To be dead was to drift somewhere between memory and the waking world.
It had been the sheer weight and presence Sandra’s heartache that roused him, that dredged him out of that sleepless, shapeless, soundless plane. Hers was a sorrow that clawed at the walls, that wailed across dimensions even as she stifled the sound of her sobs, muting her grief in the manner of one who wished she could deny or override or explain it away.
Royce had never been one to express himself through tears. To weep would have been to be dubbed a sissy, or to have invited the lick of his father’s belt. For boys like him, feelings were best bottled in glass, only examined in an abstract, stoic way – to not care was to be invincible, to be cool. But he did care, he always had, and he never failed to be moved by a woman’s suffering. Shrouded in melancholy as oppressive as Sandra’s was now, his mother had retreated to her bed, often leaving spots of blood in her wake, blooming on the bathroom floor like red carnations. From beneath her blanket she whispered domestic instructions in bleak, tear-ripe monotone. There was no need for his father to know it was his son who had polished the tiles clean, who set out the cutlery, who saw dinner on the table that night. Mothers and their sons were built to bear the burden of secrets.
Caged no longer, Royce tethered himself to Sandra, anchored in a way he found strangely comforting. She was what was familiar to him now, in this place far from home, far from the glass-walled mansion that had brought them together. He haunted her, gently.
Manifesting at the foot of her bed, he flickered in an out of paltry existence. His voice had that faraway quality, as if spoken from the bottom of a well – or from beneath the fresh-tilled soil of a half-filled grave. Sandra wasn’t okay, even if she said so, even if she pawed at her face, quick to wipe away tears.
Mustering his strength, threading together the tenuous fibres of his essence, Royce made a concentrated effort to materialise more solidly before making his approach, sitting weightlessly on the edge of Sandra’s bed. Time meant little to him, but given that the night pressed its dark, jealous face to her window, he guessed that it was late. Whatever constellations hung in the sky could not compare to those stars that stippled the flood of darling blue eyes. A terrible thing, to be unspeakably beautiful while heartsore and despairing.
Slumber might help, but Sandra was coiled tight, a whale-eyed hare held in a hound’s jaws. Royce reached for her, stroking skeletal fingers through her hair, tracing the helix of her ear with bony tips, in a gesture intended to soothe.
Industrious, restless, clever creature. Sandra devoured the printed word, always expanding the borders of her mind, always learning, always chasing the next story. Her appetite had been what brought her under that strange collector’s roof – and brought them together. An uncanny tilt of his head allowed Royce to skim the piles of paper, to catch a glimpse of his own obituary. It gave him pause. If only for a moment, if only because he saw himself intact and whole and alive. A young man with everything to play for, both on and off the baseball field.
He wished he could give her that now. Warm, intact flesh. The promise of a future, of a life well-lived. A complexion flush with blood that remained on the inside. A body to love, a body that would age. Arms that could hold her and would never waver. Ruined though he was, a shade of what he had been, fondness still radiated from Sandra, her adoration undiluted. That was enough for him. It was enough that she could look at the horror of his road-wrecked face and not flinch. It was enough that she did not recoil from the corpse-cold touch of his fingers.
