All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 55

55

Chief Nix drove.

Patch sat beside Saint in the backseat of the cop car.

He felt the way she watched him, like she had done for the past week, looking for a tell, for something that would let her know he was or was not the boy who showed at her house to steal her honey.

She had been there when he screamed the name.

Grace.

Screamed it until the nurses came and pushed a button, till memories shuffled and a new hand was dealt. Illuminations in darkness, his thoughts no more than the flare of matchlight in a storm. When it was all dark, he felt his bones disconnect as he floated down midnight rivers. He could not recall their last hours together. At times he saw the nurse and begged her to stop the drugs so he could make some sense, and other times he begged for

more, so he could swim away again.

“I need you to find her,” he said.

Nix met his eye in the mirror.

For six hours over three days the cops had sat with him and taken statements and looked at each other like they knew the girl down there with

him was likely dead.

“We’re all on it,” Nix said.

“And I am,” Saint said from beside him, her hand on the seat between them like an offering. He knew that he could place his hand on hers and give her back the friend she wanted. He turned from her and watched from too deep inside, his mind nylon strands pulled taut but holding. He would knit memories back together only for the drugs to unravel them once more.

They took statements, asked the same questions in different ways. He spoke of Grace and what he remembered, which was too much and not enough, the two state cops exchanging glances he could not read.

Afterward he would not be able to speak or eat or breathe.

Nurses lit his eyes with small flashlights, checking his pulse against their small silver clocks. He wrenched the tubes from his hand and watched his blood pool and drip till Saint noticed and screamed for the nurse to come repair him.

A doctor told him it was normal for his mood to be low. Brain fog, stress. Forgetting things. Weakened immune system. “We need light to

survive,” the doctor said.

“Not all of us,” Patch said.

He watched the town appear, leaving and returning beneath blue sky.

The past months might have been a blink, if it hadn’t been for her.

“She needs me,” he said, as the forest flashed by, and then corrected

himself. “I need her.”

He felt Saint beside.

“She saved me. She dragged me out.” He said that more than once. His knee bounced and he stared at it and could not stop it, like he could control nothing at all.

“You remember that?” Nix said and glanced back at him.

Outside the sky was raw now, the gunmetal stays traced mountain curves. Saint had bought him sunglasses from the gift shop because light hurt him. The doctor said it would take time. Time was a thing again.

His fingers were scabbed, and his knees and elbows, and though they had cleaned him up he could see the trace of dirt beneath his nails.

Nix cursed when they turned into his street, the news vans idling across the drive. The neighbors aimed smiles like he was the star of a parade, like any of them had smiled before.

He pulled his hood up and hid himself as Nix seared them a path with his badge and led them down the side of the house and into the yard.

Patch saw his mother’s face, and though makeup hid much he knew when she pressed into him that most of her had died.

“My baby,” she cried.

He stayed limp in her arms.

She smelled faintly of Sweet Honesty and decay.

“The grass is cut,” he said.

“Mr. Roberts comes across now.” She wiped her eyes and nose and laughed gently at what he had noticed first.

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