A Kind of Freedom

by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

  Just then a man’s voice rang out. “It’s me, baby.”

  Jackie opened the door, stepped backward, and watched Terry ease into the living room like butter pouring. He was all brown skin and height: There hadn’t been many boys in high school who stood taller than Jackie, but he was one of them, even at fourteen, and her head only reached his shoulder in their wedding photos.

  “It’s me, baby,” he repeated, with his fresh fade and shaved face, which was full again as though he’d been eating.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” she forced the edge into her voice. It might have been there on its own had he shown up yesterday, but after her talk with Sybil she’d developed tenderness toward him.

  He started to explain. “I’ve been staying by my mama,” he said. “I went to rehab again. I guess I hit bottom, I don’t even remember, but”—he shook his head—“there’s nothing like a mother’s love, let me tell you. I got myself together. I’ve been out a month. I wanted to come and see you and the baby right away, but Mama held me back, said don’t go in there unless you’re prepared to stay. So I did. I’m sorry to scare you,” he said. “I just got so excited. I went to my meeting and they gave me this.” He held out a green chip. “I know it’s not much, I know two months is not that long, but for me, I never thought I would hit a week, you know, so it feels like something. It feels like something. You’re the first person I wanted to share the news with. Guess I just got caught up thinking about my own excitement. I can leave if you want.”

  Jackie thought about what Sybil would say. It was what her father had told her to do in high school if she was having trouble deciding whether to accept the drink at a house party or stay out an hour later because the music at a concert had gotten good. And it had been good advice, the answer always came to her so clearly, but it was following it that had been the problem. She didn’t answer right away, just sat down. Not asking him to leave seemed to be response enough, and he sat too, not next to her but on the opposite sofa, on the only patch not covered by unfolded laundry. She noticed a cereal bowl of dried milk on a television tray in front of him and she waited for him to say something about the apartment, which looked like Hurricane Betsy had blown through it. Her family had long since started to comment.

  Girl, is there a free inch of carpet in this house? That from her mother the week Jackie paid a mover to place her bed in her living room—her fear of intruders seemed to subside the closer she slept to the front door.

  Or, You ever thought about hiring a housekeeper? That from her sister the week Jackie cooked a pot of gumbo, a whole roast, potato salad, and rice and gravy but never got around to the dishes.

  The questions haunted Jackie even weeks after they’d been asked, because after everything with Terry, she was still the same woman at heart, the one who, though she nearly always came up short, aimed to please, the one who used to paint her nails and scrub her baseboards and shave and douche her honey pot, and every week she was on a diet, like the one where she ate the same food as everybody else but dished it out on a saucer instead of a real plate.

  But he didn’t seem to notice. He only turned to her and asked, “Baby asleep?”

  She nodded.

  “That’s good. That’s good. You need a break.”

  “I’m so tired, Terry,” she said, but she hadn’t meant to. It was what he called out of her, the truth, when she had been so comfortable covering it for everybody else, her mother, her father, her sister; she had learned to smile first thing when people saw her so they wouldn’t have the burden of joining her in her despair. She had learned to stretch her cheeks out for thirty seconds, not that she was counting; to answer their questions according to what they might want to hear, not what she was really thinking. I’m good, she’d say, but it had to be with the proper lilt, with the last word stretching up so that it tinkled out like a wind chime. The only one she hadn’t had to fake with all this time was her baby: It seemed like the soft coos, the warm embraces, and the patience to get up and grab him even when she’d just gotten to sleep herself came to her through a sort of grace. But his father was here now and she was so, so tired.

  Terry walked closer, sat down next to her, holding his head down, seeming to know he had caused this pain. He reached out and held her. And for the while that she cried, really sobbed into his chest, she didn’t care if Sybil was right, if this was just another temporary lull—and of course it was, she wasn’t stupid—she was just glad that he was there now, because she’d needed this release more than she could have known.

  When she was done, she wasn’t embarrassed. She wiped her face with her shirt, and he got up to get some tissues from the bathroom.

  “Excuse the mess,” she said when he returned.

  “Please, you got enough on your plate to be worrying about housekeeping.”

  She shrugged. “I always kept a good house,” she said, sniffling again. “It was what I was known for. Remember, people would come over for some of my gumbo and pound cake? It didn’t matter what time of day it was, I always had something to offer them, gumbo or biscuits or sweet potato pie, something. Now I’d be embarrassed to let somebody in here, much less serve them something out of that God-awful kitchen.” She nodded to the back of her apartment, where she hadn’t done dishes in days. The refrigerator was empty as a ghost, and even if she tried, the cracks between the linoleum would never be free of that grime.

  He sighed, shook his head, held his hand out. Jackie had small hands, and his were nearly twice her size. Often they’d press them against each other to marvel at the discrepancy. She had an urge to do that now.

  “Don’t take that on as your fault, baby,” he said. “It’s me, I know it’s all me, but I’m—” he stopped himself. “I was going to say, I’m going to do better, but I won’t make any promises. That’s what my sponsor always says, that there’s another side to promises, like a coin, and it’s called disappointment, and well, they tell us just to take one day at a time, one moment really, moment by moment, and that’s been working for me.”

  Jackie sat with that for a while. She had heard most of his lines a million times before, but this one was new. No promises. Moment by moment. That’s what she didn’t want, uncertainty—that’s what made her feel so out of control, so desperate. She’d do her best to manufacture conviction during times like those. Last time she had sworn to her parents that it was different, she had bragged to her friends that any minute they’d be back in their house on Rosalia Drive, and if not that one, something better. She’d believed herself when she spoke like that, but when she thought about it now, that belief never led anywhere, did it?

  The baby fussed, and she stood to see about him. She beckoned for Terry to follow her, but when they arrived at the bedroom, T.C. had already quieted. Jackie collapsed at the head of the bed, her cheek on her pillow. She hadn’t made it up that morning and Terry had to move a twisted sheet to the side to find a clear space on the edge. Jackie closed her eyes, just for a minute. She knew she wouldn’t do anything with him tonight. He looked good. She’d had a chance to study him when he walked to the bathroom, and she’d seen the months with his mama had not only fattened him up, but reacquainted him with his normal stride, settled his mind so his words came out steady. Still he had broken her heart too many times for her to manage anything but talk.

  The last year was off-limits for them both, so they traveled backward. High school for one: Did she remember their first date, when he brought her home ten minutes after curfew, and he’d moved the time back on his car and pretended he thought they were five minutes early?

  She laughed. Of course she remembered. “I stayed up all night that night, reliving the date, driving to the daiquiri shop, then stopping at St. Claude Seafood for crawfish.”

  “Eating it at the Lakefront on top of our car,” he joined in.

  “I didn’t even brush my teeth or take my makeup off,” Jackie went on. �
�It was like I was too high to follow the regimen of the regular world.” She regretted that word after she used it, high, but he didn’t seem to notice. “It was like if I did something ordinary, I’d fall back down.”

  “That’s right, I sure did take you to the daiquiri shop,” he said. “I had to pat myself on the back for that one. That was pretty good right? For a seventeen-year-old? You and them tight shorts and pink pumps. Them rollers in your head.”

  “It was awright,” she said, smiling though. “Not like Commander’s for my birthday.” She still smiled.

  “Oh, well, yeah, that was later when I got a little dough.”

  “Those were the good days,” she said.

  He nodded. “Real good.”

  “Remember when we took Sybil to Dooky Chase’s for the first time?” Jackie asked to stoke the glee of nostalgia. “She ordered so much food and after the waiter left you asked her, ‘Sybil, were you ordering or reading the menu?’”

  They laughed. Sybil had been a broke law student then, and as kids, Mama would cook fancy meals, but they didn’t go out much.

  “You should see her now, Terry. She thinks her shit don’t stink, walking around in her Brooks Brothers suits.”

  He nodded, shrugged. “Yeah, I’m not surprised, I guess. You could see something like that was coming her way.” There was a pile of clothes in a basket beside the bed, and he reached down and started folding them, laying them down on the part of the bottom sheet he had smoothed. “Think about it, she was always second to you growing up. Imagine what that’s like, being the older sister but people looked past her for you. You have always been a bright light, Jackie Marie.”

  She would have fallen into the compliment, she needed it today more than ever, but the sirens interrupted him, louder than she’d ever heard them, like the police car had pulled right up to her door. Jackie thought she saw Terry’s eyes water. She felt a need to comfort him, let him know she didn’t blame him for the way things had turned out.

  “You would think I would feel safer knowing they’re here all night.” She forced herself to chuckle, rolled her eyes.

  He set the shirt he was folding down and leaned in and squeezed her. She didn’t fight him off, but she didn’t relax into him either. He seemed to sense her discomfort and eased off but not before adding, “I’m going to get you out of here.”

  She smirked. “I thought you said no promises.”

  “That’s not a promise, that’s a fact.” He paused, then started again. “When I was gone all that time, it wasn’t ’cause I didn’t love you. I know you know that, but I feel like I gotta say it. My love for you, for T.C., was the only thing that brought me back, the only thing. Remember that.”

  T.C.

  Summer 2010

  T.C. didn’t remember meeting his father. But the old man’s name was Terry, Terry Cleveland Lewis, and although T.C. wasn’t quite a Junior—his mother believed in saint names and snuck Gabriel in where Cleveland should have been—people had called him T.C. since he was born. So even now as he stood six feet seven inches, so tall he had to duck to get in and out of his jail cell, the other inmates yelled, Watch your head, T.C. The COs of course called him Lewis. Sometimes he thought that had been the origin of the problem, the fact that he wasn’t a real Junior. It wasn’t that cleaving to his father’s legacy might have made a better man of him—from what he’d heard, his old man hadn’t worked in years, and even then it was at a half-dead restaurant in the Quarter. But it was just another example of his not-quiteness, deficiencies he first noticed when he was asked to repeat kindergarten and that had culminated in his stay at the Orleans Parish Prison.

  He was getting out today though, and maybe that meant something. It wasn’t his first time in, but it was hard to count the weekend stint for stealing a bicycle from Bourbon Street. He didn’t even mention that incident to his boys; it wasn’t enough to earn him any street cred. Not that he sold drugs to impress anyone. No, he started smoking his second semester in college after his injury, and he found he could actually afford to buy in bulk by supplying his neighbors and friends. Plus, he wasn’t going to lie, there was something soothing about the boys on his block ringing his bell all hours of the day. It hadn’t been that way in grade school when it might have counted for something. He’d been a heavyset kid before basketball, and he wet the bed until he was twelve. He always passed on sleepovers—T.C. was not stupid—but he could never forgot that for so many years longer than was natural, he couldn’t control such a basic function.

  “You getting out today, huh, Lewis?” The CO was white and short, even for non-Lewis standards, so short he needed to crane his neck to ask T.C. a question.

  “He’ll be right back in though,” the other CO shot in. Black like T.C. but full of undrained malice toward him. It happened like that sometimes.

  The white one laughed.

  T.C. joined in, best to stay on their good side. But what the CO had said wasn’t true, not this time.

  “Nah,” T.C. said. “I got a little man on the way.”

  “So he’ll be coming to visit you then?” This from the black one. “Him and his momma.”

  T.C. shook his head, but he didn’t protest. If you had to convince people who you were, it was too late, isn’t that what his grandmama always said? Anyway, he was in a good mood. The girl he’d been seeing before he got locked up had let him call her every night and wrote him letters from time to time. Her name was Natalia, but he called her Bon Bon. She was a hot little thing, and she was waiting for him at her mama’s house Uptown. They hadn’t done much before he left, low-level dibbling and dabbling that reminded him of his high school days, but she was all he’d been thinking about, and tonight that anticipation would bloom into something he could feel.

  “Whatever you say, boss.” He smiled at the CO who handed him his clothes. T.C. had forgotten he was wearing sweats and a T-shirt when he was brought in four months earlier. He was on his way to the grocery store when he got pulled over. The funny thing was, his mama had told him not to go, reminded him of that later during visitation.

  “People think I’m crazy,” she said, “but I’m never wrong. Your friend Daryl would be alive today if he had listened to me. Miss Patricia ain’t been the same since, and she won’t be; Miss Patricia might as well a died along with her boy.” She paused then before going on. “It’s a goddamn shame how the city blew up them levees. Just like Betsy. If they got a choice, they gon’ always side with white.”

  T.C. ignored her when she went on like that, though it was true, his mama had predicted Katrina would take lives. Everybody knew it was coming, but half his friends banked on it being like the storms the year before that rerouted or lost force before they hit the city. T.C.’s mama had a dream the morning before the storm hit, though, called him from work, begging him to pack a suitcase. He obliged her only because she started crying. They were halfway to Alabama when the levees broke. Daryl, his brother from another mother, the friend he’d walked to school with every day for fifteen years, had decided to ride it out. They got word three weeks later that his body was found in his attic under a moldering sofa.

  On the other hand, T.C.’s mama spilled out useless details, conspiracy theories, information from her childhood nobody wanted to hear, outright inventions, stream-of-consciousness commentary, and caustic affronts that sometimes held truth, sometimes didn’t. Like the time she told Miss Patricia that she’d been ignoring her since she got her new house, but there was no new house. Then once when she was delivering a monologue to the TV screen, T.C. heard her say her mama had died when she was three years old. But her mama was still here, had let T.C. stay with her after he lost the scholarship in fact, and if it hadn’t been for his MawMaw, he’d be doing much worse than selling weed by the eighth.

  When he was done dressing, he walked with the COs to sign his release forms. Then they handed him the money left in his commissary, and
he was free to go.

  T.C. had called Tiger the day before, and sure enough here he was waiting in the parking lot leaning in front of his silver Honda Civic, fancy since T.C. last saw it, with new blacked-out twenty-two-inch rims. The two had met a few years back playing intramural basketball at Joe Brown Park. Tiger always ran with the wrong crowd, even went to juvie when they were in middle school, and T.C.’s mama banned him from kids like that his whole childhood. But things were different now: Tiger had been friends with Daryl too, and after the storm that was worth more than a good reputation.

  “Whoa, nigga,” Tiger called out. It was an expression that still stirred fear in T.C. Technically it just meant come here or let me talk to you, but it had been what the boys had called out before they jumped him in high school, and once before he even started hustling, three dudes cornered him with the same line before they pressed a gun against his temple.

  “I’m just messing with you.” Tiger walked up closer. “You know I’m just messing with you,” he repeated, laughing so hard his shoulders shook. “You done gained weight, huh?” He leaned into T.C. and felt his biceps.

  “You know it, ain’t nothing else to do in there,” T.C. said, feeling his heartbeat settle. He had an urge to knock the boy out for scaring him like that, but he took a couple of deep breaths like the counselor inside had taught him, told himself to calm down. “But looka you, you ridin’ on them thangs, huh?” he asked after a while, nodding at the new rims.

  “Yeah, yeah, you know how I do.” They both walked closer to the car. “But looka you, your dreads all twisted up, and long. They almost catchin up with mine.” Tiger fingered T.C.’s thick, black hair. His own hung past his bright green T-shirt, nearly touching the top of his tapered jeans. He was shuffling his feet, socked up in Adidas slippers.

  “Still light bright and damn near white though,” Tiger play-scoffed. “That’s why they let you out early? I thought you had another two weeks.”