Free Caught by Lisa Moore Page B

don’t get any older after that. The bride would probably be eighteen forever.
    And whatever happened to him on this trip would be his reckoning. Prison had introduced him to the notion of a consequence for every action, and he understood that freedom was the opposite of all that. He was pretty sure the bride had come across the same revelation.
    Can I give you a present for your wedding? Slaney asked. He reached up behind his neck with both hands and undid a chain and then he held his fist over her open hand and the chain with a religious medal dropped out the bottom of his fist. The water was draining out of the bath in the next room, gurgling and being sucked down, and it was a hollow noise.
    St. Christopher, he said. My mother made me wear it.
    Hopeless causes? she asked.
    Travel, he said.
    You need that, she said. I’m not going anywhere.
    I’d like you to have it, he said. He realized it was true. She had gone back to plain-looking.
    I’m pretty well ready, then, she said. She was putting on the chain. She pulled the medal out from her neck and looked at it, and then she dropped it inside the dress and pressed her hand over the spot where it hung.
    There, she said. She asked if he was the fellow who had been in the papers. And he said he was.
    She wished him luck in a very formal way that touched him.
    That night it rained hard. He watched the guests coming back from the wedding, cars crawling into the circular driveway, grinding to a stop in front of hotel entrance. The women poking their umbrellas out the doors of the cars, the wind popping the umbrellas inside out.
    The Papers
    The next morning Slaney could hear the bride and groom through the wall. The rhythm of their conversation had a stilted formality. They sounded forlorn and stoic. Slaney realized he didn’t ever want to sound that way to somebody on the other side of a hotel wall.
    On the golf course, across from his window, a man was about to take a swing. He raised the club and brought it down fast, jerking to a stop before it touched the golf ball, a white, white egg on the grass at his feet.
    Slaney pulled the phone onto his lap. He lifted the receiver and pressed it to his chest. His mother had been ashamed the first time he was caught.
    Such expectations, David, she’d said then. I trusted you.
    He put the receiver back in the cradle. Slaney wanted to talk to her but they had probably tapped her phone.
    He had to get the hell out of the Maritimes. They were closing in.
    His mother never wore jewellery, except her wedding band and the engagement ring, a replacement for the original that had been lost in the hospital when she’d had a hysterectomy.
    They all thought the ring had been stolen from her bedside table after the operation. Slaney’s father got an identical one at Birks in the Avalon Mall because she’d been inconsolable.
    Slaney’s mother could not be felled by a lie. Her trust was a magnetic force field. She used it like a weapon; she shot a beam of trust into the dark from the centre of her forehead and it blinded whatever glanced that way.
    Slaney was tossing the ring and catching it in his fist; he wanted to hear her voice. He thought of the phone in her house in St. John’s, on the hall table next to all the framed school photos. His sisters, year after year, with their sausage curls, white shirts, navy tunics. The boys in striped ties. They had a look, his brothers and sisters. Missing front teeth, mussed hair. The tamped-down grins busting out despite the desired expression: deadpan boredom. A thousand watts of joy and badness.
    Someone had drawn a ballpoint-pen moustache on Slaney’s grade three picture and put it back in the frame. Lonny had a shiner in grade nine.
    The phone would ring and his mother would bustle out from the kitchen, a dish towel on her shoulder. The apron with the embroidered butterfly. Her hand fluttering up to her throat.
    Slaney wanted to tell her he was free. But freedom required a constant watch. His