Thief (7 page)

I told myself that if my scent had such a strong effect on Breville, it didn’t mean I was vulnerable, but rather that I had
power. I had power over Breville not only because I could stop everything and never again come to Stillwater state prison
to see him, but also because of what I represented. I was a conduit for the entire outside world, or at least the bits of
it I could carry on my skin and clothing. I felt as though I embodied an entire sense, and the idea flattered me. I decided
the next time I went to visit, I would wear perfume. I didn’t usually wear any fragrance in summer— I thought it was cloying
in the heat— but I’d tolerate it for Breville and wear Saint Laurent’s Paris, sweet chemical rose. It would give Breville
something special to smell, and I could hide behind the fragrance.

Perfume. Colored water in a bottle. It seemed like a small enough thing to do, to plan to give Breville a scent to smell.
But of course it wasn’t. It meant something had changed between Breville and me, though it took me a couple of days to realize
it.

His pleasure had become important to me.

NEXT WEEK
when I drove the four hours down to the Cities from the cabin, I stopped at the rest area in Rogers and doused myself with
perfume. When I walked into the visitors’ waiting room at Still-water, the scent was so heavy I was sure everyone would look
at me as I passed by, but no one did. Each person in that room had his or her mind on private thoughts, I knew, but it soon
became clear that I was not notable enough to draw anyone’s attention in that place. Though I couldn’t smell anything except
Paris, I figured I wasn’t the only woman there wearing too much perfume, and as far as drawing attention— well, that honor
went to a young woman with long, dark hair using what appeared to be a silver drum major’s baton as a cane. She wore a skimpy
dress with spaghetti straps, and she had a rough, hacking cough that made her seem old, even though she was probably just
twenty, or perhaps still in her teens. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw her, and I was so fascinated by her tubercular
cough and the troubled craziness she projected that when she got up to go to the bathroom, I waited a few moments and then
followed. She was already in a stall when I entered, so I stood fiddling with my hair until she exited. To wash her hands,
she leaned her drum major’s baton
against the wall, but before she could even get the faucet turned on, she had to hack into her fist.

“That’s some cough you have,” I said. “It sounds like it hurts.”

“I’d get better faster if I stopped smoking,” she told me, but I could tell from the way her voice sounded she didn’t want
to speak to me, didn’t want to share a girls’ moment in the bathroom.

“It’s hard to quit,” I said, keeping on, in part because I wanted to go on looking at her.

“I’ve tried.”

I would have gone on staring at her, but she took her baton in hand and clumped and clicked out of the bathroom. I was left
standing on my own in the cool green-tiled room, so I peed and took a while washing my hands so it wouldn’t seem as if I were
following her. When I got out into the waiting room, I meant to listen to see what inmate name was called that would cause
her to rise and walk to the guard’s station, but in the end I failed even to do that because I couldn’t keep the names straight
as the intercom announced, “Visit for ——, visit for ——.” That’s the way the guards did it— they would call the name of the
inmate or inmates who had visitors, not the visitors’ names. It protected the privacy of those in the waiting room and drew
all attention to the men who were incarcerated. All I knew for certain was the young woman got called before the guards announced
my “Visit for Breville,” and I watched her negotiate to have her drum major’s baton returned to her after she passed through
the metal detector. What ever malady of ankle or foot she cited, requiring her to use a cane but still permitting her to wear
high-heeled shoes, worked, and she tapped her way into the locked cage between the waiting room and the prison.

Watching all of that unfold, as well as observing all the wives and girlfriends waiting to see what ever incarcerated male
they’d come to see, did something to me that day. I thought,
You have become a joke, Suzanne, you have become like those women in supermarket
magazines who fall for convicts, who have so few prospects that they pick a prison suitor.
I felt so foolish I wondered if I should stand up and walk out of the huge wooden doors, more like doors to a church than
a prison. But I did not get up and leave. That was another part of my foolishness. Still, I swore if I felt the same way at
the end of the visit as I did at that moment, I would never come back to Stillwater state prison.

I was still thinking that and doubting myself and my actions as I passed through the locking cage door and walked toward Breville
and the taped square where we could embrace in front of the guards. Because we had hugged goodbye at the end of the last visit,
it seemed we had to again repeat the gesture to greet each other today, and when I touched Breville, it felt utterly false
to me, and I wondered why I was doing it. Breville’s shoulders and back felt odd, rigid and unknown, and why wouldn’t they?
He was an absolute stranger to me. But I couldn’t stop myself from making the gesture— I didn’t know how not to. And in those
seconds when we were embracing, when my arms were around Breville so woodenly and his were around me, he said into my hair,
on the side of me that faced away from the guards, “You smell so good. Jesus Christ, so sweet.”

And again I was disarmed.

Even though the feeling of falseness and rigidity was still there, even though I did not feel any natural warmth for Breville,
I was glad I hadn’t resisted the embrace, insisting only on a handshake. A refusal like that would have created an awkwardness
that I didn’t want to put him or myself through.

And oddly, within seconds of taking our places in facing chairs at the end of two rows there in the visiting room of Stillwater
state prison, things began to feel more normal. Maybe because the moment in front of the guards was over, maybe because we
were able to walk together that short distance, to the end of the rows of chairs— I don’t know. I just know that as I sat
down, the room
began to feel familiar to me, and it began to feel ordinary to be sitting across the aisle from Breville with the spider plant
again touching down on my hair if I shifted too far to the left. What ever hesitation and misgiving I had felt in the waiting
room, and what-ever uneasiness I had felt when I was touching Breville— those things had all passed. And I think they passed
because it became immediately clear to me how genuinely moved Breville was to see me. I couldn’t remember a time someone looked
happier to be in my presence.

“Tell me what it’s called,” he said, leaning forward into the aisle, sitting on the edge of his chair.

“What what’s called?”

“Your perfume.”

“Paris,” I said.

“It’s nice,” he said. “It suits you.”

I nodded at that but didn’t say anything, and we sat there, not talking for a little while. Just looking across the aisle
at each other, taking the other person in. And if you can believe that it felt natural to be sitting in a room with cages
on the windows and being watched by any number of prison guards, then perhaps you will be able to understand when I say I
felt some kind of pure happiness just then.

For most of the two-hour visit, Breville and I didn’t say anything of consequence, not about his crime or my rape. Instead
we talked about places we had traveled and adventures we’d had. He couldn’t believe I’d been to Kadoka, that I’d spent a night
in Interior, South Dakota, that I’d eaten shrimp at the same fry shack where he’d had many dinners in the summers, or that
I knew exactly which Happy Chef Restaurant he’d bused tables at when he was fifteen and desperate for cash.

When I told him about the place I’d grown up in, I said, “It’s probably not all that different from Kadoka, except it has
the Appalachian Mountains around it.”

“Tell me about someplace else, then,” Breville said. “Anyplace that isn’t like Kadokah. You don’t ever want to go back there,
do you?”

“No, I don’t want to go back.”

So I told him instead about the month I’d spent in Nice when I was twenty, and about how the beach was all rocks, and about
how I’d nearly drowned one evening when I went into the sea and the water was rolling hard at the drop-off . It had taken
all my strength to break free of the turning.

“How many oceans have you swum in?”

“The Mediterranean, the Adriatic, the Atlantic, and the Pacific.”

“I was once to the Pacific,” Breville said. “Never the Atlantic. But I swam the Missouri and the Mississippi.”

“I’m saltwater but I knew you were fresh,” I said, and he laughed, as I’d meant him to.

“Do you think it was fated that we meet?” Breville asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“I think it was fated. I don’t know how else it could have happened. I’m a thief and a rapist, and look at you. Look at what
you are.”

“What am I?”

“You know what you are. How else could we have come together?”

“I don’t want to believe it was fated that I relive my rape,” I said. “If that’s fate, I’m not interested.”

“I’m sorry. You know I didn’t mean that part of it.”

“I think it’s more likely coincidence,” I told Breville. “I don’t know. What does your hand say? What do the lines of your
hand say?”

I showed him then from across the aisle the little horizontal lines under the side of the pinky finger that supposedly indicated
the number of serious relationships or marriages a person had. I had two lines, but Breville had three.

“You’re more fickle than I am,” I said.

“Which is the life line?”

“The one that snakes down your palm and wraps under the thumb,” I said. “Here are the heart line and the head line,” I said,
again showing him my hand, tracing the lines. “And that’s my psychic cross.”

“What is?”

“This cross,” I said, and I sat as far forward in my chair as I could and traced the intersecting lines at the center of my
palm.

He leaned close to see as I lightly carved out the cross. He reached out a hand then, and for the briefest of seconds he touched
the center of my cross with his index finger.

“Breville, to the guard.”

His name seemed to be called at the exact moment he touched me, and quickly I realized that we were watched closely. Breville
sighed and stood up and walked toward the guard’s table.

When he came back to the chair, he was carrying a small white slip of paper.

“Are you in trouble?”

“It’s just a warning,” he said.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“It isn’t your fault. I knew better.”

And though he tucked the slip into his pocket, it took a moment longer to push it from his mind and compose his face.

“It doesn’t mean anything, Suzanne. It’s just a write-up.”

And then they called, “Breville, five minutes,” and I knew I would have to leave soon.

When Breville and I hugged in the taped square that day, it still felt awkward to me. Though I felt the warmth of his body,
there was no ease in the embrace, no naturalness. With any other man
I’d spent so much time talking and writing to, I would have already had an intimate knowledge— sex was a way I got to know
a man, not a culmination. But with Breville there was nothing. As I held him I couldn’t get over the idea that I didn’t know
anything about his body— not the way his chest curved into his belly, not the way the muscles of his thighs were braided,
not the feeling of his scalp under my fingers— nothing. Even though I’d thought Breville was good-looking from the first time
I’d come to Stillwater, I hadn’t thought of touching him until that moment. But just then I wanted nothing so much as to kiss
him and find out what his mouth tasted like. If my lips even touched Breville’s, though, let alone if we’d French-kissed and
touched tongues, he’d get thrown in the hole. The hole— he’d told me that was the punishment, solitary confinement for a kiss.

But I felt concern for him, over the white slip of paper and for what I knew his life to be, and that was part of my embrace
that day. I know I tried to let that feeling travel out through my arms and breasts and hands. And I believe Breville must
have felt it from me, because when we parted and began walking away— him back to his cell and me back to the locking cage
and the waiting room— we both turned to look at the other. I nodded a few times and tried to show something with my eyes,
and Breville did the same, nodding and saying goodbye with his eyes, and then he put his hand out at waist level, palm down,
and made a smooth pass through the air, as if to say he was fine, that what ever feelings he had were smoothed over, that
he was steady. That he would remain so until I came again.

In the air in front of the guards, that was what he told me with no words.

IN HIGH SCHOOL
, Cree and I usually parked out at Brommer’s old farm house, but a week after I was raped, we broke into the Boy Scout camp
in Rock.

It was Cree’s idea. He wanted the night to be special, I think. All week I asked my mom to tell him I wasn’t home when he
called, and I think he was worried he was losing me. Or maybe he just wanted to be with me someplace new.

All the way out there, I kept thinking,
I should tell him now, I should get it over with
. I practiced it over and over, but I couldn’t say it. The word rape wasn’t even in my mind because I thought I had brought
everything on myself when I consented to go out with Keil Ward. If I had done what I was supposed to and stayed at home like
a good and faithful girlfriend, nothing bad would have happened and I wouldn’t be sitting there with a raw and seeping vagina.

I knew I had to at least tell Cree about the infections. And yet I could not bring myself to say those words, either.

“Did you miss me this week?” he asked as we took the dirt road up to the cabins. The road twisted through the woods and the
trees met overhead. The forest went for miles out there.