Something To Live For
The night lies still and silent beneath its quilt of snow and wishful sleep. The boy has to sit on the edge of his bed to look out of the tall high windows. The glass is cold underneath his touch, and white flowers bloom briefly at his warm breath. It is his first night here and the room is huge and unfamiliar, the corners dark with strange shadows. The mug of hot chocolate that the kind old man--"Call me Mr. Wammy, my dear boy," he had said--had brought had long since cooled.
Not too long ago he had been in another room, one that had really been his own, decorated with his defiant fancies and tottering messes. His parents had laughed at him, with the kind of laughter that really hides worry, at their boy, their only boy. He had been too little and too clever, so he easily forgives them. Where they are, they are no longer laughing; stifled by the wood and the worms and the heavy, leaden earth. Their murderers would soon join them. It is the only concession he can give after those years of worry he has caused them.
Outside, the snow still falls, fairy-light, ignorant of his thoughts; and now he buries his hands beneath the quilt for warmth and closes his eyes, lost in some unhappy, aching way. He thinks that it might be grief, but the word seems too heavy and damning for the fleeting, elusive emotions that fill him. He has cried only a little, and he knows that that also causes kind Mr. Wammy no small amount of concern. He feels an iota of regret--but how would he know? How can one measure emotions, fleeting as they are?
He lies down and sleeps fitfully, until he wakes up in a pool of sunshine that comes streaming in through the uncovered windows, and sees the room for it really is: long but narrow, corners swept free of mystery and dirt, and feels oddly reassured.
They are hanging colored lights along the slope of the roof and clusters of holly at the doors. He sees them all as Mr. Wammy takes him for a tour through the orphanage. The children are wild and noisy and uncontrolled with the coming season, and throw handfuls of melting snow at each other. He looks at them as one would look at a poisonous snake and moves away with dignity. But here and there he sees, behind pillars and against walls, quiet, absorbed children, firm in their own closed world. He passes a little girl who is building, with great concentration, a sculpture out of twigs and grass and stones. It stares at him out of blank-seed eyes.
Lastly, Mr. Wammy shows him the church. It is small and solemn, the wooden pews worn smooth with the seats of many children. A rose window lets in shards of dancing, multi-colored light that gilds gold the dust that dances merrily in the air. He tells Mr. Wammy that he does not believe in Heaven. Mr. Wammy only nods and smiles sadly and reaches out one hand to ruffle his hair. In the end he doesn't, and that is when the boy really likes him--this grave old gentleman, almost out of a novel of dim streetlights and old-fashioned language, and for the first time smiles back.
They pass out of the dim dusty church into the pale wintry day, and the boy blinks as the light hits his eyes. Far away, muffled by distance and the cold, clinging air, the bells ring shrilly, dropping their brassy clamor deep onto his heart and making it jump hoops within the frail cradle of his ribcage. He stops. Mr. Wammy advances three steps before he looks behind, his white brows knitted. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing," he says. The bells have stopped ringing but the cold remains within him, as though ice had been slipped into the cracks of his heart. "Nothing at all."
Later on, Mr. Wammy calls him, for the second time, by the name his parents had given him. The first time he had been numb, drowned in something too blank and undefined to be emotion. The second time, he shakes his head and says, "Don't call me that."
Obligingly, Mr. Wammy wants to know if he has an alternative.
"L," the boy says, as though he has never spent hours lying on his back on the wreck of his bed, in his parents' house, dreaming daydreams knotted from the rags of stories and imagination and knowledge. "L is enough." He stares a challenge at Mr. Wammy out of his large black eyes, and adds, "It would make a good code name."
The older man bows his head in acknowledgement. "Is this really what you want to do with your life?" he asks, just like his parents had asked--only, there is a quiet respect in his voice, and he speaks as though to an equal.
"Yes," the boy says, and that is that.
This room is big and orange with glittering lights like trapped stars and a tree that claims the center of attention with its branches dripping with heavy ripe candy-colorful balls and angels and galloping raindeer. He sits in a pile of chocolate wrappers and has never been happier. With careful delicacy he sucks the ends of his sweet-sticky fingers and checks them for any specks of chocolate he might have missed. There is a pile of presents under the tree--Mr. Wammy is very rich, and very generous, but the boy isn't interested in that. His mind dwells on names and dates and newspaper cuttings, and he barely hears the step of Mr. Wammy near him. There are three children clinging to him and shrieking punch-soaked laughter into his hair and clothes, and he is red-faced but smiling. Gently he shakes them off and turns to the boy.
"Enjoying yourself?" he asks, and he is kind, so kind, when he says that, as though afraid to quicken some painful memory. But the boy only smiles and nods and raises a paper cup to him in toast.
Something to live for. Maybe even something to die for. Yes, he is well content.
Notes: Written for dncontest challenge "Joy". Written sporadically before and during a brief break in my exams so I apologize for any unseemly mistakes.