Page 7 of Ghost Ribbon

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?”