Ocean Eyes

Prolouge

"Honey, go to your room okay? Mommy's busy."

Ryder Kane pouted, looking up at her mother with a forlorn expression. Caroline Kane ignored the look, instead sipping an amber colored liquid. Her daughter averted her eyes, trying to hide the emerging tears. It was the fourth night in their new apartment and Ryder hated it.

The grimy walls, the yellowed panes of glass, the ever constant smell of a forbidden drug. Ryder's room was the worst yet, a walk in closet off of the loud room in which her mothers friends would gather. Even at age five, Ryder knew that they weren't good people. She'd tried to tell her mommy but Caroline had just shoed her away. Ever since her daddy had left, her mom had been around these people.

There was Geff, the big burly man that would sometimes play with Ryder. He would send her on missions, playing hide and seek with various bags he would give her. Ryder thought it was fun. Although Geff was intimidating, a 6'5 giant with tattoos covering almost all his body, he would always pat her on the head when she came back empty handed after stashing the bag in a location. The affection made the five year old happy. Her mother barely even looked her way now. Geff was the closest thing she had to a parent in the dilapidated apartment.

There was Ashley, a thin dark skinned woman with sunken in cheeks and painted red nails. She tended to laugh very loudly and drink a lot and Ryder didn't like her. At nights when she tried to fall asleep, wrapped in her moth eaten quilt, Ashley's cackle would reverberate through her head.

There was Sasha, a wider woman who once hit Ryder. The child had spilled the drink she had sent her to get, and Sasha wasn't happy. It was only a quick cuff around the ear but it had made Ryder's head hurt and so she stayed far away from Sasha. When she had told her mother, Caroline had simply scolded her for being a snitch.

And then there was Stan. He was Ryder's least favorite, a wiry black male who spoke in an outdoor voice at all times and stunk of hard liquor. He would take her mother away, lock the two of them in a room. Ryder would hear their sounds when she tried to sleep and it kept her up for hours. Stan always looked at her as if she was some disgusting bug he couldn't wait to squash. Ryder regarded him in a similar light.

It was Stans place they had moved into, now that their landlord had kicked them out of the last rental. Her mother told her to be thankful that he was letting them stay there, but Ryder wasn't. She hated Stan and she hated his apartment.

"But Mom I feel really-"

"Ryder, I am busy right now!" Caroline yelled, looking away from the powder in front of her and down at her only child. She didn't like looking at her much anymore. Every glance reminded her of her him, the man she had given her all and the man who had left her alone. The ocean blue eyes, she hated them the most. The warm alluring eyes that had ruled her life and her heart now stared up at her in the face of her daughter, her forever reminder of him.

"Yeah you heard her, Ryder!" Ashely crowed, placing the half smoked cigarette in the ash tray. She leaned closer to the small girl, and Ryder shrunk away. Ashley's yellowed, cracked teeth smiled and blew a toxic cloud of smoke into the young girl's face. "Get to bed."

The fumes of the cigarette did little to calm Ryder's rolling stomach. She had been trying to tell her mother of the tummy ache she'd had for a few days now, one that was getting worse. Maybe it was the food they fed her. She was fairly certain the milk they claimed was fresh had been in the fridge for weeks.

With one last pained glance at her mother, who was wiping something that looked like flour off the bridge of her lip, Ryder scurried into her room. The shutting of the door did little to drown the loud shouts and laughs that came from the room beside her.

Ryder's room was hardly a room. The shelves of the closet were filled to the brim, holding old clothes and stashes of shoe boxes. One corner was home to a stack of boxes, which took up most of the floor space. Ryder didn't have a bed, instead she slept on a folded comforter. There was hardly room for even that and when Ryder slept she would have to pull her knees to her chest.

The only light source was a small lamp, decorated with stickers of all the states Ryder had been to. When you live with someone like Caroline, you moved quite a bit. The only possessions Ryder really owned where that lamp and the patchwork quilt her Aunt Sue had sent her for Christmas two years prior.

Her Aunt was Ryder's favorite person in the world. Caroline had never brought her to meet the woman, but no matter where they moved, Ryder would get a letter from her. She loved to read them, to hear all about her uncle Harry and her cousins Seth and Leah. She wanted nothing more than to be apart of their family. She kept the small picture Sue had sent her, of the four Clearwaters posing on a beautiful beach.

Their trivial fights, the small anecdotes of life that Sue would send, the stories of Seth and Leah when they were babies. Ryder lived for those. She lived for the normality of the family. They were close and they loved eachother. Even Seth and Leah, who Sue wrote always fought over toys, seemed to be best friends at the end of the day. They were a family and Ryder wanted that.

As she sat in her room, wrapped in her quilt and staring at the picture, Ryder smiled for the first time that day.