The men arrived, boots thumping, chains rattling, and then Axe-Man was there with a shovel and we were digging together even though I probably could have stopped.
My breath caught and shattered on the hard edge of a sob as my fingers wrapped around the lid of a steel box. Priest was there then, and Cyclops, prying it out of the ground with me but yielding it to my hold when it was free.
My hands trembled so badly, I couldn’t even fumble with the lock. Nova took it from me gently, placed it on the ground and produced his flash ivory handled gun to shoot the lock off before returning it to me.
I sucked in a deep breath and pried the lid off.
A gun sat in the middle, so innocuous, just an object, but it was the key to everything, the same model as Zeus’s gun, a cop’s gun, and the real weapon that killed Riley Gibson.
My eyes burned so badly, I couldn’t see the faces of the men around me as I lifted my head to look at them and said, “He’s free. Oh my God, Zeus will finally be free.”
Cressida
* * *
A month went by in the blink of an eye, and all I was, was sorrow.
Now that the evidence how been found to clear Zeus’s name, Mr. White had set the ball rolling on getting him released. I’d had this image of him getting out the next day after finding the gun and the box of documents hidden behind a painting in Danner’s old ranch home, but the law didn’t work like that. Still, with nothing left to rally against, waiting for Danner to be processed and persecuted, and Zeus to be free, I succumbed to my internal injuries and went into a kinda coma.
I knew the passing of the days by the people who were scheduled to keep me company.
Lou every weekday afternoon with the babies, except for Thursday when she went to the Autism Center.
Harleigh Rose on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, often with Danner in tow who played his guitar for me until I cried. I think they thought tears were good for me.
Maja and Hannah on Thursday sometimes along with Cleo and Lila, trying to make me laugh, but if a funny bone could break, mine had, and I never did.
Zeus on Saturday; every Saturday, I’d go to him for the full length of his visiting hours, all three of them. He’d talk and talk about King, and it was the only day I really spoke and remembered what the sound of my own voice felt like in my ears. We talked about King as if he was alive, and it was the only good I found in any days that followed his passing.
The brothers took turns too, less organized, one or more of them “poppin’ by” because they were bored, in the neighbourhood, or had nothing to do. I didn’t believe them, and they didn’t care, even when I didn’t talk. They just put old movies they knew I loved on the TV and read to me, badly, aloud from books they’d never once read.
But like I said, a month went by in a blink of an eye, and all I was, all I remember of that time, was sorrow.
Zeus
* * *
Prison’s not somethin’ a person gets used to. Doesn’t matter how many years ya spend there—not how many times a man’s in or outta the place—prison weighs on the body always in strange ways, like the air against your skin durin’ an electrical storm. At all hours you could feel the wrongness of bein’ imprisoned in a six and a half square metre concrete cell with hundreds of other men who’ve committed any number of despicable crimes for a variety of honourable and dishonourable reasons.
You felt like cattle, the kind kept on the massive ranches in the southern United States where it’s cheaper to let ’em die of heat stroke than install air conditioning in the barns. It felt industrial and animal in a strange tandem that just equalled something wrong.
I hated that wrongness and the feel of it on me like I could never get clean of it.
Took years after I got out the first time to rid myself of that current on my skin, and only when I met Lou did it truly disappear.
There was worry, as I let the guards strip search me one more fuckin’ time and collected my meager belongings, that the wrongness would haunt me again on the outside. That I’d meet my babies for the first time and the connection wouldn’t sink in my heart ’cause the electromagnetic pulse of prison would cancel it out. That I’d hold my woman and love my woman and somehow not be enough ’cause there I was, a demon fresh outta hell, and she was everything angel.