All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 43

43

He heard footsteps by the door.

“I can’t breathe down here.”

“You need to calm, and you need to kneel and to pray,” she said.

“But I—”

“Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”

They lay in silence until the footsteps departed.

She traced his stomach with her finger. And then she ran it over the bones of ribs that stood like fossils. At his collar she drew her finger along and dipped into the valley and then up and over his throat. His chin and

mouth and teeth.

His nose.

She circled his eye and felt the lashes. It took the last of his strength to grip her thin wrist as she moved closer to the other side of his face, and even in the dark he wished he had the eye patch.

“Did you know that you’re missing an eye?”

“The kids at school like to remind me.”

He thought of Dr. Klein and his office of wonderful things in jars and models of the inner ear and the reproductive system. They did not have money for specialists, but then Patch was in no way special. You simply don’t have an eye whereas the rest of us do.

“As sockets go, it’s easily in the top three I’ve felt.”

“Can he always hear us?” Patch said in a whisper.

“Maybe.”

He clamped his hands beneath his armpits and fought a shiver that began low beneath his kneecaps before raging up his body, and at his nape he felt wisps of blonde hair rise. He did not get sick, not since he was a boy and his father died and he felt a flu descend that did not lift most of that year. His muscles resisting each morning when he walked down the stairs and slowly watched the emptying of their life. It was a slide toward poverty that he had not anticipated, that no kid ever does. Meals grew smaller and hunger larger till he noticed his jeans hanging loose from his waist as he notched new holes in his belt. His mother rose and fell like the seasons, sometimes warm as she hugged him and told him things would get better, and then sparse and bare as he asked what they could fix with stale bread, a bag of oats, and a couple of cans of tomatoes. She gained and lost employment so frequently he did not know if he would return to the smell of her Irish stew or to find the electricity cut or Dr. Tooms waiting at his kitchen table like he knew Patch needed so much.

“I’m not strong enough for this,” he said.

He cried then.

“You’re tough,” she said.

“I—”

She placed a hand on his cheek. “You are. We sense our own kind. Kids dealt a losing hand. We look at others with fucking trivial problems, and we think how long they’d last with a taste of our childhoods.”

He sobbed.

She smoothed his hair, her voice a whisper. “When you make it out of here no one will know how you lost everything, how you stared at an ending they can’t comprehend. It’ll give you power. It’ll make them wish they never fucked with you.”

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