The rocklike one struck the bargain. The musician left the baby crying in the rocklike one’s cold arms.
He went home to his mother and curled in her lap.
When she asked him to sing her a song, he shook his head. He couldn’t. His throat was too tight.
“Why do you look so sad?” she asked, stroking a hand through his dark hair. “My beautiful boy, why do you look so melancholy?”
He told her what he’d done.
He cried in her arms.
She stroked his back and murmured, “Shh. Shh. Don’t worry. Shh. It will be fine. You did good. You did right. Sweet boy. It’s okay. Shh. Don’t talk about it again. Don’t tell. Don’t . . . Shh. It’s all right.”
After a long cry, the musician climbed out of his mother’s lap and went to play with his sister. And no one but the mother noticed that from that day forward, his songs were always sad. He was permanently shaded with melancholy.
He’d taken her tears and locked them in himself.
They never spoke of the freckle-cheeked baby again.
The solemn one watched the illusion fade. The colors swirled like an impressionist’s sunset, falling into reds, pinks, oranges, and golds, until they bled into nothing.
He looked down at his mother.
She was in his arms, but her spirit had already fled.
The wind waited for his response.
The brush of salt from a cosmic tear. A sharp, ragged breath. A pained moan. The shiver of a broken heart.
Even anger was a response. A clenched jaw. A hardened gaze. A hateful curse.
But no.
He was as hard as granite, as opaque as solid rock. His expression was as flat and unfeeling as a heart of stone.
The only indication the solemn one had seen his mother’s illusion was in the way his gaze lingered on the cooling paleness of her skin. Was he looking for answers in her unseeing eyes?
Had she thought of him?
Had she mourned him?
Had she ever wanted to find him and free him?
No. He wouldn’t be asking that.
The solemn one set his mother on the floor. He stared at her and then let out a quiet sigh. “I’m sorry,” he said, pulling the knife free from her chest. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know who you were.”
He wiped the knife and sheathed it.
“If I had . . .” He smiled and stared into the stark gray of his eyes in the window’s reflection. “I would’ve hunted you down sooner.”
He stalked from the penthouse, never noticing the silent gray rag man floating after him.
90
The citrus and pearl dust scented woman threw her arms out in front of her. She flinched, expecting to be swallowed whole.
The musician’s melancholy tenor rang in the darkness. The pure gong of his voice shoved at the horror. But without the twin blade of the woman’s soprano, the song wasn’t enough.
