Page 1 of Dark Ugly Places

Prologue

No one likes to be kept in the dark.

In the dark, everything is murky, even the Los Angeles sky.

But the day of Nicola’s accident, I had a pretty clear view of things. It tends to be that way—clear—when Nicola isn’t.

Nicola, Ben, and their daughter, Emmy, were walking holding hands, something the three of them hadn’t done since Emmy was a little kid. I felt the itch in Nicola’s palm, like she didn’t want to hold hands. But Emmy insisted. She was between them, arms outstretched, making that little humming sound she sometimes made when she was nervous or lost in thought. Ben walked on slightly ahead, his head down, eyes focused on the phone in his hand. I could almost hear his teeth grinding.

Up ahead, the road was clear. The sun covered everything in butter-yellow light. Crows perched in the bare-barked trees and made long, scratchy cries like a group of smokers laughing. They rustled leaves and crossed the pavement before them. But the trees were still, like the air had been sucked out of the city. Up ahead, the road was clear.

The three of them approached the corner, Emmy and Nicola chatting aimlessly. Ben narrowed his eyes and squinted at the screen as if the sky was too bright. He stepped out into the road first. Emmy, next. She skipped slightly—braids flying—and pulled her mom’s arm.

Nicola looked up and saw one of the crows overhead, its beak open, making a dreadful sound. When she looked back at the road, her gut pinged with a horrible dread she couldn’t place.

Then she—we—saw it.

From the middle distance, something large and white hurtled into view, its body glinting in the sun. Emmy screamed. Nicola tried to pull her back, but one by one, her fingers slipped out of her grasp.

It was too late.

Nicola’s body collided with the big, white thing, and in the next moment, she was airborne, tumbling through the air as if she had been taken by a tornado. Her thoughts spiraled with her, spinning out of control.

I’m going to die.

I’m going to live.

Don’t let me die.

I’m going to die.

She kept spiraling, around and around, until I stopped her with a simple suggestion: Breathe, Nicola. Breathe. We have this power, those of us who live in the darkness.

The asphalt grated her spine. It must have hurt, but Nicola did not cry. Perhaps because the air was too full of Emmy’s screams.

She rolled to her left, her left arm pinned against her chest like a piece of limp fabric. Her left leg lay stretched out before her perfectly straight, but dead. Cold. Frozen in place. She rolled to her side and saw Emmy, blood coating half of her face as though she were wearing a mask. Five feet away, Ben lay in the road unmoving, his body contorted, his face turned away.

Overhead, the stretch of blue sky angled down Beverly Boulevard and went on forever. Cars passed, some honking, others slowing to stop and help or to get a better look. Nicola grunted and heaved herself along the ground, her jaw gritting with pain. She reached for Emmy, reached for Ben.

The white body of the car stirred. A door opened. A black polished shoe emerged onto the asphalt as the driver leaned out, then disappeared again as the door shut. I heard the engine as the car started and rolled backwards, slow at first, then picking up speed until it was gone.

1

Nicola

Snap. Prick. Burn.

The pinch of electricity in my dead leg wakes me from the dream of the accident, Emmy’s scream still ringing in my ears. Perhaps I’ll always hear it now, I think as I roll to my left side—the dead side, useless as a doornail—and slap feeling into my thigh, but there’s nothing. If you took a needle and jabbed it in, I would probably twist it a few inches deeper to see if I could feel it tickle.

A groan escapes me as I heave myself from the bed and stare at the nightstand cluttered with six months’ worth of post-accident prescription bottles. I stand with prickling tendons, the burn of an aching, underused muscle, my whole left side from my shoulder to my toes as limp as if I have novocain in my limbs.

I snatch a bottle from the dresser—the usual cocktail to start the day—painkillers, anti-anxiety medication that does next to nothing, and Topamax. Sweet, beautiful, woefully expensive Topamax—the anti-seizure medication that happens to work for migraines too, even if doctors don’t quite understand why. My mind races as I swallow the cocktail, thinking back to the first day I took it and couldn’t recall how to make oatmeal—a stunner of a brain fart. I stood there at the stove, paralyzed, unable to count to three, like an Alzheimer’s patient grappling for a memory. Everything was blank, my brain ticking silently away but coming upon blank numbers, blank time.

And then there is Imitrex, the migraine abortive—easy, cheap, always available. My reliable old friend. I take her, and like magic, my migraine slowly fades to the background.

And the foreground? That’s where Anger resides. Anger is my constant companion, a vampirish love connection I cannot seem to part with. It’s with me even as I make the bed and get dressed, my feet stumbling along the floor, left foot dragging from the nerve damage. My hands fumble in the dark for clothes in the pit of my closet shelf, and I pull out clothes for my shift at the Whitmore—yoga pants that are designed to look like trousers, a black tee shirt, and a cardigan with a curious dark stain on the sleeve, so I tuck it under and hope no one will notice, especially Emmy.

Emmy will be grossed out by it. She’ll wear an entire perfectly clean outfit like she does every day. We’ll fight about it. I’ll tell her, “Just wear stuff twice! It’s not so bad!” And she’ll say, “Mom, do you know how disgusting you sound?” And for a second, I’ll agree with her in my head that it is disgusting. The whole thing is disgusting, but what it comes down to is this: Our home isn’t ours anymore. Neither are our washer and dryer. Our apartment building has precisely one washer and dryer that cost $2.00 a load, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to do laundry every week with my shift schedule. Truth be told, I’m in no shape to be hauling eight million loads of laundry around until kingdom come, even if I wanted to.