All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 57

57

Saint did not see him that first week.

Each morning she stood before the old house on Rosewood Avenue and waited, watching his covered window, sometimes slipping into the yard and settling herself on a rusting lawn chair. Ivy came out and stroked her hair, told her he was sleeping, that he was tired. Saint spent hours making a pirate card, sketching the mast and body, detailing the rigging and casting a figurehead in his image, before deciding it was babyish and tossing it into the trash.

She suffered through school, endured whispered rumors that Patch had come back disfigured, that the bad man from the woodland had plucked out his other eye and now he wandered blind.

Misty approached in homeroom.

“How is he?” she said.

Saint did not answer though wanted to lie, to say he was not ready to see anyone but her, that she knew about his time away from them but it was not her place to share it.

“Should I bake him a strudel?” Misty said.

Saint did not know what a strudel was.

Jimmy Walters fell into step with her each day after school, often picking wildflowers for her, which she would clutch awkwardly until he departed and then toss into the Baxters’ yard.

“Thanks for letting me walk with you,” he said.

She shrugged.

“We could walk again sometime,” he said.

She frowned.

“I could come see your beaver.”

“You some kind of pervert?” Saint said.

Jimmy caught himself and turned a deep shade of crimson. “I didn’t…I meant at the marshland.”

“Where you’ll expect me to show you my beaver?”

Jimmy began to sweat as he loosened his collar. “I just meant…I could

help you photograph it.”

Saint blew out her cheeks.

Jimmy looked toward the sky, then at his shoes.

And then Saint began to laugh. And she looked at his face, so open and honest and horrified, and she clutched her stomach and laughed so hard Jimmy could do little but dab the sweat from his brow and join her.

When they calmed she closed her eyes to the afternoon sun and could not recall the last time she had laughed. Or smiled. Or felt much beyond the agony of the past year.

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