All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 172

172

A quiet year had passed since that day he’d said goodbye to Grace.

A year during which he walked his daughter to school and noted seasons changing by the clothes she wore. In January they’d sat in the Mad House with Saint and her grandmother and watched the 49ers shred the Chargers at the Joe Robbie Stadium. That evening Charlotte had found an old football in the attic, headed into the frozen yard, and practiced till she could throw long passes, picking out Patch in the cherry tree end zone, her fingers so red he took her inside to thaw. “I think maybe I want to be a football player,” she said, over a dinner of toasted ravioli.

“Contact sports will turn you barren,” Norma said.

“What’s barren?” Charlotte said.

“Unable to have children,” Norma said.

Charlotte shrugged. “I might not even want children. I might be lesbian,

like you.”

Norma sighed.

They drove over to the Alamo Theatre and watched a movie on the last Friday of each month, sharing popcorn, Charlotte shaking with fear as Freddy Krueger slashed his way through a New Nightmare.

“Are you sure this is suitable?” he said.

“Yes,” she said, her face buried in her hands.

Spring they huddled together and watched a bomb tear the heart from Oklahoma, Charlotte unable to sleep that night, her mind on the families, on the nineteen children. He sat in the chair by her door till sunrise. At nine they joined a cluster at St. Raphael’s, dropped their heads and lit candles.

Charlotte read of a mother who had lost her daughter in the rubble. For seven hours the woman feared her dead before the girl was pulled from the debris, her face blackened with dust, their reunion caught by a single camera that would turn into the world’s lens as it ran on every newspaper not as a symbol of what was lost, but as a symbol of hope and promise against the harshest of odds.

The next day she asked Patch about the missing girls.

OceanofPDF.com