Darkness turns blue, like always. Emma expects it on sleepless nights as she tangles with her covers and spends quiet hours watching the air shift. Tonight, she sits against her pillows, the bedsheets forgotten at her feet. Her eyes adjust to the dim bedroom – blue nightstand, blue lamp, blue dresser, blue sheets. Her aching bones jitter.  Breaths shiver through pursed lips. Blue thoughts rumble in her head, spiraling like the numbers in her son’s bingo machine downstairs. A police car swings past somewhere outside the cul-de-sac; its sirens shrink in tone until she returns to silence.

Almost silence.  Downstairs, outside the visible blue, there are faint sounds of rummaging. He’s taking his time in the living room tonight.

She slowly leans over to her nightstand, careful to avoid pressing too much weight on the loose board beneath her. Red joins blue as her phone screen blinks awake. The background is a picture of her sunburnt son, flakes of peeling skin along his hairline. The nine-year-old Marcus forever smiles with two front teeth missing. She hadn’t checked his sunscreen that day, a small failure that she spent hours fixing, coating him in aloe and rewarding his stillness with ice cream before dinner. Later that week, when Marcus came with her to the Fourth of July party at work, he told everyone of the ordeal he’d survived. How his mother doctored him to health. How he was so lucky when he won the stupid bingo machine in a raffle, holding it up like a trophy in the photo. He played with it for weeks as his sunburn peeled away. He’d rattle and spin the numbers at the dining table, calling them out to himself. Testing his luck on the cards in front of him.

Emma tears her eyes from his face to check the time. 3:09 AM. Downstairs, a chair scrapes against the floor. 

She sets the phone face-down on the mattress, submerging in the darkness. Blue carpet, blue walls, blue door with a line of black beneath. She can hear a cabinet door bounce close, followed by a soft curse. Footsteps. A cough. Another cabinet door.

Emma wishes he’d be quieter. She wishes he’d be smart about breaking in, at least, just enough for her to live in peaceful naivete. She wishes he’d use the front door instead. She wishes he’d just ask.

She wishes a lot of things.

A clang, another curse, and another cough. Wiping her hands down her face, feeling the skin stretch taut, Emma pushes up from the bed, letting the loose board creak. She swings her legs over the side, her feet hitting the cold floor. She coughs back.

The world snaps into blue quiet. 

Her body sways as she holds her breath. Downstairs, the noises resume as he clambers to finish, to grab whatever is left for him to take. A moment later, there’s a grunt as the window slides open. A grunt as he pulls himself through it, surely leaving dirt and fingerprints all over the kitchen sink again. More clambering, more grunting, and a slam as the window slides shut. The silence that follows is just as blue, an almost black ink pouring into the bedroom from his absence.

She should call the police. Perhaps take her frail legs, however overused, down the stairs and after him. But her bones ache, and it’s 3 AM, and he promised he’d do better.  He promised it when she had to call last time, when the blue and red lights swung around the cul-de-sac as he cried out to her, his hands cuffed behind his back as he begged for forgiveness.

Instead, Emma forces her legs past the blue door and across the blue carpet to the blue window. She pulls the strings and watches the blinds roll up, the creaking of the inner mechanisms like nails on a chalkboard. Below, she sees red peering back from the brake lights of his dingy car, the same he’d been driving since his 17th birthday. He stands frozen in front of the open trunk, his back to her and his hands pressed against either side of the vehicle. Even in the moonless night, she can make out some of her belongings. He has the old porcelain pot she inherited long ago. He found her big black purse’s new hiding place and now had it tucked between a plastic store bag of a six-pack and what looked to be a jewelry box, though not her own. On top of it all was the bingo machine.

The first time she caught him stealing, it was her wallet. He was thirteen at the time, and despite finding it in his school backpack, empty of cash and tucked beside cigarettes and lottery tickets, all he could do was deny. Beg for his mother to believe her son. Promise to never do it again.

She tried. She really tried.

This time, Marcus slams the trunk door closed and turns to look at the window. His edges are outlined in brake light red, but his face looks almost like he is hers again as their eyes meet. Almost like the face of her boy on the lock screen.

Almost.

But Emma doesn’t want to see his sadness. Emma lets go of the strings. And outside, through the slats, her son takes his chance. He rounds the car towards the driver’s seat. He cranks the engine, the headlights blinking awake and beaming down the street at slumbering houses. Without any more hesitation, Marcus peels away, rubber burning against the driveway.

The red disappears with him. Emma’s eyes adjust back to the darkness. The blue pours back in.