Freedom's Child: A Novel

by Jax Miller

  Mason says nothing in return. It’s supposed to be one of the most important days of his life, all the hard work was just seeming to pay off, a long-awaited vacation was just on the horizon. And as the rain begins to beat on the windshield in a traffic jam, Mason feels the inkling of fear grow in his chest. The harder he inhales the smoke, the more he hopes it can take away that feeling.

  Hypnotized by the red lights before him, Mason remembers his last day in Goshen.

  —

  “Come with me, Rebekah. I can take you from here, I’ll take care of you,” Mason pleaded as he packed the last of his belongings into his suitcase on his bed.

  “But this is where I’m supposed to be,” she answered, unsure of why Mason was packing. “And so are you, here in God’s will.”

  “This place is a fucking trap!”

  Rebekah crossed her hands under her chin with a gasp, praying for the salvation of her brother. Mason often had to remind himself of his sister’s handicap, that her IQ was low enough that it bordered retardation. He had to remind himself that she needed some extra help, extra kindness. Her whispers ran rampant: “Forgive him, Lord, for he knows not what he does.”

  Mason grabbed her shoulders and shook her from the prayer. “When you’re ready to leave, you can come to me. Always. Anytime.” He could see the blankness in her eyes. She couldn’t even grasp at the concept of leaving home; it was inconceivable to her small mind. But Mason didn’t feel sorry for her. He was envious of her ignorance, admired her innocence. “Just promise me that you’ll always remember me if you do change your mind, if God tells you to move.”

  Things had been getting strange in their home. Their father seemed more interested in filling the pews than he was in his own family; he claimed he had these dreams where God would talk to him, would call him to lead people to the church before a certain date. It was supposedly the date that God told him Christ would return, a date that he could tell no one. And it went against what Mason was raised with in church, that not even the angels of heaven would know the date of Christ’s return. As far as Virgil was concerned, Mason was deliberately disobeying God for questioning these visions. Finding a packet in the mail from the University of Louisville for prospective students was all that it took for Virgil to kick Mason out of the house.

  Virgil was stern about it, claiming it was what God would have him do, which made no sense to Mason whatsoever. He warned Mason never to come back, forced Rebekah to amputate her brother from her life, like he was a cancerous mole. And Mason decided that, when it felt right to her, Rebekah would follow suit and try to find him, and that until then, Mason would never look back.

  Rebekah’s eyes filled with water as she looked up at him. “Will you at least wear your cross?”

  Mason tucked his lips in and reached in the front pocket of his bag to retrieve it, just to make her feel better about the situation. He held it against her necklace, identical to the one in his hand. “Will you promise to visit me?”

  Rebekah smiled like it was a sin, turning over her shoulder to make sure no one saw it. She stood on her tippy-toes to kiss him on his cheek before running off.

  Dear Mason and Rebekah, though once upon a time, you were Ethan and Layla,

  Mason, for the first year of your life, I breast-fed you. You’d wake in the middle of the night often, hungry. I could hear Lynn in the living room, a late visit from one of her many regulars, a coke deal. I knew I had to get the hell out of there as soon as possible, I was just waiting for my inheritance to clear with the lawyers. I was still recovering from childbirth, still sore, hormones running rampant.

  The room was dark when you woke. Sleep was hard to get, as hungry as you always were. I rolled over to turn on the lamp, not surprised to see that Mark wasn’t there. I crawled toward the end of the bed, to where your bassinet was. In a chair at the corner of the room, I was startled to see your uncle, Matthew.

  “Matthew, what the hell are you doing in here?”

  “Just bored.”

  I felt like my privacy, our privacy, had just been invaded as he watched me sleep. “I need for you to leave.” I picked you up to stop your cries of hunger.

  “But I want to watch,” Matthew said.

  “No.” And just as I said no, Lynn walked by the door.

  “No, what?” she barked. I didn’t say anything.

  “Oh, Mommy,” said Matthew, his eyelids heavy as if he were stoned, his words soft on the cigarette smoke. “Nessa here is telling me no. I hate it when cunts like this tell me no, don’t you, Mother?”

  Lynn marched to me, her finger in my face. “Now, you listen to me, you prissy little bitch. I’m sick of you going around my home, acting like you own the place, acting like you’re better than us.” I felt a tear of rage escape my eye. “No one says no to my boys, am I understood?”

  I thought, in her last sentence, that that’s why her boys were all little shits, with the exception of Peter, of course. I could tell Lynn was high; her agitation was worse than it was most days, her top lip tucking itself in by her teeth. But I just nodded. Lynn went back out of the hallway. “And shut that baby up, he’s interfering with my work.”

  I’d grown afraid of Matthew. This fear would dissipate the older I got. I continued to feed you, in front of him, because what choice did I have?

  A few days later, Mark and I were alone in the house. I cannot recall where everybody else was, but for Peter, who’d usually locked himself away in his room. “Ness,” Mark called down to me from the hall. I was holding you in the living room, studying, with contempt, a box of illegal fireworks that your father had brought home after one of his busts. He was always bringing things like that home. Illegal fireworks, guns, drugs, even the odd boa constrictor.

  “What is it?” I yelled back.

  “Leave the baby for a minute and just come here.” I walked up the hallway, Mark standing there in his uniform, leaning against Matthew’s doorway, thumbs tucked behind his belt. He reminded me of some cowboy. “What is it?”

  “I want you to stop leading my brother on,” he said, his voice indifferent.

  “But I’m not—”

  Mark grabbed my upper arm and squeezed hard enough that in the days following, I could map out the bruises from where his fingertips were when I’d raise my arms in the mirror. He pulled me into Matthew’s room, where, on a desk, were photos of me. Candles. Locks of my hair tied in bows. A shrine, in honor of me.

  I felt sick; I felt violated. “I know you are,” yelled Mark. “My wife will not be whoring herself around, especially to my own brother. Am I clear?”

  I nodded.

  He looked down at me and adjusted his shirt, like I was a piece of shit on the bottom of his shoe. “I’m leaving to go finish packing for the new house.”

  Officer Mattley kisses his mother’s cheek as he enters the house. “I hope he wasn’t too much trouble for you.”

  “No, he was an angel. I was just fixing his breakfast.” At the breakfast bar, seven-year-old Richie puts the heads of his rubber dinosaurs into the milk of his Lucky Charms. “You look tired. Let me make you some coffee.”

  “Thanks for coming over again, Mom. These night shifts are killing me.” He takes off his uniform top, leaving a white tee that was underneath. He wraps his arm around his son’s waist and kisses the back of his head. “Morning, Champ.”

  “I’m not Champ,” he says as he holds the toys by the tails. “I’m Spider-Man!” Richie turns and pretends to shoot his father with projectile spiderwebs from his hands.

  “You got me,” Mattley says as he stumbles back into the wall. Richie goes back to his dinosaurs drinking marshmallow milk and makes slurping noises.

  “How was your night, dear?”

  “It’s Painter, Mom.” He smiles as he grabs a stool beside Richie. “Nothing exciting to report.”

  “You mean you didn’t catch any bad guys?” His son doesn’t take his attention away from his T-rex.

  “Luckily, there were no bad guys to c
atch. The world was safe!”

  “Just Painter, Dad. Just Painter was safe.”

  Mattley rubs his son’s brown bowl cut. “You already packed for your mother’s house?”

  “Do I have to? I just saw her,” he whines.

  “Yeah, like a month ago. C’mon.” He lifts Richie off the stool and pats his butt. “We don’t wanna be late.”

  “But Mom yells too much,” he says as he drags his feet down the hallway.

  “Sounds about right.” It was a nasty divorce. A wife of two years with some insane trust issues. A wife who fell out of love with a man who cared too much about his work. A wife who didn’t adapt to the fact that she was a mother and no longer belonged at the club scene.

  “Are you doing anything exciting with your day?” His mother asks, the smell of dark roast surrounding them.

  “Gonna stop and see my friend at the Whammy Bar and maybe grab a drink before sleeping the rest of the day.”

  “You mean Freedom?” yells Richie from his bedroom.

  Mattley’s perplexed. “What do you know about it?”

  “Remember, we ran into her not long ago at the line at the fair? You love her, I can tell. You couldn’t stop flirting with her. At least she is pretty, though, not like that Jennifer next door who’s in love with you.”

  “I was not flirting, and Jennifer next door is not in love with me.” Mattley looks at his mother, his voice low. “Where the hell does this kid get his smarts from?”

  “He gets his smarts from you.” She smiles as she makes his coffee. “Accusing you of flirting with women? That he gets from his mother.”

  —

  “It’s odd seeing you, when there’s only one of you to see.” Freedom laughed, poking Mattley’s side from behind. In all fairness, it was just as odd for Mattley, seeing her for the first time in daylight while she was sober. Away from the night, she was strikingly beautiful.

  It was a few months ago, the Fourth of July. The fair smelled of sunblock and gunpowder and watermelon. Vendors’ stations smoked with hot dogs and burgers, the kids had their faces painted. “Freedom, how have you been?” Mattley’s cheeks were tinged pink, an insulated beer cup in hand.

  “I didn’t know you drank.”

  “This?” He raised the can. “This is maybe my first beer since Christmas.”

  “So, you’re here for the fireworks?”

  “I am, here with my son,” he looked around. “He’s around here somewhere. What about you? You here to share your patriotism with the rest of Painter?”

  “Me? No.” Freedom adjusted the red bandanna on her head. “I’m just walking through. I prefer to be drunk by myself.”

  “Well, all the cops are already here. Might as well save ’em a trip.” He smiled. He lifted his sunglasses to his sunburned head. “You shouldn’t drink, though.”

  Freedom looks at his beer. “Oh, really?”

  “I’ll make you a deal. I will, hand on heart, not drink one more sip if you don’t.” He tilts the beer, ready to pour it out.

  Freedom smiled, perhaps for the first time in twenty years. “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Because.” He had to think. Freedom recognized the buzz in him and was amused by this unseen side of Officer Mattley. “Because you have beautiful skin, and alcohol is bad for your skin.”

  She rolled her eyes with a laugh. “You’re not that smooth.”

  “Well, it’s my day off.” He leaned in to her ear. “And I kind of like being your knight in shining armor.”

  Richie ran up and grabbed his father’s leg. “Daddy, Daddy, look at my face paint!”

  “Last chance,” he says as he tilts the beer once more.

  “All right, fine, fine.”

  He put his arm around her shoulders as he spilled the beer onto the dried grass. “Thatta girl.”

  “That’s alcohol abuse, ya know.”

  Throughout the evening they flirted until it was time for the fireworks to finish off a seemingly perfect night.

  Moments after the grand finale, their ears and eyes sore from the blasts, and the sun long set, Richie fell asleep on Freedom’s lap, melted ice cream pasted all over his face. Mattley took her hand.

  Attendees from the show were packing their blankets and balloons and beer cans and lighting the last of their sparklers. Freedom buried her face in Richie’s hair and remembered the softness of her own son’s from twenty years ago. The smell of his kid’s shampoo filled her heart with lead. She looked down at the boy from above his head, which rested on her chest, and swore it was Ethan. She placed her hand on his heart, feeling his chest rise. Mattley wondered what she was doing, caressing the top of her hand with his fingertips. He realized that in his son’s hair, Freedom was crying.

  “What’s wrong, Freedom?” His touch moved up her arm.

  She lifted her head, the lights of children’s blinking toys reflecting off her flooded eyes. “I’m sorry, I can’t—I just can’t.” Freedom cautiously handed a sleeping Richie to his father before running off to her home, where she proceeded to drink by herself until she could no longer function.

  My name is Freedom and my womb is empty. I am reminded of this insult from God every time I’m on the rag. What a bitch Eve was. It’s ten in the morning and I am alone at the Whammy Bar. I stretch out on top of one of the pool tables. The day’s as gray as the cigarette smoke from a whore in Times Square on a frigid January morning, like most days are in this godforsaken state. Carrie did a swell ol’ job of cleaning last night and so I use the next hour to stall. With my forearms at the end of each side of the table, my hands hang off the sides. I hold the cue ball in one hand and the eight ball in the other and try to discern a difference in weight between the two. I’m bored out of my fucking skull. But I feel the voices start to come. I use the remote to turn the bar’s surround sound as loud as it can: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. “I Hear Voices” comes on.

  I inhale a menthol cigarette through my nostrils to smoke the suicidal thoughts out of my head. It’s the hangovers that make me this way, nothing more, nothing less. Lots of bad thoughts, lots of terrible voices. I don’t know what they say; they’re hard to hear over Sir Jay Hawkins’s blues, one of the first shock-rockers who ever lived. I can’t tell where my voices begin and where his drunken gurgling and grunts of his tunes begin. With the filter to my nose, I think of the voodoo bones Hawkins wore in his nose. Right, as if I really think snorting through the filter of a menthol Pall Mall will actually work. I bring the billiard balls to each temple and massage my head by swirling them, but nothing works. I’ll ignore them, as always. I see a faint strip of light on the ceiling above the front door, but I don’t move. Whoever it is tries to come in unnoticed and so I’ll play along. Could be Carrie. Could be Cal. Could be worse.

  “Whoever that is.” I hold up the billiard balls. “I have balls that can prove fatal if I put enough force behind the blow into your frontal lobe.”

  “If that’s the case, I’ll never look at you the same way again.” Mattley.

  “I knew it was you.”

  “Oh, really? And how is that?” He walks closer to me.

  “Bacon, donuts, you all smell the same.” I rise up as best as I can, given the hangover. “How’s the boy?” Not that I especially care.

  “Getting at that age.” Mattley removes his hat. “Any day he’ll be bringing home the ladies.” There’s that smile I love. It aches to sit up. I think I might actually still be drunk from last night. “Listen, Freedom, I want to talk to you about something.” He looks down and scrapes the toe of his shoe over a spot on the floor. “About your kids.”

  “What are you talking about?” I straighten my arms to my sides on the pool table. “I never had kids.”

  “I know that’s what you say when you’re dry.” He plays with his Stetson hat. “But you do talk a lot when you’re drunk.”

  “I get, um, creative when I’m drunk.” I stare off. “Have I told you about the time the pope and I bungee-jumped off the Eiffel Tower?”
<
br />   Mattley sighs with his chin to his chest. He taps the side of the table where the palms of his hands rest. “You don’t have to fool me. I’m not asking for the truth, Freedom. But what I am asking is that you consider talking to someone.”

  “I’m already talking to someone.” My anger makes its way to my voice.

  “OK.” He clears his throat. “That was suggestion number one.” I roll my eyes. “Just a suggestion, is all.” He smiles. God, I love his smile. “Have you considered getting help in other areas of your life? Like with the drinking?”

  Only inches separate our faces from touching, and right now it takes all of what little decency I have left to stop me from throwing myself on him. He cares. He’s the only one who cares and I hate it more than anything. I don’t deserve it. But I want to tell him my feelings for him are strong, that I wished all the time that something terrible and freakish would happen to him so that I could go to his rescue and comfort him in the night. But I say nothing about it. “That’s my business.” I break away from him. “Now fuck off and leave me alone.”

  It’s better this way, to nip it in the bud before anything might have a chance to flourish. He has a kid, a nice home. Can’t let myself get anything near normal. Me and normal are like gunpowder and fire. The two things should never mix.

  —

  Back in the office before the regulars can ride in, I go back to the Internet. Still nothing on Rebekah’s Facebook page. Nothing new from Louisa Horn. On Mason’s page, a few random congratulations on his wall about some legal victory this morning and one from last night, a post he was tagged in from Violet about a trip to Turks and Caicos.

  I don’t know what makes me do it, but I do a quick Google search of their names. The legal case that Mason won this morning pops up first. Already knew about that. Then I type in Rebekah’s name.

  The room spins. The music outside fades further and further from my ears. I grab the nearest garbage can and dry-heave. I think I’m having a heart attack. I stand to go for the phone, to call for help. But my knees buckle. I panic. I fall. The lights fade to nothing, not anything that the name of a color can describe. Like I’m in slow motion, the floor comes closer and closer to my face. And that’s the last thing I can remember.