17. Room with a View

He could see a treetop, no leaves, and a gray sky. Maybe it was winter already or maybe it was a dead tree. Either way, he could have just about cried to see the sky, for some reason. Not like he could get out. The sun had risen pink, and later on there was even patchy blue. He sat and watched it.

The food tasted a little better but it was still less than he was used to and everything was boiled to hell and gone, into a kind of canned-food flat gray. But hey, it had been a week in this new cell, and nobody’d pulled him out and started chopping stuff off or whatever.

The same medic who’d checked him the first day showed up and looked at his eyes, to see if the whack he’d taken had given him a concussion. He guessed. The medic didn’t explain and Mateo didn’t ask.

The swelling on the side of his face had gone down, and his lip didn’t crack open and bleed now. He counted days, now that he could see the sky. They’d stopped putting a sack over his head or taking him out of the cell. Fine by him! His cold hung on. He stopped doing pushups or trying to remember song lyrics and slept or lay on his cot and stared out the window at that square of sky they let him have.

Nothing he could do right now so he might as well stop pretending. He was never getting home and it sure didn’t look like he would ever get answers. The only thing he could do was keep his mouth shut, so he did.

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