All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 26

26

For Christmas her grandmother bought her a Nikon so old the lens cover was fixed with tape.

“You have one roll of film. Developing is costly. Choose your shots wisely.”

Saint borrowed a bird book from the library, trudged white woods and fired off photos of house finch, waxwings, and one time a red-tailed hawk.

She watched 1976 being shepherded in beneath a canopy of yet more snow, at times so deep it fell into the tops of her boots, soaking her stockinged feet as she watched a street cleaner move through Main Street and slowly remove the posters of the boy with the eye patch. She took one from him and at home placed it on the high shelf in her closet. She read more, of trauma and amygdala. The Polson book of forensic science. Her head buried in books that would somehow keep her link to him alive. She read of a team in New Jersey that could lift fingerprints from tree bark, even leaves. She took it to Nix, who looked at her with such sadness she almost broke in two.

She saw Ivy less, the woman rarely leaving her home now. Sometimes Norma would bake something, and Saint would leave it on the front porch.

A day later she would collect it, uneaten. Saint heard she had lost her jobs, and that Kim had begun court proceedings to evict her. Saint broke open her piggybank and posted an envelope through Ivy’s door. Inside was every cent she had ever been gifted or earned, from sweeping the yard to selling her honey.

She took her piano lessons with Mrs. Shaw in a small hamlet a good ten miles out of Monta Clare. And in that wide-open lounge Saint went through

warm-up and technique. Scales and chords and arpeggios. They used to review; now Saint was so accomplished the last fifteen minutes she was allowed to simply play what she felt like.

And as she looked out the window at the neat house across the street, she played Arabesque in C Major, op. 18. She thought of Schumann and contrasting moods, almost closed her eyes to the epilogue, until she saw him out there.

Chief Nix lived opposite, and Saint watched him emerge with a shovel.

He waded past the driveway, and instead carefully cleared a neat circle around the roots of an okame cherry.

As she waited for her grandmother, Saint walked across and sat beside Nix on the small ornamental bench beside the tree.

“It’s pretty,” she said.

“I clear snow around the roots so it can feel the sun. This tree blooms too early for fruit to form. It will stay eternally beautiful, and undisturbed.”

Saint felt his hand lightly on her shoulder.

“I wanted to bring him back for you. I needed Callie Montrose to be all

right,” he said.

“I know.”

“I’m sorry, kid.”

That afternoon she took her Nikon down to the reservoir where the barbed wire was trodden down. She crouched by the water’s edge and photographed a belted kingfisher as it swooped.

On the walk back she found herself in the spot where it had happened.

She no longer cried.

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