All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 87

87

On a fresh morning in the town of Huntersville he met another mother and collected another photograph, and then he sat with Misty at the back of the basilica. She knelt while he looked at the blue columns and starred ceiling.

“I struggle to pray now,” she said.

“Why?”

“I’ve been given enough already.”

She kissed him.

When they broke apart she kept hold of his hand. She would not let go of it again.

She did not notice him compare the rosary beads that hung from the wrought-iron robe hooks by the door against his memory of the ornate kind Eli Aaron had buried his victims with. There would not be a single moment when he forgot her.

He spent much of his free time in the public library, working his way through a decade both torturous and prosperous. He skimmed past news he wondered how he had missed; A Buffalo blizzard; Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone; a blackout in New York City; a science fiction movie with lightsabers; a dead king and 75,000 people on the streets to mourn his voice and the indecorous way he moved onstage.

He widened his search to surrounding states and grew his collection of names and faces. He made a copy of each at the Xerox place two towns over, then made sure to drop them on Nix’s desk. The chief no longer acknowledged his plight, instead taking the copies from him and filing them in his desk drawer.

Sammy perfected elaborate marinades, and each Sunday night the two would barbecue together on the large balcony that overlooked Main Street.

Patch sipped a soda while Sammy talked Roots and Kunta Kinte. “I get the tribal rite of passage and all, but do they really need to take your foreskin?”

Sammy said, a protective hand over his crotch.

“A woman came to see you this morning. Said her name was Nina,”

Patch said.

Sammy pinched the bridge of his nose. “Must not have read the memo.”

“I took her number.”

“And I sent her an actual memo thanking her for her service but making it clear she would no longer be required in my bed.”

Patch waited for him to laugh.

Sammy did not laugh.

For Misty there was tentative talk of prom. She did not outright ask to be asked, but each time they passed Miss Kline’s on Main Street she would stop before the yellow dress in the window, with the lace detail and waistcoat, and sigh so heavily he eventually worked up the courage to take her to Elion Point, where he went through expected motions and she hugged him tight enough to cause damage.

He did his best to care for his mother, made sure to pick up her pills and fix breakfast and dinner and make damn certain Misty never stepped foot over the threshold of his house. Between what he made at the mine and forcing Misty to take gas money, and placating his mother’s landlord with just enough back payment, what little was left did not cover utilities. More than once each month his mother would call into the gallery to say the power had died, and he would return to a dripping refrigerator and a growing sense of unease.

Sometimes he passed Saint in town and she would offer a small smile and he would return it. He took comfort in the fact that she would leave him behind fully soon enough.

And so he existed in that altered state, that middle ground between living and not, moving on and stalling.

If the travel became his scream into the void, his paintings became true north, his skill so heady that Sammy no longer guided, just stepped back and watched in quiet reflection.

He painted the Birch girl, then the Huntersville girl, each took months, and when he was done he had Sammy pay the freight and shipped the work to their mothers. A week later Carol Birch made the long drive to Monta Clare, pulled up out front of the gallery, took Patch in her arms and sobbed.

And then he painted Callie Montrose.

In such fine and skilled detail locals stood outside the gallery window the entire day Sammy displayed it. None for longer than Chief Nix, who stayed rooted there, his hair cut a little shorter now, his kind face still so utterly troubled.

The painting was duly shipped to Richie Montrose, who sent it right back.

“What will you do with it?” Nix said one afternoon as Patch cleaned the glass front of the gallery.

“Sammy said we can hang it here until she’s found. Why didn’t her father want it?”

Nix kept his eyes on the girl. “Sometimes it hurts too much.”

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