Freedom's Child (35 page)

“My name is Freedom and I’m an alcoholic.” The group greets me. In a church library with cheap coffee rings and stale rum cake, and I’m sure there were a few who rolled their eyes at that, it’s my nine-month anniversary of sobriety. It feels like years. But time’s tricky like that; it’ll make you think you’ve acquired control when really you haven’t.

I’ve even lost some weight over these past few months. Could be from not drinking, could be that I’ve lost much of my appetite since that dreadful day. That day. I tried to avoid the news and the Internet in the days following, but hearing about it was inevitable. I heard about the leaked photos, the tormenting ones of dead children sprawled along the pews of the church. The crosses and Bibles splattered in blood. The parade of little black body bags leaving the gates and traveling up the crushed clamshell roads. The headlines said on that day 345 men, women, and children committed suicide in the name of God. I also heard that several of the survivors killed themselves in the days and months following. It was the largest cult suicide to occur on American soil.

In Alcoholics Anonymous, we’re encouraged to “find” a higher power, a power greater than ourselves that can restore us back to
sanity. Not sure if
find
is the right word; I can’t imagine God hiding behind a tree. I’m not so sure what that is, today…God. But as opposed to the days that preceded my short stay with the Third-Day Adventists, I believe something is there. I know I wasn’t alone, and I know something or someone heard me when I pleaded to God back in Kentucky. So I’m giving the Bible a try. Don’t get your hopes up too much. I didn’t say I was born-again or anything like that, I only said I’m giving the Bible a try.

The news of the Delaney brothers who were killed on the Day of Freedom traveled fast to the topmost of the headlines, a sensational story in New York: a Mastic Beach fairy tale, in its own tragic way. Peter was even asked to write a book about them. He respectfully declined. And by
respectfully
, I mean he spit on the ground and proceeded to tell the journalist who’d suggested the idea to go fuck himself.

Peter lives with me now, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. He and Mason even Skype every Sunday over a beer. I even got him a job at the Whammy Bar. They love him there, and there’s no wonder. Needless to say, I don’t visit my old place of work anymore. Gotta change my people, places, and things, just like we’re told in the groups.
Because if nothing changes, nothing changes. Hear, hear
. But I still keep close to Carrie, my old boss, and Passion. Life would be boring without those two.

From what little I’ve heard, correctional officer Jimmy Doyle, the one rumored to have been hired by Lynn to break my kneecaps, went over to the Delaney house after hearing the news about her sons. It was Halloween.

I suppose the door was open, and when he let himself in, a massive pile of gray grease lay in the middle of the living room floor. It was Lynn Delaney, literally melting the floorboards of the house with decomposition: six hundred pounds of rancid decay. I’m sure Jimmy threw up at the stench, an odor strong enough that it woke the curiosity of the neighbors and probably stuck to the back of his
skull for hours. The medical examiner would place the time of death at five days before: the day Peter ventured off for God’s country. The Land of Tomorrow. The Unbridled Spirit. Kentucky.

Nosy neighbors from all over watched, dressed in their Halloween costumes, as the fire department had to tear down the walls because she couldn’t fit through the door. From there on out, the biggest legacy Lynn left behind: the neighbor who had to be taken away by a moving truck because she couldn’t fit in an ambulance.

Natural causes. Well, as natural as can be with such an unnatural weight. She fell. And she was never able to get herself back up.

After a Sunday beer with Peter, a couple months after the Day of Freedom, Mason closes the laptop and observes his new office. He uses his fingertips to trace the edges of his name on a plaque: Assistant District Attorney Mason P. Paul. No more defending criminals for him. On his desk, a gift box wrapped in red and gold for his mother. Inside, Rebekah’s cross, the one he’d found at the Bluegrass.

“Heya, Mason, got something for you.” His new assistant, a young brunette named Bobby Jo, hands him an A4 envelope, postmarked from Frankfort, Kentucky, the capital city.

“Wow, my very first piece of mail to the office.” Mason smiles, sitting in his brand-new leather office chair.

“You should frame it,” she squeals.

“You know what? I should.” He tears into it, delighted, and pulls out the contents.

“Well?” She holds her hands to her mouth like a giddy child. “What are we framing?” But he doesn’t answer her right away. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” he says as the assistant watches him sink in his seat. “It’s nothing. Say, Bobby Jo, can I have a minute?”

“Of course.” She closes the door after her. He rubs the back of
his neck, heartbeat getting faster, debating whether or not he should read all the details of his sister’s autopsy report. He decides it’d be best that he doesn’t. He doesn’t want his last memories of Rebekah like that; he already knows too much: how she was dispersed shamefully in a field like fertilizer for the animals. That was enough for him. He tossed the papers behind him, having no intention of ever reading them.

He sifts through another box of his belongings and continues to spend the Sunday making his office feel more personal. He pulls out a framed photo of him and Violet from their trip to Turks and Caicos.

“I’m sorry to bother you again,” says Bobby Jo from the speakerphone. “There’s someone here to see you.”

“Send ’em in,” he responded.

Mason studies the young woman who walks in, a visibly pregnant woman in jeans and a purple cardigan, eyes hiding behind thick bangs and nerdy glasses. “Can I help you?” he asked.

The woman says nothing, instead handing Mason a business card. His own card, his own handwriting. On the back:

Contact me soon. I will help you.

It is the woman from the Goshen Police Department, the drunken girl passed out. Darian Cooke raped this woman. And once she gives birth, it’ll be impossible to deny.

My name is Freedom and I’m working on a crossword puzzle in bed. I like puzzles when I can’t sleep. I’m too excited about my son arriving tomorrow. Twelve across, “Painter James McNeill _______.” The answer is Whistler. Fucking Whistler. Goshen.

The only story coming out of Goshen that I really followed in the weeks after was Ger and Adelaide Custis, the Amalekite. We speak often, weekly. And in the four years that she was held against her will, her faith never subsided, no matter how bastardized it was in that group. I suppose they have the best happily-ever-after ending they could have, considering the circumstances. Mason visits his grandparents regularly.

I never knew what became of Baby Theresa. Those records were closed. But I can only hope that she was taken in by some nice family. I can only hope that her brief stay with the Third-Day Adventists will never haunt her. I can only hope she grows into a beautiful young lady.

The media painted Virgil and Carol in a terrible light upon the discovery of the corpses of the twelve young females in Whistler’s Field, along with the fact of Virgil having fathered nearly sixty children within the cult. One of the bodies in the field was a decade old;
the rest had been killed within the last four or so years. They weren’t all local, one being from Louisiana, another from Indiana, one more from Tennessee. But the most recent one was a local. And Rebekah Jane Paul, once known as Layla Delaney and later known as the Virgin Mary, was never documented as having been originally from a New York state prison. But she was. My Layla. My Rebekah. That said, I guess she was never mine to begin with.

But she carried my blood, she had that passion…and she wanted to move.

Well, as for me, what can I say? I guess it was too much work for them, or maybe nobody cared about the monsters, but it was never publicly reported that the Pauls were murdered. That will remain a secret I will take to the grave. Mason will never know that skeleton. I suppose the Amalekite had her suspicions, but she never said a word. Like Rebekah, she was a victim.

“Are you crying?” Mattley comes from the bathroom, shirtless, smelling of toothpaste and shaving cream.

“I guess so.”

He comes across the bed on his knees and leans down to me. “Don’t cry, Freedom.” He tucks my hair behind my ears and wipes a tear away.

“I don’t know if I’m crying because I’m sad or because I’m happy.”

“I know,” he whispers. He pulls the drawer from the bedside table and pulls out my prescription, placing the Monday pill in my hand. No more jars. No more Gumm and Howe. “Freedom, I want you to do something for me.”

I look up at him.

“I want you to marry me.”

I lean in to kiss him, but I’m interrupted. “Daddy, I can’t sleep,” says his son, Richie.

“Me neither,” trails Magdalene in the doorway. “Uncle Peter snores too loud.”

I smile. “Get on up here, then.” Mattley and I sit Indian-style, facing
each other, Richie sitting on his lap and Magdalene on mine. The kids thumb-wrestle. I look at Mattley and nod to him.

Magdalene has been enrolled in several counseling groups since she came home with us. All the therapists say she’s making great progress, that she didn’t see as much at the Third-Day Adventists as she could have, and that, to
everyone’s
relief, she’d missed her father’s attentions by a matter of a few years. Every night, she insists on praying over dinner, and I’ll never stop her. The kid’s faith is admirable.

“Now,” I begin. “Once upon a time, there was an Indian named Freedom.”

The sand between Mason’s toes, a nonalcoholic beer from the cooler out of respect for his mother’s sobriety. Sovereign Shore.

“Do you really have to work while we’re here at the beach?” Freedom asks him, his briefcase half planted in the sand. The Pacific Ocean on the Oregon shore rocks gentler than he imagined.

“I promise, it won’t take me long.”

“Suit yourself,” Freedom sings. “And we’re off!” She lifts Magdalene in one graceful sweep and runs into the ocean. The girl squeals in delight, yells that echo off the surf, fading the farther out in the water Freedom takes her.

Mason looks out to his mother and his little sister. Suddenly he is reminded of his visions, his dreams of Freedom before he knew who she was. The more he sees of them now, the more vivid his memories become. Her tropical smell, her perfect teeth, her tattoos, and hair tangled with sand and salt. He watches, hypnotized, Freedom tossing Magdalene up and down, the sun behind them fading away to warm other nations, the sky turning to shades of gold and pink. It warms his face as the shadows grow longer around them, the evening still warm enough to sun-kiss his cheeks. And in his mind, he can imagine the airplane and banner from his youth. Freedom McFly.

He looks over at Violet and mouths the words
I love you
, and he’s never meant it more. He smiles when she says it back. He thinks how he could not possibly understand what his mother had to sacrifice, never having known about being a parent. Looking at Violet, he imagines he might have an idea. In, give or take, seven months. And he can’t wait to tell the rest of the family.

He returns to his work with a smile, papers now smudged with coconut tanning oil in the margins. He flips through them, a knot in his Adam’s apple when he sees Rebekah’s autopsy report mixed in there by accident. He inhales sharply, but he doesn’t let the apprehension show on his face. He scans through it, with the knowledge that he’ll probably regret it shortly after. His eyes stop at certain words: words like
serrated, bludgeoned, blunt-force trauma
. But one word makes Mason stop breathing. One word makes him nearly swallow his own tongue. One word makes him rise to his feet and stare out at his mother and Magdalene:
Cesarean
. It was noted on her, could still be detected by the ME. Though Virgil had cut off her arms, legs, and head and piled the pieces in a single grave, her torso and groin were still intact.

Magdalene was the daughter of Rebekah Jane Paul. She is the biological granddaughter of Freedom Oliver.

Mason looks out as Freedom dances with Magdalene in the breaks of the slow-rocking waves under one of the most unforgettable sunsets he’s ever seen. Freedom stops to look right back at her son, cradling Magdalene like the daughter she held only once. And she holds her longer than two minutes and seventeen seconds. And in that moment, in the way she carries the girl, in the way she looks back at Mason, in the way she’s changed her life for that child, Mason knows. He just knows: Freedom knew from the get-go that Magdalene was her granddaughter. She knew it the second she arrived in Goshen, Kentucky.

My name is Freedom
and I look down at Magdalene’s joy-filled eyes, the waves crashing around us. Magdalene reaches up to caress my cheeks.

“Finish the story, Sister Freedom,” Magdalene asks.

And I think back, to a porch in the Snake River Plain, as I retell it to Magdalene.

“This, in your language, might be called karma. But where we are from, it’s all part of the circle of life. And Freedom completed that circle, as everything in life happens in a circle.” The old man drew a circle in the sky with his finger. The rocking chair continued to creak under him. “And to this day, that very tree continues to grow.”

I hold Magdalene so hard that I could squeeze the life out of her. It doesn’t matter that she was a product of violence, attacks, and evil. Because she isn’t a product. She isn’t a result. She is Rebekah’s flesh and blood. She is my flesh and blood. She is mine.