THE RELEASE DATE
May the thirteenth is a bright, crisp blue day, but Louise doesn’t really notice. Her head is bent, her fingers fiddling with the clasp on her handbag, the buckle on her shoes, the strap of her watch on her wrist. Anything to take her mind off the day, off how nervous she feels.
The air, when she finally steps outside, has a cold edge to it, and she pulls her scarf a little more tightly around her neck, watching as a small dark bird pecks at a discarded piece of blossom on the pavement. Peck, peck, peck goes its little beak, and the fragile pink petals disintegrate. Louise looks away, taps her foot once, twice.
She is waiting for her daughter, Mary, to come pick her up. It’s times like this when Louise wishes she’d learned to drive whilst she still could – now, she just can’t face the thought of it. All those blaring horns and lights – no. She wouldn’t be very good at it; her driving instructor back when she was younger said it was clearly something that ‘didn’t come naturally to her’.
But she resents being so dependent on her daughter, especially on important days such as this one.
There’s the screech of brakes and Mary’s little blue car pulls up next to her mother, the window wound down already. ‘Morning, Ma!’ Mary’s voice is cheerful, but Louise can hear the dregs of tension seeping through; she’s known her daughter for forty years, she ought to recognise these things by now. Louise was always attuned to both her children, their moods, their little quirks – until, that is, one
She can’t believe her boy is finally going to be free
was taken away from her.
And today she is going to get him back.
She gets into the passenger seat, brushing off stray dog hairs – Mary has a King Charles spaniel, sweet but dirty – and tries not to wince as her daughter pulls away from the kerb at a rather alarming speed.
‘How are you feeling?’ Mary says, risking a sideways glance over at Louise. Mary herself looks jubilant – her hair bounces on her shoulders, and her back looks straight, ready for the day. Louise, on the other hand, feels terrified.
‘I don’t know,’ she says honestly, ‘I just – what if he’s changed, Mary? I’ve been reading up about it, all sorts, about how difficult they can find it to readjust to normal life after – after being away for so long.’
‘He hasn’t changed!’ Mary scoffs. ‘You only saw him at our visit last month. And the verdict – well, it’s what we’ve all been waiting for. It’s the end of the road, Mum. It’s his freedom.’
Louise looks away, back out at the glistening May day, and bites down hard on her lower lip. She wants to feel the sense of joy, the relief – after all, today is the day that she’ll be reunited with her only son after five years spent in prison for a crime he categorically did not commit – but she is struggling. It’s not that she isn’t thrilled, that her heart hasn’t been longing for this moment ever since that dreadful day five years ago, it’s that she can’t quite believe her boy is finally going to be free. There have been so many ups and downs over the last few years – first the appeal, then the discovery of fresh evidence and the eventual overturning of the fraud conviction – and her emotions feel as though they have been thoroughly through the wringer.
It’s hard to let herself hope, she supposes, until she sees him in person, feels her arms go around him like she’s dreamed of for so long.
‘I’ve invited cousin Clara and her little ones round this evening,’ Mary continues, changing gear as they round the corner and take the left turn that points towards the prison. How Louise hates this journey
– the twists and turns of it, and then the sight of that place, rising to greet them, the awful high grey walls and the security guards and the desperate sense of despair she feels that her son is locked away inside those gates, away from her, alone in the world.
Until now.
‘I thought we could have dinner all together, Chris has bought Champagne for the occasion,’ Mary says, glancing at Louise as though trying to gauge her reaction. Louise doesn’t say anything, but imagines the soft pop of the drink on her tongue, her stiff fingers curling around a glass stem. She hasn’t touched alcohol since Ben was sentenced. She hasn’t felt as though she deserved to. ‘Ma?’
‘That sounds lovely, Mary. But we don’t want to overwhelm your brother, do we? He might not be used to… socialising.’ Louise coughs to disguise the quiver in her voice.
They are almost outside the prison; Mary is slowing the car to a halt, her eyes already darting ahead, looking for a glimpse of her brother.
Ben is thirty-six, now – in her darker moments Louise thinks this is too late for him, that he has already lost five years of his life, but in lighter minutes she knows that thirty-six is young, that there is ample time for him to meet someone, to have children, to forge a life for himself in the flames of his wrongful conviction.
‘ We’re here,’ Mary says gently, and Louise realises that the engine has stopped running, the car is silent and the gates of the prison are looming in her peripheral vision.
She notices her hands are shaking as she unbuckles her seatbelt. Her hands still look unfamiliar to her; the faint liver spots, the space where her wedding band used to be. Ben’s conviction aged her, there are no two ways about it.
Mary encourages her out of the car and they lean against it to wait, their backs against the metal of the doors. The
May sun is filtering through the prison car park, and Louise lifts her face towards it, letting it warm her skin. Closing her eyes, she takes a deep breath, in for three, out for three, and gradually, her hands stop their restless quivering. Against her eyelids, the sunbeams glow red, blue, purple.
‘Here he is,’ Mary says, her voice high and childlike suddenly despite her forty years, and Louise opens her eyes to see him, her son, her Ben, striding towards them across the car park, wearing blue jeans and a yellow sweatshirt, bright against the dull grey of the prison, receding behind him as he walks closer to his family.
He looks the same yet somehow different, the coating of stubble across his chin and cheeks catching the sunlight, and as he approaches them he jerks into a run, and all at once, Louise finds that she is running too, her body reacting without her even noticing, as though the gap between her brain and her limbs has closed up, become all at once non-existent.
The space between mother and son disappears as Ben reaches Louise, and her arms fly out around him, encircling his body like a shield. She finds that she is sobbing, hot, wet tears that flow down her cheeks and nestle into her son’s yellow shirt, and then Mary is there too, her warm body pressed against theirs. They are a unit once again, after all this time.
Louise’s doubts vanish. Her son is still her son – and really, there was never any doubt about it. That night, she sleeps better than she has in five long years, the taste of champagne still fizzing on her tongue.