All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 53

53

Saint slept in a hospital chair.

She ate her meals in the hospital canteen alongside night porters and junior doctors, and sometimes with Norma, who watched the girl with open concern.

“Please,” Norma said, and tried so hard each night, but knew Saint had fixed on a resolution that could not be loosened with talk of missing school or church. No, she would stay. She would sometimes lay her head on his chest and wait for the press against her cheek because she did not trust the

screen that made lines of his life.

I won’t take my eyes off of you.

She would repeat that like the chorus to a song whose verses no longer mattered. He was hers again. She would not lose him.

For six days and nights, during which she left his side only when the doctors forced her, he breathed mechanized air and his skin lay cold and his eye untroubled by the hysteria he had caused.

Norma brought her several changes of clothes.

Saint held up the dresses and wrinkled her nose until her grandmother returned with her dungarees.

“I should look exactly the same as the last time I saw him,” Saint said.

Norma touched her skeletal shoulder.

On the second night a code was called and an alarm sounded and Saint watched the doctors and nurses scramble into his room and lock her from it.

He can’t die now.

She said that to them.

Her grandmother wrestled her into the prayer room, and Saint cried as she knelt and clasped her hands together once more.

“It strengthens your faith, now that you have your friend back,” Norma said.

Saint looked up at her. “God started the fire. And now he wants the credit for putting it out.”

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