Free Trinity by Kristin Dearborn

headed down the hallway, reading door numbers much slower than necessary. His fingers trailed along the wall as he walked. Why put all the numbers in the hundreds for a single story building? He turned the hat over and over in his hands. He should have left it in the truck.
    Room 127. A neat hand lettered sign, the ink faded, read: Caroline Slade.
    The door stood open. He hovered outside it awhile, took a few deep breaths then forced himself through the doorway.
    Instead of cold water, medicinal smells and the sounds of the Home Shopping Network washed over him. White walls, white bed sheets—adrenaline pumped through him and he wanted nothing more than to run. Out of here, away from her, away from the white, back to the hum. He gulped in a mouthful of air, then another, then remembered what the prison shrink told him. He closed his eyes. Deep breath through the nose. Just like that. Okay.
    Caroline looked more like a mummy than a human, her slight form a petite mass under thin blankets. She looked eighty instead of fifty and wore a blonde wig which removed, instead of added, dignity.
    He wanted to turn, go back to the desk, explain to the girl that they made a horrible mistake, this wasn’t his mother. But there, on the night table was a picture of him with his cousin, standing outside the Boston Museum of Science. This was the picture she chose? He and Kevin were about ten at the time, and they’d both made horrible faces at the camera. Somewhere, at his Aunt’s insistence, there was a corollary photograph where they both smiled mom-friendly smiles.
    “Mom,” he tried to say, but nothing came out. He swallowed, aching for a glass of water, and said it again. She turned to him so slowly he could almost hear her tendons creak.
    “Valentine?”
    “Yeah.” He stepped closer, setting his hat in a chair. The life support unit sat at her side like a sentinel, looking white and futuristic in the artificial light.
    “I thought they had you,” she said.
    “I got out. This morning,” he lied, not wanting her to know he let twenty-four hours pass before he came to her.
    She smiled. Her eyes looked so dull. They were blue, like his, but much darker. When he was younger, she’d called his eyes husky-blue.
    “I thought they’d never let you go.”
    Not sure how to answer, Val said, “They did.” He floundered for something else to say. “And here I am.”
    She touched his hand with one of her own: hot, dry and delicate like paper. Her nails were painted a light pink and it looked like a sick joke.
    “I thought once they had you, they’d never let you go.”
    “But here I am. My lawyer’s pretty good. He wouldn’t let them keep me any longer than the six years I promised them.”
    “You promised them?” Caroline looked worried, but a minute furrowing of her brow was all she could muster.
    “Well, I was sentenced.”
    “You poor boy.” She squeezed his hand. “Did they hurt you?”
    “No,” he lied again. “It really wasn’t all that bad.” And he closed a door in his head, keeping the memories at bay.
    “They hurt me when they took me.” At first he thought she meant one of the times she’d been picked up before he was born, once for drunk and disorderly, three times for DUI, and once for prostitution, which had been thrown out of court for lack of evidence. He should have figured it out sooner. She meant a much different They. The kind of They that warrants a capital T . He guessed if she still had her alien fantasies, the drugs couldn’t have her too far gone. Val’s attention was pulled by the next question. “You haven’t seen that girl, have you, the one who got you in trouble?”
    More lies. They got easier and easier. “Nope,” he said, sliding his eyes down to his hands.
    “Good.”
    “I might look her up, though.”
    “The girl’s trailer trash.”
    “She can’t get me in trouble now.”
    “Girl like her can always get you in trouble.”
    Val tasted Rich’s shotgun again and