Freedom's Child: A Novel

by Jax Miller

  The branches of black willows swing in the large backyard of the Victorian home, a Queen Anne architecture of ivory with black fringes, one that probably housed masters and slaves more than a century ago. He brings his silver necklace to his lips, warming the cross with his breath, but it’s just habit. In recent years, Mason decided it might be less disappointing to consider God as a loosely thrown noun instead of something profound. But it reminds him of his younger sister, Rebekah, the only member of his family who hasn’t shunned him. He misses her greatly. The bourbon doesn’t help.

  The home was born of old southern money from Cavendish tobacco fields that line the property’s edges, well-to-do bankers who made lucrative investments when the American economy was at its golden peaks. And now Mason, a promising twenty-four-year-old with a possible future in one day becoming the state’s most successful defense attorney after sticking his foot in the door of one of the most profitable law firms in Kentucky only weeks after acing the bar exam. Impressive at his age, but not entirely unheard of. Currently an associate at the firm, rumors of him being the next senior associate attorney swirled around the offices, which would make him the fastest to reach such a position. The result of a lot of interning, many many hours, and being smart as a whip. He flicks the cigarette down to the grass when he hears Violet turn in her sleep and pretends not to notice her.

  A moment later, she wraps her lanky arms around his bare chest from behind. “You’ve been smoking, haven’t you?” Mason hears her smile bleed into the question. I always knew I’d end up with one of my coworkers. Of course, she’d be a corporate lawyer embroiled in the campaign against big tobacco companies.

  Cicadas shrill in the distance and bullfrogs croak in the nearby swamps and weeping willows. Mason smirks. “Who, me?” The Manhattan glistens in the moonlight as he places his hand on hers, his gaze still in the backyard.

  She squeezes him and breathes onto his back. “I can feel your heart racing with my lips.” She kisses between his shoulder blades.

  “Another dream…” He takes a long draw from the martini glass.

  “It’ll be OK,” but she worries her attempts at comfort fall on deaf ears.

  Mason walks out of her arms and into the bedroom, sitting down on the ottoman with his bottle of Maker’s Mark, his laptop, and papers on the floor around his feet. He goes to his fake Facebook account, Louisa Horn. Thoughts of his sister Rebekah swim through the furrows of his brain. No word in days is odd for her. Hope she finally got the sense to get out of that place. Mason tries to distract himself with the pile of papers that form a cyclone around him. He shuffles through the work, breathing the vapors of bourbon between each page. He feels bad that he can’t make love to his girlfriend because of the distractions of his sister not writing and the rape case finally about to end tomorrow. It’s always that kind of stuff that gets to him. Who could get a hard-on with siblings and court trials on the brain?

  “You’re still working on the Becker case?”

  “Just double-checking that all my ducks are in a row for tomorrow, is all.” He looks up at her and smiles. “Otherwise, you can forget about Turks and Caicos.”

  “Not a chance in hell.” Violet stretches and yawns.

  He studies the photos from Saint Mary’s Hospital, the victim’s rape exam. Tender patches colored eggplant branded under her eyes and between her thighs stir something that merits another sip. Behind him, Violet looks down at the same thing.

  “How many times do you have to look at those?” she asks.

  “Believe me, I don’t like it any more than you do.” He traces the edges of the paper with his fingertips. He sometimes wishes he could become desensitized, lose all sympathy toward the victim like some of his colleagues. “It’s just until I can become senior at the firm, love. Maybe partner, in a few years.”

  “Sell your soul to the devil?”

  “More like renting it out.” From an envelope, he pulls out a photo and hands it to Violet. He speaks low onto the rim of his glass. It was the only opening in a good firm back then. It was where he was needed. But he wants to get into a different area of practice soon enough, maybe white-collar or real estate, something like that.

  She examines the picture. “Where the hell did you get this?”

  “An anonymous tip.” He takes the photo from her and examines it. “This is what’s going to win the case. This is what’s going to make me partner at the firm.”

  “Paint the victim as a whore…” She trails off.

  “I know.” Mason takes a deep breath and rubs his brow.

  “It’s perfect.” Violet kisses the top of Mason’s head and walks off. “You’re going to be a fucking star.”

  He watches her walk out into the hall, enjoying the way the naked skin of her backside rocks before him, something akin to the artwork painted on the inside of a virtuoso’s dream. As she disappears down the staircase, he washes the image down with another sip. His eyes wander back to the photos, the one Violet approved of: the victim, topless and laughing on his client’s lap the night of the rape in question. The Maker’s Mark gives him confidence, a little more hope than he might have if he were sober: if he can just win this case, he can move into any area of law he wants and never again have to defend another scumbag criminal.

  “Where is your sister?” The question of the redheaded stranger from his dream reverberates between his ears.

  “That’s a damn good question, lady,” he answers to himself as he goes back to the laptop. “Hopefully as far away from Goshen as someone like her can get.”

  It doesn’t sit with him well, Rebekah not contacting him. He knows she’s naive, a bit gullible, traits that can be confused for being slow, but can be chalked up to southern hospitality. Mason clicks to her Facebook page. The inactivity is out of character—she usually posts devotional scripture daily. The last post reads: Galatians 5:19–21.

  After years of having it shoved down his throat, Mason still knows the quote without having to look it up. “Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.”

  Below the scripture is a photo of Rebekah and their little sister, Magdalene. But Mason never met Magdalene—his mother was just pregnant with her at the time he was shunned from their church, disowned by the family.

  Mason created a fake Facebook account, Louisa Horn, to stay in touch with his sister. He wonders if his parents finally worked out that Rebekah was in contact with him behind their backs. From what he understands, Rebekah was able to keep their father’s suspicions at bay by telling him that Louisa Horn was merely somebody interested in their church. Mason knew of the church’s newly added techniques of preaching in front of department stores and such, trying to lead the lost into salvation, notches in the Bible belts…and the fictional Louisa Horn was just another prospect.

  Had Mason known that wanting to become a lawyer, even the mere thought of leaving home, would warrant a sudden severing of contact, he would have been more cautious. But over the years, the wiring in his dad’s brain seemed to shift and loosen from that of a normal-enough evangelistic preacher into something else, something more fanatical. None of the rumors credible, Mason could just laugh them off. But with his father’s transition only developing when Mason was a teenager, and the four-year age gap between him and Rebekah, the fervent dogmas of his father were mostly in hindsight, changes progressing after Mason left home and his family chose to have nothing to do with him.

  Mason sits back, rubs his chin, and squinches his brow. He white-knuckles the neck of Maker’s Mark. The red wax coating that covers the glass makes it look like his hands are bleeding. Stigmata, he thinks, remembering an elderly lady in the community who went to his father once fo
r guidance, convinced that she bore the wounds of Christ. But that was a long time ago, back in Goshen. Never a shortage of religious zealots there. Mason rereads the Galatians scripture from his laptop once more. He gets a shiver and thinks to himself, Run, Rebekah, run.

  My name is Freedom and my eyelids are heavy. Through the hangover, I stretch my nakedness across the unkempt bed. My mouth tastes like death, the whiskey seeps grossly from my pores, cheekbones soggy with rye. 11:30 a.m. Not bad. My thighs, sore from hip bones; I know the feeling well. I turn over to Cal on his stomach, his naked ass in the air as he lies stiff in a dead man’s pose.

  “You cockroach,” I yap as I kick him right off the bed. He takes the tangled sheets with him. “Who the hell said you could come over and fuck me?”

  “You called me in the middle of the night and threw yourself at me,” he yells up from the floor. I have no reason to disbelieve him, it’s not the first time. Cal’s a cowboy, and that’s the best way to describe him. Five years my junior and looking even five years younger, Cal’s the rare sort who can pull off long blond hair and cowboy boots. I, of course, will never admit it out loud, but he has the body of a god and is hung even better than Christ himself.

  I throw his white tee at him and slip into a CBGB extra-large T-shirt and stumble into the kitchen. I don’t know whose shirt this is. Could be anybody’s. It’s mine now.

  I find a clean dish among a pile of ones I plan to wash someday. I pour dry farina into a chipped bowl and drown it in spiced rum. I sigh. “Was I at least good?” I tend to black out during my romps in the hay. He comes up behind me, turns me around. He picks me up and I wrap my legs around him on the dirty sink.

  “As always, Free-free.” He smiles. I’m too hungover for his smile. I push him away.

  “Careful, cowboy.” I take a shot from the rum, just to bite the hair of the dog. The cap’s been MIA for days now. There’s a silence that some would regard as awkward, but it isn’t, not to me. In fact, I like quiet. Quiet is good. He gulps orange juice from the carton in front of an open refrigerator. He breathes the tang from his cheeks like a fire-breathing dragon.

  “Who is Mason?” He doesn’t care. He reads the ingredients of the juice. He likes the organic shit. Hippie.

  “Who?” I observe the filthy kitchen. I just don’t have the energy to clean it. I haven’t had the energy in a long time.

  “After you passed out,” he speaks into the pathetically empty fridge. “You were having a nightmare and kept on yelling Mason.” I play dumb, an act I play well. What can I say? I live in a world surrounded by incompetent retards, including Cal. But his skills in the sack compensate for a head full of rocks.

  “I never met no Mason.” It’s a double negative, therefore I still tell the truth. A simple manipulation of words to sneak past Cal. “I probably just heard it on TV or something.” The phone rings and I rummage through the kitchen cabinets for it. I put it there when the headaches come. Cal looks at me like most people do: confused. I follow the cord to where the phone sits on a few cans of peas in the back. “Yeah?” I answer. “Yellow? Hello?” I hold the receiver tight against my jaw. I pretend to end the call, covering the hang-up with my hand. “It was the wrong number. Those good-for-nothing salesmen or something.” I’m not telling the truth.

  “Your face says otherwise, Free-free.”

  I hate when he calls me Free-free. It reminds me of a kid’s pet hamster. The carton of orange juice is back to his lips for seconds. Must be the gin I added to it the other day. And with that stupid grin and those washboard abs, I pretend to watch a commercial ad for Tropicana. I think of their slogan: Tropicana’s got the taste that shows on your face. Sure, if dumb is a flavor.

  “I gotta shower.” I untangle the phone cord and walk for the bathroom. “Please be gone by the time I’m out.”

  THREE DAYS AGO

  Matthew Delaney sits on the lidless metal commode in a solitary cell. Ossining, New York, home to Sing Sing prison. He holds a small stack of papers on his bare thighs as he wipes himself.

  “Let’s do this, Delaney,” says Jimmy Doyle, the correctional officer. Matthew smiles politely and requests just another minute to finish. The officer looks away. The officers always look away. One by one, he tears each page into tiny pieces and flushes them with his piss and shit.

  He kisses one last inch-long square, cut perfect with nail clippers he had snuck in more than a year ago. The scrap reads “Nessa Delaney.”

  “Nessa, Nessa, Nessa,” he whispers to the wall of his six-foot-by-eight-foot cell, an old photograph with her eyes scratched out taped above his cot. “I don’t know which I might enjoy more. When I made love to you all those years ago…”

  “Time to go, Delaney.” Doyle opens the steel door.

  But Matthew takes one more moment to speak to Nessa. “Or when I find you and cut your arms off before drinking the blood?” He feels his guts lift with excitement, the idea of her death akin to the feeling of falling in love. The hatred and yearning for her have blended into one single emotion over the years, one he could neither resist nor fully grasp.

  A smirk crawls across his face as he walks down the C-block. Toward the north end is med-sec, medium security, where, as opposed to the solitary confinement that Matthew was so accustomed to, these were shared cells with bars.

  Matthew swings his bag filled with his personal belongings over his shoulder as he follows the officer, one he was well acquainted with. The inmates of the north end holler and cheer at his departure, rattling their tin cups against the bars and turning their soap wrappers into confetti, as such celebrations are afforded after a man’s time is served. At the last cell, before entering another passage of security, an inmate sporting ink of the Aryan race throws his shoe at the side of Matthew’s head.

  And the smirk becomes teeth grinding.

  In a swift movement that resembles something choreographed, Matthew lets his bag fall, reaching into the cell with both arms and pulling the prisoner backward against the bars. He uses his left hand to pull on his right wrist, arm wrapped around his neck and pulling tighter. “Do we have a fucking problem?” He seethes at the man, whose lips start to lose their pigment. He cannot answer, his voice constricted by Matthew’s elbow.

  “Cut it out, Delaney.” The guard grabs his biceps. “You’re two steps away from freedom. You gonna throw it away because of this asshole?”

  “Freedom…” He releases the man.

  “Now, c’mon.” Doyle keys in a code. “Your family’s waiting.”

  When they pass security and have a minute alone, Matthew sighs, the blood returning from his face and back to the rest of his body. He shakes the guard’s shoulder. “I can’t thank you enough for all you’ve done while I’ve been stuck in here, Jimmy.”

  “I’ve known you since we were kids, Matty.” But Matthew knows the help came only because his mother was the guard’s go-to dealer for good cocaine and the occasional supper. Matthew couldn’t care less, as long as he could get the information his little heart so desired, information pertaining to Nessa Delaney, now known, if his information is correct, as Freedom Oliver. “I’ll come by the house and see you guys soon, gotta visit my mom down there, anyway,” he tells Matthew.

  When met by other officers, the guard nudges Matthew in the back. “Let’s move it, Delaney.”

  —

  Mastic Beach, New York: once a hidden gem on the south shores of Long Island, adorned with summer homes and bungalows for Manhattanites getting away for beach holidays during the warmer months. In recent enough memory, it was a safe haven where everybody knew everybody and the streets were lined with crisp, white fencing. Mastic Beach had color and clear skies and everyone loved to listen to the elders speak about the place when the roads were still made of dirt and of pastoral lands before the invention of the automobile. Small businesses were family-owned and -operated, with scents of baked bread that permeated in and through Neighborhood Road. Marinas flooded with beautiful sails that poked from Moriches Bay
and rose to the heavens.

  But then heroin trickled its way through the sewers of Brooklyn and emptied into the streets of Mastic Beach, and before long, crime rose to astronomical levels. Where people used to smile in passing, now they keep their heads down in fear of being jumped and beaten. Stabbings are as common as visits to the Handy Pantry. The elderly are robbed and the children of Mastic grow up way too fast. Thirteen and pregnant? Congrat-u-fucking-lations. And chances are, if you actually have a grassy patch big enough to be considered a yard, then more than once you’ve seen the lights of a police helicopter looking for a suspect on foot. And in those instances, your brain runs through every troublemaker that you know from your block until you have an idea of who it is they’re looking for.

  Today, Mastic Beach is the dumping ground for Section 8 government housing and every perv, creep, and sicko on the Sex Offender Registry list. The town glows red on maps because of them. Every week, the residents get letters in the mail, mandated by Megan’s Law, telling them of rapists and child molesters living only a few houses down. Small businesses have become enclaves of illegal Arabs. And the gangs have colonized the area: the Bloods, the Crips, MS-13. The whites are the minority these days. Except for the Delaneys. They’re their own gang, a whole other species.

  —

  Peter doesn’t have to count how many boxes of wine it takes to get Lynn Delaney drunk. The answer is two, the equivalent of six bottles. But it’s no wonder, when the mother of the Delaney brothers weighed in at six hundred–plus pounds.

  Lynn becomes out of breath with every lift and swig of the wineglass. The cabernet stains the crevices of her smile, a smile hard to see past the quarter-ton of lard melting over the king-size bed that has to be supported by cinder blocks instead of the standard brass legs. It’s the first time Peter can remember his mother making an effort to improve her appearance, the purple lipstick stuck to her gray and hollow teeth, a result of too many root canals from years ago when she actually gave a shit about her grin.