One year later - Fern

“Leaving so soon?” my mother asks as I grab my coat and pull it on rapidly. She side-eyes me with one of her disappointed looks. An hour in her company is more than enough time for me. I love my mum, but I don’t particularly like her. We’ve never been close. Ever since Dad died and she found me huddled to his corpse, she has looked at me differently. Frankly, I think I scare her. Lately, I’ve been scaring myself.

“Sorry, Mum. I’ve got so much to catch up on. This is the first full weekend I’ve had off for months,” I apologise, anxious to get home.

“I never see you,” she gripes. “You’ve been working too hard. It isn’t good for you.”

I falter as I pull on my fawn-coloured coat. Was that sympathy? Surely not.

“You never have time to help me anymore. I mean, look at all this housework I’ve got to do…” she says, throwing her arm in a wide arc.

And there it is, the truth behind her pretence. She isn’t worried about my health and well-being, just the size of her ironing pile. Sighing, I wrap my scarf around my neck.

“Mum, you can afford a cleaner. Perhaps you should get yourself one? Give you more time for your hobbies,” I say, pointing to the embroidery in her lap. This one she’s working on is a depiction of Jesus Christ fixed to the cross, her religious beliefs influencing her passion for such artistry. She’s pretty good, but her subject matter is not my cup of tea at all.

“I’m not paying a stranger to enter my house and rummage through my things…”

“No, you just expect your daughter to be maid instead,” I mumble under my breath.

Her head snatches up. Her hearing is far better than my own. She glares at me and huffs.

“I do not treat you like a maid. That’s unfair, Fern. Maybe if you realised how much I miss you, I wouldn’t have to make up reasons for you to come visit.”

I sigh, resting my hand on her arm. “I’m sorry you feel that way. You just make it…” So hard to like you, to spend time with you. That’s what I want to say, but I don’t. I keep my words to myself. I’m not one for allowing them to hurt people. Mum, she doesn’t care. Words are her weapons and she has used them all my life to hurt me.

I’m scarred from all her words.

“Well, I didn’t bring you up to be selfish, Fern. You’re so ungrateful. All the things I’ve done for you. I took you in when no one else would. Christina’s daughters are always visiting her. They bring gifts, you know. They do her cleaning and cooking, take her shopping. You need to take a leaf out of their books.”

I took you in when no one else would…. That old chestnut. She loves to remind me about how grateful I should be for her taking me in when I was an infant. But adopting me had been her and Dad’s choice. It’s not as if anyone had forced them to do it.

“Taking a deaf baby no one else wanted…” she drones on. I flick my hearing aids off and turn away, so I don’t have to lipread the vileness I know is spewing out of her mouth. Half a minute later she taps me on the arm, forcing me to acknowledge her.

“Did you hear me?”

“I’m sorry.” I don’t have anything left to say. I know I am not the one who should be apologising, but I do it anyway. I don’t want an argument, I just want to go home.

“Christina is lucky,” she repeats. “Her daughters care about her.”

Christina is kind, that’s why.

“I care, Mum. I’m just exhausted. I’ll come back soon, okay?”

She purses her mouth, choosing to give me the cold shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” I repeat like a broken record.

“You should be. Christina can’t believe how you treat me. She thinks you’re behaving terribly…”

I switch off again. This is why I do not like my own mum. She is unkind, and an awful liar. I know Christina doesn’t think that way about me because I speak to her every day. When Mum turned cold towards me after my dad died, Christina opened her arms and welcomed me into her family. The reason I had so few friends growing up was because my mum hadn’t bothered to distance herself from the women and their children who had looked at me like I was a leper, who still look at me like a leper, just like my mum does. Christina was the only woman in my mum’s circle of friends who bothered to take the time to talk with me. She positively encouraged me to play with her daughters until I became close to Dani. I don’t see her often enough these days. The last time was almost a year ago, just after I lost Blakely. Time has flown by. I make a mental note to Facetime her, it’s been a while since we last had a conversation.

“You only get one mum, Fern…” Mum drones on and on. I turn my head away. There are few times I am grateful for being deaf. This is one of them.

Resting my hand on her arm, I squeeze gently. “I’ll ring you in a few days,” I say, grabbing my bag quickly. I don’t bother to look back as I leave, knowing that a tirade of abuse is following me out.

Grateful to be in the fresh air, despite the rain, I head towards my car. Lightning flashes above me as a roll of thunder sounds in the distance. Slamming the car door and shaking out my wet hair, I turn on the ignition and drive home. I’ve been living on my own for almost eight years now. Leaving home at twenty was the best decision of my life. I may not have a boyfriend, but I have a career that I love, a calling really, and that fills my time enough so that I can forget about the other stuff my life is missing. Men, and a loving relationship, predominately.

Don’t go there, Fern.

Too late. My black-haired, black-winged angel enters my thoughts once again, and by the time I pull up outside my house I am cursing myself for letting him careen into my head once again.

It’s been a year. A year of torture, of sleepless nights. Of constantly looking over my shoulder. Looking at every man with black hair and strong frame, half of me hoping it’s him, the other half hoping it isn’t.

But nothing, I don’t even hear the singing anymore.

I hear nothing and rather than feeling happy about it, I feel utterly bereft.

I should hate him. I should be glad that after all this time, the singing has stopped. That, finally, I am free from death.

Yet, despite what I had witnessed that day, despite Natasha’s grief and pain that haunts me still, I’ve never wanted anything more than to see him again.

My dark angel.

My?

How can I be so possessive over something that is most likely not even real? How can I want to see someone who took something so precious?

Perhaps I had envisaged him to help me cope with the trauma of losing a life. It had been a traumatic experience after all. I feel responsible for that little boy’s death; it has haunted me every day since, alongside the angel with the glacier eyes.

Perhaps I should have done something differently, perhaps I should have triple-checked the machinery and not relied on my gift. I beat myself up over it every day, going over everything I did. Maybe I missed something when I ripped out my hearing aids. Perhaps my deafness had brought death once again, except this time I was responsible.

Entering my home, I flick on the light switch and head directly to my studio. It’s just a large cupboard really, but it has a window that looks out onto the garden and during the day has the best natural light in my house. This is my sanctuary, where I go to draw, to paint. A hobby I picked up as a child that has become a passion now I’m an adult.

When I step inside the room, I am accosted with the same image repeatedly. My dark angel painted, drawn in pencil, charcoal, water colour, acrylic. He covers every available surface. I see him in my dreams, when I awake. He stalks my every thought.

He haunts me so much more than the singing ever did and yet, since that day, my world has been even more silent.

Sighing, I drop my bag and coat on my desk, rip off my jumper and settle in the chair. Pinned to my drawing board is another image of him. Its half finished, but out of everything I’ve created it is the first drawing that has begun to capture the essence of him. I lay my palms flat on the table either side of the paper and stare at my reflection in the window.

How did I get here? I feel as though I am going mad. I don’t recognise the person staring back at me. She is a shadow, a ghost. For the last year I have been living in this world, but not really living at all, just surviving one moment after the other. My fingers reach up to my hearing aids, and I remove them, placing them on the table, and wait.

I wait for the singing.

I wait for his voice.

I’ve never wanted death to visit as much as I do right now.

There is nothing.

Every night since I saw him, I have done the same, and every night I am left in a vacuum of deafening silence. A silence so thick and cloying that I need death’s voice to break me free from it.

Another bolt of lightning flashes across the sky, illuminating my tiny garden momentarily. My reflection is replaced with…

What the hell?

I stand abruptly, my fingers reaching for the windowpane, my heart galloping in my chest.

Was that…?

I wait, stuck in the same position. Afraid to move, to breathe. Have I finally lost my mind?

Lightning flashes again, illuminating the man who has shadowed my thoughts all this time.

My angel of death has returned.

Our eyes meet and shock registers on his face before darkness falls over my garden once again.

Pain…

Sudden searing, burning pain wraps around a finger of my left hand. I lift it up and sitting on my ring finger is a plain brass ring. It’s scratched and marked, dented with years of wear.

“What the hell is this?” I twist my hand, unable to understand where it has appeared from. The shock of seeing it sitting on my finger as if it has always been there has me momentarily forgetting who is standing in my garden.

He’s here…

Twisting on my feet, I run from the room and to the back door that opens onto the porch. I throw it open and step out on to the decking.

“Please don’t leave,” I say into the darkness. Rain lashes against my face and clothes, instantly drenching my skin. I don’t care. I need to see him again. Peering into the darkness, I take a tentative step forwards.

Lightning scores a white line against the black night and my back garden is illuminated once more. Except this time, it isn’t one man standing before me but three, and they all have wings.