answer her question, but there was just more silence leavened only by shifting and Quakers pinching at their damp clothes.
After another few minutes, he saw a tall gray- haired man turn and shake the hand of the person next to him, and then there was a sort of collective exhalation and everyone in the room turned and shook the hands of the people around them. The woman with the fidgety kids turned around to face him and offered him a damp red hand, and he smiled shyly and shook her fingers and nodded his head, wondering if there was some password he should know to say.
The man who had shaken the first hand stood and went to a table in the gap in the center of the room. He read some announcements. Someone named Betsy in the hospital who could use a visit, bulletins from various committees about an upcoming peace fair, a walk to protest the war, buses to a rally for Tibet.
The crowd drifted slowly toward the door. More handshaking, hugging. People catching up and remarking on the strange weather, stopping to eat gingersnaps and sip from tiny cups of cider from a table by the door. Michelle sat, not moving, her head down, though people touched her shoulder and whispered to her. Ray forced himself up and across the room and finally sat on the same bench at what he hoped was a respectful distance. When he was settled in she lifted her head but turned to watch people knotted at the door. She gave a shy wave to an older woman with a broad smile who might have been Filipino.
“Hello, Ray.”
She didn’t look at him. Her voice was low, and he moved closer and she didn’t shift away. He looked down at her knees, conscious of his own quickened pulse. She had on a long skirt and the brown sweater he had seen her in when they met. They let a minute go by as the room emptied.
She said, “I worked in a lawyer’s office in Massillon. You know where that is?” She kept her eyes on the door. “No. Anyway.” The last people drifted out the door and they were alone.
“I fell in love with one of the associates. I was twenty- two.” Empty, the room echoed with her voice. She lifted her hands and looked at them. Maybe seeing something that told her how long ago twenty- two was. “He was overwhelming. Smart, so smart. Funny and fun to be around. He took me places.” Now her eyes went down. “We did a lot of coke. At first it was just fun, made us sharper and funnier and I thought more passionate. What it looked like at the time.”
Ray was conscious of holding himself still, regulating his breathing. He waited, and she pulled her sweater around her.
“Then it became about the coke. Somehow. Everything turned on our getting high. We needed it to be together. He began to neglect everything else. Court dates, meetings. They were going to fire him.” She shook her head, smiling at the wonder of it. “Me, too. My mom got sick. Cancer. It didn’t even register. Everything sort of shrank to this point.” She made an open circle with her hands, closed it.
“ We were full of this self- righteous anger, you know, just pumped up by the blow. How could they treat him this way, and how stupid and slow they all were. Life was so unfair. So when he told me about these accounts, and how he knew how to get access to them… Anyway, I stole sixty- eight thousand dollars.” The smile again, a joke at her own expense. “And it was gone in, like, moments. It seems like so much money when you think of it in a pile. What you could do with it. In Massillon? But it came and went. Most of it. And it took them about a month to figure out what happened.” Her voice got flatter now. Someone else’s story. Ray took off the coat and threw it across the seat behind him, sweat in a line down his back.
“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
