“So, I’m twenty- two and stupid and he’s thirty- five and a lawyer. So…” Now she finally turned to Ray. “Sixteen months at Trumbull Correctional Camp. My mom died while I was in there.” Her voice broke, the sound catching somewhere in her chest. She cleared her throat, pushed up her sleeve, and showed him a tattoo, a cherry with a stem, crudely drawn and going blue now with age. “That was Cherry, a girl at the camp. I can’t… I can’t even describe that relationship now. She kept me from getting hurt. Hurting myself.” Her eyes flicked to his. “But you don’t need my prison stories, do you, Ray?”
“No.”
“ ’Cause you have your own.”
“Yes.” He tried to keep her eyes with him, but she turned her head. He kept going. “And not just prison. Juvie before that. Stu-pid things, stealing cars. Before it got more serious.” He sat back, and she kept her hands flat in her lap, sitting straight upright as if waiting to be called to another room. “I wanted money, I can’t even tell you why. It just sat there. My partner stole most of it, and I have to tell you I was…” He searched for the word. “Relieved. Like I was free of something. I wish to God I’d never seen it. Never wanted it.”
They sat for a minute, and she looked into a far corner of the room.
“So,” she finally said. “Are you another story that ends with ‘she should have known better’? Or are you the one who sees me and knows who I am? Where I’ve been and what it means?”
He wondered where the girl he met in the street had gone, the bright- smiling girl who had looked him in the eye, and it cut him inside to think he was the reason she sat slumped next to him, her eyes empty and her head full of the banging echoes of cell doors and the thousand daily humiliations of being locked up.
He thought for a while, listened to cars moving in the street and the sounds of kids somewhere. “I know some things. Not a lot, maybe not enough.”
“Tell me.”
“I know I don’t want any of it anymore. I know I want to sleep without the nightmares. Really rest, you know?”
She began to lean forward, her head lowering slowly. She put her hands on her face. He wanted to touch her but kept his hands in his lap though they twitched like wires. He kept going. “I wake up exhausted somehow. Like I never slept.”
She looked down but nodded and shut her eyes tight, listening.
“I have these nightmares,” he said. “Terrible things I can’t control, people in trouble I can’t help. And the terrible things are something I caused. Something I brought.”
Michelle put her hand over her eyes.
“I know that you’re ashamed. All the time.”
She turned her head away and began to sob, a terrible strangled noise, her shoulders heaving.
“I know it because I am, too.”
His eyes were dry, and he put his arms on her back and lowered his head to her hair. She gave a moan of pain that was dreadful to hear, a low, animal sound of loss, but clutched at his hand.
“You tell yourself all this… shit. Wrong place, wrong time. Not your fault. You were beat, or lied to, or hurt. But you know it doesn’t matter and the things you did that were wrong were in you to do. Part of you. And you let them out and they destroyed every fucking thing you might have been. Wanted to be. Everyone who cared about you. Like you set this fire to burn down your own life.”
She sat up and wrapped her arms around him, and he kissed her cheek and felt her tears soak into his shirt.
“I want to say it’s going to be okay, but that’s one of the things I don’t know.” Her breathing began to slow, to ease, and he kissed her cheek again, and she turned to him and covered his mouth with her own. Then they were quiet for a while.
They went back to her apartment, actually one big room over a garage. The first time he’d seen it. Candles and a warm vanilla smell of baking from the house next door. A miniature kitchen, a bank of small windows letting in the light and air. A photograph, torn from a magazine, of rolling green hills and a red stone house that made him think of Italy. More quotes from Rilke in her hand-writing. Fat loops and swirls, like the way she moved her hands when she spoke and was animated.
They kissed in the doorway, their mouths open, and pulled at each other’s clothing. She stood back and shucked off her sweater and then undid the buttons on his shirt as they moved to the bed. He put his hand on hers and stopped her from opening his shirt but hiked her skirt and pushed his hand inside the waistband of her pants. She moved under him, opening, and when he entered her, her eyes were still wet from crying. His breath hitched in his chest and she made a low noise in her throat and feeling the length of the space inside her for the first time he came, his teeth bared and her hands gripping his shoulders. He settled into her, breaking into pieces like a ship coming to rest in the sand at the bottom of the sea.
Later she opened his shirt. He stared at the ceiling when she put her cool fingers in the furrows left by the knife. He began to tell her, then. Everything that had happened, from when his mother left and Bart had gotten locked up. He told her about Marletta and the accident and how he couldn’t get it all back. Bits and pieces would come to him but he couldn’t hold it all his head at once. He told her how angry and stupid he’d been coming out of prison. About Harlan and Manny and Ho. About how it was all burned out or carved out by the things that had happened in August. Edward Gray dying, and the fire at the barn. He talked until it was dark and he was hoarse and his eyes burned, as if he’d been screaming instead of whispering.
When he woke in the night, his eyes wild, she was there with him and touched his head, and he fell asleep again, folded against her and smelling the warm bread scent of her skin and saying her name.
IT GOT COLDER again, and rainy. Wind tunneled down State Street in front of the store and kept the foot traffic lower than they would have liked. Michelle brought people in with kids’ parties, and open mike night for bad poetry and white wine. A kid from the neighborhood noodling on a guitar while his black- haired girlfriend watched adoringly. People started to recognize them on the street. Ray began to stay most nights with Michelle in her room on Mary Street.
Bart died in April, and they buried him in a plot in Whitemarsh on a cool day when the shadows of clouds moving were sharp on the ground. They sat on folding chairs that sank into the spongy turf, and Michelle put her hand in his lap while he tried to fit everything that his father had been into his head. When the priest finished his generic prayers, Ray looked up and saw Manny, wearing his wraparound shades and a black jacket over jeans and standing back near his car. His face was whiter than Ray remembered. Something, a tremor, maybe, shifted his thin shoulders. Ray lifted his hand, and Manny nodded and turned away. When Ray held Theresa’s arm to steady her on the marshy ground, he felt how thin and brittle she had become. He hadn’t noticed against Bart’s rapid dwindling, but soon she would be gone, too.
When he got to the store the next day the kids were there. Lynch and Stevie and Andy. Michelle called the boys Burke and Hare and teased them, and Stevie had begun to fall in love with her. Ray let them in, and they brought shopping bags in full of paperbacks and dropped their satisfying weight onto the floor by the register. Michelle took Andy into the storeroom to make coffee and ask her about the baby and came back with Entenmanns’s cookies and a couple of paper plates. The boys were fighting over the last one, Stevie hanging back with feinted jabs and Lynch giving him dead eyes and saying, ‘Don’t even bother, dipshit,’ when Ray’s cell rang and it was Theresa.
“Someone’s been here.”
HE KNELT IN the entryway and could smell the bag. Cigarette smoke and hash oil and dog piss and air freshener and Lysol fighting, almost enough to make him gag. He picked it up and took it back to the bedroom while Theresa made coffee. When he was alone he unzipped it and dumped it out. Bundles of bills in rubber bands. He did a quick count and a lot of it was gone. There was about eighty thousand left.