Last Rites

One

It was twelve years since she’d seen him. Not that she hadn’t wanted to, hadn’t written to him often enough, in the early days at least, asking him to change his mind. Featherstone, Haverigg, Wandsworth, the Scrubs. Begging him, near enough. He’ll get over it with time, she’d thought, feeling the way he does.

At first she had gone anyway, long journeys, sometimes by car, more usually by train. Not to contravene his word, only to be there, be near him, share something of the same atmosphere, the same air. From a distance she would watch the visitors at the gate: wives, lovers, got up in their best, hair specially done and makeup refreshed; others burdened, encumbered, dragging kids who skulked and slouched and scuffed their shoes. Coming out, she would mingle with them if she could, snatch bits and pieces of their conversations for her own. Then, abruptly, she stopped going; she wrote to him instead, regularly, the first of every month. Her ritual. Family gossip, bits and pieces about the kids. She persuaded herself it didn’t matter that he never replied.

Some evenings when she stood upstairs alone, gazing out across the roofs of the other houses, noticing the way the light caught their edges immediately before it fell, she would try to remember the way he used to look at her, something bright flaring for a moment in the slate-gray of his eyes.

Life. After all that waiting, it had been out of the judge’s mouth almost before she had heard or properly understood. That word: life.

She could still see her mother’s face, the soft sigh of pain as if the air had been released from within, the pale skin puckering, sinking in. She could feel again her own panic rising in her veins. Life, was that what he had said? As though he were giving and not taking away. A term of no less than twenty-five years. She had wanted to shout out then, turn it all back, the short days of the trial, the photographic evidence, exhibit A, exhibit B, the summing-up. Begin again. No: farther, farther back than that.

For a moment, as she leaned against the heavy wooden railing of the gallery, he had turned his head toward her, tilted up. And she had read it there on his face, the apportioning of blame. Just that moment and then the officers on either side had moved him on and down. Anger, even guilt-what she had felt most from him was shame. Not for himself, or what he’d done, but for her.