He doesn't know himself.

     Grace is waiting for him this time. He may come creeping out of the dark like a wounded dog looking for a place to die, but Grace shuts her eyes to the dark and lies in it, and she does this every night. This makes her accustomed to it, if not immune. And it might be that he thinks himself some sort of hunter, or a prince of the shadows, but princes know their kingdoms as well as they know their own bodies, which is to say that there are places that have never been touched, not even by their own hands. Grace knows her cell intimately, all over, the way you know the inside of your elbow: there is not much to see but she has seen it all. Every brick in the wall, every unyielding inch.

     So she is waiting for him. The moonlight is not strong enough for needlework but she has an unfinished patch in her hands anyway. Perhaps she’d fallen asleep that way. Grace picks him out of the darkness. She says, “Hello again.”

The moonlight cuts his silhouette out of the corner of the room, puts light in his eyes as they take shape. There’s a gleeful laugh at being spotted, the first one caught in a game of hide and seek. 

     Wendy stands on the fringe of the room like a vampire waiting for permission to cross the threshold. The permission comes with a sudden jolt of reality as she takes in the space around him, the sickly darkness, the curtains waving in the chill creeping through the open window. The bottle, within arm’s reach. She sniffs and imagines the air is thick with the yeasty scent of beer or Al’s martians. It might be that – the smell, whether it’s imaginary or not – that pushes her forward with all the force of a big hand at the small of her back, a hard decisiveness. “It’s freezing in here, Jack. You’ll catch a cold.”

     “It does not.”

     “Liar.”

   “You can just close the door if you want.” Jesus christ she’d rather he didn’t though. This backpack’s weighty. “I’ll find a motel.”

     “I suppose so, yes.”

     Mary Whitney used to say that tricks are a man’s game, because he will vanish a coin in his hand and while you clap and coo the coin appears on the warm flesh of your inner thigh and his hand will follow.      Mary Whitney had a crass mind and she was very talented at running her mouth.

     Grace thinks all of this and knows he’ll hear it all, so she doesn’t need to say it out loud. “Are you from Hell?”

     “Who says I called you?” She doesn’t remember doing that. If it was in her sleep, then that’s a whole separate problem she’s going to have to deal with. “Wasn’t me, big boy.”