In the old house he sifted through a collection that screamed of his madness, items he had not seen in ten years, that used to bring him closer to Grace.
The shelves bowed with Time, local newspapers and cuttings. The walls papered with old maps, streets colored in marker pen, and beside them clippings from a dozen catalogues, Junior Bazaar, Misses Fashion, Sears. Outfits cobbled together from snippets of conversation that had come to him mostly in the dead of night, when he’d wake with such urgency, pad down the stairs, and write in journals that numbered near fifty. Words that did not run together. Plaid, cut loose, emery, vanilla. He interpreted them in different ways on different days, sometimes sounds or smells and sights. He cut faces from magazines, joined them to hairstyles from newspapers, sometimes changed the eye color with the shade of a paintbrush.
He did not know if it was that leaden certainty that she was gone, or that he looked back at his folly from a mind recused, but he gathered the assemblages, tore everything from the walls of his old bedroom and filled a metal trash can in the yard. He fetched a can of gasoline from the garage and doused it all fully and lit his memories on fire.
As he breathed the smoke down and closed his eye, he found himself back there, the flames lighting another time he had thought forever confined to darkness.
“Wake up,” she cried. “Fucking wake up, Patch. I’ll try and pull you out. I’ll try and keep you with me.” She coughed and choked and tugged his arms. “I’m not strong enough to save you. I’m not strong enough to do any of this without you.”
And only as the smoke twisted on its rise did he look up through his tears and seek out a night sky he had not noticed in so many years.