All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 21

21

As cooling rains hammered the windows, Saint sat at the old piano and played Chopin’s suffocation as her grandmother sat in the rocking chair beside.

Saint closed out the doleful notes, her fingers thin like her frame, her cheeks sallow and her skin paler. In the weeks that had passed, the realization that they had lost Joseph Macauley drowned her. She did not eat much or sleep much, and at school she sat mute, only now and then turning in her chair to notice the empty seat at the back of the class.

She had thought she was close the night she ran from the doctor. Norma had found her granddaughter sitting on the hardwood kitchen floor with the

door bolted behind.

“It’s him,” she’d said.

Chief Nix arrived, and Saint had ridden in the back of his cruiser beside her grandmother, and then sat outside the Tooms farmhouse as the doctor walked from it and the two men spoke for a long time.

She heard Nix apologize and saw Tooms offer a sad smile directed toward the car.

Saint spent hours in the woodland behind her house, lying on her stomach and watching the Tooms land through Patch’s spy telescope.

Norma said he was a doctor and blood came with the territory. That the scream could have been mating wolves. Sometimes she noted a vehicle on the other side beneath trees that kept its color and driver in shadow, and she wondered if the doctor allowed house calls.

A further week and the reward money grew to two thousand dollars after Saint delivered handwritten letters to the folks on Parade Hill.

And the case began its slide from headlines to murmurs.

A bar fight turned into a murder in Cedar Rapids; a drunk ran a stop sign in Mount Vernon and killed an expectant mother. A group armed with placards torched a Planned Parenthood clinic in Columbia. Saint read of TRAP laws and crisis centers and broached the subject with Norma.

“We should have total control of our own bodies,” Saint said.

“You would not be here if we did,” Norma said, not looking up from her

newspaper.

“But my mother would.”

“It’s a sin.”

“Tell that to Jane Roe,” Saint said.

“It’s not your fight to take.”

“Only because you wouldn’t let me. I wanted to stand there with Misty and the other girls. I wanted to carry the placard and show my support on the front page of The Tribune. It’s not fair.”

“Fair has little to do with religion and politics.”

Life in all its uneven fairness went on. As summer bled out, the fall air brought a chrysalis of calm. Greens ceded to browns and golds Saint did not notice. She took long searching walks through dimming woodland, her eyes straining the ground no matter how much she tried to force herself to look up. She missed curfew, walked close to the highway like bait. If the man was still hunting, she willed herself to be taken. Nix found her and drove her home, and her grandmother moved from anger to fear to desperation.

Norma wanted her to see a counselor over in Cossop Hill.

Saint told her she was fine, choked down a mouthful of stew but could not manage more. She lost more weight, her cheekbones high, her hair still thick and too heavy for her meager frame. She had no hips and still no chest, but she no longer cared about such nonsense.

Evenings crackled with bonfire smoke.

Patch’s name was mentioned under people’s breath that now smoked with cold.

Saint marked the change in Ivy Macauley each Sunday at church. How the woman’s hands trembled as she prayed. How vodka now overpowered

the perfume.

Saint watched the television screen as Ronald Reagan threw his hat into the ring, promising the kind of change not even a dozen lifetimes could boast. This is it, you’ll see.

Saint was not sure exactly what it was, but the next morning as she watched the Ford flags stand defiant in frosting yards, she could think of nothing good at all.

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