When Cedric woke the next morning, he could feel his pulse beating in his head. He turned from one side to the other, and, in the motion, he discovered his stomach was also ill.
He pushed his head into his pillow, but light had begun to leak into his room at the edges of the curtains.
His memories of the night before were fractured. He remembered listening to Myrtle and Davian throw barbs at each other, and he remembered how uncomfortable their discourse had left him. But the scene’s details had become fuzzy, and he had the overwhelming fear that he’d said — or done — something incredibly stupid. As he tried to find the damning lines, they slipped like oil from his fingers.
He rolled over again, putting his back to the wall. When his eyes opened, the shelves looked down upon him: scores of ancient books, their topics bringing new meaning to the incomprehensible arcane. The tension in his mind raged, and he could not settle and he closed his eyes.
Against his better judgement, the images in his mind flickered and he thought back to Newburgh. It had now been several long weeks, perhaps even months, since he’d been handcuffed and stored in the cell downtown. The time since was dissolving like vapor in the wind. Here, in a dusty old brownstone in New York City, he was hungover on hundred-dollar wine, and it was Mrs. Clark with her TV tray and Star Trek re-runs that seemed like fantasy. He thought back to the library book he’d handed to Betty, inadvertently forming his last testament, and his cheeks grew hot with shame and for a while he was awash in faceless regret.
“Cedric—?” came Myrtle’s voice, muted from the other side of the door, followed by several knocks of her knuckles. “Are you awake? May I come in?”
He sat up in bed, too quickly, and his body protested, his stomach reminding him of his past transgressions.
He feigned energy and vigor where he had none. “Yeah, come on in,” he said, pressing his fingers to the side of his head.
She opened the door slowly, nothing in her hands. She was covered, as usual, in a dark dress, something seeming black even if it might have been navy or dark brown. Her jewelry, a sepia brooch, was different than she’d worn yesterday.
She stepped inside and pushed the door nearly closed, but not quite. She stood, cautious, and spoke across the room to him. “How are you this morning?”
Cedric felt small, and seen. “Tired, I guess.” He could not look at her. “Didn’t sleep well,” he clarified. “At all.”
She didn’t respond quickly, but when she did, her voice was soft and slow; the one she used for Suyon. “Red wine has tannins: from the grape skin and seeds, from the barrels in which it’s aged. They take time to be filtered from the blood,” she explained carefully. “You’re not accustomed to it. Many get terrible headaches until they’ve recovered. You should rest and drink plenty of water—”
“Why do you defend him?” Cedric demanded with intensity, the throbbing in his temples becoming unbearable. “Who the hell does he think he is? He’s always showing off, bragging, preaching…” Cedric tried to hold his tongue, but he couldn’t try very hard and his contempt boiled over. “He’s just an—”
“Davian’s methods are somewhat unorthodox,” she interrupted. “And he can be caustic and… difficult at times. He has not had a student in quite some time—”
He bit back. “Yeah, well, that’s not my problem.”
“Cedric…” Myrtle said quietly. “I understand your reservations. He’s not an easy man to get along with. And, I admit, he’s become increasingly strange over the past several years—”
The boy scoffed.
“But I do think the two of you stand to gain much from each other. You need that experience. His mind can enter doors long closed to me.”
She lowered her voice. “Others that I probably will never know.”
Cedric was quiet.
“This is your home,” she continued, attempting to soothe her newest student. “And you are always welcome here. But the ways in which I instruct the children will not be enough. You need more.”
He looked at her, but it was awkward.
“I am not turning you out,” she reassured him. “Far from it.”
She considered her words, and spoke deliberately. “But a man’s Talent is different from a woman’s. You will suffer if you take only one viewpoint.”
“Then why did you bring me here?” He turned toward her forcefully, and then withdrew, the light making his head throb in pain.
He let his eyes look at something dark while he descended into hopelessness. “Why did you bring me here if you were just going to ship me off to someone else?”
She responded in turn: quiet, resolute, the truth shaping words until they were smooth.
“I brought you here to protect you,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean the path is going to be easy. Or simple.”
“What about Elmer?” Cedric asked. “And Owen?”
“They are young, yet,” she said. “But I have no intention to hinder their progress, either, when the time comes.”
Cedric did not say anything.
“I am fortunate to count Davian as one of my friends. It is an advantage I wish to pass on,” Myrtle said patiently. “He has much to teach, yet few associates anymore.”
“I wonder why.” Cedric spat with dismissive sarcasm.
“He has good intentions behind the showmanship,” Myrtle negotiated. “He is often trying to guard himself, and he is afraid of getting hurt. You must see through that. He genuinely wants to win your affection. I realize it can be—”
She caught his eye. “—Uncomfortable for you. And he would do well to take a moment to consider where you are coming from.”
“More money than sense,” Cedric retorted of the man.
Myrtle did not respond quickly.
“Your feelings are yours, and I am careful not to suggest you dismiss them,” she said. “But you would be likewise mired in pride to rebuke a man because you do not appreciate the way he dresses or talks. To judge him based upon the same criteria for which you do not wish others to forsake you.”
Cedric looked at her, and heard her concluding argument.
“You’re a fool to stop eating because you once choked.”
When Myrtle left the room, Cedric was glad for it. Not because he wanted to be alone, but because he could not stand to endure the contrary opinion. He was in no mood to entertain her plea that he should treat the man with mercy.
He could not.
Mercy required something of himself that he could not yet muster. Wherever that strength lay within his tangled heart, it had become submerged by sand in the changing tide. Though he thought he should try to grasp at it, it had become worn through the years and it lacked an edge to hold. Davian’s hospitality — or attempt at something like it — had made him feel a stranger.
He was angry and he was resentful. Disdain melted into disgust and he was dangerously close to suffocating in the toxic cloud. In his weakened state, bodily motion was nearly impossible and the rage could not be vented, so he laid on the bed and it echoed back and forth until the original waveforms had become unintelligible noise.
There was a point at which it didn’t matter how much gold had been woven into the tablecloths. If Davian was the kind of person who thought friends were won with favors and finery, then there wasn’t going to be a single damn thing they had in common.
But the thought didn’t resonate like he thought it should. A tiny kernel in the back of his thoughts suggested maybe, too, he was confused.
Perhaps, he was lost.
Cedric had slept through breakfast because his body had demanded respite. But by the time lunch swept around, the choice was real, and he avoided it because he could not bear to have those faces look upon him.
There were seven of them: seven people around that table, with the fourteen eyes that seemed always to be looking into him, between him, and within the seams that spoke of his vulnerability. And he thought of the knives scraping against the plates and the spoons dropping into the food and the clanging and chewing and swallowing and the incessant questions and chatter and casual commentary that blended together into word soup —
When he thought they were all entertained at lunch, he slipped into the hallway bathroom. He swallowed his nausea and bent his neck such that his head fell beneath the faucet, and, in an inelegant gesture, he took in water from the sink.
Between the burbling, he wondered what business a bunch of mages had with having city water pumped into their houses. Couldn’t they have anything they wanted without cost? Isn’t that what it meant to summon? Was this all just to keep up appearances with the others?
What was it Davian had called them with flippant disregard?
‘Mortals.’
The water was cold and made him forget about the ripened decay leeching onto his tongue.
He drank, and four-letter words peppered his memory, each stranger than the last.
‘Mage.’
‘Home.’
‘Wine.’
‘…Fuck!’
He sputtered and coughed and tried to keep from choking. His thirst could not overcome his sickness, so he slumped back in defeat to his room. He thought he ought to try to have some simple meal: bread, maybe. Something to dilute and absorb the poison. But he rejected the thought.
Despite it all, he had the overwhelming feeling that he had eaten enough.
The curtain hiding the window in his room had a hook and a thick cord that accompanied it, so he drew the cloth back and secured it as best he was able so that a little light trickled into the room. He could see little particles reflect back at him, and they floated and danced as if they had no comprehension that they were caged.
He thought about opening the window, but felt unsure.
It had been weeks he’d been coming back to this chamber and in the time that had passed, he’d disturbed only the barest essentials. The chest of drawers had some things he’d slowly accepted as his own, and Myrtle had presented him with a pair of slippers to which he still felt estranged. They were soft and warm, and yet to accept them supposed some agreement beneath which he was not ready to pen his name.
He thought about lying back down, but his head was uneasy and the water collecting at the bottom of his gut was still dangerously rebellious at even the mere suggestion that it should be jostled against his esophagus. Instead, he held his head aloft and turned his neck.
The shelf’s books were arranged carefully, each an inch or two from the edge, forming a threshold like bricks lacking mortar. They were distinct, though most wore demure color. They had no paper jackets and their crosshatched skin made no pretenses.
Several tomes of astronomical interest were seated together, silvers and blues dominating the visual.
‘Beyond Celestial Mechanics.’
‘Elementary Stellar Divinations.’
‘Projecting the Planets.’
He moved on. Another shelf was equally forbidding, although here stood a preference for red and gold.
‘Fire, Flame, and Fear: Releasing Ultimate Potential from Within.’
‘Mort & Kainen’s Discourse on Force.’
The temple on the right side of his face seized painfully, so he turned away.
‘Heathens and Horticulture: My Year With Squanto.’
‘A Treatise on pre-Columbian Mysticism of the Lenape Peoples.’
He felt nameless discomfort, so he went on and took the book to the right of all the rest. He sat on his bed and read it for twenty minutes or so before he took note of the page he was on and closed the cover, a grey so deep it might have been something else. He wasn’t sure what he had learned, but he left the rest for another day.
‘The Long Memory.’
Cedric saw himself shaving, then. But it was a curious thing, and time seemed entirely to be stretched too thin.
Each time he brought the blade to his face, he made fall another column of cream. And beneath where the foam had been, was his face, clean in the exercise. And the hair fell away, cut.
But something did not look right, even though he could not see. The tile was white and the mirror was silver and the light made his pupils contract until they were small and they were green all around the black and if he’d been quiet enough, he might have noticed the pain.
[ ‘Bet—’ ]
It was Betty’s bathroom, on the second floor, left as you went up the stairs. Set above the kitchen, if you thought about it, so that the pipes ran up and down in neat little lines, gravity helping the plumbing, but never deviated — never went diagonally.
[ ‘I don’t live here, do—’ ]
No, he didn’t live here, he realized. That time and place had passed, and now…
[ ‘You’re wrong, it was right, not left. Now…?’ ]
He was shaving. But an inordinate time had seemed to stretch ponderous past his cognition, pulled tight so that the light passed through it, and still he remained on the right cheek. It wasn’t right, and he thought he’d made a mistake. In five strokes, he should be done; in five strokes, sometimes six, he could move to the other side, or at least into the middle.
Why was he in Betty’s bathroom, he thought lazily. His mind was viscous and tired, and when he tried to direct his thoughts and questions, they were a tethered ball that went in a circle but did not fly.
He went underneath his nose then, and his razor touched the division, slicing in tiny iterations, the scraping silent in the white cream—starting from the left, he went right until he reached the naked skin.
He bent against the counter to get a better look, but he hated to see himself and the way his flesh looked pink when he got too close. His eyes, too, streaked with tiny reddish vessels. The pressure of the—
[ Wait. ]
Betty didn’t have a square counter. There was no marble there, no cold corners, that wasn’t how he’d seen it. That wasn’t how it had been. This was all wrong. It was round, it had been round, yes: round; and there had been a little glass shelf and sometimes he put the razor on there and then he saw how it left a residue, and then he—
[ Look. ]
In the mirror, was his face. And he’d moved to the left now, and one swipe had left a swath glowing where the pores were open. He felt the air flood into the empty follicles and it was cold as it was burning and then he was looking at himself and he was seeing into the empty space outside the color of his eyes when his face twisted into a smile.
[ Smile? ]
Yes, it was a smile, though it was cockeyed. He still had shaving cream on one side, so the whole thing was tilted while it was straight.
And he stared for some time, thinking he saw a smile, but was not himself making it and though he wanted desperately to raise his hands and touch his fingers to his face to test the orientation of his muscles, they would not go and refused him because he was holding a razor.
[ Razor. ]
But where was the razor?
His eyes peered, but they could not see. Two bright lights had been born upon the mirror and as his eyes were open, they grew and grew and grew until they flashed white overload into the back of his retina.
[ Wheel. ]
He was driving the Cavalier—but?
He was still in the bathroom.
Cedric hated when they followed so close behind him. He hated when the lights flashed bright in the rearview, up and down, intense from askew when they came out of the divots in the road. The anger rose again so he threw his head backward to look at them, to show his face, to let them know they could not hide in his—
[ Shadow? ]
When he looked, there was nothing there. He was sure he hadn’t moved (his feet) but the walls were gone and the tile wasn’t there and the car was nowhere to be seen.
What remained was the water. It came up around his ankles and it was cold and where it seeped into his jeans, it made the clothing heavy. The faucet was running; he could hear it and he needed to make it stop. He stumbled around and looked for the sink but the weight of the denim made it hard to walk and where he stepped, the icy water splashed back and got more of him wet.
[ “Betty?” ]
He was calling out for her now. If he couldn’t turn off the sink, the noise would keep going and the level would rise and soon the whole house would flood with water everywhere.
[ “Betty…?” ]
He kept yelling into the darkness for help. It was her house, he thought, her bathroom, her sink. She would know how to fix it. She would have the tools: a wrench, the pliers or whatever she needed…
[ “…Betty!” ]
A bucket, maybe.
[ “Help! Betty, I—!” ]
Cedric had the sudden feeling he was falling, and he seized back into consciousness.
His eyes flung open, and he found himself still in the bedroom.
Still — in the bedroom.
He blinked and shifted underneath the plush covers: a sheet, supple and impossibly soft, and a thick blanket in a deep blue. It was dark in the room and he thought he felt better: less hungover, more alive, and then he remembered the water running and how it sloshed and splashed and made it hard to run around and his clothes had stuck to him and his socks were cold and wet but then a question arose —
If there had been water all over, how did he fall in the open air?
( …DONG… )
( … )
( …DONG… )
( … )
( …D— )
The clock in the hallway rang out. He counted the tolling of the bell, because the darkness gave no other clues, and when it was done he knew it was five o’clock in the morning.
He’d made it through the night.
When Cedric’s bare feet touched the floor, there was a carpet between his skin and the cold wood. The pile was short, but it was firm and dense and it kept the chill from seeping into the room.
He stood and stepped forward, and then to the left. He saw the slippers on the floor, and noticed them, but kept going.
When he opened the door and stepped into the hallway, it creaked on the hinges, but the aching groan did not keep Eloise from leaping in surprise as the two of them nearly collided forehead-to-forehead in front of the bathroom.
The young woman was fully dressed, but Cedric, in the faded t-shirt he’d brought with him, was less so.
“Cedric!” she exclaimed in an excited whisper, stammering over strange words. “W-we missed you yesterday.”
Now it was his turn to be bashful, and his mind went blank.
“Are you—” she softened her face a bit in the dim light, trying to put him at ease with a gentle query. “…Are you feeling any better?” Her eyes were deep and warm, like polished wood.
Cedric put his hands in his pockets. “Yeah,” he said, ashamed. “I’m feeling a little better. Just… needed some sleep.”
“Cold?” she asked simply.
Cedric felt stupid. “No, not really,” he admitted, and remembered where he had been, not last night, but the night before. “…Davian—”
But where he began, he stopped abruptly when he looked again into her eyes, gleaming in the candlelight. Her gaze consumed him and he quickly realized the folly of whatever it was that he had been about to say. It was a weak thing to make excuses.
“Are you usually up this early?” he asked instead.
She smiled weakly, but in a manner she could not suppress, and looked away, avoiding his question.
“D’you want some breakfast?” she asked quickly. “I’ll fix you anything you want. You name it.”
He considered his stomach, his heart, and his head, and he noticed the wracking pain between his temples had gone in the night, and he felt a little different than he had before.
“You don’t have to make anything for me. I think I just want some water.”
In the kitchen, by the time the clock tolled the half-hour, Eloise had brewed tea. She poured a cup for herself and offered it to him again. He saw the grey steam waft lazily and disappear into the air, and he thought for a moment, considering his manners, but refused again, knowing he could not withstand that heat.
“The Matron has been attending Mass on Sundays,” she said, her attention drifting as she spoke. “I’m sure she’ll be here soon as she’s ready to leave. She prefers the early service, and it takes her some time to get to where she’s going.”
Cedric looked toward the hallway but said nothing.
“I’m sure she won’t eat anything,” Eloise said. “She rarely does.”
By chance, the two of them raised their drinks and they took in water nearly in turn. When their cups were again set on the table, Cedric looked up and thought Eloise was blinking a little too frequently, and he wondered if she had rested well.
They let the silence percolate for a moment, but they both felt a quiet strain. Eloise had struck a nerve and Cedric stewed for a brief moment before erupting like a cracked dam.
“Doesn’t magic—” he said, still stumbling haphazardly over those syllables, “—and religion…”
He knew what he wanted to say, suddenly ashamed, but he tried again. “Doesn’t magic make religion—”
The word put spikes on his tongue, but he said it anyway. “…Obsolete?”
Eloise had a restrained look: curious, and patient. She let the question gather dust, and then spoke. “Why do you say that?”
Cedric had not prepared, and he tried to render words upon an abstract suspicion. “Well, y’know—”
He ran his fingers idly through his light brown hair, wandering forward as he feared her response. “If—”
That name gave him pause, and he hated himself, but turned the rage outward. “If Jesus is just another mage; just another man capable of conjuring food and walking on water and all that,” he parsed awkwardly, “then why would you worship him as a god?”
Eloise looked down, embarrassed, and let air escape her lungs through a small, knowing smile. “Son of a god,” she corrected.
Cedric’s eyebrow twitched.
“As with all things,” she explained, “it’s best not to take anything completely literally. The Matron—”
And then she stopped speaking when the creaking of footfall could be heard from the central staircase toward the front of the house. It came as slow rhythm, one step after another descending in perfect time. Eloise’s eyes shot open then, and she fled from the kitchen and dashed into the entry, leaving Cedric lingering behind his glass half-full of tap water.
In front of the door, the two women spoke to each other. Noise muffled by the walls between, Cedric found their words unintelligible, but he listened as instinct. Eloise had a voice that went up and down on the tide of her irrepressible emotions and he heard her; sometimes cheerful, sometimes embarrassed, but Myrtle’s contralto was almost inaudible, the burnished tones extinguished by the old rooms around them.
Cedric felt separate and strange. He found, too, that beneath a veneer of normalcy, he was still jittery and he realized the poison had not completely left his body. He looked at the water on the table and it felt alien to him.
Louder than their voices was the opening door, the sound when it soon closed, and the reengagement of the lock. Cedric sat still then, something in his spine remembering something no word could approximate.
It was only a second or two until Eloise came back in, and she alone looked upon him. Cedric looked up at her, and she was quiet as her lungs pulled air into her chest.
Her face softened, and she smiled, but it was a false expression, an untrue thing she deployed in an exhausted effort to put him at ease: a veil over the cracking confidence within. He wanted to make her stop, so he waited for her to speak so that the corners of her lips would twist the other way.
She sat down across from him.
“She’ll be gone for a bit; couple hours or so...” Eloise didn’t look at him, but she seemed as if she might have been trying. There was something bearing down upon them, but Cedric couldn’t point to it.
“I was wondering, if it’s not too much to ask of you,” she said after a breathy pause. She finally found his eyes. “Could I ask you to keep watch over the little ones for a little while?”
Cedric opened his mouth to say something, but he was dumbfounded by her request, and wasn’t sure exactly what to say. He couldn’t refuse her, and yet—his recent inebriation reminded him that he had earned no scrap of authority.
And he saw a quiet security in that space.
“I’ll only be gone—hopefully—an hour or two,” she said, preempting his resistance. “Probably two, most likely, but I want to get back before the Matron returns from her service.”
Cedric felt the weight, though she was making deliberate effort to mask anxiety.
“Most of them can mind themselves more or less,” she said. “Zahra can make breakfast; she usually does if I ask her…”
Again, she continued to speak before Cedric could find anything to say.
“It’s Suyon—” she said, almost out of breath. “Zahra will get her when she wakes and bring her downstairs,” Eloise continued. “But she doesn’t find it easy to spend time with her.”
“She’s too young, I guess. Zahra...” she lingered on something unseen, and instead changed trajectory. “Suyon doesn’t talk yet, and I think that’s hard for Zahra. She doesn’t really know how to play with her.”
“And where Suyon came from, I’m not sure she had any toys at all, so…” she trailed off.
Cedric was watching Eloise now, and seeing that while she was sitting, she was pulled tight like a rubber band, ready to leap from her seat. “I think she’ll talk eventually…”
His curiosity got the better of him. “Are you also going to church?” he asked simply.
Her cheeks reddened and her eyes dropped. “N-no—” she said, her tone lowered in shame. “I’m not going to church. I don’t mind it, but—”
The space between thickened, and she stumbled on an utterance she would have rather never required. “I have a doctor’s appointment.”
Cedric accepted the fact at first, but then resisted on a second glance.
“You have a doctor’s appointment on Sunday?”
The burgeoning color on her face intensified and she could not look at him.
“I... I ought to get going,” she said, sheepish. “I’ll get my purse. I’ll be right back.”
“See me out?” she asked quickly, looking toward, but not at him.
He, for his part, saw the dark eyebrows beneath her forehead. They were furled as they were soft, and he thought they were just as pretty as the rest of her.
“Yeah,” he replied. “Of course.”
Outside on the front steps, the Sun was lazily rising over the horizon. The sky was painted blue, streaked in parts with yellow.
It was not unlike the other mornings he’d left for Inwood. Later, perhaps. But in those instances he’d been alone.
He’d made that journey now on several quiet days, and he’d noticed some things while others washed away from his memory without soil in which to take root. He was still a stranger, an outsider, a kid from the Midwest, and he didn’t often know what was worth a double take.
“I ought to show you around sometime,” Eloise said, wind sweeping hair into her face even as she tried to restrain it behind her ear. “It’s a nice neighborhood. You probably haven’t seen much of it yet.”
“We’ve got a little treehouse on the other lot.”
Cedric looked at her. She wore a denim dress, a thin blue made delicate especially for such an application to a lady’s frame. It seemed different than that which she might wear on days that she did not leave the house. Around her neck was the collar of a linen shirt that sat underneath; a yellow not so unlike the sky, dotted with little flowers scattered in a regular pattern. The collar was rounded, and she’d arranged it so that the edge sat just above a grey sweater, her only protection from the cold.
“Maybe I should go inside and get something else to wear. It’s—” she said, but the last words were drowned when a jet came out of the west and roared overhead.
Somewhere in Cedric’s mind he thought he should look up, but he did not. He was watching Eloise, who had sealed her lips and stood in silent rebellion against the engine noise filling the air.
They did not say anything for a while because they could not. Cedric thought he had not noticed any of this sort of din when he was inside the house, and he had the realization that out here, standing on the last hill in Astoria, there was nothing shielding him from empty space above, not from wind, nor from rain, and certainly not the sound of airplanes making their rapid descent.
Eloise clutched a small handbag in black and looked at him. When she blinked, her eyes were gone for a moment, and when they appeared again, they were turned to the side, and she was smiling again, a pained small thing, and the bottom of her eyes were glossy.
He thought his eyes were wet too, and the smell of sulfur was in the air. It clung to them in the changed wind and it made their eyes water, but they said nothing and did not cry.
“Where’s Eloise?” Friday asked at breakfast, throwing her eyes down the table like a dart. With Myrtle also absent, the six of them filled the long sides of the table, but at either end was a chair that had never been pulled out.
Cedric looked at Zahra, thinking she should respond to the girl to her left, but she kept her head buried in a bowl of rice porridge.
Cedric spoke when it was apparent only he knew the answer. “She—” he said, remembering how her hair had been falling out of her braid in places. “She had to run an errand.”
Friday raised a singular eyebrow.
“She had to run an errand?” she repeated with an irritable flourish at the end.
Cedric looked at her and saw that she was dark and stormy.
“Yeah. That’s what told me.”
Friday just looked at him for a moment, and then she frowned in disgust, her head and shoulders pulsing in disdain while her eyes flickered toward the table’s edge.
She scoffed. “Well, if that’s the way it’s going to be, I’m going out.”
Friday stood, pushing the chair out from beneath her with her legs alone. She looked at Cedric, and her eyes were coals red with fury. “I don’t take orders from you.”
“Owen?” she said brightly.
He brought his chin up to look at her.
Friday spoke to no one in particular, while making sure everyone heard her proclamation.
“We won’t be back for lunch.”
Cedric was scraping food into a basin when Elmer came in with another stack of plates. He sat them down on the counter next to the sink to the sound of metal striking porcelain.
“I’m sorry she’s like that,” Elmer said quietly. “I don’t know what her problem is.”
Cedric kept cleaning plates, but before he reached for another, he thought he should respond.
“It’s fine,” he said, and then added something else. “Whatever.”
The kitchen was quiet then, except when Cedric put one plate on top of another and the collision echoed against the marble.
“Listen,” he said. “D’you think you could find me some writing supplies? Pen and paper or whatever?”
He moved his head a little, toward Elmer, but eyes cast over the sink.
“I think I want to write to someone.”
Dear Betty,
I hope this letter finds you well. I am sorry I have taken so long to write, and I hope you have not worried too much about me.
I did not mean to leave like I did. I took a trip into Manhattan and got caught up with the law. They let me off with some community service, but I had to stay in the city to serve it. I should have written you sooner but I was too ashamed of what happened. I made a mistake, and I’m trying to get it scrubbed off my record. The community service isn’t bad, most days I’m cleaning up trash in the park. It’s getting cold but I got a new jacket and I’m doing OK.
I’m living at a group home in Queens now. There are other kids here and I’m doing alright. I never had any siblings growing up so it’s been an adjustment but I kind of like it. There is never a dull moment.
I hope you are not still holding on to my stuff. You can donate it. Most of it was pretty old anyway. I hope someone can make good use of it.
I want to thank you for your kindness. I had no idea what I was getting into when I left, and when I landed in Newburgh, I’m glad I ended up at your house. It could have been anywhere, but you were there for me when I needed help. Be well always.
Sincerely,
Cedric
(P.S. I let Suyon draw on the letter. She’s little. I hope you don’t mind.)