Page 2 of Slander
There is no freedom for me, not really.
They process the paperwork for an hour while I sit on a bench in a hallway, and the hum gets louder.
My leg won't stop. My knee's going like a piston, and I can't make it quit, and Dag's wife sits down beside me.
Esperanza, sharp and small and the only person all week who's talked to me like I'm a man and not a verdict waiting to happen.
She puts her hand flat on my knee and stills it without a word. Just presses down until the engine of me goes quiet under her palm.
"You did good in there," she says. "You stayed quiet. That's all we needed from you."
I want to tell her I don't remember staying quiet. I don't remember most of the few days we were in there.
I remember pieces, bright hard pieces with nothing connecting them—the flag in the corner, the court reporter's red nails, a juror in the back who wouldn't look at me, the water in the pitcher I wasn't allowed to pour myself.
The days have holes in them. The last few months are mostly holes, and the holes are getting bigger, and the parts that aren't holes are too loud.
There's a name in one of the holes.
I don't go after it.
I've learned that much—not to go after it, because when I go after it, the whole thing lights up, and I can't get out for hours.
A name, a wedding, and a man named Doran with his hand on the small of her back, and the certainty, thecertainty, that had me by the throat for months.
That she was mine. That something was being taken. That I was the only one who could see what was coming for her, and I had to?—
The hallway tips.
Esperanza's hand is back on my knee. "Breathe,mijo. You're all right. Breathe."
I breathe. The hallway rights itself, more or less. The name goes back in its hole.
I didn't kill three men over a woman.
I want that on a record somewhere, even if the only record is me, and I'm the least reliable record there is.
I killed three of Bembe's men because they were Bembe's, and Bembe had his sights set somewhere he had no business setting them, and somebody had to.
That part was clean.
That part is the one piece of the whole rotten spring that still makes a kind of sense to me when I lay it out in the dark—the club's safer with those three in the ground, and I'm the one who put them there, and I'd do it again sober as a judge.
It's the rest of it that doesn't make sense.
The reason I went. The fire that drove me. The woman I can't think about without the floor tipping. That's the part that's broken. Not the killing. Thereason.
I just can't always tell, anymore, which part of me is which.
My mother's waiting at the end of the hall.
I see her before she sees me, and for one second she's just a woman standing in bad fluorescent light, small, gray coming in at her temples that wasn't there a year ago, and I put that there.
I know I put that there.
Then she turns and sees me, and her whole face breaks open. She crosses the floor and takes my face in both her hands the way she did when I was a boy.
Her hands are shaking, and she doesn't saythank the godsand she doesn't sayit's over.
