Against the far wall there was a brick rampart as thick as a small tree, and sometimes they sat on it and Grace told him they were facing the Pacific and pointed out bulk carriers and freighters and reefer vessels. She knew the names of sea birds he wondered if she’d made up. Crested Auklet. Erin Spencer. She told him sunsets were beautiful because the light took a longer path through the atmosphere so that it could scatter those violets.
“How do you know so much?” he said.
“I’ve lived a life.”
As she spoke he dug his nails into the cement and worked on the groove he had channeled. And when she was gone he used the last of his strength to move the top brick back and forth, working it looser each time.
He scrambled when the man came. Though the dark was total he was not allowed to turn. The man did not speak, though Patch felt his presence, his power. Her fear.
He took his place kneeling beside Grace, who spoke with calmness.
“Behold, God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid; for the Lord God is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation.”
She nudged him lightly.
“Isaiah 12:2,” he said, his voice strong, like they practiced.
Patch smelled things on him. Peach. Sweat. Cologne. Mildew.
And when he left them they breathed once more.
Grace made them exercise, so long and hard that he lost hours and days to flamed muscles. At first his stomach hurt so bad he waited until she slept to cry.
He felt her fingers guide something into his mouth.
“Peanut Butter Cups,” she said.
“How did you get them?” He had never tasted anything so sweet.
“I’m wily like that.”
They sat together, their backs to the wall.
“Tell me what you miss,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I miss. I miss when the moon slips underwater and turns everything blue. I miss the four faces of time. I miss yellow brick roads and tin men. I miss the fall.”
“I don’t miss…sometimes I don’t even want to go back home.”
“Why not?” she said.
“People say I’m a thief.”
“Why?”
“Because I steal things.”
She began to laugh, slow at first, and then her shoulders shook as the dam burst.
And then he started to laugh.
In that vacuum that sucked in everything before and turned it out, Patch and Grace laughed so loud.
This time his hand traced the contours of her face, the sharpness of her cheekbones, the shallow pits by her temples.
“Paint me,” she said.
“I need to see you.”
“I’m standing on a north shore, pink beneath my feet because nor’easters strip rhyolite so pretty I can’t even bear it. Maybe it’ll preserve me or something. Forty-two miles down with the crystals. Mummified in pink. I hope to hell I keep my looks.”
“Are there people searching for you?” he said, and the question somehow made that room darker, somehow stole a little more of the air that they breathed.
“There’s no one left out there. No one at all.”
That night, after the man took her from him, he worked on loosening the brick.
He channeled the groove deeper.
His nail tore from its bed but he did not cry.