Thief (15 page)

When I said I hadn’t bought the paper that week, he made me walk with him back to his place so he could get his copy out of
the kindling box.

“I guess I might not find out who was in my garage,” Merle said as we walked.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “And they didn’t take anything?”

“No, not that I can see. I just thought I’d ask. In case you heard something.”

There was a part of me that wondered if the cowboy had been back. But even if he had been, and even if he’d been looking for
me, what possible reason would he have for going up the road to Merle’s or for opening the garage door? It made no sense,
and I chalked up the little nagging feeling in the back of my mind to my wariness and to Merle’s questions.

In fact, the whole conversation made me wonder what Merle was trying to get at. He walked the road at all times, several times
a day, and he would have seen the cowboy’s truck at the cabin. Would have heard him, too. Each time the cowboy was here, we
screwed long into the afternoon, and each time he came, he’d done his coyote howling. Even though the cabin was set back a
ways from the road, who knew what Merle had heard?

“Thanks for the paper,” I said then, my hand on the screen door. “I’ll bring it back when I’m done.”

He waved his hand. “No need,” he said. “Keep it. I have plenty.”

When he said that, he sounded like himself, but his eyes were impossible to read under the cap. I told myself there wasn’t
anything more to the conversation except someone fretting about a
door left open when it shouldn’t have been. And if there was more, I couldn’t do anything about it anyway.

That night when I came from a swim, the phone was ringing. When I answered, it took a second for the recorded voice to begin
saying, “This is a collect call from an inmate at a Minnesota correctional facility.”

When the voice was done, I said, “Hey, how are you?”

“I’m sorry I’m calling,” Breville said. “You know I don’t like to call and stick you with the bill.”

“It’s okay. What’s going on?”

“You should know it’s usually bad news with me,” he said. “Do you have time for this?”

“I have time.”

“All right, then. I’ll just come out with it. I talked to my counselor today. About you. About us. I don’t want to tell you
what she said. But I have to. I have to. She always tells me the truth, you know?”

“What did she say?”

“She said this was a false relationship. What you and I have. It’s an artificial relationship.”

I didn’t say anything for a moment, and then I said, “Artificial?”

“Because there’s no way for us to share experiences together. There’s no way for us to do things together,” Breville said.
“It’s not a real relationship. That’s what she told me.”

“Well,” I said. “I think she’s probably right.”

“Jesus, I was afraid you’d say that.”

“Well, you can’t share anything with anyone,” I said. “Not while you’re in prison. But does that mean you’re supposed to go
without friendship?”

“It’s not friendship I talked to her about. I told her I had feelings for you.”

“What else did you tell her?”

“That I cared for you, and that you were making a difference in my life.”

“Did you tell her about my rape?”

“I didn’t say anything about that.”

“You might want to,” I said. “You might as well be honest.”

“I don’t know. It would probably just make it worse. What she says— do you really think it’s artificial? What’s between us?”

“I think probably it is,” I said. “But it still means something to me.”

“Does it?”

“Doesn’t it mean something to you?”

“You know it does,” Breville said. “But this person, she’s never steered me wrong.”

“I think you should listen to her.”

“I do listen to her, but it’s depressing. I could have been out this year. If I’d pled guilty. I did this to myself. Do you
know that?”

“I know,” I said. “You told me. And I’m sure you agonize over it. I bet you never stop.”

“Yeah, so you know that, too.”

“It would be impossible for me not to know that.”

Breville made a noise into the phone then that I didn’t have a word for. A short moan, a sigh, a bark— I wasn’t sure.

I waited for him to say something more, but instead I heard an alarm go off in the background.

“I have to go,” Breville said. “Bed check. Write me.”

Before I could respond, though, the line went dead.

It didn’t matter. We’d both said everything there was to say. I’d heard enough of Breville’s voice to know that what ever
he was feeling, what ever he was going through, was so private and deep nothing could touch it. There was no respite from
it. It reminded me of the Stephen Crane poem that went:

I eat it because it is bitter

And because it is my heart.

And maybe there was no connection between Breville’s regret and my own— he was a rapist and I’d been raped. Two opposites.
But I still felt like I knew something about the remorse he felt. There was a piece of tape I played in my own head, over
and over, from the night I was raped. If only I’d chosen not to go out with Keil Ward that night. If only I’d balked in the
parking lot and made some excuse to go back inside the restaurant. If only I’d stopped. But instead of telling Keil Ward I
changed my mind, instead of saying,
No, I don’t want to drop off your friend
, I got into the truck.

That was the moment I always thought of and always pictured in my mind. The moment when I stopped walking, when I was standing
beside the truck in my white waitress uniform, when my hand was in Keil Ward’s hand, when I did not know how to say,
I don’t like your friend
, when I did not know how not to do the next thing. Then Keil was lifting me and Frank L—— was reaching for me and I was getting
into the truck.

When I let myself, I could still see in my mind the parking lot lit by a streetlight, the rust-colored truck, the trash bins
beside the side kitchen door of the restaurant. But even more than that, I could still remember exactly what it felt like
to be my sixteen-year-old self. That night I was wearing my white polyester waitress uniform with a red apron I made on my
mom’s sewing machine, the front pockets big enough to hold a green guest-check pad and tips; white sneakers with rainbow stripes
on the sides and small white socks with pink pom-poms; pantyhose, and panties inside my pantyhose; a white cable sweater that
reminded me of my grand-mother; no makeup; my hair long and taken down out of the pony-tail I kept it pulled back in when
I was working.

And when I let myself, I could imagine what my face must have
looked like in those last few seconds before I stepped into Frank L——’s truck. My face would have revealed the apprehension
I felt, and the doubt. My instinctual fear. I would have looked back over at the side kitchen door or the restaurant, but
instead of making any excuse at all to Keil Ward and running toward that door, I got into Frank L——’s truck and did the thing
I’d been trained to do. I cooperated and I performed.

By the time I got home that night, my panties were so rusty with blood that I wadded them up and hid them in the downstairs
trash. I could imagine what my face must have looked like when I peered down at the blood, but what’s more, I could still
feel the look in my face all these years later.

My panties weren’t the only piece of clothing I lost that night. In my distress after the rape, I’d left my pantyhose and
pom-pom socks in the truck, along with the sweater that reminded me of my grand-mother. I could still feel a flicker pass
over my face when I remembered leaving those things behind in Frank L——’s truck, or when I recalled the moment I realized
it didn’t matter, that none of the things that used to mean something to me mattered at all.

I could remember— imagine in my mind— everything about that night. I still saw the color of the truck, the savage way Frank
L—— ate my pussy, the bleached and medicinal smell of Keil Ward’s cock. The only thing I didn’t have a clear picture of was
Frank L——’s face.

I never asked myself to imagine that.

Once, though, when I was in downtown Minneapolis, I saw a man with greasy blond hair, a snub-nosed face, a mustache worn to
camouflage rotting teeth. He was in a cheap blue windbreaker, and though I knew I didn’t know him— had never seen him before
in my life— my stomach clenched into a knot.

That’s when I remembered what Frank L—— looked like.

BREVILLE SOUNDED SO DISTRAUGHT
when he told me what his counselor said, I was sure he would call me back the next night, but he didn’t. And when no letter
came the next day, or the next, I decided to drive down to Stillwater to see him.

But instead of hearing the guard announce over the intercom, “Visit for Breville,” I heard my own name called. When I came
up the counter, the guard, a woman, told me Breville was on lock-down that day and could not get any visits.

“Did something happen?” I said.

“I can’t tell you. All I’m able to tell you is that he is on lockdown and cannot receive visitors.”

Breville told me they sometimes locked down different wings of the prison and searched prisoners’ cells if they suspected
people of possessing contraband, and sometimes the entire population was placed on lockdown if there was some kind of upheaval
or if things got violent. But since other visitors were being processed through the waiting room, I knew it wasn’t that kind
of general lockdown. I wanted to ask the guard more but I knew she couldn’t tell me anything, and I knew I was holding things
up. So I turned away and got my purse out of the locker and exited through the
huge doors of the prison waiting room. And was left with the day on my hands.

I could have called Julian and made him come out to lunch with me or gotten right back on the freeway to head north. But I
did neither. Instead, I did something I could have done and perhaps should have done weeks ago: I drove to the Hennepin County
Court house, where I could read the case file of Breville’s trial.

I didn’t know why I chose that particular day to go to the court-house. Maybe it was the reality of hearing about what Breville’s
counselor had told him about the artificiality of our relationship, or maybe knowing Breville was on lockdown frightened me—
I wasn’t sure. I’d always known I could read the file, but I hadn’t wanted to. But now I needed to see for myself what had
happened at his trial, and I wanted to read about it in the court records and not in Breville’s handwriting. I wanted that
distance and clarity. My visits to Stillwater had made his punishment perfectly visceral and clear, but the only information
I had about his actual crime came from his admission, his words. It wasn’t enough anymore.

And the first thing I understood from reading the transcripts of the grand jury and the trial was that Breville had been entirely
honest with me about the rape. Though it was disorienting to read the information from an objective, third-person perspective,
everything in those documents was absolutely familiar to me. The transcripts told the exact same story of the night that Breville
had related to me in his letters and conversations, and it meant something to me to see how scrupulous he’d been in telling
me the truth. But that did not make the documents any easier to read. His crime and a portion of his life were public record,
and that alone separated Breville from the rest of society. No spider plant gently touching down on my hair or visible gallantry
within the confines of the visiting room at Stillwater could alter that demarcation, the three separate felony counts on which
he had been convicted, or
the particular details of the rape. He had broken into a woman’s house as she was sleeping. As she was sleeping.

I had been prepared to read all those things, at least in some way. What I had not been prepared for— what did not become
clear to me until I stood at the counter of the Hennepin County Courthouse— was the arrogance and delusion it took for Breville
to plead innocent.

He had told me he’d still been in denial at the time of the trial, and that he’d believed there was a way for him to “beat”
the charge because his DNA had never been found. He believed that even though he’d had some of the woman’s property in his
possession at the time of his arrest. He told me all these things himself. But to read the court papers and see for myself
how he’d gone through the entire trial denying the rape, denying the woman’s story— her testimony— was something altogether
different. Breville’s declaration of his innocence made him seem more dangerous than if he had confessed outright that he
was a rapist.

The trial was disastrous for him. I did not know what adjective to use for what it must have been like for the woman from
South Minneapolis, but for Breville it was ruinous. His lies and refusal to admit guilt made him seem remorseless, devoid
of conscience. That, on top of the invasiveness and violence of the crime itself, must have been what prompted the judge to
increase the length of Breville’s sentence from seven to fourteen years. After reading the transcript of the trial, the extended
sentence made perfect sense to me in a way it hadn’t before, even when Breville spelled it out for me. It wasn’t that Breville
had lied to me or misled me— I was the one who’d chosen to believe in his charm and his intelligence. His grace.

As I paged one last time through the file, my face felt tight, and something throbbed behind my right eye. I was tired from
my drive, but of course it was more than that. I felt a kind of devastation, and I felt it through my whole body. If it weren’t
for Breville,
the woman in South Minneapolis wouldn’t have had her life altered as she did. She would have gone on dreaming that night in
her own bed, would have gone on living just as she had before. Each moment of pain and fear she felt during the rape and every
wave of disruption she experienced afterward was entirely Breville’s fault.

I both identified with the woman in South Minneapolis and saw myself as being different from her. What had happened to me
at sixteen was brutal and life-altering, but it was somehow less than what she had experienced. Breville broke into her house,
fractured her sleep, and assaulted her in her own home, which was something much worse than I had gone through. I could sleep,
at least when I was alone, but I wondered if she was always listening for the noise that had been him.