom and take us away to wherever we’d be going. They’d see that we didn’t have any furniture except for a plastic deck chair and two folding chairs that you might take to the beach. And they’d see that me and Ruby didn’t have beds but just slept on mattresses on the floor that had mismatched sheets on them. They’d know that I’d called them from the corner store because we didn’t have a phone, and they’d see that even if we’d had food we didn’t have no clean plates to eat from. I stood there looking all around that kitchen with a knot in my throat