All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 11

11

That night she did not sleep at all, instead stared at her map and marked with a yellow highlighter the route the van had taken. Her shelves bulged with books; the walls held no posters or photographs. She did not own makeup or perfume or a wardrobe that extended beyond school and church.

At dawn she found her grandmother sitting at the oak table, and the old lady’s eyes told that she had not slept even though she would drive the bus that morning from Monta Clare through six towns and the forge of Palmer Valley.

“The bees?” Saint asked, and her grandmother shook her head.

Upstairs she wet a washcloth and wiped her face and beneath her arms and already noticed the red in her eyes and the unruly strands that fled from her braid. Her front tooth was crooked because she had lost her retainer while chasing Patch through the corn on the old Hinton farm. And after, when she caught him, the two had sat together, their bare arms touching.

She recalled his face as well as her own, his mess of hair, how he too was skinny and pretty and when he aimed his smile just right… God, let him come home today.

Her grandmother fixed eggs that neither of them ate.

“School is closed today,” Norma said. Deep lines channeled from the corners of her eyes like rivulets forged from the hot tears spilled the day Saint’s mother passed.

“I wasn’t going to go,” Saint said, looking up through her lenses like she was waiting on a rebuke. She had not ever missed a day of school. Some might’ve thought it was because Norma was hard on her, but sometimes Saint thought the truth was less palatable. She liked to learn.

“They’ll find him,” Norma said. “They will.”

After breakfast Saint went to the woodland.

Chief Nix had put the call out late, that they’d need men to go trudge the woodland on the kind of grim journey where success and failure were one and the same.

Monta Clare answered, and near a hundred stood in weighted silence and listened to Chief Nix tell them what they mostly already knew. Walk in line and keep your mouth shut and your eyes open.

Chief Nix whittled them to only the most able, Saint swallowing dry when he shook his head at her.

Behind her fifty or so farmworkers and laborers and stone-faced teens with acned cheeks tried to dull their excitement. Midges steamed from the dirt and they batted at them idly, focused on the thrill of finding the kid’s bloodied clothes.

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