Punishment (19 page)

I blushed at the sophomoric words. Then laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess there’s nothing funny about naïveté, or where it gets you.”

“I know something about that,” she said. “So what made you quit?”

For a moment I considered telling her, but then she took my left hand in both of hers, stroked my fingers. The wind was battering the house again. “Thank God for the oil stove,” she said and snuggled closer.

“Thank God for body heat,” I said. There was a blanket on the back of the couch and I dragged it over us and soon we were
lying down, me on my back, she with her head on my shoulder, eyes closed. We drifted off to sleep like that.

It was after midnight when I woke. I realized her eyes were open, that she was studying me. “I was just thinking,” she said. “How natural this feels.”

I swung my feet to the floor and she did too. She yawned and stretched, then took my hand. “Come,” she said. And she stood and led me toward the stairs. “We aren’t going out in this.”

I looked toward the window where snow was hurtling, horizontal. I followed her.

When she came back from the bathroom she was wearing a man’s shirt, top buttons open. She had long slim legs and with one hand she modestly gripped the bottom of the shirt to stretch it down in front. But when she bent to turn off the bedside light I saw her breasts suspended briefly. “Can’t we leave the light on?” I asked. She laughed. “I don’t think so.” And then she was beside me, soft and warm. I snuggled closer, deliberately pressing my erection against her leg. She reached down and touched it. “What’s that?” she said. I slipped my hand inside the shirt, felt the full softness of a breast. Kissed her neck. “Let’s take it slow,” she said.

And so I slowly undid the buttons on her shirt, kissed her breasts, pressed my face between them, licked a nipple, savoured a faint taste of salt. “You never used to let me do this,” I murmured. “But now and then I could …” and ran my hand
along her flank, and into the warm place between her thighs, “… do this.”

She placed her hand on mine, guiding my fingers, sighed. “You never were very good at that,” she said.

I chuckled. “It takes practice. And a bit of co-operation. You weren’t much help.” She turned her face away.

“What’s wrong, Caddy?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“It’s okay. We don’t have to.”

“I started thinking,” she said. “It’s always a mistake, in bed. Thinking.”

“It’s all I ever do in bed anymore, actually.”

“Yes, that, and say my prayers. Do you say prayers, Tony?”

“I gave up praying when I realized that nobody was listening.”

“There’s that,” she said. “But it’s a nice habit anyway. Like meditation.”

“Except when it gets in the way of other things.”

She drifted off for a bit. And then, after a long pause, she asked: “What ever happened to the little red truck?” I rolled onto my back. Game over.

“The old man traded it, eventually,” I said. “I was glad. It was always a reminder.” Then I noticed that she was staring at the ceiling. I touched her cheek and it was wet. “I’m sorry,” I said, and I wrapped my arms around her, held her close.

She slipped a hand between my legs. “Your friend has gone away.”

“Old age,” I said.

“No,” she said. “It’s my fault. Thinking. Remembering. Talking.”

“It’s nobody’s fault,” I said quickly.

“Or maybe everybody’s fault,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Too many people in the bedroom,” she said, and kissed my forehead.

“How many can you count?”

“Two besides us,” she said.

“Hmmm. Just two. Do they have names?”

“Jack and Anna,” she said.

“Mmmmhmmm.”

“Listen to that wind,” she said. “Aren’t you glad we didn’t go out?”

I listened to the storm, now amplified by silence. A vehicle drove by, lighting the window briefly. The wet streaks glittered. And then she said: “So how many by your count?”

“Offhand, four,” I said.

“My, my. Four. That’s a crowd. Do they have names?”

“Two of them you know already, Jack and Anna. There was a third whose name wouldn’t mean anything.”

“Interesting. She must have been very special.”

“Who said ‘she’?”

She rose up on an elbow, staring.

“Just joking,” I said quickly. “She
was
special, maybe because it couldn’t go anywhere … except emotionally.”

“Yes,” she said. “That would make it special. And number four?”

“That’s the big mystery, isn’t it,” I said. And she became silent again.

Then she said: “So number three was like a little fling.”

“Some people might call it that. But I wouldn’t.”

She kissed me. “Don’t be sad,” she said.

“Did you ever have one of those, Caddy? A little fling that went wrong on you?”

She pressed her face against my shoulder. “No,” she said. “No flings for me. There was only Jack.” The wind was shrieking. “Just listen to that,” she said.

“So there really isn’t a number four then,” I said, “if there was only Jack for you.”

The wind emphasized the sudden silence in the room, and I wanted to rewind the conversation.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said after a while. “I never counted that as anything. Just an accident, one of those mistakes you don’t get away with. Did you ever make a mistake you didn’t get away with, Tony?”

“A few,” I said.

“I want to go to sleep now,” she murmured, an arm lightly across my chest. “Okay?”

“I loved you, Caddy,” I said.

“I know you did.”

And in a little while she was breathing quietly in a deep, untroubled sleep.

I
t could have been a dream but I know that I was wide awake, processing the reductive thought: number three was like a little fling. A little fling that went wrong. Little fling. Storm outside flinging snow and sleet and hail and rain against the window. I could have told her that there were many flings. But only one I remember now, Caddy’s stillness, her soft breathing a reminder.

When Sophie had informed me she was going to the conference in St. John’s to be on a panel on the effectiveness of rehabilitation programs, I had a momentary panic.

“You mean the one sponsored by the Judicial Institute?”

“Yes. What’s wrong?”

“Sophie, they just asked me to go to replace someone who’s dropped out.”

“Who asked?”

“Someone in the minister’s office. I didn’t even ask who else was on the panel.”

“I could beg off,” she said. “If you think it’s going to be awkward.”

“God no,” I said, suddenly elated. “Have you ever been to St. John’s?”

“No, never,” she said.

“You’ll love it,” I said. “The weather can be rotten but it should be nice in June.”

And the weather was nice, a sunny balmy day with high white clouds and a light cool breeze. On the panel, Sophie and I, as usual, ended up saying basically the same things. We were discreetly critical of the status quo, referring to the overcrowding, suicides and recidivism that offer too much evidence of our professional failures, our historic inability to turn felons into citizens. The other panel member was a journalist and author who had written widely and with admirable passion about the flaws in the system. His radical views gave me the space I needed to seem, from time to time, to be defending the establishment just enough to satisfy the bureaucratic spies and knuckle-draggers I knew were in the room. The audience was mostly lawyers and a sprinkling of judges but there were also academics and corrections managers, not to mention media.

We stayed on for a talk by an American psychiatrist who spoke about his personal experience with repeat offenders
and his insights into the clinical causes that doom certain people to spend much of their time on earth incarcerated. But after coffee we slipped away, into a sunny afternoon. We considered climbing Signal Hill but opted instead for a stroll along the waterfront, inspecting deep-sea draggers, offshore service vessels, cargo ships. Inevitably we were waylaid by the bustle of a pub. The time and place became exceptional, an experience that would forever stand apart from all that came before and after it.

Had I given it the rational consideration it probably deserved I’d have recognized that, based on past experience, we were naive. But there is a certain beauty in naïveté when it is honest and spontaneous, as in childhood. There was something childish in our pleasure that evening, in the laughter and the intimacy that was, until a certain moment, pure. Reality intervened only once—a quiet moment near the end. “The Pittman thing,” she said. “Where does that stand?”

“Let’s not talk about Pittman.”

“You didn’t talk to Dwayne?”

“I called him. Asked him to let me know if he thought of anything that could explain why Pittman would have been a target.”

“You called him?”

“At Warkworth. I kept it formal and superficial. Anyway, he said he’d think about it. Only knew Pittman vaguely. I don’t believe him, but that’s what he said. I don’t expect to hear back from him.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to …”

“It’s okay,” I said. And walking back to the hotel she slipped
an arm around my waist. I put my arm around her shoulders and we walked like that, perfectly in step, in a moment that was singular, complete and self-contained.

I was wide awake, no sense of time. And yet we had exhausted our capacity for wandering and eating and for the hilarity and music of the crowded bars we visited. In the hotel lobby I asked: “What floor are you on?”

She had to check the little packet that contained an electronic key. I was almost precisely one floor below. And I asked with pretend formality, “May I see you to your door?”

And she replied, “That would be very gallant of you.”

But outside her door we just stood, staring at each other, smiling faces flushed, until I said, unoriginally, “I really hate to see this day ending.”

“I could offer you a nightcap from the mini-bar.”

And it was that simple.

It seemed to me that I lay awake most of that night too, fascinated by the silence of a woman sleeping. Her breathing was almost imperceptible, her face was still. It was the face of an exhausted child and I was profoundly reassured by the innocence I saw there, no trace of guilt or the anxiety that would inevitably follow.

We were up early. I returned briefly to my room, had a quick shower, changed my clothes. Then we met in the lobby and set out to explore a walking trail around a nearby lake. About an hour into the stroll (we were holding hands), Sophie stopped and said, “Oh my, look at that.”

There was a sign that told us we were in a place called Cuckold’s Cove.

“Why would anybody …” she began. Her distress was immediate and real.

I tried to lighten the moment. I told her Newfoundlanders are famous for their profane sense of humour. Odd place names abound: Conception Bay, Dildo … Cuckold’s Cove.

We continued walking. My hands were in my pockets now. Her arms were folded. Finally I said, “I suppose the merciful thing about being a cuckold is that you can go through your entire life without knowing it.”

She was nodding even though I knew she wasn’t listening.

“It was lovely, Tony. But it was a mistake.” She’d stopped and her eyes were searching mine.

“Yes,” I said. “I know.”

Caddy drove me home on her snowmobile early on the morning after my storm stay at her place and I felt uncomfortably dependent, sitting there behind her, the dog crushed between my chest and her back, constrained within a blanket.

Before we left I’d asked: “What about him?” Pointing at Birch.

“My God, I think you two have become a couple,” she said

But I didn’t believe her when she said, after she dropped us off, “Last night was lovely, Tony. Thanks for the company.” In the silence that filled in behind her as she roared away, I had a dreadful feeling that, once again, something promising had died.

——

The car in the lane was unfamiliar but I recognized the tall man walking toward my door, a lawyer who had been among the several in the courtroom on the day of Strickland’s unexpected outburst. “Jones,” he said, holding out a business card when I opened the door to him. “Derek Jones. I’m with the Crown. I’ve been meaning to call you but just happened to be in the area and took a chance I’d find you home. Hope it’s not a bad time for you.”

“Come in,” I said, bending to restrain Birch who had started yapping at the first sound of the lawyer’s car.

“That’s a Jack Russell,” said Jones, crouching.

“Mostly,” I said.

“How long have you had him?”

“He isn’t mine. I’m looking after him for a friend.”

He stood. “I’m here about Dwayne Strickland.”

“I guessed that much.”

“You know him pretty well, I gather.”

I shrugged. “What can I do for you?”

“You can probably help us out by shedding a bit of light on Strickland’s time in prison, especially at Millhaven.”

“I’m sure you can get access to his records.”

“Certain records have been sealed by a judge in Ontario, at the request of Strickland’s counsel and CSC.”

“What are you looking for?”

“Some of the particulars of a situation in which he ended up in protective custody, in Kingston Pen. It was back in ’98 or ’99. I think you were involved. Corrections Canada and the lawyer claim it involves institutional security, and his safety.”

“Marginally.”

“It came up in some discussions we had about resolving this without a trial. It’s been mentioned that he could be at risk if he went back inside. I’d be interested in your opinion, now that the case could go ahead.”

“Inside is a risky place for everybody,” I said.

I could feel his impatience. He was nodding. “I’m curious about the reality … just how real the risk. How big a factor it could become. We figure he’s exaggerating, and we were hoping you could give us a sense of just how realistic his concerns are, providing some context for what, so far, is pretty vague.”

“I’d rather stay out of this,” I said.

“I understand you know the family of the victim. We want to make sure that whatever we’d agree to is fair for them.”