“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.
29
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.
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 Ikilled 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.
30
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 tomorro
w.”
“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.
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