Freedom's Child: A Novel

by Jax Miller

  But a voice doesn’t let me. Shut your fucking face and find Rebekah!

  “Hurry.” He stands and leads me to the patrol car. We rush in. “Before they call it in.” He speeds away.

  The weight of wet pine branches holds the long road in a wave of black. I sit in the front of the patrol car with the window open just a crack. I smell autumn encasing the branches and the salt of the Pacific not too far away. Aside from the headlights of a random car coming from the opposite direction, Mattley and I are enveloped in darkness. I tell him to pull over. He does. The windshield wipers whine in the rainfall on the side of this dead country road. He thinks I need to get sick.

  “I’m a protected witness,” I start.

  He shakes his head. “Freedom, you can’t tell me this.” This puts him in a bad position, I know. But I don’t want to hide it from him. What’s the point, anyway? He puts his hands up to keep me quiet. Right, as if that will work.

  “I was charged with killing my husband.” I ignore his attempts to keep my mouth shut. “But the man who was later convicted, my brother-in-law Matthew, has all the means in the world, even from prison, to have me killed.” I unbuckle my seat belt and lean closer to Mattley.

  “What are you doing?”

  I see he’s nervous. “But now he’s out of prison.” I look around. We’re still alone. “And I have to leave.”

  “Where are you going to go?”

  “I don’t know.” We look into each other’s eyes and I just can’t get enough of it. “Someplace where I can’t be bothered. Somewhere far. Somewhere where no one will find me.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” His words get faster and his vocal cords have just a little more pressure behind them. “You can’t tell me these—” I don’t let him finish. I kiss him. In the middle of bumblefuck nowhere, I kiss him. My first and last kiss with this man. And just as my thoughts return to the suicide jar, he kisses me back. But I can feel him fight it. And it makes it all the more beautiful. His tongue passes my teeth and inside, my organs start to sing.

  In his strong arms, I finally feel at home. Home, amid the sounds of the leather seats that shift below us. He tells me he shouldn’t be doing this, and sure, I know that, because he ought to be arresting me. But no one has to know. I won’t be around soon enough, and this is our last chance. Mattley will be the last person in Oregon who will ever feel the warmth of my lips. And the only person in the world who’d ever in the past twenty-something years taste them without Jack Daniel’s between us. His attempts to push me off him are half-assed. He wants this too. And he gives up on resistance. I breathe in the air he exhales deep through his nostrils; his embrace tightens.

  But then I remember my priorities here. I have to find Rebekah. I have to steer clear of Mattley, of normalcy. I pull my tongue from his mouth and back away.

  “We can’t do this,” I say. I know this. He knows this. And despite these facts, the distance between us still continues to shrink and our breath makes the windows fog up. We kiss again. I slip my cold hands up his shirt to feel the tightness of his skin. I melt.

  “Get over here,” he manages to say through my teeth. I put my hands behind the buckle of his belt and pull myself closer to him. But leave it to a burst of static from the police radio to kill the mood. He winces.

  “All units to Twenty-seven Wilson Drive, Painter.”

  “That’s my apartment building.”

  “Yeah, what’s going on over there?” He calls back.

  “Firefighters en route. Blaze is out of control.”

  Shit, Mimi! The rest of the place can burn to the ground, for all I care. Mattley puts his sirens on and flies through the night.

  My name is Freedom and I’m helpless and small. We arrive at the apartment building, the flames boxing against the blackness of the sky. All the cars of the police department, and by “all” I mean both of them, are already there by the time Mattley and I arrive. I can make out the silhouette of the super screaming with his hands in the air, shouting at the officers, but his cries are not audible against the bellows of the blaze. I run to him, leaving the dust of what should be a yard behind my Doc Martens.

  “Where the hell is she?” I roar. I rip at the super’s T-shirt and pull his face close to mine, giving a stare that says that I can and will kill him if he’s not helped her out. The pockmarks and scabs of tweeking on crank pepper his face, his bones full of homemade tattoo ink. “Where the fuck is Mimi?” I really thought I’d be more concerned about my suicide jar or the hundreds of letters to my children. To my surprise, I am not.

  I wish I took the broken bottle with me from the Whammy Bar so I could make this super suck on it. But I’ve already drawn too much attention to myself. “Mimi who?” he yells. Yeah, go back to your meth pipe, you sleazy bastard.

  “Mimi Bruce. Where the fuck is she?” I feel Mattley pull me back. I accidentally elbow him in his nose behind me and feel it crack in half. The sound gives me a chill, despite the heat of the burning home. God, me and noses, right? What the hell is wrong with me? I take off my Sex Pistols shirt so I’m exposed in my black tank top and try to stop the bleeding. When I hear the cracking and crashing of what I can only assume is the second floor of the building, the floor that Mimi and I live on, falling, I run toward the house. Mattley screams my name after me. Everybody screams after me. I get as close as I can to the complex before the heat wants to melt my clothes onto my body. I scream Mimi’s name.

  I can feel a fire stirring within me in the same way it stirs in my building, craving oxygen so it can explode into something fierce. That’s called a back draft. For me, it’s called fury. I go to kick in the door least engulfed in flames, just the way I’ve kicked down Mimi’s door so many times before. Doesn’t matter that it’s not the floor we live on, I just have to get in. But just as the sole of my Doc Marten is about to plant itself beside the doorknob, I feel an arm around my waist and I’m carried away from the blaze like a sack of potatoes, upside down over his shoulder. Suddenly, I’m facing Mattley’s police-issued Glock on his waist. I can practically taste it. Hope you don’t mind if I borrow this. I’m able to unbutton his holster and slip the gun in my underwear between my jeans and pubic bone as I squirm and scream at him to let me the hell go. And when I take a minute to look around, I see probably about a hundred bystanders, too blinded and enthralled by the fire to notice a cop getting his piece stolen by the crazy town drunk. At least I hope so.

  Mattley lets me go and I disappear somewhere into the crowd. And then I see Newbie, the new officer that assisted Mattley the other night. He is at the back of an ambulance with Mimi, who wears the same shirt I helped her into the other day. Jesus Christ. I walk to check up on her. She’s slapping Newbie as he tries to get a report out of her, and somehow I feel like a proud mother. “What are you hoping to get out of her?” I ask Newbie; I don’t know what his real name is. “She’ll tell you George Clooney started the fire in a fucking leotard, if you ask her long enough.”

  I go to hug Mimi, relieved. “What?” she asks. She’s having a moment of lucidity. Let’s see how long it lasts this time. I send Newbie away so I can get a minute alone with Mimi.

  “Mimi, what happened? What did I say about leaving the stove on?” I make it a point not to sound angry, but instead like a person who cares. I spit in my hand and wipe some of the soot from her forehead around a large but shallow gash that already starts to turn black and blue on the sides.

  “But Freedom.” She’s starting to get upset. I have to keep her calm. I have to keep her lucid. “I wasn’t cooking anything! I thought you were cooking. I mean, that’s where the flames came from. From your apartment, not mine.” Her voice gets louder. I can feel the demons of dementia on their way. “You did this! You did this, Nessa Delaney! That’s who they were looking for! Nessa Delaney. You’re not Freedom. You’re Nessa Delaney!” I realize she’s not losing it. And before anyone from the crowd a few yards away can hear anything, I close the ambulance doors and close the small, b
lue draperies to keep anyone from seeing in.

  “Who, Mimi? Who was looking for me? Who was looking for Nessa Delaney?”

  “Three men, I think. I heard them making all sorts of racket next door. And they came to mine.” She points to her forehead. “How do you think I got this? Thugs, they were.”

  I think about the other day with Cal the cockroach.

  —

  As Cal was getting ready to leave, I untangled the cord and took the phone with me from the kitchen counter into the bathroom. I recognized Peter’s voice in an instant, that deep stutter and the way he called me Nessa. I was at a loss for words. I really had no control over what came out of my mouth. “How the hell did you find me?”

  “I’m on my way to Kentucky, but the guys have a head start. Not sure if they’re going to you in Oregon first or to the kids in Kentucky…you remember my mother.”

  “Of course I fucking remember,” I whispered so Cal couldn’t hear, covering my knees with the extra-large tee.

  “They won’t hurt the kids,” he reassures me. “You, on the other hand…”

  “Nah, they’ll never find me. These Feds have me hid good.” And Mason and Rebekah aren’t babies anymore. They’re not going to just kidnap grown adults and bring them to New York. And let them come for me. Probably just a bunch of talk, anyway. I doubt they’d even know how to read a map. “I’ve missed the shit out of you, Peter.” I hear him smile with me.

  —

  I call Passion. “Passion, I need your help. I’m in a lot of trouble.”

  “I think that same trouble just walked in. Three men. New York accents. Showing your picture around.”

  “I don’t have a lot of time. I need a huge favor.”

  “What kind?”

  “You remember Gunsmoke, right? The one from the other day calling Obama a nigger and such?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Could you give him a hand job and I’ll pay you double when I can?”

  She’s about to ask why, but I tell her to hold on. Mimi yells for my help, scared of the officers who bang the shit out of the ambulance doors. But I can hear that voice, that fucking voice of Matthew Delaney on the phone. And I wish I’d saved my energies with that Corona bottle to slice his face off. Mattley and Newbie finally pry the doors open.

  With my hands up, I say, “I was just coming out, boys.”

  “I’m not decent!” yells a fully clothed Mimi. Thanks for the effort, you crazy bat.

  “Freedom, what the hell are you doing?” Mattley yells, a nasal shout with a newly shaped nose.

  “Your stupid partner was scaring the shit out of her.” I point at Newbie. “I was just trying to calm her down.” I start to walk away. “She left the oven on, again.” I ramble so he can roll his eyes at me and let me walk away. “I can’t help it if you pigs don’t do your job. The lady in the muumuu, sure. Leaves the oven on. Sic the rent-a-cop on her. What, y’all fucking graduated the police academy with Big Bird and Rain Man?”

  I go back to Passion on the phone. “Can you get him off before I get there?”

  “Yes, but why? And what about those men?”

  I tell her my plans and then find my car, where upon inspection, I see a knife in my front driver’s-side tire. I pretend to drop something on the ground, my back to the cops. I look around to make sure there’s no copper breathing down my neck and yank the knife from my tire. I walk toward the only two cop cars there, the fire behind me. Dozens of bystanders with their backs to me stand between me and the cops. “They won’t even look my way.”

  “They’re busy with their faces in some hot pie, anyway,” says Passion.

  I bend down behind car numero uno. With my back to it so I can see who’s coming, I reach behind me and stab the rear tire. I poke my head out.

  I steal the car next to it. I steal Officer Mattley’s patrol car and make my way.

  —

  My name is Freedom and this is a rush. I park at the base of the HOTEL PAINTER/HOT PIE neon-lit sign in the middle of the parking lot, where the cops usually park to scare off fresh pussy renters when they’re not inhaling their warm Krispy Kreme donuts. The neon tubes buzz overhead like the electricity created between pros and customers alike. I switch on the spotlight near the driver’s-side mirror so people turn their heads, scatter like cockroaches. At the Whammy Bar I can spot Luke at the entrance. He must have been the one that Matthew put on lookout detail. Bitch. Passion sees me and walks across the dirt.

  “You got some nasty people looking for you, Freedom.” She shakes her head, her elbow resting on the roof of the car.

  “They’re not looking for me.” I examine the buttons and switches on the inside of the patrol car, playing with them. This one’s the siren, whoops. This one’s for the lights. This knob’s for AM radio. I need something like this. “They’re looking for Nessa.”

  “I figured…” Passion trails off.

  “You do that favor I asked?”

  She looks down at me and smirks. “You know I did, you ain’t gotta ask.” She dangles the keys to Gunsmoke’s motorcycle from her finger. “Hand jobs can be so distracting.”

  “I would have gotten them myself, but the second I do and those men see me, I get a bullet in the brain as an early Christmas present.”

  “Sovereign Shore?”

  “Sovereign Shore. Take the back roads.”

  Officer Mattley can’t stop staring at the dirt ring of sweat on Captain Banks’s collar and the white that collects in the corners of his mouth; they’re hypnotizing. His blond hair whips across his lazy eyes; it moves even after his head stops. Mattley doesn’t have to listen to his actual words to know what he says as he paces the office. Barking. Sweating. Mattley’s already watched his face burn through sixty shades of red. I fucked up, I know, Mattley thinks. I fucked up big-time, Cap’n. He feels like a child being reprimanded in elementary school over a careless mistake.

  “And Freedom Oliver, no less,” Banks yells in the closed office with the blinds down, not that they stop the other officers and staff from trying to get a glimpse of the golden child that is Mattley having his ass handed to him. “Leave it to the town drunk to steal your firearm and car.” Banks takes a deep breath as he plants his ass in his desk chair.

  “Sir—”

  “I can’t listen to it, Mattley.” Banks lowers his head and raises his hands. “You’re suspended until further notice.”

  Mattley thinks about Freedom and what the hell might be going on in her mind, and he finds himself wondering why he cares about her so much, what makes her different from anyone else he’s ever known. He thinks about the eyes that will burn a hole through him once he leaves this room. But more than anything, he thinks of racing right to the Whammy Bar, because chances are, that’s where she’ll be. What a friggin’ mess. But he bites his tongue: doesn’t say a thing.

  “Hand me your badge,” says Banks.

  Mattley reaches for it only to find it’s gone. “Fuck.”

  “Goddamnit, Mattley.”

  He wants to keep his nose to the floor but forces his head upright as he leaves the office. The others pretend to be busy at nothing at all, the rumors coming to a quick halt the second he steps out. And he knows they’ll resume as soon as he leaves.

  Mattley kicks himself in the ass, curses as his shoes tap on the asphalt toward his pickup truck. He grips the leather of the steering wheel and rattles it with bellows that draft from the crevices of his teeth. And yet he’s not angry with her, with Freedom. No, he’s mad at himself for being so stupid, for letting his feelings for her interfere with his duties.

  Even though Mattley quit smoking years ago, back before Richie was born, he always kept a spare in his center console, in the event of one of those hard days that come once in a while—the random rape victim, the dead child—but now seems just as good a time as any. And he hates that he loves the way he can still smell her hair on his skin, that his tongue still twitches in excitement at the thought of kissing her. He closes his
eyes, rests his forehead on the steering wheel, and blows the smoke into his lap as the truck warms up. And then the taps on his window.

  “Officer Mattley?”

  “Not anymore.” He lifts his head and steps out to two men in suits. “Smells like something federal to me.”

  The two men pull their badges from their coats. “I’m U.S. Marshal Lenny Gumm and this is Marshal Raymond Howe from Portland.”

  Mattley slams the car door and plays stupid. “And to what do I owe the pleasure?”

  Howe, with his permanent half-smile, nods toward the precinct. “Why don’t we take this inside? Need to talk to the boss, anyhow.”

  Mattley stretches his arm and does a curtsy for the sake of theatrics. “After you.”

  Mattley knows that nothing about the night is the fault of Captain Banks, but he can’t wait to see his face when the Feds knock on his door, especially given his mood. It’s common knowledge that small-time police departments clash with Feds. And like Mattley, Banks can smell who they are before they can even say “Good evening.”

  “What the hell is this all about?” Banks curls his lip.

  “Department of Justice,” Mattley interrupts with a smile over the ludicrousness of the night. “U.S. Marshals.”

  Banks grunts as he closes the door behind the Feds and offers them a seat. “What does the Department of Justice have anything to do with a fire?”

  “Anything you can tell us about it?” Gumm narrows his brow.

  “Nothing, until the fire chief can start an investigation,” Banks says as he unbuttons the collar of his shirt. “Off the record? There’s a woman who lives there, senile. Wouldn’t be the first time she left the stove on; that’s what’s running through the rumor mill so far.”

  “Yeah, well, we don’t go by what runs through the rumor mill where we come from, with all due respect, sir.”

  Banks’s nostrils flare out as he clears his throat. Mattley can almost see the outburst rise to his lips before one occurs. “I’m sorry, I still don’t see how this would involve DOJ.”