“What do you think?”
Brenda stared down at the scene drunkenly the ferocious glare combined with sleep deprivation turning her eyes into sun-snuffed blisters.
“It looks so easy.”
“What does?”
“Driving through the park.”
She was silent for a while, studying the canopy of trees. Lorenzo watched her, thinking any second she’d conk out, but then he saw the tears again. Her hair was shot with gray, something he hadn’t noticed the night before, perhaps, he thought, because the gray of her eyes was so overpowering that it absorbed all similar shades about her. Her clothes, an indifferent pair of jeans and an old Pearl Jam T-shirt, fit her as if she had lost a great deal of weight since she bought them. He intuited that she had no idea how to dress herself in any but the most shapeless and shambly manner, that clothing in general both baffled and bored her.
“Brenda,” he began quietly, looking out over the humble turrets and spires of Gannon. “What are you thinking?”
“I was remembering something,” she said distantly, her eyes roaming the room.
“Yeah?”
“Reliving something.”
“What’s that…” He leaned against the wall, felt the tackiness of the fresh paint.
“I can’t get rid of it.”
“What.”
“I can’t get it out of my mind.” She started walking the perimeter, her movements clunky and stiff.
“What.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Is it about last night?” He found himself ducking and weaving as he tried to catch her eye. She wouldn’t answer. “Because that’s what we’re here for.” She shuffled around the blank room, her right shoulder sliding along the walls.
“Is it about your son?”
“You have two parts to your life,” she announced abruptly, continuing her tilted march. “Before children and after.”
“I hear you,” he said, allowing her another circuit around the room. “Just say what’s on your mind.”
“It’s not going to help anything.”
“You never know.”
“It’s complicated.”
“I got time,” Lorenzo said mildly, reminding himself that right now there was no more critical place to be than this vacant apartment, right here. “Hang on.” He left the room and searched the apartment for something for her to sit on, finding in one of the closets a metal folding chair spotted with what appeared to be dried red nail polish. Bringing it into the living room, he wrestled it open for her.
“Take a rest.”
She sat, got up, moved the chair into a shaded corner, then sat again. Lorenzo perched himself on the edge of a windowsill. The sun was hitting his shoulder as if through a magnifying glass, but there was nowhere else for him to sit without ruining his clothes.
“About, like, ten years ago?” Brenda began slowly, addressing the floor between her feet. “When I was about twenty-one? I moved over to New York to, like, get out from under the bell jar.”
“The what?” Lorenzo said, moving to the paint-tacky wall, the sun just too much.
“To get away from home. And, I got a job at the Hayden Planetarium and I started seeing this guy there, and he was in this group where everybody in it was in the same kind of therapy. They were all organized, with all these shrinks seeing all these patients. Maybe, like, a hundred and fifty people all knew each other. They lived in group apartments, five, six people sharing a loft or a giant apartment or whatever, everybody seeing the same dozen or so shrinks, the shrinks seeing each other, everybody kind of hanging out with each other. It was like this secret society right in the middle of the city.”
“Get out of here,” he said faintly, neutrally, marginally musing on the fact that most of the people he knew who were in psychotherapy were there under court order.
“Anyways,” she continued in a tired murmur, “this guy, he brought me to this party—they had these huge parties—and there’s no boyfriend-girlfriend match ups, everybody’s having a good time, drinking dancing getting high, making out, and, I was kind of lost at that point in my life, you know, so I’m, like, Where do I sign up? And before I know it, I’m in therapy with this shrink, he’s charging me next to nothing, and I’m living with a half dozen other women in this huge loft in Tribeca, I have all these new girlfriends, I’m seeing all these men, everybody’s on the same wavelength, and at first it was a lot of fun, you know? But there was this basic, I don’t know, worldview they had that was, like, there’s two types of people around: us, the group, and everybody else, the rest of the world, which was basically a bunch of psychopaths… And that, that family you came from? That was nothing more than a psychopathic unit. Like, your parents’ basic mission in this life was to destroy you. And if you came to the group married? Well, your marriage was nothing but a psychopathic partnership, so break it off, and, and you.” She raised her eyes, pointed an accusing finger at him. “If you reject this world-view of theirs? You’re probably a two-bit psychopath yourself.” Her gaze dropped again, her head almost between her spread knees. “It was, like, as a person you’re either growing or deteriorating, and the message was, If you reject us, our values, our wisdom, you’re obviously deteriorating, or worse, you’re choosing to deteriorate.”
Lorenzo, thinking, Jonestown, Moonies, sank into a squat before her. “Did these people… You don’t need to be afraid of nobody. Did these people have something to do with your son last night?”
Brenda waved him off. “I mean, as I’m saying this, it sounds obvious and, you know, creepy, but they get to you, they get to you. You get so wrapped up in this, this giant community, this friendship thing, this living-together thing that, and, you know, anybody who’s deciding to see a shrink, I mean, obviously you’re kind of miserable in your life to begin with, so they already got a leg up on you the minute you walk through the door, you know, offering you such a sweeping change that…So anyways, I wound up cutting off my family, living with a bunch of women, and fucking a lot of men. Everybody did. I mean, you know, I come from a police family, so it was kind of easy to take them apart with a shrink. But anyways, I was in this group, and it was OK for a while, but then we would have these weekly house meetings that were, like, half house business, half amateur therapy. Like, a roommate would say, ‘I’m mad at Brenda?’ You know, every sentence would go up at the end. So anyways, it would be, like, ‘I’m mad at Brenda? She didn’t lock the front door last night? And I think that was very angry?’ or, ‘I’m mad at Brenda? She didn’t feed the cockatiel? And I think that was very angry?’ And then everybody would be, like, ‘Yeah, me too. What’s going on with you, Brenda?’ And I’d say something like, ‘I guess I’m angry? Because I’ve been doing my family history? With Ted? And I guess I’m starting to get in touch with, like, how much my mother was an angry person? And it really makes me angry? But I think it like also really scares me? To think about growing up around that much rage?’ And then I’d start crying and everybody would give me a hug and they would start crying, and then I would feel really great and loved, and for the next few days I’d make sure the front door was triple-locked and I’d overfeed the cockatiel. It was like being a battered wife or something. You know, slap, caress, slap, caress.”
Lorenzo stood up and backed himself to the nearest wall. He was losing a lot of what she was talking about now, her comment about fucking a lot of men still ringing in his head—not the act, but the language. Lorenzo had an oddly prim sensitivity, given his line of work: he did not like profanity in the mouths of women.
“But anyways.” Brenda exhaled with a huff. “After a few months, I’m hanging in, I like some of my roommates, I’m definitely not lonely, and then this one Saturday, I come downstairs and there’s my brother, there’s Danny in a parked car, like, staking me out. And I’m scared shit because I just cut my family off, like, wrote them a note or something. So I go back upstairs, I tell my roommates he’s down there, they’re, like, ‘Oh my God, the cop?’
They asked me how could he find me? I said, ‘Well, I think I might have talked to my mother last week just so she would know I wasn’t dead and I might’ve mentioned where…You know, that I was living in the neighborhood that I was living in, but I definitely didn’t give her the address.’ So they go nuts, everybody’s ringing up their shrinks. We have this emergency house meeting where it was, like, decreed that I was a psychopathic bitch, viciously and willfully exposing my roommates to an armed and possibly homicidally enraged cop, that I had put the entire therapeutic community in danger. And they gave me two hours to leave, kicked me to the curb.”
“Get out a here,” Lorenzo said again, in that high, trailing tone of disbelief, desperate for the punch line.
“Well, I didn’t need two hours. I was out the door in five minutes. Left everything there. I mean, those spineless… I mean, it was hard work for me living like I was living. But I was really trying. I was doing the therapy, doing the house meetings. It was hard, but I thought they kind of liked me and I kind of liked them, but in five minutes it was over. I was a nonperson because my asshole brother shows up, I mean…” She rubbed her face, taking a breather.
Lorenzo grunted in sympathy, eyed the time: twelve-fifty
“So I go downstairs, I go right up to Danny in the car. He says, ‘You’re breaking Mommy’s heart.’ I say, ‘She doesn’t have a heart,’ and off we go back through the tunnel. And you know, when I left that apartment I’m sure they were back on the phones to the shrinks, you know, ‘She’s gone, Tom, Tod, Sheila, Lorraine.’ And then they all probably asked for emergency sessions where they were all told that Brenda’s therapy was probably freaking her out, making her get too close to the truth of her family’s anger, that her therapy was way too terrifying for her, so in her hateful rage at her shrink and at her peers, who were perpetually challenging her to grow, she tried to sabotage the whole show for everybody, all the people who were trying to help her.” She was swaying to the rhythm of her rant, gesturing like a conductor, her voice a mocking singsong. “They were probably told that my psychopathy was too formidable and—” She came to a full stop, began to cry, a bitter, quivering wail that she attempted to master by compressing her lips, squeezing her eyes shut, and pressing a bandaged fist to her forehead.
Lorenzo was still a little lost, but he felt for her.
“And, like, for years after that, that’s how I felt about myself, like a real piece of shit and, and everytime I fucked up after that, when I did drugs, when I—when I lost a job, lost an apartment, when I had to move back home because I didn’t have the money—every little fuckup in my life, they were like this audience in my head, you know, watching me screw up just like they predicted… But do you know when all that stopped? When I had my son, when I had Cody. As soon, as soon as I had him in my arms, I became more. I became … fuck, you. Fuck, all y’all. You cannot touch this. You cannot be this, this baby’s mother. Me. I am that… And then, I would still see them in my head, like, watching me? But it was like, it was like, they were blown away. That’s how I imagined it. It was like, I would see them, I don’t know, gasping or, I don’t know, humbled, ashamed, but—” She stopped again, leaned back in the metal chair, her chin aimed at the ceiling. Lorenzo watched grayish rivulets of sweat meander around her throat.
“They’re still in my head, you know? They’re still—” She swallowed audibly, her voice fluttering with defeat. “And so what are they thinking now, huh? It’s all in the papers, on TV… This must be like a fucking home run for them. Talk about ‘I told you so.’” She rose from the chair, moved to another corner of the room, and sat on the floor.
“OK,” Lorenzo said, to acknowledge what he hoped was the end of the tale. “OK,” he repeated, taking a beat to gear up, many forces at work in him now. Having finally absorbed the brunt of her tale, he was torn between feeling angry at her and angry for her. Fighting down panic in the face of the relentless pressure of time, he felt pity, frustration, but underneath it all, independent of this crime, this woman, he experienced a powerful afterburn of indignation. He had to restrain himself from saying how flippant and self-indulgent he had found the group’s attitude toward family. Sometimes it seemed to him that he spent most of his waking hours trying to hold families together. Lorenzo regarded a mother and a father together under one roof as a blessing, regarded a mother or a father’s swat to the backside or even to the side of a teenager’s head as commitment, as concern. Parents, no matter how angry, how strict or repressive, as long as they provided three squares, a cot, and consistent rules to live by, were to be respected, were to be honored, were to be treasured because, without a family in place, without at least some facsimile of a family in place, no kid stood a chance, at least not in Lorenzo’s neck of the woods.
“OK,” he said yet again, still marking time, then deciding to work this thing through the biggest hammer of all.
“Brenda,” he finally addressed her. “Do you believe in God?”
“God?” She slowly raised her face to him. “I don’t know how to answer that in an unclever way.” Her words left a slight tang in the air.
“Try yes or no,” he said patiently. There was some kind of shouting match going on down in Martyrs Park. Brenda didn’t answer. “See, I don’t know if I believe all that much in psychiatry and roommates and giving people negative labels and whatnot. But I do believe in God, and I believe that whatever happens to us on Earth, good things, bad things, they happen because God wills it,” he semi-lied, actually believing more in the act of believing than in God himself.
He took possession of the folding chair, dragging it over to her corner, so that when he sat he was basically hovering above her.
“See, like now, with your son, looking for your son.” Lorenzo hunched forward, his hands clasped in front of her face. “I know,” he said, his voice dropping to a gentle, hoarse whisper. “I know that in the back of your mind is the great fear of it coming out, you know, unhappily.”
Brenda turned her head until it was a profile against the wall.
“Me too. Me too… But you got to draw strength from God. You have got to believe that if something, you know, happened… that, if that’s the case, then that’s because God wanted that boy like he’s gonna want all of us one day or another, and at least on one level it was nobody’s fault—that, that there was nothing anybody could do about it.” He paused, smiling down at her through half-mast eyes, his hands in that cross-gripped clasp.
“See, you can think of people as good, bad, guilty, innocent, but whatever we do, whatever mistakes we make in life, He don’t make mistakes, and me, you, everybody out there, we’re nothing more than His agents. You see what I’m saying?” Lorenzo beamed at her, trying to get inside. Brenda was still looking away. “And if He calls for someone? They got to go. They just, got, to go.”
Brenda stared at her hands, her face all reddened triangles. “Understand me,” Lorenzo said, hunching over even more, as close to her as breath. “I will not rest until I find your son and’the person he was, last with. But what I’m trying to say to you is that sometimes the more you try to know, the more mysterious life will get.”
The ruckus downstairs was growing louder, and Lorenzo could identify voices now—a Dempsy cop named Beausoleil and a projects kid, Corey Miller.
“Like, why Kenya Taylor. Why’d she have to die. Why, why, why. We don’t know why. But He does. He does…It’s just sometimes his reasons are too deep for us, and the more we try to, to, comprehend, the more lost we’re gonna get, and so sometimes, the best thing for us to do, the only thing for us to do, is to surrender—surrender to Him, surrender to our own weakness, our own ignorance, our own humanness. Because if you do that… If you, do, that… You will have more peace in your life than you can get with a whole army of therapists, psychiatrists, witch doctors, gurus, and what have you…”
Lorenzo waited, elbows on knees, slowly rubbing his hands, bobbing and weaving again to find her eyes. She turned her face completely to the
wall and Lorenzo could see a knot in her chopped hair the size of a marble, could see the knobs of her spine, like braided rope.
“Of course you try to do the right things in life, but when things go wrong you got to know that we aren’t the ones calling the shots, and sometimes there’s nothing else to do but let go, let go, just let go and surrender…”
Lorenzo nodded, smiling softly, trying to remember how many times he’d given this speech in the last fifteen years. He always expected the perps to laugh in his face, to call him out on his transparent shit, but it never happened. They were often so desperate to latch on to anything, any kind of reasoning that would help them find a way to continue living with themselves. That did not mean, however, that they would hear his “Let go, surrender” rap and then surrender. At first, most of them simply wanted to find a way to get just one more good night’s sleep.
Brenda was quiet, breathing evenly—digesting his words, Lorenzo hoped. He had said all that could be said on the subject without beginning to preach in circles. He rose from the chair and leaned out the window, taking in the sizzling sky, then glancing down at the beef on the street. Beausoleil and Corey Miller were starting to chest bump each other in front of Martyrs Park, both of them silent now, giving each other big “Fuck with me” stares—the fight itself coming up in about two minutes.
He turned back to Brenda, who was still down on the floor.
“Yeah, and if you ever see that therapy group again? You can tell them there haven’t been any psychopaths around since 1930. It’s called antisocial personality disorder these days.” Brenda made a chuffing sound approximating laughter. “Come on up here.” Lorenzo beckoned to her. “Get some air.”
Slowly she got to her feet and joined him at the window, just as Beausoleil and Miller started shoving. “Look at that there.” He clucked his tongue as three of Corey’s friends and a bunch of cops converged on the confrontation, which, as Lorenzo and Brenda watched, became a wild exchange of headlocks and haymakers. The cops flipped Corey, belly to the mat; Beausoleil, sporting a bloody mouth, pressed the kid’s face into the steaming asphalt, while another cop cuffed his hands behind his back. Corey’s boys circled the action, cursing out the police so ardently that Lorenzo could see their neck cords standing out like pipes.
Freedomland Page 24
