Freedomland

by Richard Price

  “Stay together,” Karen said, producing a flashlight and leading them onward. The sound of their cautious, shuffling gait, bouncing off the walls of this hollow hall, came back to them in a great scraping echo.

  “I’m so tired.” Brenda’s words were as soft as breath, her head tilting back until her throat arched upwards. “What do you want from me?”

  Karen’s flashlight picked up a child’s patent leather dress shoe, laceless; a dead pigeon, its breast torn open, its wings splayed and matted with blood; another shoe, ancient in style but with an untrod sole. The women seemed to be consciously clustered around Brenda, as if they were all physically involved in propelling her forward, Jesse keeping separate, unable to tell if Brenda’s feet were even touching the ground. There was another furry streak across the floor, and this time Jesse got a good look—not a rat, as she feared, but a cat.

  They turned a corner; the building seemed to be composed of four long halls, and they came on a large pile of shoes, child-sized, with virgin soles and then on a pile of porcelain sinks. Along one wall, showerheads were affixed, spaced three feet apart, and against the opposite wall stood a row of toilet stalls, the heavily varnished saloon-style swinging doors dangling from their hinges, the toilets seatless, although one bowl was humming with flies.

  “This is such a sad place,” Karen said, playing her light across the floor, picking out more children’s shoes, an empty wine bottle, another half-gutted bird. Brenda seemed to float behind shut lids, sleepwalking through the ruins, the women around her expressionless. Karen’s flashlight picked out a pajama top, a bar of soap with teeth marks, the fire-curled pages of a telephone directory.

  “Whenever I come here,” Elaine whispered hoarsely, “I swear I can still hear them.”

  “Hear who?” Jesse asked, thinking, Whenever I come here? Another streak shot past and Jesse made out a flash of fur, the reflected gleam of an eye—another cat, the place crawling with them.

  “Such a sad place,” Karen repeated, her delivery overlarge, theatrical, her words caroming off the walls, mingling with the snare-drum shuffle of their steps. It’s here, Jesse was thinking. Whatever they had been working toward, walking toward in the last few hours, it was right here.

  They turned the corner again and came into what must have been the communal bedroom—a few white-enamel-painted iron bed frames scattered about upright and dozens of others piled in a jangle of rods and legs at the far ends of the room, as if a giant hand had swept them up and shoved them in the corners. Jesse could see that the beds had once been laid out in rows, the smudged impressions of the headboards still marking the long walls at regular intervals.

  The sun, through dirt-laden windows, dappled the floors in this hall, too, revealing a fleet scatter of eyes and fur, the light gradually yielding to the walled darkness above. Then another gibbous disk beamed through a chimney hole in the roof, hanging over the floating darkness and barren sleep hall like a true moon suspended in a starless night.

  Karen’s flashlight picked out more mementos and debris—a washcloth stiffened into its folds, spray-paint cans, crumpled cigarette packs, a headless rubber doll, another doll with its eyes poked out, a Bible, a clip-on tie, a slipper, and another half-eaten pigeon, most likely the handiwork of the cats.

  “God, I hate this place,” Karen growled. “I swear they’re still here.” Jesse kept to the shadows, but stepping in something soft, she recoiled, edging out of the hall to the shadow line. Karen took Brenda’s hand. “We’re gonna have a look around,” she said to her. “It’s a little dangerous, OK? Half these floorboards can go any minute, so I want you to stay in here and wait for us, OK?”

  “Stay where.”

  “Make yourself comfortable.” Karen, walking backwards, held Brenda’s hands and led her to one of the upright beds, boosting her up on the bedsprings, leaving her legs dangling.

  “What are you doing?” Brenda asked, dreamily.

  “Just wait for us,” Karen said, backing away again.

  “I can’t be alone,” Brenda said, half to herself, but when Jesse stepped back into the light of the sleep hall, Marie and Teenie gestured for her to stay put. The other women retreated to the shadows near Jesse, quietly toeing the debris, waiting, their faces tense, no eye contact. Brenda sat slumped on the edge of the bed alone, like an offering left on an altar, the hall seeming now to Jesse twice as vast and desolate, as if Brenda’s lone presence gave it its true scale.

  And then Jesse heard it. The crying. At first she thought it was Brenda, who sat with her back to them, but there were no corresponding convulsions in her frame. And again, crying—thin, plaintive, childlike wails that froze Jesse’s heart. As the feeble cries grew in definition and volume, it occurred to Jesse that these ghostly lamentations hadn’t just begun but were a constant presence in this building, which had over the decades housed thousands of forgotten children, and that she was only now hearing them because the Friends of Kent were, for the first time since entering this sound-sensitive hall, embracing silence.

  The other women kept their eyes to the ground. Elaine started whispering to herself, an infinitesimal rant, with the cadence of a memorized, speedily delivered prayer. Karen lit a cigarette, extinguishing the match between her fingers.

  Finally Brenda heard it. She sat up straight, jerked her head to either side, then slowly lifted her chin to the false moon, her mouth agape. The cries—tiny, penetrating—seemed to multiply. Brenda crossed her bandaged hands over her heart.

  Frightened, Jesse turned to Karen but was fended off with an out-thrust palm. Brenda slowly unrolled herself onto the rust-fused bedsprings until she was flat on her back. Inside the wails now, Jesse started hearing half-formed words, piteous entreaties. Brenda slid her headphones in place, blindly probed for the “Play” button. Marie, seeing this, hissed “Fuck,” but a moment later Brenda removed the phones and, still staring at that oblong moon, seemed to let the ghostly cries wash over her.

  Then Jesse heard one word, distinctly, “Mommy,” and it turned her blind. Karen, head bowed, closed her eyes and pressed a knuckle to her lips, as she had done standing in front of Cottage 6. She grabbed Elaine’s hand. A cat flew past Jesse’s feet, making her jump. Teenie walked deeper into the darkness, tugging at her collar and swallowing sobs. Brenda pressed her palms to her eyes, rolled onto her side, and curled up on the ungiving coils.

  “Mommy.” Again. No. And then it came to her: the cats. The goddamn cats, an endless soundtrack of mews and yowls that had been drowned out earlier by the hollow clamor of their footsteps and voices.

  Brenda lay motionless, her hands between her thighs, and Jesse thought she might be asleep. They all watched her from the shadows as the hall filled with a mindless facsimile of disembodied longing, of inconsolable abandonment. Teenie returned from the dark, her face mottled from crying.

  Slowly Brenda sat up. Stood up. She searched the walls, the spongy celestial blackness, then, calmly tearing apart her white tick suit as she went, she began to walk back toward the group with a shuffling step. Then she walked past them. Maintaining for a moment a discreet distance, the Friends of Kent then followed, Jesse bringing up the rear.

  Outside, back in the pulverizing humidity, Brenda sat against a tree, her paper suit gone from the waist up. Jesse, Karen, and Elaine kneeled to the left of her, Teenie and Marie hanging back by the open window that had served as both entrance and exit. The women waited for Brenda to speak, no one daring to disturb her train of thought, Jesse badly frightened again, this time by the silence, how it would be broken.

  “My son wasn’t like those children in there,” Brenda finally said, to no one, to everyone.

  “OK.” Karen ventured softly.

  “He was loved.”

  “OK.” There was a flutter in Karen’s throat.

  “He was cherished.”

  Karen said nothing this time, and Brenda seemed to withdraw. For a long moment, the air was filled with the lazy metallic razzle of cicadas.

&n
bsp; “He’s not here,” she finally said, her voice heavy with surrender, then lowered her head and stared at her swaddled palms. “You’re in the wrong park.”

  Part Three

  Higher and

  Higher

  21

  The Dutch Oven diner sat midpoint on Route 13, a four-lane miracle mile running from Gannon through Dempsy to Bayonne—an ugly strip of highway flanked on either side by underpopulated malls, waterbed outlets, and carpet warehouses. The diner was considered a decent place to eat, so the wraparound parking lot was always full and it took Lorenzo, fingers still trembling from the hospital-fed oxygen, nerves shot, two slow circuits before he spotted the Friends of Kent van.

  By the time Lorenzo had been brought into the medical center, his lungs were so seared and inflated from overuse of that store-bought spray they showed up on the X rays looking more like catcher’s mitts than human organs. Enraged by his suicidal carelessness, Dr. Chatterjee had begun to shout at him, drawing stares from the other patients and medical personnel in the overcrowded emergency room. When the call from Karen Collucci came through on his cell phone, Lorenzo was sitting topless on a gurney, inhaling an Albuterol solution through a plastic face mask connected by a hose to a wall-mounted oxygen feed. The adrenaline brought on by the news from the Chase Institute made any continued treatment superfluous.

  She had pulled it off, Karen—had pulled it off like he had prayed she would, and he felt embarrassed by the depth of his relief.

  There were seven people waiting in the van: Louis in the driver’s seat, Jesse alongside him, Teenie and Marie sandwiching Brenda in the middle row, and Elaine and Karen in the rear. No one was talking. Teenie and Marie each held one of Brenda’s bandaged hands, Teenie gently stroking the raw-looking knuckles that protruded from the now-filthy gauze. Without looking at Brenda, Lorenzo quickly gestured for Karen to come outside, and she followed him up the steps to the vending-machine-lined vestibule of the diner.

  “She said it was an accident.” Karen’s hands trembled as she lit a cigarette.

  “OK.” Lorenzo’s hands still shook a little too.

  “She said the kid is in Freedomtown, buried in Freedomtown.”

  “OK…Freedomtown?”

  “She said he overdosed on Benadryl, liquid Benadryl. She wasn’t even in the house.”

  “OK. I’ll get that.” Lorenzo fished in his pocket for his new prescription inhaler, dropped it, and felt the blood rush to his temples as he stooped to retrieve it.

  “You OK?”

  “What else you got?” Lorenzo asked, deaf to an answer. His sheepish jubilation faded as he began racing through a feverish checklist in his head: take a quick statement right here, right now; call the medical examiner, pinpoint the burial site, notify Bobby McDonald, take her in for a deeper statement, avoid the word arrest, avoid the word lawyer, avoid the Mirandas, avoid the prosecutor, avoid the press, confirm the body, charge her with homicide, notify the prosecutor, coordinate the players, script a press conference, choreograph some proactive riot control, pray.

  “You OK?” Karen repeated.

  The head of the Dempsy board of education and one of the deputy mayors pushed through from the diner into the vestibule, both of them sucking on toothpicks. Lorenzo turned away hoping they wouldn’t recognize him, come over, and start shooting the shit. As the two men descended the steps to the parking lot, Lorenzo realized that he had picked the worst conceivable spot for a conversation of this nature.

  “Real quick, did Jesse hear all this?”

  “Yup.” Three elderly women came into the vestibule, bitching about the no-smoking law, firing up Camels.

  “She call it in?” Lorenzo asked.

  “Nope.”

  “OK, good. Can you be with her a few more minutes?”

  “Jesse?”

  “No, Brenda. But send Jesse over to my car, OK?” Karen seemed to falter at the request, and Lorenzo, confused, was about to ask her what was wrong when she flung her arms around his neck and whispered, “Thank you, Jesus,” sweet and husky in his ear. Lorenzo was physically staggered by the force behind her impulsive act of gratefulness.

  “Hey. I should be thanking you” he said clumsily, her gratitude offered to Jesus, not his to reciprocate.

  “Next time,” she said with a smile, taking a swipe at her cheeks and heading back to the Blazer.

  Sitting in his car waiting for Jesse to make it across the parking lot, he put a call in to the medical examiner’s office, set up a rendezvous in Freedomtown, and before returning to an obsessive review of the tasks ahead of him, found himself reexperiencing Karen’s ardent embrace. Then he saw, once again, Teenie and Marie, mother and daughter, each holding one of Brenda’s hands in the backseat of the van—saw Teenie’s small, soothing caresses—and he knew, absolutely knew that the overpowering mood of these people toward Brenda in the aftermath of her confession was one of great tenderness. Perhaps they felt more sympathy for her now that she had admitted to knowledge about her child’s death than they had the day before, when they weren’t quite sure of her innocence or guilt. In Lorenzo’s imagination, Brenda was being treated not as if she had just confirmed death but as if she had given birth after a long, torturous labor, the encircling Kenters both family and delivery team.

  Jesse crossed the parking lot, then slid into the passenger seat of the Crown Vic, the subsequent slamming of the door bringing him back into focus: time to kick it in gear. “Hey,” she huffed, not looking at him, Lorenzo sensing that she did not feel like part of that family of midwives back in the Blazer.

  “Yeah. How much time can you give me before running with this?” Lorenzo slid his hands in quarter circles around his steering wheel, then looked at his watch: twelve-twenty.

  “How much time do you need?” Jesse asked with an odd flatness, staring out the passenger window toward the red van across the lot.

  “I need enough time to get the body ID’d, take a statement, charge her, coordinate a press conference, and work out some crowd control.”

  “Just tell me how much time you need.” Jesse cracked her window, took out a cigarette.

  “I think you should remember that if it wasn’t for me we wouldn’t even be needing to have a conversation like this,” Lorenzo said, touching her cigarette hand, then patting his chest.

  “Just tell me.” She tossed her unlit cigarette out the window, her toneless, defeated manner still throwing him.

  “What time you go to press?”

  “Five o’clock.”

  “Five o’clock.” He nodded, figuring she was lying by an hour. “Give me till eight,” Lorenzo said, taking back that hour, plus another, hoping to have it all wrapped and made public by seven.

  “What’s in it for me?”

  “What’s in it for you? Shit, I’ll give you everything.”

  “Am I exclusive?”

  “Exclusive as you want to be.”

  “I want to be the only paper carrying this tonight.”

  “Fine by me. I’m not saying shit till the press conference anyhow. You want to go to the exhumation?” he said, offering it like a treat.

  “No. I want to hear her interview.”

  “Whoa, wait—”

  “Just throw me in the men’s room. Those walls are like cheesecloth.”

  “Man.” Lorenzo feigned outrage, laughing as if to mask anger. “You’re, like, pushing the edge of the envelope here, Jess.” He rapped a knuckle on his window. “You’re goin’ for the ionosphere with this.”

  “Oh c’mon, don’t go all virginal on me. I won’t run with nothing that’ll trip you up, and I’ll cover your ass completely.” Jesse was hustling him now, coming back to life. “I’ve done this with your guys a million times before.”

  “My guys like who.”

  “You’ll never know,” she said, shrugging. “See what I’m saying?”

  Brenda still sat in the middle row of the van, hemmed in by Teenie and Marie, sat there exuding presence—composed, alert, expe
ctant, like a bride in the wings—and when Lorenzo leaned in through the open side-door panel and offered her his hand, she accepted it with a seamless grace, as if she had been waiting for him, for this moment, all the days of her life.

  Bringing Brenda up and out into the parking lot, Lorenzo, still holding her hand, ducked back down and spoke to Karen in the van. “You want to keep us company?” Karen quickly gathered her stuff and joined them on the asphalt, Lorenzo assuming that she understood she was to be his corroborating witness for all that was to follow.

  They returned to his car, Lorenzo, Brenda, and Karen, but after a long moment of agitated silence, Brenda said she needed to be on her feet, needed to be in the open air. They got out and walked to a shady corner of the parking lot, to a hangdog canopy of arms to heaven and other less identifiable rag trees that arched over the mesh fence separating the Dutch Oven diner from a Payless Shoe outlet. But there was a powerful reek of urine here, so after a moment they were on the move again, Brenda leading them ten steps this way, then twenty steps in the opposite direction, Lorenzo rolling with it for a minute or two, until he saw a look of mounting panic and disorientation come into her eyes. Gently, firmly, he led her back to his car.

  “Now, I understand, Brenda, that you told Karen and those other ladies back there a different version of what happened to your son, other than the version you’ve been telling me.” Brenda didn’t seem to be listening. She eyed the customers climbing and descending the steps to the diner, as if she were in awe of their ability to come and go as they pleased. “Now, I don’t know if you felt any particular kind of pressure out there this morning, you know, felt obliged to come up with something to get them off your back, and if that’s the case, I can deal with that, but if what you’re saying is the truth—”