1
Liam
Out—just like that. Like I was never in.
Out, like the shootout never happened, like I never got locked up, like three years haven’t gone by.
Out, and that gray, unyielding, bleak sky never looked more beautiful.
“Hey, asshole, get in!”
I straighten up off the chain-link fence, sucking the last dreg off my cigarette and throwing my arms wide as Margot’s beat-up silver Miata comes squealing up to the curb. Despite the plunging autumn temperatures, she’s got both windows down and is leaning across the passenger seat.
“Baby sister,” I say, swinging my arms through the window and giving her a grin. “Just fucking look at you.”
“Look at me?” She rolls her eyes, but the years really have been kind to her, kinder than they tend to be to girls like her in towns like this. Her huge brown eyes, which used to give her this eerie look of an animate porcelain doll, have gotten deeper and sharper, and time has filled her hollow cheeks and given her some kind of glow. She looks healthy, and happy. Two things I’ve been praying for, night after night, for three years. “Look atyou!”
“Yeah?” I glance down at myself. The years have done things to me too. Put ink on my arms, my hands, my ribs. Pumped muscle into every inch of me, given me the kind of cool, predatory walk that used to send me scurrying into litter-strewn alleyways. When I went away, I was still the young one, the punk nobody really took seriously. Now?
“Crazy,” says Margot with a shake of her head. “All grown up. A realmannow.”
“Alright, alright, shut up.” I flick my cigarette butt over one shoulder and salute the guards along the fence with a middle finger. They stare past me, stone-faced. “Thanks for the hospitality.”
“You’re such a twat,” Margot says, smiling nervously and waving in apology to the guards. “Come on, I’m freezing my ass off.”
I get in and, just like that, we’re off, speeding down the cold-slicked black highway toward home.What used to be home.Is it still, now I’ve been gone so long? My absence might just be a wound, bleeding and hollow for a minute, healed up and whole after all these years, like I never was, or never went.
For its part, this place hasn’t changed at all. The prison’s way off beyond the outskirts of town, a fugly compound slouched low in the wet, dismal brown grass of the foothills.
As it fades into the rearview, I feel this wound-up tension slowly going out of me. I’ve become so used to it I didn’t even realize it was still there, in me: drumming my fingers on my knee, tapping my heel, chancing a look over each shoulder every few minutes. It’s not fear, really. It’s something more animal, more instinctive. Something I can’t name, and don’t want to.
“It’ll go away,” Margot says, like she’s reading my mind. We’re four years apart, but I’ve always felt like we’re twins, walking the same wavelength most of the time, understanding the unspoken. “You know, that fidgety shit. Like Dad, remember?”
Fuck. I miss Dad, but I don’t say that either. I know Margot gets it. He died my first year in prison. Used to visit me all the time, whenever he could. That gruff exterior would crack the minute he saw me, and suddenly it was like his life goal just to get me to smile.
“Yeah. I remember.”
He’d done time back when me and Margot were kids, a lot more than me, and for a lot worse shit. When he got out he was like this for a long time too, always on-edge and wired, always searching the shadows, ears perked for that high, nearly-imperceptible, ever-present whine of danger.
I blow on the glass and rub it clean with my elbow.
“What, need a better view of this shithole?” Margot asks, without real heat.
I grunt noncommittally.
I know she’d get out if she felt she could, maybe go to a bigger city, maybe go out west. She’s an artist, and a really talented one at that. For the last few years, I’ve always thought it was me she was staying for. Maybe now she’ll finally go.
The thought fills me with more dread than I care to acknowledge.
“Nothing’s changed,” she says. “Well, wait, almost nothing—that old vintage movie theater? They’re tearing it down.”
I close my eyes, gut-checked unexpectedly by that.Shouldn’t be a surprise.No, it shouldn’t. For a lot of people that place is sacred. We all grew up around it. We all went and bitterly watched old films to please our folks on holidays, or else went for vintage slasher-horror marathons on Halloween and held hands in the dark. It’s a landmark, that old theater, in more ways than one. And for me, it’s…
A memory; one that tastes like whiskey and strawberries. One I’ve revisited so many times these last few years I’ve worn it thin. It’s lost its veneer and now I’m missing details: what was she wearing that night? White dress, red flowers…or no, she was in jeans, wasn’t she? The ones that turned her long legs to blue ribbons.
I keep seeing her up in the projector room, just like I did that night, like it’s playing on old film, bright and vivid but fuzzy at the edges.
She’s running from me down this thick-carpeted hallway, the whole world muted and distant, and I’m following, her laughter left in the air, and the smell of her perfume; then I finally corner her there. A film is playing, hard flickering lights on the moth-eaten screen far below, and I don’t remember what it is.
