Freedom's Child (14 page)

“Mommy, come on,” Magdalene yells from the porch through the screen door, breaking Carol from her trance. “Sister Michelle is still sitting in her own pee!”

Carol shoves the letter back to the bottom of her bag and zips it up. Under her breath, she says, “You’re not with Ma and Pa. You’re in hell with the rest of the suicides.” She looks once more into the mirror and continues to speak to her dead twin sister; fury stirs within. “You’re burning for eternity in a lake of fire, weeping and gnashing your teeth.”

At the top of the altar
is a sky-blue plastic kid’s pool etched with cheaply designed tortoises and dolphins; underneath it, a large, opaque tarp. Michelle Campbell climbs into the pool, aided by Virgil. Everyone else is on their knees, arms stretched out and following Virgil in a way that reminds Carol of sunflowers following the sun; the people follow Virgil. The people follow the light. As Carol approaches the altar, Magdalene sits back in the pew; the reverend gets on his knees to help Michelle onto her back in the kiddie pool. He bounces back to his feet. “If you are between the ages of ten and twenty, please come forward.” His bellows make people assume his lungs are made of iron.

Michelle becomes exposed; Carol immediately recognizes that the baby’s crowning. Blood-tinged amniotic fluid flows from Michelle and into the pool, around Carol’s knees. The teenagers cover their mouths with disgust as Virgil continues to preach. “To the youth: this is the result of Eve’s sin.” Virgil’s nose, up as he shouts. “And this agony shall be yours if you lust for one another. And when one part of your body makes you sin, you’re better to cut it off and throw it away. Better your right hand than your entire body go to hell!”

My name is Freedom and I’m getting the hell out of Painter. Shift’s over. Act normal. I’ll make a false call to the police station because I know Mattley’s on duty tonight. I’ll instruct him to go to my house and mail out my letters, in the event of something happening to me before I reach Kentucky. Time to go. I have to go find the daughter I’ve never known.

A heaviness drags behind me as I go to clock out of work on this cold, rainy night. Everything’s new in perspective. The things people say from here on out tonight will be meaningless, won’t mean a thing when I’m burning miles across the country. The place is packed, but I look around with the knowledge that I’ll never see it again. I’ll never see Oregon again, thank Christ. Walking out, I feel like a prisoner on that fearful final journey from a cell to the lethal-injection chambers. Somehow, I get a bad feeling about Kentucky. And then I see the Viper boys.
Fucking great
. It scares me to death, the possibilities of what’s happened to my daughter.

“Freedom,” they all yell out to me.
Stay away from me. Don’t ruin my last motherfucking walk, pricks
. I ignore them, but it doesn’t matter. The fattest of them, the one who left a cigar burn on my shoulder the other night, knocks chairs over on his way to me.

“Whatta you want?” I ask, not that I give a flying fuck. And then it happens, of course, because why should my last walk be my one plan of perfection? He takes his fat fingers and grabs my snatch through my ripped jeans, full force. And suddenly, the world turns red, the blood boiling behind my eyes. All I hear is Carrie from behind scream for me to get off the guy. But I can’t. I can’t control the rage. I see the broken bottle of Corona in my hand, covered in blood. It’s only after that that I realize what I’ve done. I look around. I’m surrounded by hardened criminals and bikers who back away in fear. And now I calm down and see I am feared.

I look down at the Viper; half his nose is sliced off. “You ruined my walk,” I scream at him, not that he’ll know what the hell I’m talking about. No one will. He whimpers like a baby. Pathetic. I look to Carrie and then over to Passion, who stands on the foot of her stool at the back of the bar. Not even Carrie knows what to say. Silence on top of something by David Bowie. I drop the bottle. It thuds to the ground. I have to go. I have to get out of here. I have to move. But then I hear sirens. “That was quick.” I wipe the blood from my face and walk away. I look into Carrie’s eyes. “I’m sorry.” But really I’m not sorry for cutting that scumbag’s face off. It’s a future apology for when I don’t show up to work tomorrow, or ever again. Who wouldn’t do the same? I head for the rear exit, back down that same dark hall that smells of crack rocks and antibiotic piss. And I can feel the flashback, I can. Those hanging lamps of interrogational purgatory beckon me back to the ’90s.
Not now, not fucking now
.

I run through the hall. I run to escape the flashbacks of my incarceration in New York. And now I see the police lights at the end of the hall, like a light at the end of the tunnel, something akin to the dying dream of a fugitive. On the walls around me lights flash red and blue, and still I run toward them to escape that hallway. The dark hall starts to close in around me and there’s a figure at the end. I run faster to it. And I make it. I’ve run into the arms of Officer Mattley. I crack.

He catches me as I sob and fall to my knees on the dirt near the icebox. The rain surrounds us and Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe” bleeds from the pub to where we are. Between the tears and the rain, I feel the stickiness of the blood run away from my face. Mattley holds me tight in his arms, his mouth in my ear. He tells me everything is going to be OK. If only I can believe him. Still, I grab the front of his shirt and wipe the blood and tears all over his uniform.

“Take me home,” I cry. “Just take me home.”

“Freedom, what’d you do?” he asks as he holds me like the child that I feel like. I can’t control the tears.

I show him the bloodied bottle. “Arrest me tomorrow. But tonight, just take me home. Take me home once more.”

“You know I have to bring you in,” he says and sighs.

“Tomorrow, I promise.” I stay still, cradled in his arms. “Just one last time, take me home. There’s one thing I have to do.” I think about my suicide jar. Maybe that plan is better. I’ll tell him I have to run into my apartment for just a minute. I’ll take the pills. I’ll let him arrest me and take me down to the station. I’ll tell him everything I’ve always wanted to tell him. And then I can die. I can die close to Officer Mattley.

But a voice doesn’t let me.
Shut your fucking face and find Rebekah!

“Hurry.” He stands and leads me to the patrol car. We rush in. “Before they call it in.” He speeds away.

The weight of wet pine branches holds the long road in a wave of black. I sit in the front of the patrol car with the window open just a crack. I smell autumn encasing the branches and the salt of the Pacific not too far away. Aside from the headlights of a random car coming from the opposite direction, Mattley and I are enveloped in darkness. I tell him to pull over. He does. The windshield wipers whine in the rainfall on the side of this dead country road. He thinks I need to get sick.

“I’m a protected witness,” I start.

He shakes his head. “Freedom, you can’t tell me this.” This puts
him in a bad position, I know. But I don’t want to hide it from him. What’s the point, anyway? He puts his hands up to keep me quiet.
Right, as if that will work
.

“I was charged with killing my husband.” I ignore his attempts to keep my mouth shut. “But the man who was later convicted, my brother-in-law Matthew, has all the means in the world, even from prison, to have me killed.” I unbuckle my seat belt and lean closer to Mattley.

“What are you doing?”

I see he’s nervous. “But now he’s out of prison.” I look around. We’re still alone. “And I have to leave.”

“Where are you going to go?”

“I don’t know.” We look into each other’s eyes and I just can’t get enough of it. “Someplace where I can’t be bothered. Somewhere far. Somewhere where no one will find me.”

“Why are you telling me this?” His words get faster and his vocal cords have just a little more pressure behind them. “You can’t tell me these—” I don’t let him finish. I kiss him. In the middle of bumblefuck nowhere, I kiss him. My first and last kiss with this man. And just as my thoughts return to the suicide jar, he kisses me back. But I can feel him fight it. And it makes it all the more beautiful. His tongue passes my teeth and inside, my organs start to sing.

In his strong arms, I finally feel at home. Home, amid the sounds of the leather seats that shift below us. He tells me he shouldn’t be doing this, and sure, I know that, because he ought to be arresting me. But no one has to know. I won’t be around soon enough, and this is our last chance. Mattley will be the last person in Oregon who will ever feel the warmth of my lips. And the only person in the world who’d ever in the past twenty-something years taste them without Jack Daniel’s between us. His attempts to push me off him are half-assed. He wants this too. And he gives up on resistance. I breathe in the air he exhales deep through his nostrils; his embrace tightens.

But then I remember my priorities here. I have to find Rebekah. I have to steer clear of Mattley, of normalcy. I pull my tongue from his mouth and back away.

“We can’t do this,” I say. I know this. He knows this. And despite these facts, the distance between us still continues to shrink and our breath makes the windows fog up. We kiss again. I slip my cold hands up his shirt to feel the tightness of his skin. I melt.

“Get over here,” he manages to say through my teeth. I put my hands behind the buckle of his belt and pull myself closer to him. But leave it to a burst of static from the police radio to kill the mood. He winces.

“All units to Twenty-seven Wilson Drive, Painter.”

“That’s my apartment building.”

“Yeah, what’s going on over there?” He calls back.

“Firefighters en route. Blaze is out of control.”

Shit, Mimi!
The rest of the place can burn to the ground, for all I care. Mattley puts his sirens on and flies through the night.

My name is Freedom and I’m helpless and small. We arrive at the apartment building, the flames boxing against the blackness of the sky. All the cars of the police department, and by “all” I mean both of them, are already there by the time Mattley and I arrive. I can make out the silhouette of the super screaming with his hands in the air, shouting at the officers, but his cries are not audible against the bellows of the blaze. I run to him, leaving the dust of what should be a yard behind my Doc Martens.

“Where the hell is she?” I roar. I rip at the super’s T-shirt and pull his face close to mine, giving a stare that says that I can and will kill him if he’s not helped her out. The pockmarks and scabs of tweeking on crank pepper his face, his bones full of homemade tattoo ink. “Where the fuck is Mimi?” I really thought I’d be more concerned about my suicide jar or the hundreds of letters to my children. To my surprise, I am not.

I wish I took the broken bottle with me from the Whammy Bar so I could make this super suck on it. But I’ve already drawn too much attention to myself. “Mimi who?” he yells.
Yeah, go back to your meth pipe, you sleazy bastard
.

“Mimi Bruce. Where the fuck is she?” I feel Mattley pull me back.
I accidentally elbow him in his nose behind me and feel it crack in half. The sound gives me a chill, despite the heat of the burning home.
God, me and noses, right? What the hell is wrong with me?
I take off my Sex Pistols shirt so I’m exposed in my black tank top and try to stop the bleeding. When I hear the cracking and crashing of what I can only assume is the second floor of the building, the floor that Mimi and I live on, falling, I run toward the house. Mattley screams my name after me. Everybody screams after me. I get as close as I can to the complex before the heat wants to melt my clothes onto my body. I scream Mimi’s name.

I can feel a fire stirring within me in the same way it stirs in my building, craving oxygen so it can explode into something fierce. That’s called a back draft. For me, it’s called fury. I go to kick in the door least engulfed in flames, just the way I’ve kicked down Mimi’s door so many times before. Doesn’t matter that it’s not the floor we live on, I just have to get in. But just as the sole of my Doc Marten is about to plant itself beside the doorknob, I feel an arm around my waist and I’m carried away from the blaze like a sack of potatoes, upside down over his shoulder. Suddenly, I’m facing Mattley’s police-issued Glock on his waist. I can practically taste it.
Hope you don’t mind if I borrow this
. I’m able to unbutton his holster and slip the gun in my underwear between my jeans and pubic bone as I squirm and scream at him to let me the hell go. And when I take a minute to look around, I see probably about a hundred bystanders, too blinded and enthralled by the fire to notice a cop getting his piece stolen by the crazy town drunk. At least I hope so.

Mattley lets me go and I disappear somewhere into the crowd. And then I see Newbie, the new officer that assisted Mattley the other night. He is at the back of an ambulance with Mimi, who wears the same shirt I helped her into the other day.
Jesus Christ
. I walk to check up on her. She’s slapping Newbie as he tries to get a report out of her, and somehow I feel like a proud mother. “What are you hoping to get out of her?” I ask Newbie; I don’t know what his real name is.
“She’ll tell you George Clooney started the fire in a fucking leotard, if you ask her long enough.”

I go to hug Mimi, relieved. “What?” she asks. She’s having a moment of lucidity. Let’s see how long it lasts this time. I send Newbie away so I can get a minute alone with Mimi.

“Mimi, what happened? What did I say about leaving the stove on?” I make it a point not to sound angry, but instead like a person who cares. I spit in my hand and wipe some of the soot from her forehead around a large but shallow gash that already starts to turn black and blue on the sides.

“But Freedom.” She’s starting to get upset. I have to keep her calm. I have to keep her lucid. “I wasn’t cooking anything! I thought you were cooking. I mean, that’s where the flames came from. From your apartment, not mine.” Her voice gets louder. I can feel the demons of dementia on their way. “You did this! You did this, Nessa Delaney! That’s who they were looking for! Nessa Delaney. You’re not Freedom. You’re Nessa Delaney!” I realize she’s not losing it. And before anyone from the crowd a few yards away can hear anything, I close the ambulance doors and close the small, blue draperies to keep anyone from seeing in.

“Who, Mimi? Who was looking for me? Who was looking for Nessa Delaney?”

“Three men, I think. I heard them making all sorts of racket next door. And they came to mine.” She points to her forehead. “How do you think I got this? Thugs, they were.”

I think about the other day with Cal the cockroach.

As Cal was getting ready to leave, I untangled the cord and took the phone with me from the kitchen counter into the bathroom. I recognized Peter’s voice in an instant, that deep stutter and the way he called me Nessa. I was at a loss for words. I really had no control over what came out of my mouth. “How the hell did you find me?”

“I’m on my way to Kentucky, but the guys have a head start. Not sure
if they’re going to you in Oregon first or to the kids in Kentucky…you remember my mother.”

“Of course I fucking remember,” I whispered so Cal couldn’t hear, covering my knees with the extra-large tee
.

“They won’t hurt the kids,” he reassures me. “You, on the other hand…”

“Nah, they’ll never find me. These Feds have me hid good.” And Mason and Rebekah aren’t babies anymore. They’re not going to just kidnap grown adults and bring them to New York. And let them come for me. Probably just a bunch of talk, anyway. I doubt they’d even know how to read a map. “I’ve missed the shit out of you, Peter.” I hear him smile with me
.

I call Passion
. “Passion, I need your help. I’m in a lot of trouble.”

“I think that same trouble just walked in. Three men. New York accents. Showing your picture around.”

“I don’t have a lot of time. I need a huge favor.”

“What kind?”

“You remember Gunsmoke, right? The one from the other day calling Obama a nigger and such?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Could you give him a hand job and I’ll pay you double when I can?”

She’s about to ask why, but I tell her to hold on. Mimi yells for my help, scared of the officers who bang the shit out of the ambulance doors. But I can hear that voice, that fucking voice of Matthew Delaney on the phone. And I wish I’d saved my energies with that Corona bottle to slice his face off. Mattley and Newbie finally pry the doors open.

With my hands up, I say, “I was just coming out, boys.”

“I’m not decent!” yells a fully clothed Mimi.
Thanks for the effort, you crazy bat
.

“Freedom, what the hell are you doing?” Mattley yells, a nasal shout with a newly shaped nose.

“Your stupid partner was scaring the shit out of her.” I point at
Newbie. “I was just trying to calm her down.” I start to walk away. “She left the oven on,
again
.” I ramble so he can roll his eyes at me and let me walk away. “I can’t help it if you pigs don’t do your job. The lady in the muumuu, sure. Leaves the oven on. Sic the rent-a-cop on her. What, y’all fucking graduated the police academy with Big Bird and Rain Man?”

I go back to Passion on the phone. “Can you get him off before I get there?”

“Yes, but why? And what about those men?”

I tell her my plans and then find my car, where upon inspection, I see a knife in my front driver’s-side tire. I pretend to drop something on the ground, my back to the cops. I look around to make sure there’s no copper breathing down my neck and yank the knife from my tire. I walk toward the only two cop cars there, the fire behind me. Dozens of bystanders with their backs to me stand between me and the cops. “They won’t even look my way.”

“They’re busy with their faces in some hot pie, anyway,” says Passion.

I bend down behind car numero uno. With my back to it so I can see who’s coming, I reach behind me and stab the rear tire. I poke my head out.

I steal the car next to it. I steal Officer Mattley’s patrol car and make my way.

My name is Freedom
and this is a rush. I park at the base of the
HOTEL PAINTER/HOT PIE
neon-lit sign in the middle of the parking lot, where the cops usually park to scare off fresh pussy renters when they’re not inhaling their warm Krispy Kreme donuts. The neon tubes buzz overhead like the electricity created between pros and customers alike. I switch on the spotlight near the driver’s-side mirror so people turn their heads, scatter like cockroaches. At the Whammy Bar I can spot Luke at the entrance. He must have been
the one that Matthew put on lookout detail.
Bitch
. Passion sees me and walks across the dirt.

“You got some nasty people looking for you, Freedom.” She shakes her head, her elbow resting on the roof of the car.

“They’re not looking for me.” I examine the buttons and switches on the inside of the patrol car, playing with them.
This one’s the siren, whoops. This one’s for the lights. This knob’s for AM radio. I need something like this
. “They’re looking for Nessa.”

“I figured…” Passion trails off.

“You do that favor I asked?”

She looks down at me and smirks. “You know I did, you ain’t gotta ask.” She dangles the keys to Gunsmoke’s motorcycle from her finger. “Hand jobs can be so distracting.”

“I would have gotten them myself, but the second I do and those men see me, I get a bullet in the brain as an early Christmas present.”

“Sovereign Shore?”

“Sovereign Shore. Take the back roads.”