Thief (16 page)

After closing the file and returning it to the clerk, I felt as though I couldn’t see. I waited awhile by the court house
door, until I lost the sensation of dizziness, but when I got to my car I turned the air conditioner on as high as it would
go, and I sat there. It took me a minute to understand that underneath my panic I was feeling over-whelming grief. Grief about
the rape of the woman in South Minneapolis as well as the old crushing sorrow I always felt about my own actions. Even though
Breville had made me see the randomness of my own rape, knowing that I’d opened myself to its occurrence still produced desolation
in me. That the woman in South Minneapolis had done nothing at all except wake from a dream— that was devastating to me. And
I did not know where to go with my understanding and my grief. And my grief.

A few things became clear to me on the way home, over the 250 miles and four hours. It was clear to me Breville would have
gone on injuring others if he had not been sent to prison, and it was clear prison had been his bitter salvation. Yet he was
still appealing his sentence, and he was still able to say of his crime,
It’s not like I
killed anyone.
It made me wonder if he’d really changed at all from the time of his trial, or if the same insolence that had made him plead
innocent still remained.

And if Breville— clean, sober, repentant— was in fact now a different man than the one I had read about in the court transcript,
where had his older self gone? Had it been subsumed in his new personality? Was it there alongside and only hidden because
of prison? I knew people changed all the time: they got older, lost interests and found them, grew antipathies, discovered
passions. But it was almost impossible for me to believe Breville was wholly different from who he’d been at nineteen— something
of his essential self had to remain the same. If enough of his ways of thinking and acting had changed, did it matter if some
core of him was the same? I thought it did matter. If anyone knew how difficult it was to change in a deep and real way, it
was me.

Though I kept pushing it from my mind, one other thing became wholly clear to me as I drove home. I kept thinking back to
the day I met Breville, when he told me the love of his mother and father and grandfather weren’t enough to help him, and
to the day he told me he lost his virginity to his molesting, twelve-year-old cousin. I now understood just how fully he’d
told me the truth. Nothing could have counteracted the sexual abuse, the years of underage drinking, the petty thievery, or
the violence and chaos he’d lived within. Breville had begun a certain course so early on that his life could only follow
one path.

On the long drive home it became entirely clear to me that the surprising thing was not that Breville had raped someone when
he was nineteen. The only surprise would have been if he had not become a rapist.

WHEN I GOT BACK TO THE CABIN
, I saw Merle standing at the end of his driveway, talking to someone leaning up against a pickup pulled off to the side of
the road. After he saw it was me, he waved me over.

I pulled into the end of the drive and Merle said, “Did you hear the news?”

“I’m just now getting home,” I said. “What news?”

“Someone set a fire down at the old Churchill place. That’s just down the road.”

“They set a fire? To a building?”

“A house,” the man leaning up against the pickup said. “Someone set it and they think they might have caught the guy. They
found someone walking down the road nearby.”

“He wasn’t in his right mind,” Merle said.

“Who was it?”

“No one around here knows him,” Merle said. “A guy out of Thief River Falls.”

I felt something in me fall a little bit, and I said to Merle, “Do you think that’s who was in your garage the other day?”

“Might have been.”

“What was he doing down here?” I said. “No one knows,” the man leaning up against the pickup told me. “No one knows him. He
was just out wandering. No vehicle. Just walking.”

But to me, it was a relief to hear that particular detail. What ever desperate state the cowboy was in, I doubted he would
have given up his truck, just as I doubted his troubled nature would come out in the form of arson. There were more disturbed
people in the north woods than just him. But the story made me feel funny in a new way: it made me wonder about the night
swims I took, and about being as isolated as I was in the cabin.

“What time did it happen? When did he set the fire?”

“This morning,” Merle said. “But they’re not sure it was this fellow. Could have been someone else.”

“I think it must have been him,” the pickup leaner said. “That guy set the fire and then he walked down the road in broad
day-light.”

We all shook our heads then and looked out at the blue lake and the falling dark.

I was only inside the cabin a few minutes when the phone began to ring. I heard the recorded voice say, “This is a phone call
from an inmate at a Minnesota correctional facility,” but when the spot came for Breville to say his name so I could accept
or decline the call, a man’s voice said, “Gates for Breville.”

“Hello?”

“Hello, I’m calling for Alpha Breville. This is his friend Gates, and he asked me to call you.”

“All right.”

“I promise to keep it quick. He was sick today so they had him on lockdown.”

“So he knows I came to visit him?”

“Yes, he does. He gave me your number and asked me to tell you what happened. He’ll explain it all tomorrow.”

“He’ll be out of lockdown then?”

“Yes, he will. He’ll tell you all about it.”

“He’s okay, then?”

“Yes, he’s fine. He said he’ll tell you all about it.”

“All right, then,” I said. “I understand. Thank you.”

“No problem.”

The line went dead before I could ask or say anything more. Not that I would have asked more— the rushed way Gates spoke prevented
it. But the call unsettled me, and I was still thinking about it as I walked down to the lake to swim.

Sometimes during a late swim I felt exhilarated, but to night I just wanted to swim out into the blackness and stop thinking.
Once I was in the water, I tried to relax and let the lake cradle me, but the day kept intruding on my thoughts— being turned
away at the prison, the trip to the court house, reading the transcript of Breville’s trial, finding out about the fire, the
odd tone of Gates’s voice on the phone. I wished I had been able to talk to Breville, but if I had, I didn’t know what I would
have talked about. I didn’t know if I wanted to tell him I’d gone to the court house to read his court file. Even though the
documents were public record, I felt as if I had looked at something personal and private. I understood why I did it and thought
I was right to do it, but I still didn’t know if I wanted to admit it to Breville.

I didn’t know what he would be able to say anyway. He’d told me truthfully about his crime, he told me he’d changed and that
he was no longer the person he was when he raped, or even when he was tried for the crime. Since I could never see Breville
in any situation other than the visiting room, and since I had no way of knowing anything about him except what he chose to
divulge in letters
or what I observed during a visit, I could only take him at his word about who he’d become since the trial. Words could be
meaning-less if they weren’t backed by action, if they had no context. But the relationship I had with Breville was made up
only of words, talk, and letters, and that was what made it artificial and false— exactly what his counselor had said.

Yet something real had happened between us. It had happened when I wrote about my rape and when he wrote back, and it happened
every time I sat across from Breville in the visiting room, when his dark eyes met mine. It was not just the understanding
I gained from Breville about my own rape, though he had given me insight, and it was not just sexual tension, though that
flowed like a current between us, and it was not just the strangeness of the prison in Stillwater, though I knew myself well
enough to admit I found the place powerful in its foreignness and danger.

It was something more complicated in its details, and no matter how long I looked at it, I could not get a clear picture.

Because of Breville, I’d been forced to think about what happened between people as they came together, the lines negotiated
and crossed, the boundaries declared and transgressed, the mix of offering and taking. For instance, I liked men who took
certain things without asking, like kisses and particular intimacies— and who would never dream of making other presumptions,
such as wanting me to go to their church or have their children. I didn’t generally like rough sex, but once in a while I
did, and I always liked men who kissed hard and expertly. There was a cocksureness I desired in a man, a crudeness that pleased
me, but there were a thousand ways for that to go wrong, just as there had been when I was sixteen.

And while it seemed impossible at thirty-three to describe any decision I made as a teenager as a choice, I knew that I was,
at sixteen, capable of intense feeling and thought, and the night I was
raped, I did make a choice. I wanted something from Keil Ward: attention, hard but tender kisses, excitement— a fuck. If he
had just been who he seemed to be, if he had just given me the things I was looking for, the night would have turned out differently,
as my story now would be different.

That was why, even though I had allowed Breville to convince me of the randomness of the rape, I could never fully lose the
feeling that I was somehow complicit. Not in the lie that led up to the rape or in the savagery that was worked out on my
body, but complicit because I had been seeking something that night. I was not like the woman Breville had raped in South
Minneapolis, innocently asleep in my bed, assaulted by a stranger. And yet— and yet— the thing I had been seeking, the thing
I had consented to, was entirely different than what had taken place. I had been willing to fuck and be fucked by Keil Ward
that night, but I had not been willing to be raped. When I thought of that, the picture would go upside down again.

But that was what I meant by complicity.

Whatever my life had been in the past, it now was entirely my own choosing— a result of my tastes and predilections, my abilities
and incapacities. I didn’t know what I wanted from Breville anymore. I didn’t know if the cowboy was some odd kind of soul
mate or just another misfit. I didn’t know if any of it even mattered. None of it was anything I could live my life by.

Since I couldn’t push the events of the day from my mind— not Breville, not Merle’s news of the fire or the phrase he had
used to describe the man who set it, that he wasn’t in his “right mind”— I gave up on floating. Instead, I swam as hard as
I could, American crawl, a hundred strokes out and a hundred strokes back, again and again. And after a while I couldn’t think
about anything except the dark water and the moon, my own breathing, and the beating of my heart.

“I FUCKED UP, SUZANNE.
I’m sorry.”

Those were the first words Breville said when the prerecorded message from the prison phone system finished playing.

“If I’d have known you were coming down here, I would have got up and gone to work no matter how sick I was. I swear to God.”

“I know that,” I said. “What was wrong?”

“I had a headache in the morning, so I didn’t go to my job. They put you on lockdown when you don’t report for work. I should
have just gone.”

“It’s all right.”

“I just made myself sick with things. I feel like I’m losing my way.”

“Are you still upset over what your counselor told you? About us?”

“That. That and the appeal,” he said. “But I always lose my balance. That’s what Gates tells me.”

“Why do you feel like you’re losing your balance?”

“I’m not focused on my life in here. I get caught up in things out there and things here start to go wrong.”

“How can you not think about things out here?” I said. “You’re in prison and you want to get out.”

“It doesn’t matter what I want,” he said, and I could hear the frustration in his voice. “My life is in here. I have to keep
from getting caught up.”

“What are you caught up in?” I said. “Are you caught up in me?”

“You. Trying to get this appeal going. It makes it harder. I don’t know if you can understand. If this appeal doesn’t go through,
I’ll be thirty-four by the time I get out.”

“It’s a long time,” I said. “But thirty-four isn’t old.”

“You’ll be forty,” he said. “Do you think of that?”

“Not really,” I said. “I’ve thought of it, but I don’t go around thinking of it.”

“Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. That’s good. I wish I could do that.”

We were both quiet for a moment— not too long, or the system would cut us off — and then I said, “Would it be better if we
weren’t in contact?”

“That’s exactly what I don’t want.”

“But if it makes your life harder—”

“Better. Better and harder,” Breville said. “But it’s my problem. I didn’t mean to trouble you with it. Let’s change the subject.
Tell me what’s going on with you.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Today I had an interview for that job I applied for.”

“Did you get it?”

“I don’t know.”

“They’ll give it to you,” Breville said. “You know they will. Who are they going to find who’s better than you?”

“I don’t know. But I don’t have the job yet. And if they do offer it to me, I still have to decide if I want it.”

“But you told me you wanted a change from your old job.”

“I did. I do,” I said. It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t exactly the truth.
I never told Breville about Richaux, or why I’d come up north. I never told him specifics about any of my old relationships,
but I never told any man I was involved with about his predecessors.

“Well, then, you’ll have a change,” Breville went. “You’ll be up there for good.”