When she left, he saw her in acres of poppies, on blond sand or floating on dead sea. He could not make her a face or body so instead saw through her eyes. A vacation from the darkness where she walked among normal people. Those thoughts whorled around a darker stem he tried desperately to shield.
And when she returned fear bolted him to her side as he worked up the courage to move a little closer and to slip his arm around her shoulder. And, ever so slowly, she moved toward him and rested her head against his chest. He breathed her in. Her body molded to his.
“There’s people searching,” he said. “There’s cops and locals and posters and TV appeals and helplines. And within that there’s a cadre with guns and the right kind of training to ask the right kind of questions.”
“Sometimes I want him dead.”
He said nothing back because he wondered at which times she did not.
Patch knew that compassion was strength and at times weakness, and that it was what divided conscience. Sometimes he wanted her silent because he felt closer to her, and sometimes he longed for her to take him away with her stories.
“Tell me about the police chief,” she said.
“When my mother works the night shifts, he idles his car outside our house.” He did not tell her how he would wait for that sound, how only then could he lie down and relax enough to sleep. How one time he’d gone to the window and the cop had raised a hand then waved him back, saying go on, you go rest up because it’s a school night and you’re too young to stay in the big old house on your own.
“He cares,” she said.
“But where we are now, and where he might be looking, could be they’re not even close to similar.”
“You have to think he’s not the only one. The only good one.”
“There’s a doctor, too. Dr. Tooms. He’s kind.”
“When you’re out you won’t need any of them,” she said.
When she was gone he prayed that she wouldn’t come back. That she’d find her way home.
“When you leave here…this room,” he said, and could not finish his thought, or sentence, or breath.
She pushed back into him, took his arm and wrapped it around her waist and pressed it to her stomach. “When I leave here it’s not what you imagine…what you fear. Those thoughts that make you want to—”
“To die,” he said. “To kill him. To protect you.” He felt the dip, the hollow place where her hip bones protruded. He felt the bottom cage of her ribs.
“We can’t ever go back,” she said. “It’s not the same out there. Nothing is the same. The Rockies ain’t snowcapped. The Colorado River runs dry, and the Apache Trail ain’t in Phoenix. A church in Mesa Verde lost its god, so the people pray to each other like they ain’t devils. It’s different. Everything is different now.”
In his mind her hair gleamed like spun gold, and for a moment he worried about what he looked like. That she might not like him because he didn’t look enough like her painting.
“I have a gap between my teeth,” she said.
“Oh.”
“And those teeth are large. Rabbitesque. I could open a can with them. I imagine I’m quite adorable in the right light to the right hunter.”
He smiled.
“Don’t worry, I stared at those car barns instead of turning to notice the Charles River,” she said.
“I never really know what you’re taking about.”
“I see what others don’t.”
The jangle of keys in a lock.
“So we go someplace else then,” he said, into her hair. Later that night he would finally wrestle the brick free.
Heavy steps across the floor as he turned his back and knelt in prayer.
This time he smelled chard and metal.
It would not be until later that he realized it was the smell of gunshot.