Dispatch from a Colored Room

The person who wants the very last of you

"What was it like?" I ask, when it's over. "Having Elias Charbon 'take care' of you. What happened?"

I'm at the desk; Aimée's home for one of her rare stretches, sitting on the couch in a crater scooped out of the mat of toys, Sim asleep on her lap. "It was just life," she says. "What should it have been?"

"You don't think much of him now," I say carefully; the look she gives me shows she understands my understatement is intentional. "Was that always true?"

"I didn't always have a little boy to protect."

I make myself say it. "But you were little yourself."

She twines a strand of Sim's golden hair around her finger, making sure not to pull it taut at the base. "I don't remember him well from when I was very little. He came around a lot. He and my mother had a lot of arguments. He was very sweet to me, or tried to be—he had an idea of how girls liked to be talked to, his voice would go high and he'd say how pretty I was, or my clothes were. Ask about boys and school. I didn't like those visits. I liked it better when he'd bring his friends to meet and talk, even if they would drink. You can get away from a drunk—he can't catch you, and he won't hate you for it in the morning."

"Sounds like you had a read on him all along."

She shakes her head. "Those were bad years. He borrowed from us; stole too, I think. Though he would bring food and clothes at least some of the times we needed them, and that was often. Shabby stuff, but still a shield against death. 

"Then he gave my mére a bag of shekels. 

"And it wasn't the last. He'd still have the men from the 7th over, but they'd drink good spirits, now, and touch glasses and cheer.

"There were a few good years of that. He stopped paying attention to me, mostly. I don't mean he pretended I didn't exist—he just stopped pretending we were friends. And then we got to be friends, a bit. He talked about the Hoofstone mission." She shudders. "Can you imagine? The Dandelion Knight inside the sixth's strongest fortress, like maggots in bread. Papa and Elias and Jesson shooting literally at shadows, by bioluminescence that could fail any minute, moving forward inches an hour for two whole days. They were poisoned, you know. The whole unit was. That's why they were discharged. Mama told me someone from the government came by to monitor him every month until he left."

"That sounds familiar," I said, and Sim pipes up from Aimée's lap to say "What would you know about it?" 

He takes a few minutes of merry shit for eavesdropping and Aimée sends him off to bed. When he's quiet, she picks up the story again.

"Nothing lasts forever, I guess," she says. "Eventually the bags of shekels stopped coming. Food and clothes, as needed, they kept coming, but the same ratty shit that he gave us when he was poor. And, do you know, it took me maybe a year to realize he really was—that this wasn't simply holding out because he didn't like us any more, that wherever the money had come from, it was gone.

"By that time I was almost through at the lycée, and people started noticing." She looks to the side and presses her lips together. "Look, even when we were flush, you'd have called us poor. That's all right; everyone on the peripheral sixth is poor, no matter how much cash they have. But there's poor, and then there's hard up. And when I was just poor, I wasn't as kind to the hard-up souls at the lycée as I might have been. And when people noticed that I was hard up again..."

Aimée lets the sentence trail off. "Just because your allies desert you," I say, "doesn't mean your enemies flock to your banner, does it?"

She gives a little, bitter smile. "It does not, in my experience," she says.