Chapter 1 - Alexei #2
“Because hospitals smell bad.” He wrinkled his nose, his face scrunching with disgust. “And the blankets are bad. They scratch. And the nurses are nice, but they talk like I am already sleeping, even when I am awake. They say things when they think I can’t hear.”
He looked down at the needle in his hand, turning it so it caught the starlight.
“They put this here.” He touched the inside of his elbow where a small bruise bloomed beneath his skin, purple and yellow at the edges. “I took it out. Not very smart. It hurt.”
“That is stupid.”
Marco nodded, entirely unbothered by the assessment. “Yes, I know.”
I expected him to cry. Children his age cried over smaller things, but he didn’t.
“I wanted to see the garden. Papa told me about the lemon trees. He said rich people have trees that make food and they don’t even pick it.
They just let the lemons fall and rot on the ground because they have so many they can’t eat them all.
” His eyes widened with the injustice of it. “Can you imagine?”
I could imagine many things: the slow destruction of a mind, the exact pressure needed to make someone confess, the way fear looked different in every pair of eyes.
Marco leaned closer, lowering his voice as though sharing a crime, his hand cupping around his mouth. “I took one lemon.”
“You stole it.”
His eyes widened with mock offense. “No. The tree had too many. I helped.”
I looked at the lemon tree above us, its branches full with fruit, dozens of yellow globes glowing in the darkness. One fruit lay in the grass near his shoe, small and bright as a captured moon.
“Did you eat it?”
“I tried.”
“And?”
“It was terrible.”
Again, that almost-smile threatened me, pulling at muscles I rarely used.
Marco saw it. He seemed to see everything he shouldn’t.
“My mama says lemons are not for eating like apples,” he explained, his voice taking on a pedagogical tone. “But I thought maybe rich lemons were different. Maybe rich lemons would taste sweet, because rich people always have the best of everything.”
“They aren’t.”
“No,” he agreed sadly, staring at the offending fruit with profound disappointment. “They are also evil.”
Something happened to my chest. A pressure low behind my ribs. Uncomfortable. Warm at the edges. Like a bruise forming on the inside, like something was pressing against my ribcage.
I didn’t like it.
“What is wrong with you?” I asked, and heard my voice come out different, less flat, almost curious.
Marco didn’t seem offended by the bluntness.
“My body is bad sometimes,” he said.
“Bad how?”
He shrugged again, that single-shouldered motion that seemed to be his default response to things too big to explain.
“It gets tired. I get fevers. My chest hurts, like something is squeezing me from inside. Sometimes I sleep a lot. Days and days.” He paused, considering. “Sometimes Mama cries when she thinks I can’t hear.”
His gaze moved toward the villa, visible through the trees, its windows glowing with warm light.
“Papa says when he earns enough, they will take me to a better doctor. A very good one. Maybe in America.”
“And if he doesn’t earn enough?”
Marco looked back at me. The moonlight rested in his eyes like it had found a home there, turning the hazel to something liquid and luminous.
“Then I will still get better,” he said firmly, his small chin lifting with defiance. “Because Mama worries too much already, and Papa’s hands hurt from work, so I have to get better.”
I didn’t know what to say.
Marco shifted closer, dragging the oversized shirt back up over his shoulder. He was too small.
Too thin.
Too bright.
“You don’t laugh?” he asked suddenly.
“No.”
“Never?”
“No.”
“Not even if someone falls in a fountain?”
“No.”
“What if a very fat cat falls in a fountain?”
I considered this with the seriousness he seemed to expect. “No.”
“What if the cat is wearing a hat?”
I looked at him. He looked back, completely serious, waiting for my answer.
“A hat?”
“A little one. With a ribbon.”
“Why would a cat wear a hat?”
“Because,” Marco said, with infinite patience, “he is going to church. And you must look nice for church, even if you are a cat. Especially if you are a cat. God watches cats very carefully because they think they are better than everyone.”
Then he made a tiny meow in the most solemn voice I had ever heard. “Miao.”
The corner of my mouth pulled upward before I could stop it.
Marco’s entire face lit up like someone had turned on a light inside his skull, his eyes widening, his mouth splitting into a grin that showed all his teeth including the gap.
“There!” he whispered, barely containing his triumph. “I found it.”
I wiped the expression away immediately, forcing my face back into its usual blankness.
“Found what?”
“Your smile.”
“I don’t have one.”
“You do.” He leaned forward, fearless, delighted, practically vibrating with vindication. “It is just hiding. Like me.”
Before I could move, he crawled closer on his knees and reached toward my face, his small hand extended.
I caught his wrist. Hard enough that most children would have whimpered. Marco only froze. His pulse fluttered beneath my fingers like a trapped bird.
I could have broken his wrist.
Easily.
But his eyes didn’t fill with fear. They didn’t fill with hatred. They filled with concern.
“Does it hurt?” he asked.
“What?”
“When people touch you. Does it hurt?”
No one had ever asked me that. People feared me. Avoided me. Used me. Studied me. Diagnosed me.
I let go of his wrist. Marco rubbed it once, absently, but not as if he blamed me.
“I will be gentle,” he promised, his voice soft. Then, very slowly, he lifted both hands to my face. I should have stopped him.
He placed one finger at each corner of my mouth and pushed upward, forcing my lips into a shape they had never naturally held.
“There,” he said with satisfaction, examining his work like an artist examining a canvas. “See? You are not so scary now.”
I sat perfectly still. His hands held my mouth in the shape of a smile.
It was ridiculous.
Undignified.
Unacceptable.
“You should do this sometimes by yourself,” he said seriously. “Then your eyes won’t look so lonely.”
Lonely.
I knew the word but loneliness required wanting people. Missing them. Feeling absence as an injury. I wasn’t lonely.
I was empty.
There was a difference.
But for one impossible moment, I wondered if empty things could echo when someone spoke into them. If voids could hold sound. If the darkness inside me could keep a piece of light.
He dropped his hands.
“Why did you run from the hospital alone?” I asked.
Marco looked proud, puffing out his thin chest. “I am very good at escaping.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It is a little answer.”
“It is a bad answer.”
He sighed dramatically, as if I were being impossibly difficult.
“I heard Mama and Papa talking. After they thought I was sleeping.” His voice grew quieter, losing some of its brightness.
“The doctor said more money. More treatment. More time. Always more, more, more. Papa said he would ask at the big house for extra work. Mama said he already works too much, that his hands shake now.”
He picked at the frayed hem of his shirt, winding loose threads around his finger until the skin turned white.
“So I left. Only for a little while. I wanted them to not look at me like that when they came back.”
“Like what?”
“Like they love me so much it hurts.” His voice cracked slightly on the word hurts. “Like I am made of glass and already breaking.”
I didn’t understand. Or maybe I did, in some distant theoretical way, the way I understood grief by watching people collapse under it, the way I understood love by watching people destroy themselves for it.
Marco leaned his head back against the stone bench and looked up through the branches of the lemon tree, through the gaps where the stars burned bright and eternal.
“Can I tell you something?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“When I am better, I will buy Mama a yellow dress. She likes yellow but says it makes no sense because it gets dirty fast and poor people can’t afford to have nice things that get dirty. But I think she deserves yellow. Yellow like sunshine. Yellow like the center of a flower.”
He smiled at the stars as if they were listening.
“And Papa needs shoes that don’t let water in.
His feet are always wet when it rains, and wet feet make sick, and we can’t have Papa sick because who will carry me when my legs get too tired?
And maybe we will have a room where the ceiling doesn’t leak.
A room with a door that closes all the way and windows that don’t shake when the wind blows. ”
His eyes shifted to me. “What will you buy when you are big?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“I already have things.”
Marco considered that. “Then maybe you can buy something you don’t have.”
“There’s nothing I want.”
“That is sad.”
“It is efficient.”
“No.” He shook his head firmly. “It is sad. Wanting things is what makes waking up not terrible. Even if you never get them, you can still imagine them. You can hold the wanting in your chest like a little fire and it keeps you warm.”
I again didn’t know how to answer. Why did he leave me speechless so many times?
Marco tilted his head back further, his eyes tracing patterns in the sky.
“Do you know what stars are?”
“Yes. Balls of gas. Hydrogen mostly. Nuclear fusion creates—”
“No, no, no.” He waved his hand dismissively. “That is what the science book says. I mean what they really are.”
I looked up at the stars. “What are they really?”
Marco’s voice grew soft.
“My grandmother told me before she went to sleep forever. She said stars are holes poked in the dark. Little ones, where the light leaks through. Because the dark is just a blanket, you see, and behind the blanket is light. More light than you can imagine. Light that goes on forever and ever. And sometimes the light pokes through the blanket, and we call those stars.” He smiled. “So the light can breathe.”
I looked up at the stars. Through the leaves, the sky was black and endless, scattered with white fire, unimaginably distant.