Thief (5 page)

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.

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 himself 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.”