Thief

by Gibbon, Maureen

  Somehow it was all easier to bear in that little town, though, under the blue-black sky. I got into my car and drove back home to the cabin.

  8

  THOUGH I TYPED my initial letters to Breville, I now usually hand-wrote them, keeping his most recent letter fanned out in front of me. There was nothing I couldn’t tell him if I was willing to write long enough, and there was nothing he didn’t at least try to understand and respond to.

  This particular night I started writing to Breville about the garter snake that showed up in the kitchen. “It looks like it came in through a gap between the screen door and the frame,” I said. “Once it got inside, it hid partway under the kitchen carpet. What always surprises me about snakes is how they are cool and dry to the touch— not slimy at all, the way some people think.”

  But pretty soon I switched subjects. In each letter I wrote Breville, I tried to process something about my rape. It was a way to remind myself of Breville’s crime, but it was also a compulsion. I’d already gotten more out of writing to Breville than I had from any therapist, and I thought it was important to go on doing it. So this night I described my hometown. “I still make a trip back each year to visit my family, but the place is no longer home and hasn’t been for a long, long time,” I wrote. “After my rape, I used to hate to walk down the streets there. I was afraid the two men who had raped me would see me walking and either pull over to talk to me, or else start to jeer. The houses along South Tulpehocken Street, where my parents live, always have their blinds drawn to the street, but when I was a teenager those windows seemed like eyes. I thought the people who lived in the houses were watching me and gossiping about me, and I have never lost that feeling. The houses themselves are so close together that my parents can see into the kitchen of their neighbors and vice versa. There is nothing you can do that other people can’t see. I think that is why I moved as soon as I could— to get away from prying and gossip.”

  After I put that all down, I lay thinking about my hometown and South Tulpehocken Street. And then, because I was thinking about my family, or maybe just because I hadn’t spoken to anyone all day, I wrote Breville the story Merle had told me the other day, and that I had not been able to stop thinking about:

  “He is the old man I rent the cabin from,” I wrote. “His wife died less than a year ago, and of course he still misses her. She was only sixty-eight. He said she never wanted to move to town, not even as they got older and it got harder to take care of the house. She died when she was out in her garden last fall, getting it ready for winter. He said from what they could tell, she’d gotten cold and had built a little fire for herself, and she lay down beside it. He’d been away for the day, and when he got back, he was the one who found her. When I die I hope it’s like that. I don’t want to die slowly in a nursing home, the way my grandmother did. No thank you.”

  I knew it was morbid to talk about death, even if my vision was peaceful, and I knew it was ridiculous for me, a woman who was enjoying her life and her freedom, to write to a convict about dying. But that was what I was thinking about that night, and that was what I wanted to communicate to Breville. If he wanted to be my friend, he could be my friend, and he could go through a spell of sadness with me. So I folded the pages and tucked them into an envelope, and the next morning I mailed everything before I could make myself think better of it.

  I’d told Breville before that letters were just pieces of paper, but of course that wasn’t true. A power resides in a letter. There is the time that went into the writing of the pages and the fact that the writer actually touched the paper. There are also the secret, personal emanations that come from the way the words slant on the page, the depth to which a ballpoint pen has pressed, and the ex-travagance or precision with which vowels and consonants are shaped. That was why I kept the only letter a Jesuit priest wrote me when I was eighteen and living in New York City, after he had fallen in love with me on a bus, and why I still had some of the notes my high school girlfriends wrote me in math class, almost all of which were signed, Love always. I kept all those things not only for the sentiments expressed, but also because just seeing the handwriting made me remember the people and the time and the feeling of my own life. Not only were the letters evidence of old affections, but they were also artifacts— intimate mummy wrappings of friendships and love affairs. That is the best way I can explain what happened next, but all I really know is that after I sent the letter about dying, I wanted to meet Breville.

  It wasn’t because of how he responded to me, though he did write, I can feel the peacefulness of the way that woman died by how you describe it and, yes, it is best to die the way you want, on your own terms. But I hope you don’t think about it too much. About dying, I mean. I can’t think of anyone who seems more filled with life than you.

  In fact I didn’t think much about dying, and though I appreciated that Breville was attentive to what I’d written, what ever quiet sadness I felt that day had disappeared, evaporating like morning fog over the lake. But the feeling of wanting to meet him— that had been happening gradually and incrementally, and it remained. I wanted to meet the person I had revealed so much to, and who had become, perhaps by default, the recipient of my observations and my dreams.

  That person was Alpha Breville, resident of Stillwater state prison, convict, rapist, thief.

  9

  WHEN I FIRST SAW ALPHA BREVILLE in the visiting room at Still-water, I did the same thing with him as I did with the old photo of my dead thief: I studied him.

  He was slight of build, with dark eyes and dark hair, and his face was open. He wore a red and black western shirt that made him look like a rodeo cowboy. I kept my eyes on him as I walked toward a taped-off square of carpet, which was the only place in all of the prison where visitors could touch inmates. A man and woman had just embraced inside that square, there in front of the guard who monitored body contact, but when Breville and I reached the square, I only shook his hand.

  The visiting room was nothing like those I’d seen on TV shows— no glass separating inmates from visitors, no gray phone to pick up. Breville and I sat in two plastic chairs that faced each other, at the ends of two long rows of chairs. Bright sunlight streamed in the grilled windows, and a spider plant hung above my head. If I moved a certain way, one of the baby plants touched down on my hair.

  “In the old days we could have sat beside each other,” Breville told me, and patted the empty chair next to his. “Then they changed the visiting policy. Too many exchanges.”

  “What kind of exchanges?”

  “Drugs,” Breville said. “People passing things as they sat beside each other.”

  He stretched his legs out then, twisted each foot in its vinyl loafer. “I borrowed the shoes and the shirt. For the visit. I wanted to impress you. Didn’t want you to see me in prison issue.”

  “I’m impressed that you borrowed clothes,” I said. “You look like a cowboy.”

  “You probably think it’s stupid.”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  I listened to the small talk Breville made in those first minutes, and I made some of my own, but mostly I watched Breville’s face and hands, and how he held his body, and in those first moments of conversation I came to understand something. It was something I had no way of knowing until I was in Breville’s presence, until just that moment in the visiting room, when I was sitting face-to-face with him. And what I came to understand was this: Alpha Breville did not look like a rapist.

  I know it is laughable to say that, because a rapist is anybody and can look like anyone, but I will say it again: Alpha Breville did not look like a rapist.

  To begin with, there was his handsomeness. I wasn’t prepared for his handsomeness, or how it pleased me to look at his face. His dark eyes glinted with understanding, and his whole body contained a spirit, an eagerness for life, which not even the visiting room at Stillwater state prison could crush. He was so young and hand-some and gallant, and he carried him
self with such a mixture of humility and strength, that at that moment it seemed absolutely clear to me there had been some mistake in his life, some set of events that had gone awry that led him to rape a woman in South Minneapolis. If he had been ugly or roughly put together or even unremarkable in his expression, if I had not felt drawn to him so strongly, I don’t know what my assessment of him would have been. But none of those things was true, and at that moment I knew that if I had met Alpha Breville in any other place— at a bar or getting off a bus on Lake Street— I would have wanted something with him or from him.

  And because it seemed so impossible that Breville was a rapist, it also became clear to me in an instant that if anyone, anyone at all, had helped Breville when he was growing up, he would not have turned out to be who he was. He had only been nineteen when he broke into that house, not so far out of his formative years and the stupidity of being a teenager, and if he did what he did, it was because someone had failed him. Of course, I knew not all callowness and immaturity ended in violence— it was one thing to break into a house and rob, and another to shove your unwanted cock into a woman’s vagina, and Breville himself told me he’d been filled with violence when he was nineteen. But in that first hour of the visit, it was almost impossible for me to believe Breville had committed the crime for which he was incarcerated. I kept thinking that as Breville and I sat talking, and in a little while I told him my theory of his youth, because I could not go on sitting across from him without saying it.

  “That’s where you have it wrong, Suzanne,” Breville said. “Lots of people tried to help. My mom, my dad. My grandfather. It didn’t make any difference. I did it. I raped that woman.”

  I watched him as he said those words, and I had no choice but to believe them. Breville himself would not let me believe anything else. Yet even when I reminded myself that Breville was seven years into a fourteen-year sentence, that who I saw in front of me was a different person, almost entirely, than the one who had raped, everything about Breville seemed to belie his crime. It wasn’t just his appearance, either. His self-awareness and honesty seemed genuine and more than just products of the prison 12-step programs he’d written me about in letters. When he said, I did it, I raped that woman, he looked away at first and then made himself look back at me— so I could study his face, it seemed. So I could know exactly who was sitting across from me.

  When I kept shaking my head, when I told Breville how hard it was for me to put his crime together with his face, he said, “I’m glad you can see the person I am now. I don’t think you would have liked me before, but I’ve changed. You know, I’ve been sober for seven years now.”

  Sitting there in the visiting room among the other inmates and their visitors, I understood for the first time what it might have taken for Breville to make the choices he had made in prison to get his associate’s degree and work as many hours as he could. It was the smart thing to do, and by behaving that way, Breville curried favor for himself, but none of it would have been sustainable if he hadn’t actually been changing. Or maybe I just came up with that rationalization because I wanted to believe the man I saw in front of me was the real Breville.

  “You could have done your time in a harder way,” I said. “From what you told me, I know that.”

  “True. But there’s a reason I’m sitting here. There’s a reason I’m sitting here and you’re sitting there. I committed the crime.”

  After he said that, we were quiet for a little while. Breville stretched his legs and I brushed at the spider plant touching my hair, but in a moment we both sat still. It sounds clichéd to say, but we looked into each other’s eyes. Regarded each other across the space of the aisle. We were in a public room, I was not sitting close to Breville, and I’d only touched his hand briefly when we greeted each other in front of the guard, but I still had a sense of Breville’s presence, as I am sure he had a sense of mine. I could feel a sadness in the moment and in the air between us in the visiting room of Stillwater state prison, but underlying that impression was also a feeling of peace. I do not know any other way to say it. I felt calm in Breville’s presence, and the quietness between us did not feel awkward or self-conscious.

  “What kind of swimming have you been doing?” Breville asked me after a little while. As he said it he leaned forward slightly and moved his chin up once, encouraging me to talk. It wasn’t lost on me that he was the one trying to lead us out of silence— it was usually my role with students or with the taciturn men I dated.

  “I swim across the lake a couple times a week. Whenever it’s quiet,” I said. “This week someone in a boat told me I should be wearing a flag.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I wanted to tell him he should put a flag on his beer, but I didn’t,” I said, and Breville laughed at that. Then it was easy enough to talk.

  Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, some of that first visit had the giddiness of a date. Though outside of that taped-off square Breville and I were not allowed to touch, if we both sat forward in our chairs we could talk quietly and intently, so much so that the distance between us seemed only like the distance between a man and a woman at a table in a restaurant. Still, toward the end of the two hours— after we had a picture taken together by the trustee with a Polaroid who worked in the visiting room— something happened that showed just how much of a wall existed between us.

  “Did they search you when you came in?” Breville asked.

  When I looked at him, puzzled, he said, “They must not have.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I get strip-searched every time I get a visitor. Before and after. I have to bend over and crack a smile.”

  When I didn’t say anything, he said, “You don’t know what that means, do you?”

  I shook my head no, and he said, “I have to spread the cheeks of my ass apart for the guards. I just wondered if they did it to you, too.”

  I thought at first it was rudeness or stupidity that made him ask the question, but I knew from his letters that Breville was anything but stupid. That made me wonder even more. Why hadn’t he ever asked another of his visitors, if he’d wanted to know? And did he really think that because I was coming to see him, the guards would have power over me, too?

  “I’m not the one who did anything wrong,” I said. “Besides, I wouldn’t go through it.”

  Breville nodded. “I don’t blame you,” he said, and then he looked away from me. When he looked away, I wondered if he hadn’t known the answer all along, if he hadn’t said what he said because he wanted to see my reaction. When I thought that, I could feel my expression change and go hard. In another second, though, Breville was thanking me for making the trip down to Stillwater, and he seemed so sincere I couldn’t maintain the coldness in my eyes.

  When I said goodbye to Breville that first day, I wasn’t going to hug him, but after we got to the taped-off square where inmates could touch and be touched, that was what I ended up doing. I put my arms quickly around Breville and felt his arms go around me. I felt his body against mine. I thought I would be able to smell him, some kind of sour prison smell, or at least the scent of his hair, but I smelled nothing. I pulled away and said goodbye.

  10

  THE SISTER OF MY RAPIST was a girl I went to school with. We often sat together in classes and in homerooms because our last names started with the same letter. Joy was tough, part of a crowd of kids who were hoods from the time of fifth or sixth grade. If you had parents that were certain kinds of people— drunks and toughs, or just poor bastards— you had to be part of that crowd. Some kids might have chosen the crowd out of wanting to be “tuff ,” the way it was spelled on the bathroom walls at school, but many people had no choice. Joy didn’t. Her brothers made a name for themselves and the family with drinking and drugs, and charges like assault and possession.

  I did not know if Joy’s brothers were ever nice to her or what her family was like; neither of us talked much about home. When we sat toge
ther in Mrs. Sander’s room, Joy sometimes told me how her mom and dad were fighting, or how her dad had been drinking, but that was no different from what my parents did, or many parents did. But something made Joy’s family different. Each of Joy’s three brothers had the same eyes, and each was wild and bad. The brothers were not clannish— there was enough difference in their ages for them not to run together— but you just had to say the name L—— and people knew, or believed they knew. What do you expect in a small Pennsylvania town, a deer-hunting and coal-mining town, where nothing anyone does is hidden from anyone else?

  Joy was the toughest girl and I was one of the smartest, and we both liked that we were friends with each other, that we could be friends across the lines that divided us, even at that age. We were like heads of state when we talked about girls in our grade, or school, or her boyfriends, and we listened to each other so carefully we were solemn. I was sitting at my desk in Mrs. Sander’s room close to the end of seventh grade when Joy turned back to talk to me.

  “It’s serious,” she said. “I have to talk to you.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “I can’t say here. It’s George,” she said. “I’ll tell you in gym.” As she leaned back over my desk to whisper just that much, I could smell the strange pepper smell on her breath that she carried each day. It was not a bad smell, but I didn’t know where it came from.

  Joy and I were sitting on the hard benches of the girls’ locker room, away from the other girls, when she told me she thought she might be pregnant.

  “How late are you?”

  “Two weeks.”

  “You might or might not be,” I said. “Do you use something?”

  “No,” she told me. “He just pulls out.”

  “That doesn’t work,” I said. I’d read about it. “It just takes a little bit.”