Read Online Thief by Maureen Gibbon - Free Book Online Page A

because it became immediately clear to me how genuinely moved Breville was to see me. I couldn’t remember a time someone looked
     happier to be in my presence.
    “Tell me what it’s called,” he said, leaning forward into the aisle, sitting on the edge of his chair.
    “What what’s called?”
    “Your perfume.”
    “Paris,” I said.
    “It’s nice,” he said. “It suits you.”
    I nodded at that but didn’t say anything, and we sat there, not talking for a little while. Just looking across the aisle
     at each other, taking the other person in. And if you can believe that it felt natural to be sitting in a room with cages
     on the windows and being watched by any number of prison guards, then perhaps you will be able to understand when I say I
     felt some kind of pure happiness just then.
    For most of the two-hour visit, Breville and I didn’t say anything of consequence, not about his crime or my rape. Instead
     we talked about places we had traveled and adventures we’d had. He couldn’t believe I’d been to Kadoka, that I’d spent a night
     in Interior, South Dakota, that I’d eaten shrimp at the same fry shack where he’d had many dinners in the summers, or that
     I knew exactly which Happy Chef Restaurant he’d bused tables at when he was fifteen and desperate for cash.
    When I told him about the place I’d grown up in, I said, “It’s probably not all that different from Kadoka, except it has
     the Appalachian Mountains around it.”
    “Tell me about someplace else, then,” Breville said. “Anyplace that isn’t like Kadokah. You don’t ever want to go back there,
     do you?”
    “No, I don’t want to go back.”
    So I told him instead about the month I’d spent in Nice when I was twenty, and about how the beach was all rocks, and about
     how I’d nearly drowned one evening when I went into the sea and the water was rolling hard at the drop-off . It had taken
     all my strength to break free of the turning.
    “How many oceans have you swum in?”
    “The Mediterranean, the Adriatic, the Atlantic, and the Pacific.”
    “I was once to the Pacific,” Breville said. “Never the Atlantic. But I swam the Missouri and the Mississippi.”
    “I’m saltwater but I knew you were fresh,” I said, and he laughed, as I’d meant him to.
    “Do you think it was fated that we meet?” Breville asked.
    “I’m not sure.”
    “I think it was fated. I don’t know how else it could have happened. I’m a thief and a rapist, and look at you. Look at what
     you are.”
    “What am I?”
    “You know what you are. How else could we have come together?”
    “I don’t want to believe it was fated that I relive my rape,” I said. “If that’s fate, I’m not interested.”
    “I’m sorry. You know I didn’t mean that part of it.”
    “I think it’s more likely coincidence,” I told Breville. “I don’t know. What does your hand say? What do the lines of your
     hand say?”
    I showed him then from across the aisle the little horizontal lines under the side of the pinky finger that supposedly indicatedthe number of serious relationships or marriages a person had. I had two lines, but Breville had three.
    “You’re more fickle than I am,” I said.
    “Which is the life line?”
    “The one that snakes down your palm and wraps under the thumb,” I said. “Here are the heart line and the head line,” I said,
     again showing him my hand, tracing the lines. “And that’s my psychic cross.”
    “What is?”
    “This cross,” I said, and I sat as far forward in my chair as I could and traced the intersecting lines at the center of my
     palm.
    He leaned close to see as I lightly carved out the cross. He reached out a hand then, and for the briefest of seconds he touched
     the center of my cross with his index finger.
    “Breville, to the guard.”
    His name seemed to be called at the exact moment he touched me, and quickly I realized that we were watched closely. Breville
     sighed and stood up