Saint helped Patch pick out clothes from the box of his father’s things.
She looked away as he stripped from his T-shirt, his arms crossing loosely over his front, guarding the scene. In the window she caught the reflection of him, of the scar still risen, of a history carved so deep she had stopped trying to compete, instead gradually working to bring all of him home. She wrote the Federal Missing Persons Unit in Nebraska. The National Center for Missing Persons in Texas. She sat on the landing in the tall house when her grandmother drove the buses and dialed the Aileen Plattas Foundation in Arkansas, and she told the lady all she had, which was close to nothing at all. She found more agencies with large titles in the library and soon realized none of them was accredited or official, rather just small factions of society lost, trying to keep memories and hope alive as they collated information and shared it with police departments across the country.
“You don’t have to be here,” he said.
He did not notice that she wore a new tunic, the chevrons the same brown as her eyes.
“You’re nervous,” Saint said, her deflection accurate enough.
“I’m not wearing a tie,” he said.
She tossed him a bright red bowtie.
He slipped it on and rolled back his shirt cuffs, and his hair fell over his eye. She took a little of his father’s pomade and smoothed it back.
“I look like a greasy magician,” he said.
“Like there’s another kind.”
She fixed the knot of his bowtie like her grandfather had once shown her.
“I missed you, Saint. When I was gone. I missed you.”
She turned from him, so that he would not see how long she had waited for those words.
They walked together to the brim of Main Street, and in the Green’s Convenience Store she chose a peach bouquet and paid for it with the dwindling honey money she had once hidden too well.
“I don’t want to do this,” he said.
“Don’t steal from the rich folk,” she said.
She watched the reluctance of him moving between tulip poplars that curved up and toward the big houses.
“I like your blouse.”
She turned to see Jimmy Walters. He wore a smart shirt and slacks, his hair brutally parted by a mother Saint had once seen clean his cheek with her spit on a handkerchief.
“I don’t see you much now Joseph is back,” he said.
Saint nodded.
“I prayed for it,” he said quiet.
“I did too, Jimmy.”
She stole a look at him, his eyes too blue and earnest, like he had never seen anything bad at all. Right then she longed to look at the world through his lens, certain it was simpler and purer, and easier to see everything good.
“I never said thank you,” she said.
He faced her, and she noticed his eyelashes were as dark as his hair, his skin as pale as her own.
“For what?” he said.
She watched the cupid’s bow of his lip as he spoke, noticed the finest hairs above it.
“That day…if you hadn’t told Nix where I was headed.”
“Then you would have handled it just fine without him.”
She smiled at the lie, felt a surge of gratitude as he turned and left her.
She walked back to the tall house and changed into her dungarees and painted her face with greens and browns and blacks, and she felt the cling of her childhood as she waded through the thicket and took her place on a heavy blanket in the long grass.
Saint looked through the lens of her Nikon and watched the Tooms house.
She thought of Patch.
Each day she lost more of him.