Punishment by Linden MacIntyre

“Hello Neil,” she said and continued on without me.
    “If you have a sec,” he said to me, then leaned close. “What did you make of that?”
    “Who knows,” I said, and tried to move on.
    He caught my arm. “Hang on a minute.” He looked around, then dropped his voice to a whisper. “There was a rumour going around that you were going to testify for that fellow. Put in a good word for him, so they’d go easy on him. I didn’tbelieve it for a minute, knowing how close you and Caddy were.” He laid a hand on my shoulder, squeezed. “Anyway, he saved us all a lot of trouble.”
    “Not sure I follow, Neil,” I said. I was genuinely puzzled.
    “After that performance? They’ll throw the book at him.”
    “We’ll let the system do its job,” I said.
    He laughed. “Yes, the system. We know all about the system, don’t we, Tony.”
    Outside Caddy was waiting in her car, engine running, windows up as reporters tried to get her to speak to them. There was a television camera. I pushed through but the car door was locked and I was trapped for a moment. “Sir, is it true you knew Strickland in prison?” someone shouted. The door lock popped and I climbed inside. The car was moving even before I had the door closed.
    “They’re like vultures,” she said.
    “Just doing a job,” I said.
    “What did he want?”
    “Who?”
    “You know who. That Neil.”
    “He heard a rumour that I was going to go to bat for Strickland, before sentencing.” We drove in silence. She was staring straight ahead.
    “So aren’t you curious?” I asked at last.
    She shrugged. “I can’t imagine what you could say.”
    “His lawyer thinks I could help him. He got involved in something when he was in prison.”
    “I can imagine.”
    “Anyway, I said no.”
    “I see.”
    We drove away in silence. Then she sighed. “So where does this leave everything?”
    “In limbo for a while,” I said. “They’ll have to prepare for a preliminary hearing. The Crown was hoping to avoid that. Just to get it over with.”
    “Weren’t we all,” she said.
    I stared out the window at the leaden sky. There was so much I could have told her, so much I could have predicted about the weeks and maybe months ahead. But I realized that we were strangers, she and I. Estranged by time and life, our only link a distant, painful memory. Childhood, really. I studied the dark spruce trees that lined the road and was taken by surprise when I felt a surge of grief I’d long assumed to have gone cold, like an old volcano. I almost spoke but caught myself. Tears welled. She turned down a gravel road.
    “Stop the car for a minute,” I said, and opened the door while the car was still moving. She hit the brakes and looked at me, alarmed. “Is there something wrong?”
    I walked behind the car and just stood there, breathing deeply, saying to myself, “Get a grip for Christ’s sake.” Then I blew my nose. Then went back, sat, looking straight ahead. “I’m okay now.”
    “If you ever want to talk …” she said.
    ——
    Standing at my door as she drove away I watched the car diminish in the lane. It’s a long lane that disappears in a turn that is obscured by spruce and juniper and tangled hawthorn. The engine sound was gone before I lost sight of the car and it seemed almost ghostly, floating off in silence. I became acutely conscious of a gathering breeze, and of a stinging on my face, granular snow thickening the air around me. Then the wind sound hushing trees, the caressing
whoosh
, and in the distance, beyond the field, the dark sea rumble. It was like I’d never been alone before.
    I told myself:
This is what you wanted. You wanted solitude. And how many days did you imagine this peaceful emptiness, this liberation from the grim ugliness of the limestone walls, chain-link fences, barbed wire, grimy institutional pastels
. The names rolled through my head: Kingston, Joyceville, Millhaven, Collins Bay. Once proud, lovely place names now