Freedom's Child: A Novel

by Jax Miller

  But Mattley, seeing Mason’s rush, wakes to the grasp of solving Rebekah’s disappearance not just as a priority, but as a time-sensitive matter. He reads Mason’s words and gets a move on to find Joe, who should be at, according to Mason, the Bluegrass bar.

  Mason leaves Mattley alone in the parking lot, and as he fades away from sight, Mason drives down the roads where the streetlights stop burning. He feels more alone than ever. Stillness, unlike anything. He pulls over and cries.

  “God, if You’re there, and if You give a shit about me, help me. Help me, Lord. Hear my prayer in my hour of need.” He goes on to recite the Twenty-Third Psalm of David. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me…” The desperation feels new to him, his cries to God almost regretful as he’d just about convinced himself that God did not exist. But left this vulnerable, in praying, Mason doesn’t know what else to do.

  Get a grip, Mason. He swallows the wariness of what the future might hold, a new wave of determination, like he can, and just might, take the world head-on. He wipes away the tears, almost feeling embarrassed by them, though there is no one around to be embarrassed in front of. Let’s do this.

  Forty minutes later, Mason enters the Highlands section of Louisville, a lively part of the city full of faux-Tudor buildings and old Victorian homes turned into apartments. A big sign stands high in the heart of the district, all black with white typewriter font that reads KEEP LOUISVILLE WEIRD.

  The sidewalks swarm with women with shaved heads, colored hair, and steel protruding from their faces. A lot of hippie types, a lot of gothic. The corners are decked with local musicians with tin cups and open instrument cases, lots of indie rock. Mason looks at the clock when he parks in an alley. 11:45. The smell from the nearby Vietnamese restaurant fills his nostrils, scabbed over on the inside with dried blood. Parked behind a Dumpster, he grabs some spare clothes in the back, ones he keeps for the days when he wants to head to the pool hall with the guys straight after work without going home to change. He walks through the back door of a tattoo parlor, but meets with a sign: RESTROOM FOR CUSTOMERS ONLY.

  Mason pulls out a hundred-dollar bill and holds it up to the lone tattooist as he works on the calf of another man. “In the back.” The man jerks his head. “Wash your hands. This is a sterile crib.” Mason leaves the bill on a glass countertop.

  Death metal plays from the parlor, something that sounds akin to James Earl Jones belching underwater.

  Under the sink in the small bathroom painted black, Mason grabs one of the small garbage bags they use for the bathroom pail. He peels off his sweaty and bloodied clothes and puts them in the bag. He takes a birdbath in the sink, scrubs the dirt and dried blood down the drain. He pulls out a wad of paper towels from the dispenser and pats himself dry before he slips into a pair of light blue denims and a fresh, white undershirt and a brown leather jacket.

  On his way out, as the tattooist isn’t paying attention, Mason takes his hundred-dollar bill back and heads for the Phoenix nightclub just a couple blocks over. He hopes that there, he will find Peter. Answers. Explanations. If anyone can shed some light on any of this, it might be Peter, if he can convince him. And if he leaves now, he can just make it on time.

  My name is Freedom and I’m glad Peter picked a place like this, a place where we could easily hide and grab a few drinks. I have to hang on to the hope that Rebekah is still alive. Hope. Without hope, a person is as good as dead.

  People’s faces are shadows in the red lights that thrash all over the Phoenix. The bass of the trance music rattles my body. Drinks sparkle when brought to the lips of those around me. The strobe lights blaze and I am reminded of my youth, when my tits were perkier, ass tighter, tattoos more vibrant. Nothing ages a person faster than grief.

  In my mind, the music fades. The people disappear to the back of my perception. The bass of the trance music is replaced with the pounding of my heart, someone with a hammer beating on my chest bone to shatter my skeletal structure from the inside out. My knees become rubber, my mouth full of sand. All this, when Mason enters the club. And in this moment, he is the only one here. We are the only two people on the planet.

  I am too consumed with awe to remind myself that I might kill Peter for arranging this. I wasn’t prepared to meet Rebekah, though it turned out not to be her, anyway. And I’m certainly not prepared to meet Mason. I retreat to the shadows of the Phoenix, curtains of darkness I can hide behind. But I never take my eyes off my son. My son. The concept is dreamlike; it feels foreign on my tongue when I say it out loud.

  My fingers trace a gold banister as I walk along the edges of the floor. It’s not until I feel light in the head that I realize I haven’t breathed for minutes. But I have to get out, I can’t let Mason see me. He can’t know I’m here. No, I can’t do the whole confrontation thing, I can’t turn his world even more upside down than it already is. It’s bad enough I let a letter to Rebekah already slip through my fingers. It’s worse that I was left to show myself to Violet. But I have to pass Mason to get the hell out of this fucking place.

  I elbow through the ravers, shouts that no one can hear anyway. I take a red Cardinals baseball cap from a girl in a slutty baseball uniform, blacklight paint in her hair, and a pair of glow sticks, a long stretch of my arm through a huddle so she can put the blame on someone else. But a panic attack starts to rear its ugly head, and suddenly I’m drowning in hundreds of college kids howling at the colored lights and gyrating against one another. I become lost, suffocated in lust bastardized by kids who can’t even see straight, but who the hell am I to talk?

  I fall, surrounded by legs dancing across the floor, and no one can see me. If there is a special place in hell for dancers, this must be the place. Toes slide across the dark floor; above me is what looks like a million glow sticks creating an ecstasy addict’s sky. I try to get up, I try not to get trampled on this dirty ground, but the dancers, blissfully unaware, keep me from rising. I pinch people’s knees, I reach above me and pull on their shirts, I scream for someone, anyone, to let me the fuck up.

  I try to crawl on my hands and knees when I feel someone’s arm around my stomach to jolt me to my feet. I am faced by a million masks, angels and devils and vampires and the dead. My heart races, everything around me spins. And when I turn around to see who’d helped me, I am faced with Mason. But it’s not Mason I see. It’s Mark. Mason’s father. My dead husband.

  He’s the same height as Mark at a good six feet; his eyes just as intense, like they stretch inward for miles. But where are the fireworks? Where are the open fields of flowers where we run in slow motion into each other’s arms? Where is the part where we pick up from where we started and I miraculously know everything about my son that I’ve missed for twenty years? And I realize, despite the fact that this child swam in my own blood for nine months, I am looking into the eyes of a stranger. He mouths words, but I can’t hear what he’s saying. And what do I do?

  I turn around and leave. Consider this a favor, Mason.

  But Mason follows. I walk faster. Now he walks faster. I slam the back door of the club hard behind me when I leave. Mason slams it open. The music behind us becomes sunken compositions buried behind walls, and the scraping of our shoes on the grass grows louder as the ringing in my ears fades. “Wait a second,” Mason yells behind me.

  This isn’t how it’s supposed to be; you’re not supposed to recognize me. Go back to your Bible bullshit and stay out of my way. If I wanted you to know who I am, I would have made sure you knew. You don’t want to meet me; you deserve to have someone better as a mother. You deserve to carry on living in ignorant bliss. Now, these are the things I mean to say. But it’s not exactly what spews out from my mouth. “You stay the fuck away from me, Mason, you understand? You don’t know me.” I run for the lights of the city, the noises of street performers.

  “Will you just wait a fucking second?” he yells after me.

  And say what you
will about women my age, but I can haul ass. I flip off my heels. They fly away and land somewhere in the wet grass. I move, knees to chest. But this guy just won’t fucking give up! The glares of woodwinds, the lights that bleed from the hazy flea markets, the headlights and whores of Bardstown Road. Some reunion this shit is turning out to be.

  I crash my elbows through a glass door as a man’s about to lock up and close for the night. I figure it will be dark. I figure it will be quiet. I figure I can lock the door behind me and tell the owner that a man is after me.

  “What the hell are you doing?” the dark-skinned shopkeeper yells with a Middle Eastern accent as he holds the door shut with his body.

  “You have to let me in,” I say as I shove the other side of the door with my shoulder. “I’m being chased by a madman. Let me the fuck in!” I slap the glass until my palms are sore. And as the shopkeeper and I play this game of tug-of-war with a glass door and scream profanities at each other, the blow of Mason running behind me and pushing the door open knocks the shopkeeper down on his ass. With the sudden thrust from Mason, we nearly fall into the store together. This is it. This is the reunion I pictured time and time again in my head turning into one giant, disastrous clusterfuck. Twenty years of yearning and heartbreak finally crashing through a cheap pane of glass.

  I look around and realize we’re in an empty Arabic restaurant and hookah bar. I avoid eye contact with Mason, but I feel him staring. “We’ll take an order of falafel and one order of baklava,” I say, and I don’t know why I’d say something so stupid, perhaps panic.

  “You crazy woman, we’re closed! You get out! You get out or I call police!” he yells from the floor.

  “I am the police,” Mason responds as he pulls a police badge from his back pocket. “Feel free to call Goshen PD to confirm it. The name’s Deputy Sheriff Darian Cooke; want me to spell it out for you?” The Arab looks at the two of us with wide eyes. “Now I believe the lady asked for some fluffa and block something-or-other.” The shopkeeper turns and walks fast for the back room. Mason turns to me, “And you,” he demands. “You can sit your ass over in that booth there.”

  In the otherwise dark restaurant, a glass counter glows with wrapped platters of grape leaves and olives, cheeses, and breads. The hum echoes against the linoleum of the floor; the smell of vanilla-flavored tobacco resin in cold hookahs and rotisserie lamb encases us. The leather of the burgundy booth shifts as I slide over. Mason sits across from me.

  “You realize the owner is calling the police right now,” I say.

  “I know.”

  “You’re not Darian Cooke.”

  He slides the police badge across the table. “I know.”

  I pull out Mattley’s badge from my back pocket and do the same. “Birds of a feather.”

  He takes my pack of smokes, holds them up, and raises an eyebrow. “I take it you’re not James Mattley?”

  “Do you know who I am?” I ask him.

  “Freedom McFly,” he says, his voice soft, still raspy, the way it was when he was a young child.

  “Those were the terms I made with the whippersnappers; I would only go to Or-ree-gan if that was what they called me. Freedom McFly, though I never got to keep the McFly part. They said it sounded too Burger King–ish. Too ’80s. Fucking whippersnappers.”

  “What whippersnappers?” But I don’t give an answer, to which he tilts his head with confusion and changes the subject. “I remember the beach, the ocean. I remember Freedom McFly, the plane.”

  “I’m surprised you remember so much.” I try to keep my hands out of his sight so he can’t see them tremble. The nerves make my lips twitch. Take a deep breath. Don’t fuck this up any more than it already is.

  “It makes sense.” He blows smoke and flicks ashes to the floor. The lights from the streets reflect onto his face with streaks of red as he gazes out the window. “I just don’t know how I didn’t see it sooner,” he says, his voice surprisingly calm.

  “Hindsight’s a bitch.” I clear my throat. “I, of all people, would know.”

  Mason speaks to his own reflection like he isn’t listening to me. “You’d call me Ethan and would ask me where my sister is.”

  “Once upon a time, you were named Ethan Delaney.” I rub my palms together between my thighs. “And your sister was Layla Delaney.” I show a flicker of a smile. “That was my favorite song…” I trail off.

  “Just to confirm…you are my mother, aren’t you?”

  I sigh. “Once upon a time.” I swear I hear his brain spinning from here. He looks around, as if somewhere in a Middle Eastern hookah bar in the middle of Louisville, Kentucky, are the answers to a million questions, questions he can’t seem to grab. I break some of the ice that holds his emotions, frozen. “You had a birthmark on your left knee. Your first word was ‘get,’ after hearing me say it so many times to a chocolate Lab named Mickey we used to own. Your favorite food used to be macaroni and cheese and you had a blanket with dinosaurs on it and a tan couch pillow you’d never part with. You wouldn’t even let me wash them, so I’d have to wash them while you’d sleep.” Mason listens while I put out my smoke on the windowsill and continue. “You have brown eyes like your father and your right one has a tiny speck of yellow at the top. You were born on June nineteenth at eleven forty three p.m., but the doctors wrote eleven forty five p.m. because the midwife who delivered you was a dunce with an ugly shade of lipstick and a mustache.”

  “And Peter?”

  “Your uncle.”

  “Where was I born?” he asks, and I’m not sure if he’s genuinely curious or just testing me. After all, he is my own blood, so the latter’s likely.

  “Stony Brook University Hospital, Long Island, New York.”

  Mason looks up at the corner of the room. I can see different waves of emotion wash over his face, the ebb and flow of anger, confusion, frustration, realization, the works. “And Rebekah?”

  “I wish I knew more of her.” The rattles of the antibiotics in my pocket remind me to take the pill. “I’d only known her for two minutes and seventeen seconds. Yes, I counted.” I inspect the one half of Mason’s face that isn’t concealed by the shadows. Under his eyes looks dark with exhaustion, his skin stamped with cuts and shiners.

  “But now. What about her now?”

  “There was the concept that your uncles, as I’m sure Peter has told you, had something to do with her disappearance. But I know that that’s not the case.”

  “How do you know?” His palms press into the table as he leans forward, his non-swollen eye widening.

  “They mistook your girlfriend for Rebekah.” I look down. “She’s fine, though, I promise. I just saw her.”

  “Wh—” He jumps up, fumbling to get his cell from his back pocket. “Is she OK? Is she hurt—I mean…Fuck!” he screams as the battery of his phone beeps its way to the grave.

  I’d love to sit here and explain it to him. Really, I would. But the shopkeeper returns from the back of the restaurant, chin up and eyes at the front door, like he’s expecting someone. I lean in and whisper to Mason, “We need to go, like now.” He slams his phone closed with a rumble of exasperation.

  As we leave the restaurant, we are met by Peter. God, Peter. It really has been too long, you son of a bitch. I rest my hands on the arms of his wheelchair and give him a long peck on his lips. But Peter and I know just how platonic such a gesture can be. It’s where we’re from; everybody kisses everybody on the lips.

  “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.