Thief by Maureen Gibbon Read Free Book Online

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 programshe’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 afeeling 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