“Why?”
“Why, indeed?” A ghost of smile touched Faircloth’s lips. “I think maybe I was heartbroken.”
“Not over me.”
“Over the law, perhaps, or the irretrievable failings of a system I could not improve. Maybe I lost faith. Maybe I just got old.”
“I sent letters asking for help. Heartbroken or not, how could you ignore me?”
“I didn’t.”
“You did.”
“You misunderstand, dear boy. I never got any letters.”
Adrian thought about that; nodded once. “The letters were intercepted.” He nodded again. “Of course, they were intercepted. They would have had to do that. Stupid. Stupid.”
He was talking to himself at the end. Faircloth keyed on something else.
“Who do you mean when you say they?”
“Don’t look at me like that.”
Adrian flashed the dark eyes, and Faircloth thought he understood. He knew prison; had other clients take the long walk. There was always a certain amount of disassociation and paranoia.
“I didn’t imagine it,” Adrian said.
“Then, let’s talk about it. The letters. This mysterious car.”
Adrian stepped more deeply into the gloom. Faircloth saw his back, the tilt of his head.
“Adrian?” The old man shifted above his cane. “My friend?”
Adrian ignored the question and looked out at the gathering dark. Without living it, no one could grasp the full truth of what had happened inside. Even Adrian lost track of what was fact and fiction. Was the sky really so dark? Was the old lawyer even there? He thought the answer was yes to both, but he’d been wrong before. How many times had he felt green grass and a warm wind only to open his eyes and find the blackness inside a boiler? The cold and close of a half-frozen pipe? Even friendship itself smelled of false promise. His wife had left him. His colleagues. His friends. What reason did he have to trust the old lawyer’s intent?
Only the guards were real.
Only the warden.
Adrian thought again he should kill them. How could he live if they lived, too? How could he ever heal?
“Where are you going?”
Adrian stopped walking; unaware he’d even started. “I’m not the best company right now, Faircloth. Give me a few minutes, okay?”
“Of course. Whatever you want.”
Adrian didn’t look back. He walked into the field because the sky was largest there, the night’s first stars the brightest. He thought the openness would help, but it made him feel small and voiceless, a forgotten man in a world of billions. Even that was okay for a moment. He understood voicelessness and knew more than most about being alone. Survival boiled down to resolution and will; and when such things failed, it hinged on stillness and Eli’s words, on the simple act of going away. But Adrian didn’t want to do that anymore. He wanted his life back, and to confront the ones who’d carved it down to such a thin, poor thing.
What would that look like?
A conversation?
He doubted it; and doubt was the reason he spent his hours in the shell of what had once been a proper life. The rage was so great it was a living thing, a creature in the cage of his chest. He wanted to hurt and kill, and then bury it all.
But, there was this thing.
This memory of what he’d been.
Adrian pushed into the field and felt grass on his skin. He’d been a decent man, once. Not perfect. Far from it. But, he’d done the job as best he could; he’d been a friend, a partner, a mentor; he’d loved one woman and failed another. It was a complicated life that seemed more so now, when all he wanted to do was kill five men and plant them so deep in the ground only the earth would remember.
What would Crybaby say about that?
Or Eli?
That was the other thought that kept him from violence. Eli Lawrence wanted Adrian to walk away and build a life. Such was the purpose of every lesson he’d ever taught-to make it through the day, the yard, the rest of his sentence.
No sin in survival.
Adrian woke each day with those words on his mind; fell asleep with them on his lips.
No sin.
But walking away felt wrong. The warden had been at Central Prison for nineteen years. How many inmates had died in that time? How many had gone insane or disappeared without a trace? Adrian couldn’t be the only one, but he didn’t kid himself about the risks, either. The warden. The four guards. Adrian knew their names and where to find them; yet they showed no fear at all. They’d appeared at court, and after the boy was shot; they’d followed him to the lawyer’s house, and then to his own farm. Did they really think him so weak and broken?
Of course they did.
They were the ones who broke him.
“That’s not me, anymore.”
But it was.
Memories. Nightmares.
“Stop it.”
It could have been a scream, but wasn’t. Awake or asleep, it could happen anytime. Memories marched in from the dark: the table and the rats, Eli’s death and the questions that came over and again. It was part of being broken, how the horrors rose like water.
“That’s not my life.”
But it felt like it.
When the final wave receded, Adrian was still on his feet, alone in a field he’d known as a boy. There were no walls or ceilings or cold metal. It should have been over, then; that was the pattern.
But then he saw the car.
It rolled past the field and flashed red where the road met the drive. He heard the engine, the tires. Then it went dark.
“Motherfuckers.”
He cut through the field without thinking, and when he reached the road, he stopped. They wore plainclothes, but he knew them. Stanford Olivet and William Preston. Adrian recognized the haircuts, the movements, their faces when a cigarette lighter sparked. They brought it all back, and for an instant, the memories almost rode him down: their smiles like a flicker, their thick hands on his wrists and ankles, holding him as the straps cinched tight, then reaching for the blades, the needles, the sack of rats that moved as if it had a life of its own.
Adrian wanted to pull them from the car, to pound their faces and break his hands doing it if that’s what it took. He told himself to move, to do it now; but another image rose. He saw the same men and the same faces, but there when he’d spilled like a dead man from the boiler in subbasement two. Something like pity had been on their faces, a whispered Jesus Christ as they’d shaken rats from his skin and carried him to a place with light and air and water.
Poor bastard, they’d said.
Poor sorry, stubborn son of a bitch.
Suddenly, it was too much, the rage and fear, the weight of submission.
Do what you’re told.
Eyes down.
And that was just regular fear, regular prisoners. Adrian’s damage ran deeper, and only now did he grasp its magnitude. He was a free man, yet nothing that mattered had changed. He saw their faces turn his way, their eyes as they recognized him. Olivet said something, and Preston smiled again, a thick man with pale lips and small, round eyes. The smile was knowing, and why not? He knew every inch of Adrian’s body, the smell of his blood and the sound of his screams, the places cut and uncut. Adrian felt a rush of blood, then a click as some part of him shut down. Heaviness. Numbness. He saw the car doors open, but from a distance. The world went nearly black, and when light returned, Officer Preston had a retractable steel baton in his hand. “What are you doing, prisoner Wall?”