Freedom's Child (26 page)

“Glad you guys could sort y-y-your shit,” he says. “I’m not about to chase you all over this city anymore.”

“Mason, meet the only decent person from your father’s side of the family.”

Mason looks at him with a new set of eyes, now knowing that this man who came to help Mason with his search is in fact his biological uncle.

“Well, what do we do next?” Peter asks.

From not too far away, the growing sounds of police sirens. “Let’s get out of here, first,” I say as I lead the way to anywhere that
isn’t here. When Mason follows, I stop short and turn to him in front of a storefront window full of flat-screen televisions. “I need you to understand that one way or another, I’m going to find her.”

His eyes narrow with curiosity. “How?”

“I go first thing in the morning to the Third-Day Adventists.”

“But they don’t let anybody in there, even the ATF’s tried,” says Mason.

“I promise you, I have a way in. Virgil’s already expecting me.”

“It’s as good a place as any to hide,” Peter calls out from behind Mason. When I look over his shoulder, there’s my face in the window of an electronics store on several TVs.

I tuck in my hair under the baseball cap I stole from the club, stand close enough to fog up the glass, and watch an old mug shot of mine from an old drunk-in-public charge on the flat screen. “Let’s hope they don’t have cable.”

We walk through the fog
in the darkness, our backs to the living and breathing creature called Louisville, Kentucky. Peter joins us but maintains his distance, a gesture to show that he appreciates the privacy I so desire. Each step away from the urban lights is a step further into silence, until we find a gap at the bottom of otherwise locked wired gates that seal off a baseball field, Peter parking his chair near the bleachers and reaching for his sock. I remember it’s where he keeps his flask. Some things will never change with that guy.

Grounded in the fact that I did once live in the slums of Mastic Beach, New York, I recognize that what smells like Alpo dog food is the smell of a crematorium. The engines of the furnaces seem to growl through the smog, but Mason doesn’t seem to mind. I don’t mind.

Despite numerous refusals, Mason insists I wear his brown leather jacket. I wonder if he notices that I’m wearing his girlfriend’s
clothes. I pull the jacket tighter around me, and I’m not sure where to stand.
Is this too close? Is this too far? Does this facial expression show my guilt accurately? My sadness? How about my self-hatred? My pain, my suffering, my regret, my shortcomings, my anger, my fear. Do you see me, Mason? Can you see me, son?
In stillness that he probably deems awkward, he walks to home base as I walk toward the center of the diamond.

“In the last few months that I knew you, you had your little heart set on joining the big leagues and being a New York Yankee,” I say.

Mason smiles for the first time tonight, stuffs his hands in his pockets, and scrapes the dirt off home plate. “I wanted to be major league until I was seventeen,” he says, his gaze lost in the ground. “Even played in college.”

As I step onto the pitcher’s mound about twenty feet from home plate, I call out, “I always knew you would.”

“Are you really going to make me ask?” he yells, making a stance ready to batter up.

“Ask what?” I throw an imaginary baseball.

Mason swings the invisible bat, holds his hand over his eyes, and watches a home run, his finger following the fake ball across the field. “Why did you do it? Why were Rebekah and I put up for adoption?”

“Depends.” I pretend to throw the baseball over and over into a catcher’s mitt. “Which version do you want?”

“I have options?”

“Well, there’s the one where I tell you a bunch of bullshit to soften the blow for you, what I call the candy-coated version.” I throw the ball and he swings. His eyes show it’s a strike. “And then there’s the truth, which will probably piss you off and keep you from ever talking to me.”

“We haven’t talked in twenty years.” He hits the bat off the plate. “So it sounds like you really have nothing to lose by telling me the truth.”

But I still don’t know which version to tell him. Both I’ve rehearsed for the past twenty years, but both sound pretty incredible. Mason walks over to me. “If I promise not to stop talking to you, will you tell me the truth?”

Mason sits at my feet, rests his forearms on his knees in front of him, ass in the dirt. He reaches up and pulls out a flask from the pocket of his leather jacket that I’m wearing. He offers me a sip.

“I gave it up,” I say as I plant down next to him. “But drink up. There’s not much time until sunrise. Then we should go on our way and get Rebekah.”

My name used to be Nessa Delaney and I used to know what happiness tasted like, what it felt like, what it looked like. Well, at least I understood what it was supposed to resemble. But I had a family. I had a home. I had high hopes and great expectations. I was what the American dream looked like
.

It was the winter of 1994. Black ice covered Mastic Beach, making streets look like polished onyx with the occasional tumbleweed of garbage blowing across it. There was the constant drip from the faucets to keep the pipes from freezing, the kind that irritates you if there’s no noise to cover it up
.

It was 10:00 p.m. on Black Friday, the night after Thanksgiving. The house still smelled of turkey and pumpkin pie from the night before and leftovers. Mason. That was what your adoptive parents named you. But you were named Ethan at birth. Anyway, you were snuggled between me and the back of the couch. The way your eyelids would flutter like the skin of butterfly wings as you snored turned you into something more than mere flesh and blood, something more precious. I stroked your hair and watched you sleep for what felt like days on end between chapters of L. Frank Baum’s
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,
after you’d fallen asleep at the part where Dorothy and the Scarecrow oil the Tin Woodman. I counted each freckle on
the bridge of your tiny nose and rubbed the palm of your sweaty hand with the pad of my thumb. And if ever I believed in God, it was because of you. Because of moments like those
.

Seventy-two. You had seventy-two freckles
.

At the top of the pages I would squint my eyes at the lights of the Christmas tree that you and I spent the whole day putting up and decorating with your uncle Peter while your father, Mark, spent the day working. The bleary reds and greens and yellows seemed like glitter on a curtain of darkness
.

“I wouldn’t mind a glass of eggnog right about now,” said Peter, from the middle of the living room. Back in Mastic Beach, your father and I had one of the nicer houses on the block: a well-kept one-story, newly remodeled and furnished with all the best things one could buy from Flanigan’s furniture store up at the King Kullen plaza. In the living room, cream leather couches, cream carpeting, decorated for the holidays with red ribbons and faux-greenery
.

“Let me put him down first.” I took you to your room, kissed you on your cheek, and closed the door behind me
.

In those days, I’d have only the occasional celebratory cocktail on a holiday. I added a pinch of nutmeg and cinnamon to our mugs on the kitchen counter that opened into the living room. And all I could think was that your father should have been home hours ago, and how I was so sick and tired of the all-night “work shifts,” waking every morning to a cold bed, smelling the perfume on his clothes when I’d do his laundry. Sometimes I could even smell another woman’s cunt when he’d get out of his clothes for the night
.

“Ya know, Nessa,” Peter said as he turned his chair to face me, the Christmas tree blinking behind him. “I like to downplay my intelligence too.”

“Would you stop reading my mind?” I smiled as I added a shot of Southern Comfort into our drinks and walked to the living room. “It’s better he stays out late. Less aggravation for me.” But Mark’s infidelity ripped at me, kept me from sleeping, from eating. I didn’t let it show, but Peter was too sharp for my weak charades
.

“Shoulda just married me and rolled off into the sunset,” he joked into the eggnog. What the hell was I supposed to say to remarks like those? I
mean, I knew Peter liked me and all, and sure, I liked him. He was my best friend, then. But I made it a point to never lead him on
.

“I’ll wheel you off a cliff if you don’t shut it.” I smiled and arranged the throw on the couch. Radiohead’s “Creep” played in the background, a nice break from the Christmas carols I was already sick and tired of, despite it still only being November. “Before I get too comfortable,” I said as I scurried off to take a piss
.

The mug of eggnog warmed the top of my thigh as I sat on the toilet. It was a race, then: Could I gulp the whole drink before I stopped peeing? How easily bored I used to become. With my face at the edge of the mug, the winter’s cold draft whispered through the cracks of the window. I put my cup on the windowsill to grab some toilet paper when I heard the all-too-familiar sounds of heavy footsteps on the front porch
. Damn it,
as I hurried to wipe before going to meet Mark in the living room. Somewhere as the warm buzz began in my chest, the mug fell to the floor into a million white shards of ceramic. Damn it, again. I went out to the living room, not realizing I was trailing blood behind me from my heel
.

“Oh, it’s just you,” I said as Matthew poked his head in from the front door
.

“Is that any way to greet your guests, Ness?”

He waited for me to invite him in. Sure, he had no problem opening the door, but he always waited for an invitation, like motherfucking Dracula or something. “Come in,” I called out as I lifted my foot and placed it on the counter, reaching for a kitchen towel that had a snowman sewn into it
.

“Here, let me.” Matthew walked over to me with a cigarette in his teeth. He came to me like a cautious man who walks to a wounded animal. He looked me up and down and smiled
.

“It’s OK, I got it,” I told him, careful not to look him in the eyes. You never looked Matthew in the eyes because with him came an uneasy feeling, a cloud that would follow him wherever he would go. I hated the way he’d peel my clothes off with his eyes, I hated the way he always smelled of barroom floor, like stale smoke and vodka hangover. But the more I tried to get a grasp on the sliver of ceramic, the more I seemed to push it into my foot
.

“Jesus Christ.” Peter rolled up to see the blood. There was more than I would have thought
.

“Here,” Matthew grabbed my ankle as gingerly as a strong man like him could
.

“Wait a sec.” I reached across the counter and grabbed the bottle of Southern Comfort and took a long swig from the neck. “OK, go.”

“I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen you drink, Ness,” he said, his words low and aimed at my foot. I cringed when he called me Ness
.

“I hate blood.”

The fact was, Matthew was incredibly handsome, very easy on the eyes. It was his personality that made my stomach turn. I suspected bipolar or something of the sort, like his mother. When he was nice, he was nice, gentle as he helped me take the ceramic from my foot. But when he was mean, he was a fucking nightmarish sonuvabitch. His hands were strong and calloused, stained with nicotine and oil. And while I didn’t allow smoking in the house, on account of you and the fact that I never smoked back then, making such a suggestion to Matthew could warrant a loss of temper. Being around Matthew was like walking on glass. Well, ceramic, in my case
.

“It’s pushed far in there,” he said as he leaned over the counter. “Hang tight.” I wanted to smack him upside the head when he leaned over and started sucking ceramic from my heel. It was fucking gross, my brother-in-law’s mouth sucking my blood
.

Matthew, as he sucked on the hole in my heel, looked up and made sure to make eye contact with me. I assumed this was an attempt to make me think of how he might look up at me if he were going down on a woman. I noticed his effort to be seductive, and I’d be lying if I said that in that moment it didn’t cross my mind, because it did. It may have even turned me on once upon a time, but I couldn’t forget that this was Matthew, Mark’s brother, an obsessive psycho. Plus, he was sucking my dirty fucking foot
.

As I stood, leg up, at the counter, he placed one arm under my thigh and the other around my back. He carried me over to the sink, turned on the faucet, and spit out the long sliver of bloody ceramic from his mouth. Over his
shoulder, I saw Peter raise his eyebrows, to which I rolled my eyes, a gesture to show we both knew Matthew’s weaselly intentions
.

“Deep breath, Ness.” Matthew poured some of the Southern Comfort onto the wound before putting it to my lips
.

I screamed. “What are you doing here, anyway?” I asked as the booze stung my heel
.

“Mark didn’t tell you?” Matthew put his lips under the faucet and rinsed my blood from his mouth. Clearly not. “Spending a few days here. I don’t mind the couch.”

Would have been good to know. Fuck
.

Peter went home for the night. My foot throbbed. I tossed and turned in the bed, waiting for Mark to return from work. I heard Matthew rummaging around the living room, stumbling drunk
. No, there are no pills for you in the utensil drawers, so shut the fuck up out there.
I might have fallen asleep, but if I did, it was only for a minute. I rubbed my eyes, but didn’t even have the chance to yawn. I could smell him before I saw his figure walk in, and before I could even comprehend what was happening, I was suffocating under the weight of his body
.

I wanted to scream, I really did. But I had you in the next room, and what kind of mother would want their child walking in on their mother being raped?

I wanted to breathe, I really did. But his grip around my throat closed tighter and tighter; I swore I felt the skin on my neck tear
.

I wanted to push, I really did. But his weight deflated the life from my lungs
.

His huffs made from the vapors of cheap vodka were loud in my ears, his belt chiming against the bed frame. His sweat fell right on my lips. And with each grunt, with each thrust, with each dry pain between my legs, I felt my soul slip an inch away farther from my body. And no matter how hard I would try to reach them, those pieces would be gone forever
.

The seconds lasted for hours, the minutes, days. I let my body go limp;
I gave up. I fixed my eyes to a mark on the ceiling, a dot of spackle. And when he was about finished, he released my throat. But I still didn’t breathe. Matthew pulled up his pants, each sigh of relief from his climax turning my blood into bile, like his semen was made of this poison that would turn me into who I’d become, turn me bitter, turn me lost, turn me cold. I didn’t move a muscle, I didn’t make one noise, as he leaned over and gently grabbed my jaw, his face on mine. “You were great.” He kissed my still lips and left the room
.

Minutes later, he was snoring on the couch
.

I walked into your room, still fast asleep in your toddler bed. My steps were soft on the carpet; I had trouble walking from the pain down below. Looking down, your lips puckered like you were drinking from a straw in a dream. My elbows and shoulders felt like they’d turned to rust as I lifted you, your body warm through the polyester pajamas
.

Mason, you could sleep through anything, I swear, even after I struggled to the floor and hit a toy robot, sending sirens and incomprehensible, staticky phrases through the house. I feared Matthew would wake up. I cupped one of your ears and held the other tight against my chest, as I sat Indian-style on the floor and cradled you on my lap
.

I buried my face in your hair and inhaled your shampoo. I placed my hand on your chest
.

I cried, but I’m not so sure that I cried about the rape. Because as I looked down at you, I’d never felt so overcome with love and adoration. And in that moment, nothing felt realer than your chest expanding with each breath, your heart beating, the delicate pace of each snore. I tucked each whimper behind my lips, swallowing each shard of pain. In that moment, I knew I’d never cherish another moment quite like that one
.

Time stopped working in the days following. Mornings remained dark and nights drew excruciating sunshine. I was a shell, a bruised one without any working organs, without any working emotions. Numbness, numbness in its rawest form is a terrifying notion. Because all of the emotions that you
are expecting to arrive: the pain, the sadness, the disgust, the rage…they just aren’t there. And after a while, you’d do anything to feel something, anything, even the wreckage, the remnants of a broken soul
.