Freedomland

by Richard Price

  “You hear what Bump said before we came up here today?” Brenda didn’t answer, just leaned into his shoulder, exhausted, the unexpected physical contact producing in him a confusing wave of tenderness. “He said these houses are ticking like a time bomb. Well, you know what this place is like. You ain’t no tourist.”

  “I’m so tired.” It was a whisper.

  “Brenda, I pray to God I can find your boy. That’s number one, you know what I’m saying? But I also pray to him that I do it before somebody around here gets really hurt.” Lorenzo grunted at the action below. “Look at this shit.”

  Two of Corey’s crew had joined him on the asphalt, a knee in each of their backs. Others were rushing over now—kids, the elderly, more cops, and more cops after them—everybody looking hot, half crazy.

  “I don’t know, Brenda, we’re banging our heads against the wall here on this. We’re doing everything we can… If there’s anything else you can tell us about what happened, any way you can help bring all this to an end. Now’s the time… Now’s the time.”

  Brenda stepped back from the window and sat unsteadily in the chair. She dropped her head between her knees and held it there, motionless. Frantically Lorenzo debated with himself whether he should quickly reach out and chin-lift her face to him before she could collect herself or whether the best thing would be to let her come around on her own.

  He took a gamble on restraining himself—no physical contact, no talk to break her train of thought—and when she finally sat up it was as if she were emerging from a lung-bursting dive, mouth open, shoulders lifting to her ears before settling back into her frame.

  “I’m trying, I’m trying,” she pleaded, face twisted in misery. “It’s so hard, you don’t know.”

  12

  Ignoring the cop-hoodie roll-around and mass arrest taking place in front of Martyrs Park, Jesse, tense as a dog tethered outside a butcher shop, continued to stare at the empty surveillance van that had transported Brenda to Three Building almost an hour earlier.

  From her vantage point inside Ben’s Chrysler, which was parked outside the Hurley Street blockade, she also had a clear view of the media camp up behind the train fence. Another press conference was under way, but she just wasn’t interested. After last night’s intimacy, the idea of being just another dog in the pack under this white-hot sky was unbearable. Brenda was hers, and she would not see her shared.

  Stepping out of the car for a cleaner view of Three Building, she unknowingly put herself in the path of Lorenzo’s Crown Victoria, Bump Rosen having to swerve wildly and stop to avoid mowing her down. Without missing a beat, Jesse draped herself over the open driver’s window. “Hey…”

  “Hey,” Bump responded faintly, flushed and breathless from the near disaster.

  “Can you get me inside?” Jesse nodded toward Armstrong, anxiety purging her voice of all charm and play.

  Bump stared at her hands, which, dangling over his lap, were loosely clasped in mock supplication. Reaching into Jesse’s bag, he took out her notepad, opened it to a blank page, and scrawled down a number. “Here.” He handed back the pad. “This is my home phone. My son is there as we speak.”

  “What?” Jesse said weakly, the paper drooping between her fingers.

  “Hey, I did my part. You want to keep going on this? Tit for tat. You have your interview with Terry, then it’s my turn again. Watch your hands,” he said, giving her a two-second warning before peeling out.

  Wheeling almost drunkenly, Jesse came down on her ankle and, spinning completely around on her way to the ground, inadvertently flung her cell phone like a discus, the plastic housing separating into three skittering pieces on the asphalt. There had been moments last night at Brenda’s apartment when Jesse loved her job, her life, so much that she could have cried. Now, a few hours later, she wanted to cut her throat; this twelve-hour journey from soar to crash was all too familiar. She felt her brother’s hands slipping in under her arms, felt herself being floated back to the car.

  “Don’t you think you should call Jose?” Ben asked her. Jesse was sitting glassy-eyed in the passenger seat again, her brother’s cell phone in her lap. “Jess?”

  “Not yet.”

  “He’s waiting.” She didn’t answer. “How about the mother?” he offered.

  “The mother?” Jesse turned to him, blankly.

  “Brenda’s mother.”

  “Shit.” Jesse came to life. “I left the number.”

  “Here you go.” Ben slipped the forgotten Post-it from behind his sun visor. “Better than nothing, right?”

  Elaine Martin, Brenda’s mother, lived on Farraly Place in Gannon, a densely packed land of smallish turn-of-the-century clapboard homes, some onion-domed, some with miniature turrets. The houses were painted pea green, mud yellow, or battleship gray, each structure fronted with a square plug of grass, the overall gloominess tempered by the nylon banners with simple summery images—dolphins, shamrocks, rainbows—that hung, thrusting out into the street, from almost every small porch.

  The house at 144 Farraly seemed to be guarded by a benumbed-looking old man wearing a crushed Dobbs hat, a white shirt, and brown slacks cinched a few inches below his chest. The guy scowled at Ben’s car as it pulled up, Jesse, thinking, Street mayor. She gave him a short wave from the passenger seat. “Hi there.”

  “OK, then,” Ben said to her, yawning.

  “Are you going to wait for me?” Jesse began collecting herself for work.

  “No, I got to see some people, make some calls.”

  “For what.”

  “For something.”

  “For what.”

  He shrugged, and she knew it was for her, something for her, believing it like a child believes in Christmas. “You’re going to be OK here?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said slowly, sarcastically, as she got out of the car.

  “Here.” He passed her his cell phone through the side window. “I’ll call you.”

  As Jesse turned from the car to the gate, she was surprised to see Elaine Martin standing in the shadow of her open doorway. Brenda’s mother was young—early sixties maybe—trim, almost petite, wearing slacks and a top that seemed to be made of the same material as the dove pennant hanging over her porch. She had a feathery nest of gray hair, a fine tracery of capillaries bracketing her nose, and eyes that were swollen from crying, the underrims shining as if smeared with gel.

  “Mrs. Martin?”

  “It’s OK, Angelo,” Elaine Martin addressed the old guy who was still standing outside her gate. “My bodyguard,” she muttered, and walked back into the house, leaving the door ajar.

  The spotless living room was small, made to seem even smaller by the thick, dark furniture, the dense wall-to-wall carpeting, and the ornate frames for the photos and solemn certificates that hung on every wall. Jesse felt like she was in a home where the predominant soundtrack was a deep hush punctuated by the soft, steady ticking of a clock. Brenda’s mother sat on a brown velour couch, Jesse at right angles to her on a matching velour easy chair. The woman was wearing sparkling new low-cut Nikes, suggesting to Jesse that the immaculateness of the surroundings was the handiwork of a youngish widow with too much time on her hands.

  “How are you holding up?” Jesse asked quietly, as she dug out her notebook.

  “My son comes in this morning, he looks like hell, he says, ‘Mom,’ sets me down, says, ‘Better you hear it from me than the television,’ says, ‘Brenda got beat up in Dempsy. The guy stole her car with the baby sleeping in the backseat’…” She trailed off, nodding at the far wall. “So how am I holding up? I’m sitting here three hours waiting for that phone to ring.”

  Jesse nodded, thinking, Ring from Brenda? Why the hell don’t you call her? But she kept her mouth shut, having found over the years that there was nothing so effective as attentive silence for keeping people talking.

  “Every family has its own crazy bylaws,” Brenda’s mother finally added, as if reading Jesse’s mind.
Jesse stared at her like an alert, well-trained dog. “With Brenda I learned the hard way. Let her come to you.”

  Jesse nodded, thinking, Pick up the phone, Mom.

  Elaine Martin plucked a tissue from a box that sat on an end table and swiped at the sheen under her red eyes. “So how is she,” she asked dully.

  “Not great.”

  “Yeah.” Elaine Martin shook her head. “I wouldn’t think so. Danny said she was injured?”

  “A sprained wrist, I think.” Jesse flipped her pad to a blank page.

  “You think I should call her?”

  “That’s, you know, up to you,” Jesse said, inching forward on the sofa.

  “Wouldn’t that be a coup,” she said mildly, distantly, as if thinking out loud. Jesse was thrown, not sure if the mother was reading her mind again, putting her in her place. “You said on the phone that it was important that you talk to me.” Elaine Martin looked at her, waiting.

  “It’s like, I’m trying to write something here,” Jesse began. “I want to help. I want people to know Brenda. I want…” She stopped, as if flustered, as if overwhelmed with her desire to do the right thing, but Elaine Martin stared at her in such a way that Jesse knew to cut the act—there were two generations of cop world in this house.

  “You just want background, right? You want me to ask you to sit right here, next to me…” She patted the couch. “Then whip out some old photo album and walk you through baby pictures, confirmation pictures, wedding pictures, right? There’s nothing important about that. She’s the victim. Do you study the background of the victim to catch the actor of a random street crime? If you do, then that angle of approach has eluded both my husband and my son, I have to say.”

  “Would you like me to go?” Jesse offered calmly, knowing storms like these blew themselves out fairly quickly.

  “You want some background on Brenda?” The mother rode over Jesse’s offer. “Which do you want—the Pollyanna version or down and dirty?”

  “Whatever you think would be helpful,” Jesse said evenly.

  “Whatever I think is helpful? OK, let me tell you a thing or two about my daughter, and you tell me if you think this is helpful, OK?” Her voice was beginning to buckle, despite her icy words. “She’s a bright kid who dropped out of college after one term, an attractive girl who brought nothing but black and Puerto Rican boyfriends into this house, then went off to New York, got into some kind of cult therapy, cut off her family for more than a year, got herself a nice little drug habit, got pregnant—nobody has a clue who’s the father. Anything helpful yet?” Jesse stared at her, not daring to scrawl any of this down. “No,” Elaine Martin said, bobbing her head, “I didn’t think so. And you know why? Because, unless she’s the criminal here, none of this is yours or anybody else’s business. Would you agree?”

  Jesse resisted repeating, “Unless she’s the criminal,” and said instead, “Would you like me to go?” She felt fairly confident that she would ignore this second offer too. In fact, as Elaine Martin seemed suddenly to withdraw, eyes taking on a reflective cast, fingers worrying the fabric of her slacks, Jesse sensed that, in all likelihood, this woman was just getting started.

  “I tell you,” Elaine Martin said, coming around. “You want something for the record?” Her voice was softer now, taking on a burdened timbre. Jesse waited. “Brenda? When she was little, kindergarten age, her father and I one time had a fight. Pete, he used to like his cocktails back then, and it was real bad. He was never a mean drunk, never raised a hand, but it was hell, and I told him that I was taking the kids and leaving—I had had it—and, he started crying, telling me he’ll straighten out. He’s crying, I’m crying. We’re both in the kitchen, and Brenda comes in. She comes in, sees us, and gets this stricken look on her face. And we had a radio in there back then. And the song that was playing was ‘September Song,’ being sung by, if you can believe it, Jimmy Durante. Brenda, she looks at us crying, and I say, ‘Sweetie, isn’t that a sad song? Me and Daddy are crying because that song is so beautiful and sad.’ So of course she starts crying too, so I go and I pick her up and it kind of broke my train of thought there with Pete, so I don’t go through with it. I don’t walk out on him so—which was good—but, Jesus, Jimmy Durante. You know, I have never heard him singing that song on the radio ever again. Not before, not after, OK?”

  Jesse grunted softly, notepad blank.

  “A few years ago, Pete passed on. Brenda came to the house. She takes me into the kitchen, says, ‘Mom, I have something for you,’ and she gives me a tape she made. She likes to make music tapes for people. She gives me a tape, it’s Jimmy Durante singing ‘September Song.’ I have no idea how she remembered, or where she found it, or, better yet, how she even knew who the singer had been. She was five years old. She gives me the tape, says, ‘Mom, if you’re ever missing Daddy too much maybe you could play this for yourself See, all those years she believed me, that we were crying because…”

  Elaine Martin looked off again, blinking furiously. Then it came to Jesse why she was really here—because this house had known Brenda, this woman had known Brenda, and, like a drunk upending an empty liquor bottle onto her tongue, if Jesse couldn’t have Brenda in the flesh anymore, then she would settle, would have to settle for her haunts, former haunts, the people and places that had known her. As Jesse came to this realization, it was all she could do not to ask to be shown Brenda’s childhood bedroom.

  “Cody.” Elaine Martin almost choked on her grandson’s name. “I have seen that child—I have been allowed to see that child—four times in four years.”

  She glared at Jesse, waiting, demanding.

  “Why is that?” Jesse finally asked.

  “Brenda, she goes and gets pregnant. I say, ‘You’re not married? What can I do. You’re over twenty-one, you make your own bed. But just answer me this…Do you know who the father is?’ She says to me, ‘Fuck you.’” Elaine half whispered the profanity. “‘How dare you insult me like that. You’ll never see this baby, I swear before God.’ Bang, she’s gone. So…”

  “Huh.” Jesse threw her another grunt, knowing exactly where they were going now.

  “Well, look.” Elaine Martin stared at a blown-up photo of Danny and Brenda as children that hung over a television console. “Brenda always had a problem with me. The father—well, kids always go for the father. Pete was on the job twenty-nine years, but in this house I was the cop, because Pete—he’d come home half loaded, say to them, ‘Hey whatever you did, I’m too tired, so go up to your room and spank yourselves.’” She shrugged, smiled tightly. “So where does that leave me, do you understand?”

  “Absolutely,” Jesse said automatically. This was drifting further and further from the news and she began to preview possible exit lines.

  “What I don’t understand is…” Elaine Martin began twisting her hands, slid to the edge of the couch. “She hates me, she’s afraid of me, she thinks I’m all over her, but it’s like she can’t get enough of me. She keeps testing me or testing things out on me. Like with the boyfriends. This one’s black, that one’s Puerto Rican, and it was all, you know, to get a rise out of me, because, you know, I’m from a different generation and the first time she pulled that I fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. She brings in this black kid to meet me—who, incidentally, looked totally miserable and uncomfortable, so what she was doing for him I don’t know—she brings in this kid, and I got, I go crazy.”

  Jesse withdrew, thinking briefly about Charles, her tenth-grade Jamaican boyfriend, both of them expending all their energy watching people watch them.

  “I made her break it off as soon as he left the house. And by the way, you know she made damn sure that she showed up with that poor kid when she knew her father wasn’t around, see what I’m saying? So I go nuts, say, ‘Break it off, break it off now’ and she acts outraged, but I could see…” She narrowed her eyes, peered into the distance. “I could see that, beyond all the, the storm and thunder, she couldn’t have
been more happy with my reaction than if I’d crowned her Queen for a Day, so I said to myself, OK, I get it. I’m never falling for that again. She could go out with Malcolm X for all I give a damn, because I have found out, as a parent, that the best way to, to curtail a child’s negative behavior, a child’s action, is to withhold the reaction. But Brenda, she’s tough, she’s stubborn, she’s like her brother. You know her brother, Danny? You’re a reporter. You had to have met Danny.”

  “We met.”

  “Or, like—I’m going back ten, twelve years—she leaves home, goes to New York, like this…” She snapped her fingers. “She’s in some kind of cult therapy, they tell her ‘Your family is poison,’ so she writes us some note, ‘Please don’t contact me,’ cuts us off. But let me ask you something. You cut off your mother like that, do you wind up thinking about her more or less than if you saw her on a natural basis? And let me tell you, cult, no cult, she’d call here once a week maybe, call to fight with me, with me, because she knew, once again, she knew when her father was out and when I was home.”

  “OK.”

  “She sets me up as this monster,” she went on, pressing a clotted tissue to her eyes. “But—Well, I’ll tell you. In all the time we had together?”

  Jesse was thrown by the past tense, the woman saying it like Brenda was dead.

  “In all the time, to be perfectly honest, there’s one thing I did which I would cut off my arm to undo. She must have been close to eighteen, living at home, and I think this might have been what tipped her over to the therapy in New York. I was talking to my sister on the telephone in the kitchen, and I was feeling kind of down that day and I said to her, ‘Jean, I have to tell you, compared to your kids? I’m kind of disappointed in how mine turned out.’ I just said it, and I get this feeling, and I turn around, and there’s Brenda standing in the doorway, looking like—” She cut herself off again, a tissued fist to her mouth. “And there was nothing I could say. I knew anything I said would only make it worse.”