Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(89)

Claire spends the next four hours at her desk, reading her way through a pile of books. It’s difficult to concentrate—with the video images of Miriam spinning through her mind—but midterms are approaching, so she forces down the sentences. Her mind wanders to Patrick.

Their emails range from favorite movies and books to guessing the lines to songs to ranting about the best fast-food hamburgers to issues of greater seriousness, the loss of parents, the occupation of the Republic. Sometimes their messages are feverish, sent every minute or two over the course of three hours, and sometimes they settle down, not because they don’t have anything to say, but because they don’t need to say anything, like some couple drinking iced tea on a back porch, watching the stars, comfortable with the silence and the feeling of warm nearness between them.

She takes off her glasses and rubs them mindlessly between thumb and forefinger, cleaning them of spots that aren’t there. She needs to stop. Stop thinking about him. He takes her out of the moment. She can’t live in two worlds at once. She needs to focus on the present. Focus. She drops the blinds and bends over her work and bleeds her highlighter through so many pages.

Reprobus has assigned a seven-to ten-page midterm paper due the next class period. She has decided to write about her father. His legacy in the battle for equal rights. She knows this is dangerous. Looking backward. When most people think about their history, she expects, they have a sense of the vertical, like a ladder pushing upward, through the clouds, some of the rungs rotten and unpainted, but otherwise substantial enough to bear their weight. But for her, there is only the rung she hangs from, the clouds below her dark, jagged with lightning.

On her laptop she scrolls through an article, downloaded as a PDF and originally published in the Chicago Tribune, about the Struggle, about the Days of Rage. There is the familiar photo of her father. Standing on the steps of the federal courthouse. Throwing back his head in a howl. Clutching an American flag half-blackened with a tail of flame. Rather than reading more, she lingers for a long time on the photo, double-clicks to maximize it. She tries to put herself there, to step through the screen and into the past, and for the first time she notices other details about the image. The three stone archways yawning in the background. The sun slanting down and making every reflective surface shine as bright as the flaming flag. The windowed entry revealing a muddled reflection of hundreds gathered in the street. The mustached policeman, with one arm outstretched and the other on his holster, moving toward her father. And then, in the foreground, an out-of-focus body, shot from behind, only some of him visible, an upraised fist and two long Willie Nelson braids.

She scrolls down and pauses at another image, and then another, and then another. Dead bodies in the street with rubble all around them, the aftermath of a bombing. A woman who could be pleading or could be fighting with the paramedics who try to help her, her naked torso reddened with what appear to be bites. Close-ups of protest signs, two fingers raised to the sky in a V, claw marks, a gunshot chest, a mug shot of her father defiantly jutting his chin and staring directly into the camera.

On each of them she lingers. In the photo of the dead bodies on the street, she notices the high heel blown off a thick-ankled woman, the way her panty hose melted in places like a rotten spiderweb. She notices the ambulance turning down the street. She notices the man on the curb holding a handkerchief to his bleeding forehead. She notices the mailbox on the corner and the pigeon perched atop it and the man standing nearby, observing the chaos in the street, a man with long braids.

The man with long braids. She scrolls back and squints at the earlier photo of the protest. No doubt many wore their hair long then, but the length appears the same, as does his stocky build.

She returns to some of the other articles—other demonstrations, other cities, other times—and finds him in a few more, this man with the braids, never the focus of the shot, always appearing in the back or foreground of the picture like a chair or tree, something half-glimpsed.

“Who are you?” she says.



She decides to clear her head with a walk around campus. Outside the sky is the same golden hue as the leaves that spin from the trees on the central quad. One of them catches in the hair of a girl who sits on a nearby bench. She doesn’t notice, too caught up in the taste of her boyfriend, their eyes closed, their mouths mashed together.

“What do you think about chemistry?” That’s what she wrote Patrick in an email not long ago.

His response read, “I think, every now and then, you meet somebody. And everything clicks. Everything feels right. You know? Like you’ve plugged into some current. It’s like electricity.”

“I don’t understand electricity,” she wrote back.

The pathways are messy with leaves and she can hear footsteps crunching behind her. She doesn’t like the feeling of being followed and slows so the person will pass her. The footsteps slow to match hers. For a minute she allows herself to be paced—and then spins around.

Matthew catches himself midstride and stutter-steps. He holds up his hands as if she might strike him. It is the closest they have been.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey yourself.”

She starts walking again and he jogs up next to her. He is a whole head taller than she is. He has changed since this morning, out of his TA uniform and into scuffed Dr. Martens, frayed jeans, a pullover fleece. “Where are you going?”