Liberty Begins (The Liberty Series) (17 page)

First I told them what I knew about Ray: that his last name was Lawrence, he was about forty-eight, had grown up in Eugene, sometimes worked at a convenience store near our old apartment. His mother had an apartment in the city; when he wasn’t leaching onto someone else, like my mother, he stayed at his mother’s.

“Not surprising,” Matthew said. “These guys are often parasites — living off their parents or girlfriends.”

I nodded. “He never had his own place. He probably still doesn’t.”

I took a large sip of the wine John had gotten for me and tried to tell my story as simply as possible.

“My mother was a beautiful woman. She always had a drinking problem, but when we were little, she used to only drink at night, after we went to bed. Or maybe that’s just what we thought. I remember my sister Sasha used to go look under her bed every morning for empty bottles, to count them. There was always at least one, sometimes more. I didn’t know it at the time, but she was probably drinking enough on a weekly basis to kill a large mammal. Like herself. Somehow though, her body was able to keep up and keep going. Because she was so pretty, even without makeup, she looked like she was okay most of the time.

As we got older, things started to fall apart more. She couldn’t keep a job. We’d find her passed out every morning and we couldn’t wake her up. You know, the usual. Then she met Ray and she started doing coke. I came home one day and there he was, sitting on the couch, feet up on the coffee table, right next to my mom. He had bright blue eyes but somehow, I remember they looked dirty. Cloudy, or something. He kept smiling at me. ‘I’m Ray,’ he said, and shook my hand.

‘Liberty,’ I said, and nodded at him curtly. I learned shortly that he was a dealer, and he had what seemed like an unlimited supply. He was always at our house. That’s when I was twelve or thirteen. I didn’t know what cocaine was but we kept finding razor blades and mirrors stashed around the house and Sasha told me.

That’s when my mother started having guys come over. She said they were Ray’s friends. Sometimes
she said they were her boyfriends but we usually didn’t see the same one twice.
I think maybe Ray had her sleep with the guys for money or drugs. Or maybe he owed them a favor and she was it.

After a while I started to piece it together. She made us stay in our room and lock it from the inside when she had someone over. We could still hear them, though. It was awful. They weren’t the nicest guys. My mom would cry sometimes when they left, if they’d hurt her, and Sasha and I would clean her up, brush her hair, try to make her eat. But you know what it’s like living with a junkie? They’re only able to focus on you for a second. In their mind, they’re always planning their next fix. It’s like you’re just an obstacle, talking at them, getting in their way. Even when you’re cleaning some guy’s semen off of them.” I shuddered.

“She just didn’t care. I learned not to take it personally. But Sasha couldn’t — she fought with our mother all the time, screaming, begging. Sasha was very smart and pragmatic; she couldn’t understand that someone could be ruled so wholly by their cravings. She couldn’t tolerate it. She left when she was eighteen. She begged me to come with her, but I couldn’t leave mom. She was in bad shape. Sasha almost couldn’t bring herself to do it, but I pleaded with her to go. ‘Make a life and save some room for me,’ is what I told her. I meant it.

Someone had to stay and I knew it was going to be me. I only felt sorry for my mother. I remembered what she was like when we were younger, and I knew that she wasn’t happy living the way she did. She was a prisoner. Sometimes she would hug me and cry, not saying a word. I knew how much pain she was in — how else could you do that to your body? So I couldn’t hate her, and I wouldn’t leave her. Somehow she had managed to bring me and Sasha into this world on her own and she had managed to keep us safe, or at least alive.

Safe I wasn’t sure about: some of the guys, including Ray, were starting to try to talk to me and were looking at me a lot. It scared me.

I was going to school and working as much as I could. I was in high school. That’s when I remember the heroin starting. I came home one day and my mother was laying on the couch, and Ray was there, holding her hand.

‘Mom, are you okay?’I asked.

She looked up at me then with eyes that were filled with wonder, like she had just seen Jesus, or something. My stomach dropped to my knees. I didn’t know what she’d done, but I knew in my heart that something was wrong and that it wouldn’t ever be right again. Whatever it was, it was going to possess her. I could tell that just by looking at her. And I knew I was never going to see my real mother again.”

I stopped here and drank a large quantity of wine. Part of me felt guilty drinking while I was telling this story, but I knew I would never end up like her. I didn’t have it in me. I was lucky.

“Soon after that Ray set up what was basically a heroin shop in our house. He had lots of scary, dirty-looking people coming over, and a lot of times, they sampled the product right
there. I’d come home and find a bunch of strangers nodding off on my couch. At least when it was coke they came and went; the heroin people seemed to like to stay together, and they seemed to really like staying in my living room. Because I had developed, I started to get even more afraid. They were looking at me in a way I didn’t like — Ray was looking at me in a way I didn’t like.
I started keeping a metal baseball bat under my bed, a knife under my mattress, and wearing enormous tee shirts and sweatshirts to hide my body. Ray was starting to
scare me. I heard him and my mother having sex
all night, every night, when I thought she was too out of it to even brush her teeth. She didn’t sound happy — but I guess not scared, either. She just sounded out of it. Like he was having sex with someone in a coma. And every morning, when he’d come out of her room, I could feel him watching me.”

I looked down. I felt hot bile pooling in my stomach.

“Liberty, do you want to stop?” John asked me quietly.

I shook my head, no. “I’m almost done.” I took another gulp of wine.

“Like I said,
Ray had started looking at me in a way I didn’t like. Even though I always wore bulky tee shirts and baggy jeans, he would still stare at me. I slept with my door locked and my baseball bat in my bed every night. He kept my mom completely doped up, day and night, so I couldn’t talk to her about it. Even if I had, she might not have cared at that point. She was slipping away.

She was starting to lose her looks. I didn’t think it was possible, but she was comatose most of the time, and she wasn’t able to take care of herself. One night Ray had a couple of his friends over and he let them into her room. I heard them. They were having sex with her while she was passed out. I sat there on my bed, with my hands over my ears, and cried and cried. After they left, she woke up a little and I heard Ray cursing her out. ‘You dirty fucking cunt,’ he said. ‘You’re so fucking out of it, they don’t even want to pay me anymore.’”

John let out a low hiss of a breath. I didn’t look at him. It was only going to get worse.

“She was using all day, every day, and she was going downhill fast.
I couldn’t lift her to bathe her; Ray just started to ignore her. He was watching me more every day, with a hungry look in his eye. I knew it was just a matter of time, but I was prepared, and unlike everybody else around, I was completely sober. I figured I had an advantage.

One night after work I had a glass of water at home before I went to bed. That was my fatal mistake. Ray must have put something in it when I was in the bathroom; the next thing I remember, I woke up in my room, and he was in my bed. Neither one of us had any clothes on. He was rubbing himself between my breasts, moaning. Then — this is bad, but — he shifted up a bit, and started trying to poke the tip of his penis into my mouth. He must not have liked my unresponsiveness because he grunted, like he was frustrated, and pulled out. Then he slid down my body and started to put his thing between my legs.

I didn’t move; I didn’t give any indication that I was alert or knew what was going on. After a second he stopped, reached down and got a syringe. He was talking to me, then, but he didn’t know I was awake. ‘I’m gonna dose you up nice and good, little girl,’ he said, and held the syringe down in between my toes. ‘Then you’re going to be begging me, for everything,’ he said, rubbing his hardness against my leg as he prepared to shoot me up.

I knew what was coming: the needle piercing my skin, the heroin invading my body...and then Ray would be piercing and invading my body. I couldn’t handle it. It was too horrible. I had to act fast.

‘Ray,’ I said quietly so I wouldn’t startle him, ‘you don’t have to do that.’ He looked up at me. In the darkness of the room, I hope he couldn’t see the tortured look on my face. ‘I
want
to do what you want to do,’ I said. I tried to sound seductive, even though I was clueless and petrified. I sat up and slid down the bed towards him. I gently took the syringe out of his hand and put it on the nightstand, and then I crawled, naked, onto his lap and kissed him.

He was hard, obviously. I pushed him back onto the bed and kissed him on a trail down his body. I took him in my mouth. I had no idea what to do, but he was moaning, and then he grabbed the back of my head and pushed me further down on him, so it was pretty easy to figure out. I tried to act like I was into it; I didn’t want to stop before he came. I didn’t want him to try to have intercourse with me. He got pretty excited, calling me all sorts of nasty names, telling me I was a dirty whore just like my mother, thrusting into my mouth. He shoved his fingers inside me the whole time, hard and dull, over and over, like he was trying to hurt me.

And that’s how he came: calling me a dirty whore, shoving his fingers into my vagina with one hand, and crushing my head down on him with the other.”

“I’ll fucking kill him,” John said, lethally.

I sighed heavily. “Hold on,” I said, and held my hand up. “I’m not done.”

“The next night I was ready for him. I actually went to Walmart that day and bought a tacky, cheap thong and a matching bra, so he’d know I’d been thinking of him. I wanted to seem eager. I made sure I didn’t drink anything at the house so I could stay awake — he was watching me, with those cloudy eyes, and I was pretty sure he still didn’t trust me. So I went straight to bed hours before he and my mother did, and I waited for him.

They didn’t have sex that night. Maybe he gave her more drugs than usual so she’d sleep through what he had planned with me. I laid in bed, sweating, waiting, for what seemed like a very long time.

I had to time everything exactly right, otherwise things were going to go very, very wrong.

Finally he came in, naked and hard, stroking himself. ‘I’ve been waiting for this all day,’ he said softly, and he shoved himself in my face. Without pausing, I licked him and pulled him into my mouth. He threw his head back, grunting, standing over me, thrusting lazily, just getting warmed up. I licked and sucked with abandon, until I was sure he was totally into it, not paying attention.

‘Ray,’ I said, in a singsong voice, ‘I’m ready for you.’ I laid back on the bed and spread my legs. I reached down and stroked myself with one hand. He was huge, rock hard, and he came over and straddled me. He pulled down my underwear. He started pressing himself into me. I let him get a rhythm, and moved against him so he moaned. He was just about to slide it all the way in. I could feel him getting ready.

‘I’m gonna fuck you hard,’ he said, lowly. ‘I’m gonna fuck you so hard you’re going to cry and you’re going to love it, you little whore. Just like your mama does.’

I let him pulse into me one more time. I reached behind my pillow and wound my fingers around the bat.

‘Sorry, but
this
little whore’s not into it tonight, you motherfucker’ I said.

He looked at me, confused: you could tell he was struggling with the urge to put himself in me and to comprehend what I’d said at the same time. A moment was all I needed: I pulled out the baseball bat.
Boom!
I aimed for his head, but I only cracked it against his shoulder, knocking him off me, off of the bed.

‘You bitch!’ he screamed, landing in a surprised heap on the floor. He stood up, still ridiculously hard, and lunged at me. I hit him again then, right down near his privates, and he went down. I was really hoping that I permanently damaged his testicles as I got up and whacked him one more time — in the head — and then I ran,
ran to my mother’s filthy room. I locked the door, hoping he would leave and leave us alone. I didn’t hear him for a while; I hoped he was dead, but I knew I hadn’t done anything that exciting. He was thin and wiry, and I hadn’t hit him
that
hard. He would be up and at it, eventually.

That’s when I sat down on my mother’s bed and held her cold, cold hand. Too cold. ‘Mom?’ I asked, knowing she would never answer me from the depths she was in.

I put on her one clean tee shirt and a pair of pajama bottoms and nudged her again. ‘Mom?’ I asked. She didn’t move. I got up and turned the light on. I gasped when I saw her. She was white, so white and still. ‘Oh, Mom,’ I moaned, cradling her to me. I don’t know if Ray
had
given her more than usual, but this had been coming. She had finally crossed the line. Her poor body, which had seen too much for too long, had finally given in.