Page 28 of Shatter

I lie there and look at him.

In the lamplight, with his eyes closed and his face slack, he looks younger than he does in the diner.

A bruise is coming up along his jaw I didn't notice before.

His chest rises and falls, slow and even.

After a while, his arms loosen where they're crossed, and his head tips an inch to one side.

My shoulders come down off my ears for the first time since the parking lot.

I look around the room for the first time.

It's small.

A double bed, a dresser, the chair, a narrow closet with the door half open and a few shirts on wire hangers.

A door that leads into a room I’m not sure of, or maybe it’s a closet.

A motorcycle repair manual on the nightstand, the spine cracked white from use.

One photograph, stuck in the corner of the mirror over the dresser.

An old man in a flannel shirt on a porch step, squinting into the sun, with a gray-muzzled black Lab pressed against his knee.

Nothing else.

No posters, no books, no clutter on the dresser, no shoes kicked under the bed.

It looks like my apartment.

It looks like a room somebody lives in without ever unpacking.

* * *

I wait until the window goes from black to gray.

His breathing hasn't changed in an hour.

I ease my legs over the side of the bed, one and then the other, and my ribs scream the second I move my weight.

I sit there with my eyes squeezed shut, breathing in shallow little sips until the black spots stop crowding my vision.

The floor is cold under my bare feet.

Concrete, painted gray, with a thin rug beside the bed.

I stand.

My knees nearly go.

When I grab the nightstand, the pill cup rattles, and I freeze, staring at him.

He doesn't move.

I cross to the window one small step at a time, with one hand pressed to my side and the other trailing along the wall for balance.

Through the glass, the sky over the trees is going pink at the bottom edge.