The cell was seven by twelve.
No window, the bed so close to the toilet the mattress pressed on the rim. Tug once told him the solitary cells had been out of use since the seventies, but with workmen tearing down the old seven block, Patch found himself staring at a slice of history best forgotten. The stone walls breathed damp, cold and slick to touch. The bars faced a bank of brick shedding lime paint. The only light came in from yellow bulbs.
Patch lay on the bunk, both fists swollen. He’d gone easy on the kid, sent the big guy to the infirmary. He knew things would be different after, that he was as much a dead man walking as Marty Tooms.
He closed his eye and in the confines of that cell found a memory of her came easier.
“You get out of here and you don’t look back. Never. You promise me you make it out and leave all this behind you,” Grace said.
“You know I can’t do that.”
“You can. You get out and get on. You live. You fucking owe it to me.”
Right then, in that room so stark, he wondered just how much he had failed, not only at finding her, but in every way a person could fail.
“Pirate.”
He heard the voice of the kid in the cell beside his, a little nasal, his nose clean broken.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, kid,” Patch said.
He heard the boy breathing, a line of stone all that separated them. Patch did not hate him. There wasn’t the room.
“I didn’t…I don’t want to be here.”
Patch studied his own hands. “Don’t cry, kid. It’ll be worse.”
The boy cried.
“Tell me something,” Patch said. “How old are you?”
“Nineteen.”
Patch heard a slight drawl, reasoned it was the nose, maybe even a few teeth loose. “Dentistry is the oldest profession in the world. They had long enough to practice. You’ll be smiling right again soon.”
“We were supposed to kill you.”
“You will.”
For a moment he wondered what the boy had done, what exactly got a teenager locked away for the rest of his life.
“What’s your name?”
“They…all of them call me White. I don’t got my birth certificate or nothing. Lou, he’s my foster father. He called me Tommy, but I never felt it, you know. Maybe Tom. Just Tom.”
Patch listened to him talk awhile, mostly about nothing much at all, the kid trying to stave off his own thoughts, the weight of silence more than he could deal with. He talked like a kid, like he didn’t realize that everything would harden and die. Friends he once knew, stores and girls and places.
Patch knew well that the replacement would be gradual and total, until he was born in the system, everything before the turned pages in a book no one would ever pick up again.