All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 39

39

That first day.

Patch shivered and cried, and reached up and felt his eye and it was open but there was nothing to see because he had found the edge of his world and was staring at its end. So dark he could discern no shapes or distance or silhouettes, no spells of light from the edges of doors or windows or gaps in the surround. He raised his hand and held it an inch from his face but could not make out his fingers or the blood dried in the lines of his palms. Wherever he was, whatever state he was in, he might as well have been blind.

He burned with cold, his life roils of dark and reds, his jaw locked so hard he rubbed until his teeth loosened and blood flaked from his mouth

like paint from tape.

He wondered if he was dead.

Most in Monta Clare spent Sunday mornings in St. Raphael’s, and one time Patch fell into step with them, sat at the very back and did not kneel or sing, just watched the man at the front as he lit candles and touched heads and told them they were failing but failure was expected.

Patch knew right then it was an act, and that death when it came was not light or confession, forgiveness or peace or fire. It was that cold piece of time before you were born, that glance into history books that told you the world went on before and would go on again, no matter who was there to witness it.

He reasoned the truest proof of life was pain, and he knew that the day the black car pulled up out front of his house and the two men with the stripes and military buzz cuts knocked on his door and told his mother that

her husband would return on a plane with a hundred other bodies, all too young to even place Vietnam on a map.

At ten years old he realized that people were born whole, and that the bad things peeled layers from the person you once were, thinning compassion and empathy and the ability to construct a future. At thirteen he knew those layers could sometimes be rebuilt when people loved you.

When you loved.

When Patch reached down to his stomach, he found stitches in long looping cotton bows that dove beneath swollen tears of skin.

Up higher he felt bruises on his chest.

And above that his cross hung from thin string around his neck. A cross Norma had given to him because she said it would keep him from harm. He did not believe in God, just in Saint and her grandmother, and sometimes his mother.

He lay on something soft and beneath that was cement and the bestrew of dirt and gravels of sand like the top layer had been shaved off. The panic would come, even then he knew that, but time had deserted him so totally he drifted, and life was floating pieces unreachable, his mother’s face, the Green’s Convenience Store, Misty Meyer.

He heard screams but did not know they were his own.

Dark was his blessing and curse, and in lucid moments he wondered if he was in the hospital. An ICU where no one but Saint stopped by and watched his coma and held his hand in hers.

The pain came in such sharp savage bursts he would heave and retch and puke spume that would dry and crust at the corners of his mouth.

He did not know enough to be scared.

Patch felt a hand slip into his.

He lurched.

He was not alone.

OceanofPDF.com