Beneath color there is always more color, and it is often chaotic, clashing. Nine-year-old Tommy hears it all. Too often a new family’s voices are a brittle blue or hardened onyx, despite a veneer of warmth. One of Tommy’s former foster sisters spoke only in feverish anger, even when she asked for cereal. Tommy does not try to explain this to the social worker, whose tones are muddied thick and dense with too much meaning, none of it good. She doesn’t hear colors, and even if she did, she wouldn’t understand how a honeyed gold can cover an icy rage, or that sunshine-yellow is like the sun — too much exposure can burn. 

By contrast, the voice of his new foster mother Rose is soft and warm, a pink not unlike her name. Neither bright nor bold, it lingers peacefully in the air. Its dusky rose is a quiet lullaby; what could it be hiding?  Tommy doesn’t trust it, but he wants to. All through dinner and dishes and bedtime, Tommy listens, focused on discovering what’s underneath that earthy mauve. When she tucks him in that night, her fingers idly spin the bright charm that dangles at her throat. “Good night, Tommy.” A hint of shadow lingers, feathery gray. It dances for a moment at the edge of pink, softening but not obscuring. Tommy feels a sudden, tender sense of care for Rose, a longing to blow that gray right out of her voice, her life, her soul.

Tommy recognizes that this shadow has been there all along, below and between all that pink. The shadows of the past rise up to reveal its presence in the midst of those blues and yellows and reds. It poses no danger to Tommy, but he wishes it away all the same. It will be some time before Tommy can put a name to that color-sound, and by then it will be too late — his own voice will have absorbed the grief of little Lily’s death as well. It will be longer still before he understands how Rose’s pain came as a gift to him, for the healing of his own sorrows and the restoring of both their lives, and that it accomplished this purpose.

Tonight, Tommy sleeps deeply, swaddled in gray.