Dawn’s Harbor (Indigo Love Spectrum)

  Dawn’s Harbor

  Kymberly Hunt

  Genesis Press, Inc.

  Indigo Love Spectrum

  An imprint of Genesis Press, Inc.

  Publishing Company

  Genesis Press, Inc.

  P.O. Box 101

  Columbus, MS 39703

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, not known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without written permission of the publisher, Genesis Press, Inc. For information write Genesis Press, Inc., P.O. Box 101, Columbus, MS 39703.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author and all incidents are pure invention.

  Copyright© 2008 Kymberly Hunt

  ISBN-13: 978-1-58571-569-5

  ISBN-10: 1-58571-569-7

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition

  Visit us at www.genesis-press.com or call at 1-888-Indigo-1-4-0

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to the memory of two little NYC girls named Elisa and Nixzmary, and to all the children whose knights in shining armor didn’t show up on time.

  Acknowledgments

  Even those of us who tend to be introverted realize that humans were not created by God to be solitary. Therefore, I gratefully thank the Creator for readers who still enjoy romantic stories with an inspirational twist, my supportive family, and the many friends, real and imagined, who have inspired my writing.

  In this story, Cielo Vista is a fictional country but it is based on the combined history and geography of many similar countries in Africa. The Baka people really do exist and their beliefs are typical of those described in the novel.

  PROLOGUE

  Enough! Jasmine stormed into the room and halted abruptly beside the bed where her slumbering sister lay curled up in sloth-like oblivion. The covers concealed most of Natalie’s face and exposed only a few frizzy braids. Hovering over her, Jasmine clenched and unclenched her fists in an attempt to get her temper under control. She really wanted to strangle Natalie, but ethically and morally speaking, that was not an option. Instead, she squeezed her eyes shut, counted to ten and opened them again.

  The view did not improve. Her once immaculate, inviting guest room was now a disaster area. Children’s toys were all over the floor, the rug was askew, and horror upon horrors, little Dawn’s artwork in fluorescent orange marker glared back at her from the wall. The crib in the corner held Natalie’s second creation, a six-month-old cherub who was now screaming his tiny head off. All the commotion was no deterrence to Natalie’s slumber.

  “God help me,” Jasmine seethed. She grabbed the covers and yanked them completely off the bed. “Nat, get up right now!”

  Startled, Natalie sat bolt upright and stared at her with the wild-eyed expression of a snared animal. “What!” she screamed.

  “What do you mean, what?” Jasmine shouted back, towering above her sister with her hands on her hips. “I have to leave for work in less than ten minutes. The baby is screaming and Dawn’s alone in the kitchen eating peanut butter and corn flakes. Just when do you plan on getting up and taking care of your kids?”

  Natalie, having partially recovered from the shock, rolled her bloodshot eyes and grappled for the non-existent covers. “All right already. You don’t have to be such a drama queen. I’m getting up now.”

  Before she did the unthinkable, Jasmine spun around on her heel and marched out of the room. She entered the room that served as her office, snatched up her briefcase and locked the door with a key, having recently installed the lock in order to keep the children away from the computer, which was used primarily for business.

  She had to give an important presentation before the board at work. As the only African-American and female member of Spherion Architecture, Inc., she seemed to fall under an unwritten rule that said more was expected of her than the others. She had stayed awake all night, arranging and rearranging the computer graphics for the slideshow portion of the presentation, accompanied by the baby’s crying, Dawn’s tantrums and the visit from her sister’s latest boyfriend.

  Natalie had abandoned the youngest child’s father because of what she said was an abusive relationship. It had been the same scenario with Dawn’s father. She hadn’t married either of them and claimed that she couldn’t go back to stay with her foster mother, who lived in Indiana, because she would lose her job in Manhattan. Now Natalie was living in Jasmine’s suburban New York townhouse and had conveniently lost her job anyway.

  Jasmine was furious at herself. She’d agreed for her sister and the kids to stay for two weeks only. Yet she’d allowed the time to stretch to two months. Natalie had always been irresponsible, and having young children to care for had not changed her in the least. In fact, Jasmine had found herself playing mother to both Natalie and the kids. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her little niece and nephew, but she had chosen a career and her own personal space over being a mother, and at this point in her life she wasn’t ready to change that. She wasn’t really sure what a mother was supposed to be because most of her childhood had been spent in one foster home after another with no privacy and no space. She didn’t want to live like that again. Enough was enough. She needed to reclaim her life.

  On her way out the door, she threw a glance back as Natalie dragged into the kitchen. Two-year-old Dawn was running in circles around her high chair, banging on the table with a wooden spoon, her thick, curly hair framing her head like a lion’s mane.

  “Natalie, I’m dead serious this time. I can’t live like this anymore. You’re going to have to find another place.”

  “You’re throwing us out?” Natalie turned from the refrigerator, clutching a bottle for the baby. Her expression was so melodramatic that had it been a different situation Jasmine would have found it comical.

  “We’ll discuss this when I get back,” Jasmine replied sharply. She did not want to argue in front of Dawn, even though the child didn’t seem to be paying the slightest bit of attention.

  “You’re being totally selfish,” Natalie said. “Can’t you see I have a problem here?”

  “I think you better do a reality check, Sis. You’re the one being selfish.”

  Jasmine hurried out to the driveway where her SUV awaited and paused for a moment. The sky looked jaundiced, and in the distance she heard the muted rumble of thunder. The air was laden with humidity, and she shuddered as a bizarre sensation of being transported somewhere else overwhelmed her. The foliage of the trees seemed much thicker and greener than usual and the chirping of the birds sounded too exotic for the region’s usual robins and sparrows. In the distance she could hear the rushing sound of a river running through a rainforest.

  A jagged bolt of lightning split the sky, shaking her out of her trance. She rushed to the safety of the car, took a deep breath and looked around again to confirm that there was nothing strange or exotic at all. Her eyes focused on the same old driveway and the shrubbery along both sides of it…shrubbery that needed trimming. She shook her head and laughed out loud.

  “Girl, you’re losing your mind,” she muttered aloud. A vacation was long overdue.

  Thunder rumbled again, and she groaned. It was going to be a rough commute into the city and, thanks to Natalie, she had already lost valuable time. She turned the key in the ignition;
the engine responded sluggishly at first, then caught on. That was another thing that would have to be checked out. The stupid car was only a year old, and it definitely shouldn’t be sounding as if it were ten.

  Muttering angrily, she flipped the gear into reverse and the vehicle jolted backwards violently. She floored the brake to halt the unwarranted momentum and simultaneously heard, as well as felt, a soft, resounding thud.

  “Oh, please…don’t do this to me. Not now,” she muttered aloud, thinking that Natalie’s kid had left her tricycle in the driveway again.

  She got out of the car just as the heavens unleashed a torrential downpour. Bracing herself against the monsoon, she rushed to the rear of the car and then froze. Lying there on its back, with its arms spread like angel wings, a porcelain doll with glazed eyes stared up into the stormy sky. The doll was wearing pink pajamas and had thick, tangled hair. A small pool of dark red blood was forming a halo above its head.

  “Dawn!” Jasmine’s scream rattled the heavens and lightning ripped across the sky in torment.

  CHAPTER 1

  A year later

  The trash had been emptied, the furniture dusted and the bathrooms thoroughly cleaned. Jasmine gave an obligatory glance around the echoing corridors of the hospice to make sure she wasn’t being observed and she slipped quietly into the stark bareness of room 23. No flowers decorated the bedside table, no cards from family members. There was no visible evidence that anyone cared about the person who occupied the room. She pulled up the orange visitor’s chair that would have collected dust had it not been for her nightly visits.

  “Well, Noah, here I am again,” she said, and laughed ironically that she was on a first name basis with him. “What’s going on with you tonight? Nothing, you say? I guess it’s no surprise. It doesn’t matter to people like us because we’re both just breathing and little else.” She rubbed her eyes wearily. “Actually I’m getting really tired of this…I mean it’s worse for me. I still have to get up every day, work, pay bills, and pretend to live, but you, you can just stay asleep until your heart stops beating. There isn’t much pain in that, is there?”

  She sighed deeply, flicked back a stray braid, and studied the Caucasian man who lay stretched out on the steel-framed bed before her. He wore a faded blue hospital-issue gown that stripped him of any dignity he might have had in his conscious life. Mercifully, the lower half of his body was concealed by blankets, which hid limbs emaciated by disuse, as well as the intravenous tubing and other necessary apparatus.

  He was young, compared to the rest of the residents of the hospice/nursing home who were slowly, painfully whiling away their final hours. Even in his sallow-skinned comatose state, he was a handsome man with finely chiseled features, raven-black hair and darkly arched eyebrows. She focused on the shadows beneath his closed eyes and the long eyelashes fanning them.

  On the first day she had started working at the hospice, she’d learned from a chatty nurse’s assistant that the man’s name was Noah Arias and he had been in a car accident, which had left him in his present state. Initially he’d been on life support for a month, but after the doctors declared the coma to be irreversible, his family had requested the respirator be shut down. Surprisingly, he’d continued to breathe on his own, and apparently not knowing what else to do, the family had condemned him to Glendale Hospice, where he had been for the last two years. Alive but dead.

  Jasmine squeezed her eyes shut and continued to talk. “Do you remember what I told you last night about the little girl in the apartment next door? Well, it’s true she really does like me. Imagine that. I don’t want to encourage it for obvious reasons, but she’s an unusual kid. She likes to play with her dolls in the hallway just outside my door. She used to run away when I opened it, but yesterday she just stayed there.”

  Tears welled up in her eyes and she allowed them to fall. It amazed her that she could cry so much when she was alone with him, yet at the most tragic and poignant moments in her adult life she rarely shed tears. Maybe it was because talking to Noah was only one step up from talking to herself. He never gave the slightest indication of hearing anything and he certainly didn’t see her, which was probably a good thing because her appearance—no makeup and unkempt braids emanating from her scalp like writhing snakes—would probably repel anyone.

  She had been indulging in the one-sided conversations for nearly six months, long after having stopped the recommended therapy sessions, which had done little to ease the crushing guilt over her niece’s death, guilt that was still devastating her own life.

  “I don’t know how she could come from that family,” Jasmine rambled on. “She doesn’t look or act anything like those other wild brats. And the mother…well, I’ve only seen her a few times but I’ll bet she’s an alcoholic or drug addict or something.”

  Her attention drifted toward the window. The drawn shades were lightening, telling her that in a short time a new day would dawn. She remembered the pleasure of watching the sun ascend over the Hudson River during early morning jogs through the nearby park when she used to live in the suburbs. She recalled the laughs she used to share with her childhood friend Valerie as they ran, talking about work and the impossible men in their lives.

  Valerie wouldn’t even recognize this Jasmine, who lived in self-imposed exile on the twelfth-floor of a run-down Brooklyn housing project and paid for her meager existence with her earnings as a cleaning lady. During the day she spent most of her time escaping into the benign world of sleep, shutting out all the obnoxious sounds of the city and its people.

  The truth was, since her termination from her position as a partner at Spherion Architecture, she didn’t recognize herself anymore. Initially she had been crushed by the unfairness of the dismissal. The senior partners had been sympathetic to her grief at first, but they simply had not given her enough time to pull herself together. Now she realized that they probably had had no choice except to let her go because she had started over-medicating on prescription drugs for depression, which left her in a useless haze. To add to that, she had become so traumatized by flashbacks that she could no longer drive and had sold her SUV, forcing herself to rely on public transportation, which always made her late for crucial client meetings—when she remembered them at all. Even when she was present, her mind had been elsewhere.

  Jasmine glanced down at her watch and back at Noah’s emotionless face. “I guess I’ve bored you enough for the night,” she said, starting to stand. “It’s time for me to leave.”

  “Don’t go.”

  Jasmine froze between sitting and standing. She dropped heavily back into the chair and stared at the man. “Did…did you say something?”

  There was only the usual silence, punctuated by his breathing and her own heartbeat pounding in her ears.

  Jasmine laughed and held her hand over her forehead. “Oh, God, this is it. I really am insane.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  The voice was raspy and barely audible, but his eyes were open and they seemed unnaturally illuminated in a mysterious shade of gray. The electric eyes were focused exclusively on her. Jasmine jumped up, nearly knocking the chair to the floor.

  “I’m not imagining this. You really are speaking!”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, my…this is…this is weird. Please stay awake. I’m going to get the nur—”

  “No!” he interrupted in a loud and commanding tone, which caused her to stop in her tracks. Instantly his voice dropped five decibels back to the hoarse whisper. “Please don’t.”

  “But…but why?” she stammered, feeling lightheaded. “You’ve been unconscious for a very long time. People have to know.”

  “Don’t want to talk to anyone. Just you. Could you…” He struggled for the right word. “Sit. Please…didn’t mean…to scare you.”

  “I’m not scared,” Jasmine said. “I’m just shocked.”

  She sank back into the chair, resisting the urge to flee, because she still felt she was ima
gining the whole bizarre scene. It was a good thing she wasn’t the fainting type or she would have passed out by now.

  “The little girl…”

  “Little girl?” Jasmine repeated, staring at him with dazed eyes.

  “Yes. The little girl you…talk about.”

  She swallowed hard. A man who had been in a coma for over two years was miraculously out of it and only interested in talking about some little girl who really had nothing to do with either of them.

  “You remember what I was talking about?”

  “You talk…a lot.”

  Considering the circumstances, she knew she wasn’t completely justified to feel annoyed, but nevertheless the comment irked her. She tried to control her inner impulses.

  “How long have you been awake?”

  “Don’t know.” He took a deep breath before he spoke again. “I’ve heard…your voice…for a very long time. Do I know you?”

  “Actually you don’t know me at all. I’m just the cleaning woman. I do your room every night.”

  “You called me Noah.”

  She shifted uncomfortably in the chair. “Well, that’s your name, isn’t it? It’s on your wrist tag.”

  His eyes shifted downward to study the plastic tag.

  “You don’t remember your name?” she asked.

  “I remember.” He took another deep breath. “What happened? Where am I?”

  “I’ve been told that you were in a car accident, and this is Glendale Hospice in Manhattan. You’ve been in a coma for just about two years.” She stood up again and started backing away. “I really have to go get the nurse. I’m no expert on things like this and someone else will be a lot better at answering your questions. They’ll be able to call your family and…”

  Her voice trailed off as she noticed his eyes were fixed in a glassy unfocused gaze toward the ceiling. She rushed back to his side.

  “No! Please…please don’t go back to sleep.”