Freedom’s Child
“Have you seen that cook with the dirty apron?” Rebekah asks a bartender.
“Your hero just went to the back for a smoke,” she answers with a smirk as she dries mugs.
Using too much strength, Rebekah nearly falls through the screen door of the kitchen that leads to the back alley. Outside, the cook sits on top of a few red milk crates near full trash bags, smoking. The vents of the kitchen hum above them. “Thank you,” she blurts out. Suddenly, she feels awkward, with intervals of clearheadedness between the bouts of dizziness.
“It was nothing.” He smiles at her. She feels a flutter to her stomach, unsure if it’s the beer or the fact that she’s never before talked to such a handsome guy in all her life. He takes a crate and places it in front of him, waving her over to sit. “Where are you heading, anyway?”
She crosses her arms, too bashful to look into his eyes. “West Coast. Or as far as I can get.”
“Away from whoever did this to you?” He points to her face.
She clears her throat and looks down. “I had it coming.”
“No woman has it coming.” He winces with anger. “You don’t deserve that.”
“No, I did.” Rebekah looks to him for a moment. “Because I sinned.”
“Everyone sins.” His cigarette goes out and he relights it. “Doesn’t make it right, though.”
“I’m Rebekah.” She holds her arms tight, unsuccessfully trying to hide her body in the snug clothes.
“Gabriel.” He holds his hand out to her.
She stares at it with hesitation for a moment. “Like the archangel.” She puts her hand in his.
“Sure.” He sucks hard on his cigarette. “Like the archangel.”
Rebekah watches him shake his hair from the hairnet, a full head of black and soft locks over jade eyes. He unties his apron to reveal a white undershirt and sleeves of tattoos. “So you’re a cook?”
“Part-time. I help my ol’ man do drywall on the weekends. Helps me pay for tuition at U of L and my rent.”
“My brother went to the University of Louisville!” she squeals. “Did you know Mason Paul? He’s a big-time lawyer now.”
“Never met a Mason Paul, but it’s an awfully big school. Name sounds familiar, though. Oh, wait, sure, I know who he is. He’s the one defending the Becker case all over the TV. That Becker, sure gonna be one hell of a linebacker, I’d say. I knew the name Mason Paul sounded familiar.”
“What is school like?”
“You’ve never been to school?” She shakes her head. Suddenly, Gabriel realizes what kind of girl she is. Must be a Mormon or something like it, the sheltered kind. And now she’s running away, rebelling, naive. Those types come a dime a dozen back at the university. “You’re not missing much.” Her purity attracts him and he doesn’t want to stop staring at her. He can see that her frail bones and soft skin have never been touched in a way that they should have by her age. It’s like looking at the sands of a shore that’s never been discovered by the ocean. But he fears she will drown out there, out in the real world, away from her shielded existence. “You shouldn’t be trying to hitch rides cross-country with truckers. It’s dangerous for girls like you.”
“It’s my only way out.” She rubs the toes of her shoes on the dirt. “Do you believe in God?”
“I believe in something …” He looks away, not wanting to appear strange when he sees her shy away from his gaze. “When was the last time you ate something?”
“Yesterday, I think.” He puts his finger up and walks back to the kitchen. He returns with a burger and fries in a foam container.
“I can’t afford it.”
“Don’t worry about money.” He watches her inspect the food as if she’s never seen anything quite like it. “You need to eat.” She uses both hands at once to shovel the food into her mouth. “Why don’t you let me take you out one day? Like a proper date, before you head off to the West Coast, I mean.”
She looks at him wide-eyed. “I’m not allowed to date boys.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty.”
“You’re old enough to make up your own mind and stop doing what your parents ask of you.”
“I do what God asks of me.” She continues to shove the food in her face. Gabriel takes his apron and goes to use it on her arm, where some ketchup spilled. But she pulls away, fearful, like an injured bird, broken in the sun and being circled by vultures.
Gabriel stares at her with wonder, and though she’s spoken only a few words, he’s fascinated by the mystery that surrounds her. He wants to know her more, he has to know her more. He could see her vulnerability from a mile away and feels the need to wrap her innocence in a blanket and keep it away from the cruelty of a world that wants to take it from her. “I’ll take you to the West Coast.” And as he says the words, he surprises himself. But she’s a reason, the excuse he’s been looking for to drop everything around him and see the world. “I know you don’t know me, but you can trust me.” For some reason, he expected more of a joyous reaction.
“Thank you,” she says, with her eyes down and half a cheeseburger in her cheek.
“Let me take you home. We can leave in the morning.” Really, his intentions are good. “You can have my bed and I’ll sleep on the couch. OK?”
“All right.” She believes this is her prayer come true, that God sent Gabriel to save her from the man who rubbed against her and wanted to take her away. She shows a glimpse of a smile as he takes his apron and throws it in the Dumpster behind him.
“Let’s go.” He leads her through the alley and toward the truck-yard. “I’m parked right over there.” He seems to almost skip in his pace. He stretches his arms over his head and looks up to the night. “Share this moment with me.”
“What?”
Gabriel paces around her and tastes what may very well be freedom for the first time in his life. “Make a memory.”
Rebekah scurries to catch up to him, her french fries shaking in the container. “What are you talking about?” The smile aches her cheeks.
He stops her in her tracks and looks into her eyes. “Aside from family, have you ever held a man’s hand?”
“No,” she says and laughs.
“Good.” He grabs her hands and intertwines his fingers with hers. “Now neither one of us will forget this. Whether we get nowhere or see everywhere, we’re making a memory.” She’s never heard anything so outrageous yet astonishing in her life. The butterflies multiply in her belly and her heart begins to pound. And all of the horrible things that have happened, if only for that moment, seem worlds away.
What happens next is fragmented. The sounds of bones cracking. Gabriel screaming her name. Tasting dirt in her mouth on the ground. Her most cogent memory is when she lands on her back in the trunk of a car, her hands zip-tied in front of her. She sees the vastness of the trunk come down, like a tidal wave crashing over her. She brings her knees to her chin and uses the soles of her feet to keep it from closing. But it works only the first time. And after that, she remembers the panic that consumes her in the trunk. And the brightness of the red taillights from the inside when the car brakes.
Lord, be with me.
7
High School Sweetheart
Dear Mason and Rebekah, though once upon a time, you were Ethan and Layla,
To pick up where I left off last: ah, prom, yes. 1989. If you recall from my last letter, I think I was still floating on cloud nine after Mark Delaney had asked me, that bad boy of William Floyd High School I was assigned to tutor in English in the after-school program. It wasn’t that he wasn’t smart—quite the opposite, in fact—but he spent too much time smoking under the bleachers instead of actually in class. I remember my mother laughing at me because I sat, perched on the kitchen stool next to the phone, just waiting for Mark to call and cancel. I wish you guys could have known my mother; there was nothing not to love about her. Except cancer. You can’t love cancer.
Anyway. Oh, God, I’d nearly forgotten about that dress, something with pink silk and black lace; I think I was going for Madonna’s “Material Girl” meets Desperately Seeking Susan. I wish I still had that old thing. It was the last dress my mother made for me. Consider yourselves lucky, to have missed the biggest embarrassment of our generation: fashion trends of the ’80s. I still cringe at the thought.
When Mark came to my door, my mother didn’t like him right away. He wore one of those tuxedos printed on a black tee with a leather jacket, smelling like an ashtray. His naturally dirty-blond hair was dyed black. What kind of respectable man wears eyeliner? Mother would shake her head and read her Vogue magazine, Estelle Lefébure was on the cover that month, I remember. Mother’s sweet tooth was for fashion, a gene that’d skipped me, apparently. Believe me, I’ve been referred to as a lot of things, but fashionable was never one of them.
I sat in the front of the Dodge Colt, with Matthew, Luke, and John sardined in the backseat, ready to crash prom and spike the punch with Absolut. Depeche Mode’s “Never Let Me Down Again” in the cassette player. It was a big deal back then, to still be in high school and have a car, that wasn’t your mother’s, with a cassette player.
Mother would worry that Mark only wanted to ride my coattails of good grades and being valedictorian into college, and would constantly warn me that if he ever knocked me up, she’d kill me, cut off his pecker, and then kill him too. This point was made quite often.
On the way to school, the brothers passed around a joint. I declined, earning the comments of being a priss, that I was probably glued at the knees, that Mark should have stayed with that easy bitch of a cheerleader named Donna. I can’t smell marijuana or Love’s Baby Soft today without thinking of that night. From the backseat, Matthew kept pulling at my curls (reminder: huge hair was the in thing). Matthew always pulled at my curls. He had that Billy Idol thing going on, the spikes, the leather, fingerless gloves. The bleached hair. He even practiced curling his lip in the rearview mirror and faking a British accent. Ah, to be seventeen again.
Between the comments, Mark would look over at me from the driver’s seat with a particular look, a look that said he couldn’t keep his eyes off me, a look that said he thought he was falling for me, a look that made me weak in the knees. My heart pounded so hard I literally thought I might get sick. And in that moment, I knew I was looking at the most beautiful person in the world.
When we arrived, Cheap Trick’s “The Flame” echoed into the parking lot. The others disappeared somewhere into the side doors of the gymnasium, being that they weren’t in our graduating class. Mark thought it’d be romantic if we stayed outside, always the outlaw. When he pulled me close and began to sway, my body felt weightless. Toward the end of the song, he made a hook of his finger and lifted my chin. It was my first kiss—yes, at seventeen, embarrassing and pathetic, I know. But the times were different then.
And while I’d love to tell you that we entered prom and danced the night away, we actually never made it inside.
8
The Suicide Jar
Today
My name is Freedom and I keep seeing images from twenty years ago, images of Mark’s brains splattered on the kitchen wall back in Mastic Beach.
Anyway, I plan to kill myself soon. Not today, but soon. I’ll wait until the jar is full to the brim with my pills. I pull my script out of a white paper bag. I never eat them. They make me nuttier than I already am. I can’t even pronounce them, why would I take them? I live just fine with the voices. Well, at least until the jar’s full with my pills. I hold it up and try to estimate how many are in there. Two hundred? Three hundred? I don’t know. I’ve never been all that good with numbers. But when I do, when I’m good and ready, I’ll send these letters to Goshen, Kentucky, to my children.
The sun hides behind the comforters I’ve tacked over the windows. The sounds of daytime television scream from behind the walls, from the apartment of Mimi Bruce. It sounds like The Weather Channel. What’s the point in monitoring the weather? She never leaves the house anyway. I look at the clock. 9:13 a.m. Have I really been sitting at this same spot at the table in darkness this whole time? The tips of my nails are dull after tapping them in the same spot for the past six hours. I walk to the kitchen sink and splash water on my face and rub the sharp pieces of sleep from my eyes into the skin of my cheeks and the side of my nose. Near the sink are the remains of that one photo that survived, the one of my dead husband, Mark. If he were alive today, I’d kill him. Again. Or at least that’s what I tell myself.
The smoke alarms go off and I already know why. Mimi. If one smoke alarm in the complex goes off, they all do. I run to the front door, the sun blinding me as I step outside and hurry down the shared balcony to Mimi Bruce’s apartment next door. It’s locked. I step back and kick it in, surprised by my own strength. It makes me feel like I’m in an episode of Law & Order. I see the smoke in the back of the apartment. Mimi continues to watch TV with a cup of coffee in the front living room. She smiles at me. Why smile at a person who has just kicked in your front door? Her dementia’s getting worse. I run into the back where the kitchen is.
Eggs crushed in their shells burn in a frying pan with flames trying to pull the pan down. I grab a pot holder that hangs from the oven door. Black smoke collects on the walls and ceiling above the stovetop. I chuck the pan in the sink and run the water; not as bad as it could have been. But when will it be? is the question. In the corner of the sky-blue counter, coffee drips onto the hot plate, the pot not in its place.
“George Clooney called me.” Mimi walks into the kitchen, oblivious. She says his name like she’s a naughty little schoolgirl. But she’s an eighty-something-year-old, abandoned by the government in this good-for-nothing place because she can’t afford assisted living or anything of the sort. The economy ate her pension, along with her Social Security and medical benefits. Living the motherfucking American dream.
“What did he say to you?” I ask while I take a butter knife and scrape the blackened chicken fetuses from the pan into the sink.
“Who?” She forgets what she said ten seconds earlier.
“George Clooney. What did he say when he called you?”
Mimi stands, confused, in her underwear. She puts her hands in the air for no reason, the loose skin hangs from her arms and she starts to sing, of all the songs in the world, she begins to sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” There’s no song on this planet that I resent more. Sharp white hairs poke from her armpits, and liver spots dance with the beat. And even through the tune, I hear the battery of her hearing aid ring.
I give up on the pan and help her put her arms down. “Let’s go get you dressed, Mimi.” She follows me to her bedroom, neat with photos of her deceased husband and other family members, the ones who never come by to see her. I pick out clean clothes from her dresser and maneuver them around her paper-thin skin. She hums as the polyester covers her face.
“Is George Clooney the one who spins the wheel on Wheel of Fortune?” she asks.
“Yes.” I line the buttons up right. “He’s a hottie, isn’t he?”
“I don’t kiss and tell.” She winks at me and I wink back. I decide not to explain to her the need to have the coffeepot in the coffee-maker when she turns it on. I decide not to explain to her the need to get dressed after she wakes up. I decide not to explain to her the need to not leave pans and pots burning on the stove. You can explain these things only so many times before you have to just give up. I’d complain to the super, but he’s useless. And the calls to her snot-nosed daughter are even more useless, her business skirts so tight that they apparently choke off the blood to her conscience.
“Do I have kids, Freedom?” She remembers my name this time. This makes me sad. I think of her son and daughter, the ones who come by only to raid her medicine cabinets and pillage her jewelry boxes. I warned them once, trying to do Mimi a favor, but it backfired. And now they never come by.
“No, Mimi. You don’t have kids.” I envy her ignorance. There is a piano in her bedroom, the only room with the space in the apartment to hold it. And despite the dementia, she can always remember the right notes to play. I lead her to the bench, an attempt to put her chaotic mind at ease, before she starts talking like a porn star, before the demons of dementia possess her head.
“Do you have children, Nessa?” I never told her my name was Nessa. She flips through a songbook like it’s written in hieroglyphics.
“Nessa … why did you call me Nessa?” I straddle the bench right next to her.
“Who is Nessa? You’re Freedom.” There’s no use asking her anymore. She has the attention span of a tsetse fly, not her fault. But I thought I was more careful than that around her. When did I slip? Twenty bucks says it was some night when I was striding the apartment’s balcony in a drunken stupor. I’m Nessa Delaney! I let it go. The ringing from her head catches my attention once more. I help the hearing aid out of the side of her skull and speak loudly to her.
“I’ll pick up some batteries from the pharmacist this afternoon.” I flip through the pages until we get to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. I put the book upside down on the music stand, for no other reason than selfish entertainment on my part. But Mimi impresses me. She plays it by ear, and I have to wonder how much of it she can actually hear. I take advantage of the somber melody and her deafness.
“You know, Mimi. There will be a day when I am gone, and that day will come before yours. And I’ll not be here to clean the eggs from the stove and to get you new hearing-aid batteries. And it saddens me, to imagine you dying in this home because you won’t know what the sound of the smoke alarm indicates.” I watch her hands create perfect sounds. In my head, I ask God that Mimi takes the whole apartment complex with her. And then I turn to the side of her face. “And when I lie dying next door after swallowing my suicide jar, I promise to think of you. Because I believe you were a good person, a good person who deserved better than what you got in this life. A kind soul, you were. And in some ways, I think you should consider the dementia a blessing. What I wouldn’t give not to remember anything about my life. And after the paramedics take me away, I take comfort in knowing that you will never think of me again, despite me being your only friend in this world.” The music fades with a few of the same notes interrupting the silence. Her hands curl into weak fists down to her lap.
“Would you care to have a cup of coffee with me, Freedom?” Mimi smiles. I appreciate her charm. “We can find that George Clooney on The Weather Channel, if we watch closely.”
“I’d like that.”
9
Freedom and Passion
My name is Freedom and there’s barely room at the Whammy Bar to stick out my chest. Long, gray beards spotted with beer foam protrude from black leather biker jackets. Jailhouse tattoos with the Indian ink that fades to green. Pints of ale spill from the brims. Teeth rotted by crystal meth decorate the bar as they shout over the Allman Brothers Band and Pantera. A cloud of Pall Mall smoke inflates within the walls. And to my left, at the end of the bar, is Passion, though rare is the prostitute who uses her Christian name.
Passion gets stares from the bikers, and not because she’s a pro, but because she’s black; too many of the bikers don’t like black people. But Passion frequented the place long before it was a biker bar. She came with the HOT PIE, where she sets up shop in room number 12. And it’s that time of year when the air gets too cold and the hookers stroll in for a few minutes of warmth. They hide in the corners of the bar, though not for long after the men have a few rounds. They shiver in their fishnets and hover over pots of French onion soup and cups of coffee.
Passion is good people. She’s ripe at fifty, the mother hen to the other runaways and coke-addicted pros. A gold tooth at the front of her smile always catches my attention from the corner of my eye. Her short curly hair and long blue nails emerge from a long and old white faux-fur coat. And even above the loud music, and I mean decibels hardly within the human threshold of volume, I swear I can hear her lick and smack that gold tooth with her tongue. She always smiles. She always looks like she has a secret you’re dying to know. She’s great company, smart and up-to-date on all the politics and science and literature and such, and so I love having her around, someone in Painter I can have an intelligent conversation with. Yes, the only sensible person in the state of Oregon is a whore. Life’s funny like that.
I have a minute to rest. I lean near Passion from my side of the bar. She stares into a newspaper and uses a plastic spoon to stir her bowl. She smells like spearmint gum, latex, and onion soup. There’s a chewed-up wad of gum on the tip of her nail as she eats.
“Obama this, Obama that.” She folds the newspaper away. She must be the only black person in America who hates Obama. For some reason this makes me like her more, because she’s not a conformist. I wipe down the same patch of bar over and over again as we discuss politics.
“Sure, put all the gun crimes in the headlines to back a gun ban. But what good will it do? The guns aren’t the problem.” She blows on her soup from silver lipstick and raises her voice to get a rise. “It’s these crazy-ass cracker white boys who are allowed to have them.” Anyone else might take offense to such a statement. I know she means nothing prejudicial about it.
“I tell you what,” she says as a fat biker named Gunsmoke with a blond receding hairline slams his glass on the bar.
“That nigger Obama ain’t taking my rights from me.”
“Relax, shugga, I didn’t vote for him neither.” She raises her glass to Gunsmoke, but he looks away. Passion and I share a smile. I go to the blond and take his mug to the draft taps. Foam falls from the Pabst Blue Ribbon faucet.
“Passion, would you watch the register?” Passion’s practically management here. “Gotta go switch cans in the basement.”
“You got it, honey.”
I slip my way through the crowd with a few iron elbows to the door beside the restrooms where it says “Employees Only.” The hallway smells like urine after a few courses of antibiotics and crack, the smell of sweet hay. Not that I’ve ever tried crack, but let’s not be naive.
I hold my breath. Beyond the door, a hallway in darkness. Overhead are caged lamps that flicker, dim graves to fruit flies that failed to follow the sweet fumes of liquor into the bar. The sound of the music from inside is muffled behind the walls. I walk slowly. I hate hallways, I’ve always hated hallways, especially dark ones. I focus on these lamps, and I’m reminded of an interrogation room back in New York. The hall expands. The space grows darker. The music becomes distant. And suddenly I’m back in that interrogation room twenty years ago. Before I was Freedom Oliver. Before I met the whippersnappers. Before I went crazy. Back when my name was Nessa Delaney.
* * *
“Nessa, be smart,” said one officer. He and his partner circled around me like buzzards. Their eyebrows formed V’s, faces a shade of ruby with frustration. With each hour that passed, their shirt cuffs moved an inch higher on their arms. “Now, I know you don’t want to end up having this baby in prison, do you?”
“Go to hell,” I grunted, cuffed in a steel chair with the short leg, the one that makes the suspects uncomfortable and antsy. I’d seen enough NYPD Blue on TV to know the trick. The officer slapped me across the face. It stung more and more with each backhand, until it actually burned my ears.