“Were you too old to be my friend?”
“Listen, Adrian.” The old man sighed and faced him straight on. “Life changed for a lot of us when you went away. Liz threw herself into life and the living of it. For me, it was the opposite. I didn’t care to see colleagues or be with friends. I didn’t care to care. Maybe, it was depression. I don’t know. I felt as if the sun had cooled or the blood in my veins had somehow thickened. I’ve become adept at analogies and could offer a hundred. Yet, it was my wife, I think, who said it best. She stuck it out for two years, then told me that, even at seventy-two, she was too young to live with a dead man. After she moved out, I barely left the grounds. I had my food delivered, laundry taken out. I drank, slept. Until this week, I’d barely left the house in ten years.”
“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.