Daughter of Light Read Free

“She’s always been quite fond of me and has invited me many times. Finally, I can go.”
    “Yeah, well, San Francisco is a great town. What kind of work do you hope to do?”
    “I’d like to be a grade-school teacher eventually,” I said. “I’ll probably go to college in San Francisco.”
    “That sounds good.” He looked at me and nodded. “At least you don’t look like some of the girls I see hitchin’ rides on the highway. Most of them look like they’re into somethin’ bad already, drugs and stuff.” He tilted his head a little, widened his eyes, and said, “And you know what I mean by stuff, dontcha? It gets so that everythin’ is up for sale.”
    “That won’t be me, ever,” I said firmly.
    He smiled. “You sound sure of yourself.”
    “I am,” I told him, and thought about something my father had once told me: “We’re high on life,” he had said. “We don’t need any drugs, and we would never lose respect for ourselves.”
    No, I thought now. We don’t need drugs, but we’re trapped by a worse addiction. Was I an absolute fool to think I could overcome it? Perhaps my only hope was to fear and hate my father. If I could learn to find him detestable, I could subdue all that was like him in me.
    A part of me wanted this very much, perhaps that part of me that Ava had recognized. But despite all I had learned and all that had nearly happened, it wasn’t easy to hate my father. For most of my life, he had been a wonderful, loving parent who wanted me to benefitfrom his years of wisdom and knowledge. I simply had no idea how many years there were, but despite what he was and what he could do, he rarely appeared to be anything but gentle and kind to me. I couldn’t just forget all of those wonderful private moments we’d had together, our walks and our conversations, and the way he would often comfort me at night when I was small. Even now, even after all I had seen and done to enrage and disappoint him, I couldn’t believe that he would hate me as much as Ava insisted he would. Of course, I understood that if I succeeded in escaping, I’d have no one but myself probably for the rest of my life, however long that would be.
    “It’s good you’re goin’ to be with family,” Moses said, as if he had somehow heard my thoughts. “Family’s important. People without family just drift from one empty home to another. Whatever your parents did to you, you can’t forget they’re your parents,” he warned. “That’s like a seed forgettin’ the tree from which it fell.”
    A philosophical truck driver, I thought to myself, but I didn’t laugh at him. Someone who spent so much time on the road by himself surely had to be comfortable with his own thoughts and comforted by them. How many times had he revisited his own youth, agonized over his own mistakes? With the darkness around him and the glare of passing cars carrying people to places he could only imagine were warm and friendly, he must surely have felt the pain and weight of loneliness most of the time.
    Was that what awaited me, too? Would I be forever like someone traveling through a continuous night ofher own making, afraid to stop here or there, eventually coming to hate her own inner voice? Did I hate myself already? Maybe I wasn’t exaggerating when I first told him that wherever I belonged was somewhere out there, somewhere away from everything I had known. No, I thought, I wasn’t exaggerating when I told him I was running away from myself. I really did wish I could slip off and out of my body the way a snake shed its skin. If I could only find a way to do that, I might save myself.
    Moses nodded at some lights ahead of us. “That’s the restaurant and the bus station.”
    “Okay.”
    He pulled into the parking lot. “How about I buy you some dinner?”
    “Didn’t you eat dinner back where you picked me up?”
    “No, too early for me,” he said. “C’mon.”
    He got out, and I followed him into the restaurant,